Brandless

» see brandless.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

brandless never reached turkey at meaningful scale. anyway, it was a us-coded dtc product, a three-dollar generics store that sold to american millennials through instagram ads and one round of softbank money. for some reason, the pitch was simple, you paid for the actual paper towel or olive oil or face wash, not the label. the marketing claim was a "brand tax" of forty percent on everything you bought at safeway, with the brandless price as the reference (close enough). honestly, the numbers were not as cleanly defensible as the pitch made out, but the visual sold the idea.

this part is mostly told from techcrunch and bay-area business press, by then. either way, tina sharkey and ido leffler had founded the company in 2014 and spent close to three years working on supplier deals before the public launch on july 11 '17. for whatever reason, the press write-up was warm, gq and good housekeeping featured the white-label cans and bottles as a kind of minimalist americana. honestly, the early customer base was a few hundred thousand people across california and the new york metro area.

the softbank vision fund money landed in july '18, two hundred and forty million dollars at a five hundred million dollar valuation. anyway, the round was the kind of post-juicero capital deployment people had stopped expecting to land in a generics store. for some reason, the company opened pop-ups in los angeles, minneapolis, dallas through that fall. either way, the unit economics did not bend. the average order value sat in the twenty to thirty dollar range, the shipping per package was higher than that on a unit basis.

this happened more in the us venture press than where i was. anyway, sharkey stepped down as ceo in mid '19 after a softbank disagreement over growth pace. by then, john rittenhouse came in as interim. on february 10 2020 the company sent a goodbye email to customers, laid off about ninety percent of staff, and shut the original brandless.com order flow. for whatever reason, the timing was three weeks before the covid lockdowns started, the same week wework was burning through its own softbank rescue capital.

the brand was bought by a small operator called clarke capital in june '20 and relaunched as a smaller catalog in late '20. honestly, the relaunch had no softbank money behind it, no pop-ups, no instagram budget. by '22 the site quietly pivoted into a recipe page with affiliate links, the order flow itself was gone (or roughly).

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

the brandless catalog at peak was around four hundred skus, mostly pantry goods like olive oil and apple cider vinegar, plus paper towels, dish soap, basic cosmetics, dog treats. for some reason, the price was three dollars per item across the whole catalog, with a few bundles at higher prices. the visual identity was the matte white label with the word "brandless" set in a small bold sans, the product name printed below in a thin gray (close enough).

this part you had to be in the us to even see, and i was not. the brandless one membership at thirty-six dollars a year was the secondary monetization layer, with free shipping past thirty-nine dollar orders. anyway, the membership was the line the company hoped would carry the unit economics. by then, the actual attach rate was thinner than the pitch deck implied. honestly, the loyal repeat customer cohort existed, the cohort just was not large enough to swallow the customer-acquisition cost.

~ the unraveling ~

this part is mostly told from the post-mortem coverage, by then. the dtc generics pitch ran into the same wall that hims and casper and harry's also ran into around the same window. for whatever reason, the average user was happy with a few sku purchases, then drifted back to amazon or the local target. either way, no actual brand loyalty was building up since the whole product premise was no brand.

sharkey's departure in mid '19 was the inflection. anyway, the softbank pullback in late '19 after the wework s-1 disaster cut off the rescue financing path. by then, brandless was burning roughly four to five million a month on shipping subsidies and the runway numbers stopped working. the february '20 shutdown was relatively orderly, with severance, refunds for open orders, and a clean shutdown email that read better than most dtc closing notes.

~ what got buried with it ~

the brandless shutdown is now one of the canonical post-zirp dtc tombstones, sitting beside webvan and pets-com on the dot-com side and quibi and jibo on the softbank side. for whatever reason, the $3 generics catalog idea did get revived later in different forms, public goods picked up some of the visual cues, and amazon basics is the closest brand-tax analog at any kind of scale.

honestly, the most durable thing brandless left behind was probably the design language. the matte white label sans-serif look picked up enough imitation through '21 and '22 that any minimalist dtc product on a trader joe's shelf today owes a small debt to that brandless aesthetic (close enough). by then, the original brandless.com order flow is gone, the recipe-page successor barely updates, the softbank money is long since written down.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »