Primary colors, everywhere you go 🎨 

Quick note:

• If you’re looking for last week’s email with tips on how to make your own content research checklist, you can find that here.

• Factory links are at the bottom of this email.

Last, if you’re thinking about starting a brand in the activewear space or launching merchandise (hoodies, hats, shirts, etc.) of any kind…

…We’ve compiled an ungodly amount of research into these organized reports for you to check out.

They’ll give you everything you need to start as a brand.

Check out the reports

Brands of the future aren't built on the data of the past

We are in a complex time for growing brand advertising; I touched on this in my video this week. 

If you're spending a small amount each month, you can play with different platforms and find an edge, but if you're scaling into millions a year in sales, we're seeing:

• The risk TikTok ads might go entirely

• Less ROI year over year from Google

• A significant drop in meta performance Q1 of this year versus the following year.

BUT, what's next is there are finally software tools that tie into Shopify that are giving us efficiency to help make up for it, just with new technology.

For brands getting lots of traffic, there're two services from Black Crow that you need to know about right now.

First, they have Smart-ID, which sets unique identifiers for each of your visitors on your Shopify store.

This way, your team can send Meta and Klaviyo the right data for efficient retargeting and ultra-effective email flows so website visitors suddenly become very valuable, not just within the 7-day meta-attribution window.

This same data is also used to power the machine learning behind Predictive Offer, which uses this better data to trigger your popup offer a second time to the right shoppers when they're most likely to convert.

They offer some very big improvements — their benchmarks are 40% incremental revenue in welcome and abandonment flows and a 25% improvement in ad account efficiency via Meta.

If you’re a brand doing ~$2m/yr on Shopify, we recommend meeting with their team to see how they can further boost your growth.

If you want to meet them, sign up for a demo HERE. RIght now, they’re giving $100 Amazon gift cards for completing the demo to HYPER readers whose brands are doing brands doing seven figures on Shopify.

In partnership with Black Crow AI.

Ok, so—

A friend of Hyper, Victoria, inspired today’s email. She’d recently pointed out the surge in using primary colors in branding, products, and campaigns.

It’s something we’ve been seeing in apparel specifically, but when she named it, turns out I can’t stop seeing it everywhere.

So many brands are using this moment to tweak products, inject playfulness into campaigns, and more. And it isn’t just fashion either. We’re seeing it across furniture to cookware and everything in between.

So we rounded up a few examples of this and why we like them. Enjoy!

Matty Matheson’s food empire

Chef Matty Matheson recently launched a new food brand, Matheson Food Company, and I have to say, it takes me back, if only for the branding alone.

A lot of food and snack companies have been DTC-ified in the last decade, and we’re at a point where it seems like even though the branding is different, it often has this stench of “probably raised a seed round and spent it all on a agency” to it.

But Matty’s brand taps into and scratches a part of our brains that feels nice. He’s taken the nostalgic packaging of great American food brands and served it up like we don’t miss the good old days.

Tell me it doesn’t remind you of your grandma’s cornmeal packaging (shoutout Pearl Milling Company).

All this to say, Matty and the team did a nice job of grabbing attention with the branding on this new set of products, appealing to the nostalgia of Dixie and Heartland products from years past.

Nice work to the Wedge team on the designs here.

Why KITH got this collab right

Look, I’ve been critical of KITH for how their partnerships can sometimes feel like logo slaps. But their ongoing partnership with Columbia is far from that, and I wanted to touch on a few reasons why it works.

First, loving the use of primary colors and their connection to nature (yellow → sun, red → campfires, green → trees, etc). This feels rudimentary in the best of ways, and there’s a sense of nostalgia embedded into colorful pieces, like what we used to get with OG outdoor catalog brands.

Speaking of OG and nostalgia, the visuals and creativity perfectly illustrate this too

It’s not just “streetwear” either. The products are actually sick, from the omni-tech cooling materials they use on outerwear to the Prizm ruby lens they partnered with Oakley on, among other bits.

I just like it. And it’s with a partnership like this that you see they actually put thought into it, which goes to show you how hard it is to make high-quality stuff at the same velocity.

Because it requires THIS.

Primary colors keep on giving

Last week we discussed Cliik, the new home storage accessories brand, and why they’re making such a huge wave. And this aluminum, ceramic nonstick cookware further manifests primary color work in product development right now.

WIth cookware, this makes sense. When you’re examining a lineup of 100 nude, muted-tone of brands like Caraway and OurPlace, there’s not much separating you from a clear decision.

Neoflam Shop aims to solve this by diverting your eyes from the sea of bland to something more akin to what your kids—or maybe your inner child—would like to cook with.

As with KITH, color is a powerful brand tool. And Neoflam has taken a product that would’ve collected dust next to the likes of other DTC sweethearts and given it some punch to hang with.

This week’s factory links

• Candle suppliers from this week’s overview video.

• Good starter, off-the-shelf scents, very low MOQ: Ankeshi (China)

• Great recommended go-to option for normal production (this is made in US, Women Owned) that has done previous work for Netflix and Erewhon and has a great vessels selection: Unique Custom Candles (US)

• A luxury or really high-quality option that does projects like The Montage and We Wore What Laguna Candles (US)

• If you are looking for the hat samples you’ve seen in Oren’s videos, the distressed are from here, and the nicer silhouettes are from Crease Group.

We are back to adding these weekly, so stay tuned for plenty of new suppliers!