Full creative system for a category-redefining nootropic pre-workout. Brand identity, paid ad creative, landing pages, post-purchase comms, route-routing quiz funnel. End-to-end. No agency, no in-house team.
SmartSups was launching a nootropic pre-workout for high performers. Lifters who want focus and output without the stim-stacker rage. UNHINGE needed to feel premium and earned without ever using the word "nootropic" on the can.
Differentiation in a commoditized category. Pre-workout is saturated. Most competitors lean dark, masc, edgy, in a way that signals commodity stim. The visual language, the tone, the offer mechanics all converge. Standing out meant building a brand that didn't sound like the category, look like the category, or sell like the category, while still cueing "this is a serious pre-workout" within a 320px feed thumbnail.
Profitable on first purchase. No LTV-funded loss-leader plays. The unit economics had to clear cold-traffic CAC on the first transaction. Every static, every video, every LP, every offer page tuned around a contribution-margin-positive first sale. That ruled out the category-default discount avalanche and forced the work to do its own selling.
I built and shipped the full creative stack. Brand identity, packaging, paid ad creative, landing pages, post-purchase comms, and the quiz-driven funnel that routes cold traffic to the right SKU. End to end. Same person built the rails and directed the work that ran on them.
Clinical-paper aesthetic. Two greens by surface. Teal for commerce, forest for editorial. Cylindrical bottle, real logo lockup integrated through reference compositing. Long-shadow editorial lighting. The whole identity is built to read as "serious supplement" on a 320px feed thumbnail.
Five rounds across two color systems and three typographic directions. From bold-aggressive to clean-modern, each pass landed closer to the brief: shelf impact, clear benefit communication, premium finish.
Four hero statics. Four distinct angles into the same TAM: taste-led hero, value comparison, 2-scoop mechanism, and "peaks at 40" for older lifters. Designed brief-first in a Figma → GPT Image 2 pipeline that takes copy and crop iteration from days to minutes.
Three AI-animated video ads in Kling and Runway. Caffeine-ritual cold-open, brain-fog category callout, "evil pre" positioning piece. Treated as real director work. Scripted, shot-listed, animated, color-graded. BOF retargeting role on cold paid Meta.
Cold traffic lands on the route-routing quiz at /pages/find-your-edge, classifies into the right SKU lane in 90 seconds, and routes to the offer page. Mid-funnel a click-through transparency LP carries the 16-ingredient mechanism. Built on Shopify with raw HTML/CSS/JS pages and route-conditional offers.
Five-email Welcome flow on a Clinical Paper chassis. E1 onboards. E3 substitutes the rest of the stack. E4 maps Day 1 to Month 3. E5 closes with the honest-math reframe on cost-per-serve. The flow is the bridge from first-purchase profitability to repeat purchase.
12 weeks, end to end. Four statics, three video ads, six LP variants, route-routing quiz engine, post-purchase Klaviyo flows. The Welcome v2 flow built on this chassis is currently running at A$103 AOV on mobile with a 6.76% submit rate on the quiz popup. Cold-traffic acquisition is profitable on first purchase, the constraint we set going in.
Window: 30-day post-launch, mobile cohort, mid-four-figure daily spend on Meta. Account-level numbers (full-funnel ROAS, MER, blended CAC) available on request.