What do you get when you combine the office habitats of entrepreneurs with interior design? For a company called Mr. Kate, it’s a video series deal with Entrepreneur magazine and Staples.
What started in 2011 as a simple blog with the goal of celebrating life through a more creative lens has blossomed into Mr. Kate, a creative lifestyle “infotainment” enterprise. In this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts, Co-Founders Kate Albrecht and Joey Zehr trace the evolution of Mr. Kate into an award-winning home, style and beauty content and products marketer.
The company specializes in long-form video, which has inspired a big following on YouTube. “We really specialize in interior design and DYI home transformations,” says Albrecht. “We do full room transformations on the Internet, which is pretty unique.”
In early 2016, Mr. Kate created its own reality style show called Office Goals by using its own office space, a work in progress at the time, as inspiration. “Entrepreneur saw that as an opportunity to expand upon that, so we did a deal with Entrepreneur and Staples,” Zehr says of the recently announced series partnership.
The goal of Office Goals, says Albrecht, is to help new businesses explore what makes them unique and “helping them translate that into their outer space so that it really represents what they stand for as a business.”
The challenge is integrating Staples products “throughout the whole experience to bring life and creativity to the space,” she says.
Pursuing 30-minute video content as opposed to short-form sets Mr. Kate apart, according to Zehr. “We’re taking some of the old constructs of TV and sort of flipping them on their head and doing those online.”
And while Mr. Kate is all about lifestyle content, another point of differentiation is that it brings “a millennial edge” to bear, “which is one of transparency and authenticity,” says Albrecht.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
