![]() I was once skeptical of overtly participatory brands-I don’t want a “relationship” with my mayonnaise, I maintained. And forget the word “consumers” the best new brands today have fans. I discuss this often with my business partner Craig Dubitsky (founder of Hello, amongst other things): don’t create a brand that people buy create one they can join. The dynamics above are representative of a trend in the consumer sector today that is changing the game. They are reveling in their non-corporate independence, and it’s attractive. Woolverton and Bouton took great care to nail the vibe of their communications, from minutia on the container to all other touchpoints, establishing a fun, cheeky dialogue that engaged people in conversation. One question to ask yourself when you’re evaluating a design identity idea: is it tee-shirt worthy? They have a robust side business of Halo Top merchandise for this reason. This is a great example of brand-as-art, and there is nothing else quite like it in their space. Woolverton and Bouton are proud of the Halo Top look, and appropriately so. ![]() This was and is massively novel and meaningful. By using new ingredients like stevia and adding more air into the product, Halo Top created a healthier pint that one could (in theory) responsibly consume in a single sitting. Many innovation leaders myopically convince themselves that their creations are revolutions, when actually they are just low-impact evolutions… at best. Make sure your product is truly different.There are, however, a few key lessons from their explosion onto the scene: Certainly, timing and good fortune were contributors. The founders and I discussed whether there is a playbook to what I’ll call Brand Beatlization. They persevered through it all, continued to innovate, and became a sensation. ![]() Timeline: 2012.įast forward to 2016, past untold rejection, several brushes with financial death (including huge personal credit card debt and a dust-up with predatory lenders), and one brush with actual death (in the early days, Woolverton distributed the product himself out of his car, and the fumes from the dry ice created extremely dangerous air quality issues that once nearly caused him to pass out on the freeway). And they both intensively committed to the sales process, beginning with pitching Whole Foods stores in southern California. Believing he was on to something, it was back to Amazon: he bought a “how to” book about starting a food business.īouton soon joined him, adding business rigor to complement Woolverton’s product passion. It was really good, and a few of his health-conscious friends thought so too. Then, using his apartment as a test lab, he (literally) whipped up a few batches of a new kind of ice cream, with a profile inspired in part by Greek yogurt. So on a lark one night, he bought an ice cream maker for about twenty bucks on Amazon. A diet and fitness nut cursed by a love of ice cream, he wondered one day: why does this creamy goodness have to be so bad for you? “Sugar was the culprit,” he said. ![]()
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