FINIEN

→ This is post 9 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

I spent my career as a brand strategist preaching to companies to be better. Better to their employees, better to their customers, and last but not least better to the environment.

When I started Toneoptic, it was deeply ingrained to walk my talk.

Fast forward, pictured: Me horribly stumbling on my walk of shame.

How did I get to a point of cutting corners?

Simply put, it came down to startup survival.

Our first product had to be made outside the U.S. to keep the cost low enough that all 143 premium parts were still somewhat affordable (to the few). Producing it in the U.S. from the get-go simply was not an option that customers were ready to open their wallets for.

I wanted packaging to be sustainable. Reading the fine print of biodegradable peanuts, I learned that they are made of corn and will attract rodents. That, we can’t have in the factory. Unless we create a ginormous sealed container for the huge amounts of peanuts. And that we do not have the resources for yet.

Early on, we decided that we’d like to not support certain industry giants that don’t share our values as a brand. That, too, became impossible when cost and speed to market became realities for survival.

This list goes on, and I find myself walking this walk of shame daily. Daily, until we will be at the point of creating a business that is financially sustainable; and I promise myself (and you, and my stakeholders) that the minute we can, we will. And that will start with becoming a B-Corp to be held accountable across the entire supply chain. It will be the next difficult step to take, and one that I can not wait for.

But for now, I am proudly holding a ginormous bag of horrible-for-the-environment peanuts from ULINE, padding our backs that we are producing the new products locally now, and we are packing deliveries securely so our customers will love their products. The brand will have to follow suit.

Until we are a sustainable company, we simply, and sadly, can not be as sustainable for the planet as we wish.

One step at a time. Even if it hurts.

That is the real painful cost of starting small. And a wake-up call for me.

Will I go any easier on my clients? 99% of them, I sure will not. But that 1% that is in true startup mode like we are now, you bet. I might even swing by to lend a hand.

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: https://loom.ly/b_vi8ig
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

→ This is post 8 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

An app is a wonderful thing. You build it, push it live, and then keep improving it while people are already using it.

The traditional side of product development is a completely different beast.

Physical products require endless adjustments, prototypes shipped around the world, factory visits, and production runs of hundreds or thousands of units at a time. There are far fewer chances to pivot.

Then those boxes arrive in a warehouse. And you pay for every day they sit there instead of in a customer's home.

So you have to sell quickly. But not too quickly, because reordering takes time and a lot of upfront cash. And of course, by then you've already learned things you'd love to improve in the next version.

Pictured is me in China, in our original factory, at 30°F, working the production floor assembling and packing. A month later, a container with 500 Toneoptic products arrived in Los Angeles.

Today, we're manufacturing all new products in Los Angeles. The ambiguity and complexity of overseas production is largely behind us. Instead, we've traded it for a different set of challenges. Investing in specialized machinery, sourcing aluminum by the ton, and building a manufacturing process that can scale while still allowing us to improve.

I often see titles like Product Designer or Product Manager, but most refer to digital products. The difference is substantial. When you launch an app, you can immediately react to user behavior and iterate. When you launch a physical product, you have a warehouse full of thousands of decisions already made. Every decision echoes months into the future.

That's been one of my biggest lessons, and it's one that I keep learning different variations of on a daily basis. It's what has made building Toneoptic one of the most complex learning experiences of my career.

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

Missed the latest Episode of Hitting The Mark? Allison Taylor grew up on her family’s plum farm in Northern California, which has been around since 1916 and is one of the world’s largest producers of dried plums. In 2018, Allison and her sisters launched Le Prunier, a plum-based skincare brand that reunited them with the farm and created a new family business that is rooted in authenticity and sustainability.

The story of the brand is amazing, filled with ups and downs, both of which happened when Chrissy Teigen created a viral moment for Le Prunier at a moment when they were low on stock and in midst of a re-brand. And that, my friends, is entrepreneurship, and this is an episode not to miss!

Listen:

↠ FINIEN — https://loom.ly/uCcK82A
↠ Apple — https://loom.ly/nS_Y7nI
↠ Spotify — https://loom.ly/Xe1c_ZE
↠ Simplecast — https://loom.ly/26ZhVuA

→ This is post 7 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

As an authority (I prefer it to expert, and definitely to guru or ninja - please!) in brand building, I talk a lot about the importance of building community and how it is different from gaining social media followers.

With Toneoptic, I had to find my own path of creating a community for the brand.

In an almost naive way, I did something so simple, so inexpensive, and so not-corporate that it actually worked.
worked.

I am very much my audience: a design and music-obsessed record collector. We like exploring new vinyl stores and finding rare and exciting records.

So I launched Crate Dig, a monthly giveaway of an exciting, usually rare, record. I seek out a new store, ask the owner to pick a record that recently came in and that (s)he is excited about, that costs around $80, and that’s the record I then give away to our tribe.

I get to know store owners, and they learn about Toneoptic. Our community starts looking forward to seeing where I go and which record is up for grabs this month.

I kept it real. No big brand collab. Just an $80 record that shows I am one of them. It’s the stuff we mutually love. And we enjoy supporting local record stores just like they do.

We have done this 31 times now, and the records we gave away ranged from a Keanu Reeves-signed record from a store in Chicago to the original Rolling Stones’ self-titled 1964 Mono LP from a shop in Santa Clarita.

This month, we are giving away Mac Miller's 10th-anniversary box of GO:OD AM, featuring two white LPs, plus a single-sided etched yellow LP with bonus tracks. Check it out and enter here: https://loom.ly/KiHuKmo

Building community this way is an act of shared passion, and that is always a great place to play in as a brand.

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

→ This is part 6 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

I was a guest on a podcast yesterday (more on that when the episode airs), and Edilsa Bueno, the wonderful host, crafted a theme around the idea that my career is not a ladder or a lattice. Not even a ‘Career in Motion.’

We decided, towards the end of our conversation, that it was a thread.

Welcome to the 'Thread Career,' then.

Running FINIEN and being a partner at Chameleon Collective can confuse some clients initially, but it really is just semantics. I am a brand strategist, and FINIEN joined the Collective. One role that looks like two. At the heart? Brand strategy.

Me being an author, an advisor, a podcast host, and a mentor? It’s all about brand strategy.

And then there is Toneoptic, a D2C product innovation brand I happened to start out of a need I saw for myself. This is where one would think I lost my organized career path or my professional identity, of sorts.

But nothing could be further from the truth, as it was the next logical progression of brand building: I helped hundreds of clients shape and reshape their brands; I mentored thousands on the same topic. I wrote four books on the subject.

Wasn’t it about time I myself did what I spent all my career doing as the backseat driver, or in many cases, the co-pilot wishing to get my hands on the steering wheel?

Well, now I have.

I am steering.

And I am building the car while reading the manual while going full speed.

It makes all the sense in the world. In the end, this brand's strategy needs to reign supreme to survive and thrive. This was decades in the making; I just haven’t looked at it quite that way until today.

What is your career thread? I am positive you can uncover one.

( 📸 Me, not in my black dress-shirt uniform, being 'last week years old' learning that you blow into plastic gloves to make them easier to put on. Yes, I learn on the job.)

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

Dan Lilienthal and Jose Chayet co-founded Untitledinbrackets a sacred place for work-in-progress music used by hundreds of thousands of artists and producers, including Justin Bieber, Hayley Williams, and Geese. The brand was recently awarded one of Fast Company’s 10 most innovative music companies of 2026.

In our conversation, we discuss the founders’ background in art history, their goal of allowing artists to stay in a flow state, why they started a series of text interviews on Instagram, and how they see branding as a vocabulary. A very creative conversation, one you should not miss.

Listen here:
↠ FINIEN — https://loom.ly/MRmW-YI
↠ Apple — https://loom.ly/BkvU_8w
↠ Spotify — https://loom.ly/Py5_KPY
↠ Simplecast — https://loom.ly/Q3YGpAE

→ This is post 5 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

When I launched the first version of the Toneoptic site featuring a (rather overpriced but) gorgeous prototype, it was an exciting time.

I have launched my first brand. A product I invented that the world has not seen yet, in a market I did not know well.

Finally, a message sent through my Shopify site appeared in my Inbox. It was a rather exciting moment. Even if just to know the contact form was working!

Was it from an interior designer who wanted a unit for their client?
Or a press inquiry?
A customer with questions about the best wood finish for their listening room, perhaps?

In fact, it was from someone who wanted to share how they felt. Not about the design, or the idea, or the brand, but really about me, whom he did not know personally:

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” were the words that popped into my wide-open eyes.

The advice I give founders and CMOs ran through my head: “Your brand needs haters in order to attract lovers.”

Well, screw that, I thought at the moment. And a very, very long moment it was staring at that e-mail.

A glass of wine later, I made peace with the philosophy I like to share and hoped that fans would follow; maybe tomorrow, I thought…

No such luck.

A day later, I received another rant in response to a Facebook post (pictured). I sent a very civilized reply, to which he answered: “I just wish I could afford them.”

And there it was - my smile returned to my face. And this reply taught me everything I needed to know as I set foot on this consumer brand journey filled with pointless rants and unqualified opinions.

It’s difficult, and I've learned to pause and cherish the positive moments rather than dwell only on the multitude of challenges entrepreneurship brings by design, as I remind myself of Tom Hanks' line in A League of Their Own: "It's supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”

By year’s end, we anticipate having sold close to a thousand of these $350 units.

Only you know your vision; you have to stay focused and believe in the outcome.

And that’s what I tell you, as much as I keep telling myself, as it is the only way to save your mental health and create a brand built to zip right past the haters.

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

→ This is post 4 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

Advice we all heard at least once in our lives: “The best way to see if an idea for a product will have an audience is to put a sketch, a comp, or a prototype out there and see how people react.”

And so I learned the hard way that this may not be the best advice, or at least it needs to come with a big fat asterisk about production timelines and the *risk* of virality.

Back in 2022, I conducted a photoshoot of an early prototype: a beautiful walnut box containing my (now-patented) rpm mechanism, which allows records to be showcased library-style while being easily flipped through with an elegant motion. I put the product online at a ridiculously high price to see how people reacted to my innovation. I quickly learned that the price was indeed ridiculous, shipping was impossible given the design, but that people loved the mechanism and solution and were hungry for innovation in a stale space.

A year and a half later, this video was picked up out of the blue and went viral across all major social platforms, with one TikTok clip alone garnering 2.2M views. It was the night I was heading to the airport for vacation, and the week I gave the green light for the production of a different flat-pack-shipped design. No more walnut box. Not what was shown in the viral video.

People loved the clip; they loved the design, but here I was already much further along, and I saw very little reward for an ill-timed moment of unplanned virality, besides making some great connections with A-list musicians and growing our social following. But no sales since the product people saw and wanted, they could not get.

We are now months away from bringing back a similar design. At a fraction of that original cost and with no shipping issues.

But the viral moment has faded.

Lesson learned: Don’t publicly test your market with a unique product unless you are ready for a wave of positive responses and a process to make that product a reality very, very quickly. Virality comes and goes within days, or if you are lucky, weeks, but R&D and fabrication take months, or more likely years.

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.