Hello from the final gasps of Q3, and may the impending anarchy of Q4 be everything you wish it to be.

On our side, Clayton is formally a travel vlogger now, and Oren went out-of-body talking about luxury on the Jason Levin podcast.

In this week’s HYPER we cover rock climbing as a muse, standout packaging, interview Shane from Air and take a look at it objects and subtle art direction.

Let’s dive in.

Rock climbing; our new creative muse

It’s crazy to look back at how much Gorpcore has influenced our style choices in the last eight years or so. At this point, it’s permeated nearly every aspect of outdoor / activewear.

So much so that we’ve hit a phase where brands are tapping into rock climbing as a creative muse, all of which is a trickle-down from Gorpcore as a fashion genre (not to be confused with just wearing outdoor clothing).

From OGs like Gramicci, who have been a mainstay in making great outdoor gear with a nice crossover to lifestyle, to people wearing La Sportiva tx4’s like they’re the new Salomons.

Retail spotting

Our guy Nate Rosen recently explored what’s at Urban and observed a slew of new independent brands stocked by the Philadelphia-based retailer.

This has long been a hallmark of the UO buying team, and regardless of how much product they have in-store, it’s always nice to see them circulating through independent businesses instead of solely making their stuff in-house.

Objects of interest

INH Ceramics is my new favorite brand for making Yankee hat ceramics. You can buy them as candles with wax in them or in different types, such as cereal bowls.

While we’re at it, may I suggest a fish plate that you can place… fish on? Creators like this on Shopify exist everywhere, making fun renditions of their own products.

A conversation about the future of creative operations

Today, Oren sat down in person in LA with Air’s co-founder and CEO, Shane Hedge, to talk about the future of creative operations. A quick excerpt via video here, and the full conversation is below.

I'm Shane Hege CEO and co-founder of Air. We started the business about six and a half to seven years ago with my co-founder Tyler. We help teams manage all their creative assets.

Why is it so complicated to find the right structures and process for creative team’s in todays business workd?

It's funny, so much of the world today lives in a paradigm of "Oh, be creative tomorrow. Be creative, I need this thing tomorrow. I need it next week. Can you be creative next week? Can you in the next five days? You have time to be great." It's not - the creative process has been unstructured for so long because that's how it actually works. You need a fucking minute, take a beat. You need to like go do the thing with your friends and accidentally have too many drinks, to be hungover in bed and be like, "Holy shit, this might be the way!" God knows where creativity comes from, right?

And it's tough for a business to recognize that because they're like, "Why wasn't he online at 8:30?" But as a believer in brand as it is, a believer in things that aren't necessarily what the data says, but the decision that came from the place that the data showed you or the insight drew you - my belief is the only way we can get there, the only way we can move there, is by allowing creatives to think about the hardest problem inside of businesses today, which is how do we be original? And the only way we can do that is by obfuscating them from the micro-decisions that frankly should be automated.

Paint a picture for me of what the next 18 months look like for teams that are approaching creative ops or trying to leverage the AI technology you're working on. What stage are we in now, what stage comes next, and what does that future look like?

The stage we're in now is called enrichment. There are three stages to our strategy: enrichment, generation, and synthesis.

The first stage, enrichment, is all about helping brands and companies sync their assets into one area and train a model to understand their business and brand. Enrichment involves teaching a model who your customers are, what products you generate, what your brand style is, what your photography style is.

The second phase is generation. This is similar to what you would do with an entry-level creative - create this ad for me based on the one that was successful for us.

The last thing is synthesis. This involves analyzing if an ad is performing well, and if not, suggesting what to do next. It allows you to make decisions like, "What if we try the same ad unit with the new product shot that was just uploaded?" or "What if we tried a different background color and a different audience type?" These are all decisions that have enough data to drive them, where machines should be making suggestions.

You talk about using data inside these kind of next stages. What kind of data can get pulled in to make decisions on your creative and help the machine do that? We talk about Ads Manager, we talk about Google - what are the data sources that you can use to help make decisions?

The cool thing is that today, any form of data can be ported in there. We have low-code integrations with Zapier, we have endpoints that anybody can build on top of, and then we have direct integrations. So if you want to pull data from your ads manager or your CMS or your own internal spreadsheet that you keep, all that is fine. That data can be piped in on top of the assets themselves, and next to that asset can be every version that was ever created, every working file attached to it.

So if there's a moment of inspiration, the data suggests this. The interesting thing about quantitative data is that it can be read in different ways. You can see a number and think, "Oh, I could beat that number," or you can say, "Oh, that number is teaching me I should never do that again." The cool thing is that highlighting that data to organizations in real-time allows folks like you and I, who might just be working at a company, to make decisions in real-time.

Highlighting that data with the asset is so important because it's not like, "Oh, we've come to some insight, now someone has to go figure it out." It's like, "Oh, we figured it out right here," and so you can get that into production right there. Or potentially in the future, we can just generate that version right here with a click.

That gets significantly exciting. I really believe that no one should be doing production design. No one should be doing "Oh, we need five versions of this in different colors." No one should be doing "Oh, we need five versions of this in different aspect ratios." No one should be doing "Oh, we need five versions of this in 10 different languages." All of that should be automated and can be automated, as long as a model understands who you are, your business, your product suite, your brand guidelines. That's why you need a system of record.

Last question for you. Where do you feel like sophisticated companies - where will their workflows be around this in about two years? Paint a picture of what that future vision looks like that excites you, that could excite some of the leaders out there.

I get really, really excited about - this is gonna sound stupid because it's almost like a homage to the past - I get excited about the writers' room of the creative world. The room of a bunch of people, different backgrounds, different lived experiences who come together, look at a bunch of stuff, and beat it up together.

In two years, my perspective is that the amount of data that lives inside of that writers' room that they can press and have impact with is gonna be greater than it ever has been before. The amount of - if we were right about enrichment, generation, and synthesis - inside that room, they can have decisions that are synthesized, they can say yes or no off of. They can have net new assets that they can decide to deploy and create in real-time. And they could have any moment of this business that they could trove back to if they have an idea they want to get a reference from.

If you’ve been following along the last couple of weeks, you know we’ve posted about Air’s new AI functionality and how it enables creative teams to remove the menial, arduous tasks of creating so that those teams can focus more on creating.

This was a great and insightful chat with Shane who has an awesome vision on how to free creatives up to produce their best work in a world where the boring stuff is minimized.

We hope you enjoy this chat with Shane. Be sure to check out what they’re building for marketers and creatives in general.

Packaging of the month

Inspiration for you and your teams —

Emphasizing subtlety in photography

Noah NY recently dropped another collection and I’m in love with how they used a specific color like purple — one that doesn’t even make sense, necessarily — as the subtle detail to spotlight their campaign.

We’ve talked about this before, but there’s something to using single, bold colors to drive brand affinity with customers.

Hyper Reports

Check out our market reports. We spend many hours researching markets, categories, and brands & products within the consumer space so you don’t have to.

• How to Source Blanks 101 — HERE — a guide to finding and producing your own merch

• Reports on Running, Golf, and Tennis — HERE — a guide to each sport, the market opportunities, and how to launch your own brand

Inquiries? Shoot us a note here: [email protected]

We’d love to chat!

Oren & Clayton ❤️ you