Rarity Brands®️: Recent Episodes

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In this third Rarity Brands podcast episode, Aleesha interviews Lisa Canning, HGTV Designer Alumnus & Founder of The Possibility Mom, both a book and a consulting business for moms and working parents seeking balance and realist solutions to the juggle of loving your career while flourishing at raising kids.

We discuss Lisa’s brand building and mama consulting evolution, particularly throughout this pandemic.

Additional episode discussion topics & gems:

• Toronto area mom and newlywed mentor lifelines

• Manifesting lifeline connections

• Full circle moments upon reaching motherhood and newlywedhood

• Counter-intuitive motherhood/career life balance mentorship and coaching

• The “How” behind encouraging women & moms to smash glass ceilings and still physically find a way be/do everything to/for everyone

• Feedback loop during new motherhood

• Strategically designing one’s life to reflect what is most important to oneself

• Fulfilling our faith through our work and motherhood

• Activating resilience and cultivating it

• Tenacity (mentally, emotionally, physically) as a key to overnight success, that typically takes years

• Cultivating resilience, tenacity, and grit, as a pre-requisite to success & happiness: as described in Neil Pasricha’s “The Happiness Equation” book

• Storytelling: the secret ingredient to authentic brand building; walking the walk and not being detached from your business’ brand; “here were my failings and struggles”; “here’s how my brand helps me”; having audiences feel a part of the founder’s story and tribe and spirit and ethos; making people feel like they know you without really knowing you

• Iteration breeds innovation: what success actually looks like

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In this second Rarity Brands podcast episode, Aleesha interviews Visha Vijayanand, NEXT Canada Alumnus & Co-Founder of Poche Posh, an inclusive and innovative fashion e-commerce brand.

We discuss Visha’s brand building and startup consulting evolution in the heart of Canada’s startup and tech ecosystem, particularly throughout the past 2 years’ pandemic.

Additional episode discussion topics & gems:

• Canadian startup pivots amid COVID-19

• Healthcare startup habits during the COVID-19 pandemic

• How brands successfully survive the unforeseen, including COVID-19

• Elements of brand rarity

• How brands can be nimble

• User-driven innovation

• UWaterloo startup success DNA

• Sustaining, in order to be sustainable

• Posh Poche, a fashion start-up for women’s clothes with pockets: historic launch and learnings

• Canadian diversity reflected in Canadian business branding

• Diverse market segmentation for Canadian fashion e-commerce

• Reflectivity and representation: an era of reckoning

• Defying historically “safe” conventions

• Honouring inclusive instincts

• How to mitigate risk aversion towards diverse branding and business culture building

• Turnkey operational overhaul for brand rarity: authentic diversity, unwavering innovation, and tech-driven

• Carrying the torch: sparking minds that will change the world

• Transparent leadership and encouraging employee ownership

• Avoiding box-ticking exercises for diversity in business

• How to avoid performative allyship/inclusivity/diversity

• Embedding inclusivity and belonging across every operational segment of your business

• Avoiding making a case for diversity by simply quantifying its profitable merits

• Equipping yourself for authentic allyship

• How to avoid treating diversity as an addendum/nice-to-have

• How to avoid performative optics for the sake of brand competitiveness

• How to avoid burdening or offloading diversity to junior diverse staff

• The specificity of Black experiences and how one-size-fits-all approaches help no one truly

• The onus of authenticity in rarity branding

• Positive feedback mechanisms for constructive comments and suggestions

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In this inaugural Rarity Brands podcast episode, Aleesha interviews Kayla Alexander, WNBA & team Canada basketball star, and newly-minted children's book author & illustrator.

We discuss Kayla's own brand evolution through a semi-rapid-fire series of questions into the anatomy of what makes a Rarity Brand.

Kayla also shares about her passion for working with young women in sports, her recent book launch of "The Magic of Basketball", and the crucial importance of supporting and increasing the visibility of women in sports at-large.

Additional episode discussion topics & gems:

• Creating a collective blueprint & business plan through Rarity Brands' episodes, for people to cherry-pick and adapt from for their own brand evolution

• Bucking imposter syndrome

• Defining a brand blueprint as a GTA cultural collective

• Being gentler with ourselves, even while keeping standards high

• Putting to rest the exhaustion of "zero room for error" for people of colour, especially black brand builders

• Authentic Allyship & lessons on grit from Ellen Pompeo of Grey's Anatomy

• Succeeding looks like iterating

• Doing away with away with support hesitancy/insecurity within our Canadian culture towards those hustling to gain their footing in various spaces

• Applying Canadian "care-mongering" to supporting one another's brand journeys

• Doing away with pretending like all must show up absolutely perfect right out of the gate, or straight out of school

• How adjacent industries can mutually inform progressions in innovation

• Dissecting the ingredients that make up our own brand blueprint of success, for the purposes of scaling it for young people to tap into more readily, especially when seeing themselves reflected

• Drafting an official business case for investing in girls in sports

• Beís Travel Co. by Shay Mitchell as a model Rarity Brand example

• Goddess lessons from Rarity Brands: Serena, Victoria Beckham, & Beyoncé

• Iterative Evolution: Fail Fast, Fail Early, & Fail Forward + the ethos of "Fewer Things Done Better"

• Pre-Social Media brand blueprint inspo: The Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean

• Cheering each other on BEFORE people make it to Forbes

• What do Athenian Pillars on Mount Olympus & K.A. Creations have in common?

• Student-Athlete life lessons translated to career/entrepreneurial success: Discipline, Time Management, and Sacrifices

• “The Last Dance” Rarity Brands inspo: "Always finding a game within a game" Jordan-style

• Book recommendation by Kayla: "Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made" by David Halberstam

• The Kobe effect on Canadian WNBA stars' entrepreneurship

• Transcendence Levels of Brand Building re: Maslowe's Hierarchy of Needs

• Sportswomen's Pay Equity: Being on the right side of history, versus being Jurassic

• Faith driving the entrepreneurial journey

• Privilege & Codification Responsibility: "Brampton is a city where the Canada of the future has already arrived"

• 20's Renaissance: from the 20th century to this 21st century

• Reinventing the New World we want to live in. Creating Unprecedented Precedent.

• 4REAL MTV Canada docu-journey show: Rarity Brands inspo. roots

• Remix Project founder wisdom

• Challenging & redefining inaccurate millennial work-ethic narratives

• Being your own permission-giver: Blavity CEO inspo.

• Canadian Rarity Brands winning across industries: Sandra Oh, Dwayne Johnson, P.K. Subban, etc.

• "The world needs a little more Canada"

• Brands that are both sustaining, and sustainable

• What's in a logo? Brands living up to their origin's ethos

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