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[Podcast] From Kickstarter to Cult Brand with Brandon Kim of Brevitē
Learn how a scrappy Kickstarter project became a beloved camera bag brand for photographers, creators, and everyday explorers.
[Podcast] From Kickstarter to Cult Brand with Brandon Kim of Brevitē
December 22, 2025 by Jacob Cass
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From Kickstarter to cult brand, Brevitē is a case study in how a challenger wins without a war chest.
In this episode of JUST Branding, we sit down with Brandon Kim, co-founder of Brevitē, to unpack how a scrappy Kickstarter project became a beloved camera bag brand for photographers, creators, and everyday explorers.
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We get into the real strategy behind their early momentum, including how they positioned in a crowded category, what they got right about their audience, and how they balanced instinct, research, and creative direction to build a brand people want to be part of.
Brandon also shares what bootstrapping taught them about pace, priorities, and protecting the “soul” of the brand while scaling operations.
If you’re building a DTC brand, growing a challenger business, or trying to create genuine community instead of empty reach, this one’s packed with practical lessons you can steal.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How Brevitē found whitespace in a saturated market
- What made their Kickstarter campaign resonate early
- How they approached positioning, identity, and brand voice
- The tradeoffs of bootstrapping versus outside investment
- How they built community and creator advocacy without chasing vanity metrics
- What’s next as Brevitē evolves from product to lifestyle
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Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome to JUST Branding. This time, we’re going inside the story of how a scrappy Kickstarter project has become one of the most beloved creative brands in its category. Our guest is Brandon Kim, co-founder of Brevitē, the Brooklyn based company behind a new generation of camera bags, built for photographers, creators and everyday explorers. And in a market dominated by legacy players with really deep pockets, Brandon and his team bootstrapped their way to success by combining smart strategy, clever positioning, thoughtful design and genuine community building.
And so we’re going to unpack all of that, how they broke into a crowded category with no outside funding and how they built a brand that resonates with creatives and how they’re now evolving Brevitē from product to lifestyle. So if you’re in brand building, whether you’re building a D to C brand or a leading kind of looking to challenge into any kind of category, this is a podcast for you. This one’s going to be packed with lessons to you for you, Brandon. I’m talking too much. Welcome to our show. Thanks for coming on.
Thank you for having me. This is really exciting. I’ve been listening to the podcast for a while now. So it’s fun to be on like the other side of it all. It’s very interesting.
Yeah, hopefully interesting, good, not interesting, disastrous, you know, letting you down and all that, seeing behind the curtain. But no, no, in all honesty, I think you reached out to me to a while ago. We’ve been looking at the brand and we’re just super thrilled to really get the inside track from you, because it’s tough out there, right? It’s really tough to build a brand to the level you have. So perhaps we can start with that. Like, you know, you launched into this really saturated category. So I guess, you know, it would be good to know what gave you the confidence to kind of do that, you know, to find that space for this new brand.
Oh, yeah. I mean, we didn’t know anything going into it. We just pure like, you know, it was pure, like ignorant bliss. But we were in college. We were students. My brother was going abroad to Hong Kong for a semester abroad, and he was a photographer and he needed a bag that would hold both of his photography gear and his normal everyday stuff and didn’t look like a target on his back, right? Like he was carrying thousands of dollars of gear. And oddly enough, at that time, like 2014, 2015, there was actually really no solutions on the market. There was like these like large, bulky black camera backpacks that existed. And so I took a look at that and I was like, well, I think we can design this. And we suddenly, you know, start talking to photographers and we were like, you know, doing a bunch of these interviews and we figured out that, hey, there was a real need in the market for a camera bag that didn’t look like a camera bag. And that kind of like really kicked off the journey. And then kind of over the course of the next like four or five years, we learned how the market worked. We kind of iterated on our product over and over and over. So we reached kind of this like the pinnacle, right? We kind of found our main hero product, which was the jumper. It’s this camera bag. It doesn’t look like a camera bag. It’s like really well made. And it’s just like all the devils are in the details of that bag. You know, over time, that like it kind of ended up becoming a category defining bag, which was an interesting thing to design.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful product. It’s got so many cool features as well. Like, as you say, it’s the detail, right? I just love the flaps that open up, look super interesting. And then also like the fact there’s something that in bags, right? Because I travel a lot, right? And I never buy a backpack now that doesn’t have, you know, that little strap that goes round? I don’t even know what the technical term is, but it’s like underneath the bits that go over your shoulders. There’s another strap that runs horizontally across the back and you can put it over your suitcase, right? So you could put it through your suitcase handle. Mate, that is a game changer. If you if anyone is out there who has not got that, get that and definitely check out the jumper backpack because it’s all on there.
I love luggage pass throughs.
There you go. So I love that. So it was born out of a need, a gap in the market through basically you or your brother, at least being customer of this and then realizing there wasn’t something out there. But I know you did some Kickstarter campaign. How did that go and why did you go down that route or route if you’re in the US?
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