"Well Made": You Need to Have a Reason Why Something Should Exist feat. Stephen Ango

Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

Society and Audience Connection

• There’s a difference in connection with audiences—connection through logic (written) and connection through emotion (art).
• On emotional connection: “...when it connects with somebody, it deepens the experience of the things you’re trying to say through words.” - Phillip Jackson
• Lumi is a software company connecting packaging manufacturers to brands and creating lasting relationships between those brands and manufacturers.
• Not only has COVID-19 affected manufacturing, but there’s a generational gap between manufacturers and brands. Lumi is bridging that gap.
• “I feel like we’re going to be in this golden age of business as performance art, where people are doing things that don’t make sense, but they’re doing it on a large scale when it comes to marketing.” - Stephan Ango

Tools with Soul

• “How do you create, give your company a soul, give your thing that you’re doing a soul? That’s very hard. It’s like trying to define why your thing should exist…” - Stephan Ango on what his podcast, Well Made, is trying to define.
• Slash Packaging is a hobby project of Stephan’s—and has helped brands tell the stories around their packaging.
• Slash Packaging isn’t trying to be the source of innovation for packaging, but they do want to build a framework for understanding what the more sustainable options are in your industry.
• “I want people to learn how to think about other ways that tools can be used so that they could find creative uses of these tools to expand all of our understanding and imagination and our horizons.” - Phillip Jackson
• “This idea of default, the idea of sampling, the idea of ubiquity in the tools that we use has created other problems that weren’t easy to anticipate and I think harder to solve for, which leaves room for challengers.” - Phillip Jackson

Links

• Listen to Well Made.
• Check out Lumi’s status tracker for their factories.
• Check out Slash Packaging.

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