Why Everything You Buy Looks Like It Was Made By a Hipster In Brooklyn

From Target to ShopRite, major retailers are co-opting muted pastels, serif fonts, and ampersands

At a slightly run-down grocery store at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, the paper towel shelf is in the midst of a hipster makeover. Next to reams of shouty, Crayola-colored packs of Bounty, calmly sits a new brand of paper towel that looks like it was dreamed up by either the millennial marketing whizzes at Glossier or an Etsy crafter from Portland. It’s Paperbird, styled with a lowercase “p” and accented with a feminine hand-sketched silhouette of a perched creature, all packaged in soothing tones of cream and lavender.

Paperbird is not, however, some homespun artisanal cleaning-products brand. It’s the brainchild of ShopRite, the New Jersey–based grocery store chain that operates nearly 300 stores across the Northeast. Store-hatched brands are hardly a new concept, but as retailers wake up to the shrinking margins of selling other people’s stuff — and competing with private-label savants like Trader Joe’s — they’re aggressively building up or overhauling their own brand arsenal. “I’m not sure I know of many retailers who can avoid it,” says Brian Shoroff, president of the Private Label Manufacturers Association.

ShopRite announced last month that by 2021, it will replace many of its generic-looking ShopRite-labeled products with some 3,500 new branded private-label items. Paperbird, one of the company’s first new brands, debuted in November with a line of paper goods, which includes napkins and toilet paper. Store managers are already flaunting the new brand by dressing in Paperbird-branded T-shirts (“Clean in Peace”). An ad campaign on commuter trains features slogans that could be mistaken for some venture-backed direct-to-consumer e-commerce startup promoting self-care. “Namast’ay Calm. Napkin On,” reads one spotted in the wild.

Margins in the grocery business can be tight: When stores sell national brands, margins hover around 1.3%, according to a 2018 report by CBInsights; however, with private label, that margin can grow by some 30%. In recent years, private label as a category has experienced a reputational overhaul. Once the lesser stepchild of retail, big boxers like Target and Trader Joe’s have turned customers on to their whimsical approach to product development. According to an August Nielsen report, 40% of U.S. consumers said they would pay the same or higher for store brands as they would for national brands. Last year, growth in sales of store brands was almost double that of national brands.

Retailers also possess the one asset every CPG covets: troves of data to help them make decisions about which products resonate with customers. “You understand the brands that are doing well, you learn from those brands, and then you launch your own brand in that category,” says Anika Sharma, an adjunct assistant professor at NYU Stern and a marketing professional. Costco has done this brilliantly for years, slightly tweaking its Kirkland brand from what national brands offer. And Amazon is now doubling down in this strategy with dozens of its own brands, including Mama Bear diapers and Solimo coffee pods.

The rise of store brands dates back to the 1980s, when commodities like flour and orange juice sold reasonably well as store brands. Then, Shoroff explains, retailers “got more creative with their products. They were creating products that could be sold on their own merits.” Canadian grocer Loblaws changed the game when it ambitiously hatched a store-brand chocolate chip cookie that aimed to outperform Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy. By the 1990s, national brands decreased their TV advertising, paving the way for more affordable store brands.

Since then, private-label brands have been pitching all kinds of narratives. Cult grocers like Kroger and Wegmans aren’t going to win any design awards, but Kroger’s Simple Truth natural/organic line conveys a Whole Foods vibe, while the Wegmans line has a die-hard foodie following. Costco’s outrageously profitable Kirkland brand has zero design sensibility, yet has managed to turn thriftiness into its virtue. On a 50,000-member subreddit devoted to Costco, one thread proclaims, “Everything in my life is Kirkland.” One bride even bragged that she served Kirkland at her wedding.

Walmart, the largest grocery retailer, has a robust private-brand business, keeping smaller retailers scrambling to find ways to compete. It recently launched its own skin care line, subtly positioning itself as a new competitor to Sephora. When Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017, the online behemoth immediately expanded the store’s 365 organic store-brand offerings and sold them on Amazon.

But Trader Joe’s, comprised of 90% private-label brands, is largely responsible for transforming the category into something truly unique — both playful and economical; dependable and surprising. The California-based retailer is constantly rolling out new and seasonal products, whether it’s chocolate peppermint loaf baking kits or cauliflower gnocchi. “Trader Joe’s was an important part of the story, because they made it very clear that private label could be done as upscale, creative, innovative products and not simply lookalike products,” says Shoroff.

Meanwhile ShopRite, best known as a suburban destination for fare like family-size Eggo waffles, is not exactly an arbiter of quality or taste. Recently, it confirmed that; more precisely, that shoppers trusted its store brands but didn’t like how they looked or the message they sent. Laura Kind, director of brand marketing and packaging at Wakefern, ShopRite’s parent company, told industry trade publication Winsight Grocery Business what prompted the new private label lines: “If the marketing vehicle, the packaging that the consumer is seeing, does not entice them to purchase it or eat it, then we as a retailer are at a disadvantage.” (The retail chain would not grant an interview to Marker.)

You can eat your Bowl & Basket avocado oil–sautéed asparagus in your farmhouse kitchen, decorated with items from Hearth & Hand.

So rather than appear to customers like just another mass retailer, ShopRite is seizing on virtually every popular branding trend that gives the impression that these products are the creations of a maker inspired by Goop. Along with its Paperbird line, it debuted Bowl & Basket, a new collection of “thoughtfully crafted food,” which includes avocado oil and kettle chips.

Packaging, down to font choice, helps to signify the human touch. Recently, serif fonts have taken over the food category, a departure from the stark minimalism that ruled for years. As a recent Eater article noted, serifs serve as a visual signal that a human being is behind the brand. Chobani yogurt recently changed its font from sans serif to the softer serif; it’s no coincidence Paperbird and Bowl & Basket also employ the softer serif too.

“They want to be as far away from ‘this is produced in a big factory by a co-packer’ as possible,” says David Bernard, founder of Mythmaker, a food-branding agency that has worked with high-end natural brands sold at Whole Foods. “So they’re trying to convey the idea that it was made in small batches by a young, vibrant, health-conscious entrepreneur somewhere.”

ShopRite is also embracing the well trodden alliteration-and-ampersands naming technique. The ampersand has become ubiquitous in everything from restaurants to fashion, giving a whiff of authenticity, even if the brand was conceived with the help of focus groups and sales data. (There’s now a Hipster Business Name Generator poking fun at the trend.) The ampersand plus alliteration add up to a name that is both quaint and catchy—whether it’s ShopRite’s Bowl & Basket or Target’s Good & Gather, a new 2,000-item grocery brand replacing three of the retailer’s previous store brands.

In fact, there are now so many ampersand brands that you can eat your Bowl & Basket (or Good & Gather) avocado oil–sautéed asparagus in your modern farmhouse kitchen, decorated with items from Hearth & Hand (Target’s private-label homewares line). And don’t forget to clean up with Everspring, Target’s new household paper and cleaning line that has a similar font and green brand color as Paperbird.

Still, this is likely only the beginning of food retailers upping their private-label game. European chains are expanding in the United States with business models largely built on selling high-quality, interesting store brands at cheaper prices. Aldi in particular has made inroads stateside, with 1,800 stores and counting, and is growing its market share with budget-conscious middle-class consumers.

But with all this new attention to detail, perhaps the ones who should be most nervous are the legacy brands, now getting hit with much savvier marketing from all sides. “It’s not a story of the success of private-label brands. It’s the failure of brands,” says NYU Stern professor Sharma. “If you can be replaced by a ShopRite brand or a Target brand, that’s a really pathetic story for branding in general.”

Update: An earlier version of this piece misspelled the name of the NYU Stern adjunct assistant professor. Her name is Anika Sharma.