9 ms·

Brandless has shut down

99 points by TuringNYC 7y ago

PrivateBenjamin 7y ago
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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
claudeganon 7y ago
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.
- ch4ch4 7y ago
  Maybe it's all just a scheme to funnel Saudi oil money into the US economy.
Pfhreak 7y ago
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. [1] https://theunbrandedbrand.com/ https://theunbrandedbrand.com/
hbosch 7y ago
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.
- loeg 7y ago
  Another related example is the company "NoAd," a long-running sunscreen company (1962), who don't advertise, but their products do say "NoAd" on them.
  - mactrey 7y ago
    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.
- nickbauman 7y ago
  I think of Amazon Basics a little more like "buying from the company store" in the book The Grapes of Wrath. It's an old retail move: a popular SKU is copied by the store to take more margin from its demand. Your suppliers test product viability for you.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    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.
danimal88 7y ago
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.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  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.
adrr 7y ago
For a company that said it didn’t advertise, what did they spend $300mm on?
- PrivateBenjamin 7y ago
  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.
- madamelic 7y ago
  100MM SV salaries 100MM SV office 50MM La Croix 25MM Standing desks 25MM Scooters
  - mrnobody_67 7y ago
    +10MM Living "Green" Wall
  - catalogia 7y ago
    > 50MM La Croix The bottled water brand? Is this a joke? Did they not realize water from the tap is safe and virtually free?
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      > The bottled water brand? Now now, it isn't bottled water. It's homeopathic soda! > Is this a joke? While I'm not the OP, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. :)
  - walrus01 7y ago
    0.25MM consulting for design of conjoined triangles of success
- facethrowaway 7y ago
  They didn’t actually have $300m, it was a commitment based on milestones that weren’t met.
crowdbloom 7y ago
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.
leshokunin 7y ago
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.
- softasyrbank 7y ago
  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
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    Do SoftBank have a lower success rate with their bets than other VCs?
    - mrnobody_67 7y ago
      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.
  - leshokunin 7y ago
    No question about that. I’m just pointing out the extra scrutiny to something I believe we see in the average VC portfolio and the average startup.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  What exactly is it distracting us from? It sounds like you're suggesting more important is being overlooked, and your comment has left me curious.
hedora 7y ago
I’ve been waiting for someone to implement this: https://www.xkcd.com/993/ https://www.xkcd.com/993/ Too bad they folded before establishing a brand identity.
- walrus01 7y ago
  This literally is No Name in Canada, but with yellow labels.
- timcederman 7y ago
  Home Brand or No Frills in Australia: https://jjc807.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/home-brand-products.jpg https://jjc807.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/home-brand-produc... https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/20130319-205822.jpg https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/2...
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Aldi [1] gets very close to this with their own hand picked brands; you get one or two options only, cuts down drastically on the paradox of choice. [1] https://www.aldi.us/ https://www.aldi.us/
- throw_away 7y ago
  This widely existed in the seventies and eighties: http://gbnfgroceries.blogspot.com/2014/01/from-misc-foods-aisle-generic-brands.html http://gbnfgroceries.blogspot.com/2014/01/from-misc-foods-ai... I was very young, but IIRC, it was all in its own aisle.
- jbarberu 7y ago
  There's ICA Basic in Sweden or Publix own brand in SE US, to name some additional examples.
walrus01 7y ago
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. https://www.google.com/search?q=no+name+products+canada&client=ubuntu&hs=Il3&channel=fs&sxsrf=ACYBGNRVHMzloYw7-6jU6_GI9urwaaURVA:1581387479163&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFmsq3t8jnAhXAGDQIHVPuBVsQ_AUoAXoECGwQAw&biw=1426&bih=1053 https://www.google.com/search?q=no+name+products+canada&clie... Loblaws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loblaws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loblaws
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arsome 7y ago
  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.
jrochkind1 7y ago
> and the company pivoted to selling CBD Wait, what? Could anyone imagine that going well, rather than meaning "countdown to 'what an incredible journey'"?
- ezconnect 7y ago
  That's just one of the co-founder who quit early.
busymom0 7y ago
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.
blueboo 7y ago
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.
Grue3 7y ago
Can't read the article but that picture looks exactly like Ikea food section.

99 points by TuringNYC 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

claudeganon 7y ago

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.

ch4ch4 7y ago
Maybe it's all just a scheme to funnel Saudi oil money into the US economy.

Pfhreak 7y ago

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. [1] https://theunbrandedbrand.com/ https://theunbrandedbrand.com/

hbosch 7y ago

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.

loeg 7y ago
Another related example is the company "NoAd," a long-running sunscreen company (1962), who don't advertise, but their products do say "NoAd" on them.
- mactrey 7y ago
  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.
nickbauman 7y ago
I think of Amazon Basics a little more like "buying from the company store" in the book The Grapes of Wrath. It's an old retail move: a popular SKU is copied by the store to take more margin from its demand. Your suppliers test product viability for you.
- filoleg 7y ago
  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.

danimal88 7y ago

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.

bobthepanda 7y ago
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.

adrr 7y ago

For a company that said it didn’t advertise, what did they spend $300mm on?

PrivateBenjamin 7y ago
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.
madamelic 7y ago
100MM SV salaries 100MM SV office 50MM La Croix 25MM Standing desks 25MM Scooters
- mrnobody_67 7y ago
  +10MM Living "Green" Wall
- catalogia 7y ago
  > 50MM La Croix The bottled water brand? Is this a joke? Did they not realize water from the tap is safe and virtually free?
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    > The bottled water brand? Now now, it isn't bottled water. It's homeopathic soda! > Is this a joke? While I'm not the OP, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. :)
- walrus01 7y ago
  0.25MM consulting for design of conjoined triangles of success
facethrowaway 7y ago
They didn’t actually have $300m, it was a commitment based on milestones that weren’t met.

crowdbloom 7y ago

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.

leshokunin 7y ago

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.

softasyrbank 7y ago
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
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  Do SoftBank have a lower success rate with their bets than other VCs?
  - mrnobody_67 7y ago
    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.
- leshokunin 7y ago
  No question about that. I’m just pointing out the extra scrutiny to something I believe we see in the average VC portfolio and the average startup.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
What exactly is it distracting us from? It sounds like you're suggesting more important is being overlooked, and your comment has left me curious.

hedora 7y ago

I’ve been waiting for someone to implement this: https://www.xkcd.com/993/ https://www.xkcd.com/993/ Too bad they folded before establishing a brand identity.

walrus01 7y ago
This literally is No Name in Canada, but with yellow labels.
timcederman 7y ago
Home Brand or No Frills in Australia: https://jjc807.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/home-brand-products.jpg https://jjc807.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/home-brand-produc... https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/20130319-205822.jpg https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/2...
toomuchtodo 7y ago
Aldi [1] gets very close to this with their own hand picked brands; you get one or two options only, cuts down drastically on the paradox of choice. [1] https://www.aldi.us/ https://www.aldi.us/
throw_away 7y ago
This widely existed in the seventies and eighties: http://gbnfgroceries.blogspot.com/2014/01/from-misc-foods-aisle-generic-brands.html http://gbnfgroceries.blogspot.com/2014/01/from-misc-foods-ai... I was very young, but IIRC, it was all in its own aisle.
jbarberu 7y ago
There's ICA Basic in Sweden or Publix own brand in SE US, to name some additional examples.

walrus01 7y ago

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. https://www.google.com/search?q=no+name+products+canada&client=ubuntu&hs=Il3&channel=fs&sxsrf=ACYBGNRVHMzloYw7-6jU6_GI9urwaaURVA:1581387479163&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFmsq3t8jnAhXAGDQIHVPuBVsQ_AUoAXoECGwQAw&biw=1426&bih=1053 https://www.google.com/search?q=no+name+products+canada&clie... Loblaws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loblaws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loblaws

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
arsome 7y ago
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.

jrochkind1 7y ago

> and the company pivoted to selling CBD Wait, what? Could anyone imagine that going well, rather than meaning "countdown to 'what an incredible journey'"?

ezconnect 7y ago
That's just one of the co-founder who quit early.

busymom0 7y ago

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.

blueboo 7y ago

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.

Grue3 7y ago

Can't read the article but that picture looks exactly like Ikea food section.