2D branding

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on DTC brands’ made-for-online branding. Plus, some community Discord inquiries and good links.

In March 2023, the candle brand Boy Smells teamed up with Kin Euphorics, Bella Hadid’s non-alcoholic, adaptogenic beverage brand, to debut a collaborative trio of pillar candles. The candles, which retail at $52 for one or $140 for three, look like stretched out versions of the Kin drink cans. Each candle comes cased in matte, painted glass designed in gradients of pink, yellow, blue and green. The word “Boy Smells” is written on the candle in small sans serif, center-aligned type. The label doesn’t look like it belongs on an object. It looks like a website: Particularly, the glut of landing pages that have theoretically moved away from millennial minimalism by replacing it with other design clichés: gradients, floating type, the company identity hiding in a corner somewhere.

Boy Smells and Kin give the impression of being distinctly online brands. They are the direct-to-consumer (DTC) version of “smartphone face,” a phrase the internet is using to describe celebrities with undeniably “modern” facial features. (Camila Morrone, for example, “looks like she knows what a Venmo is.”) In Instagram ads or surrounded by other digital-first products, their legibility might offer a slight advantage. But in a department store, I would glance right past them on my way to pick up a Diptyque or a Fornasetti fragrance, two brick-and-mortar scent brands with gorgeous, textured packaging.

At the height of the DTC startup boom in the late 2010s, e-commerce sites and packaging converged into one aesthetic. (Bloomberg dubbed this minimal identikit “blanding.”) Now, brands like Glossier who once championed this singularity, are moving away from that. In art, form (medium, color, composition) follows content (meaning). This isn’t necessarily true in the DTC world where form and content are one and the same.

Because these companies are focused on selling items online, their packaging design, or form, is also streamlined into pure content. There are obvious design constraints when you’re trying to sell candles or olive oil or seltzer or lipstick. Customers are expecting the product to look a certain way. Most direct-to-consumer product branding tries to reflect this logic. The idea is not the design, as is the case with modern fashion trends. Rather, two-dimensional elements, like logo, typeface, and color palette, are prioritized when it comes to “brand identity.” They have come to define physical packaging itself. (Case in point: Graza and Oatly.)

The DTC boom days are over, but customers feel unmoored when their faves deviate from the playbook. Last week, I stopped by the new Glossier store in Soho, which the New York Times described as “Apple’s Genius bar, but for makeup or skin-care services.” I picked up a tube of the rose lip balm, the first Glossier product I ever owned, and was disappointed to find that it had slightly changed. The tube was roughly the same size, but the new applicator was slanted and larger, its shape more traditional. The charm of the old design, I thought, was its resemblance to a tiny paint tube. But the change is unsurprising.

With Glossier’s tenth birthday on the horizon, the beauty brand is “rebranding,” from new packaging and formulas to experiential storefronts and a revamped website. The website resembles an editorial landing page, similar to Nike’s and Zara’s, which draws the customer’s attention towards large, highly stylized product images and videos. This is a departure from Glossier’s old, shopping-centric home page, wherein product navigation and ease of access was emphasized. I was surprised to learn that the redesign was panned by marketing experts and Glossier superfans alike. The new website isn’t as intuitive or accessible, critics said, and the early 2000s vibe feels somewhat dated.

According to Future Commerce’s Alex Greifeld, Glossier’s “decision to build a website that prioritizes aesthetics over UX best practices” is a strategic move: “If people are willing to wait in line to shop at your store, you can do whatever you want with your e-commerce site. You don’t have to put products on your homepage. You don’t have to sell your most iconic products online. You don’t need to sell online at all.”

DIRT-Y INQUIRIES

Community questions from our Discord. Join to respond directly, or email [email protected] your responses.

• 🎾 From @dustinbrown: “Just moved to NYC! Anyone have good (affordable) recs for where to play some tennis?”

• 📚 In the #books channel, @annadante is contending with a pre-summer reading slump: “I got a lot of books recently but none of them is particularly ‘calling me’ to read it.” What books/pieces of writing have helped you get out of one?

• 💐 The #perfume channel was discussing olfactory descriptors, like “indolic” (@motivatedspaghetti’s favorite in the perfumery lexicon, as it describes a smell that’s both sweet and rotten). @GlassesofJustice asks: “How would anyone familiar describe the scent of vetiver root?”

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Disney+ and Hulu will merge into one super streaming app later this year. (TechCrunch)

• Netflix plans to cut spending by $300 million. (WSJ)

• MrBeast is buying property outside his hometown of Greenville, NC, for a branded “hype neighborhood.” Disney, as always, remains the blueprint. (Curbed)

• “Queen Charlotte,” the Bridgerton prequel spin-off, has Shonda Rhimes’ fingerprints all over the series. (New Yorker)

  • I can’t avoid the ads for the experiential Bridgerton ball in New York…

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Sable Yong on the cartoons that shaped modern American beauty standards. (Substack)

• In April, Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal launched a Web3-based restaurant loyalty platform called Blackbird. I’ve been following its Substack for updates. I was interested in how $FLY, Blackbird’s native token, is being positioned as “marketing currency” in this conversation between Levanthal and Momofuku CEO Marguerite Mariscal.

• Generation Connie: an essay on the broadcaster Connie Chung and how she became the namesake for a generation of Asian American women. (NYT Opinion)

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