Behind Flamingo Estate and its founder, who left agency life to start the high-end DTC brand

Brands on the Rise is a regular Ad Age feature spotlighting the marketing and business tactics of successful challenger brands. Read other installments here. The California-based direct-to-consumer brand Flamingo Estate is many things: produce purveyor, candle maker, olive oil producer, 2021 “Oprah’s Favorite Things” list-maker and, overall, a company that is blurring the lines of what types of products can be considered—and priced as—luxury goods. But for founder Richard Christiansen, Flamingo Estate was an escape hatch from the ad agency business in 2020. That’s the year he left Chandelier Creative (which he also founded and which is still active), where he worked with clients such as Hermes, Old Navy, Cartier and other major brands for about 20 years. As the pandemic began, business slowed, and Christiansen realized he was done. “I was so fatigued by fast fashion and fast food and fake strategy … I just wanted to do something that was honest and real, where you didn’t need the strategy session or the brand explorer or whatever, because the stories were fundamentally and completely honest and real,” Christiansen said in a recent interview. Brands on the rise A look at up-and-coming brands disrupting their categories Read more here Now, more than three years later, Flamingo Estate is a thriving luxury business, successfully marketing products that include a $178 “Three Sister” candle set that made Oprah’s coveted “Favorite Things” list in 2021, as well as $80 jars of spicy strawberries and $250 jars of honey made from bees raised in the backyards of celebrities including LeBron James. Earlier this year, Flamingo Estate caught the attention of The New York Times, which in a profile noted it had $10 million in revenue last year, while raising $7.5 million in new outside funding. Christiansen declined to comment on both figures. The attention comes as Flamingo Estate proves there’s a market for luxury goods beyond watches and handbags. Case in point: the expensive strawberries and candle set have sold out multiple times since they were launched, according to the brand. Below, more on how Christiansen made the pivot from agency executive to successful entrepreneur and what is next for the brand. More DTC news and trends to know How it started Flamingo Estate is the name of the Los Angeles estate that Christiansen purchased several years ago. The grounds previously housed a porn studio before Christiansen bought the property—hence, why the company’s website refers to Flamingo Estate as a “pleasure garden.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Flamingo Estate, Los Angeles (@flamingo_estate) The brand got its start in farm goods. In the early days of COVID, Christiansen spoke with a lot of farmers who were losing money as they could no longer sell their produce to restaurants. Those farmers reignited Christiansen’s creative energy, and soon, he realized these were the people with whom he wanted to collaborate. “I hated working for people I didn’t respect. I was so sick of talking to these CMOs who were not talented enough to have those roles. I was fatigued from giving brands advice and having them not listen,” he said. During the first week of COVID lockdowns, he started selling vegetables for a farmer to help out her business. Then one farmer became 20, and 20 farmers became 50, and 50 became 120. Today, Flamingo Estate’s fresh farm boxes—which run for $65-$70 and include a rotating selection of fruits, vegetables, eggs, baked goods and more—are delivered to 2,000 homes in Los Angeles every Friday, and continue to sell out every week. The brand also offers a subscription tier for $96 per month that includes free shipping, members-only products, and more. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Flamingo Estate, Los Angeles (@flamingo_estate) From his work at Chandelier, he knew how to build out an Instagram presence for a brand—which is exactly how he started driving demand for the farm boxes. Los Angeles-based celebrities such as Chrissy Teigen (who actually mistook Flamingo Estate for a restaurant and showed up at Christiansen’s home with her whole family, as Christiansen revealed on “The Ellen Show”) and the Kardashians started purchasing the boxes, or receiving them as gifts from friends and posting about them on Instagram. During the early days of the pandemic lockdown, “people wanted to Instagram something, you know. People are stuck at home during COVID, They have nothing to Instagram, they're not going anywhere,” Christiansen said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Flamingo Estate, Los Angeles (@flamingo_estate) So he decided to make the boxes as Instagramable as humanly possible. “From the get-go, we made that delivery, the unboxing, that arrival moment, really beautiful. The box is beautiful. It’s covered in patterns. It’s full of inserts, printed stuff and information. We really made it exciting and fun,” he said. It worked: Every time a major celebrity with a big Instagram following would get a box and post about it, sales would spike. Soon enough, Christiansen was hiring former fashion photographers to take photos of the tomatoes at his home for the brand’s content. Flamingo Estate quickly expanded to bath products, which were inspired by a personal issue Christiansen was having at the Flamingo Estate itself: His roses were dying. “We started making those because the water from Flamingo runs directly into the garden,” he said, noting that “my roses were dying because of all the chemicals that were in my body wash from a very fancy brand. So I started making my own,” using the same ingredients he had access to from his newfound network of 120 farmers, who are the suppliers for the brand. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Flamingo Estate, Los Angeles (@flamingo_estate) Tipping point Later, Australian beauty retailer Mecca reached out to Flamingo Estate wanting to carry some of its personal care products, Christiansen said. “We were like ‘Wow, for us to be able to wholesale to a huge retailer like that, we’re gonna have to really step it up,’” which meant improving the packaging, as well as starting to think seriously about how the brand could start to scale with supply chain and logistics, he said. “The wonderful partnership with them had some trickle-down effects that really benefited the rest of the business here in America,” Christiansen said. While Flamingo Estate isn’t in any other mass retailers yet (outside of its beauty and home products in about 350 boutiques, per Christiansen), he’s interested in exploring that in the U.S. in the months to come. Marketing strategies Due to the success of those unpaid celebrity influencers, “we had no paid advertising for the longest time at all,” Christiansen said, noting that Flamingo Estate hadn’t gifted their products to celebrities or influencers, either. Christiansen noted that if he did some of the things he does now for Flamingo Estate’s marketing strategy when he was in the agency business, he probably would have been fired. “Often emails go out and we’re not even selling a product. We constantly take a hit on margins and things like that because we really stand up for our growers,” he said. “I write the social copy myself, I write all the emails, I read the product descriptions—it’s super personal, it’s always in my own voice,” Christiansen said. Naturally, the marketing strategy has expanded since the brand started in 2020 (though it’s still an in-house operation), but two key practices have remained the same: Every Sunday, Christiansen calls or texts that week’s top 50 Flamingo Estate customers and has conversations with them. He also writes a weekly email newsletter with his thoughts and feelings about what’s growing in the garden at Flamingo Estate, or what they’re sending out that particular week. But of course, a growing business can’t operate like a small farm stand forever. Flamingo Estate now does “a lot” of paid social media marketing, although it spent 50% less this past year on paid media than it did the year prior, according to Christiansen. “Even after the reduction in spending, our growth continued, which indicated that we had a fundamentally healthy business that was not addicted to performance marketing,” he said. Last year, Flamingo Estate placed beehives in the gardens of celebrities such as James, Julianne Moore and Tiffany Haddish, eventually selling the resulting jars of honey for $250 jars a pop. Flamingo Estate has also collaborated with other zeitgeisty brands such as Great Jones and Sweetgreen—all in an effort to “put culture in horticulture,” as Christiansen puts it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Flamingo Estate, Los Angeles (@flamingo_estate) “We’ve never paid anyone anything to do any collaborations, and so most of that money has gone back to charity,” he said, referring to the honey collabs. For instance, proceeds from honey labeled “Savannah & LeBron James Honey” (named for the NBA legend and his wife) go to the LeBron James Family Foundation, according to Flamingo Estate’s website. What the experts say Flamingo Estate remains a small player in the multiple sectors in the food, beauty and home goods sectors. But it is a hot and growing brand, said Sky Canaves, senior analyst, retail and e-commerce at Insider Intelligence, in a recent interview. “It’s still very niche,” she said, comparing the brand to Erewhon and Goop in the sense that those companies are also expanding the definition of what a luxury product can be. She’s seen other products with ties to celebrity, such as Erewhon’s $20 to $30 celebrity-branded smoothies, become normalized via TikTok and social media despite their unusually high price tag. “Because of their tie to a luxury brand, or their luxury branding, they become very aspirational. And those price points are still relatively affordable compared to a lot of luxury products that can run in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars if you’re thinking of watches and jewelry,” she said. “Consumers who might not be able to afford a Hermes handbag can afford a smoothie, even though it does stretch the budget a bit.” What’s next Armed with the new investment funding, Christiansen is interested in partnering with a national retailer in the U.S. in the next year, especially for Flamingo Estate’s food products. He is also excited about potentially expanding the brand to Japan. Flamingo Estate will also produce a version of honey with Justin and Hailey Bieber, as well as Cher, Christiansen said. For his part, Christiansen is writing a book called “The Flamingo Estate Guide to Becoming Alive.” Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here

Behind Flamingo Estate and its founder, who left agency life to start the high-end DTC brand

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