The New TRASH
The Story Behind our New Look
Where We Came From
Like many startups, product direction changes quickly. As we rolled out a private beta in July and then opened it to the public on the App Store in October, we experimented with different branding, UX, copy and all the rest of it as we put our work in front of people and talked to them, trying to put a fine point on these key questions: who exactly is this for and what do we need to change?
The end of 2019 was about coalescence. It was time to take stock of everything and decide where we needed to pivot, iterate or kill. After all that iteration we had a ton of design debt (this is normal) and it was time to re-align around what we’d learned from our early adopters.
What We Learned
Once we went public in the App Store in Q4, we shifted our focus from delivering on the promise of our tool to understanding who our top users were and why. We did in-depth user research studies with UXR sage Amanda Chessa, quickly audited the design of every screen in our app, prioritized what needed help alongside how our product roadmap was shaping up, and spent as much time as we could talking with our users.
What we realized was clear and powerful: our early adopters are creative entrepreneurs, and in particular, the next generation.
TRASH users are an amazing cross-section of creative disciplines. From models to artists to dancers to musicians (and for many, all of those things at once!), they include creators, small business owners, social media managers. They all have a common need for great video, fast, and on a budget.
This emerging class of creative entrepreneurs lines up with trends in research too. While Millennials were the most entrepreneurial generation on the planet, they have been surpassed by Gen Z, where 8 out of 10 want to be their own boss.
The Atlantic’s opinion is that artists are being replaced with creative entrepreneurs:
The institutions that have undergirded the existing system are contracting or disintegrating. Professors are becoming adjuncts. Employees are becoming independent contractors (or unpaid interns)… Now we’re all supposed to be our own boss, our own business: our own agent; our own label; our own marketing, production, and accounting departments.
No longer interested in putting in their 10,000 hours: under all three of the old models, an artist was someone who did one thing — who trained intensively in one discipline, one tradition, one set of tools, and who worked to develop one artistic identity… But one of the most conspicuous things about today’s young creators is their tendency to construct a multiplicity of artistic identities. You’re a musician and a photographer and a poet; a storyteller and a dancer and a designer — a multiplatform artist, in the term one sometimes sees. Which means that you haven’t got time for your 10,000 hours in any of your chosen media. But technique or expertise is not the point. The point is versatility. — The Atlantic
The cost to create any media of “professional quality” is expensive. Even a semi-pro 1-minute video can run you $1,500–$3,000. But the ever-increasing power of the cameras and machine learning brains inside our phones has made us all capable of emulating an entire film production studio and marketing department by ourselves. This has flattened the traditional spaces between production and post-production, and between casual creators and professionals.
87% of “businesses” now use video as a marketing tool. (Up from 63% in 2017, and 81% in 2018.)
91% of video “marketers” consider video an important part of their strategy. That’s up from 82% in 2017 and 85% in 2018.
48% of people said they’d share video with their friends ahead of other types of content.
This young generation of creative entrepreneurs (ie. “businesses” and “marketers”) overlaps heavily with “creators”. They have a native language in video, and are a powerful emerging force. Enter the new brand.
Where We’re Headed
The new TRASH brand needed to reflect our users — a diverse community of creative humans — and our medium, video. We love our halo icon (and our Angels!) and Simon artfully abstracted it as a nod to film..
One of the first things Simon keyed into was that the name TRASH (which is pretty silly), is only funny if it’s juxtaposed with something that has more gravity. We also started taking ourselves seriously as a camera brand delivering on instant video editing, and got inspired by the colored blocks and stripes of Polaroid and VHS tapes and 70's brutalism.
As a nod to the many identities of a creative entrepreneur, we stuck with our love of holographic materials, wrapping these old skool camera vibes in a modern rainbow gradient.
We hope you love the new TRASH as much as we do. Download the app, and let us know what you think (@thetrashapp on Instagram + Twitter).
– Trevor, Han & Team TRASH 😇
