Branding for the AI Era: How Herman Scheer Designs Products That Stand Out in a Crowded Digital World

0:00It has to be anchored to a human truth, a real insight, hitting on an emotional cue that this brand can authentically speak to. What if the secret to building a wildly successful brand isn't the science behind the product, but how you tell the story? John Scheer co-founded Herman Scheer right out of college and built it into the go-to creative agency for high-growth startups looking to make a massive cultural impact. By working with brands that could actually make a difference in helping people live healthier, happier lives, that's where we went all in. Helping founders strategize on their brands, whether they're in their earliest inception or on the verge of being acquired, John has helped create beautiful premium human-centric narratives and has had his hand in designing and scaling household names like Olipop, Neuro, AG1, and Native.

0:46Scientific credibility, building trust, and making those the foundations of how you build your brand are paramount for success. He's here today to share how to build a unique brand that stands out in a crowded digital world, why brands must achieve retail readiness far earlier than they used to, and what it really takes to build an agency that influences human behavior. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm your host, Adam Leventer. John, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So you guys have done some incredible work with some big brands that people will definitely recognize, right?

1:23Olipop is one, Native is another. Bobby, Neuro, Bowflex, which is a throwback to the heydays of the Gen X generation. But what was the first, quote unquote, real brand that you represented? The first real brand that we represented, I don't know. I mean, to me, they're all real, just at different stages. And they all represent different buckets from which we are kind of ideal client personas live within. And so Neuro, if those listening aren't familiar, is Functional Gum and Mints. And they were really early stage and had one product, one SKU, and they were selling specifically just direct to consumer.

2:11and what they came to us for was to help position them to get to the next stage of growth, expand beyond just one skew, get into another format of mints. And so we helped reposition them. So setting the foundation for them to grow into and expand their product roadmap and developed an entire design system, identity and packaging strategy for them to be able to meet those goals. And I'm proud to say that now they are, you know, well over$100 million a year business. They're in nationwide retailers. So that's a really fun success story. And the two entrepreneurs, Kent and Ryan, are amazing. And they're also kicking ass on Shopify on their own channels too.

3:03So that's like an exciting zero to one early stage business that we helped work with. And then on the other side, you mentioned Native. So we've been working with them over the past couple of years. And with them, they had such early success as an independent company creating amazing natural self-care products. And then they got purchased by P &G. and as they scaled into that corporation and other startups came in and started chasing after the path that they laid, they needed to find ways to stay relevant and really own their own channel for higher profit margin selling. And so we redid their entire website.

3:50We reshot all of their e-content. We had a 24-day practical shoot to shoot all their SKUs. So those who have run a production know that that's really intense and really proud of that work, continuing to work with them. So, you know, those are kind of two examples of like early stage finding success and then really successful refinding relevancy. And that's kind of the spectrum from which we work with brands. You've been at this for 15 plus years now? Yeah, that's right. And this started what, as a web agency? It started as two naive entrepreneurs avoiding working for the man. And we had complementary skill sets, the Hermann to my sheer and I.

4:33And we just started knocking on doors and asking people if they would want us to help with anything creatively. What were the challenges that brands were facing back in 2010 versus, say, the common challenges today? One of the early theses we had was creating these high-end property showcase videos for for hospitality and real estate. And it was really fun because we got to travel around and film a lot of beautiful properties. But at the time, Instagram wasn't even out yet. And video content was not as prolific and effective means of advertising and marketing as it is now, where now it's content, content, content.

5:18Back then it was, hey, you should think about making a video and leveraging more than just photography to market your product or property in our case. And so we knew we were onto something with that, but the brands couldn't quite leverage it. We were just too early. And when would you say that Instagram has a direct impact on the work that you're doing or the value proposition that you're peddling as an agency? I have found that Instagram and user-generated content, specifically in the world of healthcare, self-care, and well-being that we have really found our footing within, has been one of the most powerful tools because a lot of the brands we work with are regulated in how they can market and what they can and can't say.

6:13but they can leverage consumers to say things on their behalf. So, you know, a supplement brand can't say, Hey, this makes you smarter or it's, you know, guaranteed to work. But a consumer can say, this made me feel like I was on a limitless pill all day. You mentioned that you found this niche in health, wellness, and self-care. Was that intentional or is that market driven? It was intentional and it was personal. Both the Herman to my sheer and I, his first name is Chapin. We became members of what we call the sandwich generation where we both got married. funny funnily enough he and i do pretty much everything three months apart uh not even by planning but we got married three months apart we both had children uh three months apart and so when we found ourselves responsible for the health of our partners our children and then our aging parents both of which respectively had to help battle disease we realized that okay let's try and leverage our superpowers to do some good.

7:25And we felt that by working with brands that could actually make a difference in helping people live healthier, happier lives, that's where we went all in on. And it just so happened that we were early enough to capitalize on the market trends that we now believe that every brand should have a health-centric orientation to how they market and message to consumers. Gotcha. So health-centric orientation, but what about personal mission orientation? Do you think that's important today in the age of brand building? Yeah. I mean, it's always, I think consumers appreciate when founders and entrepreneurs have, you know, an authentic personal connection to why they're building the brands that they're building.

8:14and it always feels better to buy and support and buy into brands that are doing that. So for sure. Let's talk about the impact of artificial intelligence, specifically on the way that consumers are now behaving and purchasing or making decisions around purchasing. So in my opinion, we're in a world now where competitive products, services can be spun up in days at a fraction of the cost. Brand equity sort of now becomes, in my opinion, priority number one for a lot of these businesses if they want to scale and differentiate. Do you agree? What's your take on things? For sure. That was our thesis back in 2017 when we decided to go all in on brand building was that, okay, with tools like Shopify and lower customer acquisition costs on Facebook, now Meta, The buried entry to launch and grow a brand and start a product with dropshipping, etc., was so low that brand was the ultimate differentiator in the moat.

9:19And now, like you just said, I think it's even more so and it's doubled down because agentic tools and AI has made the ability to spin up marketing campaigns and suss out ideas has made it even easier. And so I agree that brand now is truly like the last line of defense to differentiate and set yourselves apart for success. So absolutely. And now people are going to ChatGPT or Claude and asking for recommendations on products and services that they should do. And so one of the things that we've been working on and helping brands is how do they show up within these different LLMs? And messaging and how you articulate what your product is needs to be very clear, very descriptive.

10:07and what once was all about kind of more flowery language, that has a place, but specifically on where the LLMs are searching, like you need to be very descriptive to describe what the product is, what the value proposition is in as succinctly and clearly as possible now. Yeah, I think, you know, you raise an important point. In January, Apple just made Gemini their default AI assistant on iPhone. which means that Google's AI now sits effectively between brand and customer and the purchase decision is largely driven by Gemini. So I think this is a huge paradigm shift in the way that consumers are making decisions around what products and services they engage with.

10:53And also on the flip side, it raises sort of the brand equity priority to the forefront on the company side. In your opinion, what are the key pillars of building a brand today versus what they were, say two, three, five years ago? I think today, specifically within health and wellness, it's trust because especially within the supplement category, you can put out an ashwagandha, something or other really easily. And a lot of the supplements out there are snake oil. And also the consumer is far more educated and their health IQ has risen within the last five years way more than it did before and so scientific credibility building trust and making those the kind of foundations of how you build your brand are paramount for success within that industry even with functional foods you know like you saw the studies come out about athletic Greens and even like Poppy got hit up because of their functional claims weren't real.

12:06So yeah, it's interesting. And what you say needs to be backed up by scientific credibility. I would just like to understand how you're thinking about how AI might be impacting your business, right, from the services side. For your company, for Herman Shear, do you see any differences, challenges on the horizon? So to start an engagement, we have these onboarding questionnaires to just start on the same page and understand the history of the business, the product details, things like that. And a lot of people are taking the questions that we're asking and having Claude or GPT or Gemini just answer the questions for them and then send it to us.

12:49And it's just slop and it's incomprehensible. So it's funny because what could and should make this easier onboarding process for folks is actually making it harder for us to get real answers. And so that's just one little micro example of how in a lot of ways it's making things more efficient, but it's also just it gets sloppier. How early do you think a business should be thinking about building a brand? So does this become part of the business model strategy from day one? Do you think that a founder should be developing product and then finding early product market fit first? Do you think there should be certain revenue thresholds that are met before they sort of dive in to brand investment?

13:38Yeah, I'm biased. I have a branding agency, so I take what I say with a grain of salt. But listen, you got it. Table stakes is a great product that people want. So making sure that that's real. But I do believe once the product or service is in a position to provide people with real value and scratch an itch, so to speak, then you got to build a brand. Because you want people to buy into the brand. You don't want them to buy a product. I'll double down on this topic. I would assume from the agency side or from the vendor side that a brand or a company needs to be of a certain size in order to afford you, in order to afford brand strategy expertise.

14:29So unless they're sort of venture backed and they have some early stage capital behind them, I would assume that you have your own ideal client profile and those businesses are of a certain size? Yeah, they're of certain size or those founders have raised capital or saved capital to invest in brand because they share our conviction that that's the biggest differentiator and means to success. So we work with clients at three different inflection points. One is zero to one. So in the case of the absorption company, there's two amazing founders, three amazing founders came to us with this fantastic technology, biotech, called Capsoil, where they were able to make supplements that were five times more absorbable and came to us and said, help us make a brand out of this.

15:33And so we went through our entire process of alignment, strategy, research insights to then naming it, building the identity, all the messaging, all the way through the packaging to the website and all the content. And now within less than three years, they're killing it. Even in the last year, I just spoke with the founders, they've grown a thousand X and over eight figures in revenue. So that's zero to one. And then like we talked about before, helping a lot of businesses that are, let's say, Series A, where they've had some great growth. In the case of Bobby Baby Formula. So we helped them launch.

16:15They came to us with a can and conviction that an organic European-inspired baby formula was going to be really successful in the market. And they were right. And when we launched them, it was crazy. We heard back from Kim, their chief brand officer, and she said, guys, the site is converting at 9%. And so we were thrilled by that. And that was 2021 or early 2022. And then they came back to us last year. And what they had found was a lot of competitors came into the space, a lot of European-inspired formulas. So they kind of set the stage for this new standard of quality and baby formula. And people were chasing after their lunch.

16:55And so they came to us to help regain authority, make sure that their site was performing at its best. and just position them even stronger against all the new incumbents, or sorry, all the new people coming in. So that's another. And then on the latest side is businesses like Native and Bowflex who have been around for decades and now need to find ways to regain relevancy. Because what? Why are they challenged? So Bowflex, for instance, They had built their brand off of jacked late night infomercials of dudes in tank tops sweating or no shirt at all. The fitness world has changed so much since then.

17:44They had done a lot in between, but it became less about aesthetics and more about how you felt in your body. and more of the emotive and mental benefits of exercise than just the physical aesthetics and lean body orientation of fitness. And so that cultural cue, they needed to meet people where they were now. Yeah, I would assume that what we were talking about earlier becomes a real challenge for some of these established brands, right? Like we're in that age where customers wanna know what the personal mission is behind a brand. Oftentimes they want to know who is the original founder, who's the face of the company, who's the CEO.

18:27And if they can't easily find that, because I don't know, Bowflex is 40 plus years old, that's got to be a real challenge for that company, I would assume. It's almost like you have established, you know, incumbent legacy baked into your model and that's working against you. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, when the founders aren't a part of it anymore, the leadership that takes over, they really need to translate that founder's ethos into a philosophy that then permeates the internal culture and then outward facing. And brands like Patagonia have done a really good job of that, where the B Corp and all of the sustainability efforts, helping people buy used Patagonia gear in such an elevated way.

19:14So that's a really good brand example of the founder's not the face of it anymore, but the philosophy that he created now is permeating all the way through. Yeah. Tom Shoes is another B-certified corporation that's an example. I think it's interesting when private or even publicly traded companies can find that charitable angle, right? It's almost like asking a consumer, what not-for-profit charity do you support? I mean, they have to be connected to the mission in order to invest. We're in sort of this age where I think some of the same template applies to the private sector where consumers want to know where their money is going beyond the product, if that makes sense, right?

19:59What is the broader mission? Totally. Yeah. You see it on the political side and on social media, you know, eat the rich and billionaires shouldn't exist. And so I think these for-profit companies, it's in their best interest to find ways to authentically, I hate that word, but it's true, put dollars from their profits towards things that matter and can make a positive difference in the world. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about what the client looks for when they invest in brand strategy. So there are certain elements of marketing and customer acquisition that are directly trackable, measurable. You can attach a KPI to them, right?

20:42I'm talking about things like paid ads and measuring the effectiveness of that paid spend via your ROAS metric or your return on ad spend. And then there's this idea that we want to create awareness in the market, right? We want to be everywhere at all times on billboards and shopping malls. We want to do pop-ups. All these things that are a little bit harder to track. In your opinion, how should marketers, CMOs, CEOs, founders be thinking about this side of the coin and where their investment dollars should be tracked versus not? Brand awareness is something a little harder to track, but it makes all of the performance, it's like the, what's the saying?

21:31The rising tide lifts all ships. I think it's the foundation from which all of the other areas of the business, even internally, make for more successful businesses. So I say internally because we've found that we've done work on businesses that had a brand that was starting to feel stale. the internal teams couldn't articulate what they did, what they stood for. The identity was something they weren't proud of representing. And on the other side of it, employee engagement went way up. People were excited to come to work. They were excited to rep the brand. And when people are happier and more excited about the business, they work harder and thus it performs better.

22:13I know I'm digressing off the question you asked, but I do think that's super important and something a lot of people don't think about. And then on the brand awareness side and doing more brand-oriented campaigns, when it's done really well, people say, oh, I want that. So people still talk about liquid death. They're entertaining people, and it's just canned water that's more expensive than you should probably be saying, but they're killing it because they found a human truth and leveraged consumer insights and cultural insights to make entertaining content that isn't trying to shove product down their throat, but entertain them.

22:56And that's thus making them top of mind when people are thirsty. So what's the bar for you when you go into a project? What separates a successful campaign from a not so successful campaign? It has to be anchored to a human truth, a real insight that we are solving a problem or hitting on an emotional cue that this brand can authentically speak to or orient themselves around. Talk to me about the challenges with channel marketing these days versus what they were in the past. So you've seen a lot, right? You started in 2010. Instagram hadn't even launched at that point. We've been through several iterations of Instagram marketing, of meta paid ads, of Google paid search.

23:48You know, you've got other channels like Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok that are rising. What are you seeing on a macro level? Yeah. The always on need to have content that's fresh. People get sick of seeing the same ad over and over again and don't like being sold to. The thing that I'm seeing now is that brands that were really successful with owned D2C channels just can't grow anymore. And so retail becomes a necessity and Amazon strategies and TikTok shop. So the sales channels need to expand in addition to all the marketing channels. It's quite a lot, but it's really important. And with that, consistency and cohesion across every channel is really important.

24:47So when you say that D2C brands can't grow anymore, I would assume they reach a plateau where revenue just taps out at a certain point and the unit economics are not as attractive. Do you feel like this is because for the most part, these brands have tapped into their total addressable market, their TAM, or that cost of acquisition has just been increasingly difficult in a world where CPC rates, CPM rates have gone up almost in perpetuity since 2014? I think it's both. More and more people are strictly shopping on Amazon, ask my wife. And then, yeah, nothing beats retail exposure. People are still going into stores, looking up and down aisles, trying to find new products.

25:41Target does an amazing job of introducing new brands just as one example. For startups, we have so many listeners that are, you know, have just recently founded something or thinking about starting something. What advice would you give to those folks? Athletic Greens, that was the original naming convention for that brand. They switched to AG1 in order to expand product line horizontally. They now have something called, I think, AGZ, which is AG Sleep. It's wild. It's like their second skew that they've launched in a matter of 10 years. But to your point, John, if you're going to call yourself something so super specific early on, then consumers are going to associate you with that very specific thing, which makes product expansion extraordinarily challenging.

26:34Totally. So that's, that's a, from a brand perspective and like the early stages, that's one I, I feel strongly about. And then the other is because it's so much easier to launch direct to consumer packaging, we're, we're working with a lot of brands now to get them retail ready where the difference between what your packaging says and looks like online is much different than what works on shelf. And you can get away with a lot less detail and a lot less, you know, online, you have the context of an ad and a PDP page to educate somebody on what the product is, on shelf, you've got front of pack.

27:23And so that's a big inflection point for brands where they shift to retail because they are ready to, but the packaging is just not set up to be stoppable and shoppable. You've said something to this effect, right? The difference between back of pack to front of pack thinking? Yeah. That's one of the convictions we have is as everybody's looking for more functional foods or they're trying to hit their macros and everybody's seeing the explosion of protein and how many grams on a product. What we're realizing is that what was once back of pack is now coming front of pack. And so macro counts, ingredient profiles, what's it free from, all of that is now coming front of pack and is really valued by consumers.

28:14Just out of curiosity, what inning do you think we're in, in terms of the protein obsession culture? Are we in the top of the first, second? It feels like we're - Sports analogies are hard for me, Adam. I'm just kidding. No, no. I don't think it's going anywhere. I think people are going to expect it now. Whether or not it's the biggest thing on PAC, I don't know. All protein is not created equal. I think that's the next inning, so to speak, where people are going to realize that, oh, I'm getting 18 grams of protein from these Doritos. But your body's not absorbing at all. It's not high quality protein as it would be from eating a chicken breast or something like that.

28:57And so I think that's the next inning. All right, let's do some rapid fire and then we can - Okay, hit me, hit me. Line this up. All right, what's the most overrated wellness trend right now? I think cold plunging. That's a good one. other side of the same coin, what is the most underrated wellness trend? Consistency. Like you don't need to kill every workout, but if you're in there five times a week doing something, moving, stretching, oh, stretching, stretching. You got to stretch. People don't stretch. I don't stretch. You got to stretch it. I'm actually pretty tight today. Okay. One consumer brand you really admire that you do not do work for or represent.

29:38Seed. Nice. One mistake founders make in the early days. Raising too much capital too fast. One thing every great brand in 2026 is getting right, that other brands are getting wrong. I think I mentioned this before, but not a lot, but I see a lot of brands get lost in the sauce of creating something. The pendulum swung too far in the creative, evocative brand building world where they lose the plot of what the hell the product actually is or the service actually is.

30:19And I think that's – it's exciting to create these creative, esoteric brand worlds. But when a consumer comes to your site or is unable to articulate it to a friend of what it actually is, that's hard. Got you. Do you think it's possible to create brands that have real staying power? Like decades and decades, beginning today in 2026. Do you think it's possible, let's say, to create the next Gillette, the next Patagonia? Yeah, I do. It's possible. Why not? I mean, I think it's a matter of balancing how you, what cultural waves you can hop on that are authentic to you without, you know, repositioning yourselves or hopping on trends and just staying true to yourself, but also staying in tune with culture.

31:24Like that balance, I think that's what makes lasting brands. John, thanks for being here, man. This is a lot of fun. Adam, dude, this was fun. Thank you. I appreciate it. That's John Scheer, the co-founder and chief creative officer behind Herman Scheer. Shopify Masters is produced by Hyacinth Parker, Alicia Clark, and Schwang Esther Shan. Our engineers are Miku Betlam and Matt Schwartz. And Rachel Reich is our senior content lead. I'm your host, Adam Levinter. Come back every Tuesday and Thursday to catch a brand new episode of Shopify Masters. And be sure to check out our YouTube channel for those video interviews.

32:00Until next time, thanks so much for listening.