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And it sounded like a giant contradiction — a slick, Red Antler-crafted brand called Brandless? — which made it a popular topic for discussion. A lot of industry people seemed to want to see it sink.

Brandless launched in 2017 with hundreds of products and immediately received a lot of attention — good and bad.

From the beginning, Brandless painted itself into a corner: At $3 per item, it’s hard to make a profit selling high quality consumer and food products unless you’re driving huge volume. For customers, ordering enough $3 items to hit a free-shipping minimum can be exhausting.

It was, from the start, very obviously one of those high-octane attempts to manufacture something huge, not an organic growth play. Brandless had raised more than $50 million in venture capital pre-launch — unusual at the time — and later attracted a mega-round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund.

. Still, it was losing money from high shipping costs and was plagued with quality problems, according to a report from The Information. It had tried increasing prices to $9 on some products, but it wasn’t enough. SoftBank had set up its investment in Brandless so that it would only deliver all of the cash when certain markers were hit. It never in... See more

And while Brandless made a big deal out of the concept of a “brand tax” — the idea that products from other brands cost more because they have middlemen or other distribution costs — we now know the real story is that direct to consumer e-commerce brands have their own high costs, from engineering talent to online marketing.