During a northbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail many years ago, a five-day rainstorm engulfed the Great Smoky Mountains, leaving everything wet and windy. Patrick needed a fire for warmth and to dry out his gear, but all the available tinder and kindling were soaked. That's where the idea for Mickwick started.

By the time he finished the trail, he had a problem he wanted to solve. He went to grad school, developed a formula for all-natural fire starters, and was awarded a patent and trademarks by the USPTO. He built the website himself and spent the next 10 years working as a school counselor while building the brand on the side. Once the business could carry the weight, he quit counseling and went full-time into Mickwick.

Today Mickwick sells direct through mickwickfires.com and wholesales to large retailers across the US and Canada. The brand has the same problem most small DTC operations face: a category where visual storytelling is everything, and a marketing budget that doesn't stretch as far as the big brands sitting next to them on the shelf.

Before Hypernatural, Patrick was running marketing the way most small DTC founders do. Patchwork.

For creative, he was hiring graphic designers from friends-and-family networks at $150 an hour. The work was slow, expensive, and full of friction. “You've got to come in and nitpick everything they do, because you don't like this, you don't like that,” he says. He spent roughly $2,000 on a graphic designer and “barely got anything out of it.” He'd also tried building creative himself with Adobe's AI tools, giving it a real shot before deciding the output wasn't quite where he needed it.

On the distribution side, he had 15 influencers pushing Mickwick over multiple social media platforms. Sending products, paying them, managing relationships. “Influencers are typically all about themselves. It's not about sales or engagement; it's about how many followers. And followers do not equate to sales.”

Three to four thousand dollars of product and production cost was going out the door every cycle to creators who weren't moving the needle.

Patrick found Hypernatural through accounts he follows in the AI and design space, and tested around eight other AI video tools before landing here.

His workflow now starts and ends inside the platform. He writes what he wants, edits the script, generates the visuals, exports the video. He takes his own product photos and animates them, turning a static shot of the Mickwick package into a video where it unrolls to reveal a fire underneath.

His background as a counselor shapes how he builds: short, 10-to-15-second clips designed to hold attention the same way he had to hold it in a classroom. The videos go out across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, and he runs Google ads against the strongest ones.

Website traffic and engagement at mickwickfires.com is up 150% since Patrick started using Hypernatural a year ago.

His influencer roster dropped from 15 to 3, just the relationships that were real to begin with. The $150-an-hour designers aren't getting calls. The product he used to ship out every cycle stays with him now.

Patrick has signed on as an early-access partner for Hypernatural's next release, which adds expanded model selection, chat-based editing, and individual-shot export. He's continuing to scale content across social and Google ads, running the entire creative pipeline himself.