Katie Klencheski: It’s Only Good Work If It Does Good
Katie Klencheski focuses on brands that focus on sustainability and social impact. Images: c/o SMAKK
There is a feeling that anything that builds your portfolio is good for your portfolio. Or is it? For Katie Klencheski, founder of New York City-based creative agency SMAKK, that feeling has evolved to the idea that it’s only good work if it does good. The sentiment was partially influenced by some early career agency work she did with Donald Trump’s hotel group. (metric of success: “It would be a real win if we could just move the identity from gold to platinum.”)
Ten years later, when Trump came onto the political scene, Klencheski was inspired to redefine SMAKK’s mission and only take on mission-driven clients who embrace sustainability and purpose. This meant giving up some clients, but it also fit into an emerging trend. SMAKK’s work with independent brands, such as Lip Bar, Mother Dirt and Wildflower led to partnerships with some of the biggest brands in the country, including Walmart, Burt’s Bees and Shiseido.
Here, Klencheski discusses the union of creativity and environmental responsibility, the importance of taking a stand when it comes to things you believe in, and how we can prepare for the big changes coming to sustainable design.
SMAKK developed a new brand identity, website, and packaging for sexual wellness innovator Wild Flower.
Maybe we start with the turning point, the Trump work. How did that lead you to working with clients whose work you believe in?
I started SMAKK 12 years ago, so it's been a while at this point. But before SMAKK, I worked at an agency that was brought in to work on the branding for the Trump Hotel collection, around 2007. My creative director said it would be a real win if we could just move the identity from “gold” to “platinum”. It was an agency focused on hospitality and luxury real estate, and we did lovely campaign work. I wrote the brand guidelines for all the Trump Hotel Collection properties and restaurant concepts.
I didn't think too much about that until 2015 when his name started percolating again. I'd be in meetings with clients and they would ask about my background. I used a kind of funny non-sequitur of, “You know that reality TV guy who's running for president?”
That was the moment where I started thinking about what I wanted our agency to stand for. It can't just be a machine that makes money that allows us to do creative work for whoever knocks on the door. I want it to advance the values that I hold close and represent me. I asked the team if they were onboard with it. We made tough calls about our client roster and had to intentionally get smaller before we were able to start getting bigger. Once we calculated this mission, we started picking up the clients that were aligned with where we wanted it to go.
How did you view the financial cost of moving on from certain clients with the tradeoff of your values-driven mission?
I was nervous to do it, but I also knew that by having a narrow focus on brands that focus on sustainability and social impact, we could better articulate our value to clients. That is what was right for us. The niche area we focused on is now huge. There is no global brand in the world that doesn't want to align themselves with purpose and focus more on sustainability.
At the time, we worked with start-ups and disruptor brands, and we saw the shift coming. We’ve since been able to evolve our skills and work with brands that are much larger.
How does the idea of purpose manifest itself in your client’s work?
One of our clients is Busy Co. They make wipes from recyclable material that are biodegradable. They are zero waste, and you can flush them down your toilet and they won’t ruin your septic system. Most wipes are made out of polyester so they are going to live forever for single-use products. But Busy Co. is changing things in a sustainable way.
Other brands we work with, like Otis Dental, are taking on unexpected topics that are related to a larger cultural conversation. In their case, normalizing conversations around mental health, anxiety, PTSD, and stress which are a root cause of Bruxism, the teeth grinding condition they treat as the makers of a night guard. We also helped them get to a plastic-free packaging solution so they could do environmental good while improving their consumers' well-being.
As the Mother Dirt team prepared to reformulate their product, SMAKK reformulated the brand.
What role should creative partners play in the larger trends of sustainability, well-being and purpose?
We have to hold brands accountable because it’s easy to greenwash. A brand might say they are a sustainable brand because one component in their packaging is made from a recyclable material. But there is a big difference between that and the entire package being made from recycled materials.
We've had clients ask us to put a leaf on a product because something in it is made from a bioplastic. But bioplastic doesn't biodegrade any faster than regular plastic. You need to push back on that and say that could cause confusion, so let’s workshop it a bit to make it less complicated for the consumer to understand.
When a beauty brand redesigned its hero product, SMAKK designed a new brand and packaging system to match.
For a counter perspective, what do brands most often get wrong when they talk about purpose and sustainability?
One of the big things is that everybody needs to get to sustainability a lot faster. It’s hard for brands right now because they are experiencing slowness around the global supply chain. Everyone wants to be zero waste, but there are larger geopolitical issues at play that make it hard to get recycled plastic.
Over the past 12 years, what have you learned about building a business while building this business?
Sometimes nobody knows what they are doing. You work with some of the biggest organizations in the world and they have an acronym for everything, but everybody is also just trying to figure it out on the fly.
What’s been the biggest challenge?
For the first few years, I was in denial that I was going to have to get good at the business operations side of things. As an art school grad, I felt that wasn’t fair, but I knew I couldn’t pretend like it doesn’t exist. Before the pandemic, I had the chance to do a program through Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Small Businesses initiative and I learned there was a lot of stuff about business operations that I didn’t have a name for but was already doing.
On your site you note how you are proudly “one of the .1% of creative agencies owned by women.” What must be done to drastically increase this number?
Women in leadership roles create more opportunities and provide more templates for other women to see what their futures can look like. When I started my career almost 20 years ago, I had been raised to believe that there was no limit to what I could do in the workplace, but what I found when I got my first entry level job was the opposite. Many of the women above me had their careers cut short by parenthood or seemed to hit a level of leadership and never get opportunities above that.
As I looked to the people with more experience, the gender split went from 50/50 at the entry level to much more lopsided at the top. I consider it to be a huge point of pride that the many of the women who started at SMAKK have their own agencies or ventures now, and all of the leadership roles at my company are held by women or gender non-conforming people – some who have been with me for over a decade and still have opportunities for growth ahead of them. Also that stat is from a pre-Covid survey of agencies from Ad Age, I’d love to see if the ratio has changed over the past couple of years.
Who’s a dream client you’d like to work with?
Brands like Unilever and Seventh Generation – the household personal care and beauty brands that everybody buys all the time where one small change adds up to something big. Also, Burt’s Bees. I grew up in New England and they were one of the first sustainable brands I was introduced to. They knocked on our door earlier this year and it’s been a joy working with them.
If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor, sign up for our newsletter.
Plus, check out the following pieces:
