How You Can Turn Everyday Products into Market Giants

Newsletter · Sep 22, 2024

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An entrepreneur's recipe for sweet success

3min Read

How many pickle brands can you name off the top of your head?

When I thought about this, I came up with one…

There's 5 big pickle companies in the US with $25M revenue or more and yet, I can’t even remember their names.

This is a problem… well, for them it is.

What this really is, is an opportunity.

It’s a gap in the market that Jesse Itzler noticed.

Jesse Itzler is in the pickle game and coming in hot.

If you don’t know Itzler, go check him out. He’s a rock star of an entrepreneur. A scrappy dude from New York who went from rapping jingles for sports teams to founding a private jet company (Marquis Jet) and then selling it to Warren Buffett.

He’s brilliant to say the least.

But this ability to take a product that already exists and “brand it” into something incredible is nothing new for Itzler.

Have you ever had Zico Coconut Water?

That was Itzler’s company.

He saw an emerging trend and realized what some “strategic branding” could do to a product that people already enjoyed.

And now he’s about to do it again. With Pickles.

There’s two common paths of entrepreneurship for start ups:

Create an entirely new product / service that doesn’t exist
Making an existing product / service better

But in this pickle journey, and with Zico, Jesse discovered a third path; building a brand around a product or service that already exists, but isn’t marketed well.

Essentially reverse engineering and starting with the end in mind. Building the business first through the BRAND and then through the product.

The beautiful simplicity of his entrepreneurship is so cool!

This simple framework can be applied to anything! Check it out.

Ideal scenario:

The product already exists
People like it
It doesn’t have a brand that people know or want to follow.
Maybe it’s an older brand that hasn’t changed in years.
Or even a company that once had a good name, but has been since forgotten.

THAT is what you want to look for.

Let’s take a look at some examples using this framework and then one real life example of someone (not Itzler) doing this exact same thing and making MILLIONS.

For any of these, can you name more than one brand that sells these items? If you can, have they marketed anything new or branded differently in the past 20 years?

Honey
Apple cider vinegar
Baking soda
Handcrafted soap
Rubber bands
Canned goods (beans, veggies, etc.)
Spices and seasonings
Flour and grain products
Frozen vegetables
Reusable containers

🤔

Real Life Example:

Kettle & Fire has an estimated revenue of $15M/yr. Maybe even more. It’s a bone broth company.🤯

They started in 2015 realizing the same thing that Jesse Itzler did with Zico and now with pickles. People use it, they like it, they trust it, but there isn’t some brand that dominates.

Now there is.

Take away:

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

You don’t even have to come up with a NEW wheel.

There’s wheels out there ALREADY that just haven’t been branded properly. Use those.

If you like one of these ideas and end up taking action on them, let me know. I'd love to help. At the minimum, I'd love to share your story or even interview you for a podcast I'm about to launch. More on that to come!

Until next time...

Stay in the fight,

My best tweet of the week: