We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lauren Schwartz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lauren below.

Lauren, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with a fun one – what’s something you believe that most people in your industry (or in general) disagree with?

Paying for creative. The biggest flaw I have seen within the industry is brands and agencies not wanting to pay for creative. They want the world, but yet they are unwilling to pay the full price for the value of creative they deliver you.

Over the past 3 years of owning my creative studio, I have come to see how little people are willing to pay for my services. There are several calls that I have where people see the value in creative and know they need it, but will try and nickle and dime you until they get what they want. I’ve stated this before, that creative is just as important as the media buying behind it. I would argue it’s more important. So, why are people so unwilling to budge? Or if they do they make you work for it? Needless to say, you’ll spend money on solid media buyers who say they have a track record of ad budgets over $1million and you will pay them without question, but when it comes to a creative you will try and hustle them down to pennies for what you want from them.

Lauren, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Lauren Schwartz and I’ve been a designer for over 17 years. I went to school specifically for Multimedia, web and graphic design. Throughout my career, I’ve had the priveldge to work with amazing brands in several spaces.

I have designed cut and sew garments for top brands such as BCBG, Fox Racing, Revolve Clothing, to name a few, and I’ve had the honor to work on marketing teams designing everything from landing pages, email designs, social media posts and much more. I started working for an agency back in 2017 and since then, I haven’t looked back. I love performance marketing, it is such an adrenaline high for me in that there is always things changing. The landscape shifts so frequently that you are always learning something new.

Back in 2020, I decided that I wanted to put creative in the forefront of performance marketing and branched out and started my own creative studio. It has evolved over the past couple of years, but at The Loft 325 we take our creative performance seriously. We strive to drive performance through our creative testing and creative strategy. It has been a huge blessing to me to grow this over the past 3 years. I’ve been able to grow my team, content creators who work with me and I’ve been able to work with huge brands within the direct to consumer space. It has been so amazing getting to work alongside other DTC partners who are looking to grow their performance creative marketing.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Since 2014 I’ve been running my design business on the side. Whether it was from a landing page, full website, email marketing or social media posts I’ve been working to potentially build up clientele to be able to pivot into a full time offering. There were so many hurdles in terms of making this happen. As an adult, you obviously need to make money in order to sustain living in California and your family. My husband believed in me, but also need to show that we could sustain this if I went full time on my own.

As, I started understanding performance creative more, I actually first starting building my clients working with The Social Savannah. Her and I use to work together when we worked at the same agency. She was on my team and her and I both had a drive for growing our side hustles. I wanted to understand the data side of paid ads and she wanted to understand how the creative worked and where the ideas would come from. Together her and I were able to build a solid clientele where I was able to quit my 9-5 agency job and take my creative business full time. From there it was a lot of word of mouth, I leaned into my social channels promoting my work, but being able to share the wins and losses Savannah I had. It has been a great learning experience. Savannah and I no longer work as a pair, but we are still amazing friends who share in our wins together.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Word of mouth. With the clients I work with, I truly try to be transparent with them. Its pretty much a what you see is what you get mentality. Its hard to argue with data so if the data isn’t there then we need to figure out why? The team I have built is extremely fast paced as well and we have been able to get amazing recommendations from our clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: theloft325.com
• Instagram: @theloft325
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550820960404
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-schwartz-07354312
• Twitter: @loft325
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9XXVH-c7mckvjwN8iVifqw

Image Credits
Ashley Gabes Photography