Marketing Happy Hour - Lessons on Brand Agility & Marketing Innovation | Lisa Bubbers of Studs and Orchestra

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

In this episode of Marketing Happy Hour, Cassie and Ally sit down with Lisa Bubbers — Chief Brand Officer at Orchestra and Co-Founder of Studs — for a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the world’s most culturally relevant brands are built. Lisa breaks down the real story behind Studs’ breakout success, the early risks that paid off, and how she now leads strategy for a portfolio of ambitious brands navigating growth and transformation. She shares how Orchestra decodes audience signals, pressure-tests hunches with data, and designs systems for rapid learning, bold decision-making, and breakthrough creative. Whether you’re an early-career marketer or a seasoned brand leader, this conversation is packed with actionable insights on instinct vs. insight, innovation, and building brands people actually care about.Key Takeaways:// How Studs broke through the noise and became a category-defining brand in retail.// The early, risky decisions that shaped Studs’ identity and long-term traction.// How Orchestra identifies cultural signals and emerging trends before they gain steam.// Why great brands balance instinct with insight—and how to know which to trust when.// What an “innovation system” actually looks like inside a modern marketing organization.// How to design brand teams for speed, iteration, and breakthrough creativity.// Why the C-suite must cultivate entrepreneurial agility to drive results in fast-moving markets.// Top advice for young strategists who want to work inside an integrated model like Orchestra.// How to build brands that are culturally relevant, emotionally resonant, and impossible to ignore.Connect with Lisa: LinkedIn____Say hi! DM me on Instagram and let us know what content you want to hear on the show - I can't wait to hear from you! Please also consider rating the show and leaving a review, as that helps us tremendously as we move forward in this Marketing Happy Hour journey and create more content for all of you. ⁠

An incredibly creative idea that's not anchored in what's going on in culture and trend doesn't meet your business goals and isn't based in research, is not going to move the needle. Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour, a weekly podcast helping marketing professionals build better strategies and hit career goals. I'm Cassie, consultant and your host through these unfiltered convoes with your peers. Grab your favorite drink and get ready for practical insights to support your journey in marketing. So we are honored today to have Lisa Bubbers joining us, Chief Brand Officer of Orchestra and co-founder of Studs,

excited to just dive into just overall career experience, brand building, et cetera, today. But Lisa, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Well, before we dive in, as always, I have to know what's been in your glass lately. What are you sipping on recently? Yes.

Well, I am eight months. is pregnant. So I have had a lot of sparkling water, coconut water, and for more festive moments, Gia, which my friend Melanie Mazarin's non-alcoholic brand that I love pregnant or non-pregnant. Yes, I love Gia. It is so good. Allie, have you had that brand yet? I was introduced it to Gia through you. So that's how I originally tried it. Yeah, it's perfect. Yeah, it's so, so good. I'm a huge fan. of the non-alc space and all of that. So it's so fun that your friend runs that brand. Huge fan. So that's awesome. Amazing. Congratulations. It's awesome. Yes, congrats. Thank you. That's so exciting. I think let's kick off with your career journey. So can you walk us through

your journey? How did you land where you are today? You know, I have always been really interested in building brands, creating brands that will resonate with people, very curious about customers, what makes them tick, and have really loved, you know, the sort of left-brain, right-brain marriage that building a brand brings together between analytics and data and insights and strategy and the really creative side of things, which is more based on instinct and where you see culture going and what you want to create in the world. So I've been in brand building for a long time. In terms of my original career, I was an early stage employee, employee six at a startup that no longer

exists called Home Polish, which was a great learning ground. It was a bootstrap startup and then a venture back startup where you could book interior designers by the hour. And I built that brand and that marketing team and became a VP of marketing and kind of got my sea legs in the world of startups and brand building. And it was a great learning ground. And then after that experience, I started Studs with my co-founder, Anna Harmon. We created that brand.

We started working on that in 2018. The brand just turned six. And so I'm on the board of Studs, and I'm an advisor to Studs and very close with my co-founder. And while I was at Studs for five years, I was the chief brand and marketing officer there. An incredible journey. We now have like 37 studios across the country. And I really wanted to approach the next phase of my career by figuring out how I could bring this set of skills of brand strategy and brand marketing and brand building and integrated marketing to different sectors and different types of clients across different scales. And so that's when the opportunity to join orchestra came around.

An orchestra is sort of a new company. It's the merging of nine different agencies into a platform under orchestra. And I knew a lot of the agencies that were in the network that had been acquired, and I was very, very interested in the mandate. And so now I joined in April, and so now I'm the chief brand officer of orchestra. Oh, that is awesome. And I love how you're able to just take your experience of building brands in house to other brands and help them build as well.

So that's absolutely amazing. I want to kind of focus in on studs first, and then we'll switch over to orchestra and talk more about that. But we know and love studs. Again, like I'm literally wearing earrings from the brand right now. I lived in New York,

so it was a frequent visit for me and just have loved seeing the brand grow over time. But I'm curious, like when you look back at the early days, what do you feel like actually drove that growth? early on or helped to drive that traction? The true answer is that there was real white space and real latent demand for the thing, and no one had executed on it. And we executed very well, and that's why it worked,

but the demand for this thing, which was safe and accessible and cool, experiential ear piercing, where you could work with an expert and get pierced with a needle, not with a gun, and have a wide assortment of cute but affordable earrings that were safe for your ears, and you could eerscape, which is, you know, a term we invented, it just really didn't exist. And so if you were a Gen Z or millennial woman, you didn't want to go to Clare's. You didn't want to go to a tween brand in the mall, and you weren't that comfortable in the tattoo shop, and it wasn't the core experience of a tattoo shop is not ear-piercing or ear-escaping.

And I think the customer wanted ear piercings so badly, they were going to these places that weren't exactly meeting their needs. And so when we made the thing that they actually wanted, which was this great experience with incredible hospitality, with incredible expertise and safety and great merchandising and a cool brand, it just was sort of like a light bulb moment because I think the customer really wanted that. So that is really what drove the success. And then I think, you know, we executed. Like I think we made the thing very well. As Cass mentioned, like, we're both very, very big fans. I have the huggies in right now that have, you know, been with me through showers, pools, et cetera.

The brand itself is just category defining, as you mentioned. And I'm curious to hear from you. What is, or is there a decision that you made that you kind of made that you kind of made? very early on in the brand that felt kind of risky at the time but ultimately helped define the future of studs i had never designed a retail experience before and i as the chief brand officer was in charge of building the brand identity the merchandising strategy the store design the store experience with my co-founder obviously but that was sort of all in the brand world and build the branding of it and while we knew at first we were targeted

getting a younger Gen Z customer that was the hypothesis. We also know that ear piercing and earring shopping is incredibly broad and mass. 80% of women have their ears pierced. You know, 50% to 60% of those get second and third and fourth piercings. You start your piercing journey at six and you go all the way through. You know, we have people getting their ears pierced in their 80s at studs. And so we knew that we needed to make a very cool brand, but ultimately it had to be very mass. And so the choice was really around the store design. I think it was a very unusual retail

design at the time. It didn't look like other retail experiences. There was no photography in the stores. It was sort of this like very clean neon and white disco spaceship installation using a lot of really cool design materials. It felt more like an installation. and an experience that has this, like, crazy silver hallway with purple lights and the big neon studs, and it had a lot of iridescent surfaces, but it was also this, we kind of called it this, like, Medi Spa Disco spaceship, and that was not what retail stores looked like at the time, and we made a choice to sort of be like, this will make it more experiential, more Instagramable, people will be able to project their identities onto it instead of seeing, you know,

photographs and it didn't have like promotional signage it didn't have what stores looked like you know it looked more like an installation or what maybe a cool pop-up might look like and so that that was a risky choice because it was a very non-traditional retail design but that I think really worked out I'm really curious too Lisa before we switch gears to talk about orchestra what were some of the marketing channels as you were growing and developing what was that looking like for you guys just to get the word out about this new brand that was kind of defining this category it was creating a need in a way that maybe wasn't previously there. What did that look like for you guys? You know, it's a lot of the same channels I think I still really recommend in brand

marketing and consumer. We really, really focused on community building, brand marketing, celebrity, PR, earned, social event, and the ecosystem of basically bringing the brand to life. We had really cool collaborations. You know, we had a Susan Alexandra earring collection and she helped us launch our party and we had like a 500 person lined down the block for that party. And we did a four-day press preview before we opened and invited like every cool editor in New York for ear piercings and a first look. We had really great customer swag. So if you're part of the first customers, you got this tote and stickers. And, you know, we, we made the store experience one where you really wanted to make content while you were there. And so then we got that content

ecosystem going. We invited a lot of influencers and creators to make content. We did a lot of eventing with different communities. And that turned into kind of like the engine of retail marketing for us. And it's still, I think, a lot of the tactics that work because they're, they're really authentic to the DNA of what you're making, and it really brings people in. I'm still waiting to get my hands on the Dintai Fong collaboration. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes, absolutely. No, definitely truly integrated, which is something we're going to talk about a little bit here as we pivot over to discuss orchestra. So one of the things that is mentioned, you know, across your website is just decoding audiences and just capturing these trends before they really gain a lot of steam, being early on in some of these different spaces. So what does that process look like for you all in the inside? Are there certain signals that you're looking at to kind of define closely before you jump into something?

I'm just curious kind of what that process is. Yeah, it's been really fun for me because I think when you have your own consumer brand and your own startup, you do a lot of, first-party customer listening. You can survey your customer directly, you can look at your Shopify data, you can look at your own Instagram data, your own at Google Analytics, and that's amazing, but you also don't always have like massive tools or resources for large third-party data, and you're not always getting like the full landscape of trend and conversation at orchestra, which is, you know, a 700-person organization with many,

many capabilities across everything related to communications and marketing, we have a large strategic insights team that is devoted to intelligence, research, analytics, reporting, and audience insights. And then we can connect those dots across our vast, amazing client base. And so we can understand what's going on in trend and conversations, audience mapping, audience listening on social, or media listening. And so it's a, we also do, you know, we, we do surveys and we do focus groups and stakeholder interviews and really like a, and now with AI, like another incredible suite of tools for consumer insights. As a brand strategist and as a chief marketing officer, really, really tried to base my decisions in data, whether they be your sales data

or your customer data or your market data. And this is no different, but just a lot more robustness, I would say, to the suite of things we can take into consideration when putting together a strategy for a company or brand. With kind of combining data, with validating some of those instincts with real-time behavior, how do you balance that instinct versus insight when making big brand decisions? And also, like, on that, too, confidence and ideas. like how would you recommend to marketers to build that confidence in testing and trying,

depending on what the idea is? I think, you know, building an incredible brand is a marriage of understanding your business goals, the white space in the market, and the research and data and insights, and then having a creative approach to that innovation. So we really need all of those things to come together to get the right answer. I think an incredibly creative idea that's not anchored in what's going on in culture and trend doesn't meet your business goals and isn't based in research, is not going to move the needle. And I think if you only looked at the data, you might not get the most creative idea

if you don't consider what will actually break through the noise, especially in this crowded landscape that we're all operating in. And so you need that group together, right? This is what the company needs and their business goals, what they're trying to achieve. This is what the research and insights say. These are some super creative ideas. And this is what's going on in culture and the zeitgeist. And here is where we are going to, how we're going to attack.

And this is where we see the ball going. So that's the process. But yeah, you really need to think outside the box. Because if you only relied on AI to get there, you would get state ideas. You're going to get ideas that just already exist in the data, it exists in the ecosystem. And so you do need to push forward with just your own creativity

and then try to back that through a business strategy and data analytics. Absolutely. And I think creativity, but also innovation. And so we've talked a little bit about these innovation systems. So what are those non-negotiable ingredients for you? How should brands that are listening, how should they structure their teams to get ahead,

of that learning and iteration process. I think personally I've seen a lot of brands who are a little bit hesitant to go through that test and learning iteration and don't necessarily give their teams the freedom to do that. And so how can innovation systems kind of help that process along? I do think startups have a great playbook for this because the culture of the MVP and fail fast is such a culture you learn and a venture-backed startup ecosystem. It's really embedded in the way the studs like companies have operated when you are sort of venture-backed and you have a big vision

and you need to get there quickly. So I think this idea of sort of having a test and learn mentality and figuring out how you can make an MVP of your innovation and get early signals and then pivot quickly if you've missed the mark but don't be afraid to take risks.

And I think that is a cultural, I think that's a culture mindset of the company and of the CEO or the CMO or the founder and of the agency that's working with that team. And I think that's also why insights and intelligence aren't so important because you need to kind of get some signals, right? Like is this actually working with this risk? And I think one thing I learned really from my co-founder, Anna, the SUD CEO, who is a lot of, lawyer and worked at Bridgewater and came from Walmart and it's just like a real like uh she is like a great mind for innovation with rigor and prioritization so like you know having guardrails around that like what are we trying to get out of this what resources are we putting behind it what's the test and what's the signal and then if it didn't work out no problem you know like what's what this was

an innovation test and so i think um it's interesting to see larger corporations starting to adopt that mindset because they have to right now in order to compete. But I think startups are nimble like that. I think adopting that mindset, but also the leaner teams, we're in an age with like leaner teams, right? So that mentality is actually easier to adopt with a leaner team I found. And it's really interesting to see that trend shift. I'm just curious too. You know, we get asked all the time. Allie especially is in integrated marketing and I've dabbled in that space too. So I'm just curious, you know, a lot of people are asking how do I get into a role like that? How do I work either for an agency that focuses on integrated or in-house even in a role like that?

So I'm just curious from your standpoint of building teams and finding talent. What skill sets are you looking for? What do you think is important to be building and to be thinking about for talent as they search for positions, whether it's in-house or in an agency setting? It's really the reason I joined Orchestra. You know, Jonathan Rosen, the CEO of Orchestra and Jesse Derris, the president, who I knew from he had started Derris, which is one of the communications agencies acquired into the platform. They really have a vision on how the landscape is changing in real time, how you can no longer buy attention. It has to be earned, but the deficit of earned is much, much.

much broader than it ever was before. It is not about just getting an article in the New York Times. You have to go figure out where your audience is, how they consume media, what messages resonate with them, what's happening in their culture, and you have to then go meet your audience where they are across every channel. And that's what orchestra is, and that's what orchestration is. And so it's earned, its communications, its influencer, its social, its own content, it's AEO, it's paid media, it's experiential, and it's backed by intelligence and data and a great

brand strategy with awesome creative, and it all comes together, not just to build the brand, but then to reach your audience every day, multiple times a day, across so many ecosystems. And you need that level of robust orchestration to win in this environment, which is what orchestra is building. And then you need the players. You need flex players. And so I think, you know, it doesn't mean that people shouldn't have specialization. Of course, when you're starting out in your career, it is super valuable if you are a social media strategist that knows TikTok and YouTube inside and out, like that's valuable.

But you also need to be knowing, you also need to know what's going on with creators and influencers. You need to know what's going on with Substack and Reddit. You also need to kind of understand how paid media works. And you need to understand how this is all going to affect your search results in L. And you have to sort of live in a full outside of a silo now in a really meaningful way. And I think being able to flex and be really curious early in your career is more important than ever. We talk about this quite a bit, actually, in the sense that marketers actually categorically wear so many hats. And it's actually really important, especially early on, to continue to ask questions and meet with people in different departments or different functions of marketing to be able to get at,

at least an understanding of how it comes together from a 360 approach and from an ecosystem approach. So I absolutely love that advice. Yeah, I would say the other thing, too, Lisa, I'm really curious. This is a big topic that I've heard a lot of conferences lately. You mentioned just knowing your audience. And traditionally, the way that we look at audiences is audience personas and building out demographical elements and psychographics and things. I'm curious, like, how are you thinking about audience now? I know interest clusters is a whole other thing. to be looking at, especially with the way that the algorithms on social are changing and the way that people are latching onto different brands and themes. So I'm just curious, like, from

a, at orchestra, how are you guys looking to build out audience identity and just think about defining who these people are that you're speaking to? It's a great question. I still find demographic info helpful, whether that be age or geography. I think, You need some guardrails, you know, are we talking to 40 to 65 year old women in the middle of the country? Like, if you have those targets in mind and you have that data as a company, it is helpful. I think the layer on top of that now is where are they really consuming media and how so that you show up on the right channels? Where is so, and I think in we have the ability now to understand if that is podcast or, Reddit or Substack or YouTube or Instagram.

We know which influencers are the most influential. We know which media sites are the most influential. You know how that customer is searching in Google, and soon you'll have that transparency into LLMs. And so you have the ability now to understand how the customer is thinking and how they're consuming and how they're being influenced. And I think that is the most important now outside of the demographic, But if you can layer it all together, you can get a fuller picture.

But I think the days of like this is Sally, she's a mom, like that's done and is not dynamic enough. But I think having a clear picture around conversation, message, media consumption, coupled with demographic info, and then really important I think is the truth on how people are really searching. How are they actually, because customers will tell you one thing, but then what they actually type into Google or actually type into chat GPT is a totally different story. And so you sort of need to go interrogate the audience, interrogate those truths and find like the real, the real behavior. Yeah, absolutely. It really, and it takes time, right? It takes time to really

like sit down and figure out what the behavior is. And I think one thing that I would tell marketers too that's beneficial is being the consumer that you're targeting like thinking about yourself how am I searching for things what do I gravitate towards and not gravitate towards so I think it's a lot of internal reflection but also just actually to your point speaking to your audience but also paying attention to some of that behavior and really using that to your advantage so totally and spending time with your audience I mean that was something with studs that I mean I just read every Google review you know, and you just watch people in the store and you read the NPS and you now you can analyze that in real time, you know, via these tools and get your trends and you get kernels

that are like very, very actionable. You know, for us at Studs, it became very clear the fact that we were experts that pierced with needles with trained piercing professionals is just a huge value prop for the company. And that is based in data. We didn't, you know, that was, that was just became clearer and clearer to us as we through the years. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, data is very important as we've discussed. So making sure that you're always watching your data, paying attention to it, and leveraging it when you build campaigns

or build brands in general. So thank you so much for that. Lisa, this has been absolutely fantastic. I feel like we could ask you so many questions about both orchestra and studs. But let us know in the meantime before we hopefully bring you back for another check-in an episode down the road. How can we stay in touch with you personally online? also both studs and orchestra as well. Yeah, I mean, for me, my favorite platform right now is

LinkedIn. I think that's just been, I think that's probably what a lot of people say that are chief brand officers, chief marketing officers now. But I'm on LinkedIn. I'm following what's going on on LinkedIn. I'm interested in where LinkedIn's going to go. Orchestra is very, very active on LinkedIn and has a lot of LinkedIn followers, actually. And so you can find me and orchestra on LinkedIn and studs you can find in your city and you should go get an ear piercing. Yes, you should. Absolutely. Yes, thank you so much, Lisa. This has been great. Like I said, thank you for just joining us and sharing all of your insights with us today. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation,

I would love your feedback. And if you're ready to take things to the next level, sign up for my weekly newsletter in the show notes. You'll get weekly career and marketing insights straight to your inbox. And if you have an idea for a future marketing happy hour episode, shoot me an email. Hello at Marketing HappyHR.com. Thank you again and I'll see you next Thursday.