Studio
One principal. Close to the work.
Influential Lifestyle Media Group is a marketing and brand-management firm working with clients from small businesses and mission-led nonprofits to corporations. Programs are tailor-made — built around goals, budget, timing, products, and services. Based in Los Angeles. Active across New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.
You work with the principal, not through layers.
Founder
Vern Harris
Founder, President & CEO
Vern Harris is the Founder, President and CEO of Influential Lifestyle Media Group. His practice brings together corporate marketing, brand development, image consultation, business development, entertainment, and large-scale event planning and promotion.
He works across the strategy and execution of a brand: how it is positioned, how it communicates, the relationships it builds, and the experiences it creates for its audience.
'Founder-led' isn't just how ILMG is run — it's how Vern builds. His own product work was selected for Apple's Entrepreneur Camp, placing him in the top 1% of founders in the program.
Explore ventures & workSectors
- Entertainment
- Fashion
- Beauty
- Technology
- Nonprofits & mission-led organizations
- Automotive
- Sport
- Consumer
- Online marketing & services
Apple Entrepreneur Camp
Selected participant
Cross-category practice
Entertainment, automotive, online marketing, and service businesses
Experience & perspective
Corporate operations & entrepreneurship
Vern began his career at Staples, overseeing Business Machines departments across northeastern New Jersey and Spring Valley, New York. He then worked at Acer Computers, followed by Datavision NYC, before moving into entrepreneurship with AB Tuning, an automotive customization and accessories business north of Manhattan.
He also served as a national distributor for Benevento Automotive, contributing innovations and improvements to product and design concepts. Those experiences shaped his understanding of how teams, systems, products, and service create consistency and trust.
Marketing & business development
The ILMG practice Vern leads combines corporate marketing, brand development, and brand and image consultation with identifying business opportunities, building client relationships, and negotiation. Partnerships and public-facing communications are part of that practice, connecting a brand's positioning with the relationships it builds and the ways it reaches its audience.
That work extends into websites, graphic design, print, and promotional materials, bringing strategy and expression together across a brand's public presence.
Entertainment, sport & live experiences
Vern's experience includes relationships and work across entertainment, music, and professional sports in various capacities, alongside large-scale event strategy, planning, and promotion. ILMG's event production has included experiences attended by professional athletes and recording artists, bringing its brand practice into live settings.
His work has involved established brands, recording artists, professional athletes, and public-facing organizations across a range of engagements.
Legends of CreativityFashion & digital ventures
Vern's original ventures bring fashion, product development, storytelling, and digital experience into the same practice. Building his own brands and platforms has given him a firsthand understanding of how an idea develops into an identity, a product, and an experience for its audience.
Company engagement breadth
ILMG's archived work spans corporate, civic, education, community and consumer organizations. Across its company engagements and media partnerships, the practice connects brand development, public-facing communications, and live experiences. The public portfolio offers a closer look at documented community and advocacy work.
The making of a point of view
Built through culture, material and movement.
Vern Harris's creative perspective was shaped long before ILMG had a name — from fashion and nightlife in New York, to custom interiors in the Bronx, Art Deco and brand building in Miami, and product creation in Los Angeles.
Before Vern directed brands, he learned to read materials, environments, people, and culture.
01Where he grew up
New York — Instinct
Vern grew up in New York City, introduced to fashion early by his parents. In a city where presentation carries meaning, style read as identity rather than decoration — a first lesson in how people signal who they are before they speak.
Fashion taught taste and self-expression.
02Custom-car culture, late 1990s onward
The Bronx — Material
Deep in New York's late-1990s custom-car era, he opened an automotive-accessory shop in the Bronx in the early 2000s, selling and installing body-modification kits and developing custom interiors. Working in velvet, leather, suede, and microfiber taught texture, proportion, finish, and the discipline of building something specific to one owner. New York nightlife through the 2000s sharpened the other half of it: how presentation and self-expression actually read in a room.
Customization taught material intelligence, personalization, and finish.
03December 2012
Miami — Color
He moved to Miami in December 2012 and started a brand-management firm. The city widened the palette — Art Deco geometry, color used with confidence, hospitality as a craft, and business conducted through relationships that outlast a single project.
Miami taught color, environment, hospitality, and relationships.
Before founding ILMG, Vern's experience across corporate operations, technology, client service, and entrepreneurship taught him how organizations operate. That practical foundation sits alongside his cultural perspective: an understanding of how teams, systems, products, and service turn a concept into something people can trust.
2018 — present
Building the proof.
Beginning in 2018, Vern made a deliberate decision: instead of continuing to explain ideas that others could not yet fully see, he would build the proof himself.
While continuing to accept select brand, nonprofit, and cultural engagements through ILMG, he focused on developing original ventures — first Legends of Creativity and later VEU. These platforms allowed him to connect fashion, technology, storytelling, community, and digital experience without waiting for conventional categories to catch up.
The shift was not a hiatus from client work. It was a move from presenting possibilities to creating tangible evidence of what those possibilities could become.
That founder experience now gives ILMG a sharper perspective. The agency understands both sides of the process: how to advise organizations strategically and what it takes to turn an original idea into a brand, product, platform, and experience.
Cultural memory
An era that cannot be duplicated.
The places, people, and businesses that shaped Vern's point of view.
Enter the storyWorking together
Start with a conversation, not a questionnaire.
Tell Vern what you're building. If it's a fit, you'll know quickly.
You work with the principal, not through layers.