Is Less More?
Brands are embracing the countertrend of “blanding” to stand out in today’s DTC space.
The last few years have seen blanding— a non-brand branding aesthetic—rise in an attempt to revolutionize the look and feel of direct-to-consumer brands and win the wallets of new generations of consumers. Promising to cut out the middleman and catering to millennial and Gen Z's decreasing loyalty to brands, many DTC brands have successfully resorted to simple, minimalist designs to market their products without all the splash.
While this once-novel “bland” formula was in stark contrast with what was available at the moment, it quickly became the status quo. Many start-ups that reinvented anything from fashion to personal care followed suit and found success, or less. Brandless, an e-commerce brand that closed shop in 2020, made a comeback in later that year with an enriched and repositioned branding strategy. The rebranded Brandless offers more product lines, a richer color palette, and more precise communication of its values to match its customers with messages focusing on the quality and integrity of its products. While still going by the name BrandlessTM, the brand clearly stopped attempting not to be one.
The countertrend to blanding is by no means a return to the mystifying, pre-DTC-era paradigm or a global application of loud colors and patterns. "I find the omnipresence of blanding similar to the Swiss Style movement of the 40s and 50s, where graphic designers experimented with limiting their aesthetic subjectivity to let the “content” shine through. Design-wise, simplicity often stands the test of time”, says Naseem Niaraki, creative director of WS Development.
Ultimately, a brand is the fundamental values that a business uses to connect with its customers. Together with the brand's products and what the brand does to commit to its values, aesthetics create the brand’s narrative and build trust and relationships that influence consumers' decisions to choose one brand over another. To this end, the virtue of blanding lies not in eliminating branding, but rather in making deliberate choices that are humble, intuitive, and easy to understand.