Welcome to the latest episode of Behind The Print, where we bring you the creative stories of industry leaders shaping the world of professional printing. In this episode of Behind The Print, we’re joined by Daniel Molnar and Jackson Fay, Co-Founders and CSOs of Donavelli. Together, Daniel and Jackson take us through how they founded Donavelli, the services they provide, and how they stand out from the crowd.

Below, you’ll find the transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity to ensure easy reading. If you want the full, authentic experience, make sure to check out the video attached below.

Connor Shields:  Welcome back to Behind the Print Podcast, where we feature industry leaders and uncover the creative minds and their businesses within the world of professional printing. Our mission is to provide you with inspiring actionable resources that elevate your business projects and accelerate your journey to excellence in profit and in print. Joining me here today is the CSOs and Co-Founders of Donavelli, Daniel Molnar, and Jackson Fay. How you guys doing today?

Daniel Molnar: How’s it going?

Jackson Fay: Thank you for having us.

Connor Shields: Thank you for joining us.

Daniel Molnar: Doing pretty good.

Jackson Fay: No complaints here. 

Connor Shields: Alright, well if you guys are ready, let’s dive right into it.

Daniel Molnar: Let’s do it.

Connor Shields: So tell me a little bit about yourselves and tell me a little bit about your company.

Daniel Molnar: Yeah, so I’ll sort of give a brief intro of like both of us and then the company. So me and Jackson are both actually still university students here at the University of Washington in Seattle, entering our final year. Frankly, school is a 50/50 priority at this point for me. And then we have Donavelli, we’re a full stack creator merchandising agency, which pretty much means if you’re a creator, you come to us, we help you bring a brand to life.

Connor Shields: Can you tell me about how your company got started. It sounds like a very unique company. 

Daniel Molnar: Yeah, sure. Jackson, you want to go ahead and tell the story? 

Jackson Fay: Yeah. So me and Daniel lived across the hall from each other in college, and  right away we hit it off and became great friends. We started looking for business opportunities and the first thing we gravitated towards was our own clothing brand.

So we started that and it was pretty successful. We had some success selling locally and doing stuff in like pop-up shops, but I think we came to the realization it’s a very saturated market. And there’s just not a lot of room for us to grow outside of our city. So me and him had a conversation one night and we started brainstorming different ways we could take this business to actually be able to grow it. 

And I think the realization we came to was the creator economy is really, really taking off. And a lot of these creators don’t have enough time to build merchandise themselves. So we were like, “let’s take the best of both worlds”. We decided to start doing merchandise for creators, and we wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just putting their face on a t-shirt or their name on a t-shirt, but actually creating products that were meaningful and had long-term equity potential. 

“So we started that and it was pretty successful. We had some success selling locally and doing stuff in like pop-up shops, but I think we came to the realization it’s a very saturated market. And there’s just not a lot of room for us to grow outside of our city. So me and him had a conversation one night and we started brainstorming different ways we could take this business to actually be able to grow it.”

Connor Shields: I’m curious, where did the name come from? 

Jackson Fay: That’s a good question. We get this one a lot. It’s sort of just a made up name. We developed DON from “Developing Online Names”. That’s what that stands for. But Donavelli goes back to one of my high school friend who had this name since like, I don’t even know, like seven years ago. It just sort of stuck. It’s been a, it’s like a fun, cool name and we just decided to use it for this business.

Connor Shields: Yeah, sounds good. It’s got a nice ring to it. So what can you tell me about your typical clientele? 

Jackson Fay: Daniel? 

Daniel Molnar: Yeah, so like Jackson mentioned, what  we work with and who we work with is what you would say is your tier one social media influencer. So whether it’s across YouTube, which is our primary platform that we engage with, or Instagram or TikTok, these are creators that have millions of followers and you’re creating content that’s organic and  impressionable and that has a mass following. And then based off of that, we really look at what is their content and can we find that product market fit? And then that’s where their product business is born out of that.

So really at the end of the day, like the straight up answers, typical clientele, social media, influencers. The more nuanced answer is it’s somebody with the scale and with the potential to have a multimillion dollar product business behind them and behind their following. 

Connor Shields: So how do you identify these people? Do you approach them? Do they do they approach you? 

Daniel Molnar: Yeah. So for us it’s varied based off of our size. So at the beginning it was just purely cold outreach, just trying to find any independent creator that would want to work with us. We had, of course our experience with clothing. But you have to try to prove to somebody first, what is your experience in the creator economy? But once we got that experience, once we got the first couple, just with that cold outreach, it’s now transitioned into a who you know business at the end of the day, and most creators, it’s probably somewhere in the 60 to 70 to 80% of larger creators that is, are actually underrepresentation and under management. So a lot of our deals now involve going to those agents and them being our strategic partner. And if they have a creator that comes along that is best fit for our services, and then they kind of come across our desk. And then we have that first sort of ideation brainstorming meeting, get super excited about some certain sort of set of ideas and then kind of take it from there.

Connor Shields: So these influencers you’re working with, what was the most exciting or interesting influencer you guys have worked with? 

Jackson Fay: Yeah, the most exciting one’s definitely been Tara Green. We signed Tara Green nine months ago, I think, maybe a little bit longer, and we signed him at like 651,000 subscribers, and he’s over two and a half million now. His growth is just tremendous. It’s been really exciting to be on that journey with them and see him grow. We’re just sort of experiencing what that whole stage of growing with an influencer looks like and how that merch can develop with it too. 

Connor Shields: Yeah. That is quite the exponential growth. So did he come to you? Did you go to him? 

“The most exciting one’s definitely been Tara Green. We signed Tara Green nine months ago, I think, maybe a little bit longer, and we signed him at like 651,000 subscribers, and he’s over two and a half million now. His growth is just tremendous. It’s been really exciting to be on that journey with them and see him grow. We’re just sort of experiencing what that whole stage of growing with an influencer looks like and how that merch can develop with it too.”

Jackson Fay: This is, this was all Daniel’s work. So Daniel, please. 

Daniel Molnar: Yeah, like I said, Tara Green was an independent creator at the time. I’m just a big animal guy myself. So he had a video, if I remember correctly he was making like a fish tank for a seahorse, and I came across it while watching my nightly videos. I like to watch something real comforting to go to sleep to. So I watch it and thought “oh, this is super cool. This is a fun, fun channel.” When we found him, he only had like, I think it was 12 or 13 videos, so I was like, this guy’s just ripe to explode, right? It’s like if you have almost 700,000 subscribers.

Barely a dozen videos and people are clearly already, you know, attributing and building that fan base. This is the type of person we wanna work with. So we reached out to him and said “Hey man, we’d really love to work with you. Here’s what we do, here’s what we think your products could look like specifically.”

And you know, honest to God, a lot of times you got to just get lucky in business. And we got lucky, right? Because he responded. He’s like, “I’m super interested, let’s get on a call.” I reached out to him on like a Thursday. He responded on Saturday. By Monday we had the meeting. The next day he was signed, and then within four weeks we had his entire merch line live.

Connor Shields: Wow. That’s a pretty quick timeline. 

Daniel Molnar: Yeah, definitely fun stuff there. 

Connor Shields: When it comes to – not just Tara Green – but your other clientele, what are some typical problems that you guys run into?

Daniel Molnar: That’s a great question. Jackson, you have a couple? 

Jackson Fay: I can give a couple.  The first thing is obviously supply chain, just in general, supply chain’s a very complicated thing, and when you’re dealing with so many moving parts of getting something from a manufacturer and then a distributor and then sending that to your clients. We’ve experienced a lot of delays in that process and a lot of things that’s been tough on us. I think that’s just one of those things that’s going to be a learning experience until the end of the business. There’s going to be ways we can improve, years down the line. So that’s probably the biggest issue. There’s a lot of little things, but it’s all about just trying to optimize timelines because these creators, their audience only stays for so long, and if you can’t get that merchant at their peak popularity, then you’re, you’re missing out on sales. So that’s definitely been one of the more important things. Danny did. Did you have something? 

Daniel Molnar: Yeah. I would say there’s 1,000,001 things, right? You can’t run a business without having pain points. But another thing that I would say that’s a challenge is to  identifying like what is the best product for their audience, right?

You obviously have products that can stand by themselves and alone because that’s just a super cool product. And if you can effectively put those two together and have the creator market that you’re going to see tremendous amount of growth and a really successful product line, especially if that product line is directly related to that creator’s content, right?

You don’t take somebody like Tara Green who’s an animal creator and make something that’s against animals in that regard, right? Or you’re not going to take a fashion influencer and make them some arbitrary baggy clothes or whatever that looks like. So it’s really trying to go, you know, like Jackson said earlier, above and beyond that step and that level of just put their name on a t-shirt, it’s really.

Creating a brand for them that can stand on its own, have its own legs with that retail potential. But if you’re a fan of them, you’re going to think “Wow, this is awesome. I really want to support this.” And you know, this is my way of gaining that access into this creator’s community. 

Connor Shields: What’s some of the most popular merch that you guys have gotten for influencers?

Daniel Molnar:  Yeah. So shout out to PrintingCenterUSA. I honestly think our biggest seller now to date is our coloring books that we just did with Tara Green. They just dropped. I think now it’s the, today’s the 20th. So a little less than a month ago now, about three and a half weeks ago. And you know, those have just been crushing it for us. We’re really excited to see that, we appreciate you printing with us, of course. 

Connor Shields: So Donavelli is already a very unique company, but how does it stand out from other businesses within your field?

Daniel Molnar: Yeah, so I’m sure me and Jackson both have answered that. So I’ll go and then we will let Jackson answer that. 

Jackson Fay: So I would say, and this might sound like kind of a fluffy answer, but frankly it just comes down to the level of care, quality and effort put into it. This is not to try to belittle or to try to put down competitors, but when we work with people and we work with creators and we build these brands, no matter what we’re doing, we’re giving it 110% and that alone helps us stand out.

I’ve spoken to probably dozens of different manufacturers and companies that do something similar to what you do. You guys are the first people that have actually understood my vision and have a vision that I feel like we can execute on. It’s just like our creative effort and our ideation and actually having that sort of wherewithal to figure out what is the best product to aligning with that product market fit. For the creator’s audience is top-notch and once you boil it down, you go through our full range of services, because we are full stack, there’s really only a couple competitors that fully do the entire breadth of what we do as well.

“This might sound like kind of a fluffy answer, but frankly it just comes down to the level of care, quality and effort put into it. This is not to try to belittle or to try to put down competitors, but when we work with people and we work with creators and we build these brands, no matter what we’re doing, we’re giving it 110% and that alone helps us stand out.”

Connor Shields: Yeah, I was going to say, you might not have any other businesses in your field. You’re just so unique. What can you tell me about milestones, major milestones that you guys have accomplished, either personally or professionally? 

Daniel Molnar: There’s been so many, and especially for us being so young, we were just talking about this yesterday. It’s like every month you look forward and you’re really planning and building for the months and building for the year and, looking ahead and looking into the future. And then you so often look back and you’re like, “wow”.  To think about how much you’re you’re able to accomplish in a year, right?

So right now one of the huge accomplishments for us was getting our office. We have a nice, beautiful office, we have a warehouse, and we’re really building like our infrastructure systems out. And I think that for us has been a huge milestone. It allows us to operate with these clients better and really help to grow these brands. So I think that’s been really fun for us. It’s been like a really big exponential growth curve for us. So, Ja Jackson, any additional, like more substantive ones you had on your mind? 

Jackson Fay: Not really. You’re nailing it right now. I’m super optimistic about what we’re going to do. I’m very bullish on the creator economy. It’s growing at like an unprecedented rate. I think we’re going to start seeing a lot of competition in our field. I think me and Daniel are both very happy with where we are. I don’t think there’s anything we would change, but we’re never satisfied, right? There’s a ton of stuff coming up. We have a ton of cool drops and cool products dropping. We have Plushies four tear green dropping soon, and ax a lot plushy and a snake plushy. Super excited about that. Super cool. Super cute. Lots of stuff, so it’s hard to sit down and give you accomplishments when there’s so much to look forward to. 

Daniel Molnar: To kind of add on to that. It kind of feels like every new month we go on what we considered an accomplishment last month was the day-to-day this month, if that makes sense.

“I’m super optimistic about what we’re going to do. I’m very bullish on the creator economy. It’s growing at like an unprecedented rate. I think we’re going to start seeing a lot of competition in our field. I think me and Daniel are both very happy with where we are. I don’t think there’s anything we would change, but we’re never satisfied, right? There’s a ton of stuff coming up. We have a ton of cool drops and cool products dropping.”

Jackson Fay:  It absolutely makes sense. It’s hard to give you something when a month from now that you know something that’s exciting to us today will be nothing next month, you know? 

Connor Shields: Well, it sounds you like you guys are really growing fast. What can you tell me about any challenges or obstacles you guys are currently facing in addition to supply chain issues?

Daniel Molnar: Yeah. I think one thing that’s come to mind during this interview is you mentioned how there’s not really any competitors in our field. That’s actually a pretty big issue because when you’re looking at like even something as simple as like how do you set up a deal? What’s a deal structure look like if you don’t have many competitors?

There’s not really a lot you can base those deal structures off. So we’ve spent a lot of time looking at market analysis and different industries that are parallel to us to just figure out what’s a good percent for of profit that we should be giving these creators. We want to make money, but these creators also have to make money. It has to be worth it for them too. So yeah, one thing we’ve definitely been trying to figure out is what other competitors in our field are doing and how we can replicate their systems and build their own at the same time. 

Connor Shields: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, there’s nothing to base it off of, you’re kind of starting from scratch. So as entrepreneurs yourselves, what advice would you give to a new entrepreneur that’s just starting out? 

Jackson Fay: That’s a good question. I think the number one thing for me is consistency. The high is are really high and the lows are really low and, and I think a lot of people get stuck on how they’re feeling in a moment and letting that play on them.

Me and Daniel have been down low a lot, a lot of times. And I think every time that we pick ourselves back up we can see the high again. I think that’s my, my biggest message to anybody trying to do something in this field or or their own field is just be consistent.

It’s going to suck some days and it’s going to be really fun other days, but if you can just wake up and do that routine that you’ve been building and all the stuff that you have to do, it’s going to move forward even when it doesn’t feel like it’s moving forward.

Connor Shields: That’s a, that’s a great quote actually. So a few more questions for you. How have you used print to help elevate your business? 

“It’s going to suck some days and it’s going to be really fun other days, but if you can just wake up and do that routine that you’ve been building and all the stuff that you have to do, it’s going to move forward even when it doesn’t feel like it’s moving forward.”

Daniel Molnar: Yeah, so for us, we embarked on this coloring book journey so to speak. The book is a literal journey through it, so we use the same sort of lingo there, but it must’ve been around February where we started the ideation and the planning of that project, you know. Obviously it’s something that we don’t have in-house capabilities for. If we could, we would, but you know, that’s something that we rely on the expertise of somebody like PrintingCertainUSA to help us execute and bring a vision of life, both for our sake and for the business’s sake, but also for the end consumers.

You’re talking about thousands of young kids across the entire country, right. That we’re really trying to spread that education. I think the more and more that technology adapts, the more and more important it is for kids to understand the value of the ecosystem and these animals and just, just to take things back to the paper, right?

I think that’s why print is just so fun because you know, so often you see these little kids in like restaurants and iPads and just so glued to this technology. So you give them like a 60 page journey through five different habitats and it’s like in their hands, in their paper and there’s like a hundred fun facts that they’re learning.

It’s been super cool to see all these emails from parents that are like “the second my kid got the book, they’re teaching me all these things I would’ve never known.” So I think just like bringing that vision and bringing that to life through print, I think is just awesome. So I think that’d be the answer on that.

Connor Shields: Yeah, definitely. It’s always good to see kids not glued to a screen, like holding an actual book, even though it is a coloring book, but you know what I mean. It’s something physical, it’s something you can touch. It’s not just through a screen. So, sort of a different question for you guys. If you had a day completely free to spend however you’d like, how would you spend it?

Jackson Fay: That’s an interesting question. I mean most of our days now are just spent working. I feel like a day together would be the best way to spend it. Me and Daniel spend a lot of time together and I feel like a good day would just be me and him going out to the beach. We have a  lake near us that we hang out at a lot. We’d go out there, maybe grill some steaks and, and, and just relax. 

Connor Shields: Steaks on the beach? That sounds awesome actually. One last question for you. How can our listeners get in touch with you guys, collaborate on a project or maybe even request your services? 

Jackson Fay: Daniel, you’re the CSO. You have to take this one. 

Daniel Molnar:  So, I will say the only thing to add on to that last question is. I’m a big surfer, so perfect day for me would be heading to the beach and get a good session in, just come and work. Like I think me and Jackson can both say like, we love what we do and frankly I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

And I think just like that privilege and that opportunity to be so young to build something of yourself and you know, especially to do it with like somebody that you call your best friend and brother, I think is just like. Like it almost makes me emotional, say like I wouldn’t want it any other way. But that being said, so for those of you who want to get in touch with us, we have just feel free to reach out to my email.

It’s just manielm@donavelli.com, and if you’re a creator, know of anybody who’s a creator, an agent, or anybody who’s just even just curious to learn more about merchandising the creator economy, you know, feel free to get in touch. 

Connor Shields: Well, I’d say that’s a wrap on another episode of Behind the Print. Thank you guys for joining us, and thank you to our listeners as we explore the artistry and innovation of the printing world. Remember, having a strong vision, building the right strategy, and using tools like Print to amplify your message will make your brand stand out from the crowd.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to get your sample pack today from PrintingCenterUSA.com and share with your fellow business enthusiasts. Until next time, keep those creative sparks flying. And remember, there’s always more to discover behind the print.

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