I joined Ecomm Cowboy as a guest this past Friday. Click on the below link and go to about the 39-minute mark.
I love what these guys are doing. Pretty bullish on live streaming. It got my mind going on how I can add live streaming to some of the projects / clients we’re working on/with.
Anyway, we had a few new business conversations this week — a merch agency, a medical-grade gel manufacturer, and a wellness brand - that is worth digging into on this week’s newsletter.
Here’s something consumer-facing brands forget more than you’d think: Feeling > Features.
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👋 Hey, I’m Brandon Blum. I’m the Founder and Managing Partner at New Edition - a Brooklyn-based creative agency that creates winning creative for emerging consumer brands.
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PROBLEM #1: Your competitor is selling the outcome. You're selling the specs.
We spoke to a a medical-grade gel manufacturer — the kind that supplies Walmart and Target, the legitimate source behind half the foot-care products on the shelf. They’re doing $25K a month on Amazon. Same client that we spoke to a few weeks back, if you recall.
$25K a month isn’t necessarily bad. That’s a real business. But a D2C lifestyle brand bought their product wholesale, wrapped it in warm photography and relatable creative, and is doing $1 million a month.
Same exact product. Forty times the revenue.
Their photography shows a person — living, moving, relieved. Not a spec sheet. Sell the lifestyle. Show the outcomes.
DO THIS: Pull up your top competitor's listing. Ask: what life are they selling? If they're leading with outcome and you're still leading with ingredient, start there — your hero image, your first two lines of copy. You don't need a rebrand. You need a reframe.
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PROBLEM #2: Your services page is a menu, not a pitch.
We later spoke to a founder who runs a high-end merchandise agency.
His words: "(Our website) kind of looks like a catalog. It makes you think we're not like a partner, we're just a production company."
What his clients are actually buying: time. They don't have the bandwidth to build an internal merch operation. This agency takes the whole thing off their plate. That's the outcome. It's nowhere on the page. And it needs to be.
DO THIS: Read the first three sentences of your homepage. Are they describing what you do — or what your customer stops worrying about? Same product. Completely different story.
PROBLEM #3: Your ad hook isn't speaking to your customer’s real pain.
We got on a call with a growing wellness brand selling sleep patches. They’re seeing a strong AOV, loyal repeat buyers.
The founder told me their biggest challenge is finding UGC creators who convert.
The problem isn't the script. It's the creator delivering it.
Their buyer is a woman, 35 to 50. Real sleep issues. Tried things. Skeptical.
The creators this brand has been working with? Twenty-five-year-olds.
Pain has to be credible. If the face, age, and life stage don't match, the hook dies — no matter how good the copy is.
DO THIS: Before briefing your next creator, write down: your buyer's age range, the moment they first realized they needed your product, and what someone who genuinely has this problem looks like on camera. Filter every creator against those three before you look at follower count. A 43-year-old who actually can't sleep will outperform a polished 24-year-old almost every time.
All three brands have real products. Real value. Customers who love them.
But somewhere between the product and the market, the message flipped from "here's the pain I solve" to "here's what I'm made of." That flip is expensive — lost deals, ads that don't convert, listings that should be doing 40x.
The fix is rarely a rebrand. Sometimes it's one sentence on a services page. One creator swap. One image that shows the after instead of the before.
Start there.
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IN SUMMARY
Here's the through-line across all three calls:
Rewrite your homepage's first three sentences around what your customer stops worrying about — not what you do
Pull up your top competitor's listing and ask what life they're selling. If it's not the same life you're selling, start there
Before your next creator brief, filter on age, life stage, and pain credibility — before follower count
Customers don’t buy features. They buy feelings. They buy the solution to their pain.
Want to chat? Reply to this email or email me ([email protected]).
Until next week ✌️
