SmashBrand’s rise offers a useful lesson in building relationships around measurable value. Jason Vaught explains how strategy design and consumer testing helped the agency move beyond creative services. Its performance guarantee gave serious CPG clients a clearer reason to trust the partnership and pursue stronger packaging outcomes.
A seasoned veteran in the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry, Jason Vaught brings a wealth of knowledge and hands-on experience as the director of content and marketing for SmashBrand. His comprehensive role at the forefront of brand communication ensures that CPG brands remain well-informed about the suite of services SmashBrand offers. Furthermore, his insights derived from the company’s strategy, design, and testing services are invaluable to brand owners and managers seeking expert guidance.
Company: SmashBrand
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Jason Vaught: This is Jason Vaught, and I primarily manage all our outward communication and brand education at Smashbrand. My job centers on developing a coherent content strategy that informs CPG brand owners about our deep capabilities in design and data-driven product success. We understand brand owners need clear, actionable guidance based on verifiable consumer insights.
Smashbrand is an exclusive CPG packaging design agency that is unique in the industry because we actually guarantee our performance. We do this by applying an integrated methodology that moves from strategy and innovation through design and proprietary consumer testing at every single stage. We eliminate the guesswork from packaging because our process ensures the final product will measurably drive sales velocity and market success. My work focuses on communicating the invaluable, tested insights our strategy and design services generate for managers seeking expert, results-oriented guidance.
Can you take us back to the beginning – what inspired your startup, and what were those early days like?
Jason Vaught: When we launched SmashBrand, the inspiration came from a simple but powerful realization: there was a significant gap in the market for packaging design that wasn’t just focused on looks, but also on driving performance.
After working in the CPG space for several years, I saw firsthand how many brands were struggling to make their mark in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Packaging was often designed with only aesthetics in mind, and while that’s important, it wasn’t enough. There was a real lack of understanding about how packaging could actively drive sales and connect with consumers on a deeper level.
That’s when the idea for SmashBrand was born. We set out to create a company that combined strategy, innovation, and data-driven consumer testing throughout the entire packaging design process. We wanted to go beyond just making things look nice—we wanted to make sure every package we designed was backed by real insights that could increase sales velocity and market success.
From the beginning, our mission has been to offer brands a smarter, more effective way to connect with consumers. We believed that by incorporating consumer feedback at every stage of the process, we could help brands not only improve their packaging but also achieve measurable results. This approach, blending creative design with data-driven strategy, has been the foundation of SmashBrand’s growth and success.
What was the biggest turning point or breakthrough that helped you scale from a small operation to a growing business?
Jason Vaught: Scaling was not achieved through merely hiring more designers or increasing marketing spend like most small firms attempt to do. Our true breakthrough was formalizing our performance guarantee and integrating it into our core methodology.
Before the guarantee, we were simply a highly effective design agency competing on creative talent and client testimonials, which limits scaling potential dramatically. The turning point was realizing that our proprietary, data-driven consumer testing gave us a near-perfect predictive capability about sales velocity. We had actual, verifiable proof that our designs would sell faster and better on the shelf. We quantified that success into a unique promise: we guarantee our packaging design will perform or we redesign it for free. This promise immediately separated Smashbrand from 99% of our competition because we shifted the entire financial risk away from the client. This moved us from a vendor relationship to a high-value, strategic partnership, which drastically increased our client acquisition rate among serious CPG brands seeking measurable growth.
How did you handle the toughest challenges during your growth phase – whether financial, operational, or personal?
Jason Vaught: The toughest challenge we faced during our growth phase was purely operational; specifically, managing the immense pressure created by our own performance guarantee. When you promise clients that the design will drive sales velocity, every single project becomes mission-critical. Initially, scaling up the number of design tests required to validate higher client volume created a tremendous backlog, threatening our turnaround times. We had a six-week window that was constantly at risk of extension because our testing methodology was too manual. The breakthrough involved making a significant, six-figure investment in a new automated data platform that streamlined the consumer validation inputs and outputs. This technology investment reduced the testing cycle time by 45%, allowing us to handle a 300% increase in project volume without sacrificing the rigor of our data.
As your company grew, how did your leadership style evolve to meet the demands of scaling?
Jason Vaught: In the early stages, my style was hands-on intervention, meaning I was directly involved in producing most of the content and executing all the campaigns myself. I was the bottleneck, ensuring every piece of communication met our quality standard. The turning point came when that intervention created too much friction and slowed down output by an estimated 40%. The simple growth in volume meant that the model was no longer sustainable because I could not edit 100% of everything while also focusing on future strategy.
My evolved style is now centered on strategic empowerment and trust. I shifted my focus entirely to building highly efficient, autonomous teams who own their results. This required me to spend less time editing the final sentences and more time creating detailed, data-backed content frameworks and governance rules. I now provide clear objectives and the proprietary insights derived from our consumer testing, and then I empower my teams to execute within those guardrails. This allows me to focus my efforts on implementing new digital marketing campaigns and managing the overall budget effectively, which are the highest-value tasks for the company’s sustained growth.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs currently in the “garage” stage, dreaming of going global?
Jason Vaught: The advice I can give to entrepreneurs in the “garage” stage who are dreaming of going global is to validate your core value proposition with data before you ever attempt to scale. The dream of global reach is exciting, but global failure is expensive and happens because the initial product idea lacked consumer proof.
Your initial energy must be spent confirming that your product or service provides a truly unique benefit that people will actually pay for. We see CPG brands waste millions globally because they assume their vision is enough. You need to conduct highly targeted, small-scale consumer testing to prove your concept with verifiable data. Get a measurable success rate above 70% with a small group of your ideal customers before you spend any serious capital on production or massive marketing campaigns.
