Elio talks NotCo with Impact Alpha
Craftory co-founder Elio talks NotCo with Impact Alpha
How the Craftory is deploying ‘cause capital’ to back impact-driven challengers to consumer brands
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Shop the Category: Period-Proof Underwear
I Shopped the Category: Period-Proof Underwear
Does period-proof underwear work? Is it a viable alternative for pads and tampon users? To find out I tried the big four brands. Here’s what I learned.
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VC Money - Death Traps Exposed
Avoid toxic VC and find the right investment partner for your challenger business.
The first in a series of short films for cause-driven entrepreneurs, here’s our candid take on the risks traditional venture capital presents to ambitions challenger brands.
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Manhood in Therapy
Insights and challenger opportunities from a category in crisis
These aren’t happy days for men. Toxic masculinity, #meetoo and decades of entitlement have finally come home to roost, and what exactly constitutes the right model of masculinity in our woke, enlightened times is a topic of considerable (and refreshing) debate. As new definitions of covetable manhood replace the discredited old, so behaviours are changing – and the towering brand equity of incumbent male brands is crashing down. This leaves the space wide open for an exciting new generation of cause-driven male brands to define our times.
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Reconsider The Consequences of Your Consumption
Elio addresses the One Young World 2018 summit
Watch Elio explain how consumer packaged goods uniquely have the potential to effect large scale positive change, fast.
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My Bloody Vagina is Not a Wound.
There’s a critical difference between natural bleeding while menstruating and the unnatural bleeding of injury.
Period blood not only has a different look, consistency and smell, it also means something different: Menstruation is fertility and life. It’s time for cultural attitudes to menstruation to take a giant leap forward.
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Price. Boldly.
Why the future lies in saying goodbye to discounts and hello to charging unapologetically.
Mankind’s nature is both conservative and incrementalist. We fear the consequence of change, and we venture out of our comfort zone with endearing timidity, one small step at a time. We might admire the boldness of “damn the torpedoes” trailblazers – but, by definition, that admiration is projected from the angle of our own evolutionary cautiousness, and instinctive preference for staying with the pack.
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Partying with Mephistopheles
Why no D2C challenger brand can ignore Amazon
In Goethe’s 1808 magnum opus, “Faust – A Tragedy”, the eponymous hero strikes a pact with the devil to show him the wonders of the world, in return for selling his soul. Fast-forward 211 years and countless tortured German schoolchildren later, and the same Faustian bargain is one faced by every righteous modern challenger brand: to strike a pact with Amazon, or not?
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Zippy, Lithe and Disposable
Why turning new product development on its head is the challenger way
Back in the inebriated days of 2003, when Yahoo ruled search and Myspace was all the rage, technology products were mostly developed like the Pyramids of Giza: grand designs springing from a founders’ visionary foresight, long in planning and epic in the build. Fast forward to the present, and it’s widely accepted that grand designs and waterfalls are not the way to build technology products that consumers love. Remarkably, the same is emerging as the knock-out model for challenger brands in consumer goods.
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Hemp and Tobacco: A Reversal of Fortunes?
The vape shop is becoming the arena of a significant economic and cultural change.
Visit any vapery and you’ll find once mighty Tobacco reduced to a niche enterprise attempting to redefine itself through twinkly tech and cute aromas.
Look closer and you’ll also find CBD oil for sale.
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Weniger ist Mehr
Why 3 German words are the only challenger brand strategy you’ll ever need
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a famously difficult man to get along with. Arguably one of the finest architects of all time, he was cantankerous, mercurial and intimidatingly bejowelled, forever blowing plumes of thick smoke from one of his beloved Cuban Robustos. Other than a string of exquisite buildings, he gifted mankind an enduringly poignant insight, delivered with fitting clarity: “Weniger ist mehr”, he bellowed, “Less is more”.
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Stores We Love
What DTC brands can learn from great stores around the world
It’s great direct to consumer (DTC) brands are opening a small number of new physical stores around the world. But a lot of them could be better. Stores can feel soulless and vacant, displays don’t survive first contact with customers, and so on. We identify things we can learn from a handful of great stores around the world.
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Physical Retail is Dead. Or is it?
How physical stores can be good for your brand, even if everyone else is struggling.
Stores are closing in their thousands across the world, and yet there are direct to consumer (DTC) brands opening a small number of physical stores. Companies like Allbirds and Deciem/ The Ordinary.
Physical stores can make financial sense, increasing sales in the region and purchases by loyal customers. More powerfully, they can be the embodiment of the brand for customers and the business itself. But crucially, don’t open too many of them.
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Feed Your Second Brain.
How’s your gut microbiome these days? I’m talking about that 2kg smear of good bacteria, fungi, and protozoa hanging out in your intestines.
New science points to the importance of a flourishing gut microbiome in maintaining optimum physical and mental health, and new brands are leveraging old knowledge to help you and your gut stay in optimum health.
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The Poison Chalice of Coolness
Or: how to avoid your one-way ticket to irrelevance
We live in extraordinary times, where new, digitally-activated startup brands continually topple the hegemony of big-business with unruffled ease. The product landscape in many consumer categories already looks unrecognisable compared to just a few years ago - and when Fever-Tree tonic replaces Schweppes even on board British Airways flights, you know that no holy cow is safe anymore. How fabulously exciting that is.
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Are agencies unintentional incubators?
It’s hard to feel an iota of sympathy for the legions of Suits complaining about how hard it is for ‘creative agencies’ these days.
But consider for a moment the thinkers and craftspeople stuck in that quicksand - confronted daily by risk averse ‘managers’, sour lemonade budgets, cocaine expectations, and slag heaps of data.
Perhaps then it’s no surprise that some of the most interesting challenger brands have been/are being conceived by agency creatives sick to the back teeth of big clients who don’t listen.
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Of Luxury Wolves and Robot Sheep
Why Big Business can't crack the challenger model
“Surely it can’t be that hard”, the thin-rim-bespectacled CEO thundered. “Go launch some copycats, and unleash our spending might. We’ll crush them in no time.” For the CEO in question, insert at will any of the distinguished gentlemen running whatever FMCG giant tickles your fancy. The scene might be imagined, but the reality of it is anything but: in boardrooms around the globe, Big Consumer Business is trying to respond to the challenger brand onslaught – and notably failing.
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The $1Bn Bedtime Stories
Why chewing the fat is the Ad Man’s Kryptonite
It all used to be so beautifully easy. The Venerable P&G Rule Book for Effective Advertising codified the perfect 30-second ad in 5 easy steps: (1) set up a relatable context – cue woman-next-door in wholesome nest, (2) define the problem statement – children’s lifetime of happiness in ruins over vexing mud stains on pristine cricket gear, (3) offer relief – behold! it washes whiter!, (4) back up with evidence – confusing but strangely credible-looking animation of miraculous washing molecules, and (5) end with a close-up of the pack to a happy jingle – the ad-man’s money shot.
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Why Trust vanishes like a Guilty Thing
When it’s gone, it’s gone. Rejoice!
There was genuine sadness in their eyes, and more than a hint of hurt pride. For the assembled coterie of McDonald’s executives, the maligning of their brand was simply incomprehensible. “All our beef comes from sustainable, local farms”, one of them said. “There’s only prime chicken breast in our Nuggets”, another insisted. “We give some of the most disadvantaged in our society safe jobs with decent pay and real prospects for productive lives. So why does everybody think we’re slave drivers and that there’s only disgusting gristle in our burgers?”.
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A Wolf Wakes
(Not) announcing the launch of The Craftory
The Craftory Ltd today pointedly failed to announce its launch via conventional PR Newswire. That’s because press releases are both endearingly ineffective corporate relics of the 20th Century, and because The Craftory’s target audience – those fearless CEOs and founders of the world’s boldest challenger brands – wouldn’t know what a PR Newswire was if it bit them in the derrière.
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