There is a storefront on Southeast Division that sold vintage denim until spring and now sells tinctures. I went in Saturday out of pure nosiness. Roughly forty products on the wall behind the register. Sage green boxes, cream labels, a sans serif letterspaced within an inch of its life, and a line drawing of a leaf abstracted so far it could plausibly be a fern, a feather, or a sound wave.
I stood there ten minutes and could not tell you which company made which bottle.
Not because there was too much. Because there was only one. One palette, one paper stock, one vocabulary. Calm. Balance. Restore.
Which is exactly the problem.
A category where every brand signals the same thing is a category where no brand is signaling anything at all.
I understand how it happened. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. When a product is legally ambiguous and culturally suspect, the first instinct is to look respectable, and respectable right now means the wellness aisle: muted, botanical, vaguely Scandinavian, priced like skincare. Every founder walks into the same brief and asks for the same reassurance. Nobody wants to be the one that looks like a head shop.
So the design work stops being differentiation and starts being a costume. It says we are legitimate. It does not say who we are, who we're for, or why we beat the bottle six inches to the left.
Here's the part that gets lost. Category codes are useful exactly once, at the moment a shopper needs to understand what a thing is. After that they are dead weight. Liquid Death is selling water, of all things, in a tallboy that looks like a metal record, and it works because the codes of bottled water were doing nothing for anybody. Oatly writes its cartons like a person who is mildly annoyed with you. Both took a category that had settled into one look and refused the look.
CBD has no equivalent yet. It has forty companies auditioning for the same aesthetic and hoping distribution sorts it out.
If I were briefing one of them I would ask three questions before touching a color. What is the actual use occasion in specific human terms, not wellness? Who is the person, and what do they do instead today? And what would we look like if we were allowed to be funny, blunt, clinical, or loud?
So the design work stops being differentiation and starts being a costume.
I bought one. Sage green, obviously. Truffles knocked it off the counter that night and Barnaby batted it under the stove, where it remains, unbranded and unmissed.