There is a stretch of shelf at a boutique in the Pearl where I counted nine skincare brands and could not tell you which was which. Nine. All of them in soft matte tubes. All of them set in a sans serif with the corners rounded off. Two shades of pink, one dusty sage, and copy that said hello like we had already met.
I sent a photo to a friend who still works agency side. She sent back a shelf in a different city. Same nine tubes.
Which is exactly the problem.
The direct to consumer playbook worked so well that everyone ran it. Cut out the middleman, buy the subway ad, write like a friendly barista, ship it in a box that photographs well. That was a genuine insight in 2013. In 2018 it is a costume forty companies are wearing to the same party.
Blandness is not a design failure. It is a strategy failure wearing a very nice typeface.
Here's the part that gets lost. Nobody sets out to look like everyone else. It happens upstream, in positioning, where a founder says the category is cold and impersonal and we are going to be warm and human. Warm and human is not a position. It is a temperature. Everyone on that shelf wrote the same sentence in the same deck, then hired good designers who solved it the same way, because there is really only one obvious way to draw warm and human.
So the cure starts well before the logo. Three things I push for now. One, a specific enemy. Oatly is not fighting dairy in the abstract, it is fighting the idea that milk is the neutral default, and it fights that on the side of the carton in a voice that sounds like an actual person losing an argument. Two, a point of view that costs something. Patagonia ran an ad telling people not to buy the jacket. That sentence has a price tag on it. Three, one ugly detail the committee would have sanded off. Trader Joe's keeps its hand lettered signs. They are not elegant. They are unmistakable.
Warm and human is not a position. It is a temperature.
None of this is expensive. It is uncomfortable, because each one requires somebody to say out loud who the brand is not for, and most rooms are built to avoid that conversation. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The blandness never arrives in the design review. It arrives eight weeks earlier, quietly, when nobody wants to lose anyone.
I came home from that shelf and found Truffles asleep on the one chair I have asked her to stay off, and Barnaby staring at a wall with real conviction. Same house, same food. Nobody has ever confused the two of them. They did not need a refresh to be distinguishable.