How to Design Packaging for Ecommerce Brands: Operators Build (E4)

Welcome back to Operators Build, episode 4. Today we're talking packaging. We are taking you behind the scenes as we discuss all things product packaging and design. What makes for great packaging? What does your packaging need to say about your brand before anyone reads a bloody word on it? We are talking brand identity. Yes, the word brand. What's the difference between how a package looks and how it actually needs to function in the real world? From design concept to structural design, what are you even choosing between? What are we choosing between? Is it pouch? Is it box? Is it stick pack? Is it something else? There are so many types of packaging, and you're gonna listen to us real time talk about how we design the Winx packaging. And in this episode, we are gonna be joined by Chris Ganz, who's the guy that was blessed and maybe cursed to help us with all of our packaging needs. You'll hear that in both segments of this episode. Let's get into it.

Alright, so we're doing it. We are launching a sleep brand, and one of the big things that we've got to get done to get this thing to market— we're recording right now, it is beginning of July— and what we learned with Trevi was if you're working on it in July and you're moving towards a PO, you can probably get it out the door November or December. That's our goal. We want to be launching this in Q4, so we're at a pretty critical path. piece in packaging. We're getting close on formula. Would you say we're close on formula, Curtis?

Yeah, we are. So, we've obviously have the formula dialed in. Now, it's just about taste and, yeah, flavor. And so, once we firm that up, then we're ready to go.

So, we got the good stuff inside that makes you sleep. We need to make sure we make it taste the way we want. We're close there. We're iterating as we're taping this. But, we need to start deciding on packaging so that once we do get flavor dialed in, we'll be ready to go. And one of the things that we did learn with Trevi is that the packaging piece can be sometimes the, the most time-consuming piece. It can be a lot quicker to get the formula pieces and ingredients than it can be to get the packaging. So that's what we're gonna do today. And as we were discussing, like, hey, how do we wanna handle this packaging? Uh, there were several comments that, uh, between Simple Modern and Trevi, we had some really great packaging and, uh, brought in a person from our team, Chris Ganz, who is with us today on the pod. And Chris has handled a lot of packaging things for Simple Modern. We went through a, a rebrand, uh, recently and he headed up a lot of those efforts. Uh, but then he's actually moved full-time onto the Trevi team. And Chris, why don't we start by just give us a little bit of your background. How'd you get into packaging? What all have you done over the years?

Yeah, so my name's Chris. Uh, like Mike said, I work now on the full-time on Trevi, but was with Simple Modern before that as one of the creative directors there. So my background has always been more on the design side, but really what drew me to design was brand and the kind of the mythical sort of, you know, ethereal thing that we call brand and just kind of trying to help develop, consider with consideration how to develop that sort of gut feeling that people have to to want to buy your stuff. And so design was where I kind of naturally fell into and working with, you know, a myriad of D2C brands, some Shark Tank brands of developing their visual identity, but then really kind of started to carve out a specialty in packaging and moved to work for PepsiCo on the Frito-Lay team for about a year developing packaging for a subset of their brands, kind of managing them, working for collaborations, doing brand activations, full visual redesigns as well. And when I came to Simple Modern, it kind of came timely where we were doing a brand refresh there, led up the logo redesign, visual identity process along with the packaging. And kind of in the middle of almost where we were starting to really get to the point with cranking all of that out, it was like, hey, we're also gonna start this new brand called Trevi. So Chris, would you like to handle that as well? And You know, always love a challenge. So worked on that as well. And that kinda leads to now.

Awesome. So thanks, Chris, for that. It's great to have you with us. So one of the things that happened a few weeks ago, I went to Chris and I gave him some very broad strokes. We wanna do a brand around a powder around sleep and helping you to get better sleep. And would you come up with a few different concepts for us? And that's what we're gonna look at today. Chris is gonna present the different concepts he has. I think there's even some additional stuff I haven't seen because what I've learned about Chris, I— how many hours How many hours did I tell you to spend on this, Chris?

Uh, you told me to not spend too much time, but—

Yeah, I was like, take a, take a stab at it. Don't spend too much time. And then when he actually presented, uh, the deliverable, I said, there's no way you did this in that amount of time. And he said, you're right. And even since then, he's put more work in. So Chris is one of those guys that like just gets obsessed with doing the best job he can. So I'm really excited to look at all this stuff. So Chris, maybe give us a, a, an overview of your process as you approach this project before we jump into the designs?

Yeah, so definitely the first thing before you ever like touch a pencil, I think with good design, whether that be identity design, with product design, with packaging design, is really to dive into research and take a like good audit of what just the competitive landscape looks like. Thinking about that and then From there, taking that to start sketching, concepting, thinking about what the potential visuals would make sense with a name like Winx. You know, what would be visuals that would make sense with that kind of brand? With that sort of name, there comes a certain maybe expectation of personality. So playing around with that, thinking about how copy can intertwine with the visuals themselves. So while you may think of design and packaging design as very visual, the words are almost as big of a part of the and design as the visuals and the graphics themselves. So wanted to take all of that into consideration and really create a holistic sort of 360 idea of what the brand could be, because that's gonna make the packaging feel the most authentic and the most, I think the most successful on shelf is whenever you're having that consistent touchpoint from packaging to Amazon storefront, to D2C website, to social media, the full nine.

So do you, when you're going through the creative process, how do you begin to put this stuff into concrete, tangible world? Is it you start to play with some AI stuff to generate some concepts to take as a base? Do you just start sketching with paper and pencil? Do you hop in Adobe? What is it that you do to start the process of actually translating what's in your head to a concept?

So there's a few different sort of ways that I'll go about it. There might be times where I am sketching it if it's a bit more of a, you know, sometimes you just strike when the iron's hot and so you want to get an idea down. So, you know, having a notepad handy is always good, but sketching out maybe certain ideas of what does it look like if we maybe, you know, make a bit of like a winking face, like what are different ways we can sketch that? If there's things that are more maybe geometric and tactical like that, I'll probably go ahead and hop into Adobe. And then I've definitely used AI for generating Certain things. Even if I make the maybe mockup in AI, I'm still gonna have to go into Photoshop and really polish it up to make it look more professional.

Yeah. And do you, do you actually write out a Word doc with first, or do you start with design and then add words on top of that? Do you start with words and then move to visual?

I'll essentially kind of create more of like a word, uh, word cloud essentially to, on the note of, uh, Winks of just thinking about what are these kind of visual things and these things that I think of whenever I think of Winx, whether it be, uh, or Sleep Aid, which is like emotional. What does sleep mean to me in that way? Or what is like a visual that I think of with clouds or with the moon? And maybe try to like tie those things in, uh, that you may not expect in a certain way that'll help make it feel more differentiated.

Why don't, why don't you share your screen, Chris? And, uh, let's start by just going through the different designs. Maybe walk us through them the way that you walked me through them. And then we can spend some time discussing them. Or actually, let's do this. As you're presenting through them, let's talk about Curtis, Matt. I'd love to hear your, your kind of thoughts on, on each one as we go through it. And then at the end, we can kind of compare and contrast.

Yeah, that sounds good.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited to take a look at some of the stuff you've come up with. So, uh, you want to kick us off and show us how many concepts do you have?

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Yeah, so we have 5 concepts. Uh, I'll go ahead and share my screen. Well, yeah, we're gonna look at 5 different directions, but the first thing we'll do is just look a little bit at an audit, like I said, of the different players in the space that mainly caught my eye and just some observations about what they were doing. And then from there, we'll look at a few of the different mood boards developed of just the different territories that felt like they were starting to become potential pillars to take from for these different directions. So we'll do audit, mood boards and design territories, and then we'll do the actual design directions themselves. So we're gonna look at the competitive landscape and just dive into a few of those particular case studies as well. So this is something that I learned whenever I was at PepsiCo of how to sort of identify this different spectrum of brands in an industry. And so there's kind of this more commodity side of maybe what you might think of as just like the cheapest option, or, you know, maybe it's the, the Great Value option at Walmart or something like that. These are more, you know, affordability is their main thing and they're able to get the job done, but there's no real brand tied to them. But there's still always some things to take into consideration. And, you know, depending on the way that some people want to take their, their brands, they may be looking for something more commodity. There's obviously the dominant retail players. Those are, you know, typically owned by PepsiCo or owned by something like a big Unilever. You see that with Ollie here is a particular one that makes sense for being in the dominant retail space. They're, they're in the Target, they're in the Walmart, they're in all the different mass retail stores. And then Vicks ZzzQuil is another one that is a sleep-specific consumable, so not NyQuil, but they're in all the mass retail stores, they're in all the pharmacies. They're definitely a dominant player. And then there's the emergent D2C side of things. So there's some more up-and-coming brands here that are, you know, maybe making a loud splash in the D2C world on the e-commerce side of things. So there's Beam, they are a sleep consumable that's more around like flavors and different things like that. There's Som Sleep, which is a little bit more clinical in how they go. They were originally a ready-to-drink option that's moved into more of the stick pack and mixing side of things. And then there's Proper and Sonnet. So those are 2 other consumables that are just kind of more bigger players that are coming up in the Emerging like D to C side of things. So I want to kind of get into a few of these specific ones, and you guys have probably done research on this as well. Would bet on it. But Ollie, you know, is owned by Unilever. They're definitely more of the gummy side of things, but they have really transformed the vitamin category into this more colorful, playful, enjoyable experience for adults. They use bold one-word benefit names such as sleep. for what the function of that gummy is. They have a really playful, upbeat tone throughout their packaging, and they solved like visible— visibility challenges through structural and graphic design. So they've got a really nice blocking here of having Olly on the top and this sort of solid white. So I think when you see this sort of cube shape with this white cap in certain aisles, you're gonna think Olly whenever you're looking for those, that kind of gummy or that consumable. I think a takeaway here is—

As a side note on that, Chris, man, Ollie, I think, was the brand that opened my eyes to how much packaging makes a difference. I don't know why, but I just, I remember the very first time I saw it in retail and being like, wow, that's really cool looking. And then I got to know actually the guy at Unilever that headed up their sales at Target and then later Walmart. And they have absolutely crushed it since being acquired by Unilever. But I think you're right. I think this is a good example of like, there's so much stuff on the vitamin aisle and they have just shown how packaging can be so much of a differentiator.

Definitely. I think that they really bring those colors and those different patterns that they have a pretty wide, you know, opportunity in terms of how they can bring in those different patterns for different functions. They've done a good job of still keeping that structure at the same time. To communicate things really clearly. So some sleep was another one that I referenced in terms of the more emergent D2C side of things. So they originally, like I said, a ready-to-drink solution. They've entered the stick pack drink mix space. They have a really clean look, I would say, and they're definitely more maybe clinical in terms of how they talk. So you look at this example of kind of showing these statistics of like how they are like kind of helping you solve their problem of sleep. So they. really talk more about the formula, talk about the, you know, clinical traits that help make this something that you would want to buy. Um, they're maybe not being as playful, you know, they might here and there, but they're not being as playful maybe as someone like OLLY is with their, with their communications and even with their packaging. I mean, you look at what OLLY is doing versus what, um, SOM is doing, it's a very different, um, function that they're, they're performing. In terms of like competitors, I thought Beam was a really, really, really one to keep an eye on in terms of what they're doing. They've created this more vibrant, lifestyle-driven brand that is bringing in these different flavors to make it more like a nighttime routine that make it feel like you're not necessarily just taking something to sleep, but you're, like I said, having part of your nighttime ritual be this experience. And I think it's pretty interesting how they do dream as a callout for their, for their sort of sleep aid rather than it saying just like sleep supplement, things like that. I thought that was an interesting takeaway. So they're selling a lifestyle, not just a product. Build rituals, use color systems. These are some of the takeaways for Winks on this one. Okay, so from all of that landscape and competitive audit and whatnot, developed 3 different design territories. So the first one is called Refined Relief. It's all about minimalism with a purpose, clean lines, structured layout, medical meets lifestyle aesthetic. I think something to just sort of call out here is that there's just clean, utilitarian kind of approach to the information so that you're seeing, okay, this is the name, this is what it's performing. This is like the function that this performs for me. And you're just kind of quickly able to read through everything that's on the packaging. So this is just one of the territories that was explored. There's trust. Trust is something that is emphasized here. You use white space, you create some quiet confidence using simplicity. Pops of color can be really strong whenever you have this kind of structure to it, because then you're able to really see the name such as Being or the name such as Seepaboo, things like that. are really able to kind of come across whenever you have this more refined relief kind of take. The next one is called Systematic Sleeping. So this is just emphasizing geometric shapes to kind of communicate different functions. So something that I really thought was interesting was this sort of golly packaging as inspo, this dahlia using these different shapes of like the lightning bolt or the moon cloud or You know, the smiley face, the bolts, just these different shapes can communicate different functions. And then you're able to bring personality in through color, through, you know, unique logo design, through unique shapes, but really being systematic with how you structure it. Think expressive systems built for shelf impact, essentially. And then lastly, this is my personal favorite, is just joyful functionality. So Pairing playful visual elements with clear product communication, bold primary inspired colors, expressive iconography. Think eyes, mascots, illustrations. So I think this is just an idea of being cheerful, honest, and distinctly memorable. That's the idea here. So from these 3 design territories, I pulled different parts of them for these different design options that you're about to see. You're going to see elements of joyful functionality paired with systematic simplicity and things like that. Really seeing that these were kind of common trends, not just amongst some of these sleep consumable brands, but also just amongst packaging in general right now. And how can we maybe create a unique combination of them to make distinct packaging for Winks was the idea.

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So with option 1, the territories incorporated were refined relief and joyful functionality. So this direction plays off the original wink face. And, you know, you can see here just the actual winking text maybe is kind of the semicolon plus the parentheses. Face and is bold in color palette. So it utilizes a simple graphic treatment utilizing big bold type to bring personality. The copywriting will be an important element to this brand direction. So if there's 3 words I would use to describe it as clean, bold, and fun. So this is the logo mark. You can see very clearly it's just a simplistic sans-serif usage of the word Winx, but rather than having it expected I, you're using the semicolon to bring in the winking face into the wordmark itself. How that looks on the logo as a system and how you can create different elements from that. You can have the Winks wordmark there, and you can have the semicolon inverted to create a winking face incorporated into a cloud. This is one where you can really dial up and down the amount of playfulness that you want to bring to the brand. And that comes through, I think, from things even with packaging. So when you see the packaging here, like I said, really big, bold colors. Blue and purple were clearly the 2 colors that came across the most in terms of the sleep consumables. And this is utilizing that blue. I think that will help it stand out against Beam and against Ollie in particular, and allows you to really put the name up front and be really bold with it. Um, you're able to kind of have a simple structure where you're calling out the different benefits. That was something that I noticed on the competitive audit as well, was just seeing the different, um, ingredients was something I think that people will, will really gravitate towards. Um, and then having a big call out of what the function of the product is itself. Um, I included original here because I do think you could have a future state where you're having a bunch of different flavors and you can maybe turn this into a different colorways for the different flavors. So if you're doing maybe more of a, let's say more of a, you know, strawberry flavor or something like that, you could have a pink and red color palette incorporated here. But I think by having this sort of geometry in place and this, you know, structure in place, you could do a nice billboarding of the different colorways across different flavors.

So pause there for a second, Curtis. What's our thinking right now? In terms of number of flavors, is the idea to kind of come up with one kind of hallmark flavor or to have a—

Yeah, I think we were gonna launch with one, just one hallmark flavor and then expand on that if necessary. But, you know, it's, yeah, I mean, as we all know, it's unique and you gotta find something super neutral and familiar and people that wanna have repeat the same thing every single night. If this is a daily supplement, you don't wanna get tired of a, you know, One flavor, so.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, makes sense. So, all right, keep going, Chris. So, what else would you like to share about this design before we talk about it?

Yeah, well, I think that just kind of wanted to show how this design can kind of come across in sort of different areas of the brand as well. So, thinking about how that packaging, you know, you're utilizing this color palette, you're utilizing this element of sort of the winking face, and we have this sort of like. Dashed tear mark here that you can use and bring in the wink face as well. Just what that looks like to bring it into things like website. So you're able to kind of bring in some of these visual cues as well on the website and on something like, you know, something that's never, you're never actually going to see the light of day, but just really allows the brand as a whole to really be shown on something like a billboard.

Yeah. So Matt, Curtis, I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts on this design. I mean, the, the one observation I'll make is that when we started talking about the name, which I think the name is great, Curtis was— the name you're writing—

Yeah, there's an old saying, uh, get 40 winks. And so it's like back in the 1800s, 40 winks was get, you know, optimize your sleep with, uh, you know, some sort of nap. And, and then it went from 40 winks into, into the concept of the just shortening like one-syllable word, Winx. And, uh, and that's how we came up with it.

It's such a great— I, I, I guess just as an aside here, it's such a great name. And, uh, honestly, one of the reasons I got excited when Matt first brought this concept up, uh, to, to me was just, I love the name and I think name matters a ton. And it, one of the things that we found, it's, it's interesting with Simple Modern when we started it. Um, in a lot of ways, we just took 2 words that have positive connotations and we threw them together, but it served us pretty well. Um, that simple modern— I guess modern has a little bit to do with drinkware, but here you've got a word that ties in perfectly with sleep, but it has a really positive connotation. Like when I think about Wink, I just think that's a positive word. And so one of the very first things that popped into my head, I don't know if I even shared this with with you, Chris. I don't think I did, but it's just like, man, we got to incorporate, you know, the winking emoji or the winking, uh, kind of, uh, semicolon. Is that right? Semicolon?

Yeah.

Uh, in, in this somehow. And so I really— it's very distinctive. I can't think of an example of somebody including a semicolon in a logo this way that's so like obviously on brand. Have you— did you see this anywhere else, Chris?

I didn't see it anywhere else, uh, from what I was looking at. That's not to say that there's not someone out there that's, that's utilizing it, but none of the, none of the major players were, were utilizing it.

I just, I love how creative it is. Like you think about, like you actually just said it, it's a winking eye. Like it's actually a winking eye, like in the, um, yeah. So super creative for sure.

Matt, what do you think?

Yeah, I think quality of the name. And that the fact that it's single syllable and then this is like as a wordmark, this is probably my favorite wordmark of all the concepts that I saw. I just love that it's easy to text as well. So like the logo holds whether you're texting it, it's an email, it's in visual because it is literally a keyboard character.

That is a great point.

I think, I think to add to what you're saying too, Matt, is there was something about when the Airbnb went through their kind of initial redesign, you know, way back in, I think it was maybe like 2012 or something like that. The desire for the logo to be so easy that anyone can draw it, and that's usually a really positive thing for your brand is whenever you're able to, you know, anyone can text it out, anyone can draw a semicolon. That's just usually a sign that you're onto a really strong mark.

Okay, this is awesome.

All right, number 2. The next option. Yeah, so for option 2, to go back to the territories, we incorporated systematic sleeping and refined relief. We're utilizing soft curves and classic iconic design. Use of green makes the brand feel like you can get a great night of sleep and feel healthy while doing it. So the 3 words I'd use to describe this is simple, earthy, and iconic. This is the wordmark. So using more of a soft serif typeface, lowercase, making it maybe feel a little bit more approachable while using that serif to make it feel a little bit more classic and traditional, kind of makes it feel like a familiar old friend. And having that crescent moon used for the dot of the I allows for it to be quickly tied into the idea of what you're doing, of sleeping. with the name Winx. In terms of the logo marks, utilizing this nice green just helps, like I said, make it feel a little bit more healthy. And then you can kind of see what happens whenever you can strip it down to just a simple, you know, for the first one we had just the semicolon would be kind of the single icon favicon that you'd use for this. For this one, the monogram would be the W and you can tuck in this crescent moon nicely underneath the overhang of the W. It really makes it a really nice clean mark for this brand. This was something, so for the packaging, we've added in some clouds to kind of maybe make it feel a little bit more moody, give a little bit more of a premium feel, and then still calling out the different elements that are in there. But this is the callout of designed for better rest. So really this one is just bringing in a little bit more of a premium look. While having some elements that make it feel approachable and friendly at the same time. And I think that this color would really allow for it to be standing out in the shelf because it's on the digital shelf as well, because there's no other brand that's utilizing that green color. So this would really be an ownable color for you guys. And this is what it could maybe look like on something like a website. So again, using a little bit more premium photography, bringing in some nice sort of cloud imagery in the background. Really making, you know, makes me wanna fall asleep personally. And then what this could maybe look like in terms of a whole system. So those clouds become really an iconic element for this direction for Winx. And then just some nice moody green allows for it to be used as like a more of a premium distinguished element. So let's talk about this one. What do you guys think?

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A broader question, Chris, is, um, can you, like, when it comes to, like, when we look at all these concepts, the elements of certain things, like if we like the wordmark from one, the clouds from another, like what is your view on, 'cause you've, you've approached this like they each have a different angle or vector that you're coming at it from. 'Cause there's elements of each that I'm sort of like attracted to. And obviously you don't wanna create like a Frankenstein that where shit just doesn't work well together.

Right.

I actually think we should avoid it, guys, just because we know that Athletic Greens is coming into the space and that's kind of like their—

Yeah, no, they definitely own that.

That dark green package is like AG1.

Yeah.

And the AGZ product is probably going to do the same damn thing. Yeah, that's the— my thoughts on green is like we want to be— if they're going to be the demand generator and they're going to spend the mega bucks on ads, Like, right, differentiation from them is probably gonna be important, like just positioning-wise.

For sure, for sure. And there's definitely things like that whenever there's new competitors coming in where you're gonna wanna be cognizant of not wanting to look like a me-too brand where you're looking like you're trying to kind of like scrape the bottom of what they're doing.

Yeah, from my perspective on this specific one, probably my least favorite, and the only reason why is just based on You know, the green comment that Matt made, I think, you know, you have someone like AG1 coming into this space. I think also there's not really a, it's not a relatable color to sleep. Like, I don't think of sleep and green being at the top of the list. And of course, black, dark blue, blue is something that people tend to go to. But I think you have something in some other designs that, you know, some variations of color that actually do really relate, which we can talk about later.

Yeah.

Um, I think it's also where we're at with the font and the premium but approachable side of this to me is almost a little bit like Beam, which is a competitor. Um, you know, Beam, like you look at the font style, I think it's similar. I think you have a premium. Yes. You've made it a little bit more approachable with the, the clouds, but you know, it's not just like really clean looking, but I think the font style's closer to a Beam and I think You know, the one callout I would say is I love the visibility on the ingredients. I think that's gonna be important. You look at like the success of like RXBAR or, you know, some other ones where it's, you know, very, it communicates the, and builds trust with the visibility of like the clean ingredients or, you know, the natural ingredients in the product. I think that's gonna be important, but It is semi-premium. I think what we've seen in this space is like, it's either premium, like you have like the AG1s, the IM8s, the, you know, or just like one color palette, no imagery, no clouds as an example.

Yeah.

Premium packaging, or you have what's trending right now, which is the grunds of the world where it's, you know, that approachable friendly type.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know.

No, I think that's really well said. There's definitely, you kind of wanna be one or the other and when you're trying to kind of split the, split the difference, you end up being nothing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. As they say that the best art divides, right? So it's like, you know, you wanna stand out, you don't wanna get stuck in the middle.

For sure. Okay, we'll move on to option 3. So this is kind of a, this was originally an iteration of option 2 in terms of the Systematic Sleeping, Refined Relief. This one is a little bit more geometric-based and using a sans-serif, being a little bit more clean, has a bit of a retro-modern feel to it, making the packaging like instantly memorable and recognizable in the category. So this is the wordmark. Like you can, you can see how this is a clear sort of play off of the second option, and it's got a different execution in terms of things like color, in terms of its geometry. It's a lot more geometric, clearly just working off of like rectilinear, you know, hard angles as well as curvilinear, the sort of those circular motions that you see in the W, the N, and the S. And then you're able to kind of create a system of icons based on that sort of crescent mark, and you'll see sort of this particular mark come through in the packaging. So And this one, it's almost an inverse in some ways of the first direction where rather than having the name super loud, you're having this icon that calls out the function be this sort of predominant figure that's sort of centerpiece for your packaging. What I like about this is if I were to stare at this from far away and I see that dot, you know, you could interchange the colors if you have a similar execution. I think you're gonna start to recognize that. as, uh, Wink's packaging. And so, you know, just for example, if like you zoom it away, that, that dot stays really strong, um, even from further away.

Mm-hmm.

And so there's something about like that ink density that really allows for that to, to hold up at scale, um, and from afar, and whether it be like small on your phone as well. And so just using a sort of a different approach to have the features and the ingredients on the 2 sides of that big icon. Clearly that's kind of anchoring all these other elements together. Still have the flowing sort of graphic that you had in the second option. But outside of that, you're really starting to bring in some different elements to execute. In terms of how it looks on something like a website, this is the copy for this is just a little bit more clinical, maybe a little bit more of that proper Sonnet direction of just being designed for better sleep. Um, from the very first sip. And then again, like you're really leaning into that circular shape to be an anchoring point for what you see across the marketplace as like a piece for Winks. And so just seeing what it would look like, uh, in something like a billboard as well.

I really like this logo as well. Um, the, I, I love the moon. instead of the, the dot on the I. And, um, I, I think the, like you said, Chris, the, the circular thing is very distinctive. It was, it's actually interesting. I was looking at it. It's like it almost starts to look like an eye that's, that's about to wink.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, uh, anyway, or an eye that's about to shut, you know? Um, so I, I think it's It's definitely interesting. Curtis, Matt, what'd you guys think when you looked at this one?

I am a fan of the larger dot, uh, but if I had to weigh it against the, like, the—

yeah, the wink and the wink, I'd keep—

I'd still keep the wink because it's just, to me, knowing that we're going to be digital first Like, that to me is the more recognizable— like, if I look out like 5 years, 10 years, yeah, you know, it's like the Amazon A to Z thing, Mike. The, the, the smile that goes from everything from A to Z, that's just so iconic. And I think owning the, the semicolon—

the—

my ego wants to own the semicolon.

Yeah, well, I think you're right.

It's not common where your name can be a portable story, like in and of itself.

Right.

So like when somebody talks about a product, like AG1 is less portable, you know, or like, uh, IM8, right, Curtis? Like, like the letters IM8. Like if you say to somebody, IM8, how are they gonna spell that out? Like, how do you even go to Google to say that? Whereas like Winks is an English word.

Yeah.

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I'm going to move on to option 4. So this, on the note of like being more playful, these last 2 really start to move more into that direction. And this is another iteration on the name Winks. Obviously, the type for the wordmark brings a lot of personality, and we introduce a winking face to the packaging that can be seen quickly to recognize the brand. This can be applied across various products and configurations with ease. So the 3 words for this are friendly, memorable, and bold. So this is the wordmark here. We had originally like a dark navy, brought in more of a purple to feel like it's matching more, like we kind of talked about with direction 2, how that green felt off. Wanted to explore this one being in more of a purple color palette. And then you can see with this brand, we'd bring in this sort of motion of being awake, drinking Winks, and then falling asleep. And you're utilizing a sort of a crescent moon as an element that can kind of be used for the wink, can be used to signify that you're asleep. This is the packaging for this direction. So really putting big and loud the winking face. And so just one of the first thoughts whenever was sketching was just the idea of like if the packaging itself was winking at you. And there's, you know, examples in the across design, across like the market of the smiling face. You know, you think of Amazon whenever you get a package and it's smiling. One that comes to mind is when Kraft Mac and Cheese did their redesign. One thing that they do is they have a smiling noodle and that that is The thought behind there is there's a psychology that if someone is smiling at you, you're inclined to smile back. It sort of creates this positive emotion. And so how could we potentially bring that forth in the packaging by bringing a winking, smiling face? You can start to see, you know, this direction could also be called like 1, 2, 3, because I think about these 3 different states of being awake, you know, the drinking winks state, and then the sleep state. And so better sleep, easy as 1, 2, 3. And this is how it starts to just potentially come alive as, as a brand. So let's talk about this one. What do you guys think? Any thoughts, feedback? Open to it all.

Love the color palette on this one. And the, and I mean, smiling face. Yes, the psychology there is great. So like, no question.

And again, something that can certainly be brought into like a different direct— like direction 1 or something like that, where you could certainly recreate this with the semicolon.

And the ingredient highlight at the bottom is really smart, um, to what Curtis was saying before, right around like transparency and trust. Because I, I ultimately, guys, like Mike, I think you weren't here last week, but we were talking about like who the customer is. And I really do think this is going to be like family-friendly sleep hygiene, like family-friendly health, sleep health.

Well, it's just expand your market so much when that—

Yeah.

You know, like, gosh, when you're a parent and your kid can't sleep right now, it's like you're just giving them Benadryl. Basically, you're just drugging them. I mean, I really— we've talked about this on the Simple Modern side where we've like done a great job with women 25 to 45, and we've done a great job with really young kids, but you can never hit the same highs as if you're making something that go— can apply to everybody, right?

That's just it. It's, it's— and I find a lot of supplement companies, and I've said this to Curtis before, they're designed by total freaks of nature, and that they are like hardcore health people. So the brand represents them, you know, like it's very much the biohacker, you know, everything in my life is optimized, I measure how many erections I get in my sleep, like it's that guy, right? Like that. And that's who they sell it to. And if you look at like all the influencers, it's all that guy. And I sort of think the opportunity with Winx is like, yeah, how about you just sell it to my wife? Because she'd be the best customer ever. And our 9-year-old does not like to sleep, you know.

Well, targeting, targeting moms is always the easiest way to make a brand successful because they, they spend more money than anybody else. And it's, it's not particularly close from the research that I've seen.

I was just going to say that When you can win over the moms and they're introducing it to the kids, there is also this thing where the kids start to adopt that as like a brand that they're familiar with for the rest of their lives. And so when I think about, you know, 22-year-old Chris can't sleep or, you know, is needing to like catch up on sleep or something like that 'cause he's not sleeping enough, he's probably gonna take something like a ZzzQuil because I grew up having NyQuil. Like I have a trust element built in because that's what my mom gave me, you know?

Yeah.

Like it still kind of sticks with a kid even whenever they're as an adult.

You know what I love about this packaging? Well, there's multiple things. Number one, I have an 11-year-old daughter and she is, I mean, she looks at branding all day long. She could walk into a Sephora at 11 and fricking know the trending brands. And she smiled the minute that she looked at this in the concepts that you had sent over early on. And I think it was different colors before, was it not, Chris?

Yeah.

Like it was like a blue and an aqua type color. But I like it. I think the winking face is front and center. And I think that, you know, the emotion that that brings, it's not hidden in a semicolon. Like that's the pro and the con of the semicolon. Like I think, you know, from a kid perspective, they get it right away. And my curiosity is if we're targeting moms, Number one, if it's marketed, if it's if it's so approachable that if people know it's kid-friendly, they know it's going to be good for you. Like they just do. Like if it's if if it's a kid-friendly product and it's 100% natural, organic, you name it, then are they more likely to take it too? You know, and and this one is you know the the imagery in the the front and center you know. winking emoji is just— it just appeals to kids. Like this, you know, it's really friendly and approachable. I also like, you know, I didn't pick up on the first, like the 1, 2, 3, how you went from, you know, smiling or awake all the way to sleeping. And, there's a concept that we're looking at is this isn't just about sleep, it's night routine.

Yeah.

So, like Easy as 1, 2, 3, there's some There's some level of 1, 2, 3 can be used in multiple different ways, whether it's like, you know, how we do almost instructional, like, okay, number 1, you know, uh, you know, timing, um, bedtime routine and taking winks. Like, it's, it's, there's things that we can incorporate in that 1, 2, 3 element of what do you do to, you know, prep your nighttime routine to sleep well. And, it's not just about the supplement itself. So, there's some things that we could maybe iterate or just go off of on that. And so, yeah, I mean, I like this one. It's a level of iteration on the first one, I think. And yeah, there's a lot of— yeah, a lot of goodness, I think.

Awesome.

Well, we take it to the full dial of playfulness, I would say. On option 5, I want to give a quick shout out to Charlie Warren on the Simple Modern side. Mike, he worked on this logo and some of this design as well. So just want to shout out Charlie. But the playfulness is on full tilt with this direction and lean towards the Gen Z demographic with its use of expressive typography and hand-drawn elements. A little cozy monster becomes the mascot for the Winx brand. And his watchful eye is here to ensure you get more winks of sleep. So organic, playful, and bold would be the 3 words used here. So for the wordmark itself, it's very expressive, utilizing an eye, a literal seeing eye as the icon. And then you can see the introduction of that monster. When Charlie first drew that monster, I then thought about later of, you know, it's kind of like if you think about you're not getting sleep, Um, there, you're not gonna be thinking about like the monsters that you maybe had as a, uh, that you were scared of as a kid. And like that the monsters in Monsters, Inc., you know, they miss you, that they want to, um, see you again. They want to, they want you to sleep again. And so thinking about that, maybe a friendly monster wanting, uh, wanting to help you come back to sleep, uh, was kind of a, a narrative that started to formulate. So bringing that in and to go back here, you know, just you can bring that eye and that winking face, uh, as an icon itself. You can strip down that, the dot of the I to be an icon. There's a few different tools you can use for this direction. And then for the packaging itself, really keeping it straightforward, letting that mascot be a big part of the brand for this direction, and then letting that wordmark still be pretty strong. You have a friendly serif type that is soft in its corners. You're kind of using it at different weights to call out different information that you need to have. Um, something that this one has that you'd wanna have, I think for any of them, is the callout of the amount that is in the packaging. Um, something that you said earlier, Matt, of how you wanna, you don't want people taking 2 of these or you don't want people getting addicted to these. That is something that is different from Trevi to this is that you're gonna have 30 nights worth of Winks. You're not gonna have just a 28-count of hydration sticks that you could use in, you know, half, half that time. Uh, so that is something to call out. And then just kind of showing what a website could look like. You could certainly do a lot of sort of playful things of drawing that, uh, winking face on top of, uh, people's eyes or on top of a, you know, a blindfold whenever they're sleeping. And just really allowing that eye to maybe like be following you as you're, you're scrolling through the page. And then using it on— oh, a bit of a mistake there, but using it on the billboard as well. Really, this kind of leans in, in my opinion, towards more of a Gen Z demographic in terms of how the execution of like the playful typography, the hand-drawn elements. This just feels something that's very inspired by Graza or Groons in particular.

Mm-hmm.

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The only downside to this, guys, is that this feels like a commitment to going after the family and the kid. Like, we sort of have to say, like, we're really high conviction that this is moms doing this, and that the performance, you know, biohacker—we're leaving that guy. Yeah. And we are saying adios out of the gate.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Which, by the way, I'm okay with. I, I like doing things with high conviction. Um, and I think, Mike, you've made the most important point, which is like any parent who's ever had a kid who doesn't sleep, uh, or any parent who's not getting sleep because they have kids is like such a potent, uh, example.

As a, as a father of a 2-year-old, there's a, yeah, you'll get desperate pretty fast. Can't fake desperation.

Yeah. Um, I, I love brands that have mascots, like that have a little character. Uh, we actually just had a bunch of consumer research done on Lomi, and this was one of the things that they called out that is interesting. Our customers refer to Lomi as a member of the family, and that we get images and posts on social where people put faces on the damn machine.

Yeah.

So like they'll actually add like eyeballs. to the machine and then they'll draw and put stickers on it. And one of the recommendations from this research shop was like, you should turn this into a character because they're there and they had a term for it. I don't know what the term is, Chris, but like sometimes brands that have a character, it creates like an emotional connection.

Mm-hmm.

There's, there's another psychology element to it. So I kind of like that there's this little fluffy soft looking, very friendly creature, little monster, I think is like a cool, is definitely cool. I actually wonder too, Chris, like if you can combine the wordmark with the monster on this one, like instead of that eye, could you actually do the semicolon with this? Um, and still be like very Gen Z, like texty, you know, everything's on my phone.

Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting idea and you could certainly bring that in. I think that's like one of those where I'm pretty interested in trying that and seeing how that could look. 'Cause I think that's an interesting idea. It's a good idea.

You know, this was my, you know, one of my top favorites too. And, you know, my kids, my 11-year-old daughter, she gravitated to the last one or this one. She giggled when she saw this, like actually giggled. And I don't know if, you know, how old your kids are. It sounds like Chris, yours is 2, but you know the Jellycats, like they're massive. Right? Like they're, they're the next Beanie Babies, right? Well, what happens if we gifted like a little, like, think about kids going to bed with this little fluff ball, this little monster. Mm-hmm. You know? Um, I mean, you know, it's, it's their, they're going to bed and, and they're sleeping with this and it's a friendly reminder every single night that you gotta take Winks. Um, you know, I don't know, like there's, you know, just like, you know, there's a lot of psychology there, Curtis, like with having a character.

Like I said, the only downside is that it's like this is very much built for parents.

Oh, 100%.

Parents can take it, the kids can take it, you know, there. And then there's like a whole— and if we're going in that direction, you know, Mike, then there's like the whole pricing and business model and how we model this out. It's like, is a 30-day supply a different price from a 60-day or a 90-day because there's 3 people in the home taking it? You know, the What I like here is like, even, 'cause like the ad creative in this is going to be hilarious. Right. Right. Like we have so much.

Yeah. There's a lot of serious area.

So much on this. Like, even if Mike, we go the angle of like the nightcap, like the new nightcap, it's like you could have fun in ads with this where like mom and dad pour themselves a drink and kid gets a drink too. And like how off, how, how patterned that's like Liquid Death, right? It's like, why is the kid having a nightcap? Like, you know, your, your 10-year-old's got a lowball with an ice cube in it and it's just Winx. That is like such a pattern disrupt in content. Um, I, I just think there's a ton to do with this concept.

Yeah. I mean, I just got back from Disney and I think, uh, like Monsters, Inc., when was that released? Uh, it was released in 2001. So if you were 24 or under, you, you kind of grew up, I mean, really, you probably, if you're 30 or under, you kind of grew up in a world where like, that's, that's a part of your, your frame. And it is interesting, like I was reading something, this is kind of tangential, but I was reading something about how like the Nolan Batman films have not really aged that well with Gen Z because their framing of superheroes is more kind of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And, and the, the Nolan stuff skews way darker. And so I, I think that it's, it's real that like pop culture-wise, this, this is gonna really resonate with someone that's sub-30, sub-35. Uh, and I, I, I wonder, I mean, I think going back to the audience conversation that we had, I think one question, if you try to go after everybody, the problem is you just have to go really generic.

Yeah.

If you instead say we're going to niche down into like this particular group or this kind of angle, it does get easier to tell a compelling story. And I don't know why, but the first thing that pops into my head when I see this is that this is like the anti-anxiety monster or something like that. That's not what you would call it, but like, that's the emotional idea.

Do you want to talk about a single chart business, Mike? One chart business. Just plot it. Go Google anxiety in children.

Well, that's that's why I said that straight up to the right. Think about think about what else codes with thirty to thirty-five year old and and under, and that's the generation that grew up with cell phones and the the information that we have about the things they struggle with, the way they see and experience the world. It's interesting. My wife and I were talking about. Uh, burnout yesterday, and it reminded me of a long piece that I read. Maybe it was on Twitter. Uh, it was, it was somebody talking about like, why is burnout becoming more common? And their, their thesis was that it's the always-on nature of things. Like, we live in a generation that basically doesn't know what a busy signal on a telephone sounded like. Like, I can say that. I mean, Chris, you know what a busy signal is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and I know as a concept, but it's like my kids probably don't even know what a busy signal is.

Yeah.

You know, and they wouldn't know what it is.

Yeah. Yeah.

So just this idea that like the way that technology has kind of invaded our lives and this kind of always-on nature has clearly disrupted our ability to sleep, our ability to relax, or it's upped our anxiety. And if this little fuzzy monster is your companion to help you to relax and tune out and zonk out. Like that, that's actually like a really compelling idea, I think. I don't think it would work with the older crowd, you know, and I don't think it works with like, like you said, like the Bryan Johnson crowd. But I don't think they're the majority of buyers. And, uh, I, so I like the idea. I think, I think it's really interesting and I do like the idea of, I don't find the logo on that one being, yeah, there you go.

It's one chart business. Yeah. Like, I just, I don't know how else to illustrate the, like what you just hit on, Mike, and why it's so important is, 'cause I do, I think that's the reason I liked the package. is it speaks to sleep and this like calming, like what is the reason that people struggle with sleep today? It is that like all people, it's grownups, it's kids, it's everything. But like look at the freaking Google trend for anxiety.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

That's a one-chart business, man.

It's a pretty easy concept. I mean, like what I kind of think of when I'm looking at that is it's almost like a, a stuffed animal, you know, like, and like, that's what you have stuffed animals on your bed for. It's to help you sleep.

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what I was saying with the Jellycats. Like, can you imagine if every little kid got one of those? I mean, you could do, you could do everything. You could do—

Subscribe and save gift. Yeah.

I mean, listen, that's, if, if we decided we wanted to really go after families, especially families with, uh, kids under 10, then And I will say this, the other thing that I like about that is that I think there are certain things where you're a lot less price elastic or a lot more price inelastic. I guess that's what I'm looking for. And it's like, if I had to say, how much are you willing to pay for your kid to sleep well? If you ask that to a parent whose kid is not sleeping well, the answer is an outrageously high number.

A lot.

I mean, it's like, I would dedicate a lot of money to this problem right now.

Right, right. When you're getting woke up in the middle of the night, your kids— anyway, so I, I do agree that—

Actually, Mike, you know the funny answer to that question is? If you asked me, well, I'd tell you I'm starting a company to solve the problem because I have a kid who has this problem.

You're really putting money behind it.

I'm committed.

But what I'm kind of hearing, like, as the you know, like early consensus, I guess, like you guys give me some feedback on if this is kind of a good summary, is that we— I, on the first concept, we just love the idea of the semicolon in the logo. And then on the last concept, we love the idea of this mascot kind of thing. And that if we could take those 2 things and put them together in a compelling way. And then I think, I think that What I heard was, I don't know, like maybe those last 2 options that kind of are more purpley in nature is kind of more color-wise what we'd want to do. Is that a good kind of synopsis of the feedback we've given so far?

Yeah, I think so. I think we, you know, you look at the bookends on 1 and 5 are probably the ones that we talked about the most. 4, because of the similarity of the smiley face in the mark, I think is something that I liked, but it's the same reason why I like Direction 1. 2 and 3, I think, are not—

Yeah.

The highest talked about and discussed or interest. But I think, Mike, to your point, and I just wanted to double down on Direction 5 again. I keep on mentioning my daughter's 11. She sleeps with a goddamn 20 Jellycat. She's she has you know anxiety like that we had to go get tested for and figure out. She's she's a Sephora. She just like just loves all brands and colorful playful you name it. And she also speaks sleeps with an eye mask. Like she every night sleeps in an eye mask. What if a subscription gift was a little—

I find it so weird. I didn't even know they were a thing.

Like, what if they could subscribe and they could add to a cart adult eye masks, kid eye masks, and, uh, and a subscription gift is this little freaking anti-anxiety little monster?

You know, the more that we're talking about Five, The more I, I really am sold on the mascot idea. What usually happens when I've worked with Chris on things is that he's able to take all this feedback and then come back with a second round of stuff, but is now much more kind of targeted. And it's same, uh, Chris, it seems like we've given you enough feedback. I'm guessing you're kind of itching to get in there and say, okay, I'm gonna take all—

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So I, I, I, I know, I know how you work. So, um, I think that's what we do for the next step.

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Okay, so Chris, you got some stuff to show us today. We, we looked at a bunch of stuff and we're excited a couple weeks ago. You've gone back into the lab. Uh, we'd love to see what you've come up with.

Yeah. Yeah. So, Thanks again for, as always, for meeting with me, guys. Based on round 1, these were kind of the main talking points that I sort of took into the second round of development. So, you know, explore— I think a big thing that we all walked away with was this idea of a character, this idea of kind of building a, like, sort of humanizing the brand, giving a bit of a personality to it, a bit of maybe like kid-friendly energy. And then another thing was, is there a way to incorporate the semicolon? I know that was something that we liked about that first direction. Curtis, you had mentioned like an additional flavor. And so I wanted to kind of see what this system could look like if we extend it to a second flavor as well. So those were the 3 sort of primary focal points of this round. And then just as a quick recap, these were kind of the 3 directions that we wanted to sort of take things from. So, you know, definitely loving the character and a lot of the personality that was in direction 5, loved the semicolon element of direction 1. And then just some of the things with direction 4, I think the big thing was just this idea of like awake, wink, and then sleep, kind of incorporating that as like an easy 1, 2, 3, sort of like part of your Evening ritual. So with that, this is just kind of a splattering. You know, it's been a bit of a chaotic time on the Trevi side of, you know, Prime Day was huge for us. And we just launched some new flavors as well, but wanted to kind of give a quick snapshot without building out a ton of slides of some of the different work. So we definitely worked on different explorations with some of the wordmarks, you know, seeing some of the different flavors and some different character illustrations, styles like that. You can see some of the wonderful sort of AI renderings of the different possible characters we could develop. I loved Snorable Winx as a name. Curtis, I don't know who came up with it, but I thought that was an awesome name and just thought about what if there's a world where we create a family of characters and things like that.

Yeah.

So I'm gonna jump into option 1, which is pretty much a refined version of direction 1 originally. Still playing off of that semicolon, and then kind of bringing in a bit more of that things that we liked about Direction 5 with a character and a little bit of fun with it. So still have the same sort of primary wordmark incorporating that semicolon as the winking eye, as we've called it. And then you're starting to see a little bit of an addition of a character into this system. And this would be sort of the character for this direction where you're bringing that semicolon in, you're making it a little bit more playful, a little bit more friendly. just a fun semicolon cloud, winking eye cloud that you can incorporate into the packaging, becoming that hero for this direction, seamlessly connects the semicolon with the character in a way that we were just struggling to do that with the other direction that we'll look at here in a bit. And so I wanted to just give it its due diligence and explore it as far as, push it as far as we could to see if this direction had opportunity. And you can start to see how that looks in maybe a more orange peach flavor, things like that. So just sort of showing the color schematic like that, showing what the website would look like. And then this is just kind of an updated version of kind of that billboard design where we're just showing a bunch of the different design elements. So you can kind of bring that character into engage with photography using that semicolon on the sleep mask, which was something I know we talked about for the other direction as well. So, you'll see a bit of a blending between this direction and the next one.

Hey, pause there. Yeah, let's talk about that for a second. Shawn, one thing that we talked about 2 weeks ago, I think we mentioned to you, but another kind of reason to maybe be— to slow our roll a bit Is I think you were the one who originally said the idea of, hey, we should have nose strips. So we three there's three ideas we have now, maybe four. I've heard four ideas of like throw-ins that could go with this: nose strips, sleep mask, some kind of like a stuffed animal, and then like a frother or something that kind of like mixes it up. And we started like looking at as we started looking at the packaging concepts, it started to be obvious that hey on you know. on nose strips or sleep mask or, or a stuffed animal. There's really easy ways to do that. And those are great free gifts with, you know, a subscription purchase, which I think is the way that we're going to want to go is an offer where it's like, hey, subscribe for this bigger cart value, but also you get these add-ins. But we would obviously have to source all that stuff.

Yeah. And the frother is the easiest thing to source. I mean, that'll take 1 minute. I can get the frothers on Alibaba, ship them. We can make them a cool purple, put a cool design on them, like literally not no problem at all. Sleep masks, also easy, but the challenge is sizes. If it's for kids, it's gonna be different sizes, right? So we have to look up kids sleep masks. And then like, do we do kids and adults? Once again, not that challenging. And then the nose strips, I don't know if they make them for kids. I'm sure they do, right?

They must. Yeah, or just smaller. They must.

Yeah. So we'll just do a small, medium, large nose strip package for family. Honestly, all that stuff, fantastic. And it is like, okay, maybe we just take more time, put more money into it. launch it in like a March or whatever, get a stuffy, find a 3PL that can do a box, package it all together. But yeah, dude, I love this direction. This looks awesome.

So I will say, yeah, on the actual design, Chris, yeah, I don't know if we picked this design, but like the— you actually took the cloud, which I kind of disliked, really didn't like, and you did a very good job of making the cloud thing work. I really liked the way that that Kind of character evolved from V1 to V2. Yeah, awesome.

Appreciate that. Yeah, I think with just to kind of piggyback off of what Sean was saying too, and just in general, this idea of, you know, product and this sort of added throw-ins and like swag and things like that. And then also just what Sean was saying of like needing time for the marketing. I feel like I sat in on a speech by the VP of creative for Liquid Death, Andy Pearson. And he kind of talked about that, that those were his 3 products. Like those are the 3 products that Liquid Death sells. It's the product itself, the merch for them. It was like merch and kind of those like Liquid Death, like, you know, the different graphic tees and hats and things like that. And then marketing itself was its own product. So just to, you know, another example of how I think like those 3 pillars are going to be just a good foundation for whatever we do. Awesome. Well, option 2 is a buildup of direction 5 from the first one with the monster and whatnot. So taking that playfulness and just trying to kind of explore it a little bit further, see what it would look like with another flavor, refining a little bit of the illustration itself. I'll jump back up real fast. You know, let Charlie and myself—we worked on a few different versions. He made this kind of wild-looking dude in the middle to me. I think he pushed it as he pushed it, which I loved. I love to see. Kind of gave me some grimace vibes when you stripped off the off the hair of the of the guy. But just wanted to kind of again like shout out Charlie and his awesome illustration skills. So we worked on a few. Different things for this direction. Let me— so we refined the wordmark a little bit just to make it a little bit easier to read. Like when you scale it down, just keeping that N and that K a little bit more legible. We worked on trying to have the semicolon involved here, but between this sort of type of letter form, the, like the semicolon from the original, like inspired font was not quite working and that more angular squared-off semicolon didn't quite fit the look and personality for the rest of this direction. So we still kept kind of that lowercase i, which we think is still kind of a nod to the idea of winking and just cleaned up the wordmark itself a little bit to help with its legibility. And then taking that element from direction 4 of like awake, A wink, and then asleep, and then cleaning up the character itself a little bit more. And then this is where it gets fun, is adding in some other characters and some other sort of building out a family of sort of Winx monsters and seeing how that could sort of— you guys are talking about these different flavors. I just chose green as a third color that kind of worked well with the orange and the purple, but can certainly change that color to be for a different character or for a different flavor. You could really bring these characters to life on the website. You can do things like the stuffed animal, things like that are definitely capable with this direction. And yeah, we just cleaned up a few different things on the packaging, added in for this one, I think in particular, the idea of like maybe your bedtime bestie, that it's like you don't go to sleep without Winx, whether it be the character or, you know, the actual product itself. Kind of an idea potentially for some copy and just integrating that into the packaging itself. Made the character a little bit larger on the stick pack as well. Looking at how it looks whenever we bring in a different character for something like Fuzzy Peach. And again, I think it just is showing how that sort of system can start to come to life in the packaging in particular. And then we have website and then showing billboard as well. So again, just kind of something you guys have already seen. And yeah, I would say that's it for this one. And we can either look at both directions next to each other or we can just talk more about this one.

Who wants to go first?

My only concern with option 2 is that it looks like a testicle. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's trying to be funny, but I, I look at—

Are you talking about, are you talking about this guy or both in general?

How hairy are your testicles?

The normal amount, Curtis.

The things that like when you, you don't see it and then when someone says something, you're like, can I unsee that?

I, I love how we went an entire 2-hour conversation looking at this and nobody thought of a testicle. You get Sean in here and within 5 minutes, like right away.

Yeah, perhaps the, uh, the, the, the, the grouping there could be reworked and then some things like that as well.

I think, I think that one— there's one where he's a little bit more ovally, and that one he's more like a kind of like a gumdrop, and that one does not feel as, uh, prone to being mistaken for a piece of Sean's anatomy.

And we can also keep it all in the same shape and really change the color. That was something that we looked at as well.

I guess, Sean, what do you think of a character overall?

Oh, I like, I like the characters. Um, I think the character is cute and cool and we should have one. Uh, yeah, this is, you know, very, uh, the one on the left is very reminiscent of a Grimace. And then, uh, if you guys know what Meatball is from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, that's what the one on the testicle-looking one is like. He's very much like Meatball. I like option 1 the best, but I think you guys don't. You want to flash option 1 real quick?

Yeah, here, I'll go down here.

Show us the bags. Yeah, I'd love to look at the 2 bags. There we go.

I think I like option 1 when I see the little cloud with the— there's something about that semicolon that I just think is such a mark.

I like the moon and I've always liked the clouds. I mean, but we should ask what kids think because, you know, with like with the boo-boo trend, like maybe they want the little ugly testicle monsters.

And, uh, and I'm like, they're children, they don't even know what testicles are yet, Sean. Right, right.

But the one on the left, I'm like, that's like the cool like skateboard sleep guy.

Yeah, well, I think age-wise it feels like maybe the left one's a little bit more diverse. I, I, uh, I said this earlier, but I think, Chris, you, you upped the, the one on the left enough, the, the option 1, enough that I think both of them are very cool. I, I think ultimately the thing that I really care about is what does the bag look like and what does the stick look like. That's, you know, 90% of the impressions you get, right? And I think both of these look very cool. Probably my only strong opinion is I think our direction of having a character is just right. Like when I just look at the bags and I see the character, it makes me happy. It feels distinctive. I think it's— I think that with a stuffed animal that comes with it—

Feels family friendly.

Yes. Like, we're definitely on it. So like—

I still, I still, I do think the primary user of this is going to be a mother. And that's just a sleep pain thing. Like how, where is the, when you have kids, like who takes the brunt of not sleeping, it's usually the mom.

Oh, totally.

Right? Like, most kids sleep just fine. It's the mother who can't. So I, I'm only saying that because I think that's what my gut tells me. And then it's like, which of these really caters to her, but then leaves you open that like, maybe mom does have a kid who actually wants to take this, or like, or should, right? Anxious kid, something like that.

I don't know. I have a tough— Yeah, like, for me, it's funny. I would— my brain typically is like, I like clean lines. I like, you know, bold items. I don't like, you know, you know, on the creative side, like, I would typically lean to the left one, direction one. There's something that makes me giggle and laugh with these little furballs. Like, there's something unique and It's unique. Like, there's not the clean— the lack of clean lines and, you know, just little kind of squiggly monsters is memorable to me. Like, there's something about it and I don't know what it is because to your point, Sean, like the guy with— it's like the cloud is cool. It's kind of like cool. Like, he could have a skateboard in his hands and he could be— he could kind of be a little, you know, Fido Dido or I don't know what it is.

It's like '80s marketing. It's kind of, it feels retro.

It does. It does feel retro. And it's like a combination of like Fido Dido and Mickey Mouse with his hand like that. Um, but it's at the same time, the other one, Direction 2, just stands out. Doesn't remind— it just, I don't know. There's something that makes me giggle a little bit with that guy.

I wonder, so I guess here's a question. We're a little bit away from like being ready to pull the trigger on a PO. So we've got some time to focus group this in some ways. Let's get this in front of a little bit more of a sample and maybe, I don't know, a woman, a child, somebody in the target market, and let's get some feedback. We can figure out as a group how to do that. But Chris, I think you brought up—

do you guys want me to tweet it or do you think we shouldn't show anybody yet?

Your audience, no.

Sean's like, I already tweeted it. Is that okay?

It's like, if you want a bunch of testicle comments, just tweet it to Sean's audience. But I think that we do some kind of focus grouping, whether we go to one of those websites where you can pay people to do it, or we find— I mean, like, we could easily put together an internal list of 100 friends and family that we think are kind of in the—

I was gonna say, I could— I just on my team, I probably have enough moms.

Okay, well, so like, let's, let's do that. Let's focus group this. And then we can kind of look at that feedback and make a final decision. One question that comes with this, I think we should start thinking about, okay, what are the free gifts that come with this and start sourcing those? Sean, you mentioned the frother's easy. If we're going to do like a little stuffed animal character, even if we don't know who the stuffed animal is, we should probably look into that.

And I've got suppliers for that.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So you've got on stuffed animals. So do you want to kind of own the free gift, Matt?

Sure.

Okay, so I think we look at all of them. We look at the nose strips and the stuffed animals and the sleep mask just to kind of understand what those things would cost. So Matt's gonna own the, the free gift. I can own feedback on the 2 designs. If we kind of come up with how we're going to generate that list.

Yep. Yeah.

How many moms do you have, Mike, that work for you?

Oh, a decent number. Yeah.

Yeah. And I'll send it to my wife who knows women.

Yes. I have children. I have 2 children. So there you go.

I would be interested in getting some, even if it's just getting some kids, uh, like a portion of like the survey is taken by kids.

What would— interesting. Any, any thoughts about actually having 6 to 8 kids on a podcast episode and presenting this and seeing what their reaction is?

It's great content. I mean, we just did something.

Kids say the darndest things, man. Like, you know, if you, if you get like—

I'd be interested in presenting to kids. I've never, uh, never done that. I've gotten some pretty interesting feedback in a design presentation, but that would be a new—

They're all off school right now. I could, I could wrangle 10, 8-year-olds in a heartbeat.

Go to the park.

All right, Curtis. Curtis, go to the park with some sweet powder and try to get some kids.

If you get a van, you can get more of the kids to give you feedback at once.

So include ice cream or what?

These are all ideas. Hopefully this never is admitted into a court as evidence. And so, okay, let's plan on that. We'll coordinate via text how we're going to gather some feedback, but we'll try and gather feedback. Um, great job, Chris.

Just from a marketing perspective, Matt, or, or everybody actually, going back to the design, I know that we're going to survey, um, of what people think between 1 and 2. One of the things that you brought up, Chris, on the presentation is this whole concept of like bedtime buddy. I think that's what you said.

Yeah. Bedtime bestie. Yeah.

Or bedtime bestie. I just, When I hear that kind of tagline or, you know, a stuffier, you name it, I would probably lean more towards the furry guy versus the little cloud guy. You know, I think about like bedtime monster or sleep monster slash bedtime buddy. I would lean more towards those guys if we're going to use that. To me, the cloud guy is the cool guy, which is like a little bit more fido-dido used in marketing, but not Not masculine is my view.

It is. As much as I like, I like it. Right. I'm trying to— I bet you if I like, I put both in front of my wife and daughter, they would instantly choose the furry guy. Yeah. And that's— and I think that that's also like a— like, I bet you if I went and talked to like 10 of my wife's friends, they probably all still have a stuffed animal.

Oh, yeah. Especially if they like now with kids, it makes them nostalgic of their stuff. Totally. Like my wife, it's an emotional thing for women.

Yeah. You know, like, like my wife still has like a little bear that she gave to our daughter. Right? Like, it's just, I just, I don't know if it's the mom. I like number one, but I don't know that I'm the customer. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I gotta do some thinking. I think, Mike, you're right. Like, let's get this in front of moms and kids and see what they like. I'll start working on possible free gifts and suppliers and sourcing and all that. That's gonna be pretty easy.

We can even—

If it's a little furry dude and we want a stuffy, Curtis, I talked to Brad about this and Brad's like, no problem making stuffies. Yeah. He's like, how high quality do you want it? It's like, I can get you a a $1 piece of shit that you get at a fair, or I can get you like, uh, uh, whatever those things are that are viral right now.

Oh, Jellycats?

Yeah, Jellycats. He's like, he's got, uh, Mike, my old business partner, or my current business partner owned a giant toy company. So did a shitload of stuffies.

Yeah, that's gonna be a great, that's gonna be a great tie-in.

So we're good there. Um, okay. All right.

Good plan. We're making progress. I'm getting excited.

So you watched us discuss what all of our options were for packaging, how we thought about it at this stage of building the brand. And if you are following us posting about the brand on X, on Instagram, then you've clearly seen the final choices we made. For you, the listener, I want you to walk away with this question: how does packaging design influence consumer buying decisions? What makes someone recognize this as your brand across a very, very crowded shelf, both physical and online? This is what we're talking about. This is brand recognition, folks. Why does the simplest looking option often win? Minimalistic design? Yeah, that's a thing. And sometimes it's really important. And above it all, how can your packaging make a customer feel it was worth the price before anyone opens it? This is also called perceived value. And if you've heard us on the show before, We all know that perception is reality. All right. Thank you for joining us. And if you like this, please like, comment, subscribe. It helps our egos. We're fragile little creatures. We could really use the support.