Building a transformative consumer brand in a saturated market.
The Challenge
The baby market is full of big brand names that dominate the category. How do you break in – and stand apart?
The Approach
Working with their marketing team, we’ve supported everything from social media to email to packaging…to Shark Tank.
The cleanest dirty diaper ever.
Launched mid-pandemic, Kudos set out on a mission to change the way we diaper — in the midst of the world changing how we work, play, shop, and interact.
Founded by a team of MIT-grad diaper engineers, they’ve both built a new way to design the diaper and developed patent-pending DoubleDry Tech to keep baby dry longer. Good for Mama Earth, good for baby.
Even better – they’re the first-to-market in the U.S. to have 100% organic cotton touching baby’s sensitive skin. We began our partnership with them pre-launch and have worked alongside to support the full gamut of their marketing efforts.
Email marketing is an effective way to reach the loyal Kudos customer. As the mailing list grew and orders rolled in, email had become a mainstay in our marketing quiver. Beyond the initial welcome flow, regular product updates and PR updates funneled out to keep consumers on top of the latest news.
Paired with a robust social media strategy, coordinated email blasts provided auxiliary support and ensured our target audience had Kudos in every inbox. Real-time data and analytics from our email marketing platform gave the Kudos team even more insight into their customers’ behaviors and motivations. This omni-channel reporting led to key insights and logistical improvements for Kudos, allowing them to expand the business and get more diapers and wipes into the hands of parents nationwide.
Content creation has always been a large part of the Kudos brand. The early days of Kudos focused heavily on illustration and stop motion photography using the product. As the brand matured, having a library of parents and babies interacting with and wearing the product was more important than ever.
What’s that translate to? You need a whole library of babies – diverse in age, size, ethnicity. Kudos for everyone. We worked with local parents to create shoots capturing just that. These photos and reel snippets are used in social campaigns, emails, the website, and more.
100% cotton truly is revolutionary, and this difference resonated with parents. This was the big value proposition that really spoke to those who were already leaning into a more natural option, and the DoubleDry™ tech leak-preventing aspect locked them in. An animated video was a great solution to communicate these differences quickly and effectively while reinforcing the brand.
Additionally, 3D animations were developed for use on the website (and made their way onto the Shark Tank big screen) to dive in and highlight how materials and the product technology works.
Kudos launched as an online-only product, but that didn’t mean packaging was less important. The unboxing experience coupled with a need to position Kudos as a premium product relied heavily on the packaging. We worked with the team to develop packaging for diapers, wipes, and the shipping box. Brand touchpoints, including custom tissue paper, inserts, and sticker sheets were key to developing a delightful first experience for the user and an unforgettable introduction to the brand.
Today, we’re considering how packaging can live on shelf and in store. How it can stand out among that sea of other diaper brands, get its ‘cotton first’ messaging front and center, and make an impact to convert the curious shopper into a loyal customer at a quick glance.
Kudos is all about play, and a robust illustration system has been developed to use brand-wide. Illustration is such a powerful way to add fun while simultaneously supplementing as an explainer tool. Custom iconography was also developed to live alongside copy and deliver a key selling point in a way that is both fun and engaging for all ages. These illustrations adorn everything from stickers and social media posts to product flyers and trade show materials and infographics.
One of the major deployments of the Kudos illustrations was in setting up those initial email flows. These styles continue to be used across materials as appropriate and are continuously being built upon to shore up an ever-evolving, omni-channel marketing and brand strategy that has grown alongside its loyal clientele.
In tandem with Kudos’ pay-per-click and digital ad agency, we provide creative support through ad design so that their team can perform date-driven A/B tests across several platforms. These were tweaked and perfected as engagement and conversion rates became available to us. Once data and results become available, we join the strategy fray with teams to tweak and perfect ads to ensure optimal performance for ones that are working and create learning opportunities for the ones that aren’t.
To help shore up the data through the entirety of the sales funnel, we create custom, purposeful landing pages for digital ad campaigns that drive conversion through engaging content and hyper-focused call to action that turn clicks into diaper sales.
Fast-forward to late 2022. Kudos is catching some serious traction, diapers and wipes are selling out, and the biggest problem is keeping products in stock. We’d been talking about Kudos internally, and a team member mentioned they were the perfect Shark Tank brand. It was brought up on our weekly call.
“Actually…we’re talking to Shark Tank now.”
Shark Tank had reached out to Kudos.
We spent the next few months preparing set design, posts, and communication materials in anticipation of them making it to film – and then making it to air. As it turns out, not everyone who films makes it to the big screen.
Kudos aired on Shark Tank in January 2022 and has re-aired three times since. See the full episode here!
