I stood in the refrigerated aisle at New Seasons on Sunday holding two cartons of oat milk from two companies that have never met, and I could not tell you which was which without turning them around to read the back. Same warm cream background. Same high contrast serif with the slightly wonky lowercase g. Same one word name set enormous.
Then I walked four aisles over and found the same face on a bag of coffee, a jar of hot sauce, and a box of tampons.
We did this to ourselves, and we did it very recently, which is the part I keep laughing about.
For most of the last decade the whole industry redrew itself in the same geometric sans. Airbnb, Google, Uber, the fashion houses that flattened their crests into identical capitals. Everyone called it clean and modern and legible on small screens, and by the end you could not tell a bank from a bike share.
So we fled. Straight into a warm serif with a big x height and a friendly ink trap, which is now doing the exact same thing at the exact same speed.
If your identity stops working the moment your competitor licenses the same typeface, the typeface was never your identity, it was your excuse for not building one.
What actually holds up is boring and structural. Oatly does not own a font, it owns a way of talking, the carton that argues with itself in six point type on the side panel. Liquid Death owns a shape and a posture and a joke it will not stop telling. Salt & Straw owns a color and a flavor board handwritten by whoever is working. You could set any of them in Helvetica tomorrow and still know them from across the room.
Distinctive assets are the ones a customer can recall with their eyes closed. A silhouette. A sound. A ritual. A specific blue. Type matters enormously, but it is a layer, and layers get copied in a quarter by any competitor with a decent studio.
The honest test is the squint test. Print your packaging, print theirs, back up six feet, and squint until the words go soft. If what remains is a rectangle with a name on it, the serif did not save you. It just bought you eighteen months of looking current.
If your identity stops working the moment your competitor licenses the same typeface, the typeface was never your identity, it was your excuse for not building one.
At karaoke on Thursday four different people sang the same Fleetwood Mac song, and only one of them was worth watching. Same notes, same screen, same sticky floor. The host called all four of us baby anyway. Sameness is not the problem. Having nothing underneath the sameness is the problem.