Help Remedies's Hip Pharma

If you were one of the creative geniuses attending the annual TED Full Spectrum conference in Long Beach, Calif., a few weeks back and happened to cut your finger, you’d be grateful for the package of bandages handed out called Help: I’ve Cut Myself and I Want to Save a Life. Help Remedies, a pharmaceutical startup, not only provided its own brand of generic bandages free of charge, it also invited TED attendees to register their freshly spilled blood with DKMS, the world’s largest bone marrow donor center. The kit contained a sterilized cotton swab to collect blood and a prepaid envelope for injured TED attendees to send in their sample. Help’s website features a video, narrated by a shirtless man in silver body paint, dressed as a bread knife, offering further explanation on the value of donating marrow.

Help is fast becoming a case study in the triumph of branding. Co-founders Richard Fine and Nathan Frank are doing for generic drugs what American Apparel did for plain T-shirts: wrapping them in cool with every trick in the downtown branding playbook, from hip packaging to absurdist videos to youth targeting. Fine, who, like Frank, previously worked in branding and advertising in New York, is the son of two medical professors in England. “Medicine’s an entirely self-referential world filled with terrible communicators,” he says. “MDs love warnings and being very technical about things.”