Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Kleinman.
Hi Lauren, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My entrepreneurial journey started when I was ten years old. I tutored kids in my neighborhood and eventually moved on to selling hot products to my classmates and friends like Tamagotchis, inflatable couches, scooters and more with the help of my uncle, who was also an entrepreneur in the import and export business. I even created my own business cards and would ride around in my scooter, passing them out at our local outdoor mall.
After college, I held roles at fast-growing companies like StartEngine and Scopely, where I was part of both company’s early teams and learned the ins and outs of building brands from the ground up. I left Scopely after serving as their Director of Corporate Communications and launching some of the largest mobile games in the world like The Walking Dead, Star Trek, Wheel of Fortune, and Yahtzee with Buddies. In 2015, I joined Ritual, the iconic DTC vitamin brand, as their Founding Team member with the CEO and VP of Marketing. There, I led the brand to their most lucrative performance partnerships, many of which impacted the trajectory of the company. Today, Ritual is known as one of the most prominent, respected, innovative, and iconic DTC brands.
After working at Ritual for almost four years, I left to start my agency Dreamday, where I coined the term “Performance PR” to encompass a more modern and data-driven approach to PR based on my experience working with the best top-tier traditional agencies at Ritual. With Dreamday, I’ve trailblazed a new path for performance marketing that has set editorially-adored DTC brands like Fly by Jing, Brightland, Girlfriend Collective, Our Place, and more on fire with explosive growth. Today, Dreamday is a first-of-its-kind award-winning Performance PR agency at the intersection of affiliate marketing and commerce PR that is driving industry-wide discussion around data-driven PR with many agencies in the same space scrambling to catch up and follow suit. By staying extremely selective with the brands we work with and the talent we hire, Dreamday has become one of the most innovative and sought out PR firms in the game.
In 2020, I co-founded The Quality Edit with my friend Lee Joselowitz, formerly Head of Growth at Ritual, and our third co-founder and Editorial Director Scott Silver, who was formerly at Pinterest, Google, and Twitter. The Quality Edit was inspired by our experience working with many of the top-tier publishers and performance marketing agencies at Ritual and a desire to create a new type of publisher, a ‘Performance Publisher’, that understands DTC brands’ needs for content that not only increases brand awareness but drives sales, traffic, and performance. The Quality Edit is bootstrapped, profitable, has doubled in growth YoY and calls top DTC brands like Parachute Home, Bobbie, Ritual, The Bouqs, and Our Place clients. On the editorial side, and probably what TQE is most known for, we curate and review the web’s best brands. My co-founder Lee and I were personally constantly trying and testing all of the coolest DTC products we could find, and couldn’t find a publication we trusted for the best reviews, so decided to build our own.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I left Ritual after my son was one year old so I could spend more time with him from our home. I had the absolute best experience at Ritual and owe a lot of where I am today to that experience; I always say you can only connect the dots looking backward, not forwards. The name Dreamday actually came from a cheesy reason. I thought every day I could create my ‘dream day’ — I could take a few meetings, spend time with my kids, make time for wellness, etc. I quickly learned that when you own a business, you work a hundred times harder than you ever did as an employee. In the beginning, there were days that I’d forget to eat lunch, use the bathroom, or just have a minute to myself which led to me burning myself out. That was easily one of the darkest times in my life. I’ve since found a better balance and keep going back to my mission of creating that dream day, which has helped me prioritize and manage my time better. I also have accepted the fact that it’s not always possible to be perfectly balanced every day. Every day I make a sacrifice, whether that’s my kids, relationship, self-care, or work that needs to get done. Accepting that I can’t be everything to everyone all of the time and doing my best to say “no” to anything that is a distraction has really helped me. I started as a solo consultant at Dreamday, and now we’re a 20-person team. I owe a lot of my more newfound balance to my team–hiring the right people who are incredible at what they do and empowering and entrusting them to support has been crucial.
Dreamday and The Quality Edit have grown very quickly over the past four years. Sometimes I deal with imposter syndrome or the feeling of not really being able to step back and acknowledge what my team and I have built. I know we’ve built something very special with both businesses, but sometimes still fear that it could all go away. I felt this especially in the first couple of years building the businesses, but have noticed that as more time goes on, you find your footing, confidence and have built so much resilience to get the businesses to where they are today that you know there’s always a potential solve if you were to need to pivot.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Dreamday and The Quality Edit?
Dreamday combines the best of storytelling and data to bridge the PR and affiliate gap, driving both a high quality and high quantity of measurable press in a first-of-its-kind synergistic approach, which I coined as “Performance PR” in 2019. Unlike traditional PR agencies, Dreamday is able to apply affiliate data to press to optimize and deepen media and publisher relationships, inform pitching strategies, and provide tangible data like traffic and revenue driven by the press back to brands. For the first time ever, PR is data-driven and truly measurable.
The Quality Edit is a modern media company that curates the internet’s best brands with a unique take on the hottest new products across fashion, beauty, lifestyle and more.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I love the diversity of people, thought, and ranges of experiences you can have here. I love nature and try to immerse myself in nature as much as possible when I’m not working out of my home. I try to take most of my calls walking through our neighborhoods and try to take hikes or go to the beach on weekends. The weather is also unbeatable; as a native Californian, the weather impacts my mood and being outside and active in the sunshine gives me so much joy. I also love how accessible we are being a few hours away from the mountains or the desert, the latter of which we frequently travel to with our kids and dogs.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dreamday.la/ https://www.thequalityedit.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dreamday.la/ https://www.instagram.com/thequalityedit/
Image Credits
Credit to Kate Moore
