Nextday delivery is so last year as DTC and retail get a new shipping channel. Now DoorDash will ship you same-day sneakers from Foot Locker. The DoorDash partnership now joins thousands of brands that have implemented on-demand delivery services. Could this be a change in customer behavior, or a simple marketing push?

In an aggressive move, Dollar Shave Club are taking on Women’s razors with a new category expansion, marketing campaign and strong words from the CEO. “It’s the anti-Venus, anti-Billie, anti-Flamingo… It’s no B.S… We’re gonna give you what you always wanted. And by the way, we know a lot of you use [the men’s product], and now this one’s geared for you.” says Larry Bodner CEO of Dollar Shave Club. Directly attacking competitors owned by Procter & Gamble and Mammoth Brands.

Coachella has become such a marketing boom that brands are now building roadside pop-ups on the way to the festival. Maruchan, the noodles brand, has built a convenience store-style activation 45 minutes from the festival grounds, while Pacsun have built a roadside stand on Highway 111. Unsurprisingly, success will be measured less by foot traffic and financial ROI than overall awareness and social chatter.

UniLever has acquired Grüns. The brand founded by Chad Janis only three years ago, shows incredible growth. Today, Grüns has more than one million customers and ships roughly 10 million gummies each day. As some of you may know we have a Starter who helped Grüns grow on the platform.

Kiel Faulkner is a marketing and culture expert, making his name in partnerships and licensing for names like Dr. Squatch and Mikado. At Dr. Squatch Faulkner was responsible for the viral Sydney Sweeney bath water soap, Star Wars licensing, and saw the brand from 10 employees to a $1.2 Billion exit. We caught up with him for The Interview:

You've likened growing the partnership and licensing business to nine figures at Dr. Squatch to the Supreme streetwear model. What do you feel the similarities are, and where did you take inspiration from?

There was certainly some product of being in LA and seeing the lines around the block for the Supreme store, seeing how they continued to get so many people hyped for these launches.

The overlap is the scarcity to drive collectibility and hype. You're training your audience to move on limited drops and recognize they'll miss out if they don't act quickly. Along with that, we had the true artistry, from the packaging to the scent and the soap, all being presented, which adds this element of craftsmanship.

With Supreme, they always had the crazy resale value on the aftermarkets. I thought if we could translate that hype to a digital experience, we could create the same relationship with our fan base. And that's what did happen. If you ever go on the Dr. Squatch Reddit, people are posting all the time, asking if people want to trade. People are literally taking in-store displays and signage to keep and collect at their house.

The Sydney Sweeney partnership was a huge success. How did the partnership come about, and why artificially limit the product to 5,000 units, making that aforementioned resale such a strong component?

Resale was always top of mind. My joking gold standard was: any launch we do, it goes for double on the aftermarkets. Same as what you saw with Supreme, the Nike shoe drops, all of that.

Huge credit to John Ludeke, he's still leading marketing at Squatch. He was really bullish on getting Sydney in the door and going back to a more masculine-targeted, "hot girl" angle. He came up with a body wash genie concept, but the bathwater soap idea stemmed earlier.

Me and my former coworker Dejan Rankovic, we always had this idea to can celebrity bath water and sell it. We wanted to play into this weird subculture of people buying "hot girl" used items. We could can the used bath water, shoot a spot, auction it off, and see how that reacted on the internet. We originally wanted to leverage our Liquid Death partnership for that angle, trying to get them to can the bath water, but we never felt like we could present it in the right way. 

How that translated from the original canned-water idea was through an early partnership I did with Stone Brewing. Through our scientists, we found out that we could take Stone IPA and it would actually survive the soap-making process. That was our proof of concept. Fast-forward to this moment, and we're like, oh, we can actually take her bath water and physically put it in as part of the soap ingredients, because you can take liquids and safely incorporate them into the batch.

That was how the idea came to life. It went from us wanting to can it and playing into that weird subculture, to us fully being like, let's put it in the soap and lean into that angle.

To your point about the hype; we knew what we were doing. On the low end, units for a launch were 30,000 to 50,000, and that was the very low end for one SKU. 5,000 is much further below that. It was certainly intentional to drive hype and scarcity and get people crazed about this bath water soap.

You can hire Kiel through The Starters HERE.

March Madness had a significant impact on e-commerce, boosting online sales by up to 40% on game day, even when a State lost. This isn’t about jerseys either, state sales across categories were up over a third, showcasing just how important that event-related marketing calendar is for e-commerce brands.

In a report by Rithum, the analysis found:

As Rithum states: “A fan in New Haven checking the injury report at halftime is two taps from buying something. Maybe they didn’t plan to shop, but hey, their phone is already in their hand, and if the right ad has been built for the moment, or the right TikTok influencer pops up . . .”

Read the full Analysis HERE

Each week we feature recent hires, showcasing top brands partnering with human brilliance to build their brand. This week’s hires include: