Creative Weapon Brief: Issue No. 08

I am at war with product positioning right now. RAAHHHHHHH

If you caught my reel last week you already know the setup. Two brands, both slinging sunscreen. One did $5M last year. The other did $100M.

Same SPF. Same aisle. A 20x gap.

That gap has been living in my head rent free, so this issue is the full autopsy. And I promise it will change how you look at whatever product you are building or selling.

Before I pulled a single number, my money was on Vacation.

If you have spent any time in the DTC corner of the internet, you know them. "The world's best-smelling sunscreen." Elite 80s country club nostalgia. And the whipped sunscreen that comes out of an actual whipped cream can... that product had a chokehold on every brand designer's group chat, mine included.

So I did what I always do. Tapped into Particl through Claude to see what all that heat actually converts into.

About $5M in the last year.

Respectable. Real business. But here is the part that made me sit up. The whipped can, arguably the most viral sunscreen product of the decade, is not even in their top 5 best sellers !!????

For every founder reading this: virality and revenue keep two different scoreboards.

Then you go look at Supergoop.

Roughly $100M over the last twelve months.

But the number that actually broke my brain was the winter. They did $10M in the thick of the winter months…. ❄️❄️❄️

A sunscreen brand. Printing money in January.

Sit with that for a wee bit, because every dollar in that winter chart is a positioning story.

The lazy read here is "Supergoop just has better marketing." Wrong. Vacation's marketing might honestly be better.

The real difference is the question each brand built itself to answer.

Vacation asked: how do we make people love buying sunscreen? And they nailed it. The nostalgia, the packaging, the fake corporate org chart, the whipped can. World class brand building, genuinely some of the best in DTC.

Supergoop asked a heavier question: how do we get people to wear SPF every single day?

That question has a backstory. Founder Holly Thaggard started the brand after a close friend was diagnosed with skin cancer. So from day one, she built SPF as a daily skincare step. The thing that goes on after your moisturizer, every morning, so you stay out of the dermatologist's office.

And you can see the positioning in the content. Vacation entertains you. Supergoop educates you. UV coming through your car window, incidental exposure on your walk to lunch, why you reapply at your desk. Every piece of education hands you one more reason to wear it on a random Tuesday in February.

Vibes give people a reason to buy once. Education gives people a reason to use it daily. And usage is where the compounding lives.

Here is the part I want you to steal, because this is the actual mechanism.

Position sunscreen as a beach product, and your customer needs you maybe 15 days a year.

Position it as a skincare step, and they need you 365.

Then look at the category you just walked into. Sunscreen is about a $5B market. But a daily SPF that lives next to your moisturizer is competing in skincare, and skincare is a $20B market.

Same active ingredients. One positioning decision. The ceiling moved by an order of magnitude. That winter revenue chart up top is the receipt. January sales are proof the positioning took.

I want to be clear, because the internet loves crowning losers and Vacation is not one. They own their lane completely, the brand is a masterclass, and I would frame their packaging on my wall.

But they made a positioning choice, and that choice set their ceiling. Summer fun is a seasonal occasion in a $5B category. Daily skincare is a 365-day habit in a $20B one.

Branding decides how people feel at the shelf. Positioning decides how often they come back to it.

So if you are chasing the $100M version of anything, you need two things before the logo, before the packaging, before a single ad:

These are the three questions I run on every brand now, client work or my own rabbit holes. Steal them please =)

1. The frequency question. How many days a year does your customer have a real reason to reach for this? If the honest answer is under 30, your positioning is capping you, no matter how beautiful the branding is.

2. The category question. What market do your price, your format, and your content actually place you in? Vacation sits in sunscreen. Supergoop moved in next to the moisturizer. You get to pick your neighbor on the shelf, and that neighbor decides your ceiling.

3. The reason question. What is the deeper reason someone uses this daily? For Supergoop it is "so you dont get skin cancer." When the daily reason is real, the education content writes itself, and education is what turns a purchase into a habit.

This prompt runs the exact Supergoop move on your own product. Copy it, fill the brackets, run it in Claude:

Run this before your next rebrand conversation. Most brands reach for a new logo when the actual problem is how many days a year they matter to the customer.

And to close out another brief, the weekly word from The Muse himself, Rick Rubin:

Til next time soldier,
Carson

P.S. I throw punches at these pixels daily and I'm trying to figure out this YouTube thing... plz show some love over there »»» Subscribe to the YouTube channel.

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