Nobody sets out to "manufacture" brand love — and yet somehow, some businesses get it and most don't. Charles Savage and Andrew Smith built very different companies in EasyEquities and Yuppiechef, but ask them separately why customers love what they built, and you'll hear the same answer from two different directions. This conversation comes from Mark and Suits and Sneakers.

Charles Savage and Andrew Smith built very different businesses in EasyEquities and Yuppiechef, but their experiences point to remarkably similar reasons customers came to love them. Neither started by asking how to manufacture “brand love.” They started by removing friction, treating customers fairly, meeting them where they were and caring deeply about the experience they were creating.

For Charles, EasyEquities changed investing by making it accessible to everyone. Fractional shares meant someone with R1 could participate alongside someone with millions, on the same pricing model. The platform removed intimidating language, minimums and complexity from an industry that had historically excluded ordinary people. Over time, that accessibility became something bigger: customers did not simply use EasyEquities, they began to feel ownership of it and formed communities around it.

For Andrew, Yuppiechef’s early advantage was range and service. It found products customers could not easily get elsewhere and then treated every order as a human interaction. Handwritten cards, free delivery, beautiful packaging and exceptional service were not simply marketing tricks. They created a culture inside the company that constantly reminded the team that there was a real person behind every transaction.

Both men also acknowledged how much harder this becomes as businesses scale. Growth introduces complexity, investors introduce expectations and economics eventually matter. The challenge is not to preserve every early practice forever, but to protect the principles underneath them. Charles described constantly balancing what is good for the customer with what is good for the income statement. Andrew described Yuppiechef moving through different phases until it understood which parts of its model actually worked.

Ultimately, both argued that businesses people love are built through thousands of decisions rather than one clever brand strategy. Treat people fairly. Remove friction. Care about the details. Stay curious about why customers love you. Build a culture capable of carrying those principles beyond the founders. And, perhaps most importantly, stay in the game long enough for those things to compound.

Key takeaways

1. Meet customers where they are. EasyEquities succeeded by removing the barriers that made investing inaccessible and intimidating.
   
   
2. Treat every customer as valuable. Both businesses deliberately avoided creating experiences where wealthy or high spending customers received fundamentally better treatment.
   
   
3. Small touches become culture. Yuppiechef’s handwritten cards mattered to customers, but they also forced employees to remember the human being behind every order.
   
   
4. Love is created through a combination of things. Charles described EasyEquities as a “witch’s cauldron” whose individual ingredients are difficult to isolate, making the CEO’s job partly about protecting them.
   
   
5. Scale creates tension. Businesses eventually have to balance what customers love with what produces sustainable economics.
   
   
6. Do not confuse experimentation with strategy. Andrew described strategy as something often identified in hindsight after enough hypotheses have been tested.
   
   
7. Ownership changes behaviour. Charles believes EasyEquities customers became powerful advocates partly because many also became Purple Group shareholders.
   
   
8. Patience is a competitive advantage. With Brave Hardy, Andrew and Shane deliberately want to remain in the game long enough for luck, learning and momentum to compound.
   
   
9. Founder DNA has to become organisational DNA. A truly enduring business must eventually be able to protect what made it special without depending entirely on its founder.

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