Showing Exactly How I Came Up With The Brand Idea from Scratch before Launch - Doc the Journey Ep 35

Yo, back with episode 35 of document the Journey, I actually thought for once. I've been talking about it repeatedly for ages. Don't know what you can see on the screen. I should actually do some screen share and do some different shit and not just ramble aimlessly to the computer. Even though that is also what I'm doing. Are we actually recording? Yeah, we are. Cool. I thought I'd walk through some like design shit because this ain't gonna be like a design lesson at all. It's not gonna be that in depth either. I've also got front facing camera for once because I for some reason didn't set up properly. So I'm really distracted by the fact I can see myself on here, but also on here. Yeah, I thought I'd talk you through how the fuck I like came up with the brand visuals and shit originally because I think a lot of people have kind of mentioned that and they say that I'm good at designing and shit, which I kind of agree with because I've got decent eye. Over the years I'm screen sharing. So I'm panicking about what I'm fucking showing on screen now. But this is basically, I guess, where it all started. I always kind of. This is where my entire E Comm career started in the sense that in Adobe Illustrator I used to come up with logos and that was my first foray into brand building was designing a logo which isn't really a brand, it's just a visual identity. But I think that kind of is what most people mean when they say a brand. It's a visual identity, what it looks like, sounds like what the product is, etc. And I used to always just start with a name and a. An icon really. I mean, I think I've shared before. I kind of literally. Will I go back to the actual brainstorming. Let me see one sec. Archive brainstorming. Yeah. This is where like probably I literally. I don't know what's in these documents. I'm kind of scared to open them. But this is where it actually fully started when I say I sat down with a blank piece of paper. The piece of paper was a Google Doc, October 2021. This says August. I must have probably first made it in August. But yeah, it was originally gonna be a fucking teeth whitening brand, which I think I've mentioned on the POD a few times, which would have been terrible idea. So don't give a shit about that. I'm glad I pivoted. It was kind of funny. Looking back I've actually got videos of me stacking. Not stacking, like packing fucking teeth whitening tablets. Cause I was gonna base it on this brand I'd seen in America. And it's kind of mad that I was going down that route and how different things are now. Maybe I'll like put some dramatic emotional montage of like old footage together when I was propping the trenches after everything went wrong with the previous business. And then I went back to the drawing board. But yeah, this is the. This is. This is like where I started. So it's fucking document, obviously. Literally just brainstorming names. Space, I decided was broadly something to do with space was quite cool because I think I liked it because it was, you know, space as in like the fucking universe relates to all that obviously, like planets and shit, like utopian, like, I don't know, aspirational, but also space in like clean. I don't know, it just, it seemed to work. Something to do with space and sexy sustainable wellness products was kind of what I was running with. I don't know what's on here. Should I share all this? There's probably some weird shit. I don't know. Yeah, this is just. I'm gonna go through all this in detail, but this is where I started. I just coming up with a broad idea of what it might be. And I think, yeah, what was in here? I was referring to this brand. I was gonna do something to do with teeth whining basically. But that's kind of broadly where it started. There's a lot of other stuff in here. Brand three. And then like this was probably a bit more defined. I've actually looked at this in a fucking long time. I say that that's about Yuga, nearly Yuga. What is space goods? Obviously at this point I come with space goods, the mental wellness brand, the next generation wireless brand, blah, blah, blah. So this is before I launched and I decided I was gonna go into the mushroom space. You know, just general points, what it was gonna be. This is my general consensus. You know, I didn't want to do medicinal products. I wanted to do stuff that was like, enjoyable. So you get the idea. I mean, fucking pause it and read it if you want, but these were just literally, yeah, just notes I was writing down, coming up with stuff that. Oh, there's probably some good shit in there. Yeah, I don't know what's in here. I haven't looked at this for a long time. But if you really want to read it, pause it. This was kind of the way I was thinking. And I've just fucking realized I wasn't recording on this camera at all. So it's going to run with this one. But yeah, that's what I was thinking. And then coming into here, we actually recording. Yeah, fine. Yeah. This was the first logo I came up with basically for space. What became Space Goods, obviously, like very different font. It was a. It doesn't match the brand. Like this was some idea I was rolling with. And then I'm just gonna speed it along. This was like a second version. These are all the versions I saved. It was slightly more edgy, I guess. I then started playing around with colors. I like the idea of purple. I mean, this looks a bit shit. Looking back, it's funny how things can progress so quickly. And then this is where I kind of went with the pink. And then the pink and purple gradient, which seems to have stuck from this point. And then obviously very different font, etc. Then I got to this point says September 2021, where this is pretty much what it is now. I didn't have an icon though. I was gonna just go with like, SG is like the. The logo icon form with the logo rather than the word. Then I started playing around with these. I think I went on like. I just made some shapes. And yeah, this is quite cool because this was literally how this shape came to be. Just started with a circle and a fucking curved thing. And then I was like, I saw that and I instantly thought, wow, that's the one. I don't know why it just clicked outer. I think I was playing around with a different name at one point. That's kind of weird. It was gonna be outer space. And then I got rid of the space. But yeah, the reason I like this in the end was because first I'm obsessed with circular logos. All my previous stuff's been circular. If you've seen like Midnight City in Neon beach and stuff I did before that, including Dusk clothing brand, they all have a circular theme. But then I just. I just thought visually it was strong, basically. And then I guess if you narrow it down, it kind of looks like a planet. It kind of looks like two things coming together. It kind of looks like a circle, which is like whole. But then there's like a. I don't know, the fucking line going through it maybe illustrates like disruption or whatever. I mean, this. Yeah, whatever. There's a lot of fluff in it, but that's kind of how I thought about it. And then I guess this was like the final version I got to. Which is October 2021, just before I started finding a supplier, pretty much. And yeah. And then take you to. And then I start playing around with like, more visual stuff. So like archive. Not this one. My Google Drives. Fucking two and a half terabytes. Yeah. This was the first mood board I did. And this was. This is like after the logo, I think. So. I mean, I should just made this on Pinterest, but you get the idea. It's just this sort of vibe. And this was all what I was kind of aesthetically into before I actually made the brand a real thing. And yeah, I recently made one. One of these actually, like the other day for. I've just revealed that one of the products that's coming, like this sort of pool party vibe for one of the movies that we're working on for a future product which is already in the works. But yeah, like, you get the idea. Like, this is how I think I'm very visual. And obviously I had this kind of broad idea stuff. Came up with the logo, had a few mood board Pinterest ideas that became a guide visually. And obviously from there I came up with fucking Rainbow Dust, as everyone knows, you can see that. Which became. And then you obviously get momentum and like, you pivot and change the. Change what it looks like and add to it over time. And obviously that's what I'm doing now as well. I'm sure the brand will look probably very different in a year's time to what it does now. But then to go on to a bit of like, product design stuff. And I guess this is just packaging design, but the actual process for that. So two new products I'm working on right now, which people would say this may be stupid, obviously, just running with the pouch thing for now. And I've just come up with a very consistent theme across the board of using gradients. I don't know why, I just fucking love gradients. I think it's from like sunsets. I just. It's like neon signs sort of vibe. And yeah, obviously Rainbow Dust was pink to purple. Dream Dust is purple to blue. This obviously green to blue. But then one of the products. Don't know if it's gonna be called Unicorn Dust, by the way. This is like the Midnight Pod colors, I guess, like my favorite. My favorite two color combos. That's the same pink from Rainbow Dust and the logo and the same blue from Dream Dust and also the poor party logo thing, which I've done anything with yet. But it all kind of ties into each other as you can probably tell, but yeah, when I'm coming up with product stuff, I guess this is just like from a visual point, I might make another video actually going through how I actually come up with and what the process is to develop a product that's very different. But I don't think I'll do that in this video. Partly because I don't know what's on my screen that I'd want to share right now if I go and find it in my Google Drive. Whereas everything here feels safe to put on the Internet. So yeah, like I guess having a competency with Illustrator fucking helps because I do. I do all my design work myself. Obviously. Brady does the movies, does some shit as well. But I mean like the core stuff, products, brand, how the website looks. I've always just done it myself and probably weren't forever. But I think that's a great starting point if you're a creative first. I think it's definitely easier to launch a brand. What else did I want to show you? Product, brand. Fuck. Can I show this? This is my fucking Monday board, which I'm forcing myself to use. Yeah, I'm really not that organized. And then I start playing around. I always just have ideas. I love mock ups. I'm a sucker for a good mock up. And obviously knowing how to use Photoshop and so on. This is gonna be. I feel like this could be a perennial seller, which is obviously like, if anyone's not heard that term, basically means like a product that's so good it just sells itself and people keep buying it, which is obviously what you want with any product. I think rainbow dust is kind of like a flagship product. But I had this idea the other day to do a ready to drink version and this is going to be. I just obviously wanted to do the same color can as the pouch because I've never seen that before. Pink to purple gradient, beautiful. Obviously this is a mock up. The idea with this is for it to be a. Essentially an iced rainbow dust in a can and ready to drink. I've been told. The advice I've had off a lot of people and VCs and so on, if I really want to get to that insane potential scale, you've got to be mass market retail. And pouches aren't necessarily the best for that challenge with this will be you kind of. It's pretty specific for retail in a way. Like you ain't gonna. You could sell online and you. We definitely will. When I do it, I'm doing it right now. I'm developing as we speak. But shipping liquid's never that smart. Well, it isn't smart and it would sell a lot better retail. So it's kind of chicken or egg and it's a product built for retail. But, yeah, I'm very excited about that. Obviously, I was just playing around with this. I think this looks fucking sick. I don't know what this would be. People said this looks like an energy drink, and I get that because obviously it's a can. So you don't instantly think like, hot chocolate sort of vibes, but the whole vibe of rainbow dust from the start has been. The packaging looks like it's probably not a chocolate drink. And then the fact it's chocolate is like this weird, like, contradiction. And I don't know, I think. I think it just works. So this color scheme will definitely be like an iced rainbow dust. And yeah, I'm fucking excited about it. But was that an interesting video? I don't know. I just want to put something together, I guess. Right now there's a lot of shit going on. Yeah. I'm really trying to focus more on product than ever before. And I've got two new SKUs in the works, some of which may have been on the screen or not. Others that probably haven't. Yeah, there's more movies in the works. I really want to fucking rent one of these. I think that's like a custom one, but a Lamborghini count. How do you say it? Is it Diablo over counter current Contact or something? The one that's in Wolf of Wall Street? Or is that this one? I don't know. Yeah, that's this one. Be fucking sick to rent that for a movie, but. Maybe I'm just getting carried away, but I do like listening to music and putting this shit on. I even have like a playlist. Well, I have a lot of playlists, but, like, I'll have a playlist of songs that I just find fucking hell revealing. All my Spotify here. That's a bit of a deep one to listen to. I think that was playing when I was in the shower Space brand playlist. I started same time I started playing around with classic song. I don't know if you can hear that, but started playing around with the initial ideas for all this shit. I start making a playlist and I did this for all my brands in the past. A lot of them are just kind of cringy pop songs or whatever, but any song that I hear and I think I just. That is a cool vibe that I want to associate with the Brand I would just add here. And you can see, obviously Day added a lot of them way before the brand launched. I didn't really use it for a while. Starting to add more shit. And that's just the way my brain works. I like visuals and music to understand the vibe of something, and that's what I. That's what helps me design shit and come up with shit. Like, even now, I put on a certain vibe of music. Like, for example, today, seven hours ago, I found this song. I don't know if you can hear this on Loom, by the way. I don't know how it works, but it just has this. You probably can't hear it all. It just had this synth and I heard it and I was like, that has to somehow be associated with a movie, the next movie we make. And I don't know, I'm just very romantic. And that's it there. I don't know if you can hear this. I'll just put in when it goes there. One sec. Yeah, it's just a nice synth. And I was like, fuck, I need to somehow incorporate that. But, yeah, that's how my brain works visually and musically to create what I think is something that is aesthetically cool, which hopefully the brand is. And fuck it, I'm rambling already. I don't know if you can hear this music, but gonna start giving a fucking romantic speech in a minute. Because I can hear it and it's going off. But, yeah, as always, fuck it. I thought it was a bit of a different video to show you a bit behind the scenes of how I think. And maybe I'll do more of these on specific parts of the business. If there's any you want to see, and I'm sure there is, let me know in the comments and I'll actually do a good video next time because I haven't recorded on this camera. I thought it was. I'm just on this one and we're doing a loom. That's nine minutes of fluff. Hope it was remotely interesting. Catch you the next one. As always, space goes to the moon. Cheers for watching the docket. Document the Journey series in a bit.