Why Every Brand Looks the Same (We Did It On Purpose)

Look at the last five things you bought online. Chances are they arrived in a kraft-paper box with a lowercase wordmark, a pastel accent colour, and a card that thanked you in a warm, rounded sans-serif. Congratulations. You have been blanded.

We know this because we did it to ourselves, deliberately, after trying the alternative. Here is why every brand looks the same, and why we decided that the same was, on balance, fine.

The convergence is not an accident

Direct-to-consumer brands optimise for the same thing: a stranger on a phone trusting them enough to type in a card number. Trust is built from familiarity, and familiarity is built from looking like the last thing that worked.

So a handful of decisions get made over and over:

• A calm palette. Navy or charcoal for authority, cream or off-white for warmth, one accent colour for personality. Ours is pink. Yours is probably sage.
• Two typefaces, occasionally three. A serif for headlines to imply heritage, a sans for body copy to imply competence, and sometimes a script for the wordmark to imply a founder with good handwriting.
• A small animal. A whale, a lobster, a pheasant, a crocodile. Something you could embroider on a chest pocket in three colours or fewer.
• Heritage language. “Est.” followed by a year. “Purveyors of.” “Since.” The vocabulary of a shop that has been on the high street for a century, applied to a Shopify theme launched last spring.

Individually, each choice is sensible. Collectively, they produce ten thousand brands wearing the same outfit.

Our first attempt at being different went badly

When we started, we thought the honest thing for a brand called Average was to look grey. Grey wordmark, grey products, grey everything. The exact middle of the hex range. It was conceptually pure and visually a mistake.

Grey does not read as a joke. It reads as unfinished. People did not laugh; they assumed the images had not loaded. We learned, quickly, that a parody only works if the thing being parodied is recognisable. You cannot satirise a preppy brand by looking like a spreadsheet.

So we joined the club, sincerely

We rebuilt the whole thing in the coastal-heritage uniform. Navy and cream. A Garamond, a geometric sans, and a script for the flourish. An “Est. recently” label. A club that confers nothing. And a mascot.

The mascot is the tell. The genre demands a small, charming animal with implied pedigree, so we chose the one bird nobody has ever put on a polo shirt: the pigeon. It is everywhere. It is unbothered. It is, statistically, the most average bird in any city on earth, and it has never once been invited to a regatta. We drew it in pink.

The insight: the fastest way to be recognisable is to be recognisably like something. The joke is not that we look different. The joke is that we look exactly like the others, and admit it on every page.

Is blanding actually a problem?

For the brands, not really. Sameness lowers the cost of trust. A customer who has bought from six navy-and-cream brands has been trained to buy from a seventh. That is a good deal, and if you are starting a merch brand with no audience, it is one of the few advantages available to you.

For customers, the honest answer is that the box is not the product. Our products come from the same print-on-demand facilities as everyone else’s, which we explain in some detail here. The brand is the wrapping paper. Choose wrapping paper you like.

For designers, we are sorry. You are right. It is all the same. We just found the sameness more useful than the alternative, and we think most brands, if pressed, would say the same in a quieter voice.

How to tell an average brand from a genuinely different one

A short checklist, offered without judgement:

1. Does the palette contain navy or charcoal, plus cream or white? Average.
2. Is there a serif headline and a sans body? Average.
3. Is there a small animal? Average.
4. Does the About page mention a founder’s grandmother? Average, but ambitious.
5. Does the brand admit any of the above? That is us, and, as far as we can tell, only us.

That last point is the whole strategy. Everyone is average. We simply put it on the label.