Hiring people who have taste

Summary

Podcast Summary: Your Next Move – "Hiring People Who Have Taste"

Host: Inc. Magazine (Diana Ransom, Executive Editor)
Guest: Stephanie Liu, Founder of Levitate Foundry
Date: December 9, 2025

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode spotlights Stephanie Liu, founder of Levitate Foundry—ranked #168 on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list. Stephanie shares the story of building the largest female-founded Shopify agency in North America, her journey from creative musician to entrepreneur, the agency’s focus on storytelling and creativity, and her insights on building teams with "taste." The episode delves into the value of creative alignment, authentic brand stories, the dynamic landscape of e-commerce, and Stephanie’s vision for impact-driven products.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Levitate Foundry’s Mission and Approach

• Overview: Levitate is the largest female-founded Shopify agency in North America, focusing on launching, growing, and selling ecommerce brands, with an emphasis on creativity, performance marketing, and storytelling.
  • Quote [01:07]:

    “We build brands, primarily e-commerce brands on Shopify, and then we do all of the performance marketing associated with running that brand... My team is made up of creatives, performance marketers, landing page specialists, funnel experts...” – Stephanie Liu

• Brand Building for Celebrities: Levitate has built and launched notable celebrity brands, such as Bella Hadid's perfume line, Orabella, offering end-to-end services from website design to advertising assets.
  • Quote [01:53]:

    “We launched a brand for Bella Hadid... We had the ability to touch the website. We did the full graphic design ideation, photo shoots... the creative around it and a lot of the assets that go live with advertising since day one.” – Stephanie Liu

2. Platform Specialization & Adaptability

• Shopify Focus: The team primarily builds on Shopify for its ease and scalability, but can support complex migrations as brands grow, moving to platforms like BigCommerce or Magento as needed.
  • Quote [02:26]:

    “Shopify has become like the easiest platform... anyone can go on there and build a store... But we also can develop stores on pretty much any platform.” – Stephanie Liu

3. Founder's Journey: From Music to Marketing

• Creative Roots: Stephanie’s background as a musician, her creative aspirations, and the transition to business under family expectations.
  • Quote [04:00]:

    “I'm a creative by trade. I actually was a musician for a long time... I got into Juilliard... I ended up going to UC Berkeley. And when I was there... I just wanted to create things.” – Stephanie Liu

• Learning by Doing: Early hands-on experience in e-commerce and marketing during an internship at Sephora led to a career in digital marketing at major brands, culminating in starting her own agency.
  • Quote [05:23]:

    “I learned digital marketing basically at Sephora... That internship taught me so much about beauty marketing, digital marketing... This is like pre-Facebook ads.” – Stephanie Liu

4. Organic Growth and Word-of-Mouth Success

• No Sales Team, Only Reputation: Stephanie describes a path of organic growth, with referrals leading to more than 270 clients signed personally, facilitated by consistently great work and connections in the LA celebrity world.
  • Quote [07:15]:

    “I didn't have a sales team for three years. I signed about 270 clients by myself. All through word of mouth.” – Stephanie Liu

5. Focus on Female Founders & The Value of “Taste”

• Women in the Agency: While working with all genders, the agency focuses on hiring women due to alignment with the brands they serve and the detail-oriented, creative strengths women bring.
  • Quote [08:38]:

    “I hire a lot of women. Over the years I have found... you can never teach them taste... So for me, it's all about finding people that really align with what we're doing in our mission and the mission of our clients.” – Stephanie Liu

• Finding Talent with 'Taste': The ability to discern creative ‘taste’ in candidates—how they present, design portfolios, and fit with the team—is considered an intangible but critical skill in agency hiring.
  • Quote [09:27]:

    “You can just tell... design case studies, the way they write about themselves, the way that they have their header image on their LinkedIn... It's very easy to tell.” – Stephanie Liu

• User-Generated Content (UGC): Team members organically create content for clients, furthering authenticity and creative alignment.
  • Quote [10:49]:

    “They love to just, you know, put it on, make videos... We hire a lot of people that are just very creative. And I think it's also a generational thing.” – Stephanie Liu

6. Current Market & Adaptation

• Tougher Market, Creative Responses: Stephanie discusses the economic slowdown for CPG brands, budget constraints, and how both clients and agencies are shifting to more creative customer acquisition methods beyond digital ads.
  • Quote [11:21]:

    “The last 18 months, the economy has not been as good as people claim... A lot of them are pulling back on spend. Media is very tough right now, especially with the election coming up, but it's very expensive and costly.” – Stephanie Liu

  • Quote [12:04]:

    “I don't see any agencies that are growing tremendously... You have to be really creative in how you're getting new customers. So experiential dinners, going back to the real world, truck wrapping...” – Stephanie Liu

  • Quote [12:25]:

    “The days of being, hey, I'm just a D2C brand... all of our clients are really omnichannel and they're really leveraging the ability to build brand awareness...” – Stephanie Liu

7. Next Steps & Values-Driven Innovation

• Making a Human Impact: Stephanie shares aspirations to create products with global impact, especially around safety and well-being, combining her background in e-commerce with hardware innovation.
  • Quote [13:06]:

    “I'm trying to figure out what is impactful for me moving forward that is really going to allow me to make like a real human impact in the world.” – Stephanie Liu

• Product Innovations: She is developing Artemis Defense, a safety device company, and working on wearable products in the longevity and wellness space.
  • Quote [13:57]:

    “I've been inventing a safety device... It's called Artemis Defense, and it's like the first ever connected safety device for men and women... We also have a kids product we’re designing.” – Stephanie Liu

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• On the importance of taste in hiring:

  “You can't buy taste. If you find someone who's amazing at design but they have no taste, you can never teach them taste.” – Stephanie Liu [08:51]

• On organic growth:

  “I didn't have a sales team for three years. I signed about 270 clients by myself. Yeah, it was a lot of work. All through word of mouth.” – Stephanie Liu [07:33]

• On the creative team’s passion:

  “Our employees become the UGC creators of the content... They love to just, you know, put it on, make videos and... They are the customer.” – Stephanie Liu [10:01]

• On shifting from D2C to omnichannel strategies:

  “The days of being, 'Hey, I'm just a D2C brand.' We don't have any clients that are just D2C anymore. Honestly all of our clients are omnichannel...” – Stephanie Liu [12:25]

• On her next move toward impact:

  “I'm trying to figure out what is impactful for me, moving forward, that is really going to allow me to make a real, like, human impact in the world.” – Stephanie Liu [13:06]

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Important Segments with Timestamps

• [01:07] Introduction to Levitate Foundry’s work and team structure
• [01:53] Discussion of projects with celebrity brands, specifically Bella Hadid’s Orabella
• [04:00] Stephanie’s creative upbringing and transition from music to business
• [05:23] Early digital marketing career at Sephora
• [07:33] Word-of-mouth growth and client acquisition
• [08:38] Hiring philosophy: focusing on female founders and talent with “taste”
• [09:27] Evaluating candidates and hiring process
• [11:21] Current CPG market downturn and adaptation strategies
• [13:06] Stephanie’s vision for impact-driven product innovation

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Conclusion

In a candid, fast-paced conversation, Stephanie Liu provides a compelling look into the making of a standout agency rooted in storytelling, taste, and creative alignment. Her career trajectory—from creative arts to digital marketing and entrepreneurship—underscores the importance of adaptability, reputation, and authenticity in business growth. Highlighting both the challenges and opportunities in today’s e-commerce and CPG landscape, Stephanie’s forward-looking vision emphasizes innovation for social good, making this episode both instructive and inspiring for aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders.

Transcript

[A]

With the Venture X Business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus, the Venture X Business card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs. Capital One what's in your wallet?

[B]

I'm Sarah lynch and you are listening to youo Next Move audio edition produced by Inc. And Capital One Business. For this season, we gather gathered an array of conversations with entrepreneurs who made last year's Inc. 5000 list. They joined us in our your Next Move Booth at the Inc. 5000 to share lessons learned and anecdotes from building their businesses. In this episode, Inc. Executive editor Diana Ransom interviewed Stephanie Liu. She is the founder of Levitate Foundry. They're ranked number 168 on the 2024 Inc 5000 list. Diana and Stephanie started by discussing the brands Levitate works with and how they built those connections.

[C]

What Levitate does is we are now the largest female founded Shopify agency in North America. So we build brands, primarily e commerce brands on Shopify and then we do all of the performance marketing associated with running that brand. We've done a lot of work in the last five or six years around celebrity brands, launching them, growing them, deploying them, and then selling them. And my team is made up of creatives, you know, performance marketers, landing page specialists, funnel experts, user acquisition, email, life cycle retention. We've done a lot of great work over the last six years with consumer brands that you and I both eat, buy, drink, sleep, wear in.

[D]

That's amazing. Congratulations. So what's an example of a celebrity brand that you've, I guess, helped incubate?

[C]

So just this year we launched a brand for Bella Hadid. She's a worldwide model. It's her perfume brand called Orabella. So that came out in May of this year and really exciting project. We had the ability to touch the website. We did the full sort of graphic design ideation, photo shoots for the products, really the creative around it and then the like a lot of the assets that go live with advertising since day one.

[D]

And it's only for folks who have Shopify shops.

[C]

Yeah. So we build primarily on Shopify. Shopify has become like the easiest platform for building a store, quite frankly. Like anyone can go on there and build a store. It's very native. But we also can develop stores on pretty much any platform. There's a lot of more complicated platforms out there that are more sophisticated and it just kind of depends on the needs of that brand in our industry. There are, you know, there's brands that Go onto a headless platform, which is just a more complicated tech stack. And I would say most brands that are launching and want to be quick, go to market, find it very easy to launch on Shopify. And that's why we primarily launch brands there. And then as they grow and they get bigger, they have different needs. We can port them and migrate them to different platforms like a BigCommerce or Magento or a Headless.

[D]

So do you stick with them after they kind of transition from Shopify?

[C]

Yeah, we do. They typically keep us on. They really love a lot of the creative work that we do. A lot of what makes us really different from other, like, brand launch shops out there is we really focus on making the brand and the face of the brand sort of like a story. And so really being able to tell that story and make the brand different is what we're really, really good at. At the end of the day, it's not just the media buying, like running of the ads, like, that's all easy. At the end of the day, it really comes down to crafting a unique story. And what brand so unique because there's so many brands out in the world today, as you know, where did the.

[D]

Idea for the company come from? And like, take us back, back in time.

[C]

I'm a creative by trade. I actually was a musician for a long time.

[D]

What kind of did you sing or play?

[C]

I sang. I played the violin. I actually got into Juilliard.

[D]

Oh, wow.

[C]

And then I. Did you go to Juilliard? I know. I went to UC Berkeley.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

Yeah. That's a twist, isn't it? Yeah. So Asian parents. My dad wanted me to get a business degree. He wanted in state tuition. And it's hard. I think it's hard to be a musician, like a career. I played a lot of instruments when I was younger. Guitar, I sang. I started the music club in high school. We did all the rallies. But no. So I ended up going to UC Berkeley. And when I was there, of course, my mindset was very different. Being in the business school, all of my friends went into banking and finance. And I just wanted to create things. I've always been a creator and at the time it was really hard to understand. How do you even get a job? Yeah. What year was this creative? This is like 2010.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

So actually I got into E commerce since college, so I had the opportunity. I applied for an [e-mail], they're based in downtown San Francisco on Market Street. So all through college, I would take the BART from Berkeley to San Francisco. And I learned digital marketing basically at Sephora. I didn't learn as much about all of this world when I was actually in school. It was more that internship taught me so much about beauty marketing, digital marketing. This is like pre Facebook ads. This is when I did SCM marketing at Sephora on Google.

[D]

Wow.

[C]

And like as like a junior or a fresh. Actually sophomore year, I started with them buying keywords and doing shopping placements. And that's really where I learned kind of like what I do now. And like you know, at Levitate, we have worked with probably 200 beauty brands over the last six years. Like we've done a lot in beauty, skincare, makeup, cpg. It's really a specialty of ours. And it kind of goes back to my early days of college where that was what I did and I loved it so much. So after college I went to Gap Inc. I was in the dot com world. Then I went to Amazon.com for about three years. I went to Honest and there I was also on the dot com team where I managed basically the website launches, that sort of thing. I've always been in that world. And so in 2018, 2019, I actually didn't want to start an agency. Cause I'd hired agencies my whole career. But I was starting brands and I'd started a couple brands prior to my agency and I kind of just fell into it.

[D]

Were these brands that you had thought of, I guess organically or there people who you knew that I knew that I started with.

[C]

Yeah. And I would always like kind of come in and I was a digital consultant, you can call me, but I would come in and I would basically wrangle all things digital. And so people just started calling me up, being like, oh, I heard you did this for this haircare brand. You know, come do this for a skincare brand. So I did that like multiple times over and it was really fun. And that's how I started my agency. People just kept calling me. I did not wake up one day to say, oh, I would start an agency. It just honestly just kind of happened. And being in that world in la, I was very close to sort of celebrity. Like in 2019, I met Bieber's manager at a meditation retreat and she was like, oh, we need to launch this website. And my team did the website. Like it was very organic. Like these very organic opportunities just started happening to me and I had the team to do it and it just, you know, life kind of took me down that direction.

[D]

And how do you find people these days. Is it word of mouth?

[C]

I'm very, very grateful. It's been a lot of word of mouth. A lot of people have helped me through this journey. And I will say that hard work really does pay off because if you do really good work, people will notice it. They'll see the case studies and they'll tell you about you to other. And that's how we built a business. I didn't have a sales team for three years.

[D]

Wow.

[C]

I signed about 270 clients by myself. Yeah, it was a lot of work.

[D]

That's wild.

[C]

All through word of mouth. I know, it's crazy.

[B]

When we come back, Diana asks Stephanie about their strong focus on female brands. You'll hear her answer after this quick break.

[A]

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[D]

So congrats. Why focus on female founders? Like if, if someone wanted to come to you tomorrow and it was like a male focused brand, would you do it?

[C]

Oh my gosh, absolutely. Absolutely. We're working on a celebrity brand right now. The CEO is a guy, he's very great. He's just amazing. Like he's done so much in the beauty space. But yeah, it's a female celebrity and we love working with, I mean, obviously all genders, but in particular I hire a lot of women. Over the years I have found and obvious is my first time starting an agency because agency really are people business. So it comes down to the people you hire and their minds and what they do. And I have found that hiring women just aligns so well with what it is that we do. They're detail oriented, they're creative. I always say you can't buy taste if you find someone who's amazing at design but they have no taste. You can never teach them taste. So for me, it's all about finding people that really align with what we're doing in our mission and the mission of our clients.

[D]

How do you know when someone has taste?

[C]

Oh, just, you can just Tell like case studies. We do case studies all the time. Design case studies. They get to meet the rest of the team. When we hire, we typically have most of our director level and above. Meet the new hire and you can just tell even by the way they, like, write about themselves or the way that they have their header image on their LinkedIn or the way that they present their case study to you. It's. It's very easy to tell.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And we do work with a lot of female founders. I think female founders gravitate towards us because we have higher over 80% women. We are a very diverse company, but I think female founders gravitate towards us also because of the types of brands we've worked with. We have a lot of, like, CPG brands that cater towards a female psychographic demographic. And not all of those CPG brands are founded and led by women, of course, but generally speaking, we know the female psychographic. We, you know, a lot of our buyers and creatives internally, like, they are the customer. And we can also save our clients a lot of money because our employees become the UGC creators of the content. So they'll do, like, reviews content on a weekend or the try on the makeup and shoot little reviews videos. And I think just, I have a great team of people who just love the space and just love to do this kind of work. And so our clients get the benefit of that too.

[D]

They do that on their own time.

[C]

Yeah, they really love it. I mean, they get free product, of course, but they love to just, you know, put it on, like make videos and. Yeah, we hire a lot of people that are just very creative. And I think it's also a generational thing. I think a lot of people that are Gen Z or kind of like between Millennial and Gen Z, which would be like 28 to 30. Some, like, they're really just. They love that. And with the rise of social media and they're doing it on their own too, so they're just very digitally and very UGC native.

[D]

Yeah. Have you seen it on your end that there's been like a pullback in CPG investment?

[C]

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think the last 18 months, the economy has not been as good as people claim. The stock market keeps going up, and it seems like unemployment is low. But then if you really, like, look at our clients, for example, a lot of them are pulling back on spend. You know, media is very tough right now, especially with the election coming up, but it's very expensive and costly. Right. And everyone wants the Best roas. Everyone wants a good sort of user acquisition metrics but I definitely see that even with some of our clients that are doing hundreds of millions in revenue, everyone's very just watching their belts right now for sure.

[D]

What are you doing as a result? Like is it affecting your company and what's the plan?

[C]

I definitely see it. I don't see any agencies that are growing tremendously over the last, I would say 18 months. A lot of the people in our space are just sort of, you know, holding on. I think for us we've been really, really lucky. We still get a lot of referrals but we have to be very conscious of how we spend and we always have been conscious of how we spend our clients money. But we have to be really conscious and really creative and really smart in how we're getting them new customers. So I think people are starting to realize the days of you know, running ads like just doesn't really cut it anymore. You have to be really creative in how you're getting new customers. So experiential dinners, going back to the real world, you know, even like truck wrapping, like out of home advertising, things like that. The days of being, hey, I'm just a D2C brand. We don't have any clients that are just D2C anymore. Honestly all of our clients are omnichannel. Even the ones that started D2C are now in retail and they're on Amazon. Like all of our clients are really omnichannel and they're really leveraging the ability to build brand awareness to become a household name as a way to gain new customers.

[D]

What's sort of next for you?

[C]

Exciting stuff. I think for me personally again I've been very lucky. I think in the last five to ten years I've accomplished everything I wanted to. When I set out in college and my career and I never thought it would end up this way. I manifested it. It's. It's really great. I'm trying to figure out what is impactful for me moving forward that is really going to allow me to make like a real like human impact in the world. And so with my skill set and some of the things that I've built, I'll still probably be in E commerce but just building products that are actually like life changing for people specifically as it relates to human safety, just you know, human safety, human wellness and being like basic human rights like having water and feeling safe, things like that. Where I think with commerce we can make a global impact.

[D]

You would build these companies or you would try to work with companies that are nonprofits?

[C]

Yes, I've, I've been, for the last year and a half, I've been inventing a safety device, and I don't have it with me today, but the company's called Artemis Defense, and it's like the first ever connected safety device for men and women. And we also have a kids product that we're designing as well, but we're actually inventing, like, wearable products. And I also, I've been working on something in the longevity space as well, for human longevity. So that's sort of in like the. It's like a mix between cold plunge and cryotherapy. So I have some, like, wearable things I've been working on, and those things take a lot of time. Hardware takes a lot of time. But combining that with, like, my background in E commerce, we're going to be launching some new products.

[D]

That's exciting.

[C]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[D]

Well, thanks for sharing your story with us. Yeah.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

That's all for this episode of youf Next Move. Our producers are Blake Odom and Avery Miles. Editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already subscribe to youo Next Move on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, your Next Move is a production of Inc And Capital One Business.