When customers want to stand out, small brands can cash in.

11-30-2016, Entrepreneur.com -- Benji Wagner knows a dirty little secret about the outdoor apparel industry: Big brands like Patagonia and The North Face may advertise their gear being put to the test in the highest mountains and at the ends of the Earth, but 83 percent of all camping trips in the United States actually take place within a few feet of a car or a house. So Wagner is going straight at those consumers -- people who want to feel comfortable inside a tent perhaps just a few feet above sea level.

“The outdoor industry was founded on mountaineering, but most people are wearing their jacket to go grocery shopping,” says Wagner, cofounder and creative director of Poler Outdoor Stuff, which, since its 2011 launch, now sees double-digit growth every year. “The industry went down the rabbit hole in terms of creating more and more technical products for a consumer that’s essentially a weekend warrior. Poler makes a great jacket, but we’re not going to pretend you’re gonna climb Mount Everest in it.”

It may have once seemed impossible to go up against giant, established brands, but that increasingly just isn’t the case. Poler, and the apparel industry at large, tells an important story that’s true across all types of businesses: Broad but overlooked segments of consumers are being forgotten by big brands’ mass appeal, and even the smallest of players can use the internet to build strong personal connections with those left behind. The key is to tell seductive, inspiring (yet realistic!) stories that resonate and to give customers what the biggest companies can’t: a sense that Yeah, we get you.

“What many brands have nowadays is the ability to communicate who and what they are,” says Marshal Cohen, a retail analyst with The NPD Group. “Customers today are not looking to be one of a million people -- they’re looking to be one in a million. They want to stand out.” 

Communicating that doesn’t require big-budget money. Tracksmith, an upscale running apparel brand from Wellesley, Mass., doubled its social media reach in the past 10 months with less than $5,000 in ad spending, and has netted a $4.1 million investment from Pentland Group, which owns a stake in Speedo and licenses for Lacoste footwear and Ted Baker. Here’s how: It saw that household names like Nike, Adidas and Puma have conflated running with health and wellness in an effort to win the attention of gym rats -- so Tracksmith, which launched in 2011, celebrated the tradition of running as a stand-alone sport. It chased the habitual runner, creating a visceral brand story with photography that portrays everyday runners training, sweating and looking exhausted rather than triumphant.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

Entrepreneur -- When it comes to success, it’s easy to think that people blessed with brains are inevitably going to leave the rest of us in the dust. But new research from Stanford University will change your mind (and your attitude).

Psychologist Carol Dweck has spent her entire career studying attitude and performance, and her latest study shows that your attitude is a better predictor of your success than your IQ.

Dweck found that people’s core attitudes fall into one of two categories: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

With a fixed mindset, you believe you are who you are and you cannot change. This creates problems when you’re challenged because anything that appears to be more than you can handle is bound to make you feel hopeless and overwhelmed.

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253095

Entrepreneur -- You can tell a soon-to-fail entrepreneur by the tired, haggard look in his eyes. Like extras from "The Walking Dead," they stumble around looking not entirely alive.

Because they aren’t.

Despite covariance in the rate of startup failures with overworked CEOs, the problem persists. Some founders are fanatical when bragging that they work 60 to 80 hour weeks. Their sense of building “sweat equity” blinds them to the sacrifices they make -- to their health, to their marriages, to their families and communities. What they mistake as a successful lifestyle is actually a massive failure.

Related: Here's Why the 8-Hour Workday Doesn't Work

Personal fatigue.

People are not designed for 80-hour work weeks, at least not over the long term.

Various studies show that we humans operate efficiently for maybe 10 hours a day, and that is if you sleep well, eat right and exercise regularly. As you will quickly see, attempting to work more than 10 hours is an exercise in diminishing returns, as it keeps you from being at your peak performance for those 10 top hours.

Most people need a solid eight hours of sleep to rejuvenate. This leaves 16 waking hours in a day. A fair amount of that time is spent in maintenance: eating, bathing, brushing teeth, walking dogs and other mundanities. Subtract also from these 16 available hours the minimal family interaction and duty time (driving kids to school), special events (seeing your doctor for that chest pain that has been nagging you), your commute time (which for most people is non-productive). Pretty soon, you may only have 10 hours in a day to do real work.

The only ways you can do more is to either work seven days a week (and that only buys you a maximum of 20 extra hours of productivity) or you skip doing those things called life. You ignore your spouse, miss your kid’s soccer game, renege on volunteer work, avoid the gym and live on fast food since you don’t have time for real food. With this lifestyle you soon won’t have a spouse, won’t see your kids because they live with your ex, are mutually ignored by people in your community -- and you will be found dead of a heart attack with a McDonald’s sack clenched in your fist.

Related: Working Long Hours Could Kill You

Why entrepreneurs work too hard.

Impatience is a universal trait with entrepreneurs. They have a vision and want to achieve it before the weekend. They also lean toward perfectionism, and pay close attention to the myriad of details in their business. Between wanting it done now and wanting it done right, they often choose to do it themselves. All of it.

But life doesn’t work that way. You don’t scale that far. Yet you start down the road of overworking yourself because you make many of the common entrepreneur mistakes:

• You don’t prioritize: Not everything is equally important, and you let B’s get in front of A’s.
• You don’t tackle "Tough Things First": Dread of big problems and distasteful tasks keep you from launching important initiatives.
• You don’t delegate: Fear of other people not performing tasks the way you think they should be done causes you to micromanage or otherwise add to your workload.
• You obsess over unimportant details: You cannot get your head out of the weeds long enough to see that the grass needs mowing.
• Read the rest of the story HERE.