Jake Paul's New Body Care Brand Sucks

Good Brand Versus Bad Brand is Back

GM everyone, happy Friday!!! 😈

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In Today’s Newsletter—

• Good Brand vs Bad Brand: Inside Jake Paul’s New Body Care Brand

• More on Apple’s Style Problem

• The Best Spas in NYC

• NYC’s Retail Revival

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Tomorrow is the first Who Do You Know? run club, come run with me as I train to run the entire 31 mile perimeter on Manhattan in a few weeks. I’d love to meet you all!

Saturday June 15th 8am

5 Miles

START: Central Park East

END: Leon’s Bagels

SIGN UP HERE

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GOOD BRAND VS. BAD BRAND 🥊

BAD BRAND: W by JAKE PAUL 📉

Jake Paul is one of the most divisive figures of our time. As a fellow man born in Ohio, named Jake, I can’t help but feel some loose connection with a midwest bro trying to make it in this crazy world (LOL)

He’s successfully transitioned from a YouTuber into a true athletic success story, winning 9 of his 10 sanctioned boxing matches, and is slated to receive a massive payday for his upcoming boxing match with 58-year old Mike Tyson.

And now he’s following in his brother Logan Paul (creator of Prime energy) and launching his own CPG brand: W.

W is a men’s focused body care brand, boasting body wash and antiperspirants as its debut SKUs. The venture is backed by Anti Fund, a venture capital group for ‘pioneers and rebels’

W is not going DTC, rather they are launching exclusively in Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer.

Paul claims to be integral to the creation of the brand, after analyzing store shelves and seeing that the same category leaders have dominated the marketplace for decades (Old Spice, Axe, etc.) and he is hoping to disrupt by creating a brand for “winners”

“It’s just wild to me that a brand has never been built around winning, or just like being a winner in general,” — Jake Paul

My qualms with the brand stem from how tasteless and dull the packaging is, and my disagreement with the premise that no brand has been built around winning.

Nike, for example, pillared their entire brand ethos around creating products to help athletes win for decades. Gatorade, albeit probably not that great of a drink, has tied themselves inextricably to helping performance.

Brands have been built around helping people win since modern brand marketing began. There’s not a whitespace to fill there.

The packaging is so dull, hypermasculine, and nearly illegible. The more I stare at the “W” the more it reminds me of the cover of a horrible post-punk band logo.

Its 2024: are men so dumb we need to be force fed products made just for us? Are Gen Z men so tragically uncomfortable with their own masculinity, we need to purchase soap ‘for winners’ to feel something?

The art direction for the launch campaign is also so lazy. Putting Jake Paul in a locker room? So genius…

I can promise you, fellas: bring a girl home and if she sees the full range of Jake Pauls brand in the shower she’s making an excuse to leave.

To add insult to injury, Paul’s business record isn’t exactly as clean as the soap. He’s been fined by the SEC for promoting a crypto scam, and received a ton of backlash for his course on how to become an influencer.

BAD BRAND!

GOOD BRAND: Salt & Stone 🧴

My personal favorite body wash brand is Salt & Stone.

Created former professional snowboarder Nima Jalali, Salt & Stone has created a tasteful product that has great ingredients and impeccable creative.

The packaging is minimal and gives you a window into the soap’s color. I’ve also always appreciated the pump design.

The creative direction by Sarah Rados has consistently evoked a sense of cleanliness and freshness that bleeds throughout the incredible product photography by Michael Kazimierczuk.

michaelkazimierczuk

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And the brand just launched their first Times Square ad—

sararararados

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Salt & Stone is a perfect example of a body care brand with taste, that is targeting a consumer with more money to spend on exemplary products. Perfection.

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NEWS

• Apple has a serious taste problem. The companies new AI tools, like generative emojis, and an image playground threaten the clean, controlled design that has been a hallmark of the companies style since Steve Jobs comeback in the late 90s and up until his death. We can all agree gen-AI tools like Dall-E can create some incredible imagery if you know how to prompt, but the vast majority of consumers do not, and the imagery they create will be a burden on our society.

  Jobs once said Microsoft had no taste—

“They don't bring much culture into their products... Their products have no spirit to them... they are very pedestrian.” - Steve Jobs

And now Apple, nearly thirty years later, find themselves in the same predicament. By giving into the GenAI trend (and receiving a healthy stock boost because of it) they risk losing the design ethos that catapulted them to success.

Jobs said of consumers—

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

Apple’s approach should feel controlled, innovative, and tasteful. Giving into the trends of today risk putting the company at a major disadvantage: looking like everyone else, and everyone else looks bad.

• Vogue wrote about the top 5 spas in NYC. This list is pretty incredible. I’ve never been to a spa and don’t know what its like to be pampered. But I’d love to explore this world. If you’re an NYC based spa brand… email me.

  

• NYC is experiencing a retail revival. GQ wrote about the changing NYC retail scene. With the closure of stores like Opening Ceremony and Barney’s retail has scattered into little pockets throughout the city. Places like Orchard St. are lined with smaller stores each catering to their own demo. Colbo, Awake, Luke’s, Fugazi, Bode, and more all call this corner of town home. I love this story and the ever evolving NYC retail scene, and the cute photos of the store employees are a nice touch. Makes me want to go shopping 🛍️

GOTTA GET ON A MEETING!!! BYE!!!

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Jake Bell is a content marketing, creative strategist, and designer based in NYC. He specializes in brand building, content creation, branding, art direction, creative strategy, and making things cool.

Want to chat? Email me: jake@jb.studio