Introducing a breakthrough product in an established category may seem daunting. However, there are plenty of industries where innovation has lagged and newcomers can find success based on intuition and insights, according to Craig Dubitsky, who has launched products in cleaning products, lip balm, toothpaste and coffee.

Breakthroughs can come pretty much anywhere, he said. Take headphones, for example. AirPods and other wireless models added an innovation people may not have previously considered. “Who knew wires were the bane of our existence for so long?” Dubitsky said at Ad Age’s recent Business of Brands conference. “The bar is low.”

Below, three pieces of advice Dubitsky, the founder and CEO of Happy coffee, shared at the conference.

You can break into a crowded category

Sometimes, to make something a little bit better, you don’t have to do that much and it ends up making it a lot better, Dubitsky said.

After creating brands including eos, which launched its spherical lip balm in a category long dominated by players such as ChapStick, Dubitsky and a small team launched the oral care brand Hello in 2013. Within a few years, Hello began outselling longstanding brands at Dollar General—and Colgate acquired Hello Products in 2020.

“The bar is low for everything, including things that we’re used to dealing with every day,” he said, discussing items such as headphones and shoelaces. “There’s no such thing as a boring category. There’s just boring execution because people care about everything.”

Do something people care about

Consider how to improve on what already exists, Dubitsky said. He tries to think about categories where there is a lack of innovation. Try to consider the total addressable market, or how many people might care about a product, said Dubitsky.

“The key thing is figuring out what sucks for people,” Dubitsky said.

He said to consider emotional innovation, not just technical enhancements.

“There’s lots of technical innovation, but if you don’t give a shit about it, who cares? Like it’s great that that thing can do that thing that you never knew you needed, but does it make you feel anything?”

Earlier this year, Dubitsky launched Happy coffee, co-created with Robert Downey Jr. As Dubitsky previously told Ad Age, “the part that we thought was open for some innovation was emotional innovation … it’s knowing that the coffee isn’t magical—people are magical. And I feel like a lot of brands treat people as targets or as commodities in a way. And we want to flip that.”

Read more about the coffee brand’s launch strategy

Happy incorporates its message into its packaging. A canned caramel latte, for example, is described as having notes of butterscotch “and positivity.” The brand message goes beyond that. Happy gave an equity stake in the company to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

Names matter

After brainstorming name ideas, remember that there can be room for improvement.

When Intel was going to introduce a “pro” chip, people at the firm Lexicon asked for more time to work on the name, Dubitsky recalled. They came up with a coined word, one that previously didn’t exist. Then they tried out the coined word—Pentium—on everything from mascara to gasoline to skis to find out what people thought of it.

“No matter what they put it on when they asked people to describe how they felt, what they thought that this brand name meant or evoked, it meant powerful and innovative and strong,” Dubitsky said.

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It can be a process to find names that are unique “in a way that’s emotionally resonant with people.”

Even then, one has to trust their instincts. The brand names eos—which stands for evolution of smooth—and Hello were both discouraged by some outsiders, Dubitsky said. 

“It’s a lightning rod, it’s a shorthand, that takes somebody very, very quickly to why your thing is special,” Dubitsky said.