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Guest: Chrystal Clifton, 20 Years in Premium & Luxury Products.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
How Premium Positioning Helps a New Product Compete
Chrystal Clifton explains why new consumer products benefit from premium positioning and how brand authority, customer experience, and consistency support it. The discussion also covers premium positioning, pricing, product strategy, brand authority, launch channels, customer experience, and growth.
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Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from someone who took a wine startup from zero to number eighth wine in the world on why you need to promote your new invention as a premium product and how to pull that off.
Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product developers,
Narrator: and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store,
Narrator: shelves. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small
Narrator: product businesses. Now, onto the show.
Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Chrystal Clifton to the show. She is the founder of Chrystalize, a company that helps luxury consumer product brands grow and monetize their marketing and brand authority. She also led the charge on
Kevin Mako: growing a wine brand from nothing to the number eight wine in the world, which is just one accomplishment amongst 20 years in the premium and luxury product industries. Today, Chrystal's going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers should
Kevin Mako: think about their product as a premium product, even if it's not in a typical luxury industry. She explains why this is so important to a new and growing brand, then explains best practices on how to pull it off the right way to ensure your product leads your industry in both
Kevin Mako: reputation and success. Now on to the show. Chrystal, welcome to the show. Thanks, Kevin. I'm excited to be here. Very excited to have you on. So I understand you're quite a bit like me. Before this whole crisis, you're on a
Chrystal Clifton: plane international traveler, traveling all the time every week. And like myself, we've been essentially landlocked for the last year. Isn't it crazy? Now I went from knowing airports,
Chrystal Clifton: knowing what I had to pack and quickly packing and having my itinerary always set to waking up and I'm now doing laundry between Zoom calls. It's just a totally different world. Yes.
Chrystal Clifton: It's different.
Kevin Mako: I'm not checking myself into a hotel and having meetings. It's I'm adapting in the best way I can. I love how one of your boys are just telling me before the show brought you over a report and slipped it across your desk as to why they need a gecko.
Chrystal Clifton: And like with pictures and everything, like a well done report, I'd say. Well done. A fourth grade report instead of doing his homework just slides in like all the reasons that we need
Chrystal Clifton: a leopard gecko in our house, which in the middle of a Zoom goal trying to keep a straight face with a 10-year-old behind the screen, like flashing this just up and down behind the screen.
Kevin Mako: And, you know, that's the reality of today's time. Absolutely. Well, I'm very excited today
Kevin Mako: to talk about luxury and premium and why and how new inventors, product startups, or people who are scaling their product of business should really be thinking about quality, premium,
Kevin Mako: high end, and how that affects their business, whether or not it's a luxury brand. So let's start there. Like first and foremost, describe what it means to create a premium product. Because I think
Kevin Mako: a lot of people, they think Louis Vuitton handbag. But in today's day and age, that's not necessarily
Chrystal Clifton: the definition of luxury. That is a luxury item. But on a new product, there's many ways to look at premium.
Chrystal Clifton: Absolutely. And it's so important because premium simply means that you are focusing on
Chrystal Clifton: the value you bring to somebody's life in so many ways. I mean, inventors especially are always
Chrystal Clifton: looking at making something better. And that's a premium solution that we need. And if you race to the bottom or you start thinking, oh, it has to be this price or it has to be, have
Chrystal Clifton: this feature and benefit. What happens is you leave the transformation of the way you're going to really help somebody's life and you start getting focused on little details that become
Kevin Mako: the race to the bottom. Right. So premium is the value you bring and giving yourself permission to be that valuable.
Kevin Mako: And this is so important because when you're a new product, and this is the first time you're launching, your new product and your new brand wrapped into one.
Kevin Mako: And one of the most important things that you can do is come out as a quality product. And quality and premium are very much interchangeable kind of words, especially when it comes to a new product. So again, it doesn't mean that you're necessarily creating a luxury good,
Kevin Mako: although that is even more important if that is the case. But even if you're creating a new or proprietary product, you want that to be the best version of that product can because you only have one shot at going to market. And that first shot is what's going to build your fan base and
Kevin Mako: all the rest. So if somebody really focuses on, okay, look, I'm creating this product and this invention,
Chrystal Clifton: I want to be premium. I want to be great. I want to be high quality. I want to be luxury, whatever you want to call it. How, like, let's first start with the mind. How do they start thinking about that in terms of themselves, their business and the product itself? Absolutely.
Chrystal Clifton: I have to tell you that one of the biggest pieces I work with my clients on is the permission to be premium, the permission they give themselves. And I would like to take a quick second to define premium because you say, you know, quality
Chrystal Clifton: and premium and then there's the idea of luxury. Premium is simply somebody being authentically aligned at the best version of themselves and giving themselves permission to be that. If they've been able to create an incredible invention,
Chrystal Clifton: giving that life to changing somebody else's situation and bringing it to market, standing behind it as a premium versus a comparitis of all the other things that are going on and all the other things people are,
Chrystal Clifton: if you decide that you are the best version of yourself and you give yourself permission to be premium,
Chrystal Clifton: then you can take the next inspired action steps from that place. It's a model of you start at the top and then you can always, you can always,
Kevin Mako: eventually create other products or portfolio products or other revenue streams that honor and offer other price points. But it's very challenging to go from an ascension model where
Kevin Mako: you're down at the bottom at the lower price point. And then as you develop your brand to try and raise prices. Absolutely. And that's consistent in a number of different product categories.
Kevin Mako: It's always easier, always easier to cost down. And that's a normal exercise. A lot of the time, you'll see a premium brand, they'll start at a certain level, and they'll be selling through high-end retailers or whatever else direct-to-consumer.
Kevin Mako: But then they'll get Walmart knocking on their door. And Walmart says, okay, look, you know, you've got a great brand, great product, but we need this at half the cost that you're manufacturing for right now. So what can you do? And that's what we get
Kevin Mako: down to, from a design perspective, we look to costing down and trying to maintain most of those quality elements while figuring out ways to actually manufacture for cheaper, faster,
Kevin Mako: bed or whatever else that we can do, especially with economies of scale, which can lay into that. But the first and foremost thing is you want to build that brand credibility. Even you can look at companies like automakers, right,
Kevin Mako: at luxury automakers, BMW, Mercedes, right? Originally it was fairly high-end brands. And they've come down and down. You look at the BMW
Chrystal Clifton: down to the one series, right, which is kind of like a mid-market car with the premium branding attached to it. So you're kind of having your cake and eating it too. But it's very difficult. to go the other way. It's very difficult to start as a low-end producer and then all of a sudden
Chrystal Clifton: come out with this supposed premium luxury high-end version of it when you've already lost that kind of brand credibility.
Chrystal Clifton: It's so true. And as you bring your product to market,
Chrystal Clifton: you know, one of my friends says, you only have one first impression. Use it well, right? So aligning with yourself authentically so that you know what the value is you bring and be willing to stand out
Chrystal Clifton: the top, be willing to say, hey, this, I am the one and only, because if you're inventing something, you really are. You are the one and only. You need to stand on the peak of what your one
Chrystal Clifton: and only is, because then people will look and hear you, and that's how you really stand out in the marketplace. But to use your analogy, Walmart, if you created a mass scale product and you went right away to Walmart,
Chrystal Clifton: Nordstrom is not going to go to Walmart to find what products they want to bring in.
Chrystal Clifton: They're not going there and finding, okay, yep, we're going to pull this up and we're going to put this in Saxtap Avenue and we're going to double the charge. But what you are able to do is if you are the one and only and you stand behind it and you have the inspired action and you really have a
Chrystal Clifton: good product that you understand how to storytell that transformation, well, then stand behind that premium and you can then secondly look at white labeling, creating a different version of it.
Chrystal Clifton: you can create a secondary version. I mean, for instance, for me in the winery,
Chrystal Clifton: we had our high-end wines.
Chrystal Clifton: We had premium $100 bottles of wine, but then we would have clients come and say, you know, for instance, we've done wine for a lot of famous chefs like Wolfgang Puck
Kevin Mako: or we did a lot with the French laundry, Thomas Keller, or even Joe Bostionage. They'd want a version of that. Well, we're not going to take our product that already is $100.
Kevin Mako: and then go just resell it to them, we came up with, okay, if we're going to align with you
Chrystal Clifton: and your clients use to spending $40, then this is what we can do for $40. Right. And we just put in again, that inspired action plan that allows us then to look at how we build a portfolio. You can build your portfolio down. It's really hard to build a debt.
Chrystal Clifton: That's great. And talk a bit about your experiences there as well. You touched on the wine. You've done all kinds of things in your career. Just highlight some of the kind of the experience. that you've created for your users, your, your, and buyers, that sort of stuff in your,
Chrystal Clifton: in your, you know, 20 year experience in the luxury industry. Absolutely. So one of the things I always pride myself on is that I, even as a very eager learner of
Chrystal Clifton: business in my early 20s, I was 21 going on 22 when I was in the winery. I didn't have a background in winemaking. My family didn't have that background in winemaking. I didn't even understand that there was different levels.
Chrystal Clifton: of wine. I just knew I loved wine. Living in Italy, growing up there, going to school there, I just knew wine was beautiful and I wanted a part of it. Well,
Chrystal Clifton: I had the opportunity to learn from some incredible teachers that taught, you know, how to make quality wine. So right away, I was able to enter the marketplace, again, giving myself permission to go, oh, this is where we belong.
Chrystal Clifton: And so what was so interesting about that is going to a restaurant, with that kind of assumptive nature or their permission to be a quality wine, right? Oh, yeah, we sell quality wine. It also changes how confident you aren't approaching it.
Chrystal Clifton: And then the interesting thing is you just magnetically start creating other people that follow you. And what back in 2000, I'm going to date myself here, Kevin. This is really embarrassing.
Chrystal Clifton: 2001 and 2002, there was no website. And Gary Vee was an old friend of mine back then. And I remember his enthusiasm of saying,
Chrystal Clifton: there's this, the worldwide web is going to blow up. It's going to blow up. We're going to have websites with wine on it. I thought, here's such a nut. I mean, I get it. But like, really? I mean,
Chrystal Clifton: he's genius now. I love to see his success. But I was back when people, when we wanted to sell wine, they had a fax in their order.
Chrystal Clifton: Right. So even transitioning these experiences, first of that, and it was we hand-wrote letters to all of our clients. And we'd send out the newsletter. And then we would process the order and write thank you notes and send them out.
Chrystal Clifton: But that human touch, we still carried through once we did have a digital version of it. You get a handwritten note from us. And then what was really fun about the other winery, Palmyna, because it was about Italian experience,
Chrystal Clifton: I quickly learned that we weren't making wine, we were making memories. So from that place, what other things could we be doing? Well, people create memories around the table. So this is before Blue Apron,
Chrystal Clifton: this was back in the early 2000s, we started white labeling different products and creating a wine club that you got a wine, an oil ingredients, and a recipe of ours. So you got an entire way to create a memory.
Chrystal Clifton: And people buy wine, but typically they're not buying wine. They're buying a way to have a great connection with somebody or a great meal or whatever it is. So we created this
Kevin Mako: entire club, this wine club where people got these shipments. And I remember it was so challenging because nobody at the time was shipping, you know, food and wine and all this together. And so we had to go over and over talk about inventing, talking to cardboard companies
Kevin Mako: and cutouts and how expensive it was and where were the margins. But,
Kevin Mako: you know, the result was huge because people just loved it. And from there, we grew more experiences of having pop-up dinners. They would come and we would have cooking classes. Again, this is the early 2000s. It seems very normal right now.
Kevin Mako: But when we entered the eyes of what experience do we want to give? people, not what are we selling, it allowed for all these different magnetic marketing pieces that just naturally fell into place.
Kevin Mako: You know, product startups have a lot to learn from you because I'll tell you what's so impressive about this story is that even back then, and obviously still to today,
Kevin Mako: to be a premium wine was a very, very competitive industry. It still is, of course.
Kevin Mako: You ended up being number eight in the world for your wine, competing basically starting in the garage and competing all the way up.
Kevin Mako: And a lot of this is around this philosophy of thinking premium and all that. So I really want to dig into kind of your best practices around this. You've highlighted some. Let's dig into it.
Chrystal Clifton: How do you really do premium well? Because you were the one who won that game in an extremely competitive industry, which you think for hardware startups, and you already mentioned it, when you create, that new innovation, you already are number one. If you think that you're number one and that
Chrystal Clifton: it's obviously new innovative products, so you're the only one out there to start, or at least you have a feature that's unique or a certain element or a design that's unique, something makes you number one in your vertical, in that very vertical. So as a hardware startup,
Chrystal Clifton: if we can apply the lessons that you've learned in a highly competitive industry, it can make for home runs in the hardware industry. So let's go through some of those best practices. You You talked a bit about a few things, human to human, taking the time, connection is currency.
Chrystal Clifton: You talk about those things when you're doing guest speaking around the world. Can you highlight some of those things and how we can apply that in our businesses and in our hardware startups? Absolutely. So what I always found fascinating is we would go to these winemaker dinners.
Chrystal Clifton: We'd be invited to other wineries dinners. And it would be painful because they would be so in love with their wine that they would talk through all the features and the benefits.
Chrystal Clifton: and I picked it at 28 bricks, and then I did this, and the pH is 4.7, and then we bought this glass. And people are literally nodding off into their asparagus soup. I mean, they're just like,
Chrystal Clifton: this is so boring because they're so focused on features and benefits.
Chrystal Clifton: And we, in every industry, right, I was selling business to business and direct to consumer. But really, what we all have to remember in everything that we create is we're selling human to human. And humans don't want to
Chrystal Clifton: hear another human just talk about features and benefits. Since the beginning of time, it's been a storytelling process.
Chrystal Clifton: We've always told stories. I mean, that's how we used to remember things as children. That's why there's, you know, songs that are saying about, you know, Gideon and whatever.
Chrystal Clifton: I mean, you just hear these songs and stories told historically because even back then teachers sold teachings because it was a human to human experience. And humans remember emotional
Chrystal Clifton: connection. They remember somebody who cares enough about them. So if you take the time to know your clients and fall in love with your clients more than your product, they will fall in love with your product.
Chrystal Clifton: I'm going to say that again. If people fall in love with their product before people,
Chrystal Clifton: if you do that as an inventor, other people won't fall in love with your product.
Chrystal Clifton: So take the time to know your customer and fall in love with them. And when I say, fall in love with them. I mean, take the time to know who they are. What really matters in their life?
Chrystal Clifton: How are they feeling before they have your invention? How do they feel after? What do they have
Kevin Mako: before? What do they have after? Take the time to sit and actually know them as if you really have watched them for a day. You really get them because then you will naturally know what to say to them.
Kevin Mako: then your marketing becomes easier and then you become number one and suddenly you'll have a following, you'll be magnetic and you don't even know why. But it's because you care about them. You care about your customer. And that's really what you're doing. You're selling to another
Kevin Mako: human being. Please don't forget that.
Kevin Mako: And what I always say is connection is currency. There is no greater power in your business than stepping into how can you connect with another person.
Kevin Mako: How can you connect with yourself to your why, to your team and your audience? Because that, that is the currency. That is how you will scale. That is how you will grow your sales. That is how you create brand culture.
Kevin Mako: That is how you keep your team. That is how you turn somebody who might know about you to a raving fan.
Kevin Mako: That's all. Not only is a great advice, but that understanding what it really does for you, your business, your product is huge. there's all kinds of direct and probably even bigger indirect benefits that result when you focus
Kevin Mako: on. And we talk about, we use one word on the show quite a bit, value.
Kevin Mako: And value really, it doesn't come down to the features of your product. It comes down to the value you've created in that person's life, the experience, the benefit, whatever it is, right? How is their life
Chrystal Clifton: changed? Like you said from beginning to the end of that experience with your invention or product. And I must say, like inventors, hardware startups, designers, you folks out there, you really have to understand that if you can sell the vision on value, everything else falls into place.
Chrystal Clifton: And because you're creating great value you are with the features that you've created, which are important to actually engineer the product and all that, but if you can create that value in the end, then that is what creates all of these external benefits.
Chrystal Clifton: And everything from raving fans to better corporate culture, to having better people working for you or working with you, better partnerships,
Chrystal Clifton: more leniency, right, which is always important, right? If your product maybe is slightly off-centered, a certain group, but they're a raving fan and you're really helping with them, they may be more lenient to those sorts of things. Maybe if you have manufacturing delays because it's your first run or whatever else, you need
Chrystal Clifton: that baked in extra encouragement, extra fan following to go through that. And all this comes back around to focusing on premium. Even if you're, you don't have to be a luxury brand. but you do have to focus on premium when it's a new product.
Chrystal Clifton: Absolutely. It is so incredibly powerful when it's applied in a way that's not deceptive, but authentic, right? Because when you're inventing something,
Kevin Mako: you don't want to say an outcome or transformation that's holos, ballast, you know, just, oh, yeah, you're going to suddenly be able to fly. No, listen. But people struggle every day, whatever it is you're solving, whether it's how you're putting on jewelry or how you're getting in your car or how you're starting
Kevin Mako: your car in the snow or how are you able to remember your grandmother's birthday with a favorite bottle of wine i mean that was something that i knew like we give an opportunity for people to create
Kevin Mako: memories it's giftable memory right because there's really only two arts in the world that are contained within a memory that brings in all your senses it's music and it's wine
Kevin Mako: because you you can capture that moment in time and you go, oh, I remember when we're in Provence or I remember we're in Italy and we drank this wine or we heard this song. You might have had a meal too or seen
Kevin Mako: a beautiful sculpture, but the reality is you're not going to be able to completely recreate that meal, maybe a version of it, but you can absolutely listen to that same song and open that same bottle of wine. And so when I worked with my team around that culture,
Kevin Mako: everybody from customer service to how we addressed our clients when they walked in the door or they called us or they emailed us. We're there to make a memory.
Kevin Mako: So what memory are we making?
Chrystal Clifton: That's what branding is. You're making memories and connections.
Chrystal Clifton: It's amazing how you take something like a bottle of wine and you can just almost exponentially amplify the value when you portray it the right way and when you create that experience and that brand promise and everything around it. And just as a bit of
Chrystal Clifton: a side note. I know a lot of people when they think about premium or luxury, it seems scary because that means, okay, product development, that means more expensive and more difficult and more costly. But something that we've talked about a few times on the show that help with all that
Chrystal Clifton: is focus.
Chrystal Clifton: So if you are worried that creating a premium product is difficult, I would say your worry is probably correct. It is difficult to make a high quality product. However, if you really
Chrystal Clifton: narrow your feature set down and focus on the one or two features, which are creating those great experiences, then you can highlight how those, and essentially like Chrystal's done with
Chrystal Clifton: their wine, you can take those two features and exponentially expand the value that your customers are going to derive. You can do a great job on those features, but you can also enhance them to a massive magnitude by putting Chrystal's methods into place. So Chrystal,
Chrystal Clifton: I really appreciate you for all these insights. Where can people, go to learn more about you. What can they, what can they do to get involved with your organization? How does your organization work? Just give us kind of a high level on all that stuff.
Chrystal Clifton: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, I, because you mentioned, I am just always creating myself, right? So I have a few different areas that I work in. One I'm really proud of is taking these concepts
Kevin Mako: and we have a very beautiful agency called Elite Connection Marketing. And my partner and I, we really stand for the same values, which is authentically aligning our clients so that we can
Kevin Mako: help them build their authority, monetize their authority, get the correct clients they need in a genuine way that helps them become number one in the market. And as we just talked about, everything else
Kevin Mako: will flow as we walk them through that transformation stage. For those who want to understand, how do they even get past the mindset, because we do in our own business worlds, we hit our own
Kevin Mako: glass ceilings over and over. I offer crystalclifton.com. There is a brand quiz. You can kind of get a chance to learn more about who you are as a leader, who you are as a
Kevin Mako: brand. And I do offer trainings and experiences there as far as inner circle and masterminds on just how to overcome that, how to give yourself permission. The power of permission is so important.
Kevin Mako: Permission in all areas to have grace and space, power of permission to say, wow, I'm really worth this or it can be power permission to say, oh, I had a not great day today, but I'm going to accept myself anyway, because it's a ride as a roller coaster ride.
Kevin Mako: We all know that. I mean, it's, I love that cartoon. I don't remember who it's by, but where somebody's jumping off, you know, building a plane as they're coming off the cliff. That's basically what it is, right?
Kevin Mako: We're all just taking that leap of faith and we're building it as we go.
Kevin Mako: Chrystal, much appreciate for that. And I'll have all those links in the show notes underneath. So just pop over to macawdesign.com slash podcast or product startup.com and take a look for Chrystal Clifton there and all the show notes will be in there with all the links
Kevin Mako: and whatnot. Chrystal, thanks so much for being on the show and providing all this 20 years of experience in building premium brands and providing it to our audience. So for that, thank you very much, Chrystal, and hope to have you on again. Thanks, Kevin.
Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode. of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by
Narrator: Mako Design + Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product
Narrator: business clients. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, Head over to Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako-designs
Narrator: for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
Raise Perceived Value Early
Build a Premium Product Position the Market Believes
Premium pricing must be supported by the product promise, customer experience, proof, design cues, channel, and brand behavior. Product Startup can help you align those signals.
Work directly with Kevin Mako, the leading expert in hardware startup consulting, on premium positioning, pricing, product strategy, brand authority, launch channels, customer experience, and growth.
A focused strategy call on how premium positioning helps a new product compete, tailored to your product, stage, and commercial goals.