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There’s a particular kind of marketing failure we’re seeing more of in 2026: brands adopting visual trends, aesthetic movements, or positioning strategies without asking one critical question first. Does this actually fit our audience and our core positioning?
A brand sees a trend taking off. The aesthetic looks premium. Successful. Like everyone’s doing it. So they adopt the visual language without examining whether the strategy underneath actually belongs to them. And then something strange happens: they become indistinguishable from the competition. The trend that was supposed to make them stand out makes them invisible.
Melbourne, 1987. A hairdresser named Dennis Paphitis founded a beauty brand that would eventually redefine luxury skincare — but not through the usual channels. Aesop started with a simple apothecary-inspired aesthetic: amber glass bottles, minimal labeling, typography borrowed from pharmaceutical tradition rather than cosmetics marketing. For 17 years, that look sat on shelves alongside competitors, functional but unremarkable. It wasn’t until Aesop invested in its own retail spaces, each one individually designed with local architects, that the aesthetic finally communicated what it was supposed to: intentionality, restraint, quality.
Le Labo arrived in 2006 with a different take on the same aesthetic. Founded by two former Armani perfumers in a Nolita warehouse, the brand rejected pre-blending and insisted on hand-blending fragrances at the time of purchase, with handwritten labels. Every bottle marked with the date it was made. The apothecary look here meant something specific: transparency, ceremony, a deliberate slowness that contradicted everything luxury fragrance had become.
L:A Bruket, founded in 2008 in the Swedish coastal town of Varberg, took the same language and rooted it in a different story altogether. Monica Kylén, a ceramicist, started making soap in an IKEA pot in her basement because she couldn’t find products that matched her values. The dark amber bottles, the minimal labels, the focus on seaweed and sea salt as active ingredients, these weren’t design choices for Bruket. They were direct expressions of a specific geography, a 200-year spa heritage, and the harsh Swedish coastline where the brand was born.
Each of these brands had a reason for its aesthetic. A story was built to express. And it worked. The look became a visual shorthand for “clean, intentional, quality.”
The rest of the market noticed. And fast.
Jean & Len, a German brand founded in 2013, saw what was working and understood the assignment differently. Founder Leonard Diepenbrock wanted to close the gap between natural skincare that “gathered dust in the eco corner” and products that looked cool. Ambient hand soaps in amber glass bottles, minimalist labeling, the whole apothecary language. Vegan, paraben-free, silicone-free. But sold through drugstore chains like dm, Rossmann, and Müller, at €4-7 a bottle instead of €35. Available in 5,000+ retail locations.
Northern Dawn, a Meraki product distributed through the House Doctor lifestyle brand, followed a similar playbook. Certified organic, fresh orange and cedarwood notes, dark amber bottles, minimalist labeling. Priced around 189–199 Danish Krone (roughly €25–27 for a 490ml bottle). The aesthetic was identical to brands priced at three times that amount.
What happened next is predictable. Walk into a boutique, a concept store, or scroll through any aesthetically curated bathroom shelf, and the visual language has become noise. Amber glass bottles, cream labels, typewriter fonts, ingredient-forward packaging. A consumer now spends real time squinting at labels to figure out if they’re looking at a €7 Jean & Len product, a €25 Northern Dawn, or a €35 Aesop cleanser.
This is “blanding”, the process by which a distinctive visual identity becomes so widely adopted that it stops being distinctive and becomes a category baseline. For the brands that pioneered the aesthetic, the cost is real. Aesop, L:A Bruket, Le Labo — these brands spent years building visual equity rooted in genuine brand stories. Now that equity has been transferred to an aesthetic convention that any brand with a printer and a bottle supplier can access.
For L:A Bruket, this is particularly pointed. The brand’s dark amber bottles and minimal labeling weren’t a style choice. They were the physical embodiment of a very specific origin story: harsh Swedish coastal climate, seaweed harvested from Varberg’s 200-year spa tradition, a ceramicist’s philosophy of reduction and function. When that same visual language appears on products with no connection to those values, the packaging loses its ability to carry the story. The brand’s differentiation gets drowned out by the category’s beige consensus.
Aesop’s challenge is different but equally real. The brand, which L'Oréal bought for $2.5 billion AUD in 2023, invested in site-specific retail spaces, each one designed by local architects and never templated. The in-store experience — the scent, the materials, the sensory ritual — does more for brand distinctiveness than any bottle could. But walk into a mid-tier home goods retailer and see a knockoff apothecary aesthetic, and suddenly that packaging no longer communicates what made Aesop distinctive.
This is the structural tension that affects any category where a strong visual identity becomes widely imitated: the more successful the original positioning, the faster it becomes a convention. At that point, packaging reverts to a hygiene factor, necessary to appear credible in the category, but insufficient to justify a price premium or carry what made your brand different.
The brands that hold ground in a blandified category tend to share one thing: they’ve built identity layers that go deeper than packaging. Le Labo’s city-exclusive fragrances, which are only sold in specific cities except for one month per year, create a form of brand participation that no imitator can easily replicate. The ritual of in-lab hand-blending at purchase, the handwritten personalized label with the mixing date and location — these create scarcity and participation that transcend what a bottle can communicate. Aesop’s individually designed stores function as cultural destinations, not just retail. L:A Bruket’s founder story and connection to Varberg’s coastal heritage are told through content, not just products.
The broader principle applies well beyond beauty. Visual identity has a depreciation curve. It’s a competitive asset that loses value as it diffuses through the market. Brands that understand this invest in building equity across multiple dimensions: content that expresses a genuine point of view, storytelling rooted in authentic brand heritage, community with real texture, experiential touchpoints that can’t be replicated via packaging, and a digital presence that feels consistent and intentional rather than trend-reactive.
The amber bottle is, at this point, table stakes. What sits behind it — the story, the strategy, the reason a customer comes back — is where the actual brand lives.
If your brand is blending into the background, the packaging might not be the problem.
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