We recently connected with Nikki Becker and have shared our conversation below.

Nikki, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

This is actually a really odd story haha. At the time, I had been travelling a lot for my 9-to-5 and was looking for a way to keep up with my workouts when I was in hotels across the world. I had come across this app called FitPlan, which basically offered training programs from various social media fitness influencers. They had all kinds of programs that you could choose from – and a good portion targeted home workouts or workouts with limited equipment – which was perfect for me at the time and I was hooked. Well, I later found out I had been one of the first early adopters of the app and so I received an email asking me to take part in a survey about my experience. Since I was a genuine fan of the app and had already been telling all my work colleagues about it, I told them I would be happy to participate. On the call, I was so passionate about my responses and began to give advice/insight on brand growth/extensions/etc that eventually the person on the line asked ” Can I ask, what do you do?” When I told them I worked in branding and fashion design, they responded “No way!” We’ve actually been looking to expand into clothing that supports our workouts – and since you clearly understand the brand/customer and do this for a living would you come in for a meeting? and the rest is history. To this day, they are one of my favorite clients and I continue to do numerous projects for them and their new ventures. They took a chance on me at the very beginning and I will be forever grateful to them.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Technically, I am the founder of Ghauste Agency, which operates as a private label manufacturing firm within the fashion, beauty and lifestyle space. However, the company I run today has come a long way from the initial company I founded back in 2018. When I started the business, it operated more as a one-woman consultancy for emerging brands in the fashion space. I would provide insights and basic support to new and/or young brands, in the fashion space, looking to cultivate their brand identity and launch their line and/or grow their product offering based on my extensive experience in trend research, product design, manufacturing, importing, wholesale and direct to consumer sales and brand marketing. With time, we slowly started adding more and more services as happy clients continued to request that we manage more aspects of the processes we were helping to put in place. For example, after receiving a marketing audit, we would have clients request that we produce the photo/video shoot concepts we were proposing, and/or build out their e-commerce website using the collateral created, etc. So, we started offering full package and a-la-carte services to help businesses build/strengthen their brand identity through the products they offer. Our design team is extremely adept at being able to take larger market trends and fine tune them to fit within the individual identities of the brands we work with to create truly unique and highly saleable products. Today we have clients that range from new entrepreneurs all the way to major retailers and continue to grow our product offerings.

Have you ever had to pivot?

About a year ago, we actually completely re-branded. It was something I had wanted to do for a while, but had a lot of hesitation around because I felt it would look bad or mean we had failed in some way, etc. However, at the end of the day I knew it was the right move for the business. The business had changed in so many ways since it was founded and the original name/branding no longer fit the brand. Eventually, I had to take my own advice and allow the brand to evolve free from ego and I’m so glad I did. Everything I was afraid of – people judging the change, us looking like we made a mistake, etc – didn’t happen and actually had the opposite result. Everyone loved the new name and new branding. We also discovered that we were right about how it would be perceived by new clientele, and found that we were attracting not only more clients – but more clients that were in direct relation to the quality of services we were providing.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Honestly, in my opinion, the best way to gain more clients is to keep your current clients happy. We’ve been blessed since day one that a majority of our business has been referral based. I believe that our close connection with each of our clients is what enables a project to be successful. When we take on a new client, it’s like adding a member to our family. Since I’ve launched my own brand/run my own business, I can relate to what our clients are going through as they walk through the process. At Ghauste, we also pride ourselves on providing each client with a customized approach to carrying out their project deliverables, which has resulted in clients that continue to return for additional projects/services and refer us to their colleagues. In this way, we have not only been blessed with great organic growth – but we’re also adding additional clients that subscribe to the culture we are cultivating within the industry.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ghauste.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ghausteagency/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ghausteagency?_rdr
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ghausteagency