Why do so many new brands look the same?
A first look at why young consumer brands converge on the same fonts, colours and tone, and what that sameness might be optimising for.
By Jayaprakash DasMarketer, researcher and speaker
Field NotesEntry #001
Details
- Evidence
- Observation
- Format
- Strategic question
- Topic
- Why people buy
- Evidence
- Observation
- Reading time
- 2 min read
- First published
This is a sample entry that shows how a note looks. It will be replaced by a real one.
The observation
Scroll through a handful of new direct-to-consumer brands and a pattern appears quickly: a soft sans-serif logo, muted colours, friendly lowercase copy and the same product photograph on a plain background. Each brand looks considered on its own. Side by side, they are hard to tell apart.
This note is an observation, not a measurement. It is based on browsing, not on a structured sample, so it may say as much about what I happen to see as about the market.
Why it might be happening
- It feels lower risk. Borrowing a look that already seems to work in a category is easier to defend to a founder, a board or an investor than something unfamiliar.
- The tools are shared. The same website templates, the same agencies and, increasingly, the same AI image and copy generators produce the same defaults. When a tool makes the average option the fastest one, the average spreads.
- It signals the category. Looking like the others tells a shopper “this is a modern brand like the ones you already buy from”. Sameness may be doing a job, not just failing to do one.
The tension
If the third reason is right, sameness is not simply laziness. It buys a quick, cheap kind of trust. The cost is memory: a brand that looks like everyone else may be accepted in the moment and forgotten the next day. The question is which of those two matters more for a young brand with a small budget.
What I would want to know
If sameness signals the category, does breaking it cost trust, or does it earn attention?
A possible experiment for the Lab: show two versions of the same product page, one in the category look and one deliberately different, and ask people a day later which brand they remember and which one they would buy from. Nothing has been run yet, and I have no data on it.
Where this stands
This is an open question. I will update the note as I collect examples, and link to any experiment that grows out of it.