It was one of the strongest cups of coffee I had ever had, and Silvano said to me, "How would you like to write a sales letter for my toothpaste?"

Within a couple of months, I saw that there was much more that needed to be done to tie everything into the brand, however, I only knew so much about branding, and I only knew so much about his target market, so spinning the right story would take significantly longer. But that was fine. The time it takes to get a product onto the shelves can be between 2-10 years. This is with everything from marketing strategies, to headhunting, to production, to patents.

I started with the shape of the box.

With a product like a toothpaste, the most common thing that will happen is that it will land itself on the bottom shelf until it starts selling.

I thought back to how to play a crappy hand: find the context where the crappy hand has value.

I am an avid player of Cards Against Humanity. In a game of Cards Against Humanity, you are pitted against other players who play the funniest cards in their hand, and the "Card Tzar" chooses the funniest one. In my year of studying comedy, I know how it works. When everyone else is being funny, telling great jokes, they are waiting for a fool. Someone who throws caution and common sense to the wind and spits up jokes left and right. When telling an act of jokes, if you tell all of your funniest jokes, you bored your audience. If you stick to a rhythm, you end up boring your audience. There needs to always be something to keep their minds actively listening to you, and you alone.

In Cards Against Humanity, your hand is usually filled with a bunch of duds, two marginally good cards, and one or two great ones. The more you empty your hand, the higher the chances are that you will get another great card to make your play worth while. If you know how to play a dud card, your hand will empty, and you will end up with more great cards in your hand for an end game strategy.

If you're playing the great cards as soon as they reach your hand, you will end up with a handful of duds, and when in a tizzy, you'll be stuck with nowhere to go.

Here's how the Cards Against Humanity strategy usually works for me. People play their great cards until they exhaust all of them. This is when you play whatever card in your hand is the second to funniest. When everyone has burnt themselves out, start jumping between the most funny cards, and the least funny cards. Firstly, no one suspects that you played those cards. Secondly, when people start getting good cards again, they will be playing the good cards at the same time. Because you are the only one not playing good cards, you will end up being funnier for the surprise factor.

Here's how the toothpaste aisle looks as of 2020: Square boxes with circles, red, white and blue, cheap looking pastels with claims about how great the toothpaste is, dark corrugated cardboard with NATURAL written all over it with a pregnancy warning at the back. Nothing is black and white. No company strays from the traditional shape of the box, so they end up all doing the same thing. "Anything I do to the box to modify it, even in the slightest amount, will make the packaging 10x better than the competitors."

So I did.

However, doing this is a bit more costly, time consuming, but the added benefit of having great packaging outweighs those costs.

What I learned: Always know how to play the hand that's been given to you.