Today we’d like to introduce you to Craig Thorn
Hi Craig, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
For sure. I’ll keep it brief as there are three main areas of my life that define where I’m at professionally – music, Social Media and craft beer.
I got into rap music at around 11 years old in the early ’90s, started writing my own stuff at around 16 years old, and finally began recording in 2001. I’ve always been in groups, it just felt like the best way to roll. Music was always a collaborative thing for me. I was in groups all through the ’00s, until I moved to Canada in 2010 and finally went solo. We were grinding hard around Ontario and Quebec for most of the ’10s, until we realized that touring and doing shows were pointless and just focused on making great music and videos. Right now, I’m about to come back off a music sabbatical. I really needed a break; there’s way too many people doing music now compared to when I started, so the market is flooded and incredibly noisy. I needed to recentre myself to see whether I still had something unique to offer, and I finally decided that I do.
As far as Social Media is concerned, after I got back from travelling in 2004, I wanted a way to connect with the folks that I met in my travels. I found this site called WAYN (Where Are You Now), which lead to finding MySpace – that changed my life. I took social really seriously from the jump, and found a way to work professionally in the field from 2007. While using the skills to push our music, I leveraged them as an early mover in the space to work for big banks, colleges, and movie production studios in Australia. After moving to Canada with dreams of making it in music, I wanted to avoid getting a corporate job so I did freelance social gigs. My girlfriend also had skills in social, so we combined forces and in 2014, we launched our agency High Season Co. Today, we’ve worked with massive brands like Meta, Sony, the NBA, Mitchell & Ness and the City of Toronto, we have a YouTube channel that’s quickly climbing towards 100k subscribers, and a growing e-commerce business.
Finally, craft beer. I always dabbled in new and fun beers back in Australia, but it wasn’t until January of 2011 that I began to take it seriously. Mates back home did this challenge called “365 Days of Beer”, where you had to drink 365 beers in a year (not one daily), so I tried it assuming there weren’t even 300 beers on the planet. I clocked it in 7 months and kept going; to date I’m at over 8,400 unique beers reviewed, and I started my pod, BAOS Podcast, in 2015. We were one of the first craft beer podcasts in Canada, and we’ve been thriving ever since. We’ve travelled all across the US, Australia and Canada, working with tourism offices, vlogging and podcasting with some of the best breweries on the planet. It ain’t so good for the belly but man, it’s been a journey. We also launched a non-profit, Link Up, back in 2021 to support the BIPOC community entering craft beer. The joke is that beer is “white dudes with beards”, and the only way for it to grow globally is for everyone to get involved.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s never a smooth road, and maybe that’s the purpose? If it was easy, there’d be no lessons and no growth. The level of roadblocks have been WILD. I don’t even know where to start.
For music, let’s put it like this. My boy told me that in 1999, there were 10,000 active artists. By 2023, there were 10,000,000 active musicians. That means the lake that we were trying to cross became an ocean. I love that anecdote. If it’s factually true (it has to be?), then it explains why any music career is essentially a pointless excursion if it’s for anything aside from self-gratification. And tbh, I’m not mad. I’m kinda glad we never “made it”. We do music for our own gratification and it’s never been anything aside from authentic. I’d rather have an impact on a much smaller group of people than deal with the nonsense to “blow up”. Very internally satisfied with where it’s all at.
For everything else, there have been constant struggles. Clients that don’t understand what they’re diving in on, the beer industry that wasn’t ready for new media. It’s crazy, but the one thing that kept us going was consistency. Everyone gives up on podcasts because they’re “too hard”. Everyone pretends to know about social media but they really don’t know jack. We’ve proved year after year that we love the game, we know our stuff and we can’t be ignored.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We’re a Social Media agency primarily, but we moved into education in 2018. We’ve grown our YouTube channel to over 60k subscribers, set up a vibrant e-commerce business with our digital store, consultations and other offerings, and grown our affiliate and sponsor business. We deliver actionable, applicable social tips to small businesses and creators in a way that none of our competitors can because we’ve actually done the work. I’ve been working in social professionally since 2007 – between my partner and I, we have almost 30 years of experience, and none of our competitors on YouTube actually do the work for major clients. We have literal trillion-dollar and billion-dollar clients; we’ve successfully executed social strategies in many industries and have proven that we know how to maneuver in this industry. That I’m extremely proud of. While we’re one of the smaller creators currently, we’re the only ones of our calibre and it’s a matter of time before things get to where we know they can.
What’s next?
So much. We’re growing the YouTube channel and e-commerce business; growing the podcasts from 2 to 3; and getting back into releasing new music. It’s been a quiet year for us in 2024 as we’ve been laying low, heads down just working. We’re excited to launch the new products we’ve been working on and to continue building out the many businesses in our portfolio.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.themovementfam.com, www.baospodcast.com, www.highseasonco.com
- Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/ceefor
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ceetmf
- Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ceefor
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/movementfam
- Soundcloud: http://www.soundcloud.com/ceefor
Image Credits
All photos by Tiffany Alexis