Leveraging Design for Retail,
Amazon & DTC Success in 2025
with Ashwinn Krishnaswamy

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if you're building a physical product.

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even if you're building a digital product,

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you have to work backwards from knowing the channels in which you're going to sell,

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because that is going to determine

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so many decisions about your packaging and your design.

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And

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even like the form factors you're going to go in.

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what is your infinite game?

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What are you building towards? Like, what is this business on earth to do?

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And then we kind of,

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treat these three things the stories, symbols and systems,

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we build those around that infinite game, that future vision.

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Ashwin is,

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Honestly just, I think one of the best creators in the space right now. Your content is really, really hitting. I know a bunch of people are here to see him. And he's a great mind within consumer. Ashton would love for you to kind of introduce us, to yourself and some of the work that you do across forge and some of the other brands that you work with.

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That'd be great. Yeah. Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for for coming in and doing this live. I think this will be a fun conversation. So, yes, I'm a content creator where I talk about branding and marketing and how you can go grow consumer brands, as a kind of day job. I have a branding and design agency where we help launch brands.

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Going from idea to launch that we do brand strategy, positioning, packaging design, kind of the whole nine yards getting brands to launch and we predominantly work with brands in the CPG space. So having done this now, many tens of times, we've launched a couple of brands that we are pretty active operators and so I kind of see a wide spectrum of things and how all of these pieces and brand building are very, kind of united.

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And so just try to share some of those perspectives. Yeah. I mean, can you share a little bit more about, so forge is the design agency, and then you also have a couple of brands that you operate to, that I think are going to be relevant to today's conversation. Yes, yes. So I have a design agency.

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I have another brand called Oklahoma Smokes, which we launched back in 2020. That's a CBD company. And then we have a skincare supplement company called Sun Powder.

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think we'll talk about some of those today, too. This is Ashwin and, his face, and some of the short videos. See, the rest of me.

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Yeah. This is just a great format. And we discuss forage. Ashwin's. Agency.

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Okay, let's just start from the founding, and, I mean, guys, can you give me an idea of, like, how many, how many people in the crowd are like, brand operators or founders or launching a brand?

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So, I mean, usually most of the folks who show up are kind of in that 0 to 1 phase.

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Where do you kind of start? Where do you think about starting when when launching a brand? How do you kind of go through that process? So there's there's two places that I like to start and I think,

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there's two places I like to start.

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It's data and design. And so when I say, when I say data. So we were just having this conversation over here about, about H.R. Right. Your, this this, it's it's kind of like Indian, spicy sauce. And he was, like, telling me about this brand that he's like, you know, exploring, building. And so the two ways that I would look at that brand right now as I'm designing it is, what is can I find any data points on how this sells online?

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So if E-Com is one of the channels I'm going to be selling it. Let me go on Amazon. Let me do some keyword volume search. Let me go on Google. There's tools like eight H refs. There's tools like particle where you can plug in brands and see what kind of sales volume they do. So I like to understand just kind of what category demand there is with some numbers first.

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So you can kind of see if there's whitespace, if it's like super competitive and crowded, even if it's a big market, like I think a lot of people miss underestimate the actual size of a market. It's much smaller and much bigger than they thought. Yes, yes, 100%. And I think, it is important going in, knowing how much organic demand exists for your product in a certain category, you need to understand if you're joining a very large category from the start, or if you are going to be moving into a category where you're kind of creating the category and have to do a lot of that education and demand, creation, because that's going to

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change how you market the product. So first is kind of starting looking at some of this data, and then looking at things from looking at the landscape from a design standpoint. So in this example of this, you know, Indian sauce that is a category that exists right now. So I would look at that entire landscape of who are the major players, what are the channels in which they sell, who are they speaking to?

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And if there is if, if all of these brands are speaking to one audience, they're all at a similar price point. They all sell in similar channels. Then you can say, hey, I actually have a concept here that I want to make this more accessible to a totally different audience, that all of these brands are going after people who are of South Asian descent already.

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I want to make a brand going after people who have maybe never tried this before, but would find this is an interesting condiment and design that, like that kind of insight is what drives the design of your brand identity, your visual identity and all this stuff I'll get into. Yeah. So there's almost like an analysis of the market.

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And that's from a business perspective, like what is this market size? What's the opportunity within the, you know, the competitive set of the businesses that you'd be competing with. And then there's almost like a visual audit like, let's see if we were going to launch in a particular category, how would we would start? How would we would we stand out?

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How would that visual identity actually match our brand and how would it be differentiated? Yes, 100%. And I think one of the problems, and we'll probably talk about this is, a lot of people, when they're designing a brand, they'll jump very quickly to just design or say, hey, I'm going to hire a designer. And then I want that designer to generate a few different concepts for me, and then I'm going to choose a concept that I like.

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That is that kind of treats design as this exercise of esthetics, when design is really an exercise of strategy, like the look and feel of a thing, has to be informed by some strategy of who you were speaking to, how you want to communicate them, how you want to communicate to them, and what position you want to occupy.

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And yeah, I think without strategy, design is just like, I don't know, it's like art. No, I completely agree. I think a lot of newer founders too, they like to think about design as like logo or typography, these outputs of identity. Right. When we kind of work with clients, we really like to see the longer term vision of, of an operator.

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And the thing that we usually kind of hearken back to is like,

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what is your infinite game? Like? What are you building towards? Like, what is this business on earth to do? What are you on earth to do? What is your mission? And then we kind of, treat these three things the stories, symbols and systems, and we build those around that infinite game, that future vision.

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And those outputs end up being identity. They end up being your logo. They end up being the copy on your website, all these other things that are meant to kind of communicate that shared vision. So, I mean, that's where that's what I mean when I say, like, design should be an asset that's built on your balance sheet.

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It's something that should grow. It should grow with the company. And I think if you're starting a business, you need to think five, ten years out. And your identity should be evergreen in that way. Yeah.

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How important is sales context to visual identity? We've talked about this a lot, and I think it's it's really interesting point.

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Yeah. I think it's everything

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I always say like, you have to work backwards from distribution if you're building,

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if you're building a physical product. I mean, even if you're building a digital product, you have to work backwards from knowing the channels in which you're going to sell, because that is going to determine so many decisions about your packaging and your design.

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And even like the form factors you're going to go in.

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So, an example of this is right. If you are building a, if you are building a snack food brand or a beverage brand, the reality of where you're going to sell is going to be in grocery. Even though you may want to build an e-commerce business, the consumer purchasing behavior just isn't there for a, speaking in generalizations, but for a broad range of like beverage and and food.

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So if you are then saying, hey, my distribution channel is going to be these retail channels, you have to understand those context, right? You have to be looking on shelves, in the spaces, in the categories in grocery, where you're going to be selling and understand the limitations of those spaces, the lighting in those spaces, how to consumers browse in those spaces, because that is going to inform what your packaging needs to do on a shelf, because you don't have the internet to communicate that message.

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You just have like two seconds. So I always say work backwards from distribution because it really impacts like it impacts case architecture, pack sizes, everything. Yeah, and there's not that many options really. It's like here at DTC brand you're digitally native or you know, your packaging is really going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you at retail.

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I think with DTC, there's just so many more touchpoints for you to sell. Sell a person and an individual on your product. Yeah. You just have like more opportunities to to communicate. Tell us a little bit more about like the discrepancies between, you know, DTC and retail. Yeah, I mean, let's go to we have a couple things in here.

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Right. So I think this is this is a good slide. And so we'll we'll talk about two things here. So there's this brand, some

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So. So they make these, like, amazing, like, delicious sauces. And a bunch of other, like, meal kit accessories.

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They were originally a DTC brand. This is what their packaging looked like before they got into retail when they were just DTC. And then this is what their packaging looked like when they entered retail. And in entering retail, they realized, they couldn't even, like, get on shelves if they looked like the former because the former doesn't actually tell you anything about the product.

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Right? When you're in an aisle comparing this to any other number of sources, you look at it and it's like, well, it looks cool. It got my attention. But unless I flip it over and like, read all of the details, I'm not going to have a good understanding of what this product is. So here they have far more appeal in terms of how you're going to plate this, right.

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It kind of is immediately attractive to you. They have, you know, call outs on what the flavors are. They have a little bit of like the story of the founders. And so this is kind of retail ready packaging that then had to be translated to all of like their merchandizing and shippers and everything.

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There are some brands that will take their DTC packaging and go into retail and you just see it not perform that well in retail, because what was doing a lot of the heavy lifting before, which is Instagram, the Facebook ad, the product, you know, the product page on the e-commerce, site.

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All of that context is stripped and you just have two seconds to communicate a lot, to your consumer. And more than that, to go on a PDP or in an e-commerce experience, you're kind of insulated. You're just one brand. Speaking to the customer. I mean, yes,

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if you extend that into Instagram or TikTok, like in theory, other brands would be targeting the same customer, but it's different than it retail.

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At retail, you're literally, you know, shoulder to shoulder with other brands. And so the customer's making a decision at retail immediately. Oh, immediately. I mean, I think this is a good image. If we talk about this idea of working backwards from distribution, if you were a product, say you're making a protein bar and you're going to sell in like the cold section in grocery, where these other protein bars are sold, you have to understand, like all of the mechanics of the shelf space here and the lighting, and that's going to determine what your packaging look like.

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Looks like. So if you look at the top you see this like really nice color block of these drum roll donuts. That is I mean they they're in this like vertical pack. So they take up a lot of visual real estate. The colors are super bold. So they grab your attention. They have really big, bold, images of the donut.

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So from afar you can instantly understand what the product is. If you compare that to something like Lexington Bakes over here, even even the way that it's merchandised, the name of the brand is kind of all the way in the back. It's a little bit darker. It doesn't really invite you to, like, take a product out. Perfect bar.

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They make it super clear for you to understand where that product is. The one next the Lexington bakes like you don't even know that product is because all that information is on the top. So these are the kind of decisions or like thinking about what is communicated to someone walking by, scanning things visually and understanding the information that needs to be presented to them, for them to stop and say, like, these are the type of decisions that have serious implications for sales velocity at retail, for sure.

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And in terms of like your process, how much of that is hypothetical? And just like, you know, basically human strategy and how much of that is data?

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whenever possible, if we're working on if we're working on brands, kind of like in this category or selling in retail of some kind, I will always try to, like, spend time in store in those aisles, even, like talking to managers in the store or people who like, who just work in the store and just get some understanding from them, like, hey, what's moving in here?

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Like, oh, what did people like about this? Or like dislike about this? Or, you know, have there been any issues with this? And I just get a lot of insight from that. They're like, oh, yeah. Like, customers are often confused about this brand because it doesn't look like it belongs in this section. And so you pick up on like little kernels there.

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There are ways that you can get a little bit. You can get far more data driven if you have like spins, data and stuff. But we typically don't like at scale when you're larger. Like you can kind of understand more about how these packaging rollouts affect, you know, sales velocity. But when you're a startup, it's kind of just like you're looking at the category and you're figuring out, how can I stand out?

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I brought in an example from one of our brands that we did the visual identities for, stores that has recently launched in New York City. And this was a, I would say, clear case of like, how can we leverage a visual identity audit within the, the, the pure landscape and figure out how we can just stand out on shelves?

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And so in the tomato sauce category, everything has that old world heritage, Italian brand identity. And we wanted to pop off off the shelf. I have this this inclination that like, customers kind of make, subconscious decision whether or not they want to buy your product within, like the first three seconds of interfacing with it. I think the identity plays such a role in creating magnetism with your customer, whether or not they know it.

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And so if you can leverage packaging and, and your identity to like, actually do that heavy lifting for you, it makes delivering the sale, growing your business so much easier. Rather than like needing to educate and continue to market to a customer, which just ends up being a lot more expensive.

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What do you think of when you hear the word creative in the brand context?

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Like do you think packaging, do you think advertising? Do you think website? I think I think more advertising, just because whenever I work with agencies, they're like, well, this is our creative team. And they're like generally generating the assets.

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Yeah. I also think it gets a bad rap, like it should be the most valued thing for the majority of like consumer brands.

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Because it is like, I'll give you this example in like talking to ad agencies where, are like performance marketing agencies that will be talking about the creative and they're like, oh, we're going to generate like 20 pieces of creative. And it's like, okay, there's a couple of people doing that. And as someone who has generated that creative before who's like written those ads and like structured those like static images or videos, that's like the most important thing, right?

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That is like the sales pitch for the product that gets that top of funnel awareness. Get someone to click like go through to the landing page and go buy the product.

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So I feel like it doesn't get the, the, like a merit it deserves. Like it does a lot of heavy lifting, but seems like this kind of nebulous thing.

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I think it's just going to get worse, too. It's like creatives becoming so inflationary, especially with like AI production tools. Like it's just become this endless cycle of churning create. Yeah. And I think, well, what we try and bring to the table and what I try to educate marketers on is like, creative should be your customer experience design.

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It's like how our customers interfacing with every single part of the customer journey, whether it's your identity, your advertising, your website. And I'm, I'm very much of the opinion that like quality and and intentionality is just like so much better than volume at a certain point when you're scaling meta ads and like, you need crazy volume. Yes.

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Like zoom in, figure out how you can, you know, pump out that, sort of that, that sort of flywheel and operationalize it. But I think when you're starting out, like quality first, for sure. And, you know, we, I, I put together this, triangle for everyone here. Creative is more than just your advertising, you know, digital product, your visual identity, your growth marketing.

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And I think that the things that we do and you definitely do in your advertising practice is like, let's start with the brand. Let's start with the like, DNA, the genetics. And when you have a great foundation, it's much easier to conceptualize how that foundation is going to live on the site, on the website, and then through the growth marketing.

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And then you can build high tempo programs to, to, to, you know, communicate in the way that you want to.

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more on the creator side, can you talk to us more about the benefits of having a personal brand and brand building how important that is today? And what you're seeing within consumer?

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there are brands that are founder led brands. So there are a couple, a couple in the apparel space. There is, I mean, two that kind of immediately come to mind. One is minted, which is this running brand. And, you know, this guy Marcus, he's like the face of that brand through and through, and he's kind of, like, merged his identity with the brand and the products that he makes, which I think builds a really loyal like, cult following.

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There's another one called Odd Muse, which is another, like, women's fashion brand, and they are phenomenal with content. But the creator has just been like documenting. The founder has been documenting that entire journey of, you know, over the past X number of years. So I think it is a huge point of leverage for smaller brands. Hot Girl Pickles is another one that's like popped up.

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Just invest in that business. Did you? Yeah. Close today. I think it's going to rip. I think so, but it's like the whole thing is like, you know, in a lot of their content, they're like, hey, where these two girls were best friends. We left her job and we started this pickle company. It's like a great story to follow along.

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And that was our litmus test right there. Like this is they got the marketing. It gets people to buy in. Right? If you look at it just from like a standpoint of, well, hey, they're making pickles. Like, how interesting is that? Okay. Like, yeah, maybe it's not that interesting, but the fact that they can weave in the story and get people to care about a category that otherwise, like, what other pickle brand do you really like, know about or have an affinity to?

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I think there's a a lot of leverage that small brands can get from that, which is a kind of zero cost thing for the for them to do, which is just their time in talking about this. And what I always say is you're doing it anyway, like you're building the business anyway, you might as well just like document some of that journey and bring people along.

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So I think there's a lot of value, there's a lot of value in that. And there's, you know, I follow people kind of across platforms, whether it's like Twitter, there's a lot of people who are like building in public on LinkedIn. There's people who like, share very like technical wins. And no matter what channel you use, I think you can find leverage, not just from, hey, here's my product, here's my brand, go buy it.

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But in building a team and like building heat for your brand. So some of these guys are in the CPG space who talk about a lot of their stuff on LinkedIn. I think works really well for them to like, you know, be top of mind for buyers and potential people that they want to hire because it's like, oh, I've seen this guy ten times.

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Talk about how his Costco rollouts increasingly get better every single time he goes out there. So the personal brand thing doesn't have to be like, hey, I need a million followers, and I have to, like, sell 1 to 1 to every consumer. It can be, hey, I have 3000 followers on LinkedIn, but like, I almost give my private investor update in a public way, and then that just builds interest and demand.

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It's more of that. Like the I think the personal channel is just becoming like a really important critical marketing channel for a brand. It's like we need to do founder marketing and we need to figure out how to do that.

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Can you talk about the negatives of, of, being a creator and trying to launch your brand and you've, you've done it.

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You've you've actually launched multiple brands, not as a creator. And now you've been a creator and launch brands. Yeah. I think,

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you know, my background is in launching brands. So I knew all the steps that kind of had to be taken. And I knew people like the people that I would need to lean on for various aspects of the business.

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So it has been slightly easier, like launching a brand no matter what is very tough. So it's been slightly easier than, say, if I was a creator in a totally different space, like I just made really, like funny comedic content. I had 5 million followers and I'm like, hey, I'm going to go launch a, like a candy brand.

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I think there are a lot of creators who try to monetize their audience that way by like launching a physical product or CPG product to their audience, and then very quickly realize, hey, there's like 15 functions of this business I need to be good at or hire for, and maybe, like I'm bootstrapping the business because I'm, like, doing both of these things and I can't hire all of these people.

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So it ends up being a lot harder than they expect. I remember this one comment from, Mr. Beast where he was talking about festivals, and he was like, if I knew how hard it would be to, like, build this shard, this chocolate brand, like, I never would have done this. It's like one of the hardest things I've done.

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This is like, the most famous YouTuber in the world. Like finding it difficult because there's so many just operational challenges with the stuff. So, yeah, I think there's negatives, but I also think there's a lot of positives to. So yeah. And you're just, you know, it's it's it's your it's your practice. It's your work too. So you're at you're in the game.

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Yeah. So I think it's different than like just a pure play creator trying to, you know, launch a business without any experience. Because there are so many different steps. It's it's not easy.

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I mean, we've kind of talked about this and you've you've given some really good examples. Anything else that comes to mind in terms of brands that are using design in a, in a really interesting way to drive sales.

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Yeah. So let's go to the next slide. Because I think these are two good examples. And I have some, some good data from them too. So these are rebrands. So both of these brands sell in retail. They're old packaging on the left. Their new packaging on the right.

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I mean, everything is different, in these packaging, everything that they communicate, what they communicate about their product, with greenhouse foods.

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Right? They on the old one, it's like plant based mini donuts. It looks kind of like this mint thing. You're not even totally sure that there's a donut in there. There's a lot of call outs on the front of pack trying to communicate a lot, whereas the new one is, hey, we're just going to make this look really, have a lot of appetite appeal.

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And then just have three call outs and we're going to leave the rest of the information to the back, and we're going to have this, like bright, vibrant color. This shift, they made the shift while they were in retail. And the three acts, their velocities when they went to the rebrand. So like three thing, your velocity basically means like, hey, if in a given store you're selling ten units per week, you're now selling 30 units per week.

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And so that's just like exclusively from a packaging shift, right? They and they were merchandise in the same exact place. Same case is true for neutral. This is milk. Their old packaging. They were trying to make the statement saying like this milk fight fights climate change. I don't even know what that means necessarily. And there are not a lot of cues that it's milk in there.

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A lot of their customers actually thought it was orange juice because they were like kind of close in in the refrigerated section. So they had a lot of issues with that. So they did the rebrand and they're like, when we did the rebrand, it was like night and day. Like we've had the best month we've ever had.

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And like, that's kind of continued since they've rolled out the new packaging. So especially in retail contexts, the design is like is truly everything. Yeah, like and specifically visual identity and packaging. It can make or break you. Shifting gears, because we've talked a lot about retail design also matters so much in DTC and in more ways than you think.

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It's not necessarily just visual identity. This is a brand that we work with called sculpt. And they do, you know, at home pottery kits. They work with potters and they create a ton of different content around it. I love this product category because it's highly giftable and all of the content is very demonstrable. So you basically can first of all, the ads are super fun, and some of the things that these potters are making are really beautiful.

00:26:59:03 - 00:27:19:16

It's all design driven. But you can basically like warm up an audience over the entire year about, you know, this product. And then Q4 comes around, this is a Q4 business. You can kind of get people to really go out and gift. So another way where you can clearly see how design is super powerful on the, on the DTC channel, not just at retail.

00:27:19:23 - 00:27:25:24

How can a small brand with a low budget use design to compete with bigger brands?

00:27:25:24 - 00:27:34:26

it's funny because there's a lot of, like, bigger brands that are actually subpar with design. They just have better distribution and dollars to acquire customers.

00:27:34:26 - 00:27:45:01

you know, we're talking about this idea of how creative has changed now, especially with AI and like just demands. Also, the bar on design is so high, so high.

00:27:45:02 - 00:28:13:24

It's crazy. It's so high. And I think to execute well. Right. If we're talking about, you know, packaging design or like a brand identity design, the, there are always places where you can spend a lot of money. You can hire these like really big agencies like do fantastic work for you. But there's so many talented and skilled and independent designers that can get you equal, if not better work than some of those bigger agencies.

00:28:13:24 - 00:28:34:00

It's like, hey, a little bit more hand-holding and a little bit more effort kind of working through that together. But, you know, whether that's across packaging, whether that's across site design, whether that's to some degree across product design, you can get a lot of these things done still at a lower cost. You just have to get kind of a little creative with it.

00:28:34:02 - 00:28:54:16

And I'll kind of like give one example of this that I saw the other day. It was from, it was from a, from a supplement brand where they were there were like a smaller brand and like the supplement category, and they were talking about their influencer seeding or their kind of PR gifting strategy. And they said, hey, we see it a ton of people every month.

00:28:54:16 - 00:29:27:18

And, we would just send them our box and like our typical plain mailer. And we recently printed, you know, like 20 or 30 custom boxes with four slots for each of our supplements, plus this like really unique welcome card and this really unique design on the outer box. And, when we gifted these boxes to those same like level of creators, the hit rate on shares there was like 90% because everyone wanted to show off the box, because the box was super nice.

00:29:27:20 - 00:29:54:14

And you look at an example like that where the actual cost of getting those 30 boxes designed and printed and sent to them was phenomenal. You can like, do that. You know, maybe it's 500 bucks of design and then ten bucks a box if you're doing like these really low minimum order quantities. So there's ways that you can get creative with design on a budget where it's like, hey, we're just going to do this custom thing for a small audience.

00:29:54:16 - 00:30:11:05

Yeah, I think you can do that across industries too, not just in consumer, but like you, that's one of those things. These are like these moonshot marketing plays where it's just like a flash in the pan, but it creates a lot of awareness and you don't necessarily need a big budget for that. You just need to be a little bit more creative.

00:30:11:07 - 00:30:12:16

I think that's a great point.

00:30:12:16 - 00:30:17:07

what major mistakes do brands make? Obviously they make a lot. But when it comes to design,

00:30:17:07 - 00:30:22:28

and I'm curious your take on this from the performance marketing side, but, I think there's a couple,

00:30:22:28 - 00:30:39:10

when they think about design is purely an esthetic exercise. And this is something that I was kind of alluding to earlier, design in so many forms and functions is a has to be rooted in strategy because it, it it is really just a communication exercise.

00:30:39:10 - 00:31:01:20

What am I communicating about myself as a brand, visually and verbally. So that strategy has to be in place before you get into the actual design work. Whereas so many brands approach it from the standpoint of, hey, just like, does that look good? Like, does that feel right? Does that, you know, align with my esthetic sensibilities?

00:31:01:22 - 00:31:21:16

So I think that's one kind of major mistake. I think the second mistake from curious, your take from the performance marketing side is a lot of brands are actually very precious with their brand guidelines, when they should have more flexibility to break that. So it the ad doesn't look like an ad. It actually gets their attention first.

00:31:21:16 - 00:31:48:05

And then you handle like the brand side on these other touchpoints. Yeah. Yeah. We deal with that a lot. We've worked with some crazy founders. Our brand attracts like brand driven founders, like the agency brand attracts brand driven founders. And sometimes those are like just the hardest people to work with. So, just by nature of that, we've had to figure out, like when I look at creative advertising programs, there's like when I think about creative, there's two things I think about.

00:31:48:05 - 00:32:08:25

One is like the estheticism of the program. It's like, is it meeting design standards? That's number one. And I think that's where you get a lot of assets that just can't be shipped because they don't like, meet standards. That's like the baseline. I think any good design team should be able to get to baseline. We've spent a lot of time there.

00:32:08:27 - 00:32:29:08

The thing that actually really matters, though, is like, can you create good advertising? And there's a number of different ways to do that. Like, do you have engaging hooks? Are you good at selling a product? Like that's actually the hard part. And, yeah. Like you need to be really good. You need to be creative. You need to be producing a lot of video content, a whole bunch of different formats.

00:32:29:10 - 00:32:48:02

And you need to know the brand really well and why people want to buy it. But yeah, if you don't have that, the design guidelines, they don't even it doesn't even matter. And like, you can make the argument that like, you don't even even need to work with those. There's a whole subset of advertisers that talk about ugly ads, make ugly ads.

00:32:48:06 - 00:33:11:00

You know, and those perform really well. Yeah. And I think there was a huge aversion to people even running UGC a while back. Now. It's generally accepted you want to scale a meta program, you need. UGC so, you know, that's an exception to that rule. So yeah, I mean, for me, like I think brands make a lot of mistakes when it comes to design.

00:33:11:03 - 00:33:24:16

And I think that the most important thing, though, is when it comes down to the identity, I, I'm a big visual identity person, especially when you talk about retail.

00:33:24:16 - 00:33:37:00

Okay, cool. I think that was great. Really good thoughts. Do we have. Yeah we did. Let's give it up for Ashwin. We'll do some open Q&A.

00:33:37:02 - 00:33:38:14

Who has some questions?

00:33:38:21 - 00:34:05:04

Hi. My name is Madeline. Thanks for the chat today. I'm curious if there are any categories that you feel are under saturated right now or, like, ripe for something? I don't know. I guess I just feel like even in the food category, in the makeup category, everything is getting, like, so saturated. And I'm just, you know, like, these brands are competing after, like you said, like the bar for design is so high.

00:34:05:06 - 00:34:44:20

What are maybe like three categories that you feel are, like, ripe for innovation. So I was having this conversation earlier today. So it's a good question. So I think about it less is. So first I will I will answer it from this point of like you said, skincare and like makeup is super saturated. And I think where we see saturation, like we're here in New York where like, you know, have friends in LA and like we're all in this, you know, millennial gen Z kind of demographic.

00:34:44:22 - 00:35:19:12

We see a lot of brands built by people our age for our cohort. And so the space feels extremely saturated. But if you take if you look in makeup, are you looking like, let's go even more niche. You look in, you know, topical, topical serums and you say, okay, there's all of these brands hitting, you know, friends my age that all look and speak this way, but there aren't really any addressing these issues for an older audience.

00:35:19:12 - 00:35:48:26

Like, are there brands that are catering towards a 50 plus or a 60 plus or 70 plus, like this baby boomer audience? Is there are there any brands skewing super young, you know, like hair care for like ten year olds or like kids? You know, body care. So the first place I like to look is like, okay, can you skew up or down in terms of ages, demographics and use cases?

00:35:48:28 - 00:36:01:02

Before kind of like exiting a category and saying, hey, I'm not going to get into that category because it's super saturated. That's one, two, I think there are.

00:36:01:02 - 00:36:18:24

This is a tough one because there are there's many categories that are probably like ripe for opportunity. I mean, when I walk around Home Depot, I look at all of these brands and I'm like, every single one of these could use a redesign that could be made, like, more accessible to like the millennial who, like, does some stuff around their house.

00:36:18:24 - 00:36:36:15

But like, isn't that adapt and like, doesn't want this, like bug spray that looks like it's going to like kill them with like, toxic fumes and poison. But every single one is like, kill the roach like dead roach, like all over it. And it's like, you probably just like, I don't know, make it kind of cute and, like, friendly and tastes like natural or whatever.

00:36:36:18 - 00:36:42:26

And like, that would probably sell. So, I think walking in, it's interesting because

00:36:42:26 - 00:36:55:25

you don't see much of that in Home Depot or, or hardware stores, but you see all of this happening in the grocery stores. With every category, it's like, we've done the better for you. We're like, you know, it feel super saturated.

00:36:55:25 - 00:37:18:27

So I think it's, yeah, kind of showing up and just kind of like looking around and, less expected places and then observing, you know, if everything looks similar. Yeah, I agree, I think that's a really good exercise to, like, look at the age demographics and like, what, what successful brands are doing, where they're communicating and where they're opportunities.

00:37:19:00 - 00:37:42:24

I'll also say, yes, there are tons of brands today. I think Shopify has made it very easy to launch products. It's always been that way though, like it's very, very competitive and it has been for a long time. And there's this cycle of like new brands getting launched, like some being unsuccessful, some being successful. It's just like the endless cycle of, you know, us as consumers, we always want newness.

00:37:42:24 - 00:38:02:00

We always want new products. And, you know, the the value propositions change. Like if you just look at some of the trends over the last couple of years, totally different. Longevity is becoming a really big thing. There are other categories popping up. One of the things that I look at are like the genetics of the business, like the business models, like, is it consumable?

00:38:02:00 - 00:38:25:13

Like is there, are there repeat mechanics? Oftentimes I actually think that's like a lot more important, in building a sustainable business than, you know, the trend. Did your, the other thing that I like off of the sculpt example is like this gifting category, like anything that's super demonstrable, I think there's just so much opportunity to run that through, like a display.

00:38:25:13 - 00:38:44:03

You don't need this crazy retail distribution. So, yeah, I would look into that too. That that's a that's a good point. I would say so. So take that insight. So, we worked with a few brands in the gifting space and like conversion on gifting is higher. Like, people are happy to spend money on other people in a way that they're not happy to spend on themselves.

00:38:44:06 - 00:39:09:08

And, your return rates are lower. And so, say you, you we had, a brand that we worked with in, in the candle space and in the book space where, the candle category was super saturated. There was like a trillion candle brands, but they said, they did these customized candles called birthday candles. It is like customize with your astrology and horoscope on the front.

00:39:09:08 - 00:39:31:02

So they have 365 candles, like one for every day of the year. And so it feels like this personalized gift you get, like, my birthday is August 30th, I get received the August 30th candle. And overnight that business just took off because it's like this novel concept. You bring in the gifting component of it and then layer it into something that, yeah, otherwise feels like a crowded category.

00:39:31:02 - 00:40:04:10

Guys had a question about, if you guys had any specific case studies or examples of. It's a very niche, niche question, but in the restaurant industry, if you had examples of someone rolling out to take out a program like Sushi takeout, but, talking about what you're saying, like packaging, interesting, strategies of like, how to kind of increase brand awareness, because if you look at every sushi takeout program in the city, it's kind of like, you know, the same as one if you guys have any specific ideas or any restaurants in the industry that are doing something novel.

00:40:04:10 - 00:40:32:09

Yeah, I can take this one. I think grocery like the quick commerce grocery like these hybrid businesses where you have like a restaurant or like grocery lends itself really well to direct consumer or quick commerce as well. I'll, I'll take this question in a different, different direction actually, I think, brands, CPG businesses can go the other way into restaurant and quick commerce and delivery.

00:40:32:11 - 00:40:55:08

And I think you're going to start seeing that over the next five years where like, you take a SaaS and SaaS all of a sudden partners with a ghost kitchen provider, and they launch a, Italian restaurant in New York City. And they leverage the knowhow of the brand to create a new, innovative dining experience that you can, you know, find on DoorDash or UberEats.

00:40:55:10 - 00:41:14:11

So they're leveraging the brand awareness that sauce has created and some of the ingredients. And all of a sudden you have a new restaurant concept. I think a brand like Alley Pop or Pop, you could really easily do that too. So this didn't answer your question at all. But, it was something I thought was interesting.

00:41:14:14 - 00:41:42:10

So. So so hold on if I understand if I understand the question correctly, it's, the restaurants with their takeout often look the same. Well, I was just saying, for example, if you have a sushi program. Okay, and you take over a business that's, like, really old and kind of like, you know, old fashion, and you want to improve their take our program, and you want increase your brand awareness as well.

00:41:42:11 - 00:41:58:27

Sure. And so like one of the ways I was thinking I would do that would be like through just the packaging itself. Yes. Right. And like, you know, like when we were younger, like you had the Happy Meal, for example. Yes. Kim McDonald's. I was just thinking, like if you had in case studies or any, ideas, okay.

00:41:58:27 - 00:42:17:03

I don't have case studies, but I'll give you a couple of ideas. They're just like things that come to mind. The other day, I ordered takeout from this Chinese restaurant. On ninth and second called Hulu. They had a really nice takeout bag. It's really nice. I've ordered takeout a ton of time from, like, every restaurant.

00:42:17:09 - 00:42:34:28

They just had an amazing takeout bag. And I've told everyone that I know about this takeout bag. So sick I, like, kept the bag. The bag is probably like a marginal, marginally additional cost for them, right? Especially when they're getting this at scale. But you look at what everyone else is doing, which is like the brown bag with like the plastic thank you over it.

00:42:34:28 - 00:42:55:01

And it's like, oh, they just have this like really nice touch point that is like $0.50 more here, like a buck more. And I think that word of mouth a little hard to track. Maybe there's people who take photos of it, but the word of I've told six people about this, about this restaurant now. And now all of you, it's a phenomenal food, by the way.

00:42:55:03 - 00:43:34:03

The, the second thing that I would think about is if you look at consumer brands like CPG, brands are really good. Their CPG brands are always on the cutting edge of like, marketing and trying to get as build as much brand awareness as possible because it's like so deathly hard to, like, build those businesses. So, you know, a tactic that CPG brands have been doing for quite some time is, hey, if you buy our product like they have referral and affiliate and all that stuff, but hey, if you make, if you get our product and you post an Instagram story about us or you make like a real about us,

00:43:34:05 - 00:44:04:18

we'll give you, like a free product or we'll give you X or like, leave us a review and we'll give you Y. And that's a kind of common thing where with every order you'll get a card and like, you'll, you know, customers can opt into that and you'll have like some percentage of opt in. I wonder if there's something similar to do on the restaurant side where it's like, you get this and have a card and it's like, hey, take a picture of the meal, tag us in an Instagram story, and we'll throw in like a free roll on your next order, or like A3X on your next order.

00:44:04:18 - 00:44:12:17

So you build the retention for them to come back the next time around. And then maybe you get some exposure from their shares to.

00:44:13:08 - 00:44:39:12

I had a good question. Thank you so much. Again. This is great. I'm in the retail space on the management side from the side of a retailer. So and I studied design, so I kind of have some experience in both worlds. But I've noticed it's it's been a challenge early in my career kind of communicating to both the retailers the importance of design and also, having to communicate the importance of turn and how the retail system works to the design teams and the brand team.

00:44:39:12 - 00:45:05:21

So wondering from your guys experience, how you kind of manage those relationships and they can share, but the retailer and the brand are happy and that's that relationship. It's kind of managed well. Godspeed. That's, it's a, I think it is when people don't see the importance of design and they've been around in that position for a long time, it's like really hard to get them to understand it.

00:45:05:24 - 00:45:39:20

I think wherever possible, if you can find data points that that can support the need for good design. So if you're like, hey, if you're talking to a brand and you're like, hey, Greenhouse Donuts came on shelves like this, and then they swap, they, you know, rebranded and they three x their velocities and like, here's what that means in terms of like revenue for them or like the trajectory of that business, then I think you can get buy in for someone if they're thinking about, you know, updating packaging or something.

00:45:39:22 - 00:46:15:02

As there are, there's a new website and hopefully this is like answering some of your question. There's this website, navigator. I mean, it's called, are you still inside? I'm actually in, fashion. But, yeah. So there are, I don't know, there's kind of like, just niche trade publications, and if you like, read them long enough, like, you'll get these kernels of insight where they'll highlight a brand and then you're like, oh, that's like, let me keep that in my back pocket.

00:46:15:02 - 00:46:32:29

So like, I have to have this debate with someone, you know, I have that my friends. But in terms of managing the conversation, I don't have direct experience to that. So I'm sorry. Is that like they don't understand the value of like, is that that is like the actual design of the product you're bringing in, or is it like the brand?

00:46:32:29 - 00:46:55:00

Like, what's the real problem, sir? I think it's more risk taking. I think like being able to make those changes, especially I work at like a legacy retailer, and a lot of it is dealing with legacy brands that are making, you know, big changes, things like you about, for example, something of that magnitude is sometimes challenging to get some buy in.

00:46:55:00 - 00:47:13:21

But I do agree, I think when you have I think what's interesting about retailers having having kind of the sales velocity is something to everyone is on that same metric. If if it sells, everyone's gonna buy them and having that as a way to navigate that. But the design conversations are always challenging. Is it men's or women's fashion?

00:47:13:23 - 00:47:35:03

I'm in women's. I work for, yeah. I'm in women's. Yes. Okay. I mean, there's so many great examples in New York City, like, New York's going through like a men's and women's retail renaissance. I would say it's like so many new storefronts opening up and like, they're driving a ton of foot traffic and they're getting really, you know, a lot of notoriety.

00:47:35:03 - 00:47:55:03

I was just at Cobo last weekend. There's van space. There's like all these places that are really popping up doing good work. So I think you use those as like these studies and yeah, to Ashton's point, like there's a ton you can build a, a case set around design, you know, driving more retail velocity. I think at any industry

00:47:55:03 - 00:47:57:12

just going off that a little bit.

00:47:57:14 - 00:48:16:25

For someone who's trying to go from 0 to 1, how would you suggest, going about an efficient, cost effective way, to test out design when you're trying to maybe test out different personas, different brand concepts? Do you have any suggestions on on how to go about, one shot at category? Sorry, what product category?

00:48:17:02 - 00:48:19:01

CPG food.

00:48:19:01 - 00:48:41:29

Yeah. Is it product testing or design like labeling, packaging, labeling, packaging? Yeah, I mean, all the above. Honestly, if you were just trying to see what resonates with. Let's go with branding. And design, are there efficient methods to, to go about that, see what really sticks with potential consumers without having to break the break?

00:48:42:01 - 00:49:11:14

I think in one of the really important things that you should be doing, if you're going 0 to 1, you're like building the business is start to like build out the community infrastructure around around what you're doing, around all of these, like, things that you're doing as a founder, whether that's like label feedback, flavor feedback, design feedback, like we've we've I've talked to a number of really successful founders who they started doing that through simple formats, discord, Facebook groups, just family and friends initially and then they get more people on board.

00:49:11:16 - 00:49:40:29

You offer some sort of incentives and you leverage the community to give you feedback on design. Now the customer is not always right. So like, you definitely need to be working with good designers, like somebody who has a vision. Maybe that's, you know, who's co-founder, maybe it's a designer that you hire an agency, that can kind of look at the market, assess the competitive side, do a visual identity exercise like we've been talking about, and can create something that's novel, that's unique to you.

00:49:41:02 - 00:49:59:22

But I would definitely have a couple permutations of that, whether that's design directions and then talk to a lot of people get feedback in real time. And, yeah, the community thing is really big. We were talking to Kevin for each, and they launched everything through their Facebook community. I got feedback early on and that community still is going.

00:49:59:22 - 00:50:04:25

And they show up for like all their retail launches. So that's one thing that I would definitely institute.

00:50:04:29 - 00:50:38:27

Yeah. Similar to his question, if you are so early that you haven't figured out like exactly what your MVP is or your ideal customer is, especially if you're launching a brand new subcategory, how do you start to think about like brand strategy or design strategy? Is it too early? What's the category? It would be a consumer wearable, a consumer wearable that doesn't exist there.

00:50:39:00 - 00:51:08:21

It's like a brain wearable. So others kind of exist. It's a it's brain wearable. So like an aura. But for your brain. And so it's like there are brain realm out there. But a lot of them are for different things like sleep or stress. And we're focusing more. We think in like the productivity, the space. But again, because we're still so early, we haven't fully committed strategically.

00:51:08:21 - 00:51:15:04

We're not sure if like, this is the right way. Right. So how do you start to think about brand?

00:51:15:04 - 00:51:29:23

When you say you're kind of like, not committed, does that mean from a positioning standpoint? So from this position a word for this like productivity kind of like performance optimize your audience or are we going to be for someone else static.

00:51:29:28 - 00:51:59:15

Like big question. Yeah, I think I think we probably want to go that direction and then maybe evolve into the stress management side and then other like mental wellness, but yeah, I feel like branding for focused productivity would be very different than like wellness. And so how do you think of that five, ten year plan? More like, I want to build this brand that can put it into that space.

00:51:59:17 - 00:52:21:11

I would say to not worry about the five year plan or the ten year plan. I think it's it's way too far, too much changes. And like what really what what the the growth of that will really depend on is if you found that early adopter audience and it wasn't and it worked well and it wasn't like mocked by them.

00:52:21:11 - 00:52:41:29

And so there was this like consumer acceptance. And then that continued to grow over time until it became kind of like normalized. And then you can bridge it into a, into a much wider audience. And at that point it's I think it's it's common for especially tech like that to go through distinct rebrands and spaces to become more accessible to people.

00:52:42:02 - 00:52:58:20

So I think right now it's like, if you have to go super far from a branding and positioning standpoint, it's like really niche audience that, you know, it's going to take some of those risks to fail to use the product, then just own that, say like, okay, the brand in five years, like, I have no idea what that's going to look like.

00:52:58:24 - 00:53:16:09

We'll get there. We'll like earn the right to get there, basically. Yeah. I think it's a good point. I also think like in hardware, wearables, like if you're still if you're either entering a new market or like, you don't know how the customer is going to react, I think you need to really do a lot of testing and figure that out first.

00:53:16:11 - 00:53:35:18

And then you can actually work backwards and build a brand around that. Once you kind of like have proven out, hey, there's a market for this product. We have good positioning. We validated the idea at some sort of way. Then you go to the brand roundup. That's how I would think about it. So maybe a little too early, like, just kind of.

00:53:35:21 - 00:53:56:21

Yeah. It sounds like you still have some stuff to to figure out on the product side. Right? Yeah, I, I think, I mean, like, the device is built, the features are built and we're starting to test. But part of that is also testing, like how to, how to market it, how to position it, to attract the right testers.

00:53:56:21 - 00:54:07:11

yeah, there's a lot there. There's a lot there. I want to know more about the product. You should. Let's talk. Yeah, I'll talk after this. Any other questions?

00:54:07:11 - 00:54:30:02

So I work on the brand agency side. I also write consulting business. Curious how you guys navigate the conversation of paid versus organic, or maybe for larger brands like writing content versus a, position that I find myself in offline?

00:54:30:05 - 00:54:54:12

The value of each sometimes bigger brands don't want to invest into sort of the world building around their brand, and they want to throw money at the problem. Similarly, smaller brands like pop ups want to, you know, hey, you run Facebook ads for me, but not understanding that maybe, you know, organic might be the actual thing that that is a growth driver.

00:54:54:12 - 00:54:55:03

So

00:54:55:03 - 00:54:58:06

how do you start to navigate that possible?

00:54:58:06 - 00:55:31:08

Yeah, I think both are extremely important. And I think the opposite same thing from I would say like very small, but I'll think about it from the performance side of that, from the organic side. I mean, I, I'm always telling brands like organic content, it's like the best thing you can do because you can test messaging in test, how in certain videos convert if this is like one of your primary acquisition channels, but you get a lot of just like awareness by your brand continuously being out there.

00:55:31:11 - 00:55:48:02

And so how I like to think about it is organic. At least one pillar of content and organic can be this testing ground for things and angles that you want to run from the performance side and so with with one of my brands,

00:55:48:02 - 00:55:57:15

our best performing meta creative was just our best performing TikTok app, which the same ad and then like, you know, cut 10s out of and it performs,

00:55:57:15 - 00:56:05:15

so I think brands that like large scales and small scales have to be doing both.

00:56:05:18 - 00:56:43:06

There is some interesting data. There was like report from a company called tracksuit, which basically showed the conversion efficiency. The, the efficiency of paid marketing efforts increase when a brand was investing in like brand awareness and brand building. And those touchpoints are organic. They're like real life activations. They're all these other points. So there's like there are some data points and there's a good case studies out there, and I think it's just showing each side the value of the other.

00:56:43:09 - 00:57:05:17

Yeah, I think people I mean I'll rip off that too. Like I think people misunderstand performance marketing like they think of it as a sales channel. It's really meant to be an amplification feature for your existing marketing efforts. These are hyper efficient advertising channels that you should leverage. But I think about the moderate performance marketing stack as being organic.

00:57:05:17 - 00:57:29:16

And hey, it's like two halves of the same old and the best teams today. They have really efficient, organic muscles that are consistently pushing things out. I mean, it's been proven that it can be, a pretty healthy sales channel to, like, you can move a lot of products through organic creators. Do it all the time. And it's a great way to test to test, to test creatives.

00:57:29:18 - 00:57:47:01

So I think there, there, you need both. You really do. But if you're a new brand starting out, like, start with organic, get into the content creation, like, build that muscle. And then again, meta, or performance marketing is meant to amplify what you're already doing.

00:57:47:01 - 00:58:12:29

Brand refreshes. So I was recently in South by Southwest, and the big discussion, I feel like the overtone was how if you as a brand are not pivoting every three years, like in this same age, you're going to, like, go out of business, right? Because everything moves so fast, so what is your thoughts on brand refreshes?

00:58:12:29 - 00:58:39:18

Like when brands should be brand and like what they should keep? Maybe when it speaks to like a legacy brands, you know, like we've seen them done really well and then seen some major flops. I'm just curious your take on that. Like what is important to you. Yeah, I think if I'm going to speak kind of generally about categories you have especially a lot of like the large legacy brands that like, you know, they get a new CMO and then they like change their packaging, they change their design.

00:58:39:18 - 00:58:52:11

And it's like every five years that do things like this. In some categories, it's a pretty disruptive thing to do because you actually need to build like symbolism in terms of like your look and feel and colors with a consumer.

00:58:52:11 - 00:58:57:16

I think a lot of brands approach it that way because it's the easiest thing to do to show forward momentum.

00:58:57:16 - 00:59:22:08

It's like, oh, we have like a new book. We, you know, it's like we've refreshed everything here. When that doesn't actually solve their problem. It was just this easy, easier thing to do. The more important question to be asking is how do you maintain relevancy and continue to be relevant over a long period of time? And you can look at a brand like, a brand like Crocs.

00:59:22:08 - 00:59:46:09

You know, Crocs has been absolutely ripping it last like ten years or so. And they're they've been a brand that's been around forever. When I was a kid that all, like, Crocs were super lame. And it was like a fun thing to be around, to be seen in. And now they're like this very fun thing. And they maintain this cultural relevance by like really smart niche collaborations, really cool designs.

00:59:46:11 - 01:00:03:04

They have this, you know, I think, you know, there's there's also this element of timing and then new generation coming to them without this preconceived notion of what they were, where it's like, oh, the first time they see proxies like with this like Pringles collab. And it's like, okay, that's like fun. I want to like grab some of those.

01:00:03:06 - 01:00:16:17

So I think the harder work is actually in how do we expand our products and our collaboration and our creative to maintain relevancy, not just how do we update the look and feel of our thing?

01:00:16:17 - 01:00:24:26

And I also think like, that's what campaigns are for, too. You know, you can have different permutations of the brand and appear more fresh without going through like a full rebrand.

01:00:24:26 - 01:00:48:14

so, when you think about, the digital ad space, but particularly like meta ads, like on a, grocery store rack, you know, differentiation by different packaging works. But when you think about, like in fashion particularly, and there is a ad format in terms of you purchasing a t shirt, there's a certain type of way you want to look as a consumer at that t shirt.

01:00:48:16 - 01:01:08:02

And if you try to deviate from that path and show it very differently, it may not land. So the question is, is that how much variation tolerance have you? Are you seeing in particular in the fashion space, around the way in which you present a product? Of course there's different like ways to do it, but you can talk about the technical aspects of it.

01:01:08:02 - 01:01:20:25

You can store, tell about, and you can tell that, you know, this denim was in Japan, etc., but in the way in which you display product, when you only have less than 15 seconds, like what is your take on that growth? There's takes on?

01:01:20:25 - 01:01:26:27

Yeah. Fashion is one of those categories where like I think it's people make decisions pretty, pretty quickly.

01:01:26:29 - 01:01:52:03

Like after just seeing the product display taste like it's all part of it's very nuanced. You know, it's not one of those categories where you can, like, go out and sell the product, you know, and create an ad around that with like a great hook and a strong body, like you're talking about the value propositions. It's very much about like the visuals, like how does it how does the how does the shirt hang?

01:01:52:03 - 01:02:05:22

Like how does it look on a certain angle. So I think the masterful curators can, can, can do things really well there. But it's, it's a, it's a really tough, tough, tough category. And I don't think there are a lot of rules that apply to it,

01:02:05:22 - 01:02:12:16

I think you have the right idea where you said there's various formats you can use, like storytelling formats.

01:02:12:18 - 01:02:43:02

Yeah. I think in this category and especially in your brand too, like there should not be a deviation from the brand guidelines. So it's really about like, okay, in some ads it's just going to be totally standard, like here's a silhouette, like turning around and it's like either like you didn't see it for you or it's not, but then there are other ad concepts that I think you can create where there is just a really interesting visual hook before you get to like the product.

01:02:43:04 - 01:02:46:01

I'll send you some examples of things I'd like you.

01:02:46:07 - 01:02:53:09

All right. Well Ashwin, thank you so much man. We really appreciate you you guys. Incredible.

01:02:53:11 - 01:02:53:20

We're going to

01:02:53:20 - 01:02:58:02

be hanging around. Any follow up questions? Feel free.

01:02:58:02 - 01:03:08:02