Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another SLD meetup, your host Alvaro. We're back in Miami actually a couple hours ago, just landed. So very excited to be here with all of you. And today we're going to be bringing another interesting guest.
His name is Gary Lipovetsky. And alongside with his wife Valeria Lipovetsky, they've built Valeria Inc, which they focus on, celebrating and bringing a bunch of celebrity products. And he's going to talk about the key elements on how to bring a strong relationship, personally and professionally into fruition, because they've done phenomenal and I'm very excited to have him with us today. Harry, what's happening with you?
How are you, sir? How's it going? Good, good. I mean, I bid you a like, I guess, because I just landed not to log ago from Madrid.
Very cool. Very cool. But very happy to be here and to have you in one of our episodes, the 101st episode, the new century. Congratulations, man.
That's awesome. Your page is running your Instagram profiles grown tremendously. So all the best, too. No, thank you.
And I'm very excited to have you here with us today, because I mean, you represent what many people will dream of. You know, you have a beautiful right here. I'd love to know what you mean, right, family? Well, I mean, what I mean by that is that you're happily married, you have a beautiful family, you're working alongside with your wife, you guys have built a really successful platform and business out of it.
And it keeps getting more exciting and exciting every day. So tell us a little bit about how did you guys get started. Yeah, I mean, so look, obviously, I'm extremely blessed with my wife and my kids. So you're absolutely right.
In terms of how we got started, I mean, the short story is that one day I found a deposit in our bank account, our mutual bank account, our only bank account with myself and my wife. And it was for about $10,000. So I didn't know how it got there. So I asked my wife, I said, do you know where this $10,000 is from?
And she said, oh, yeah, this moisturizer company sponsored one of my YouTube videos. So I said, would, and they take you $10,000? Because I hadn't known really that much. I didn't know anything about it in consumer marketing.
She said, yeah, she's very nonchalant about it. It wasn't a big deal for her. So I said, can you let me see what you're doing on YouTube? So she showed me, I looked at her Instagram.
I kind of had an idea of what she was doing, but I wasn't really following it, because to me it was for hobby. So that was, that was her thing. I was doing my thing. And then when I looked at it and I logged in and I took a look at the media, I took a look at some of the metrics because I have a background in, you know, in online media and online e-commerce and whatnot.
I took a look at it and I said, wow, this is real media. Like, and the fact that someone's willing to pay for it is incredible. So kind of the genesis of that was that I said to her, hey, like, what do you tell me about your day? What do you spend your time doing?
And she says, well, I work about 12 hours a day. And you know, at this point we have two kids. I said, okay. And she said, I work 12 hours a day, an hour a day, I'm in front of the camera, and 11 hours a day I'm editing.
So I asked her, I said, how do you know how to edit? How is that possible? And she said, oh, I just look it up on YouTube. So I said to her, listen, let's hire a videographer full-time.
They'll work for eight hours a day editing video. And then instead of you shooting content and being in front of the camera for an hour, you'll be in front of the camera for eight, nine, 10 hours a day. And that way you'll make so much more content and then we can start scaling the business. Fast forward to an hour of 25 people.
You know, 20 people run the, 20 people operate the media company, which is Valeria Inc, which supports, you know, all of the content creation and optimization and everything for our audience about 5 and 1 half million people across four platforms. And then we have five people on Varee, which is our new e-commerce venture, where we sell women's accessories and clothing. So yeah, that's kind of how it's spawned from there. That's amazing.
It's a great story. Just for those that are watching, obviously you can also follow Gary, but take also Valeria's Instagram so that you can see, because I saw some of the comments asking about Valeria's Instagram. And as you said, she has over five million followers across all social media platforms. And I think that nowadays influencer marketing is dominating when it comes to the marketing, the organic marketing that we saw previously.
How has it been working alongside your wife? You know what? I have to say, it's been a pleasure. So that's probably not what most people expect to hear.
They expect to hear that there's a lot of hardship and a lot of confrontation and struggle and disagreement. But there really isn't, you know, from really early on in our relationship, before we got into business together, we have this rule to never raise our voice. So we never escalate conversations. We'll talk about it in a very clear, succinct way.
And that seems to have worked. That seems to have that strategy of seeing the transfer well from our personal life to our business life. One thing I'll tell you is that this is actually something that I can't imagine not having this in common with Valeria. I don't know.
I think when people are married after a certain amount of time, they kind of run out of stuff to talk about. We never run out of stuff to talk about. Tell us a little bit here about the current project that you have going up. Valeria, as I mentioned, there's 20 people and those people range from a two person team for business development, a two person team for customer relations.
Obviously our CEO, we have a production manager, a manager, three editors. So I mean, there's an infrastructure there. I mean, that's kind of the nature of the business and not business is growing in terms of both the not so much the quantity of sponsors, because with sponsorships, which is the main revenue model there, we're actually doing less and less sponsors, but the quality of the sponsorships are growing. And the average investment by the sponsors are growing as both Valeria becomes more established as an online celebrity.
And the industry continues to grow and evolve. And then with Veri, Veri is a lot newer. We just figured we'd do this for our clients and they come back to us and they keep coming back to us to gain access, meaningful access to that meaningful connection to the audience. And we should do it ourselves.
So we've been experimenting with different product categories. We've been creating product that's been really interesting. So it's actually really interesting to create product. I've never done that before.
And just like iteration on concepts when it comes to jewelry and clothing and glasses. That's all very cool. So those are those two projects aside from that. I mean, for myself as an individual, I have another YouTube channel that I don't really talk much about.
It's actually a partnership with a different group of people. Where there's a lot of all of that. And we have almost 4 million subscribers there on YouTube. Yeah.
And it's like a channel about health information. We do health research. So that's a lot of fun too. So I also personally manage our real estate portfolio, which I actually really enjoy doing.
That's been an interesting journey. That's been a long journey and a long and a fun and a risky and a journey with ups and downs. Can you remind me anything? No, I'm saying stock market.
So it's not really like, yeah, stock market. Not real estate, real estate also. But yeah, with the stock market, when COVID hit, I think our portfolio took a 70% hit. But I didn't panic sell and I held on and obviously the markets have recovered.
And then some. So yeah, so a lot of stock market investments. I don't really, I'm not a big believer in wealth managers, like typical wealth managers who will invest their company in food stock market for you. I feel like I do a better job myself.
And then there's a real estate portfolio. So we have some properties and we rent them out. So that's kind of, that's what we, but I got to say my biggest project is my kids. That's just, yeah, you know, do you have kids?
No, no, but I was just in Spain and I have, you know, 10 nephews and nieces. So I get to see the madness. Yeah. Yeah.
Our boys are already at that age where, and we have all boys, we have three boys. And so I'm an eight year old and are seven year old. So, you know, it's, it's a lot of fun. So we're definitely between needle area.
We're definitely busy around the clock. What's the one thing that you will suggest people to do to make sure to combine all the areas of the life. Man, like stay calm, stay calm. Yeah.
Because you know, when there's so much going on and the challenge is, I mean, just to be really frank, I mean, the challenge is that you kind of layer COVID on top of this, because, you know, we just, we arrived from Toronto not so long ago and it was very different there with a lot of pounds. And it's just very different when you're trying to do all of the things that I just described. While your kids are also in the house and not going to school. I said I would give to somebody who would go down this path with being business partners with their spouse.
I think the first thing you need to do is understand if your spouse wants to do that too. So I was always, I continued always checking with Larry. Like, are you okay with this? Do you want to continue?
Because one of the things that I'll push hard, like I will, like I'll push hard on all aspects of business, the way it's a barrier, but where I won't cross the line is when it comes to like her mental health, right? So you kind of have to know, you have to know where that line is. So I guess my advice would be that if you're going to do business with your spouse, you have to remember that the personal relationship and the relationship that, I mean, your relationship as an example for your kids. So if you mess that up, like business isn't as important as your relationship with your spouse.
Plus you because obviously the concept of creating content, it has revolutionized the way that marketing is consumed. The product, the services, everything is consumed nowadays with the content. That's why it's so important that people get used to being in front of the camera and recorded in a very genuine and trendy way, right? And you guys have been jumping on all trends.
You know, I love it. The dicta of the real thing. Thank you. So what, because with this concept, right, the celebrities, because we realize this for real estate and other luxury brands combined, expanding the valerian to something like real estate, where you can utilize the public figure status that she has created alongside with you.
Is it something that, have you thought about? It's actually funny that you should ask because about a year ago, I was approached by a friend of mine who was developing a, like a high-rise building in Toronto. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Toronto market, but it's very dynamic. There's a lot of inventory going up in that market.
And he had approached me and he asked, can we retain valeria to basically try to sell our append houses? It's somewhat outside of what we do. I think that it would be tough to track a direct sale. And that's the thing with influencer marketing is that you can't look at it as a straight-out of charge in the sense that if I paid this much to an influencer, what am I doing in a revenue?
It's hard. It's a return investment. Yeah. It's a lot of branding.
It's both. I mean, you will get some tracking. So if you get somebody, let's say Valeria would have done that. And then somebody, somebody from overseas, like a couple would have come in.
Chances are it's the wife that follows Valeria because her audience is 99% female. And the wife told her husband, hey, we should go take a look at this property because the influencer that I follow is promoting it. It looked great. You could get it's where the property looks amazing.
So if when they come, let's say, to buy that property and they're asked how to be found out about it, then you could potentially track it back down to it. And depending on the profitability in that sale, you might say that one sale of a multi-million dollar condo was worth the campaign. But then all of the other benefits in terms of the branding, in terms of everything as well. Right.
It's part of an overall marketing mix. And one thing is actually interesting that I want to mention is that at the beginning stages when Valeria's audience was a couple of hundred thousand, the types of advertisers that would approach us with the advertisers that are very like, if I'm spending X amount, I need to do this much ROI, I need to know this much in profit. And that's a very, in my opinion, basic way of looking at marketing. But I think there's an opportunity for it.
I think there's a global opportunity for it. Let's make it happen. I wanted to mention, I wanted to mention it. I'm sorry, I'm not giving you my money.
Come on. Let's go. We should grab lunch. Yeah, we should grab.
Well, yeah, sure. I mean, I would say let's grab lunch socially. But if you want to talk about something like that, I think it would be great. I think I don't want to speak for Valeria because at the end of the day, Valeria decides every course.
But yeah, I think we're doing like a really cool tour of a property of how we in there acting kind of goofy and our banter between us. I think it would be a lot of fun. So yeah, definitely something to consider. Before we let you go, I wanted to ask you because we always ask these questions to our guests.
Sure. Because luxury comes in all different shapes and forms. But what is really luxury to you? Freedom.
Freedom. There we go. Yeah, it's the ability to wake up and do whatever I want with who I want. Freedom to drive my sons to school every day.
Freedom to pick them up in the middle of the day because I can work for anywhere I want. Freedom to, for example, drink COVID when things were really bad in Toronto and we had all these lockdowns. We were able to go to Costa Rica and we were able to be there for two and a half months. And that's to me is luxury.
That's to me is like, that's the best thing the money can buy for me. Don't get me wrong. I also like, you know, find watches and fancy cars and nice homes. But I think freedom overall is a bigger luxury.
Totally. Well, Gary, thank you so much for your time. I want to make sure that everybody please follow Gary, follow Valeria, follow all the different projects they have happening. And it's been a pleasure having you here.
I'm sure we'll see each other soon. Yeah, I'm taking you up on lunch. There's a nice few cool spots in South Beach that I've discovered. So I definitely want to take you out to lunch and continue the conversation.
Anytime you want, Gary, thank you again for everything. Have a good day. Okay? Thank you very much.
Have a great day. And thanks again for everybody tuning in today. We hope you enjoyed it. And remember, embrace it's beautiful, success in life.
My name is Alvaro and I'll see you next time.