Why Is Flamingo Estate So Thirsty? 🍅

Plus a ton of layout design inspiration...

In Today’s Newsletter—

• Flamingo Estate’s Thirsty Copy

• Luxury Markets Continued Pain

• Top 10 AI Startups to Watch + the One with the Best Branding

• Layout Design Moodboard Spill

• Would You Dump Your Boyfriend for a Chatbot?

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NEWS 🗞️

• Flamingo Estate’s marketing copy is taking a thirsty turn. Your rich friend’s favorite place to buy a tomato scented candle, Flamingo Estate, has taken a noticeably thirsty direction for their copy across web, email, and social, according to Philip Jackson from Future Commerce. Take a look at this graphic he put together—

  

  And design genius, Elizabeth Goodspeed, noted a recent email that alluded to increased Ozempic usage with the subject line ‘Look How Small We Got!’ to promote their new mini-sets. Capturing attention in the email inbox is hard, so I get why they are using more divisive copy in the subject lines. We’ve seen other DTC brands use a similar strategy to get email opens. But could Flamingo Estate turning into a horny brand be a slippery slope that could alienate consumers? We’ll see…

• The luxury market is still in a downward spiral. LVMH reported earnings yesterday, showing they had their smallest sales increase since 2009 (excluding 2020)— just 1% compared to the 2.89% analysts expected. Whether it be economic insecurity or changing tastes, consumers are simply spending less on luxury goods from major brands. And LVMH is by far the least affected of the luxury conglomerates, other companies like Kering are feeling the pain even more. This was supposed to be the roaring ‘20s, but rising inflation, high interest rates, and global instability had other plans.

• Would You Dump Your Boyfriend for an AI Chatbot? When you think of who is spending hours on end flirting with an AI chatbot, the classic incel bro comes to mind. But Axios reports that, surprisingly, women are also spending more time using romantic AI chatbots. Overall, the this emerging market is growing, Andreseen Horowitz named 8 of these apps on their ‘Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps’ list, and report that average usage of these companion apps is 10x the usage of normal assistant apps. Founders of companion apps claim their value proposition is to augment human interaction, claiming they “… aims to fill gaps where human interaction might be unavailable, like late-night conversations or role-playing scenarios.” A record 53% of Gen Z say they often feel lonely, driven partially by the rise of social media, remote work, and a lack of ‘third places’ to commune with peers. While some are combatting this by joining run clubs, playing poker, or a (oh god) climbing gym, others are just simply supplementing real human interaction with AI. Slippery slope… just curious—

• Bloomberg Released their Top 10 AI Startups to Watch. To no one’s surprise, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI led the list. But I do want to highlight one that is doing an incredible job at branding: Perplexity. While AI could come across as really nerdy, Perplexity has taken a more thoughtful approach to their branding and design. I really appreciate the retro, surrealist aesthetic their design team uses across their social graphics—

When every AI chatbot feels the same, brand will be a key differentiating factor in which products come out on top, and Perplexity is taking a thoughtful approach to brand marketing that feels human and interesting.

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LAYOUT DESIGN MOODBOARD ✨

Use these images (directly from my reference vault) for inspiration on how to arrange your next design project.

An interesting layout can go a long way in getting attention, and thoughtfully arranging nuanced copy and info with imagery and graphics.

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

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