BACKGROUD
Craighill is a Brooklyn design brand making everyday objects like brass keyrings, desk knives, metal puzzles and scissors, and their YouTube channel has passed 120 million total views, which is a number you'd expect from a media company and not from a small studio that started out selling a keyring made from one loop of brass wire.
Hunter Craighill launched the brand at the end of 2015 after leading product development at Best Made Co., and he brought in his college friend Zach Fried in January 2016, who at the time was playing in a band and renting people apartments. Hunter was the one who could get things made, and Zach was the one asking every question about how and why, which ended up becoming the whole brand. Their stated mission is helping people understand how things are made by encouraging them to ask questions.
Most brands in the well-designed objects space sell on looks, with a nice photo and a short product description, so you never find out why the thing is shaped the way it is. Craighill went the other way and made the reasoning behind every product the thing they sell, and they got there through video, which is something both founders were scared of doing.
Move 1:
They made founder-led videos even though it scared them
A few years into the business, they could see their growth was going to hit a ceiling, and a friend told Zach the way past it was building a community online by making videos. Neither founder wanted to do it, and Hunter has said it felt like learning a new sport where you don't know what you don't know. However, Zach treated that fear as the reason to do it, because if they were that afraid of it, most other small brands were too, which meant very few of them would ever show up.
Evidence: Their scissors video hit 2.3 million views, a Short about a desk pad hit 2.2 million, and a measuring tool Short crossed 1 million
Why it works: People trust people; having a face to the designs builds more trust.
Move 2:
They explain the flaws with existing products
Hunter doesn't just show the product; he walks you through how it works, where they took inspiration from older designs or completely different fields, what they love and hate about the versions you can already buy, and how they combined all of that into something new. The videos cover things like four-bar linkages and wave springs, and their scissors video is literally titled "Why most scissors suck (and how we fixed it)."
Evidence: Craighill calls these "little justified decisions": a corner radius, a material choice, the exact pattern of a dimple on a surface, each one deliberate and each one defensible.
Move 3:
They let the story pre-sell new products
Because their audience already cares about the thinking behind the products, Craighill can launch new mechanical puzzles through crowdfunding and have people pay before the product exists. The Tycho puzzle went to Kickstarter in 2019 with a small goal and blew past it.
TAKEAWAYS:
Put the person who designed the product on camera. The person who can explain why every part is the way it is will always beat a spokesperson.
Explain what's wrong with the existing version. Show what you love and hate about what's already on the market, then show how your version fixes it.
Turn your small design choices into content. Every material, shape and detail you argued about internally is a video your customers have never seen.
Start the channel you're scared to start. If it makes you uncomfortable, it probably makes your competitors uncomfortable too, which means the space is open.
Use your audience to fund launches. Once people care about how you think, pre-sell the next product to them before you make it.
One-line takeaway: “Storytelling is the single most powerful tool a small business can use to grow and build a loyal customer base”
Until next week,
BTB - AMAY
