ISM Bags | Selling The Perfect Everyday Carry

Today, ISM Bags is a luxury leather backpack brand featured in popular publications like Business Insider, Wirecutter, Refinery29, Forbes, and more. 

Back in 2018, it was the culmination of hours of painstaking product design by a good friend. The idea was simple—create an everyday carry balancing the elegance of a leather bag with modern functionality for everything from the boardroom to the bar. For the next two years, my two co-founders and I worked to bring ISM to the masses. As the CMO, I played a pivotal role in driving ISM’s monthly revenue to $100k within 6 months, without any outside funding.

I was responsible for: 

• Redesigning, testing, and implementing email marketing flows accounting for ~16% of total annual revenue 
• Conducting user research & establishing personas for primary and secondary audiences 
• Competitive audits and market research
• Influencer marketing outreach and strategic partnerships
• Product photo/video shoots, post-production, and final asset delivery 
• Continuous launch, experimentation, and analysis of paid advertising campaigns
• Crafted a Black Friday Campaign in <24 hours that brought in >50k over 4 days 

We were featured in some of the hottest fashion publications in the world, successfully launched multiple products, and made some money while doing it. But nothing beats seeing countless backpacks worn by happy customers in cities across the world.