Brittany Hodak is not a rock star.
But she’s close.
With business partner Kim Kaupe, Hodak, 30, a native of Fort Smith and an honors graduate of the University of Central Arkansas, created and runs the New York-based ZinePak.
“We primarily partner with the record companies and artist managers to create deluxe editions of people’s CD releases,” Hodak says. “We’ve worked with everyone from Katy Perry to the Beach Boys.” Their client list also includes Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Toby Keith and Mary J. Blige.
The ZinePak, she says, “nixes the jewel case. You have the CD inside a small-format magazine, somewhere between 64 and 80 pages, although sometimes it’s much larger, if it’s a compilation release. And then there’s some sort of exclusive insert item in every package. We like to make custom merchandise that’s thematic to the artist.
“So with our Duck Dynasty Christmas release, there is a Christmas ornament inside, and there are gift tags, stickers for people to put on their Christmas packages.”
Each project is tailored to the performer, she says.
“Our demographic is ‘super fans,’ this is for the person who loves the artist, who wants to know everything about them, who wants to be super-duper involved,” Hodak says.
The average cost of a ZinePak at Wal-Mart, the principal purveyor, is $3 to $4 more than the price of a standard-edition CD.
Among her most exciting projects, Hodak says, was for the October release of Perry’s latest album, Prism, “because Katy starred in a national TV commercial for that project, which we did with Wal-Mart.” Perry’s Prism ZinePak includes a custom patch, nail decals and tattoos.
“Another favorite personal project of mine was KISS - we did a ZinePak last year for their Monster album. I was a huge KISS fan growing up, and I still am a huge KISS fan, so it was really exciting to collaborate directly with the guys.”
Hodak’s experiences as a teenager and as a student at UCA fueled her career path.
At age 16, she spent a day shadowing employees at a Fort Smith radio station. While writing concert reviews for the station’s website, she discovered it was possible for people to get paid to hang out with rock stars.
While earning a bachelor’s degree in communications with a specialty in public relations in the Honors College at UCA, she also had a half-dozen internships at record labels. When she graduated, she took a job in New York with RED, a division of entertainment mega-giant Sony-BMG, where she became the first person ever to debut a magazine on the Billboard Top 200 chart, Summer of Rock in 2009.
She subsequently oversaw the implementation of Johnson & Johnson’s sponsorship program and partnership marketing deals for A&E, LG mobile phones and others as an account supervisor at advertising-entertainment company Fathom Communications. She made Billboard’s list of “30 Under 30 Music Power Players” in 2010. That year, she earned a master’s degree in marketing from Baruch College at the City University of New York.
She says ZinePak was inspired by fan club magazine packages she found in record stores in her youth.
“That was kind of what inspired the idea, this throwback of taking all of the great things that were available when there was no ‘online,’ so you couldn’t discover artists online; it was all about engaging with them through their physical packaging.”
And ZinePak sometimes partners with fan clubs, Hodak says.
“Selena Gomez, for example, was launching a new fan club in August, and her manager came to us and said, ‘We want to create an exclusive premium magazine all about Selena just for members of the fan club.’ It was a little bit different from our usual ZinePak: It was larger, there wasn’t a CD inside, and we included augmented reality,” using a mobile device to activate virtual content from a print piece.
“For the first time, we had an app that people could use to access bonus content. They could watch a video from Selena, and get additional photos, do some fun virtual things - it looked like they were taking a picture next to Selena on the cover of Selena’s magazine.”
Hodak says she can’t think of a single horror story involving a performer being nasty to her.
“It was scary for two women in their 20s who didn’t have any experience at all in running a company to try to start an entertainment company,” she says. “Quite honestly, we expected a lot of people to tell us to get lost, or tell us not to call again, but we’ve had nothing but amazing experiences. Even the people we’ve approached who said, ‘This isn’t right for me at this time,’ several of them have referred us to other people.
“Now we’re at the point where most of our music business is people coming to us, saying, ‘Oh, I saw what you did for Taylor Swift’ or ‘I saw what you did for Justin Bieber, and I want to do that for my artist.’ It’s been a really gratifying experience that people we’re such fans of [are] coming to us and asking to work together.”
Hodak turned 30 Dec. 1, so she’s no longer eligible for any more of the under-30 awards she has been receiving on her own behalf and that of the company.
ZinePak brought in revenue last year of $2.5 million, and this year, Hodak says, it will be $3 million.
Hodak describes herself as more of the “outside” partner and Kaupe is more the “inside” partner.
“We are very much tag-teaming,” Hodak says. “I do a little more of the external stuff. She is supervising our growing team - we have 10 full-time employees now …. I do a lot more of the outward-facing, looking at our growth plan and figuring out what 2014 and 2015 partnerships look like.”
Hodak says she returns frequently to Arkansas - her grandmother still lives in the central part of the state, and she’s a regular visitor to Wal-Mart’s Bentonville headquarters.
“It wasn’t until Wal-Mart said, ‘We’re in, we would love to start carrying these,’ that [Kim and I] made the leap to quitting our day jobs,” Hodak says. “They’ve been incredible supporters.”
Style, Pages 45 on 12/29/2013