There are four Blue Apron boxes in my building's recycling room this morning. I counted them while breaking down my own cardboard, the way I have counted them most weeks since March. Same insulated liners. Same ice packs sweating into the bin. Nobody in my building has ever mentioned Blue Apron to me. They just quietly get it for a while, and then they quietly stop.
The company went public on June 29 at ten dollars a share, priced down from a range that started considerably higher, and it has traded under that number ever since. Amazon announced it was buying Whole Foods two weeks before the offering. The timing was cruel and also clarifying.
Most of the coverage has gone at the arithmetic. Churn, acquisition cost, the money spent to win a customer who leaves inside six months. All true. But the arithmetic is describing something any strategist should recognize on sight.
Blue Apron invented a category and never gave anyone a reason to choose it once the category filled up.
Convenience is a feature. It is a wonderful feature, and it will carry you a long way when you are the only one offering it. What it cannot do is survive contact with a competitor who is also convenient and cheaper, or convenient and faster, or convenient and already sitting in the warehouse nearest your customer. The moment somebody matches you on the thing you sold, you have no argument left. You are a box.
Compare that to the brands people protect. Patagonia customers will walk past three cheaper jackets, not because the jacket is more waterproof but because buying it means something they can say out loud. Salt & Straw has a line down Northwest 23rd in the rain for ice cream you could buy, sitting down, one block away. Neither of those is a convenience argument. Both of them are reasons.
Here is the part that gets lost. Category creation feels like brand building because it produces the same early evidence: the press, the growth curve, the sense that you named something. But naming a behavior is not the same as owning a preference. One is a market you built for everybody. The other is a position only you can hold.
The test I keep coming back to is embarrassingly simple. If your company vanished tomorrow, would your customer be inconvenienced, or would your customer be sad. Inconvenience is replaceable by definition. Sadness is a moat.
If your company vanished tomorrow, would your customer be inconvenienced, or would your customer be sad.
I still cook from a box some nights, when deciding is the hard part. Truffles and Barnaby supervise the entire operation from the counter, deeply invested, waiting on the chicken. They would not miss the brand. They would miss the chicken.