shepx reimagined: a brand experience lab

Speaker A: I believe that savvy brand builders are never quite satisfied to stay still. There is a case to be made of picking, uh, and choosing that which needs to be consistent in, in your brand equity because people come to rely on those experiences. But then there also needs to be wisdom and discernment over what can change and then when to change it. When the market conditions, when the environment changes, uh, that requires or would benefit from a change to the brand. And Brand shepherd is, is not immune to that whatsoever. On this episode of Field Notes, I want to get into that specifically and make a big announcement. My name is Dan. I own Brand shepherd. This is our 20th year of growing, guiding and protecting brands of all, uh, sizes and scales and ages. It's been my great honor to do that for 20 plus years now. And I'm looking forward to announcing what I have to say today about our next steps. All right, so back up, quick history lesson. In, uh, 2018, I set out to create a spin off of Brand shepherd that just focused on websites and logos. There would be no brand strategy, no brand positioning, no brand architecture, uh, none of that. No, no marketing, no nothing. It would just be, hey, are you a business, a brand? Do you need a website and a logo? Cool. Here's what we'll do that. And by 2022, that idea came to fruition. Of course there was a lot of stuff that happened between 2018 and 2022, uh, including a global pandemic and a relocation of the Branch shepherd offices. But it came to fruition and it was wonderful to see that launch, that idea come to life. Shepex has existed, um, and served those customers that just wanted a logo and a website and it's been wonderful. Um, but I'm looking around and I'm seeing a lot of changes being, coming, um, to the surface with brand building and how people experience brands, combined with the fact that branch effort is turning 20. And I'm never content to just rest on our laurels. I'm always thinking of what's next, how can we provide fresh value, things like that. And I'm looking at this and I'm saying, you know what we need? We need a, ah, space to experiment. We need a space to do that publicly so people can see what we're doing and how we're doing it, um, but not on the main stage. This needs to be kind, ah, of like a lab, like a brand experience lab, that we can take some risks, uh, do some experiments, show what's working, what's not working, and by doing so, show the Public that hey, we think that there's something to this before it's a big focus. And, and by that we're leading and showing that we're not, we're not sitting back and waiting for a trend to emerge. We're actually poking at the boundaries, seeing what can, what can be developed next and how we can make brands uh, more experiential and make it more interesting and valuable to their customers. And so that's what I'm doing. I am converting Shep X into a brand experiment lab for Brand Shepherd. So real quick, the current roster of client brands for Shepex will be simply just absorbed by Brand Shepherd. It's a natural fit. Uh, websites have been Branch Shepherd's number one service for years, since about 2020. So it's a natural fit. I'm just moving ah, the Shepex staff over to Branch shepherd and we'll just get stronger in our, in our strongest service already. And then you add strategy into that, which is Branch Upper's probably like big umbrella service because it touches literally everything. And I, I can just say, hey, I'm glad I did it. I'm glad Branch Shepard had a spin off that was just focused on websites. But our DNA really is for the complex. It really is. It's, we're, we're proud generalists, I like to say, we're expert generalists. Um, I'm of the belief that insects and non human entities are our specialists. You know, the ant, the bee, the things like that, I mean, no hate, no shade on them, but uh, humans are made for complexity and we're made for complex thought. And so it's, it's a rewarding thing to have our hands in a number of different things, whether it's industries or services and how those things combine and uh, all the different things that connect everything together. Yet there's always more, there's always more. And so Shopex allows us to do that. Shepex as an experimentation lab, as a brand experience lab, allows us to take risks publicly show our findings, allows us to fail and fail rapidly and not be afraid of, and not be afraid to fail, not be afraid to take risks and invite, uh, invite our clients to ask, hey, can we, can we do this, uh, as kind of an aside, um, at no additional charge to you and then take those risks. And that's going to be part of it, but then part of it's going to be our own risks, our own experiments to see what we can do. So in the, in the near future you're going to See a brand new Shep X emerge over at Shepex Us is where we will be showing the work. And there's four experiments that we will be launching with. Okay, and I want to cover those right now. Experiment number one is, is web design and development itself. We have used, uh, a combination of our own design savvy with Claude Claude code and Claude design through a series of sessions to create a one page website for ShopEx US. However, the messaging and the final stuff that gets published are all human generated. Uh, we used AI to speed up and amplify our ideas. We did not use AI to create ideas, we used it to amplify and speed up our ideas. And so from that we then looked at what platform do we want to build our website on. And a few weeks and months ago I shared about how Cloudflare has launched a new content, uh, management system called M M Dash and it's built for the AI era, built for agentic web design and development, yet it's still in development, developer beta, I think, version one point, whatever. And so I got in contact with one of our devs and said, hey, this is an experiment. You want to take it on, build a website with us. We're going to build it using a combination of human, human and AI. Ah. And then we're going to see what we can do with em m dash and build it on em m dash instead of WordPress. And the dev was just more than eager to get into it. So that's our first experiment is building a website using em m dash instead of WordPress. And so far it's going really well. I'm very pleased with how this is all coming along. There's uh, a lot of savviness that went into the creation of MDASH M by cloudflare to make it familiar enough for those of us who've been using WordPress for a long time so that we can just start working right away. But there's a lot of great stuff under the hood that makes it uniquely suited for the times we're in right now. So the very first experiment is a website built without WordPress and using atypical agentic and AI practices, um, to see how far we can get with the building of the website at all. Now, once you visit the new Shepex Us when it's ready to launch, and I'll have a separate announcement for that here in a little bit, you're going to see three experiments on the, on the main feed, it's a single page website. For now. We'll have an expanded website later that has a feed of experiments, but just on the homepage we're going to be demonstrating, demonstrating three different experiments. The first is brand music. Now this, this uh, dovetails into a stereotype that tends to be true more often than not and that is that creatives are musicians on the side. Or there's kind of an old joke that professional uh, creatives in design, branding, advertising, marketing are failed musicians that needed to make money somehow so they went into creative services. Well that, that's kind of true, that, that does have a ring of truth to it because most of the branch upper team on the creative side are also musicians. We write music, we play music. We've been doing so for a long time. I myself uh, have been playing music for a very long time since the mid-80s, mid-1980s. And um, I looked at this and I thought, you know, with, with the emergence of AI and platforms, um, like Suno and others, it allows us to take a very simple idea that humans create like a melody and use that to use the AI to expand a uh, fully produced version of the song. Now I want to say a quick thing about this because there's a, there's another way of producing AI generated music which is to prompt the song. That's not what we're doing. Um, there is a good and rightful um, reaction, adverse reaction to prompting music into existence. But it's, it's, it's not really how professionals are using AI in music production. Professionals all over the world are using AI to take their human ideas, their melodies, their song sketches, their demos recorded on the Voice Memos app or you know, some rough, rough capture and using it to create a, a robust, specific production of their stuff. They're prompting. The way that the prompt works is they're tell AI, they're telling it the same thing that you would tell a producer or tell session musicians or tell a sound engineer or tell your band. They're saying I want these instruments played it this way, I want this tempo, I want this dynamic, this blah blah, blah on my song that I created. And so the copyright lives with that musician. So we're going to be doing that, we're going to be making some experiments because we use music a lot for videos. We, we are, we're constantly dipping into stock music available to anyone and everyone as background music for videos. And I'm um, I'm looking at that and I'm saying why we, we have a whole team here that, that is fully capable of, of writing a little jingle, writing a Little melody. Why can't we just take that hum um or play something into a voice memo and give it to Suno, tell it specifically what we want it to be that fits the vibe of that brand and then use that a unique vibe specifically tailor made for brands. So brand music will be the, the second experiment. The third experiment is going to be in um, the the types of hard goods that is, is now possible with 3D printing. This is going to be very, very niche. And one of the experiments we're doing right now is a custom scoop for one of our hard goods clients and their product needs to be scooped out of a container. And right now they're relying on customers to come up with their own scoop to get it out. And it could vary just based on where the material is being uh, placed. I look at that and I say hey, why can't we just 3D print a scoop in a variety of different ways, put some branding on the actual utensil itself so that it's branded and experiment with uh, what works and what doesn't work. And then if it ends up being adapted and useful to our customers, we could then go into some kind of mass production run and either include it in the bag itself or sell it separately for those that maybe already want a scoop and don't have one or you get the idea it's an experiment. There's some other ideas that we can do with 3D modeling and 3D printing to aid brand experiences. We're not looking at product design yet. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in small delightful ways that, that make a brand experience more valuable through um, through hard goods. And the way to do that is through rapid prototyping 3D printing that's on brand. Again you can go to any number of 3D modeling uh, shops and, and buy generic models that are available to everyone. But it's not for your brand. Just as the music is not for your brand, the models are not for your brand. And so we want to change that. We want to do experiments in terms of creating stuff that's for your brand. Shupex as an experiment for brands, a brand experience lab allows us to do that. So that's experiment number three. And the fourth and final one is going to be the fruit of small language model AIs. So right now we're in the process of creating some of these and it's, it's a thing where we can't really talk openly about it because of NDAs, but I can show some before and after examples of the AI into use for copy and then eventually for some images and maybe even some videos down the road. So what we would do is we would say, hey, here's the copy based on a prompt, based on some information that is from a large language model, generic, not on brand, hasn't been trained on your specific brand. And now here's the same prompt, the same need from a small language model that's created just for your brand and has been trained on a brand experience guide that was generated after going through the Vibe tribe and Y process. Here's uh, a, here's a photo that we asked the AI to create an image that we, that it did without knowing your brand through a brand experience guide. And now here's the after photo that the AI that a small language model produced after being trained on your, your specific brand's brand experience guide through Vive Tribe and why. And so to me this is, this is perhaps the, the star of the show because this is, or maybe not the star of the show, but the one service that could graduate the fastest because we're already doing AI work over in Brant Shepherd. This is, this is a way of us to show off some befores and afters and show the, the small language model. So far the services we're doing are large language model AI work for brands, but the small language model is I think, the next big thing, ironically in wording. But I think that that's, that's where our um, our biggest wins are, are on the horizon. Because think about it, if you have a large language model, then it's going to create uh, an amalgam m of everything it's been trained on and it's not going to be for your specific brand. The brand experience guide comes in and fixes that because we can start with that and then build layers on top of that with other brand information. And what results is a small language model that's on brand every time? And now you have a partner that's not replacing humans, but it's amplifying humans in ways that amplify uh, their ideas and content. So that's the new Shep X. I'm going to have more to say on this, but I wanted to give you a preview, an announcement of what's coming. This is a brand experience lab where we get to make uh, experiments, make some risks, make uh, some failures along the way and show you that we're thinking forward, we're thinking what's uh, next. How can we be providing value for brands in our next thing while staying still focused in our expert generalist approach of brand building. We're not, we're not leaving that lane. We're staying firmly in the lane of brand building. We're just trying to figure out how can that expand into new, uh, areas, how can we broaden the lane, in other words, of brand building? Be sure to keep up with brand. Shepherd over on LinkedIn, stop by branchhepherd.com and you'll get a link and more information as Shepex us is available for public viewing.