This clothing brand grew from 0 to 598K followers (without ever talking about their clothes)

There's a clothing brand that's been breaking my content brain lately.

It’s called Wants and Needs.

They've built their Instagram channel to 598,000+ followers with one of the most rabid fan bases I’ve ever seen.

And here's the crazy part…

They don't post lookbooks, fabric details, or model shots.

As far as I can tell, they break every conventional “clothing brand content rule” and don’t talk about their clothes at all in their videos.

Their entire content strategy consists of voiceless comedy skits and stitch videos where the clothing is worn by the main characters and/or featured intentionally at the very end.

They built this entire brand on $25K with zero influencer partnerships, and they've done 18 restocks of the same product because they keep selling out over and over.

I’d estimate they are doing between $500K-$1M per month in revenue.

So I had to pull up their channel in Sandcastles to figure out what the hell they're doing that’s working so well.

Spoiler alert — it’s awesome.

Breaking down the LEGO bricks of viral entertainment marketing

For clothing brands specifically, there are really only three ways to market via organic content in 2025:

• Path 1: Talk about technical specs (win with features)

• Path 2: Sell lifestyle and aspiration (win with vibes)

• Path 3: Create broad entertaining content people actually want to watch and connect it back to the brand slowly overtime (win with entertainment horsepower)

Wants and Needs chose option three.

You wouldn’t think that would be the ideal path, but it’s working…absurdly well.

Here’s the exact process we used in Sandcastles to figure out their content formula👇🏻

When you're analyzing a brand’s content strategy (to reverse engineer what’s working), the god-tier strategy is to break down each video into its component parts — what I call the "LEGO bricks" of short-form content.

I filtered their top-performing videos and analyzed the top 10 individually, breaking down the seven key lego bricks for each:

1. Topic - a one liner describing the topic/premise

2. Angle - the meat of the video (facts/takes/plot/etc.)

3. Hook - the spoken, text, and visual hook in the first 3 seconds

4. Storytelling Style - the overall flow/structure of how the story is told

5. Visual Format - the way the visuals are laid out

6. Key Visuals - the visuals used

7. Audio - the audio, music, SFX used

By taking an extra 2-3 minutes per video to document these variables, it’s much easier to spot patterns and build hypotheses for which pieces you should take inspiration from to test in your own content.

The Wants and Needs content pattern: 90% entertainment, 10% product

The first thing I noticed upon analyzing? There's no transcript.

These guys aren't talking in their videos at all. This means the Spoken Hook and “Writing Style” variables are non-factors here and should be ignored.

The second thing I noticed? They're not actually marketing the clothing.

Despite being a clothing brand's social media page, in all of the top 10 videos, the actual clothes don't usually appear intentionally until the final 2-3 seconds of every video.

The story structure of every video is roughly the same:

• First 90% = comedic/entertainment skit or viral clip stitch that has already worked

• Final 2-3 seconds = unexpected transition to clothes or funny reaction

It's the unexpected head-fake at the end that makes people laugh and causes them to engage and follow.

Overtime, people begin to “like these guys” and a portion of those viewers eventually convert to purchase.

It’s important to note that this raw entertainment focused content strategy will only work for a physical product brand where “buyer education” is not required, and where the price point is such that a mass market audience could buy.

Because of this, you always want to gut check whether or not the specific learnings from a single source of inspiration are applicable for you, depending on what you sell or offer.

This is why it’s super important to build your Watchlist in Sandcastles with relevant channels to your niche…so that the reference videos you’re studying relate as close as possible.

But even if this example isn’t perfectly relevant to you, it’s helpful to understand how to conduct this analysis process and what to look for when you do.

Let’s further analyze the skit structures they’re using…these map to the “Storytelling Style” and “Visual Format” variables, and explores how they’re flowing the story visually.

Here's are the 3 types of “Skit Styles” this page uses…

Type 1: Original creator skit (originals)
Type 2: Recreating a viral social media moment (clip mimic)
Type 3: Quick-cut transition from viral clip → creator's version → product reveal (stitch clip)

The visual format is always the same: full-screen, in-world POV. No fancy editing. No talking heads. Maximum immersion in the story.

Why? Because it maximizes the shock value of the unexpected product plug.

The LEGO brick breakdown: What to steal for your brand?

Just so you can see it in action, here’s an example of what I would write down when analyzing one of the Wants and Needs mega outliers (in an attempt to figure out the pattern):

I looked at this video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMq78bSvKdR/

1. Topic/Premise - throw shirt across room and have it snap transition onto body on beat with music, reveal restock date

2. Angle - walk into laundry room and then throw the shirt, make the edit compelling and quick

3. Hook - use a super shocking visual hook that has already been validated (this will have nothing to do with the video itself but will stop the scroll)

4. Storytelling Style - hard cut from unrelated hook into voiceless skit. Walk into laundry room, put clothes down, throw shirt across room, have it snap transition onto body

5. Visual Format - Clip Stitch Full Screen Hook, In World Skit

6. Key Visuals - Full Skit in House

7. Audio - Native on hook, upbeat song, SFX and song beat drop on clothing transition

I run this process ^ for as many relevant videos as I want to analyze.

Now if you're a clothing brand (or frankly, any brand) looking to crack entertainment marketing, here's what I would extract out of the Wants and Needs formula after mining for those variables across all their outlier videos…

1) Hook (0-3 seconds)
Start with something that looks like pure entertainment. No logos. No product shots. Just an intriguing moment that makes people stop scrolling. Bonus if you find a visual from a video that has already gone viral in the past

2) Story (90% of runtime)
Deliver genuine entertainment value. Original comedy skits or recreations of viral moments. The key: it must be watchable even if you removed the brand entirely. If you’re playing the entertainment game, you’re competing against Mr. Beast and Netflix. Does this hold up to be as entertaining as those?

3) The head-fake (final 2-3 seconds)
Unexpected transition to product. This is the moment that recontextualizes everything and makes people go "wait, WHAT?" The more absurd and out of pocket, the seemingly better the video performs

4) Audio strategy
Either silence or using the original audio from viral clips they're recreating. No corporate music. No voiceover. Just raw, immersive content. When using a song to create a transition, make it something popular, upbeat, and switch the transition on the beat

5) Visual format
Always full-screen, in-world POV. Never break the fourth wall until the product reveal. This maximizes the surprise factor.

Now that I have these proven insights, I would factor them into my own versions of content for my brand.

Maybe I execute a different visual style, but I still experiment with the viral clipstitch to headfake format as a test?

This is how you use extracted insights from validated winners to inform your own content strategy.

Try it out this week

You can run this same discovery process for your brand in Sandcastles.

To do it…

1. Build a Watchlist of 5-10 brands doing entertainment marketing well (not just in your category)

2. Filter to Last 3 months → Sort by Outlier Score

3. Pick 3 top videos from each brand

4. Break down the LEGO bricks for each video: topic, angle, hook, story style/structure, visual format, key visuals, audio

5. Look for patterns across all the videos. What's repeated? What's unique? What can you hold constant in your videos? What should you change?

6. Make your first test video this week using the patterns you’ve extracted

Btw, if you think this Creator Breakdown series is valuable, let us know if we should keep writing it.

We initially ran it as a test, but if we get enough positive feedback, we’ll keep going!

PS: If you're ready to start reverse-engineering winning content strategies, you can sign up for Sandcastles here: sandcastles.ai