Creative Weapon Brief: Issue No. 05

**I have let you all down by being a day late on this!! I had plans to write and send late afternoon yesterday but my girlfriend had other ideas and threw a surprise bday party for me…. (it was a blast)

So after a few tequila sodas I no longer had brain power to complete the task at hand. IM SO SORRY!**

A few weeks ago I had one of my more odd brand ideas. Bath bombs… for men.

Don’t ask how I got there.. My brain has some sickness of trying to reposition every random product I see.

But that dumb little idea sent me down a rabbit hole, and I discovered the brand FLEWD. An epsom salt bath soak brand.

So being the pocket watcher I am… I tapped in with my Particl connector in Claude to see behind the curtain and dig up some revenue figures.

Tbh I was NOT expecting the numbers that came back…

FLEWD did $116M in the last 365 days…. $10.5M in the last 4 weeks alone.

And let’s not forget the product we are talking about here.

Magnesium. Cut into little foil packets. Named after feelings. For $9 a packet.

That is the whole product.

Then I pulled the rest of the categories numbers and it got even more appealing to build a brand in this space.

In the last 30 days the ENTIRE direct-to-consumer bath soak category did about $20M.

FLEWD was $19.7M of it. The brand in second place, Primally Pure, did twenty five THOUSAND dollars.

That is not a typo hahahaha. FLEWD doesnt really have a competitor. And they are branded to only speak to a segment of the market.

Do some digging on almost any other bath soak brand you’ll see:

And don’t get me wrong.. the above critiques do not stop Dr. Teal's from doing hundreds of millions a year on the retail shelfs.

But nobody carried that demand into the DTC channel with an actual brand on top of it… until FLEWD.

Yes FLEWD did a great job of rebranding a boring category with their packaging, messaging, and direct targeting.

But where those massive numbers come from is how they push their product as a routine. Not just a one off bath when your feet are sore.

FLEWD changed the format & frequency. (This is another elite counter positioning lever you can pull).

Regular bath salt is a $5 sack that lives under your sink. You scoop from it maybe twice a year, you forget who made it the second its in the cart, and you rebuy… basically never.

I literally have the same bag of epsom salt I bought 2 years ago and it just sits in my bathroom cabinet. Btw does that shit expire???

But generally it’s a brutal business. Low ticket, zero loyalty, no high re-purchase volume.

FLEWD took the exact same magnesium and cut it into single-serve foil packets. One packet, one bath = $9. That tiny change quietly turns a bath product into a supplement.

Think about how you treat a supplement. Its a dose. Its a ritual. You take one when you need it, you watch the box empty, you reorder. You subscribe.

Instead of their "insomnia ending" packet being just a scent, it’s actually a dose you take for a problem, exactly like the other supplements in your cabinet.

That is the real sauce. Same salt. Completely different business. One is a $5 sale that happens once. The other is a $9 habit that reorders forever.

Bath soaks sit around $3B today, projected to hit $4.3B by 2033. And magnesium for sleep and stress is on basically every 2026 wellness trend list.

Now lets double click down into the supplement aisle. There is a version of magnesium for men, for women, for athletes, for kids, for sleep, for focus.

Bath soaks are barely past version one.

FLEWD proved people will happily hand over $9 for a packet of it. The ingredient is hot, the demand is printing, and the category has exactly ONE real brand standing in it.

1. The shower play. A massive chunk of people who'd buy this don’t have a tub, or never touch the one they have. Nobody has built a real magnesium stress product for the shower. A steamer, a wash, something that hangs off the head??

2. The men's play. FLEWD is pastel, soft, cramp-coded. That site would never reach the algorithm for a different persona. Those "rage squashing" names are BEGGING for a charcoal-packaged sibling brand. No flowers. Post-gym. Sits next to the protein, not the bath caddy.

3. The blue-collar recovery play. Who is making the magnesium soak for the guy who wrecked his back on a ten-hour shift? Nobody. Same magnesium, pointed at the job site instead of the spa day.

4. The outdoor / athlete play. The mountain biker who just bombed a trail and is gonna be wrecked tomorrow. The trail runner. Recovery positioning, gym-bag size, packaging that looks like it belongs in a truck bed.

Same magnesium. Different person. THAT is a brand.

The last few weeks I gave you prompts to FIND the white space. This one does something a tad sharper.

It takes a category that already has a dominant winner and finds the lanes that winner structurally CANNOT serve.

Copy and edit this:

Run this on any category with one obvious king.

Or pay attention to products that are crushing but only in one channel. Retail is locked up… but who is crushing epsom salts on TikTok shop???

If any of this info got you hungry to actually start a brand, and you want to test a small batch of magnesium soak asap:

Alibaba: Pre-filtered magnesium bath soak suppliers, Trade Assurance + Gold Suppliers only

Pietra** (paid plan needed): vetted small-batch manufacturers, lower friction if you'd rather not wrangle Alibaba

^This is the beginner entry level version of this & if you want to really go big and create your own salt mix, there are formulators all over the US that can help you out.

Search “small batch supplement manufacturing” and start ripping some emails to get quotes for samples.

And for the weekly quote we are back with the creative whisperer, DOUBLE R.

Till next time soldier,

Carson

P.S. If you made it this far, here is my weekly beg to subscribe to my brand new YouTube channel. !!!!!

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