A few weeks ago, after we published our review of Our Place’s new AlwaysPan Pro, I got into it with Our Place’s CEO, Shiza Shahid. See, after that initial review, a bunch of y’all started tagging us in a few of their TikToks, and so I jumped into their comments and started talking shit. By which I of course mean trying to help their customers get actual answers to their questions. Unbeknownst to me, I got a key detail wrong both there and in my initial review, which is that the inner apply of the AlwaysPan Pro is in fact titanium and not stainless steel. That mistake led Shiza to hop into the comments, and we went back and forth there briefly and then took it to email. And while I have several concerns about specific details Shiza shared over email, I think many of those issues are actually problems with modern product marketing generally. Specifically, the way that brands are incentivized to make outlandish claims that are as close to untrue as possible without opening up the company to a lawsuit. But Brynn, aren’t you just speculating? Not at all. And here’s where a little bit of cult-flav-lore enters the picture. Okay, so for the last 15 years or so, I’ve worked as a product designer and engineer building software, primarily for community products. I love building communities. I love building platforms for communities. And in 2016, I pitched the CEO of a tiny little pre-launched design tool called Figma on a community-oriented marketing strategy and offered to come and implement it for them. For those of you who have never heard of Figma, just imagine Canva for people who know what they’re doing. The point is that because they made a good product and I cared about their audience, I took a pay cut switch from design to marketing and made it my whole job to create an alternative strategy to this bottom-of-the-barrel approach. Here’s Figma’s original head of marketing and my old boss, Claire, saying that in nicer words on a podcast. And one person who loved Figma so much and just believed in the future of it so much that they came to work for us. And we brought them in and they were somebody who had all the design background, all the design expertise, but just like loved the tool. And that person really became the face of talking about Figma to the community. One of the things this first designer advocate, his name was Brynn, taught me really early with me was, don’t be thirsty. And I know that that’s a funny phrase, but it was never about the hard sell. We were getting people to try it and then try it again. And so much of this lightweight fun stuff became important because, yeah, we weren’t ready for the hard sell at this point. And so we never did it. Skipping ahead eight years, that tiny little design tool is now so important to my industry that Adobe tried to buy them and couldn’t because it would have constituted a monopoly. And guess what? There are now 18 people doing that job and they still credit that initial honest community focused approach to marketing with a lot of their success today. And that designer advocacy position is actually scaled with Figma. And we still have it today. It’s one of its extreme, I think it’s kind of the magic dust, you call it, that we sprinkle on go to market to make a lot of our go to market function work. But yeah, we didn’t focus on marketing or marketing, like traditional marketing, right? We’re very focused on the technical aspects. I promise I’m not saying all this to flex. I’m just trying to make the point that I’ve been in the same position that a brand like our place is in now, where they’re trying to compete with incumbents with much better resources and they’re under a lot of investor pressure. But not only have I seen it done well, I’ve executed it personally. I know it can be done firsthand. Since Figma, I’ve designed and built software for companies large and small. And in every single one of them, I’ve worked closely with marketing. I understand the incentives. I’ve seen these decisions get made. So instead of taking a turn for the dramatic and just picking apart every word she has a set over email. I’m going to introduce a fun new mechanism to Colt Flav. It’s called the trust rating. And it’s a really easy system for evaluating public marketing claims. Here’s how it works. We’ve got one axis from true to false and another from honest misleading. We’ll give each claim a brand makes about their product a score from zero to 10 on each axis. And the average of those two scores is the trust rating. So let’s give a couple of examples. When I said that the inside of this pan is made of stainless steel, that was a reasonable to make based on their marketing copy, but was factually untrue. Five out of 10. When Carroway says there’s no PFOA in their stainless steel cookware, that’s almost certainly completely true because it’s been illegal to put it in any cookware for years now. But it’s also utterly irrelevant because you wouldn’t expect it to be in those pans anyway in 2024. And therefore it might mislead customers to believe that their competitors in the steel pans do contain PFOA. Another five out of 10, but kind of the opposite. When Hexclad says that their pans have unbeatable searing power unmatched by any other pan, that’s abjectly untrue. Not only are there many other pans with almost identical composition, but a PTFE skillet, even one reinforced with steel, isn’t remotely ideal for searing. The searing power of stainless steel comes from its ability to get ripping hot without risk. PTFE does not have that ability and is generally recommended to be used below 500 degrees Fahrenheit. But Hexclad is able to make a claim like this because there’s a qualitative assessment and thus difficult to disprove. But since their core audiences are people who don’t know how to cook, creators they’ve sponsored and Hexclad investor Gordon Ramsay, I would categorize this statement as intentionally misleading. Zero out of 10. When Heston says that their nanobond line is four times harder than stainless steel, making it resistant to scratching, staining and saltpitting, there’s four separate claims here and they’re almost all completely true. I was completely unable to put even a slight scratch in it with even my hardest calibrated tools. Fun fact, I did buy a corundum pick after this and I was able to scratch it. Oops. Saltpitting isn’t an issue at all. The one miss is that while there’s probably less chromium available at the surface to cause staining, these pans are still inarguably prone to rainbow staining, probably because the dark surface makes it stand out more. So while it’s technically true, I don’t think a lot of consumers would see it that way. And lastly, let’s take it back to R. Place who says that the AlwaysPan Pro’s titanium surface is 300% harder than stainless steel, which makes it virtually indestructible and able to withstand up to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. That statement is either misinformed or intentionally misleading for multiple reasons, but there are three separate claims here, so let’s take them one at a time. First, when R. Place is talking about hardness, they’re talking about results from the Vickers hardness test, which is a measure of how hard it is to poke a very specific probe into a material. By that measure, this claim is almost certainly true, though I don’t have the equipment to prove it. The problem with this claim though is that punctures aren’t the type of destruction people are concerned about when they’re using a non-stick pan. Unless you’re wearing it to a duel. Big shot! The concern with non-stick cookware has always been surface abrasion, which removes the non-stick coating. That context makes this claim almost certainly true, but fundamentally misleading. Five out of ten. As for virtually indestructible, we’re again getting into semantics. Yes, it would be inconvenient to attempt to completely disintegrate this pan, but it’s actually not that hard to ruin the condition of it or reduce it into useless form. That’s because the raw titanium surface of the pan is actually easier to scratch than cookware. And the oxide coating, which is far harder, still can’t even hold up to an old stainless steel crane barrel fork. It genuinely takes almost no effort to completely destroy this coating. They’re playing word games here, and while that’s not technically lying, it is clearly, undeniably untrue in practical terms. I never thought they’d be so brazen as to make such misleading claims. I should have tested this in my initial review. Zero out of ten. Lastly, we have able to withstand 1000 degrees Fahrenheit with an asterisk next to it that just calls out that the gold version has a lower maximum operating temperature. As for its factual basis, titanium’s melting point is actually far higher than that, at over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. When you see 1000 degrees Fahrenheit listed as a max temp in cookware, it’s almost certainly because of aluminum, which melts it just higher than that. I genuinely don’t understand why they attributed this to the titanium surface, but I suspect it was just a copy editing issue. That makes this claim kind of the inverse of the hardness one. It is technically incorrect, but it wouldn’t change the way you use the pan anyway, so I wouldn’t consider it misleading for practical purposes. Five out of ten. Initially, I gave the AlwaysPan Pro a seven for materials, and with what I know now, I’m dropping that score to a four. The surface isn’t as non-stick as PTFE or even ceramic, but it is slightly more resistant to damage than either of those coatings, though it is still incredibly easy to completely remove the coating. That brings my updated review score down from 3.2 out of 10 to 2.4 out of 10. And when we factor in Sarah’s score, we get a cult score of 1.8 out of 10. I guess she didn’t like it either. Listen, I have shipped bad products in my life, and I’ve obviously gotten things wrong publicly, but I’m also not going to be shy about pointing them out and correcting them. Maybe I’m a self-righteous idiot tilting at corporate windmills, but I want brands to act that way too. So going forward, we’re going to test and score marketing claims in our product reviews. Those scores will all roll up to the brand itself to help people make decisions about which companies are worth buying from. But we also want to make it so you can add community notes with screenshots of claims and your own scores over on cultflav.com. That’s what I was going to say when I wrote the script yesterday, but I actually just built it this morning. So you can do it right now if you want. Each claim can be resolved so that companies that improve their marketing strategies and treat their customers honestly and with respect can get rewarded for it. Sarah and I are trying to build Cult Flav into a lot more than just a channel. We want it to be a great community for cooking enthusiasts on the internet. And while it’s not necessarily our place to police rampant capitalism on the internet, we think it’s always worth incentivizing honesty for this community of home cooks that we care so much about. Hopefully the trust rating will help in some small way. Fuck, I’m sweating.