We’ve been Gin Lane for over a decade, and today, we’re announcing the end of that chapter and the beginning of a new one.
We are closing our agency business and starting a new company together called Pattern.
We couldn’t be more proud of the business we built as Gin Lane, creating over $15b worth of brands, with last year as our best year on record.
What could possibly make us walk away from that?
What Pattern aims to solve
Today’s culture of addiction to work, productivity, and technology has left many of us in a state of burnout.
The General Social Survey of 2016, a nationwide survey that since 1972 has tracked the attitudes and behaviors of American society, found that 50 percent of respondents are consistently exhausted because of work. This is compared with only 18 percent two decades ago.
At the same time, the attention economy has helped to create an addiction to smartphones and in turn, hijacked our ability to stay focused and reach a state of deep thought. As a result, in 2018, American adults reported being 39% more anxious than a year ago.
The achiever mindset we were told we needed to cultivate growing up has led us into an endless and exhausting pursuit of always needing to be and do more.
Our team noticed this culture affecting each of us personally. We were stressed, anxious, and searching for more intrinsic forms of enjoyment. In response, we began to pursue activities like cooking, painting, writing, camping, and learning other new hobbies; seemingly small things, but they made a big difference in our days, allowing us to reach a state of flow that our work and phones couldn’t always provide.
Speaking with friends and family showed us that our feelings weren’t just limited to our age group or people living in New York. Anxiety, exhaustion, and perfectionism are afflictions that have recently bubbled to the surface of our society’s collective consciousness.
In this state of chronic burnout, our generation has lost the ability to find enjoyment in everyday moments — the simple pleasure of doing something (or even nothing) for the joy of it, rather than the end result of improving oneself.
We’re on a mission to bring this back.
Why Are We Starting a New Company to Bring Back Enjoyment?
Gin Lane has over ten years of experience building consumer brands for our generation. This has allowed us to have important conversations with consumers about their health, habits, and even self-esteem.
In this time, we interviewed thousands of consumers, listening to their needs, aspirations, and concerns. Through these conversations, the values of our generation emerged and we built brands that resonated with their needs.
While helping to launch businesses has been incredibly fulfilling and instructive, our long-term aspiration has been to have a more direct impact on our generation’s lives.
We realized we can use this superpower to do what we do best — build brands — this time in-house, with the help of $14m raised from leading consumer investors.
We can now have a direct conversation with consumers to help them take back control of their time, attention, and energy to shift it toward experiences that bring them more fulfillment.
What is Pattern?
Pattern is a multi-brand consumer goods company owned and operated under one roof, with each of its brands working together toward one mission:
To help our generation find more enjoyment in daily life.
We’re creating a family of purposeful brands with products and guidance that inspire you to learn, explore, and lay the foundation for a more present life. Each brand provides the essentials to make, shape, and grow a home — the center of daily life.
Our name, Pattern, represents the habits that form each day.
We architected our family of brands to offer myriad ways of finding enjoyment in daily life. Each brand offers high quality, responsibly-made products that are inviting and easy to use, paired with access to ongoing guidance and support.
We built Pattern as an answer to what we heard from conversations and live tests we ran with hundreds of consumers — that transforming habits is incredibly difficult and products alone are not enough.
One Family of Brands
Under the Pattern umbrella, each new brand we introduce will have a distinct identity and story while laddering up to our overarching mission of enjoying daily life.
Our first, Equal Parts, is designed to help people find a sense of comfort and intuition in the kitchen. Our subsequent brands focus on other activities that foster daily enjoyment, such as organizing and maintaining a home, learning hobbies, and more.
In many communities around the country, these types of activities are not possible due to a lack of access and infrastructure. To help address this, we are giving one percent of revenue from each Pattern brand toward neighborhood-based organizations to provide the resources they need to flourish.
Building A 21st-Century Model for Consumer Brands
In addition to the problems we aim to address with our brand mission, we’re also excited to take on the challenges of building consumer businesses in the digital era.
We’ve been forming a thesis on what makes a great consumer brand through our work with DTC companies and are excited to expand and evolve it through a model we’re calling “DWC,” or Direct with Consumer.
We’ve seen that while it’s easier than ever to start a brand, it’s increasingly more difficult to grow a brand. Low barriers to entry have introduced noise and copycats, and launching with limited products creates difficulty expanding into other categories under one brand name. As a result, consumers can suffer from an overwhelming number of options and lack of differentiation, which is what digital-native brands initially set out to do.
Our DWC model creates a deeper, more personal relationship with consumers at scale, with sustainable economics through a multi-brand approach serving customers across multiple aspects of their lives over time.
We believe this is the next evolution of how consumer brands will drive value for their customers.
Thank you to all who made this possible
We are so thankful for all of the experiences and support that have made this new chapter possible. Thank you to our team, our partners, our families, our investors and to you, our community.
We are dedicated to helping raise awareness around workism culture, the attention economy, and trying to provide solutions for what millions of us are challenged with on a daily basis.
Our vision is for Pattern to become a stamp of approval on each brand and product we create. As such, we want to be held accountable and to earn your trust.
We want to do this through a positive, engaging, and approachable brand. This is the start, and we hope you will be part of our journey. We’re bringing on world-class talent for the roles we’ll need to thrive in our new model. (Join us, we’re hiring!)
To talk with us and learn more, find us at www.patternbrands.com and on Instagram: @patternbrands.
Please check out our first brand at www.equalparts.com and on Instagram: @getequalparts.
Thank you,
The Pattern team 🏡
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