SPEAKER_00
In this video, we are going to talk about how to make cool products that people want to buy. Sounds easy. Reality is less so. We're going to do this by talking through a number of actual brand examples. We're going to break down the two main tactics, aesthetic differentiation and functional differentiation, and why one is way harder than the other right now. We're going to talk through why so many new brands fail and look at tools that can actually help you decide what products you should make. Whether you have your own brand and you're trying to branch into something new, you're stagnant trying to find something that works, you're a creator or a potential entrepreneur who's trying to figure out what you want to launch, or you work at a brand and just really want to understand why this all works, this is the video for you. Let's lock in.
SPEAKER_00
First, we're going to talk about aesthetic differentiation, making things that look better. This is what most people who do apparel brands, launch products, feel like they're going to make something that looks cool that they can sell. But aesthetic differentiation is at the hardest place it's ever been. I'm scrolling here through a brand I like called House of Errors, who makes absolutely amazing clothes at pretty reasonable prices. But this is your competition. If you're trying to make streetwear, you're competing with them, you're competing with Bad Son, you're competing with kids. For a lot of these folks, their hoodies are, say, $150 to $250. Their bottoms are $80 to $150. They're not much more expensive than new brands put out. And the designs are, frankly, amazing. And the same goes beyond streetwear into more classic garments like male and female stuff you see here with Gaunt, strictly to women's wear. If you want to succeed off of aesthetics, a few things need to happen. One, you need to have a strong point of view. What is your unique visual ID? I talk a lot about this in my How to Create a Brand Vibe video. But you need to have an ownable aesthetic that the algorithms can translate. They know that there's people that like it and they can put it in front of. And that's why things like Western, Gothic, Americana, Coquette, big categories often take center stage. But aesthetics is at its hardest time for differentiation right now. Because as I mentioned, design is at its peak. The design of small to midsize brands is amazing. But what this also means is that copying is at its peak. As many of you have watched my videos know, I've worked on and been a partner with a women's wear brand for about six years. And we get knocked off all the time. We actually have an article that just ran about our lawsuit with Forever 21. It's the second time we've been embroiled in something like that with Forever 21. They're just taking one of our designs. It's one of maybe a dozen of those things that have happened from major brands just in the last 18 months. And the duplication is out of control. If you see something aesthetic that's good, it can be replicated extremely quickly. And there's only so much you can do. In fact, we've actually won lawsuits of people taking our ideas. But I found that the resources and the time and the mental energy as a small team that gets spent putting into doing that isn't even worth the money you get back. It's worth just staying on target and focusing. But that means that you're competing with an ever quicker, ever-changing landscape where you have to be that good at design. And guess what? Most people actually aren't. And you also have to be amazing at content inside the same world. Because for aesthetic brands to work, the content, organic content, paid content has to be the driver. And the standard of that is extremely high. So if you don't have both the design quality and the content quality, it's going to be a hard run. And again, there are plenty of brands that do. But it's worth thinking about as you begin to dive in. Is this aesthetic you're going for enough? Is the design acumen enough? Because the second category I want to talk about is functional products. One of the reasons I often recommend when everyone says they want to start a fashion brand, I'm, hey, you should actually niche. Look at activewear. Look at niching into sports. And not because it's any less competitive. It's just as competitive, if not more. But there's more room to create function. So we have aesthetic, how it looks, and we have function. Does it actually provide a difference in people's lives? And so I want to call out my friends at Bandit. And one of the reasons I call out Bandit is I wear their shorts and their products. And they have really thought through user experience for running. I just enjoy the actual details of how the product is for how I train. They have a functional advantage on top of an aesthetic advantage. It's why one of the reasons I recommend their products all the time is because of the function that they've put together. And for 90% of entrepreneurs and people that want to be out there, even if you are design minded, I can't recommend enough to not be going into apparel, but be going into something that is specifically functional. Maybe it's apparel adjacent, but finding anything where you can have a consumer problem solved. And so what do I mean by that? Let's look at my brand. So Valuables is a fun project for me. The creative studio where I get to bring some of my ideas to life. But my best-selling product by far are my shoe bags. And that's because they have function. You see any of the other ads, I'm selling you on aesthetic. And that's fine if you like the aesthetic, I can sell there. But when I'm selling you a shoe bag, I'm saying, hey, are you putting your shoes in a plastic bag when you put them in your luggage? Or you just putting the shoes raw inside of a duffel bag? Let me solve this problem for you for an affordable price with a product that's thought through that experience. And that video of me delivering that is an excellent performing ad asset. And you will find if you've been advertising on aesthetic things on Meta and Facebook, ads are working on organic. When you actually start playing to a consumer pain point, you start solving a problem for them, your ads immediately do better. Function leads to more quality products. And we are in an aesthetic generation in an aesthetic world where saying something like that seems like it's common sense. But for many people, they're so obsessed with the aesthetic look of it, they forget about the function angle that goes with it. And what's nice is if you are good at content, you are good at creating aesthetics, you'll also realize that a bunch of these functional things that exist in the real world or in retail, their teams aren't good at aesthetics and aren't good at content, haven't brought that over to the internet. And there is white space there to operate. So I'm going to talk a bit through how you actually find data and dive into this category and think about what you actually might want to make. And I'm going to roll through a bunch of brands that have this perfect world of they've established an aesthetic and they've established function.
SPEAKER_00
look of it, they forget about the function angle that goes with it. And what's nice is if you are good at content, you are good at creating aesthetics, you'll also realize that a bunch of these functional things that exist in the real world or in retail, their teams aren't good at aesthetics and aren't good at content, haven't brought that over to the internet. And there is white space there to operate.
SPEAKER_00
So I'm going to talk a bit through how you actually find data and dive into this category and think about what you actually might want to make. And I'm going to roll through a bunch of brands that have this perfect world of they've established an aesthetic and they've established function. They do both together because that's the ideal state you want to get to with your idea and your brand is something that looks amazing, that has the content, that also has the function to go with it.
SPEAKER_00
There's plenty of examples out there, some leaning one way or the other. So I'm going to go inside Particle and I use Particle all the time for research for brands, whether I'm doing competitive research or I'm looking to create my own stuff. I actually found a lot of the insights I used to launch some of the car accessories I launched specifically by going through a process like this. Particle agreed to partner on this video. So you can check them out at the description below if you are doing research or you want to do competitive analysis for any online category. But they have this section over here called trends. And you can select trends by their growth status and by their type. And you can see here things that are growing in volume. So for instance, you can see living room sets are having a moment versus two years ago. I have this set on a two-year time horizon. So you can see seasonality. That's important here. Look at these graphs. You'll see, oh, this is just a wintertime spike.
SPEAKER_00
If you look on a one-year horizon and you see a big spike and realize that's not the holiday where everyone buys way more, then you can lose yourself in the data a bit. But you'll start to notice, okay, accent tables rising, costume jewelry kind of flatline. You can begin to go through and look at these different angles. But this one's interesting to me, industrial storage. Because look at this, it's going up on a steady line and it has a huge holiday. Look at that holiday compared to this holiday. Industrial storage is having a moment. So I'm going to click through and say, okay, what exactly is happening here? What happens is it's actually going to show me a market size, show me a volume of what it's tracking, show me how it's changing over the last year. And then the product types, metal storage cabinets, storage hooks, plastic storage. And it's going to show me a bunch of the brands, their average price points, who's selling it that I can dive into the category for. And the industrial storage one is a really interesting one to me. Because when you talk about aesthetics and function, look at the brands we have here. The Grip Store is selling full-size and The Container Store. Oh, Crates. Now The Container Store. Oh, Crates is an amazing example of a standout product that ties together everything that we are talking about here. So these are The Container Store crates are $34 full size. They are $24 half size. They come in all of these different colors. They have the options to add lids. But this is basically saying, if you are looking at storage in your house or in your office or for your work, and you want to have a bunch of options, you want to have it look good. This looks good. This is tactical man adjacent. Solves this work built for professionals, right? Cool. Hey, I want to carry around all my camera gear. Look at how I can divide it. Look how I can put it together. This video is worth a thousand words, right? At a cheap price, supports this weight, have all these options. This is an example of they took an existing market, crates storage. They applied an aesthetic to it. They said, hey, we're going to go towards the more tactical guy aesthetic, the Yeti aesthetic. We're going to have function behind it, right? You're going to be able to divide things easily. They're going to look good. They're customizable. They're stackable. They're collapsible. This is a thing that a lot of people use for a lot of different reasons, and they created a brand around it. And this is where you can begin to look adjacent and say, hey, is it actually just, it makes sense. Should there be a way more female leaning version of this where we go really far in on specific colorways or functions or a sleeker look? Do you want to have a brutalist version of this? You can begin to look at categories and find your own aesthetic. And these kinds of things are makeable, just like you can find a manufacturer for activewear. You can find a manufacturer for products like this. Like this is joinplastic.com. This is a company in China that makes crates of all kinds wholesale for customers with your designs, right? And you can go hunt this down on Google and Alibaba and import Yeti, same way you can anything else.
SPEAKER_00
You don't have to limit yourself to something super straightforward that everyone else does. I'd much rather see creators and entrepreneurs tackle the problems like Cidio has versus tackle the same exact thing. But let's look at a smaller example. So this is my friend Flock Manufacturing, who has a product that is a car gauge. So basically he is saying that if you really care about your car, your car gauge's speed is wrong. Companies intentionally have it wrong as a consumer protection. And so he has built a product that has level of function, but then built a lifestyle in and around it, right? He's doing videos like, what's your name? What's your car with other people that are drifting? And he's selling a thing that's really specific to a niche, but setting it up to be like, hey, here's this one functional thing. Here's this lifestyle that's built around it that I'm now synonymous with so that this list and his following will be able to attach to any other functional product that he made inside this world. That's why I encourage people to look at anything that people consume already in bulk and be like, what are the functions that we can add to that? And a controversial example I like to bring up is the Ridge wallet, right? Ridge sells nine figures of these wallets.
SPEAKER_00
I look at this wallet and it's extremely corny to me as a consumer. The aesthetics of Ridge are repulsive, but from a marketing perspective, I couldn't have more respect for it because they have said, hey, we realize the traditional wallet aesthetic is bad. We can advertise this improved function by what we put together here, and we can hit a market with massive TAM, which is guys without taste. We can always have stuff on sale and we can promote to them this easier, simpler lifestyle that makes them feel good. Even little things like RFID blocking, things that aren't actually real consumer problems. But if you begin to put inside of your marketing and begin to add on to that story, to that function, helps differentiate the product that's out there. And you look at any one of those
SPEAKER_00
Repulsive, but from a marketing perspective, I couldn't have more respect for it because they have said, hey, we realize the traditional wallet aesthetic is bad. We can advertise this improved function by what we put together here, and we can hit a market with massive TAM, which is guys without taste. We can always have stuff on sale and we can promote to them this easier, simpler lifestyle that makes them feel good. Even little things like RFID blocking, things that aren't actually real consumer problems. But if you begin to put inside of your marketing and begin to add on to that story, to that function, helps differentiate the product that's out there. And you look at any one of those categories. You can look at socks and be like, how do I make a hotter version? And you can look at activewear. Activewear is one of the most saturated categories in the world. But right now with what's going on with Make America Healthy Again and the based movement, you can have brands that literally just say, we are not made of polyester. You're not putting much of plastic on your body the same way Ridge is saying, hey, wouldn't you want a metal modern wallet instead of a big old leather wallet? This brand, Mate here, their whole proposition, they make very similar clothes, look and feel. This could be any activewear brand in the world, but it's 92% cotton, 8% spandex versus 100% polyester. So they are positioning entirely based on materials. Detox your closet, organic essentials. And that is just looking at any core category and then finding a position that appeals to people. And you can manufacture a lot of that position. But noting cultural insights around it is a really important way to look at it. And the cultural insight that people care a lot more about wrapping their body in plastic to work out is a good one. Another one I want to call out here is my friend Brandon, who has Blank Studios. So he makes desk accessories primarily, right? He has hangers and a few other things, but he makes things for an aesthetic desk. He's basically said brutalist aesthetic. Now, if he was selling brutalist clothing, that would be one thing. But since you're selling something where your only options out there, there aren't other brutalist desk accessory brands, maybe there's a handful, but he is marketing it on Instagram with great content and being like, hey, this is a functional thing. This is a holder for things. This is a lamp. This is stuff that makes a difference in your life. It's not just purely a piece of clothing or a lifestyle item. It helps you organize. And I'm applying my unique aesthetic to it and building an entire world around that aesthetic. And that combination of, hey, this is actually something that I will use on my desk, or I will use in my life versus just another thing I will wear is just entering you into such a better scenario to be able to sell. And how I would encourage anyone who wants to break into these brands or into these worlds to think. And I'll end this with a bit of an exercise to think through in your head. Anytime you're creating something, whether that's a hoodie, a coaster, beverage, it's about creating a blank for X. If your brand does not have a strong for, so you say shirts for, I mean, it doesn't get really specific from there. It's in trouble. So if your shirts for Hispanic guys under five five, that is a niche. That is okay. I'm tapping into a lifestyle and a background and a culture, and I'm tapping into a specific pain point of I want shirts that are going to fit guys who are of shorter height. So let's throw an example out there. The perfect activewear for health conscious Pilates moms, right? We're saying, hey, the ones who care about the anti-polyester, zoning into that one person. But if you're saying that, if you're saying, oh, this is just streetwear, you're missing that one level deeper that separates a lot of these brands out. And it can be pretty simple. One of the ones that is a favorite of mine is Iconoclub to call out where they're making very similar streetwear to tons of other brands. They do a good job, but they've put themselves synonymous with a particular type of Bay area car culture and adjacent car cultures where they are making, hey, I'm making this thing for this extremely specific audience. And they are owning that and making great content around it. And you can always branch out from a certain place, but that's a lot different than making it just for car enthusiasts, right? It's niche down to one really specific area. If you take anything away from this video, it's that whatever you want to create, get down to that one level deeper of who it is and attack it as hard as you can. So my thanks to Particle for sponsoring this video and their information is down in the description. If you want to do any competitive research in the space or use any of those trend analysis tools, they are a great place to start. And as always, I appreciate y'all watching.
SPEAKER_00
First, we're going to talk about aesthetic differentiation, making things that look better. This is what most people who do apparel brands, launch products, feel like they're going to make something that looks cool that they can sell. But aesthetic differentiation is at the hardest place it's ever been. I'm scrolling here through a brand I like called House of Errors, who makes absolutely amazing clothes at pretty reasonable prices. But this is your competition. If you're trying to make streetwear, you're competing with them, you're competing with Bad Son, you're competing with kids. For a lot of these folks, their hoodies are, say, $150 to $250.
SPEAKER_00
Their bottoms are $80 to $150. They're not much more expensive than new brands put out. And the designs are, frankly, amazing. And the same goes beyond streetwear into more classic garments like male and female stuff you see here with Gaunt, strictly to women's wear. If you want to succeed off of aesthetics, a few things need to happen. One, you need to have a strong point of view. What is your unique visual ID? I talk a lot about this in my How to Create a Brand Vibe video. But you need to have an ownable aesthetic that the algorithms can translate. They know that there's people that like it and they can
SPEAKER_00
put it in front of. And that's why things like Western, Gothic, Americana, Coquette, big categories often take center stage. But aesthetics is at its hardest time for differentiation right now. Because as I mentioned, design is at its peak. The design of small to midsize brands is amazing. But what this also means is that copying is at its peak. As many of you have watched my videos know, I've worked on and been a partner with a women's wear brand for about six years. And we get knocked off all the time. We actually have an article that just ran about our lawsuit with Forever 21. It's the second
SPEAKER_00
time we've been embridled in something like that with Forever 21. We're just taking one of our designs. It's one of maybe a dozen of those things have happened from major brands just in the last like 18 months. And the duplication is out of control. If you see something aesthetic that's good, it can be replicated extremely quickly. And there's only so much you can do. In fact, we've found, we've actually won lawsuits of people taking our ideas. But I found that the resources and the time and the mental energy as a small team that gets spent putting into doing that isn't even worth the money you get
SPEAKER_00
back. It's worth just staying on target and focusing. But that means that you're competing with an ever quicker, ever changing landscape where you have to be that good at design. And guess what? Most people actually aren't. And you also have to be amazing at content inside the same world. Because for aesthetic brands to work, the content, organic content, paid content has to be the driver. And the standard of that is extremely high. So if you don't have both the design quality and the content quality, it's going to be a hard run. And again, there are plenty of brands that do. But it's worth
SPEAKER_00
thinking about as you begin to dive in. Is this aesthetic you're going for enough? Is the design acumen enough? Because the second category I want to talk about is functional products. One of the reasons I often recommend when everyone says they want to start a fashion brand, I'm like, hey, you should actually niche. Like, look at activewear. Look at niching into sports. And not because it's any less competitive. It's just as competitive, if not more. But there's more room to create function. So we have aesthetic, how it looks, and we have function. Does it actually provide a difference inside of
SPEAKER_00
people's lives? And so I want to call my friends at Bandit. And one of the reasons I call out Bandit is I wear their shorts and their products. And they have really thought through user experience for running. I just like the actual details of how the product is for how I train. They have a functional advantage on top of an aesthetic advantage. It's why one of the reasons I recommend their products all the time is because of the function that they've put together. And for 90% of entrepreneurs and people that want to be out there, even if you are design minded, I can't recommend enough to not be going in
SPEAKER_00
apparel, but be going into something that is specifically functional. Maybe it's apparel adjacent, but finding anything where you can have a consumer problem solved. And so what do I mean by that? Let's look at my brand. So valuables is a fun project for me. The creative studio where I get to bring some of my ideas to life. But my best selling product by far are my shoe bags. And that's because they have function. You see any of the other ads, I'm selling you on aesthetic. And that's fine if you like the aesthetic, I can sell there. But when I'm selling you a shoe bag, I'm saying, hey, are you
SPEAKER_00
putting your shoes in a plastic bag when you put them in your luggage? Or you just raw dog in the shoes inside of a duffel bag? Let me solve this problem for you for an affordable price with a product that's thought through that experience. And that video of me delivering that is an excellent performing ad asset. And you will find if you've been advertising on aesthetic things on meta and Facebook ads are working on organic. When you actually start playing to a consumer pain point, you start solving a problem for them, your ads immediately do better. Function leads to more quality
SPEAKER_00
products. And we are in aesthetic generation in an aesthetic world where saying something like, that seems like it's common sense. But for many people, they're so obsessed with the aesthetic look of it, they forget about the function angle that goes with it. And what's nice is if you are good at content, you are good at creating aesthetics, you'll also realize that a bunch of these functional things that exist in the real world or in retail, their teams aren't good at aesthetics and aren't good at content, haven't brought that over to the internet. And there is white space there to operate.
SPEAKER_00
So I'm going to talk a bit through how you actually find data and dive into this category and think about what you actually might want to make. And I'm going to roll through a bunch of brands that have this perfect world of they've established an aesthetic and they've established function. They do both together because that's the ideal state you want to get to with your idea and your brand is something that looks amazing, that has the content, that also has the function to go with it. There's plenty of examples out there, some leaning one way or the other. So I'm going to go inside
SPEAKER_00
particle and I use particle all the time for research for brands, whether I'm doing competitive research or I'm looking to create my own stuff. I actually found a lot of the insights I used to launch some of the car accessories I launched specifically by going through a process like this. Particles agreed to partner on this video. So you can check them out at the description below if you are doing research or you want to do competitive analysis for any online category. But they have this section over here called trends. And you can select trends by their growth status and by their type. And you can
SPEAKER_00
see here things that are growing in volume. So for instance, you can see living room sets are having a moment versus two years ago. I have this set on a two-year time horizon. So you can see seasonality. That's important here. Look at these graphs. You'll see, oh, this is just a wintertime spike. If you look on a one-year horizon and you see a big spike and realize that's not the holiday where everyone buys way more, then you can lose yourself in the data a bit. But you'll start to notice, okay, accent tables rising, costume jewelry kind of flatline. You can begin to go through and
SPEAKER_00
look at these different angles. But this one's interesting to me, industrial storage. Because look at this, it's going up on a steady line and it has a huge holiday. Look at that holiday compared to this holiday. Industrial storage is having a moment. So I'm going to click through and say, okay, what exactly is happening here? What happens is it's actually going to show me a market size, show me a volume of what it's tracking, show me how it's changing over the last year. And then the product types, metal storage cabinets, storage hooks, plastic storage. And it's going to show me
SPEAKER_00
a bunch of the brands, their average price points, who's selling it that I can dive into the category for. And the industrial storage one is a really interesting one to me. Because when you talk about aesthetics and function, look at the brands we have here. The grip store is selling full-size and the city. Oh, crates. Now city. Oh, crates is an amazing example of a standout product that ties together everything that we are talking about here. So these are city. Oh, crates are $34 full size. They are $24 half size. They come in all of these different colors. They have the options to add lids.
SPEAKER_00
But this is basically saying, if you are looking at storage in your house or in your office or for your work, and you want to have a bunch of options, you want to have it look good. This looks good. This is like tactical man adjacent. Solves this work built for professionals, right? Cool. Hey, I want to carry around all my camera gear. Look at how I can divide it. Look how I can put it together. This video is worth like a thousand words, right? At a cheap price, supports this weight, have all these options. This is an example of they took an existing market, crates storage. They applied an aesthetic to it. They said, hey,
SPEAKER_00
we're going to go towards the more like the tactical guy aesthetic, the Yeti aesthetic. We're going to have function behind it, right? You're going to be able to divide things easily. They're going to look good. They're customizable. They're stackable. They're collapsible. This is a thing that a lot of people use for a lot of different reasons, and they created a brand around it. And this is where you can begin to look adjacent and say, hey, is it actually just, it makes sense. Should there be a way more female leaning version of this where we go really far in on specific colorways or functions or a
SPEAKER_00
sleeker look? Do you want to have a brutalist version of this? You can begin to look at categories and find your own aesthetic. And these kinds of things are makeable, just like you can find a manufacturer for activewear. You can find a manufacturer for products like this. Like this is joinplastic.com. This is a company in China that makes crates of all kinds wholesale for customers with your designs, right? And you can go hunt this down on Google and Alibaba and import Yeti, same way you can anything else. You don't have to limit yourself to something super straightforward that everyone else does. I'd much
SPEAKER_00
rather see creators and entrepreneurs tackle the problems like Cidio has versus tackle the same exact thing. But let's look at a smaller example. So this is my friend Flock Manufacturing, who has a product that is a car gauge. So basically he is saying that if you really care about your car, your car gauge's speed is wrong. Companies intentionally have it wrong as like a consumer protection. And so he has built a product that has level of function, but then built a lifestyle in and around it, right? He's doing videos like, what's your name? What's your car with other people that are
SPEAKER_00
drifting? And he's selling a thing that's really specific to a niche, but setting it up to be like, hey, here's this one functional thing. Here's this lifestyle that's built around it that I'm now synonymous with so that this list and his following will be able to attach to any other functional product that he made inside this world. That's why I encourage people to look at anything that people consume already in bulk and be like, what are the functions that we can add to that? And a controversial example I like to bring up is the Ridge wallet, right? Ridge sells nine figures of these wallets.
SPEAKER_00
I look at this wallet and it's extremely corny to me as a consumer. The aesthetics of Ridge are like repulsive, but from a marketing perspective, I couldn't have more respect for it because they have said, hey, we realize the traditional wallet aesthetic is bad. We can advertise this improved function by what we put together here, and we can hit a market with massive TAM, which is guys without taste. We can always have stuff on sale and we can promote to them this like easier, simpler lifestyle that makes them feel good. Even little things like RFID blocking, things that like aren't actually real
SPEAKER_00
consumer problems. But if you begin to put inside of your marketing and begin to add on to that story, to that function, helps differentiate the product that's out there. And you look at any one of those categories. You can look at socks and be like, how do I make a hotter version? And you can look at activewear. Activewear is one of the most saturated categories in the world. But right now with what's going on with Make America Healthy Again and the based movement, you can have brands that literally just say, we are not made of polyester. You're not putting much of plastic on your body the same way Ridge is
SPEAKER_00
saying, hey, wouldn't you want like a metal modern wallet instead of like a big old leather wallet? Like this brand, Mate here, their whole proposition, they make very similar clothes, look and feel. This could be any activewear brand in the world, but it's 92% cotton, 8% spandex versus like 100% polyester. So they are positioning entirely based on materials. Detox your closet, like organic essentials. And that is basically just looking at any core category and then finding a position that appeals to people. And you can manufacture a lot of that position. But noting cultural insights around it is a really important way to look at it. And the cultural
SPEAKER_00
insight that people care a lot more about, they're wrapping their body in plastic to work out is a good one. Another one I want to call out here is my friend Brandon, who has Blank Studios. So he makes desk accessories primarily, right? He has hangers and a few other things, but he makes things for an aesthetic desk. He's basically said brutalist aesthetic. Now, if he was selling brutalist clothing, that would be one thing. But since you're selling something where your only options out there, there aren't other brutalist desk accessory brands, like maybe there's a handful, but he is
SPEAKER_00
marketing it on Instagram with great content and being like, Hey, this is a functional thing. This is a holder for things. This is a lamp. This is stuff that makes a difference in your life. It's not just purely a piece of clothing or a lifestyle item helps you organize. And I'm applying my unique aesthetic to it and building an entire world around that aesthetic. And that combination of, Hey, this is actually something that I will use on my desk, or I will use in my life versus just another thing I will wear is just entering you into such a better scenario to be able to sell and how I would
SPEAKER_00
encourage anyone who wants to break into these brands or into these worlds to think. And I'll end this with a bit of an exercise to think through in your head is anytime you're creating something, whether that's a hoodie, a coaster, beverage is about creating a blank for X. If your brand does not have a strong for, so you say shirts for, I mean, it doesn't get really specific from there. It's in trouble. So if your shirts for Hispanic guys under five, five, that is a niche. That is okay. I'm tapping into a lifestyle and a background and a culture, and I'm tapping into a specific pain
SPEAKER_00
point of I want shirts that are going to fit guys who are of shorter height. So let's throw an example out there. The perfect active wear for health conscious Pilates moms, right? Right? We're saying, Hey, like the ones who care about the anti polyester zoning into that one person. But if you're saying that why, if you're just, if you're saying, Oh, this is just street wear, you're missing that one level deeper that separates a lot of these brands out. And it can be pretty simple. One of the ones that is a favorite of mine is Iconoclub to call out where they're making very similar streetwear to
SPEAKER_00
tons of other brands. They do a good job, but they've put themselves synonymous with a particular type of like Bay area car culture and adjacent car cultures where they are making, Hey, I'm making this thing for this extremely specific audience. And they are owning that and making great content around it. And you can always branch out from a certain place, but that's a lot different than making it just for car enthusiasts, right? It's niche down to one really specific area. If you take anything away from this video is that whatever you want to create, get down to that one level deeper of who it is and attack it
SPEAKER_00
as hard as you can. So my thanks to particle for sponsoring this video and their information is down in the description. If you want to do any competitive research in the space or use any of those trend analysis tools, they are a great place to start. And as always, I appreciate y'all watching.