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How to make brand your competitive edge: Oddbox + eve sleep fireside chat
‘Brand’ might be the most overused word in business.
It can mean your logo, your tone of voice, your purpose, your colour palette, or (as brand guru Kuba Wieczorek puts it) everything you do.
So when we got Oddbox’s Chief Growth Officer, Gastón Tourn, and eve sleep co-founder Kuba Wieczorek in the same room, we asked them to make it practical - drawing from years of experience growing and designing brands from Emma and Bumble to Heights and Skin + Me.
Gastón joined Oddbox in September 2024 and has led a rebrand that, since, has seen the business nearly triple conversion rate. Kuba built eve sleep’s famously yellow brand from a standing start and supported Oddbox through that rebrand earlier this year, through his agency Kuba&Friends. Between them they’ve seen brand done brilliantly, done badly, and blamed for things it didn’t do.
Here’s what we think matters most for founders.
Your brand needs to land in three words
Before the rebrand story, Gastón started with a more basic question: what is brand actually for at an early stage?
His answer is to stand out in three words. That’s roughly the attention you’ll get, because nobody is sitting around thinking about your business.
“It hurts as a founder, because you’re like, this is my whole life, and nobody else cares as much as I do. And yes, that’s the reality. Nobody else cares as much as you do, so you need to be able to explain it in really simple words.”
Kuba added that, in his view, the consumer doesn’t really care about your product, which means brand is the job of making them care. He borrowed a definition from David Ogilvy: a brand is what the consumer says about your product. His goal at eve sleep wasn’t only for customers to say it was a great mattress. He wanted them to say they were into the vibe, the content and the world around it.
The good news is that the foundation costs nothing. Kuba said you can almost do the first part yourself: Work out what makes you different, then work out how to own that territory. At eve sleep, that meant celebrating how a great night’s sleep makes you feel in the morning, and everything else was built on top of it.
Gastón added a test for the “why” behind your brand. It has to be inspiring, but it also has to make sense to the customer and explain why they should choose you over the hundred other options. His example was WeWork, a co-working company whose stated mission was about expanding human consciousness. It’s inspiring, but it tells a customer nothing about why to rent a desk there. In marketing speak, he said, every brand claim needs a 'reason to believe', usually found in your product. Oddbox talks about fighting food waste because its product genuinely does that.
Write your three words. Then check that your “why” is grounded in your product and makes sense to someone who has never heard of you.
Think about brand before you invest in it
Kuba made a distinction particularly for early-stage founders - thinking about brand is not the same as investing in brand. And both can be powerful.
eve sleep’s first brand move was free. They delivered mattresses on cargo bikes rented for around £20 a week, because they wanted to be an energy brand. They didn’t need an identity system. They needed a clear idea and a way to act on it.
His second example is that mattresses traditionally arrive in a plain cardboard box. eve sleep’s co-founder wanted a white, glossy box with the logo on it. Kuba wanted to go further and print quotes about the morning on the inside, which added around 75p per unit. When you’re turning over £35 million, as eve was two years in, someone asks you to justify that. His answer was that 'what is the ROI?' was the wrong question. They asked how much engagement it would create, and they planned to check social. By then they’d sold about 15 mattresses, and the box effectively became their first advertising campaign. It also earned their first press piece.
“Know why you’re doing it and know how you’re going to measure it.”
Brand is a medium to long-term investment, and ROI is a short-term measure. If you set the objective for each piece of brand activity up front, you’ll know whether it worked.
Attach a specific, measurable objective to every brand decision before you spend the money, not after.
Every metric is hiding something
Whilst Gastón was CMO at the dating app Badoo, the best-performing ad was titled “How to Cheat on Your Husband on Badoo”. It was driving plenty of downloads, so the performance team could justify more spend. But day-seven retention was poor. (He pointed out that in dating apps, you don’t even get as far as day 30.)
The tell-tale signs of a business that isn’t prioritising brand, he said, are a high CAC (because you don’t stand out) or, when CAC is low, an audience that isn’t invested in your product. You end up optimising for the short term at the cost of long-term sustainability.
“It’s not either metrics or creative instinct. It’s more understanding that every single metric is hiding something.”
His habit is to ask what a good-looking number is hiding, and he reckons a healthy level of paranoia leads to growth. Kuba’s advice to numbers-led founders was to put the spreadsheets down for two or three days and look at the business through the customer’s eyes. For brand-led founders, it’s the reverse: brand isn’t just a shiny logo, so ground yourself in the numbers. He credits eve sleep’s success partly to his co-founder Yash, who was “100% numbers”.
For every metric you celebrate, ask what’s sitting behind it. For a lead-gen number, that might be retention. For a CPA, it might be quality.
“The brand isn’t working” isn’t a diagnosis
When Gastón joined Oddbox, the chairman and founder wanted to rebrand immediately because “the brand isn’t working”. He pushed back, and he did it with data: Awareness and sentiment were both high. He joked that blaming brand is the same as blaming God, because you can’t argue against it.
So he spent his first six months on core commercial levers, and revenue started to climb. Those months also taught him who was actually signing up to Oddbox, which he says you need to know before you touch a brand. His advice to any marketer who joins a company and wants to rebrand immediately is to treat it as a red flag.
What eventually triggered the rebrand wasn’t a failing brand. Oddbox was moving from fruit and veg boxes into food more broadly, with recipe boxes and rescued items, and in that new category its identity wasn’t distinctive enough. Recipe boxes are a crowded space, and the market leaders are well known for plastic sachets and waste, which is exactly where Oddbox wanted to stand apart.
Rebrand because your category or ambition has changed, not because someone has a feeling. And do it only once you understand your customers.
Change how you look, never what you stand for
If someone you know as democratic and inclusive wakes up one day acting like an authoritarian, you stop trusting them. Brands work the same way.
“You can change your messages, you can change how you look. But some fundamental values cannot change.”
For Oddbox, that value is fighting waste, and the rebrand built on it by adding taste (“never waste taste”) rather than moving away from it. Gastón gave a second example from his time at Bumble. The leadership saw the app as feminist, not just female-led, so for a long time they declined to let anyone start a conversation, because it went against what the brand stood for. As soon as you change your values, he said, people start questioning everything.
Kuba’s story of the colour is a good reminder that this applies to how a brand looks, too. The first design for Oddbox was clever: The letters looked like fruit and veg crates, and the concept worked. But it was green, and Oddbox’s team told him it wasn’t distinctive enough. That is the opposite of the usual agency–client dynamic, he said, where the agency pushes the work further out. The final answer was orange.
In Kuba's words, colour is easy to change, “four clicks of a mouse”, but it’s one of the most important distinctive brand assets you have. Logos, fonts, illustration styles and mascots belong in that category, too. People remember eve sleep as 'the yellow one'.
List the values that must never change and the assets that make you recognisable. Everything else is open to challenge.
Hire an agency, then be a good client
The Oddbox and Kuba&Friends partnership took around six months, and roughly a third of it was strategy before any design started. That included in-depth interviews with the founder, the marketing team, the chairman and others across the business.
Both were open about the bumps (tone of voice was one), and both said that’s the point. Gastón admitted his team went in with a clear picture of what to change and what to keep, and some of it was wrong. His routine was to sit with an uncomfortable idea over a weekend and find, the following week, that it was obviously the right call. You need external thinking, he said, because after a while you can’t see your brand from outside.
“The client always gets the work they deserve.”
That was Kuba, borrowing a line from his old boss. Don’t hire an agency, he said, if you haven’t thought about why you’re bringing them in and how you’ll work with them. Welcome the challenge, and make them a partner.
An agency’s best contribution is often external perspective and alignment. Brief them clearly, and let them push back.
Decide how you’ll measure it, and expect backlash
Gastón’s rebrand goal was to be distinctive in a new category. That told him which side effects to accept. Changing colour is like getting a new haircut, he said. The people who love you most comment first. Oddbox received messages from loyal customers saying they hated orange and begging the team to change back to green.
He’d prepared for that. He told the board about his experience working on Google’s logo change from sans serif to serif, when people still wrote in to say it had ruined their internet life. His point to the board was that they shouldn’t optimise for the brand’s loyalists but for the new audiences they wanted to reach, and that loyal customers won’t leave as long as the values stay the same. The reply to every angry message was essentially 'we’re still fighting waste', and the usual response was an apology for overreacting.
The results:
Conversion rate nearly tripled after the rollout
CPA this year is around a third lower than last year
The rebrand also lifted the product: the old brand perception focused so heavily on fighting waste that it risked devaluing the product, and the new look puts taste first
Gastón was honest that he can’t attribute all of it to the rebrand. You can’t A/B test a brand refresh, because you’d never be able to isolate seasonality. But he is confident it played a big part, and that short-term metrics can hide long-term effects. He wouldn’t have expected CPA to improve so much looking only at last year’s numbers.
Set your goal first. If it’s new audiences, don’t judge the rebrand by how your existing fans react.
Get your co-founder aligned (early)
One founder in the room asked how to sell a “trust me, bro” brand idea to a co-founder who controls the spreadsheets. In Kuba's experience, that tension is healthy, and it’s what made eve sleep work.
His advice is to treat the brand project as a chance to get aligned on values. They’re objective, whereas “I love yellow, you hate yellow” is just subjective. Starting from “we’re an energy brand about perfect mornings” makes the colour conversation far easier. And don’t tell a numbers-focused co-founder to stay in their spreadsheets. Bring them in early.
Gastón’s addition was about roles. Oddbox’s founder wasn’t interested in the visual identity, so they asked where she did want to be involved. The answer was positioning and messaging, and they then agreed whether she was the final approver or a consultee. That clarity up front, he said, is why it was one of the smoothest rebrands he’s worked on. Fighting is fine, he added, “but in a civilised way”.
Agree your values and roles before you see a single design.
One brand, segmented messaging
For a founder who sells both to cafés and direct to consumers, Kuba’s advice is that you don’t need two brands. You need one brand and different messages for each audience.
His example was Pumpkin, a US pet insurance company with two key audiences: Pet owners and vets. The shared idea was “pet parenthood is parenthood”, with different messaging for each.
Gastón drew a line between brand messaging and functional messaging. Brand messaging is the why. Oddbox’s acquisition campaigns don’t always lead with food waste. For the past year, supporting British farmers has been one of its most effective angles, but it sits underneath the same purpose, and it has limits (they won’t be growing mangoes in the UK).
Hold your brand constant. Tailor the functional benefits to each segment.
Be brave, but not at the expense of trust
Kuba’s view on research is that he doesn’t like to research creative work, because branding is largely instinct. He describes a 'risk scale' - you can be bold and make a splash, but not so bold that you lose credibility with existing customers.
His example is eve sleep’s yellow mattress. One of the VCs wanted research before investing, and an expensive study concluded unanimously that they should not make a yellow mattress. He still has the debrief. They did it anyway, because it was central to the vision. He adds that it’s easier when you’re starting out. With an existing brand, as Oddbox had, there’s baggage and the decision is more nuanced.
On brand names, Kuba compared it to naming a child. Everyone has an opinion, and the name grows into its meaning.
“A name is only a naked, shivering word on a piece of paper.”
It’s the values and design around it that give it meaning.
Gastón helpfully added that if you have international ambitions, think about whether your name will travel. Bumble doesn’t work well in French, and Emma was chosen as a name because it exists in nearly every language. Oddbox, meanwhile, was originally called Tasty Misfits, and Gastón said that when it became Oddbox, people warned against using the word 'odd' for food. Now, he says, it’s so clearly the right name that they’d never change it.
Be bold in a way that’s consistent with your values, and choose a name that will still work in the markets you want to enter.
What it all boils down to
Both speakers kept coming back to the same idea, that brand is a clear answer to “why us?” that a stranger can understand in three words and a company can live up to in everything it does. The look follows from that. The values stay constant.
They also agreed that you don’t need a big budget to start. You need clarity, an objective for each decision, and the willingness to look at your metrics and ask what they’re hiding. If you do change your brand, do it for a strategic reason, know how you’ll measure it, and expect a few angry letters about the colour.
A huge thank you to Gastón and Kuba for such an honest and generous session, and to everyone who brought such sharp questions to the room.
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