In March, a pair of wrapped trucks spent days circling Expo West. David Protein wasn't even exhibiting.

Two drivers covered roughly 1,000 miles for a fraction of what a booth would have cost. By the end of the conference, about ten retail buyers had called to ask when the product was coming, competitors wanted to know if it was real, and the stunt had pulled in around 30 million impressions. The product was ice cream, a deliberately contrarian follow-up to David Protein's bars. When it dropped, it sold out online in about an hour. "It's the disruptor's plight," says Gavin, who leads growth at David Protein. "You just have to do stuff and break it."

Anyone can make noise. David Protein makes noise without making mistakes, and that takes more preparation than most people see.

Gavin joined the week David Protein launched. The team has since grown from 9 people to about 120, and the product line now spans bars, shakes, and ice cream. His job covers creative, paid media, and demand forecasting: one day a three-day shoot in Montana, the next a forecast that runs past 10pm.

Since bringing concepting and ad design in-house, the team has shipped 3,000 to 4,000 ads this year. Requests come in through Slack, the team pulls footage and stills from Air, designers build in Figma, and finished ads go straight to Meta.

The product moves just as fast. David Protein is on the fifth iteration of its gold bar formula, and every ingredient change can mean a new nutrition panel. At one point, around 30 PDPs sat in a single Google Drive.

Air became David Protein's single source of truth. Boards are organized by end use (retail, out-of-home, production, guidelines, website, external partners), and each retail account manager owns a board for their accounts, pulling current packaging and SKUs to keep their own brochures up to date.

The stakes are real. Early on, one error in Amazon item setup led to mislabeled product, a wave of returns, and what Gavin calls "one of the most annoying technical fixes you're ever going to make." Today, Air agent tags assets by SKU using the team's product data, so the current version is the one that surfaces.

Because every product shot lives in Air, Canvas gives the team a head start on anything new. One hero image becomes alternate angles, fresh backgrounds, and new treatments for retail listings and paid media. Product photography becomes a 360° spin for a PDP. When a nutrition fact changes, the team edits the render directly instead of filing a design ticket. When a launch beats the shoot schedule, new imagery comes together in minutes, not a studio day.

The rule hasn't changed: nothing goes public until it meets the bar the team holds every asset to.

The less time Gavin spends tracking down the right dieline, the more he gets to spend on the stuff that made David Protein worth talking about in the first place: finding inspiration, pushing ideas further, and planning past next week.

We asked him about all of it for A View on Air, a series of video portraits filmed on our roof. Watch his below.