From Tactical Ads to the Super Bowl: This \"Campaign\" Strategy from HexClad is INSANE

**Ashley Rutstein:** So, Matt, I'm very excited to get into this. I have seen the phrase brand and performance come up multiple times today in the chat and in other sessions. So people are obviously very keen to understand how the heck to balance these two seemingly very separate things. It it does seem like there are a lot of brands out there who have this desire to do bigger, more campaign level thinking, but the reality is the day-to-day tends to be a lot of testing version after version, optimizing ad spend, what have you. So when you try to think bigger and you try to think of campaigns, it just feels kind of nebulous and hard to pin down, probably even harder to sell into leadership when you've got revenue targets to hit and CPMs to worry about. But it seems like you and the HexClad team have really figured this out and you have seen a ton of success with the campaigns that you've been doing, but at the same time, you have not abandoned performance marketing. So I want to dig into how you have seen this marriage of those two ends of the spectrum and how people in the audience today can borrow some of that strategy even if they don't have a Gordon Ramsay kind of budget on their on their side. So, um, quick note for the chat, like Evan said, we're going to have some room for a Q&A at the end, so drop all of those things, all of your questions for Matt in there and we'll hit those at the end.

**Matt Duckor:** But is this session being recorded?

**Ashley Rutstein:** Yes.

**Matt Duckor:** Oh, I don't know. Good question.

**Ashley Rutstein:** I don't know if they've answered that yet.

**Matt Duckor:** Excellent. Good. Just making sure. Fantastic.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Um, so I want to start with just a very basic definition of campaign because I think that word can mean so many different things to different people. Like for me, I come from a very traditional creative ad agency background and that means one thing to me, but then for someone who is knee deep in Meta Ads Manager all day, that means something else to them. So for the the purposes of this session, what should we think of as a campaign and campaign thinking?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, thank you for that setup. Uh, Ashley, I think that really kind of encapsulates like where we were at at HexClad earlier this year where, um, if you've been here all day, you've heard from my colleague Connor Rolain, if you listen to the marketing operators podcast, you hear him talk about kind of how we're thinking about this kind of combination between brand and performance marketing and what happens as a brand gets bigger when you cross that nine figure, that nine figure, uh, you know, number that we crossed, um, several years back before I even joined HexClad three years ago. Um, what sorts of things does the brand have to start doing? And I think for us, it's not sort of one or the other. I think when you you originally wrote this question, it was like, why has HexClad moved from tactical D2C to campaign driven marketing? And really it was about bringing those two worlds together. So trying to take the best of like legacy brand building, brand moat building, thinking that, you know, Ashley in your agency background, this is the paradigm that you thought about how to think about, uh, brands. It was 13 week, uh, campaign cycles with like, you know, our top of funnel, you know, activity is on TV and out of home, you know, filtering down to social and performance driven direct response advertising. And I think like, you know, we've had a very, um, bottoms up approach in many ways where we've been very focused on top or bottom and and and middle of funnel channels, uh, like Meta and and sort of how our brand shows up there. And then we started spending more on TV over the past couple of years. We brought on Gordon Ramsay in 2021, obviously. Um, he does a lot for us, very high brand awareness, uh, figure. Um, you know, we're on all of his shows. Um, but you know, I think this year we started thinking about what does a campaign mean to a D2C brand in 2025? And for us, um, we tried to think about, um, one, where we wanted to roll these things out in around what time periods? Is it around our offer periods? Is it around product launches? Is it around, um, partnerships and brand moments? It has become all of those things. But, um, two, uh, what does that adaptation of the campaign look like? Do we have to have a TVC spot? Do we have to have like these really big top of funnel ideas? And I think what we landed with that we wanted to have the highest impact possible within the organization when we shifted this thinking to, um, retention, paid media, website, um, connected TV, all these channels starting to work together rather than sort of operating excellently within silos with amazing operators at each of these different touch points, sort of, you know, against their KRs and Is working, you know, with their teams. But really, how do we bring the brand together to speak through one idea even during an offer period? So really the, you know, the first time we kicked this off, we'll talk about it a little bit later is our Mother's Day campaign this year. And we thought, you know, as a brand that has 75 SKUs, there's only so much we can do from an offers perspective. We don't have thousands of products that we can kind of move in and out. We aren't releasing five new products a month, right? We have like our really core products, our cutlery, our cookware, our our Hex Hex Mill salt and pepper grinders. Um, you know, we have some products to work with, but not a ton and there's only so many ways we can discount products. So how can we create a connection with consumers around the way that we're marketing those sales, um, beyond just save up to this percent off. We're doing that obviously. There are the direct, you know, direct action, direct response, uh, call to actions, uh, throughout the marketing materials. Um, but you know, with with our Mother's Day campaign this year,

**Ashley Rutstein:** we talked a little bit about like a simple idea of like, you know, challenging our consumer to do better than flowers, do better than the like the grocery store flower bouquet that you buy for your mom. Buy something that will last her a lifetime. Um, and that sort of idea, that ethos informed the creative direction, the art direction of all the assets across all channels.

So it's a really simple idea for us, like, you know, campaigns, sometimes, uh, we'll talk about the Super Bowl. We obviously had a very, a very, very tippy top of funnel, um, you know, TVC spot to lead off that campaign.

And sometimes, it's a, it's a, it's a web retention, um, you know, paid paid media on Meta mostly, um, campaign that's running across those channels.

So it really depends, but we wanted to start, um, with offer periods. Those were the periods that we felt like weren't the brand squishy moments where it's like we're doing this because we want to build brand awareness or other metrics that we have to somehow validate in Tracksuit or other places or Motion, uh, to to sort of say that this this did something for us. We wanted hard hitting performance driven metrics to validate the idea that creating a consistent brand experience across all channels and moving the user through that journey, um, and having the paid ad lead to the collection page, lead to the, you know, the conversion experience and have that all be connected around one idea could could, you know, pay dividends. Um, and we've done that six, seven times now since Mother's Day and that that's worked really, really, really well for us.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Amazing. And I definitely want to get into the the Mother's Day stuff. I know you've got some actual examples for us to see, which is going to be amazing. Um, but when you think of when you first started this shift, what was the the internal buy-in for something like this? Like what do you have to do? What do people who are watching this have to do to convince their leadership that this is the right direction and how do they answer questions and and worry about how much, how many resources this is going to take and how much more time it's going to take? Like how do you convince them that this is the right direction?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I think like the biggest question internally was like this was a divergence from like our previous strategy. I think that, you know, there's a lot of work that go into all of our offer periods where we're creating, uh, in the past especially 2024 and before, many, many, many, many versions, many ad sets going live at the same time to support these sales. Um, we've actually reduced a lot of those things this year and kind of focused, uh, a little bit more, um, in terms of creative production. But I think it was more, you know, abandoning the strategy and what works, right? Um, and that that can that can, uh, that can make people nervous. Um, you know, but I think internally there was there was this feeling of we want these offer periods to stand out from each other and we're feeling like they're not. Um, we think creative could be a solve here, but then in terms of what that actually looks like, I think there was there was a lot of a lot of discussion. And, um, you know, when we first developed, when you develop creative direction for a campaign that where there's like an idea driving it, um, inherently, hopefully, it's aesthetically going to be different from your your top performers and winners from years past that you've been kind of running and updating the tagline on or the discount offer, like switching out a PNG with a different product. Um, and that's going to require a leap of faith on the part of our creative strategist and our paid media team and ultimately the teams that are accountable for, um, all the metrics that we're measured on, like our, you know, obviously our top line MER, but individual sort of ROAS and efficiency like on an asset by asset basis. Um, but I think we also had to meet the moment, right? We didn't come with a proposal for a campaign that was going to cost us $50,000 to execute. Um, you know, we spent $8,000 on a on a on a photo shoot, um, to to make this to make this campaign happen. Um, we have a a content team that I lead at HexClad with a lot of talented producers and and and production folks. Um, great vendors that we work with. We have our own studio. We do have a lot of luxuries as as a larger brand that not everybody has, but we didn't engage an agency here and, you know, do a, you know, $100,000 campaign for our sale. We developed all this internally, shot all the assets in a single day and worked with our our channel leads to roll everything out across channels. So I think there's a lot of trust and buy-in that this coordinated creative idea, um, could work, but again, we scoped it in a size that, um, it didn't we weren't asking for an outsized budget beyond what we would normally do to support something like this. We were just supporting it in a different way than we have in the past.

**Ashley Rutstein:** I love that you're talking about the scope of it because I think too, when you hear campaign, that seems very large and scary and like you have to have this hero 30-second spot that's fully produced in order for it to be a campaign. But that's not necessarily the case, right? You you're just kind of elevating your creative so that it has some sort of cohesive red thread throughout everything and not we're not just looking at one meta ad, we're looking at how the meta ad connects to the website, connects to everything else that's going on with the brand, right?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, and we we, you know, I think like very simply, like we we hadn't really done something as a brand that most brands do, but I think like in the, in the sort of like desire to move fast, disrupt things and just like get stuff done, which I think is like what we have to do, especially this time of year, right? We're all just like trying to survive and get through all of our tasks. Um, we hadn't like put all of our channel assets up on like one Figma file or like in, you know, on one on one whiteboard if we were if we were pinning things up. Um, we hadn't really looked at our brand as consumers look at our brand, right? Which is like they're experiencing us like in a very channel agnostic way where they're no one is just experiencing us through through Meta. I mean, hopefully they're they're they're clicking on a CTA and going to our site, right? So they're inherently going to experience like our brand on at least those two touch points. But ideally, you know, we create an entire ecosystem where where they can't get away from HexClad. And so to have some cohesion and continuity between that messaging and how we're going to market, um, and how we're choosing to present a a sales period, um, you know, offer period, I saw there were some some things in the chat. When I say offer period, I'm talking about a promotional sales period here essentially. Mother's Day, 4th of July, uh, Labor Day, um, you know, like our, you know, BFCM coming up obviously. So, so those are our huge times, eight or nine times throughout the year. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I think I think, you know, that that was a that was an exercise that again, seems really simple and seems like, um, low hanging fruit to just really just even consider visually like what are we saying, who who are we during these two weeks of the year across channels? And if it's really fragmented and different and there's very little connection, um, our consumer is going to feel that even if it's just a subtextual thing and, um, some of the results that we saw, I think indicated that, um, it's like very, it's very powerful to connect those channels together.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything else you see at that time of year. Like you said, the pink and the tulips and just very cliche visuals. Um, and I want you to tell us like how did you uncover an insight like this and how do you identify these creative concepts that you build into these campaigns? Like where where should someone start if they want to do something like this?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think ideally you hire really amazing and talented people, which is I think what we've done at HexClad. Um, you know, our design director, Harry Squirtis, our producer, Crystal Bahami, uh, like we have amazing people who have like a real, um, yeah, a real knack for this and like really care, they care deeply about their jobs and the brand. Um, and for Mother's Day, I think like, you know, it really started with this idea of like, yeah, Mother's Day is presented as one thing where it's really bright and, you know, kind of tulips, pinks, pastels, like I said. Our brand is darker. Moms and like parents like can be sexy and have fun too and like we can have an elevated experiences for them that don't have to infantilize mothers as like it doesn't have to involve your kids. It could be a moment for yourself. It could be having a Martini at the end of the day. Um, these things are really, really important, uh, parts of our identities as humans. And I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they go to tulips and kids, they go to grills and whatever. And like that's it. We're we're like just binary people. And so I think we wanted to kind of expand beyond that.

And this is a look at what we did last year for Mother's Day in 2024. And this is taken from like a deck that I, you know, presented to our C suite after this this campaign rolled out. Um, there's nothing proprietary in here. All this stuff was available. You can see it, you can go on Milled, you can go on Ad Library, you can see all this stuff. You can go on the wayback machine and see our website. So anybody could pull this together. But it kind of just shows where we were last year, which is like, you know, if you look at our paid stack, there's the top six performing ads from 2024 during this sale period. There's urgency messaging, there's Gordon, there's PNG bundle shots of our pans. Um, you know, really these were top performing ads that we had run for, you know, six months to a year in many cases that we were just reversioning, you know, it's like Mother's Day sale, there's a free griddle that was like a gift with purchase that wasn't happening before. But that's really the only difference. And if you're a consumer like coming across, um, many, many ads every single day on Meta, you might not even notice that there's any urgency here, there's any difference because these ads are very, very similar. Um, our retention design was like, I think beautiful, the colors were great. Um, we had a designer dedicated to that on point. We had offboarded our agency that was running retention by this time in 2024. We have a really talented designer, Julio Juarez that, uh, does a lot of our email designs. Um, and then our website was like a very standard adaptation of like what our normal evergreen site is. So I think it's just important to show where we were where we were at. These, you know, HexClad is seen as like a a great darling in the D2C space that is known for its performance and these these things performed. But I think when you get to a certain point, you have to look back at your, you know, the ghost you're trying to beat from last year and and really think critically about like, well, how can we do better? How can we bring these channels together? Um, and it doesn't take more work, it just takes working differently, right?

Um, so I think this is really how it started. This was like the first mood board imagery. Um, and I think, you know, for us, like the crushed velvets, the reds, or the um, the uh, the dark, the dark greens, um, like was something we really wanted and we didn't want these like bright perky flowers. We didn't want death like dead flowers, but we wanted like a little bit more of a goth vibe.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Moody.

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, moody. Yeah, moody. Um, we because again, like that is our brand and I think for us to zag super hard in the other direction is really disorienting for a consumer and not like in line with, um, you know, the brand that I think, uh, a lot of people at HexClad before I got there worked really hard to build. Um, so this sketch was cool. This was our design director Harry who I mentioned, who put this together and again, this idea of challenging our consumers of doing better than flowers and really just showing how we wanted that composition, uh, to end up looking like, which is very much what ended up happening, um, at the at the end of the day.

Um, but like it started with this. It started with like pulling a few pieces of swipe, um, and a few sketches, which is no different than how, uh, you know, art directors and copywriters and and all the amazing creative folks who make these campaigns work, whether you're prompting, uh, one of the tools that they were talking about in a previous session or like briefing a photo shoot to create it. Um, it starts with this, right? It starts with some sort of creative idea and and what you're going for. So this was really the the starting point for us. And this was the end point, you know, and so I think to this is 2025, this is 2024. Um, you know, for us, like wanting to have a bird's eye view of our brand and how we showed up. Again, I I, you know, the simple act of like putting every single asset that we released throughout 20 2025 Mother's Day on a single frame and seeing the continuity, um, you know, you see our emails on the left hand side for our sets, our product, our individual products, our knives, our pepper mills. This is the same playbook. We didn't change our email retention playbook. We sent out, you know, seven emails during the course of this sale, very similar call to actions, very similar product representation. We didn't say let's remove offer language. There's a badge there that says up to 49% off. We didn't say let's remove product shopping bundles and PNGs. Let's just drive people to an elegant collection page and have a bunch of beautiful photos. We're doing the same thing. We were just organizing the information a little bit differently and putting a different creative wrapper around it. Um, you'll see our paid media stack, you know, down on the bottom right hand corner, our web stack on the top right, and then our organic social down, uh, you know, bottom center. Um, and so just this idea of like, I think starting with like, how does our brand show up, certainly just like evergreen all the time, but especially during really important high intent, high conversion moments throughout the year. And like put yourself in the consumer's, you know, shoes and just see like, does this make sense together? How how how is one experiencing our brand? And you know, this is a really monochromatic way of showing up. We're running evergreen creative during this time, but we wanted anything associated with this moment and this messaging to feel of a piece. So, um, our brand is more flexible than this, like even during this time period, but these touch points that we're touching and leading up to this campaign, we wanted it to feel a certain way. And I think we were we were successful at doing that.

**Ashley Rutstein:** Absolutely. And I want to get into some more of the specifics of how you think about those sale periods. Like, walk us through the process. You you have this sale or this offer or Black Friday coming up. How do you think about it? Where do you start? And how is that different now that you've campaignified everything versus when you were kind of in a more tactical D2C performance mindset?

**Matt Duckor:** Yeah, I mean, I think when we thought of our content previously, um, you know, we're trying to just do a lot of more editorial style content, brand building, offering value beyond, uh, like in our retention program beyond just like, here, buy this, here's an offer, here's a new product. Um, and I think that's like a playbook that a lot of brands have been running, you know, to some degree over the past decade or so where it's like, you know, we have more to say to our consumers than just, um, telling them to buy something. So we want, we want to, we want to, you know, uh, occupy the space that we are, uh, producing product in, uh, as, uh, tastemakers, thought leaders, um, and and beyond just like manufacturing, uh, you know, a CPG product. So, um, you know, for us, uh, that definitely, um, you know, that that shift happened this year when we decided we really wanted to be focusing our resources on supporting these offer periods, uh, through these campaigns. And again, bringing together some of our editorial chops and acumen, that brand side with with the performance side. So I think the first thing we thought about with Mother's Day or any of our campaigns is like, is there a compelling angle that only HexClad can kind of bring to life in our category? So Mother's Day was really easy because we looked at, um, you know, 2024 performance, there's the cat, excellent.

**Ashley Rutstein:** There's the cat. Every time.

**Matt Duckor:** As soon as you say performance. Um, no, so so like for us, there was a real opportunity to zag. Anyone who if you're familiar with the HexClad brand, we're Gordon Ramsay, we're like dark, we're not, um, you know, we're shooting on black, we're shooting in these these worlds. You'll see a little bit of later some of the creative. Um, you know, I think we're not sun-dappled countertops in Venice with pastel cookware. There are other brands that do that really, really well. Um, so I think that, you know, our founder, uh, Danny Winer and CEO, like smartly zagged on the brand identity early on for HexClad that we wanted to stand out and be different. But that needs to that really needs to continue like through all of our touch points. So if we're doing a Mother's Day sale to suddenly go pastel, pinks and tulips, um, doesn't feel like it is in line with our brand DNA. And sure enough, when you look at all of our competitors, they are very much doing one thing, playing from one playbook. So thinking about like what can HexClad own in this space? And then what's a message that can really tie things together? Mother's Day, Father's Day, even Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I'm very excited about the messaging that we're going to have for that. Um, these holidays really mean something. You know, they're gifting holidays, which is really helpful and people already have an emotional connection to them. Um, even if it's like a difficult one, right? We we have to think about our consumers who Mother's Day or Father's Day are are tough times for them. But you know, for us, we we wanted to lean into, um, you know, our brand ethos of challenging people to be better in the kitchen, um, and giving them the tools to do so and wanting them to, uh, you know, give a better gift to mom and something that, you know, flowers die, HexClad lasts forever type thing. Um, so like trying to find that visual and sort of emotional connection with again, something that is just a two-week period where our products are on sale. But can we make it seem like something more than that? Um, so I think that that sort of conceptual brainstorming and visual, um, road mapping and kind of mood boarding is is the first step. It's like, how are we going to bring, what's everyone else doing around this holiday? How are we going to bring this into the world of HexClad that feels like an it's an extension of our core brand identity? And how do we want people to feel when they're experiencing it across all parts of the funnel?

**Ashley Rutstein:** I want to pull up that that Mother's Day campaign because it is it is beautiful and it looks totally different from anything