On Crafted we love to highlight great products, so for this special holiday greeting we asked Artisans and friends of Artium two simple questions:  “What product did you fall in love with in 2022 and why?” Find out which products people didn’t know they needed or wanted this year, which features they really appreciated, and what their game changers were. But most importantly, have yourself a Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2023 with more stories about great products and the people who make them. 

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Erin: It's something that I didn't think I wanted or needed.

Henry: It'll be really fun this holiday season as you get together with friends and family.Brett: It's an absolute lifesaver.

Dan Blumberg: Hey everyone, Dan Blumberg from Artium here. Just wanted to drop by with a short little holiday greeting card episode. As you know, on Crafted, we love to highlight great products. So we asked artisans and friends of Artium two simple questions. What product did you fall in love with in 2022 and why?Jackie: This year I fell in love with an app called Forest.

Dan Blumberg: That's Jackie Lamport, one of the producers of Crafted.

Jackie: It basically gamifies focus, which is something I have a really hard time with. So essentially you're planting trees, which is setting a timer for you to focus, and it takes over your entire phone. And if you get too close to it says things like, "Stop fubbing" or "Put your phone down." And if you want to exit the app, it says, "Do you want to give up?" which of course, I don't want to give up.

Henry: Hi Crafted listeners, this is Henry Meller. I am one of the co-founders of Artium. And a product I'd recommend you check out this holiday season is something called Clip Two Comic. It's an app in the App store. It enables you to take any photo on your camera roll and it will auto automatically convert it into a comic book style animated image. It'll be really fun this holiday season as you get together with friends and family. It's a great way to make the photo you take together that little bit more interesting and different. So, check it out.

Dan Blumberg: Back on the work productivity front, we have two recommendations for AI powered tools. Here's Kevin Brauschweign, Artium's digital marketing manager. He loves Descript, an app that can take any audio or video recording and create a transcript from it. And then, and this is the real game changer...

Kevin: From there, I'm able to go in and word by word edit every single piece of that transcript. Through AI, it's able to take their video and completely and seamlessly edit it to match anything that I type, allowing us to exponentially increase the content we're able to create.

Dan Blumberg: Descript is founded by Andrew Mason, who previously founded Groupon. It's definitely an app that I have my eye on. Meanwhile...

Trace: I am really happy for the robot overlords to help.

Dan Blumberg: That's Artium evangelist, Trace Wax.Trace: I am newly this week, like everyone else, obsessed with OpenAI and ChatGPT. I'm obsessed with it because I take a ton of notes throughout my day as I talk to people, and the notes are completely disparate and disorganized. And everyone's saying, "Can you just give me just a concise summary? Give me just the three top facts?" And I can ask it that, and it'll get it wrong. And I'll ask it again, and then it'll get it right and I can pick the story I want to tell, make a couple changes. And so when I'm thinking in a very generative mode and I just want to be creative and free write, I can take that free writing and have that consolidation step happen automatically, which is the part I don't enjoy. I am really happy for the robot overlords to help.Dan Blumberg: I spoke to Trace after the special live taping of Crafted that we hosted at Rise, created by Barclays, a FinTech incubator in New York. I also spoke to some of our guests and asked them for their favorite apps of the year.

Adekunle: My name is Adekunle Oduye. This might be controversial, but Robinhood.

Dan Blumberg: Adekunle is a design engineer and he appreciates a very simple but powerful detail in Robinhood's app.

Adekunle: They actually create a product where it changes during the daytime. So when it's at daytime, it has a light mode, and then when the market actually closes, they have dark mode. Which I think is interesting because it lets the people know that like, "Hey, I can't really trade at this time because it's dark. Because people don't know like, 'Hey, after five o'clock you can't really trade anything."

Dan Blumberg: Meanwhile, here's product consultant, Holly Hester Riley.

Holly: Okay, so I feel kind of lame saying this, but I'm going to go with TikTok. Because it's gaining adoption amongst adults, like people who are older than the 20s. And I am a content creator, and I started creating content on TikTok. And I've never had a platform where, as a brand-new content creator on that platform with no followers, I get so many views.

Dan Blumberg: Brett Davis is a talent engagement lead for Artium. And his lifesaver in 2022 was...

Brett: Avail. It's a platform for do-it-yourself landlords that includes everything from processing applications and background checks, to helping you generate a lease that you can send directly to your tenants. My wife and I recently purchased our first rental home at the beginning of the year, and Avail has been an absolute lifesaver.

Dan Blumberg: But it's not all about software.Erin: Hey, this is Erin MacIndoe Sproule.Dan Blumberg: Erin is one of Crafted's producers.Erin: And a product that I totally fell in love with this year is my extra large bath sheet from Ikea. It is cozy, it is large. It's something that I didn't think I wanted or needed, but now that I have it, just makes me really happy.

Dan Blumberg: And I love this recommendation from Ashley Yancy, director of Employee Experience at Artium. Ashley loves Spotify, but for more reasons than you might think.

Ashley: I found that I rely on it to not only be a mood stabilizer, holding me down during my workouts or allowing me to focus during deep work time, but also to sleep. Sometimes I find myself putting on a binaural beats playlist, that just helps me get into that deep sleep.

Dan Blumberg: As for me, here are two products I fell in love with this year. One, and this is totally cliché, but after seeing a gillion design product people rave about their AeroPress coffee makers, I finally got one. And yes, it does make an incredible cup of coffee and it's easy, and you can do it at home or on the go. So shame on me for not trying that one early.

And a product that for me is an actual lifesaver, is my dry suit. When I'm not building software I moonlight is a kayak guide on the Hudson River, this year I finally got a dry suit, which means I can extend my season and paddle even when the water is cold enough to kill you. So shout out to coffee and kayaking.

Just some of the products we've fallen in love with this year here at Artium. What product did you fall in love with this year? Tell us at hello@thisisartium.com, and we may feature your recommendations on the show.

Crafted will be back in 2023 with more episodes about great products and the people who make them. In the meantime, if you're new to the show, you might want to go back and listen to our early episodes for great insights on how to run experiments that really move the needle, why features won't save you, and how and why to run a Wizard of Oz MVP. Please subscribe to Crafted and join us as we explore more great products. I'm Dan Blumberg. Happy New Year.