The end of Brandless

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

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.

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.

But this isn’t really a story about the consequences of raising too much venture capital, or even about branding. It’s mostly a story about a not-great business that never figured itself out — where customers spent too little and didn’t come back enough.

It had a founding CEO, Tina Sharkey, who was unabashedly trying to build a community in public, and got great press.

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.

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.