I think a more true representation of "brandlessness" is AmazonBasics. It's not exactly correct to think of the lack of a logo being the lack of a brand -- brandlessness is the brand, logo or not. On the other hand, having no phony story about your products ("Handmade by artisans in Nicaragua") or marketing ("Better than 99% of our competitors!") and just existing is how to communicate brandlessness.
"Brandless.com" was never what it told you it was... it was a brand with a logo that told you it wasn't, and it stocked mediocre products. Buying from them was supposed to "feel" like "anti-consumerism", and they told people they didn't invest in marketing so they could give customers better deals. Unfortunately, Brandless actually wasn't a radical rethinking of how we market organic kale to the 27 year old tech set.
Having never heard of Brandless, I was hoping they were possibly marketing something I have a fierce desire for, which is consumer products with minimal branding, that are superlatively well made, and priced commensurately.
Unfortunately, finding these kinds of products is hard, and i don't quite understand why.
About the closest I have found to this ethos in a mass-market kind of way is Muji, but only some of their consumer goods are actually solid and worth purchasing. Anything they sell that is made of plastic is almost certainly not.
The next nearest thing to this seems to be certain classes of Etsy stores that take pride in how well they manufacture their products, but unfortunately this approach isn't replicable to any number of things.
This does exist and is fairly common, at least in retail, otherwise known as "White label products". Costco's Kirkland brand is a fantastic example of this, where they rebrand the same products such as a particular SKU of vodka under their own Kirkland brand.
A lot of in-house brands are just white labeled versions of a branded product. The rub is that not all are high-quality brands like Costco's
Kirkland brand vodka is indeed a gem in the rough. I just wish there was a brand of "white label products", where every single item is consistently good, because the range of quality when it comes to each individual item within a "white label" is still pretty high. Though I realize that at this point, it would become a brand of its own.
I was always afraid to buy "white label" alcohol that wasn't super basic stuff like vodka or cheap wine, but with this rec, I will definitely give their single malt a try. Thank you!
Unfortunately, as you mention, not all are high-quality.
If I want good white-label vodka I go to Costco.
Good white-label monitor arms apparently come from AmazonBasics.
Good white-label socks come from a third place.
Even worse than the fact that these different classes of products are in different places is that even items in the same class from the same place are completely different quality. Costco's vodka might be fine, their whiskey might be awful. Monitor arms from amazonbasics are fine but their mic arms are garbage.
There's no manufacturer of consistently very high quality consumer goods. There's not even a manufacturer I can point to and say "everything they make, even in their narrow field, is fantastic".
Sears used to be that, back in the day (not recently - say, maybe pre-2000). "Quality at a decent price" was their motto, and they did pretty well at it. You could by clothes, tools, appliances, and none of it would fall apart on you. They also had, perhaps not white-label brands, but their own brands. Craftsman tools were pretty solid.
There might be an opening for someone to do that again. There's a cost to going to 17 places for 17 things. Even if you're online shopping and getting free delivery on everything, there's still a cost in terms of time and aggravation. It might be worth something if some business solved that.
Unfortunately, I don't see anybody who would do so. Amazon would have to control quality of everything they sell (or start a premium brand that was actually premium). Sears has been irrelevant for a couple of decades, and soon will be history. Costco seems to me to have the best chance of pulling this off - their quality is reasonable-to-good on most things we've tried there, but there's a lot we haven't tried. Still, they seem to have the best handle on consistent quality out of any of the current contenders.
I find Kirkland products to all be of pretty high quality. Especially the food. And you can get Kirkland socks, home goods, just about everything. Though I don't think they do electronics.
There was an expose a few years ago on olive oil. Kirkland brand olive oil was one of the only brands to actually be pure olive oil. And that was comparing it to many Italian "high end" brands.
I remember seeing in-person about 10 years ago, that a staff editor at a well-known cooking/lifestyle mag was evaluating different prepared food item recipes to be sold under the Kirkland brand. I don't know if they do this kind of testing anymore but it made me feel better about eating their pesto instead of just using a blender.
Also in Modernist Bread, it's noted that the baguette scoring at the Seattle Costco was better than the scoring at many Parisian bakeries.
Most grocery store house brand corn flakes are made by Kellogg's. If you pour a bowl of the store brand and the Kellogg's, you'll notice there is a difference: the Kellogg's flakes are larger. The store brand box is mostly the corn flakes that met a lower quality standard but are still of acceptable quality. Wouldn't be surprised if this is often the case with other white label or store brands.
For two reasons. The first is that I dislike the idea of being a walking advertisement. The second is that frankly I find most brand logos to be somewhat tacky.
Branding is fine if it is considered, but most simply isn't.
If you make something well enough, people who love your gear for its quality will shout about it from the rooftops.
If you're talking about clothing, the unbranded/no logo high quality option is bespoke tailoring. Or just unbranded mediocre stuff off the shelf and then tailored to fit.
I'm a fan of these sorts of brands, too. I'd guess these products are hard to find because they don't show the same year after year growth you'd see with heavily marketed brands. Not the kind of returns a VC firm is going to want, anyway.
You need a stable brand, stable products, and patient owners.
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I would love the same thing and have often dreamed of starting such a company. And you're totally right about muji - do you know what its full name means in japanese? Something like "No logo high quality"! And I do believe it was started with that ethos properly in mind. Another one that comes to mind is, believe it or not, IKEA. IKEA used to be very good, and pretty expensive.
But I think that all such high-minded projects, especially once the founder becomes less involved, become subject to the "optimisation" of capitalism. The next CEO after the founder steps down might not be quite so high-minded, and the process known as "quality fade" begins.
If you're really spending that much on quality materials and craftsmanship, why not spend a tiny bit more overhead to effectively market it? That's why judging based on marketing is actually rational.
I'm actually very opposed to visible branding on a lot of things, especially clothing. At first I felt like I was being a little obsessive-compulsive but then eventually realized it's an ethical issue for me. Every time someone puts on a garment with a logo, they're being used to serve the interests of the corporation and not their own interests in a tiny way. The fact that this seems so natural says a lot about the state of our society in this regard.
As for your argument, I think it's reasonable but I would turn it on its head: to me every bit of money that's going into visible branding in some way is a signal that the company is putting effort into advertising itself on the outside of the clothing rather than improving quality. I can think of a couple of companies I buy from whose quality has declined in the last couple of decades overall in certain regards, and it's been directly associated with an increase in visible branding on their goods. Basically they started cashing in on their reputation, focusing on their brand identity rather than the quality of their items. Judging from comments in various places I'm not alone in the sense their quality has declined.
My impression is actually that it is not difficult to find minimally branded high-quality goods in many areas. In fact, the highest quality goods in a some areas are those with minimal or no branding.
I admit there are also many areas, like athletic wear, where this isn't usually the case. On the other hand, I've often noticed that if you actually compare some types of very high end activewear to less expensive variants, the difference is often just the logos. You're in effect paying more to have the logos off rather than less.
I personally feel that companies should be shamed out of including visible logos on their clothing.
Maybe we're talking about different things though. I do think having brand identifiers of some sort somewhere is important, as it increases accountability. And some things that are likely to be shuffled away, like laundry detergent, I don't really care about. But things that are likely to be out and about? Especially on you as a person? Brand visibility shouldn't be a factor imho.
You’re absolutely right, I’ve been avoiding visibly branded clothing and I still dress well. I “risked” choosing for the quality by inspecting the items instead and didn’t have many surprises. Sure, once I find a non-conspicuous brand whose quality I tested myself and which I like, I add them to my list of future options. When I was younger I got bitten a little bit by flashy brands. Young people will have to learn this lesson themselves.
I don't wear visibly branded clothing very often myself, but I think it's important to understand why other people's actions could be rational rather than imagining I know best
I cannot speak for the entire range of AmazonBasics offerings, but that definitely doesn't seem like the case of just copying. Afaik AmazonBasics monitor arms specifically are just rebadged Ergotech arms that are actually still manufactured by Ergotech.
P.S. sidenote, can totally recommend their monitor arms.
I think it's actually worse than that. Buying Amazon Basics is pretty much the only way for you to know that the product you're buying on Amazon came from a reputable seller. The commingling of inventory means almost anything else you buy on Amazon could be a low quality counterfeit that came from a random seller.
Another one: the Japanese brand 無印良品 "mujirushi ryouhin", which essentially means "Quality Goods Without Branding." Of course it's developed a little following behind its "brand" because the goods are mostly high quality, if a little pricey.
So like all of the other "-less" things being pushed recently, it actually means "thing is hidden and we pretend it's not there", not "without the thing".
I was really worried for a moment, because I thought Unbranded [1] went under. It seems like many businesses have a sort of 'brandless' identity. I suppose it is difficult to be well regarded, well heard of, and also lack branding. I'm curious what the takeaways are here, and what broader lessons there are to learn.
That's a shame for the company. What's more interesting for me in this headline is how the main point is that it's a SoftBank-backed company.
News of startups dying happens every day, even for VC-backed ones. There seems to be some kind of extra scrutiny applied to SoftBank in the post WeWork debacle. It's rather unfortunate, because that creates a narrative that's distracting.
1) SoftBank doesn't give up on companies it believes can be fixed. Look at Sprint as an example. So when a SoftBank company fails, it's not a simple oversight.
2) The narrative about WeWork wasn't created, it was real. Bullshit valuation of a company whose few competitors were worth less despite ostensibly executing better. SoftBank gets to wear that one. You can't exactly call a multi-billion-dollar loss a "distraction."
The fact that this was a SoftBank backed company, the insane valuation placed on it, the poor vetting of founders/higher management, and the wild gyrations required when new decisions come down every month (get more customers doesn't matter if they are profitable! no, stop getting customers, they aren't profitable yet! etc) does in-fact have a lot to do with the outcome tho
signed: someone who programmed for a SoftBank backed company
Too early to tell. Funds have 10 year lifespans...
But their biggest bets are heavily in the red and they are having trouble raising their second fund, which means LPs are doubtful they can return top quartile VC returns.
We live in an attention economy. Anything not insightful or meaningful is going to consume time that could be used for better things. What that is, is up to you!
I used, and for the most part, enjoyed brandless food products. Decent quality and fair prices ... then they started advertising too many non-food items that were very obviously cheap, low quality mass-produced in China items. I knew this was the beginning of the end for them. Iirc, a $8 “santoku” shaped knife at one point. Super cheap frying pans and kitchen tools with outrageous “mark downs“ ... a “pro blender” was:$180 now:$90. I stopped buying altogether and had not thought about them until this posting.
A much older and more successful version of this is No Name in Canada, which is for the house brand versions of products from the grocery giant Loblaws.
The thing about store brands like No Name (Loblaw), Compliments (Sobeys), Great Value (Walmart) etc is that they get free access to shelf space, enjoy higher margins from the store and lower requirements for marketing by simply being the cheapest product available and competing exclusively on price. Brandless still needed to deal with those issues.
I’m really starting to appreciate Masayoshi Son’s determination to prove that much of the tech industry is make-work for grifters in our era of low interest rates.
Brandless' real mission was virtue signaling. A lot of good people put a lot of good work into doing the right thing, but ultimately, no one in leadership was actually as interested in bringing affordable organic products to lower income families as they were in being publicly seen pretending to bring affordable organic products to lower income families. Loads of talk about "building a community" with no idea what a community actually was aside from "gated."
Leadership constantly lied about the financial situation being wonderful and focused primarily on sending tens of thousands of dollars worth of free product to D-list Instagram influencers that only affluent, unemployed Marin stepmoms paid any attention to. As such, the typical customer ordered one bottle of coconut oil and filed 32 customer service tickets complaining about the box it came in. It doesn't take a genius to see how that's going to pan out but the ubiquitous narcissistic marketing bros were able to con their way through hiring more and more of their friends to come up with brilliant ideas like "Groupon" in spite of the fact that their numbers were consistently pathetic and they were generating more HR complaints than sales.
SoftBank installed a new CEO and his plan to increase AOV was literally snake oil. He lasted a couple months. Nobody on the ground knew if he left voluntarily or not. My guess is "not." After that they started hawking Alibaba blenders you can buy with a different logo on them for $40 and I have no idea why it took this long for them to pull the plug. I do think they deserve some credit for not actually giving them all of the money at once, though.
The day they shut down somebody did something stupid with the old payroll system and it sent additional copies of 2018 W2s to the IRS with bogus numbers on them. Folks are now receiving threatening letters from the government demanding payment for tens of thousands of dollars of unreported, nonexistent income and there's nobody left who knows how to do anything about it. A tire fire to the bitter, bitter end.
In general, it feels like this sort of company as a venture backed company is a waste of time. I understand you can create a 'brandless as a brand' company and make people think they are getting more for less, but this is literally just an exercise in consumerism and customer acquisition. I don't love that nonduraable CPG is controlled by a small handful of conglomerates but I also wish VCs would ignore this type of play and work on doing something more meaningful. I understand that there are and will be investors in different categories, but things like this feel like venture backed plastic pollution as a lifestyle brand.
Yeah, the problem in a market like this is differentiation. Lots of stores have "brandless" or own-branded goods that are at least acceptable (Costco's Kirkland, Trader Joe's general goods, etc.) and it's hard to see what the value proposition of buying something non-branded is from a website vs. a store.
The literal brandlessness of Brandless is and always was a complete red herring.
People are making apt comparisons to AmazonBasics, grocery in-house brands -- apt because these are all brands. People choose those goods for a variety of reasons including the reputation of those brands.
With a modestly trained eye, people can spot the difference between a logo-free Old Navy white t-shirt and a Gap one (not to mentiono a Hanes t-shirt.) The lack of a logo doesn't make something without brand.
This dynamic may have been lost on entrepreneurs more concerned with VC decks and tech stacks.
I never really understood their appeal as compared to something like Amazon Basics or Walmart's Great Value or No Name from Loblaws chains. At least the later ones enjoyed free shelf space and didn't really need additional marketing other than simply being on the shelves to visible customer eyes. Brandless on the other hand didn't have any of those benefits.
They never had that much money, but no manufacturer of food or cosmetic products anywhere is even going to pick up the phone if you don't intend to buy an extremely significant amount of product from them. If you intend to demand recipe/formulation changes as well, then they want even more.
The office was honestly a cramped, sweltering sty and not at all showy.
"Brandless.com" was never what it told you it was... it was a brand with a logo that told you it wasn't, and it stocked mediocre products. Buying from them was supposed to "feel" like "anti-consumerism", and they told people they didn't invest in marketing so they could give customers better deals. Unfortunately, Brandless actually wasn't a radical rethinking of how we market organic kale to the 27 year old tech set.