oren meets world: create cool products people buy - product design, brand launch, marketing

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. And we're gonna do this by talking through a number of actual brand examples. We're gonna break down the two main tactics, aesthetic differentiation and functional differentiation, and why one is way harder than the other right now. We're gonna 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 wanna launch, or you work at a brand and just really wanna understand why this all works, this is the video for you. Let's lock in. So first, we're gonna talk about aesthetic differentiation, making things that look better. This is what most people who do apparel brands, launch products, feel like they're gonna make something that looks cool that they can sell. But aesthetic differentiation is at the hardest place it's ever been. So 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 bucks. 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 Gantt, strictly to women's wear. You wanna 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 idea? 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 mid-sized brands is amazing. What this also means is that copying is at its peak. As many of you have watched my videos know, I've worked on, I've 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 in bridal in something like that with Forever 21. We're just taking one of our designs. It is one of maybe a dozen of those things that 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've 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 this 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, everyone says they want to start a fashion brand. I'm like, hey, you should actually niche. Look at active wear. 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 people's lives? And so I want to call out my friends at Bandit. 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 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. To create a 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 are you just raw-dogging the shoes inside of a duffel bag? Let me solve this problem for you for an affordable price with a product that has 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 or 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 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 gonna talk a bit through how you actually find data and dive into this category and think about what you actually might wanna make. And I'm gonna 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 use to launch some of the car accessories I launched specifically by going through a process like this. Particle has agreed to partner on this video so you can check them out at the description below if you are doing research or you wanna 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 winter time spike. If you look on a one year horizon and you see a big spike and realize that's 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 flat line. 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 gonna click through and say, okay, what exactly is happening here? What happens is it's actually gonna 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 gonna show me a bunch of the brands, their average price points, who's selling it, 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 Citio crates. Now, Citio crates is an amazing example of a standout product. It ties together everything that we are talking about here. So these are Citio crates. They're $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 wanna have a bunch of options, you wanna have it look good, this looks good, this is like tactical man-adjacent. Solves this work, built for professionals, right? Cool, hey, I wanna 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 1,000 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 gonna go towards the more, like the tactical guy aesthetic, the Yeti aesthetic. We're gonna have function behind it, right? You're gonna be able to divide things easily. They're gonna 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, does it make sense? Should there be a way more female leaning version of this? Where we go really far in on specific color ways or functions or a sleeker look. Do you wanna have a brutalist version of this? You can begin to look at categories and find your own aesthetic. And these kind of things are makeable, just like you can find a manufacturer for active wear, 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 hump 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 rather see creators and entrepreneurs tackle the problems like Citio has versus tackle the same exact thing. Let's look at a smaller example. 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 a 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 is 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. 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 consumer problems. But if you begin to put inside of your marketing, 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 active wear. Active wear 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 a bunch of plastic on your body. The same way Ridge is 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 active wear 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 closets, 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. And the cultural insight that people care a lot more about their 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 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 it. 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. Because anytime you're creating something, whether that's a hoodie, a coaster, beverage, is about creating a blank 4X. If your brand does not have a strong 4, so you say shirts for, I mean, if it doesn't get really specific from there, it's in trouble. So if your shirts for Hispanic guys under 5'5", that is a niche. That is, okay, I'm tapping into a lifestyle or the background and a culture and I'm tapping into a specific pain point of I want shirts that are gonna 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? We're saying, hey, like ones who care about the anti-polyester. Zoning into that one person. But if you're saying that, why? If you're just 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 Iconic Club to call out, where they're making very similar street wear to tons of other brands. They do a good job, but they have 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 they're 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 niched 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 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.