Ammunition Founder Robert Brunner: Skin in the Game

Ammunition CEO Robert Brunner taps its latest product, FEND. All images: Ammunition

Ammunition Founder Robert Brunner likes to have skin in the game. He founded Ammunition with a goal of sharing in the success of his clients by investing in the companies the studio works with. Brunner says that having skin in the game always leads to better work—and that work has been lucrative: headphones and speakers for Beats by Dre, the Square Stand, in-car icons for Lyft, instant cameras for Polaroid, a self-heating mug for Ember, and most recently, FEND, a mister for nasal hygiene. 

Brunner and his 50-person team were first introduced to FEND by David Edwards, its founder and Harvard scientist, at the start of the pandemic. They were intrigued because Edwards, while doing work for the National Institute of Health in the UK on how to combat anthrax, came upon this idea of airway health and hygiene. Edwards found that by paying attention to the upper respiratory system, the body can use its own resources to help fend off things in any environment.

As the Ammunition team learned more about it, they discovered humans take in millions of particles daily. When your system works well, the mucus is captured in your upper airways and washes out and goes into your stomach where the acid kills it. But there has never been anything that really focuses on the health and cleansing of that system. That’s what FEND is about and, well, the timing is certainly good, isn’t it? Everyone is thinking about hygiene these days. 

Here, Brunner shares how they’ve designed FEND, why Ammunition invests in the products it builds, and what he’s learned about developing a great team and culture as one of San Francisco’s last independent studios.

Recognize these? Just a few of the products Ammunition designed.

Can you share more about how FEND works?

It’s a pocket mister, so you squeeze it and hold it for a few seconds and inhale through your nose - and do that several times a day. The solution is made up of natural salts, and it's delivered in a precise way—the droplet size has to be exact. We worked with David and his team to commercialize this technology and put it in people's hands in a simple, cost effective way. But what you're really asking people to do is to put another routine in their lives, which is a big challenge. But Fend has a number of benefits beyond airway protection, so we’re motivated to take on that challenge.

How do you do that?

It’s counterintuitive as a designer in that we're trained to go out and reinvent the world, and imagine everything in new and different ways. That is an important thing, but in terms of people accepting new ideas, it's not always the best. People need a launch point where they can enter into something, feel comfortable and understand it, and then expand upon it. 

Fend is an entirely new technology that requires new behavior in order to be effective, so our goal was to make the Fend mister immediately understandable to use. We focused on creating an approachable, modern form that encourages the correct behavior when dispensing the mist and ensures the right dose. 

The solution is twofold: Making the process easy, familiar, understandable, and fun, and then providing people with information to help build motivation around it.

The Fend mister is designed to be easy to carry and fun to use, so people will build a habit around using it.

From a brand perspective, how did you approach communicating this new idea with customers? 

We helped Fend hone their messaging around the idea of airway health, the benefits, and how you do it. Then made the mister itself affordable, easy to carry and fun to use. It’s cool when you compress and hold it to create the mist. We have this little flexible section in the middle of the mister that compresses and expands and gives you this unique, animated form gesture.  

We developed the brand strategy and visual identity that reflects the optimistic and scientific nature of David. The brand identity is centered on a gestural mark with the letter F crafted into a droplet. A little reminiscent of a scientific symbol, it’s meant to be a forward looking and positive representation of Fend's natural ingredients – salt and water. 

The design of the packaging takes its cues from beauty products, using angled panels within a simple sleeve and carton structure to create a familiar yet elevated experience. We also used the packaging as an opportunity to help users begin building a healthy new habit by including a “21 Days of FEND” insert – a simple way to get started with airway hygiene. All taken together, it’s a really great foundation for a new category of product.

Ammunition team members can spend weeks refining products in their factory.

The Ammunition team takes a lunch break (pre-Covid).

What was the trial and error process like?

Our typical process is where we’ll build a framework of understanding of how things have to function: What do they need to do? Who do they need to reach? And how do those people live their lives and what are the potential pain points for them? But then we kind of ignore all that and go off and come up with 1,000 ideas, and then come back and marry them together.

That was the process we did working remotely. Our model maker has been working his butt off for the last year because we have two giant 3D printers that he's just running 24/7. Everything that we make, we need to make anywhere between three to six sets of and they go out to everybody. When we do this, we’re at least all looking at the same thing and have models to play with. Key to our process is taking information, iterating, building a lot of models, evaluating with ourselves, getting our families and friends to play with them, and continuing to build upon and refine that idea. 

Why did Ammunition invest in FEND?

First and foremost, it is a great investment. FEND is at the forefront of airway health, which given what we’ve been experiencing in our world of late, is critical for health worldwide. We believe daily care of our airways will become as common as brushing your teeth, so we felt it would be great to be part of that movement to build this practice. 

From a culture perspective, being invested in something sharpens our focus as designers and increases the trust with our clients or partners. For a long time, I worked pretty exclusively in a pure fee-for-service model, and we still have people come in the door who just want to hire a designer. That's fine, and we do have those clients. But I know that when we have skin in the game, it makes us look even more deeply at the company's business, and we can better push people to make decisions and drive products out the door. It completely rewires the chemistry in how we work with people from other disciplines, business, technology, whatever, in a very positive way. The chemistry is totally different than anything I’ve ever experienced before as a designer. As a result of being invested, and as a result of that better chemistry, creatively what comes out is just much better and on-point.

When we are given that seat at the table as investors, and given that responsibility to build and drive something beyond just making a nice object, it helped reshape who we are, and began to become a benchmark for us of how you should work with people.

You mentioned how your team has adapted over the past year. What have you learned about building and developing a great team?

It takes an investment. You hire somebody, but you have to look at it as you're taking on a project to invest in, grow, and build. Part of it is also the environment. Early in my career I felt supported by my peers in management to take some risks and potentially fail. I did much better work. Here, there is a feeling that people can push and not get penalized if they fail. 

What else?

One thing happened to us around 2012 that was important to our team building approach. Apple, Google, and Amazon were all growing design teams and we found ourselves fighting for talent with these mega corporations, trying to compete with their salaries and benefits. And I had this epiphany. We were looking for a senior designer and interviewed a group of people who wanted very high salaries for our structure. But when I looked at their work, I realized we had people here that had a couple of years of experience that outperformed them. I realized we actually have a good ability to identify and nurture talent. That’s the way we're going to play this game. We're going to build on that. 

Almost every designer here has started as an intern, spent six months on an intern’s salary and worked their butt off. But we invest in them, train them and then we find shortly after they are performing at a high level above their experience. You end up with good people and you end up with loyalty and commitment from them because they realize they've been invested in. 

How do you identify talent and potential? 

It falls into three buckets. There is the work that they've done. We look at it through our particular lens of what we think is good and see if there is something the person has taken and run with to build something interesting. 

The second is we take a deep dive on someone's technical abilities or potential for technical ability. You have to have an interest in how things work and how they're made right. Do you mind spending three weeks at a time in the factory? 

The third piece is character. I've always looked at wanting philosophical alignment but cultural and background variance. People who bring different viewpoints make a richer community. And we look at how we feel they will interact with our team. We tend to like people who can check their ego at the door.  An ego is really important to a strong designer, but you also need to see the bigger picture.

If you could go back to talk to your younger self when you were first starting out, what might you tell yourself?

I would tell myself to enroll in an acting or stand-up comedy class. I learned over time that the ability to get something you have designed out in the world is a social process. You can’t build an amazing thing and deliver it into consumers’ hands all by yourself. And the more important it is, the more people that you have to get aligned to what you want to do and aligned to that vision. How you do that is by effectively communicating, engaging and drawing people into what you're doing. You need to tell a great story to do it.

This is not taught in school. No one ever teaches you how to actually influence, how to actually sell, and how to actually promote your work and how to get people on board with your agenda.

If I was going back, I would take an acting class, a stand-up comedy class, a speech class, and more creative writing. I'd probably have gotten a lot further earlier than the 15 years it took me to out that those were important skills you had to cultivate.

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