ARTIST COMMERCE | PLATFORM & REVENUE STRATEGY

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Client: Okayplayer / Questlove, L.I.E.S. Records, Snoop Dogg
Role: Commerce Strategy, Brand & Platform Development
Timeline: 2012–2018
Project Type: E-Commerce, Product, Retail & Revenue Strategy

Different audiences need different ways to buy.

Over six years, I built commerce businesses around artists and cultural platforms that had almost nothing in common.

Okayplayer was an established hip-hop institution. L.I.E.S. was an underground electronic label. Snoop Dogg had a global audience and a cultural moment built around 4/20.

The opportunity wasn’t to give them the same playbook. It was to understand what each audience already valued and build commerce around that.

For Okayplayer and Questlove, I built the first real e-commerce platform, developed private-label product and connected online commerce to Roots Picnic and Live Nation.

For L.I.E.S. Records, the answer was almost the opposite: limited editions, a deliberately independent visual language and a direct-to-consumer model that preserved the scarcity and attitude of the label.

The releases sold out within hours and expanded into wholesale with Dover Street Market, Union Los Angeles and Supreme.

For Snoop Dogg, I built commerce around 4/20 itself, turning a cultural date into an event-driven product and sales opportunity that beat projections and could be repeated.

The audience is the business model.

There was no universal answer across these projects.

Sometimes the opportunity was infrastructure. Sometimes scarcity. Sometimes wholesale. Sometimes an event.

What stayed consistent was starting with the audience instead of the merchandise.

The product changed. The channel changed. The culture changed. The job was figuring out how each one could become a business without sanding off what made it valuable in the first place.