Meet Brandon

We’ve all come to Open Eye from diverse backgrounds. What are some of your career or personal highlights to date?

Brandon: My major work experience to date has been B2C brand marketing management at the L’Oréal Group, with luxury fragrances being my segment and category; lots of great scents! My primary mandates were brand strategy and operational marketing; my role was to use local insights to devise optimal strategies to launch products within my portfolio of brands into the Canadian market. A rich experience that regularly exposed me to sales analysis, local sourcing & product development, demand planning, operations, retail merchandising design, experiential retail, sales management and digital strategy.

Prior to this, I had the opportunity to dabble within business development at a nonprofit and spent a summer learning the ins and outs of agency work for clients in the health sector. My current passion project is my personal brand, Happy Tears Accessories, with a mission to bring more positivity and happiness practices into everyday life through vibrant, daily accessories.

For every engagement I’ve pursued up until now, whether in my personal or professional life, I move towards opportunities that my intuition tells me I will enjoy and with people I will enjoy doing it with. This very same mindset has lead me to Open-i and I am so thrilled join this team.

Outside feedback is enormously important for businesses. What’s some feedback that you’ve received personally that helped you grow?

Brandon: “Test and learn” and “fail fast.” As personal growth is a product of learning, for this reason, these two pieces of advice come to mind right away for me.

In a digital marketplace, consumers are incredibly dynamic which provides an exciting opportunity for businesses to test ideas very quickly and learn from them through real-time feedback. Sometimes these ideas take off and sometimes they don’t; this is where ‘fail fast’ comes in. The question we should ask ourselves is how can we quickly take the feedback received and carry on, knowing a little more than we did yesterday. The people working in any organization don’t want to be paralyzed by fear and so, the organizations who can perpetuate a mindset of experimentation and learning, have the best opportunity to grow their people, keep them around and reap the biggest rewards.

Taking it a step further, I would even take the word ‘fail’ completely off the table and say: ‘test and learn fast.’

When you “fail” in the traditional – something I tried did not meet my expectations – kind of way, there is always something to learn and carry forward. This pure fact of learning makes you better off than you were before and therefore, would we really stand to call it a failure? In my humble opinion, it simply cannot be!

We all try to bring a lot to the table at Open Eye. What’s your superpower?

Brandon: I self-identity as a creativity confetti cannon with the power to inspire people to think bigger and differently.

I am always primed for launch and thrive off of a collaborative brainstorming session or any opportunity to flex my creative muscles.

We’re fond of the saying, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” What’s one thing you think an organization should immediately start measuring that they likely aren’t?

Brandon: HAPPINESS. Hands down!

We’re at a time where the world is more and more machine-driven, replacing the tasks traditionally performed by people. What this will continue to do is move these people into jobs where collaboration and these very human attributes grow in importance; attributes like feeling mentally well, feeling well in our daily work environments and well in our relationships with the people we see with each day.

I see organizations now catching a glimpse into the hard data that is looking closely at happiness and well-being indicators and seeing how they are proving to be not only a part of the formula for life, but also part of the formula that leads to increased productivity and ultimately, an organization’s financial success.

What do you love doing in your spare time?

Brandon: I am a spin instructor and teach 5 times per week! Energy is contagious and I feel lucky to go into a dark room for 45-minutes and leave it carrying that energy into my personal and professional lives. Plus, I get to take my loves for dance, music and personal growth learnings into that room, too, and that’s just the best.