Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities.

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How to Launch a Brand in 2024

It’s easy to forget in this AI-crazed moment, but we still live primarily in a world of atoms, not bits. And how we move those atoms around—how we make and transport goods in an increasingly complex, interconnected world—is the focal point of the $28.5T global commerce market.

When I think of globalized commerce, I think of 2021’s Suez Canal debacle. On the morning of March 23rd, a 400-meter container ship called Ever Given was buffeted by strong winds, becoming wedged across the waterway. For six days, the ship remained stuck, halting one of the world’s busiest trade routes. At the peak of the crisis, about 400 ships and $9.6B worth of trade were stranded every day.

The Suez Canal crisis was a memorable example of how fragile and inter-reliant our supply chain has become.

The pandemic also threw our interdependence into sharp relief. The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating breakdown of the global supply chain, using the example of a hot tub. Parts of one single hot tub come from seven countries and 14 states, traveling a cumulative 887,776 miles (!) to assemble one tub. Electric motors come from China’s Guangdong province, then are assembled into water pumps in Tijuana before being trucked to Utah. Before COVID, customers could get a hot tub delivered in weeks; during the peak of the pandemic, though, trade slowdowns and shortages meant that customers were waiting up to six months.

So, global commerce is complicated—we get it.

The inner-workings and evolutions of retail are frequent topics in Digital Native (most recently: May’s The 10 Forces Shaping Commerce). We know this in the abstract, but the goal of this week’s piece is to illustrate it with a specific example.

This week, I launched my own product (!). A few years ago, I started playing a game with friends on group trips: we’d bring a set of Jenga and write questions on each block. Then we’d sit in a circle and go around drawing blocks, taking turns answering the questions on the blocks we drew. It became a fun way to bond and get to know each other on a deeper level. 

So a while back, I thought: why not make this into a game that friends and families can play together, with my favorite questions from over the years? I looked for a manufacturer, wrote 54 questions, designed the box, and ordered samples. The game is called Block Talk, and it’s now available at www.shopblocktalk.com 😊

While global manufacturing and fulfillment are more complex than ever before, launching a product has never been easier. This is the contradiction I want to explore in this piece.

I thought it would be interesting to dig into the process behind launching a product—the tech stack I used, what was easier than expected, what was harder than expected. How the sausage gets made. That’s the focus of this week’s Digital Native: a case study of launching a product in 2024.

Before diving in, a shameless plug: if you’re looking for a new game to play with family and friends over the holidays, give Block Talk a try 🥹

Shop Block Talk

The game is $45, and I wanted the profits to go a good cause: profits will go to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The game will ship later this fall, but I wanted to get orders now so that proceeds can go to the crucial last month of the election cycle.

In addition to this project being good fodder for a Digital Native piece, it’s a fun way to (1) support the U.S. election, and (2) get a new game to play with your loved ones. Win-win. Hopefully some Digital Native readers also love good old-fashioned intentional bonding and a good Democratic cause. If you do purchase, thank you! I really appreciate it.

I’ll now take off my salesman hat, and put on my analysis hat: let’s examine commerce in 2024. We can break the process of launching a brand into four components:

1. Finding a Manufacturer

2. Designing the Product

3. Building the Storefront

4. Fulfillment

Let’s dive in 👇

Finding a Manufacturer

Over the past decade, we saw a litany of celebrity brands: George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila; Logan Paul’s and KSI’s PRIME energy drink; Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty; Kim K’s SKIMS shapewear. Nearly every category had dozens—even hundreds—of celeb entrants.

And we’re not done: despite clear consumer fatigue, celeb brands continue to make headlines. Blake Lively was criticized for promoting her new haircare line during this summer’s press tour for It Ends With Us, and Logan Paul and KSI this week announced they’re teaming up with MrBeast on a Lunchables competitor—naturally, the pre-packaged lunch will include a PRIME drink and a Feastables chocolate bar.

For big celebrities, finding a manufacturing partner is easy—they have the connections and the team to negotiate good partnerships. Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics, for instance, struck a deal with Seed Beauty, the manufacturer behind the popular ColourPop line: Seed would manufacture Kylie’s line, and in exchange get a cut of sales (reportedly about half). All Kylie had to do was market the products through her social channels.

But if you’re not a Kardashian, finding a manufacturer has traditionally been a challenge. One of my favorite business books, Shoe Dog, spends several chapters chronicling Phil Knight’s trips to China to find a manufacturer for the first Nike shoes. It took a long time—and lots of frequent flier miles—for Nike to get its prototype and start manufacturing at scale.

In 2024, things are a bit easier. For Block Talk’s manufacturing, I turned to Pietra, a company that offers full-stack solutions for anyone to launch their own brand. I searched “wooden blocks” on Pietra and found a manufacturer called Shuhuan, based in Yiwu City, China.

Shuhuan and I messaged back and forth about types of wood and packaging materials. We landed on Paulownia for the wood (I’m now an expert on different types of wood and their associated production costs) and we picked cardboard for the packaging.

I sent Shuhuan my list of questions to engrave on the blocks, and they ordered a sample shipped to my apartment—about $100 for the set of blocks and $100 for the packaging. I gave them feedback, then put in the final production order—costs for the final order were calculated on a per-unit basis.

Designing the Product

I used Midjourney for the imagery on Block Talk’s product packaging. The prompt I fed Midjourney:

A group of friends sit on a couch around a coffee table. They are laughing together. On the table in front of them is a game of wooden blocks stacked in a tower. The colors in the image are yellows and oranges, and the mood is warm and inviting.

I took that Midjourney image and I went over to Canva. There, I created designs for each side of the packaging.

(Side note: Canva continues to fly under the radar, but the business actually generates more revenue than Figma, Miro, and Webflow combined. Canva does $2.3B per year in top-line, has 185M monthly users across 190 countries, and has been profitable every year for over seven years. It’s one of the most impressive success stories in the startup world, yet we rarely talk about it.)

I pay $10 / month for Midjourney, though the company again offers new users 25 images free—I could’ve created the above artwork free of charge. And while Canva is a master of upselling (the “Background Remover” feature is the feature that always converts me to a paying user), I used only free features on the designs above. All in, costs here were minimal. I sent the designs to Shuhuan to put on the packaging.

Building the Storefront

There are 4.5M stores live on Shopify. As of last week, there’s one more. Shopify was the logical choice for launching the Block Talk storefront; it’s the infrastructure that underpins the sites for household names and mom-and-pops alike.

Shopify got its start as the home for small brands—famously, Tobi Lutke started Shopify after struggling to build a storefront for his snowboard brand, Snow Devil. But today, Shopify isn’t limited to the long tail: bold-faced names like Mattel, SKIMS, Heinz, Bombas, Crate & Barrel, and Lord & Taylor all use Shopify.

Outside of Amazon, Shopify is the most impressive business in Western commerce. Here’s a snapshot from the latest investor relations deck—I like that it highlights major numbers, and Floof Cotton Candy 🍬:

Over 10% of US e-commerce penetration and $2B in top-line still growing 20%+ YoY. Super impressive.

Amazon is famous for its flywheel (lower prices → more customers → more sellers → better cost structure → lower prices) but Shopify has its own flywheel:

That flywheel has been compounding for 15+ years, with impressive product velocity.

In spring’s Seurat and the Opportunity in Vertical AI, we talked about the playbook for vertical software: identify your customer’s most salient pain-point, solve it, then layer on more products to improve your moat and drive up customer contract values over time. Shopify is a masterclass in executing this playbook. While Shopify started by letting a merchant build a website with a shopping cart integration—simple enough—Shopify’s current list of products on its website run 10 pages long (!).

Slide 9 from the latest investor relations deck shows broad categories of innovation:

And in a world in which the term “platform” is used widely and often incorrectly, Shopify truly is a platform: there are now over 13,000 apps in the Shopify App Store.

Building my Shopify store was simple enough, though the company suffers from some complexity creep: when you’re serving the Mattel’s of the world, you naturally become a tad overcomplicated for a new single-SKU storefront like mine.

I paid roughly $100 / month for Shopify’s service, and got started by selecting a custom template, writing a product description, and setting my price. Most of my set-up time was actually spent trying to figure out how to set up Payments, and in particular ensuring that customers can check out with Apple Pay.

Payments is a huge focus area for Shopify, and for good reason: most of Shopify’s revenue now comes from payments. Shopify used to generate most of its revenue from what it calls “Subscription Solutions”—this is the ~$100 / month I’m paying to operate my storefront. Today, though, Subscription Solutions comprises only about 30% of revenue. The other 70% comes from “Merchant Solutions,” which is a fancy way of saying payments.

Shopify takes a cut of gross payments volume, which has been growing rapidly in recent years:

In many ways, Shopify is a fintech disguised as a place to launch your e-comm store.

Fulfillment

Shopify also has designated “Product Partners”—in payments, for instance, Product Partners include Affirm, Stripe, and PayPal. A key Product Partner is Flexport, which I chose for Block Talk fulfillment.

Here’s the way Flexport works:

The crux of it is:

1. I put Flexport in touch with Shuhuan—Flexport will pick up the goods in Shenzhen.

2. Flexport will then ship products by maritime shipping (the cheapest option) to its San Bernardino, CA fulfillment center.

3. As the last step, Flexport will fulfill to end customers from San Bernardino. (Flexport syncs with Shopify so that when orders come in, Flexport knows where to ship products.)

Seems simple enough. In reality, things were…a bit more complicated. It turns out, there’s a lot of paperwork to fill out for importing goods from China. Shipping will take a while (we’re all spoiled by Amazon Prime), and I’m sure there will be some headaches to deal with this fall on last-mile logistics. Setting up Fulfillment was the most time-intensive part of the entire launch process, and it surprised me by in the end costing about the same as manufacturing costs.

Final Thoughts

Recently, a woman went viral on TikTok for talking about the croissant lamp she bought on Temu.

Basically, this woman began to feel suspicious when she noticed ants burrowing their way into her croissant lamp. So she began to investigate. Could this $20 lamp, she wondered, be a real croissant covered in resin? Surely not.

In her TikTok, the woman proceeds to break open the croissant, revealing flakes that look suspiciously croissant-like. To seal the deal, she…takes a bite: sure enough, the cause of her lamp’s ant infestation was that Temu literally shipped her a resin-coated pastry. Wild.

This is the world of commerce in 2024: we live in a world where you can get a pastry lamp shipped to your door from China.

Temu, essentially an online dollar store backed by the Chinese internet giant Pinduoduo, remains hugely popular in America: it was the most-downloaded iPhone app in the U.S. last year. On SHEIN, meanwhile, customers can get fast-fashion apparel delivered rapidly and cheaply. And Amazon now has nearly 10M third-party sellers (roughly 40% are estimated to be Chinese), comprising 60% of its sales; Amazon has steadily followed the path from retailer to platform, and its innovations in supply chain have led the industry for 20 years. (I highly recommend the chapter on FBA, Fulfilled By Amazon, in Brad Stone’s book Amazon Unbound.)

It’s now easier than ever to design a product, manufacture it, and set up a storefront—even if the inner-workings under the hood are more complex than they’ve ever been. As this piece shows, you can go from idea to product in a matter of weeks—anyone can launch their own product line by stitching together services from companies like Midjourney, Canva, Pietra, Shopify, and Flexport.

AI, of course, will only amplify each step of this journey. With AI, design software will get better, manufacturers will get more efficient, and supply chains will get smarter. Each step of this process presents an opportunity for startups.

I’m curious what other tech services I could’ve used to make Block Talk even easier—I’m sure there are turnkey solutions I missed, and more are being invented every day. I’m still an amateur here at launching a small business, so let me know what I missed!

And, of course, if you’re looking for a new game for the holidays and to support the Harris-Walz campaign, check out Block Talk 😊🛍️

See you next week!

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