There is a dispensary six blocks from my apartment and on Sunday I went in to look at the shelf, because looking at shelves is the job. Twelve brands were facing out. Eleven of them were the same brand.
Muted sage. Warm cream. A geometric sans-serif set generously, in lowercase, with a lot of air around it. A one word name that could belong to a Scandinavian chair or a meditation studio. No leaf anywhere, because the whole category decided at once that the leaf was embarrassing.
Oregon has had recreational sales since October 2015. Three years in, the shelf has converged instead of diverged. And on Wednesday Canada legalized nationally, which means a much larger market is about to make this exact mistake at a much larger scale. The early Canadian packaging I have seen out of Tweed and Tokyo Smoke is doing the same thing: clean, quiet, tasteful, and interchangeable.
Every one of these brands is positioned against a stereotype instead of for a customer, and that is precisely why they all look identical.
Positioning against something is a trap, because your competitors are running from the same thing you are. If the entire category is trying to say we are not the burnout in the tie dye van, the entire category ends up in the same beige apothecary costume. Distinctiveness is not a design problem here. It is a strategy problem wearing a design problem's clothes.
Yes, regulation is real. Child resistant packaging, opaque exit bags, warning symbols, no appeal to minors. Those constraints are genuine and they eat surface area. They do not explain why every name sounds like a vowel someone found on a beach.
Oregon has already run this experiment in another category. Craft beer had a legitimacy problem in the eighties and did not solve it with uniformity. It solved it with range. Deschutes is not Cascade is not the taproom that opened last spring, and none of them are apologizing. Salt & Straw sells pear and blue cheese ice cream with total confidence and nobody thinks less of them for it.
Three things I would tell any operator opening in Ontario next month. One, name a real customer, not an absence. The nervous first timer, the arthritic sixty year old, the person who wants to sleep. Those are three different brands. Two, let the name mean something, because a word with no associations acquires none. Three, use the constraint. The warning label is a design element. Treat it as one.
Distinctiveness is not a design problem here. It is a strategy problem wearing a design problem's clothes.
I walked home past the food carts with nothing, which the budtender took graciously. The rain started somewhere around Ankeny. In three years someone on that shelf will have committed to an actual point of view, and everyone else will copy that instead.