Likely, I am at Rehoboth Beach with my kids and very sunburnt. Or I am listening to my parents list their many ailments, as this is what they feel good conversation entails these days. I also may or may not be reading Robert Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, but it’s hard to say because it’s currently June 24th as I write this.

That’s because we’re all on vacation this week; you, however, are perhaps still chained to your laptop or your phone, and for this I am so, so very sorry. Regardless, I at least wanted to give a little shine to some of my personal favorite stories from the year so far, considering that we’re officially at the halfway point.

Anywho, turn on that OOO as soon as you’re done reading this:

• Boy howdy, I just love a stupid story, and if there’s an arms race to make the smallest beer bottle ever, sign me up. Do you know what packaging in North Korea looks like? Now you do.

• I long for a day when food’s only function is sustenance and not blank-maxxing. Everything is very stupid.

• This Japanese snack brand now has black-and-white packaging for the worst possible reason. Anywho, now is the best time to revisit that slept-on sustainability plan, brands.

• Here’s a 100% gorgeous Palestinian olive oil brand that doesn’t come in a squeeze bottle.

• Calico Cut Pants now makes underwear, too.

• If narcissism were rum, it would look an awful lot like this.

• Lovely interview here with Daniel Irizarry,

• There isn’t one single America 250 campaign that will bring this country together, no matter how many dead horses Coca-Cola insists on beating.

• Smoke if you got ‘em.

• Best redesign of the year that’s actually from 2025: Moctezuma.

• Worst redesign of the year: Not telling.

Tat-ta from vacationland.

-Bill

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Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Co-sign on this Tom May piece. I would like to aggressively block any LinkedIn design “stories” or posts that use this specific language. Just like I would like to have ChatGPT bar marketers from making prompts about Levi’s and the “power of brand, as if anyone beyond your 347 LinkedIn followers cares about any of this.

• Captain, there’s a floating bodgea ahead.

• Rich people are hilarious. “We’re here in the Haptons so Trask can learn at long last how to properly tie a Grief knot and go on data literacy quests, obviously.”

• I know what you’re asking yourself right this very second: how can I use shitty memes to promote my brand without having to lift a finger? Stop contributing to the slop-social discourse.

• I get that anything that comes from Conde Nast can never seriously be called a “zine,” but I do like it when publications actually PRINT things. And while I don’t much care for her music, Olivia Rodrigo seems like a pretty good egg.

• I get that they’re three separate drinks, but these Sazerac RTDs look like they just slapped some stock images on them and called it a day.

• A Fast Company interview with David founder Peter Rahal presented without commentary: And I was curious, the name David—did you worry at all about it appealing less to women? No. Men will not consume feminine things. They just don’t. Women will consume masculine things if they’re aesthetic or beautiful. If anything, it’s cool for women to consume masculine things if they’re aesthetic, but the inverse does not happen. You would never have a pink protein bar. You’d be like, “That’s not for me.” But if you were to have a protein bar that was masculine yet had good design or aesthetic, you would consume that, and your wife would, too.

• OK, I lied. Fuck that guy.

Toodles.

-Bill

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In April 2025, Muskaan Kasat, a brand and packaging designer based in India, developed a student concept called Mitini, a conceptual spirits brand centered on Jaipur Blue Pottery, a traditional, globally recognized craft, known for its cobalt-blue glaze and floral motifs. The idea was to bring a centuries-old regional craft into a contemporary luxury context, preserving its lineage by translating it onto a bottle that people would keep long after the liquid was gone.

Mitini won the Pentawards Student Category, was featured byWorld Brand Design Society, and was mentioned in Creative Lives in Progress.

Later that year, in September, Godawan 173, a limited-edition Indian single malt whisky produced by Diageo India and designed by Butterfly Cannon, launched at The Savoy in London. The packaging drew directly from, yes, Jaipur Blue Pottery, marrying the craft’s signature cobalt motifs to a luxury spirits bottle intended to honor both the endangered Godawan bird and the fragile art form it shares its name with. It won aD&AD Pencil and a One Club for Creativity award. The Dieline has also recognized it for its originality of thought.

Kasat noticed and posted about it on LinkedIn.

“My first reaction was an unhelpfully loud, ‘Well, that looks exactly like what I did,’” she told me. In her LinkedIn post, she questioned where original thought goes when better-funded players enter the room. It’s an interesting conversation around combining cultural inspiration with creative ownership. I don’t know the answer, but who really can lay claim to this craft? Or any craft?

The conversation Kasat started touches something we’ve all been seeing for years. We are in an unusual cultural moment in which Art Nouveau linework, Art Deco geometry, folk craft, and artisanal technique have come to the forefront of design to convey a sense of authenticity. It’s a likely reaction to AI-generated imagery, which has flooded visual culture with technically competent images that absolutely feel completely hollow. Craft, on the other hand, becomes proof of humanity. Historical reference becomes evidence of research, intentionality, and rootedness.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, dupe culture has quite literally taken over consumer goods, whether it’s perfume and fashion dupes or water bottles and probiotic gummies. The design industry has its own version. Ideas, directions, and aesthetic territories travel far and wide. They move through student portfolios, awards websites, Behance pages, Instagram saves, and mood boards. And when a bigger studio or global brand picks up a similar thread, there is often no clear line between inspiration and appropriation.

The question Kasat is raising isn’t whether Blue Pottery belongs to her. She’s very clear on that. “I am not claiming ownership of the endless possibilities the craft holds,” she tells me. “It would be as bizarre as if I claimed a potato because I saw it first.”

A student and a major global agency both looked at the same endangered regional craft (master potters refused to share their trade secrets with fellow craftsmen), identified the same opportunity to incorporate it into luxury spirits packaging, and arrived at visually similar outcomes. There’s an overlap, but it also describes how design works.

Jaipur Blue Pottery, with its instantly legible visual identity, its Mughal-era roots, and its documented precarity as a dying tradition, was a culturally loaded subject waiting to be picked up. It’s precisely the kind of material that many creatives are not just enamored with, but the kind of craft they’re essentially primed to discover.

Butterfly Cannon responded directly in the comments of her LinkedIn post, noting that Blue Pottery was one of several creative routes explored for Godawan toward the end of 2024, and that on projects of this scale, significant time passes between concept development and final execution.

“We had been building the Godawan brand alongside Diageo India from its earliest beginnings, long before anyone had heard of it,” Butterfly Cannon Co-Founder, Jon Davies, told me. “That meant spending time in Rajasthan, immersing ourselves in its landscapes, meeting its people, and discovering the extraordinary crafts that give the region its distinct identity. Jaipur Blue Pottery was one of those early introductions that stayed with us.” The collaboration extended to working directly with Dr. Leela Bordia, one of the foremost custodians of the craft, and her team of artisans, every sketch shared, every motif discussed. “The final decisions weren’t made in isolation by a design studio; they were the result of ongoing dialogue between brand owners, designers, and the people who have dedicated their lives to preserving the craft itself.”

Which I totally believe, but I also believe that the internet moves quickly, too. And who’s to say that someone on the Butterfly Cannon team wasn’t inspired by Kasat’s work? Even peripherally or unconsciously.

Kasat graciously received the agency’s comment. “Thanks for sharing your perspective,” she replied on the LinkedIn post, “and congratulations on the fantastic work on the project. It has definitely started a conversation around drawing inspiration from cultural crafts and traditions.” Which is a generous read, but also, notably, a shift in framing. The post that asked whether Godawan had taken “moving parts from an idea already in circulation” became, in the comments, a broader conversation about cultural inspiration.

None of this is to say that Kasat is wrong, but there’s a point at which taking to the internet to accuse someone of something should perhaps start as a private conversation first. The day I forget about Andrew Benin, Graza’s founder, taking to LinkedIn to call out Brightland and its founder Aishwarya Iyer by name, writing that he viewed it as ‘a blatant disrespect’ and that he was ‘choosing to voice his discontent’ for the brand packaging their olive oil in a squeeze bottle, is the day I die. Benin acknowledged he’d been told to ‘hush’ and ‘not be rash,’ and did it anyway. Which, fair. But the public callout turned what could have been a direct conversation into a PR nightmare for the brand.

Though it’s worth noting that the case involved two direct competitors in the same product category, which makes it a different kind of allegation than two designers independently reaching for the same centuries-old craft.

But, don’t get me wrong, I also understand where she’s coming from. When you build and design something that you’re proud of, there’s always a sense of ownership, and there should be.

Even if the Godawan case isn’t the clearest example, there is a structural asymmetry in the design world. Student work and independent concepts circulate within professional communities. They get seen, absorbed, contextualized. Kasat won an award for her work, which was publicized. The designers who benefit most from that circulation are rarely the ones who originated the idea. A concept that wins a student award and gets coverage in design media in April lives in the same visual ecosystem where agency mood boards get built in October. Whether anyone makes a conscious connection or not, influence is rarely traceable and almost never credited.

“I am describing the all-too-familiar experience,” Kasat wrote, “of watching an original idea remain publicly visible and largely overlooked until a better-funded player like Diageo India attaches it to a bigger narrative.”

The visibility gap between student work and professional work is real, but it isn’t total. Especially now with how the internet works. And sometimes two designers look at the same beautiful, endangered craft and see the same opportunity.

The harder question this moment raises isn’t about Kasat or Butterfly Cannon specifically. It’s about what happens when an entire industry reaches for the same historical and craft references simultaneously. As Davies put it. “A project genuinely engaging with craft starts with curiosity and humility. It asks where this tradition comes from, who protects it, and how the work can contribute back to it. Simply borrowing the visual language without that understanding risks turning a living heritage into decoration.”

The question of originality in design has always been complicated. It gets more complicated when the raw material is a living craft tradition, when the cultural stakes are high, and when the design industry’s hunger for “authentic” and “craft” references moves faster than its ability to think carefully about what that appetite really means.

It’s certainly no coincidence that both landed on this craft as a source of inspiration.

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Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• What’s my medium? Oh, that would be saxophones and high heels (Loving Willie Cole’s mixed media sculptures).

• I wouldn’t call this an “absolute must-have lifestyle piece“ because that would be silly, but Supreme and Coppertone collaborated on an SPF 50 spray.

• Yesterday, I learned of the existence of installing a “mini” data center on your property. The idea here is that by essentially harnessing your home’s excess power capacity, you can offset the costs, delays, and environmental footprint of these resource-draining warehouses (and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but people really hate them). San Francisco startup SPAN has also thrown in quite the kicker—potential free internet and electricity. It’s likely not that cut and dry, and I’m sure there are also some issues around privacy and harnessing data, not to mention getting on board with the AI industry to cut down on your utility bills. Anywho, this is all to say that free ain’t ever free.

• I do enjoy a good catalog.

• I really thought it was gonna’ be Scotland’s away jersey or the Mexican home jersey that would take home the gold for yours truly, but in the end, it was Curacao’s away uni!

• Come, join me in crying about grocery prices.

• Charlotte interviewed logo and lettering specialist Tobias Hall.

• The global memory shortage has led Apple to raise prices on Macs and iPads. What affordability crisis!

• Wired on the Google x A24 partnership: Rosenfield regards the deal as a form of positive PR, at least on the part of Google. “They’re saying, ‘We want to launder our reputation through you,’” she says. “We want to make it look like serious artists are going to be making things with these tools. Because serious artists, by and large, aren’t.” (Asked if the Google deal was a form of reputation laundering, A24 offered no comment.) Personally, I am not sure I trust anyone who says they want a “seat at the table,” when, for the most part, I would like to see the table hacked to pieces with an axe and then sold for kindling.

Go outside and play.

-Bill

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Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• A24 is no longer cool.

• I have come to really hate the word “iconic” and how casually it’s thrown around these days; every last one of you is using it wrong. Here’s a small list of things I have been told are iconic over the past year: Lisa Rinna, the Quaker Oats mascot, Fruit Loops, Pizza Hut’s red tumblers, DHL, Hidden Valley Ranch, Perdue, and whatever reality star Ziwe is currently interviewing this second (though to be fair, I would like to think that she’s at least winking at us when she says it). If everything is iconic, then nothing is iconic, but especially Quaker Oats and the cast members of the Real Housewives franchise (no disrespect to the Great American Bravo franchise).

• That said, here is an example of something that I genuinely think is iconic. Of course, I can see you rolling your eyes as you read this whilst clutching your green Brat pearls, but like, say, Coca-Cola, it does not need to change (though it is OK if the brand world around it changes). It is all well and good to disagree with me here (and on WD 40 of all things lol), but there is something to be said for a brand that has remained mostly unchanged since the 60s.

• Trailers are almost always lies, but this is the exact opposite tone of Klara and the Sun, and it makes me feel like I read an entirely different book.

• I would mess around with Algae Cooking Club’s Smoked Tomato Oil.

• I see these concerns, and producers and manufacturers are right to have questions about how to navigate them. That said, this is exactly why EPR must be done on the federal level. If recycling is a mish-mash of different approaches and NO ONE has the same kind of curbside services county to county, well, you’re going to have a chaotic end result and even more lobbying from plastic manufacturers crying wolf, what with all the trash they keep selling you. Only 7 states currently have an EPR law on the books, and New York couldn’t get a bill passed because of industry opposition (and, as a reminder, they are very definitely gloating about it).

• Obviously, Prime Day(s) is in full swing, so I’ll just drop this Hallie Bateman comic here.

• Related, but I like it when people can go to the bathroom.

  Levis didn’t actually win anything, and the resulting “cover-your-logo” World Cup frenzy was straight-up hacky.

• This is what happens when you give no-bid contracts to cats who look like Batman villains/campaign donors.

• Hear me out: Scrap the 2024 Mountain Dew redesign and go with the nickel cans instead.

• Welp, that’s a wrap on glop and jizz letters, everyone!

Buh-bye now.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• I find all of the hype and the weeks leading up to Cannes Season exhausting and insufferable. And I know that, even as you pose for a not-at-all candid LinkedIn-destined shot at the Spotify sweat lodge, you feel the exact same way, because I can see the cold, deadened gaze staring out from behind your Meta glasses. Anywho, saw these “cans” for Cannes from Tavern, and they’re not too shabby.

• My oh my. I mean, whoever could it be!

• You had me at “Warriors-inspired” card game. Didn’t see a Baseball Ghoulie, but perhaps I should buy the game and find out for myself.

• Love these Nadia Lee Cohen photos of Madonna for Interview.

• I get that I’m probably the “company beer guy,” but I had no real desire to talk up Keystone Light Apple because, well, woof. That being said, I don’t know why their press shop insists on releasing interviews that have been pored over and pruned by internal stakeholders and PR folks so that they can release golden nuggets of dreck like : “Keystone Light is a great and refreshing everyday brew that authentically connects to people’s passions such as hunting, fishing , and the great outdoors.” I say this as someone who has written gobs of truly horrendous sponsored content in the past, but the Molson Coors blog kinda stinks. Why bother with any of this, and who is this really for? None of this sounds natural! Have you heard a guy toting an Ugly Stik Carbon Crappie Spinning Rod (I Googled this, obvi) say, “Boy howdy, as a person enamored with the great outdoors, I sure do authentically connect with Keystone Light?” No one writes or talks like this. Lean into the absurdity of what you’re selling—a crappy light beer with apple flavoring—and let that do the talking. No one cares about “value portfolios,” even the marketing people.

• Olivia Rodrigo just started her own music festival, Daisy Chain Fields, and it’s very much inspired by Lilith Fair. All net proceeds will go to non-profits advocating for women and girls.

• No part of me wants to try a Slurpee Soda, but I do like the cans!

• Pasta Rankings: There are supposedly more than 600 (!) pasta shapes known to man. Let it be known that angel hair is by far the worst among them.

• Might I also recommend becoming an editor for a packaging website?

Go get ‘em, tiger.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Easily one of my favorite projects from last year, and it’s a big ol’ bag of concrete, of all things. Killer work from Brands&People, and it very much cements them as a studio to watch.

• Come to America, and we will woo you with our, uh...Waffle Houses (no disrespect to Waffle House, but I do find this very endearing and hilarious that World Cup tourists are having a moment with our many, many chains).

• People are freaking out about cottage cheese shortages, but just imagine what would happen if the power grid went down.

• Missed this, but Danone is suing Chobani over protein claims. Let them fight.

• I don’t much care for the new Recess Pink Lemonade, because that can is anything BUT calm and is completely out of step with the brand world they created. Too busy!

• This proud Papa got some Fishwife for Father’s Day. The dad hat was a nice touch.

• A new ice cream shop opened down the street, and its signage was clearly made using AI. They are certainly not the only ones, and when I was traveling for work last month, I was genuinely surprised by all of the AI-generated menu items hanging out outside restaurants. Anywho, good piece from Derek Horn here about something that I think many of us are already starting to miss: design from non-designers.

• Finally, a Formula 1-approved electrolyte drink.

• Angels reliever Brent Suter studied environmental policy and science at Harvard, and he’s tired of playing under 76 gasoline signs. It’s great that he’s on board with EcoAthletes, but billionaires love other billionaires, and people aren’t just going to up and boycott the Dodgers when they have, maybe, the greatest player ever to play the game (who is not named Darren Daulton and did not write a book about ascension and other dimensions). Anywho, good for Suter.

• Hercules and Love Affair still fuck. Have a Hercules and Love Affair summer; you can listen to their self-titled album literally right now, and there are no skips.

By the by, have you or anyone you know designed the packaging for gas station pills? You know exactly the kind of pills I’m talking about. If so, get at me and comment.

TTYL.

-Bill

I live in Savannah, Georgia. Every day, I hear the tour bus trolley rolling by my house ferrying visitors through a retelling of what this city used to be. I walk my dog through the historic squares and admire the Spanish moss draping the oak trees, sunlight twinkling through the cracks. Everything about this town is quaint.

My neighbors and I meet every evening at five o’clock sharp in the park by the fountain with our dogs. We claim a long stretch of the benches, and we talk about our days, what’s for dinner, what books we’ve been reading, and, lately, about one member’s cancer journey. I am the youngest person there by a solid twenty years, and the most pleasing part of it all, for me at least, is that nobody at that bench knows what a Labubu is. Nor do they have an opinion on the shoe, color, or song of the summer. Nary a thought is shared about the “taste economy.” For one hour a day, I am completely offline, talking to people who seem to be, from all appearances, always offline.

It’s refreshing in ways I couldn’t comprehend at first.

Just the act of talking with people with whom I don’t have much in common besides our dogs and a zipcode, I realize just how important it is to get off the internet. Which is rich, coming from someone (me) whose job it is to be very online.

Since 2003, the average American has added roughly 24 hours of solitary time per month, while face-to-face socializing has dropped by about 20 hours per month, already underway before the pandemic made it catastrophic.

The average American now spends 2 hours and 16 minutes on social media every day, and my personal screen time will be taken to the grave with me. Multiply that across a lifespan, and you begin to understand how we got here. We’re living in a country of people who are technically more connected than any humans in history, and lonelier than almost any of their predecessors.

But we have spent the better part of a decade where “being online” is an entire personality. My own Instagram bio used to read “chronically online,” as if it were a badge to be proud of. And for a while, it was something I was proud of. Being the person who found the thing first, like the meme, the micro-trend, the obscure reference, carried a sense of social currency.

But I’m starting to feel and sense a shift.

The narcissism that social media has always enabled has stopped feeling aspirational and started feeling like an endless hamster wheel. A race to nothingness. Everyone from the president to the person next to you at a red light performs on the platforms, for an audience of people also performing, and somewhere in there, the question of what any of us actually think or feel or want becomes unclear. And research backs this up, 82% of Gen Z adults associate social media with the word “addicting,” and 40% say they wish it had never been invented.

A 2025 Deloitte survey found that nearly a third of Gen Zers deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months. Film cameras, paperback books, and “dumbphones” are making a comeback. Even media brands are feeling the reversal. Country Living, a Hearst publication celebrating small-town life, antique collecting, and scratch-made baking, has seen 57% year-over-year membership growth, with Gen Z and Millennials now making up 51% of its audience, up from 36% the prior year. The hobbies driving that growth, antiquing, crocheting, and baking, are, as its editor-in-chief put it, “all about surprise and delight.”

People are trying to leave. It’s been dubbed a “Dopamine Diet,” and, in effect, it’s a behavioral strategy that involves temporarily abstaining from highly stimulating digital activities. The goal is to reduce overstimulation from algorithms, notifications, and endless scrolling, helping the brain’s reward system recalibrate and break compulsive habits.

We’re seeing it from Luddite Teens, sure, but we’re also seeing it on a larger scale.

Phoebe Bridgers locks phones in bags at her shows, and audiences lose their minds with gratitude, which says everything about how relieved we are when someone just takes it from us. The best concert I’ve ever been to was Florence and the Machine at Gov Ball in 2019, when Florence threatened to throw anyone visibly holding a phone out of the concert. The most memorable sporting event I ever went to was The Masters, where phones and cameras are vehemently banned. And lest we forget the virality of products like Brick, which lock you out of certain apps.

Eventbrite reported a 567% increase in phone-free event listings between 2024 and 2025, with 49% of Gen Z and Millennials saying they want less curation and more real moments. The pouch company Yondr, which makes this all possible, has now secured over 20 million devices across more than 10,000 events.

Being offline is its own form of luxury.

Brands, naturally, have noticed. The offline moment has become a marketing strategy, which is either poetic or depressing, depending on your tolerance for irony. Brand dinners and events are being positioned as refuges from the feed, curated evenings where the whole point is that you’re not supposed to post, which of course everyone posts about anyway, because the whole thing was designed to be posted about. Zimmerman hosted a dinner by the Mediterranean Sea, and Byredo hosted an event called “In Conversation With” that evolved into an exhibit in collaboration with artist Jeanguillaume Mathiaut. The most interesting one, in my opinion, was the Anthropic dinner for Claude. Of course, there was a conversation prompt on each plate, too.

But the forced authenticity of it is almost impressive. Can you feel the brief underneath every candle? Help creators get offline so they can post about it?

Earlier this year, Pinterest launched a phone-free activation at Coachella. Upon entering the event, guests were to lock their phones in a pouch and step into an experience “designed for uninterrupted joy.”

A genuine desire to disconnect exists, but the moment a brand tries to create space for it, does it become fake or even performative? Brands are increasingly discovering that the more they try to perform realness, the less real they seem, and the consumer who’s already exhausted from performing realness themselves has a very low threshold for detecting it in others.

So what does this mean for the CPG space right now? For the brands spending their budgets trying to reach people who are increasingly suspicious of being reached, or for the consumer who no longer feels the pull to constantly scroll?

It’s not easy for brands to think outside of being online or wanting/needing to be posted. But a few brands are showing up in smart ways. On and Erewhon announced a multi-year partnership built around a community-led Wellness Club. It’s a series of running, training, and recovery events across LA, alongside a co-branded post-run recovery juice available in stores.

In 2025, the All-American Rejects had a “House Party” tour, playing intimate shows in bowling alleys and fans’ backyards, with Mike’s Hard Lemonade sponsoring the final tour stop. There was no elaborate production, but the intimacy of the setting created the magic. Mike’s bought into an inherently low-documentation experience that creates a strong, lifelong fan base for its consumers.

In February of 2026, Fishwife took a tour of local bagel shops around the country to celebrate the launch of their new smoked salmon. And Graza has just announced a partnership with the Food Network on a Food Truck Tour across five cities serving up “super tasty bites,” according to their website. These tours are a great way to show up in people’s routine lives, not their feeds, and create a more personable and memorable experience. Not necessarily to be posted, but to be experienced in real life.

What all of these brands are creating are moments that force people off their phones in ways that build connection. It’s less about creating branded moments and more about creating a brief period when people with a shared love of a brand can build a sense of community.

What will inspire people to get offline and enjoy lived experiences without the pressure to post about it? What cuts through right now isn’t a campaign designed around disconnection. It’s something so good that people forget, just for a moment, that they were “supposed to” document it.

Until next week,

Chloe

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Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Sam’s Club just got a new and improved logo that even made this Goldstar member blush. That said, if you really wanted to go all-in on the diamond, David Lee Roth, aka Diamond Dave, was sitting right there ready to do some air splits.

• Epic beer packs are completely out of control at this point, but at least PBR’s 250 box has a picture of a monster truck on it. What says Happy 250th Birthday, America, better than Gravedigger?

• CVS just started packaging some of its private-label OTC drugs in aluminum. This is a good thing!

• Speaking of aluminum, are we going to see more milk get packaged in cans?

• Boy howdy, I haven’t thought about photographer Gregory Crewdson in 20 years, and those eerily cinematic images still send me. Anywho, he shot some promo photos for Phoebe Bridgers upcoming tour on a “desolate street“ in Massachusetts, no less. That said, I think desolate is the wrong word here, Rolling Stone, and I would call it “quaint” and “positively New England.” But that’s just me, a Massachusetts resident.

• Gummyworm-flavored whipped cream doesn’t spark joy for me.

• This is a fun idea, but only AI can “grow” broccoli that will fit into this packaging.

• I talked up Market Basket’s in-store playlist the other day, but shout out to Katy Elliot for singing the praises of the best grocery circular in the game. It’s really that good!

• Etsy would like you to ignore Amazon Prime Day and “shop other Jeffs.”

• It seems to me that the Christian thing to do is to stand with a marginalized community that is still facing an alarmingly high rate of hate crimes. It’s a genuine shame that Pride and MLB-related Pride nights have been politicized and turned into an us-versus-them free-for-all, especially when nearly 10% o the US population identifies as LGBTQ+. As Giants beat writer Grant Brisbee wrote earlier in the week, “There’s a way to help people navigate this life with the respect and grace they deserve. It is a choice to ignore that on a night dedicated to people who need others on their side. Do better. That’s the only thing we’re all supposed to do around here, anyway.” Here here.

Now, please do something summery this weekend.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Richard Nixon hasn’t had this much heat since Family Ties.

• Seriously, though, what snow? Denver wants citizens to cut back on their water usage, and this is a mighty good billboard.

• This is your semi-annual reminder that comic nerds can be the worst, and they have some thoughts on the more “androgynous” Batgirl update.

• Good piece here from Rudy on what the proposed bipartisan CREATOR Act does—and critically—doesn’t do. The whole “provide visual artists the exclusive right to authorize the commercial exploitation, or public distribution in or affecting interstate commerce of a stylistic impersonation of that visual artist, and for other purposes” sounds nice in theory and all, but seemingly doesn’t go nearly far enough.

• Pepsi’s Cherries & Cream didn’t have to go this hard.

• I am a state fair enthusiast, because where else on this planet can you witness butter sculpting, eat a deep-fried pickle that’s shoved into a Twinkie, and see the Gin Blossoms all in the SAME PLACE? Anywho, would love to go to this Smithsonian exhibit, State Fairs: Growing American Craft.

• Serious question for the record geeks—after Big Star and Teenage Fanclub, obviously, are Gin Blossoms the very next best power pop band?

• Charlotte interviewed designer Daniela Barrio de Mendoza, and now I want to move to New Zealand for the work-life balance we all crave.

• Required summer reading for all brand designers.

• Genuinely love these bottles from Visualbraingravity. Sure, I know I’ll never find one of these at my local Market Basket (shoutout to the greatest store playlist of all time), but I love that they look as if they’re deflating right before your eyes.

You are that much closer to your summer Friday now. Toodles.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• You know, when you make a diatribe against plastic cans, like I did yesterday, it helps when you actually put the hyperlink where it belongs! Anywho, in the first item, without much context, I was talking about the new Svedka Canned Vodka Water. My mind hasn’t changed since then. They’re still awful.

• A’ja Wilson, a WNBA Champion three times over and the league’s first-ever 4x WNBA MVP, just got her own Wheaties box.

• I don’t think this is the death knell for Pizza Hut, but that nostalgia trip everyone seems to be on means that those plastic cups and Tiffany lamps will have to do some serious heavy lifting if you want to see those red roofs surge back into the American consciousness.

• Speaking of being borne back ceaselessly into the past, this coffee company packages its beans in VHS cartridges.

• A cruel thing I do to my younger brother is make obnoxious yum sounds when eating a cheesesteak or a whole pizza pie in his presence because he has Celiac’s. This is all to say that Banza and Campbell’s just dropped a GF Chicken Noodle Soup.

• 10/10 against wrapping a head of lettuce in plastic, but this soccer ball wrapping is admittedly pretty cute.

• e.l.f. just released a haircare line. Watch out for tween allowance advances.

• Holy shit. The John Daly Dunkin’ commercial. This is better than the “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” performance and is perhaps the most accurate reflection of living in the United States.

• Speaking of, everything is working exactly how it’s supposed to.

Have a better day.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• I cannot begin to tell you how exhausted I am with these fucking plastic cans. The only “unique” feature they carry is that they are completely unrecyclable (though, I suppose if you cut off the top, you can recycle the plastic bottom—that you even need to perform recycling surgery also means it’s not recyclable). Obviously, this reminded me of the energy water brand, Orka, which I never wanted to feature on the site because everything about the branding and packaging has a cursed aura that screams bad vibes city. That and you have to be a genuine fucking moron to launch a beverage in a “plastic can” for the sake of virality.

• Crayola’s crayons are made from Petroleum. Honeysticks, however, are made from beeswax. They’re also the 2026 Plastic-Free winner at the DIELINE Awards, and Charlotte interviewed Milk, the agency that handled their redesign.

• These clowns (complimentary) put up fake tech ads, and I think 80% of them are absolutely believable if you give them a sideways glance. Kudos.

• I understand that we are what you might refer to as a niche destination or an industry rag, and I will never not be amazed by some of the press releases that come my way, especially the ones from people who have no idea what we do. That said, I love that I now know there is such a thing as “The Spooky Awards, the Halloween & Costume Association’s (HCA) “official celebration of innovation, creativity, and excellence in the Halloween industry.” I mean, we give out awards for packaging, why not costumes, too?

• Speaking of being an oddball publication, to my knowledge, there is only one website covering the KFC redesign and doing interviews about lube packaging on the same day. Just saying.

• Asshole’s are out. It’s official.

• Clearly, I haven’t eaten a Fig Newton in a really, really long time, because not only did they redesign the packaging(announced two-ish weeks ago), but they are also no longer known as Fig Newtons (announced in 2012).

• On that note, KFC is a very JKR redesign in that it’s not even remotely offensive to LinkedIn jockeys and armchair experts (these names are also in my title FWIW). That said, I do like the employee hats with what appears to be a “wordmark bucket,” though I’m not sure what else you could call it.

Thanks for letting me calls ’em as I sees ’em.

Bill

A few weeks back, Bella Hadid was spotted on a yacht in Saint Tropez eating David’s new protein ice cream straight from the pint before it launched. It looked candid. The paparazzi picture was sun-drenched and effortless. To stumble upon it felt like uncovering Hadid’s little secret. Stars! They’re just like us; they eat ice cream straight from the pint. Shockingly, even those like Bella Hadid. It made me want to be on a yacht on the Mediterranean eating a pint of ice cream, which tells you everything about why it worked.

But was it a paid product placement?

Everything in the photo was, suspiciously, perfect. Not to mention the brand name was perfectly oriented. And the image was everywhere, including on Pucci’s Instagram page. The comment sections were all filled up with the predictable chorus of want, envy, and jokes. When asked how Hadid scored a pre-launch pint, David’s founder, Peter Rahal, told Emily Sundburg’s FeedMe that “she’s a fan.”

I even stumbled upon an Instagram video with the caption, “saw@bellahadid eating David Icecream so obvs I had to try it.”

But does anyone actually believe that Hadid was spontaneously eating a pint of ice cream, brand name perfectly placed, and was organically captured by the paparazzi?

Of course not.

And yet, once the product “officially launched,” it sold out immediately. I’m guessing not solely because of Hadid, but not, not because of her either. The gap between what we know to be true and how we respond has never been wider. The scariest part is that brands have figured out how to market to this fascinating gap.

And while David seemingly did this flawlessly, that’s not always the case. J.Crew recently worked with fashion-focused creators, all of them posing in the same dress with the same straw basket. The goal was likely to have this be the “viral” dress of the summer, similar to how their rollneck sweater became “the sweater” of this past winter, but consumers saw right through it. TikTok creator Megan Brinton has less than 10k followers, but created a video captioned, “the pics were all gorg but seeing 15+ people in the same sponsored outfit does not influence me to buy something‼️ consider me deinfluenced.” At the time of writing, it has over 40k views with comments like, “Brands need to understand that when partnering with a creator, it behooves them to give them creative freedom over their selections and styling bc their followers know when it’s their true style.” and “I saw the same dress 4 posts in a row like whyyyy all at the same time and same dress 😂”

@meg.brintonthe pics were all gorg but seeing 15+ people in the same sponsored outfit does not influence me to buy something‼️ consider me deinfluenced #jcrew

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“When you’re negotiating a deal, of course there are deliverables. There are posts, appearances, content commitments, usage rights, and approvals. That’s the business side. The mistake brands make is assuming that more control equals better performance. In reality, the opposite is often true,” notes Sara Brooks, Co-Founder of Goldilocks, a CPG brand growth and strategy firm.

She continues, “The more prescriptive the brief, the more branded the language, the more heavily art-directed the content, the less believable it becomes. The best celebrity partnerships are surprisingly loose at execution. The brand establishes the strategic guardrails, but the celebrity retains enough creative freedom to make the content feel native to how they already show up in the world. That’s because audiences aren’t evaluating whether a partnership is paid. They assume it is. What they’re evaluating is whether the endorsement feels plausible.”

It’s the suspension of disbelief. When you sit down to watch a movie, you don’t actually think the people on screen are real. You know it’s a set and that it’s scripted, yet you still cry at the ending and flinch at the jump scare. The emotional experience is real, even when the premise isn’t.

The internet appears to have reached this theory, too. We know about influencer contracts. We know that “candid” shots are often the product of a dedicated photographer and come at a steep cost. We know that a celebrity being photographed at Erewhon three times before announcing a smoothie collab is no coincidence. The infrastructure of these moments is, at this point, fairly obvious to anyone paying attention, and yet, the engagement climbs anyway. “As people face increasing financial and professional insecurity, we’re observing youth audiences wanting less unattainable signals of aspiration, and genuine solutions to help them navigate their lives. We all know brands are here to sell you products, but if they also help provide entertainment, access, or a genuine sense of belonging, people need this more than ever,” Christian Hurley, Head of Cultural Intelligence at The Mix Global, tells me.

It’s something more like a cultural contract. Brands have agreed to deliver creatively, and consumers have agreed to play along.

What makes that contract hold? Part of it is social proof, the deeply human tendency to treat the behavior of others as a signal for how we should behave. When something appears in everyone’s feed simultaneously, the volume alone creates a sense of relevance. And if you’re in the know of what’s relevant, what does that say about you?

Aspiration, it turns out, doesn’t require belief. We can know that a moment was engineered and still feel the pull of the world it depicts. The ease with which Bella Hadid eats ice cream on a yacht makes me want to live in her world. It’s the beauty and the suggestion of a life that protein ice cream will give you. We’re not buying the product so much as buying temporary access to a story we find appealing.

Participation in it becomes a form of self-expression.

Brands and strategists have been circling this insight for years, but the more sophisticated ones have started designing for it explicitly. Consumers, the thinking goes, don’t reject marketing as a whole; they just reject being treated like they’re not smart enough to see it. The new game is making the advertisement entertaining enough, or culturally resonant enough, that people want to participate.

“As marketeers, it’s crucial we do not underestimate how savvy consumers are. Across our research, we are consistently impressed by the analysis, observations, and ideas that come from outside our industry. It’s less about being manipulated and more about earning a right to be part of the conversation,” shares Hurley.

The industry spent years preaching the importance of “authentic storytelling,” the idea that brands needed to appear unpolished and real, but that era feels more and more out of date. What’s replaced it isn’t the abandonment of authenticity so much as a different definition of it, one that’s less about aesthetics and more about coherence.

“For years, the industry treated authenticity as synonymous with being unfiltered, unscripted, or raw. I don’t think that’s the right definition anymore. Today, authenticity is about consistency. It’s when a product, founder, partnership, or campaign feels like a natural extension of a story consumers already know to be true,” Brooks mentions.

She continues, “A good example is Alix Earle‘s recent skincare launch, Reale Actives. Her audience didn’t embrace the brand because they believed it appeared out of nowhere. They embraced it because she had spent years openly documenting her struggles with acne, skin treatments, breakouts, and the emotional impact that comes with them. Long before there was a product to sell, there was a conversation.”

By the time Hailey Bieber’s strawberry skin-glaze smoothie became an official Erewhon collab, she’d already been photographed there so many times that the partnership felt more like a confirmation of something consumers already believed. The entire arc of paparazzi shot to product launch was the campaign.

The same thing happened with the rollout of Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila, where she appeared in casual settings holding the bottle long before the brand was officially announced. Or Justin Bieber wearing a Rhode eye mask courtside, a paparazzi image that circulated for days as celebrity gossip before the marketing context became apparent. Or, famously, Beats headphones and their years of celebrity seeding ahead of the Apple acquisition.

Brooks notes, “Consumers know they are being marketed to, but they are not necessarily offended by that. What they reject is being treated as if they are not smart enough to see the machinery. The new game is not ‘hide the marketing.’ It is ‘make the marketing entertaining enough, useful enough, or culturally fluent enough that people want to participate anyway.”

David, the protein bar brand, is aggressively designed and aggressively self-aware, from founder presence to product extensions. The cod launch alone became a cultural moment because it was strange enough to warrant an argument. It’s engineered chaos.

So if we know, and we engage anyway, what does that say about us?

The easy answer is that we’re being manipulated as consumers. But manipulation implies passivity, and passive isn’t quite right for what’s actually happening. Most consumers, when they share a staged brand moment or add a product to their cart after a “candid” celebrity sighting, have made some version of a choice. They’ve decided that the entertainment value, the aspiration, the social currency, or simply the product itself is worth the transaction.

Hurley shares, “With audiences savvier than ever before, you’re not trying to pull the wool over their eyes, but inviting them in on your strategy. In the UK, M&S is doing a brilliant job of peeling back the curtain, transforming its staff into online personalities. M&S food developer Kathryn Turner has been going viral thanks to her authentic expertise, and the brand is benefiting in real time.”

And he continues, “In theUS, Crocs commissioned the love story series, ‘Charmed to meet you’. The top comment is ‘Why am I so invested in this ad?’ The content lives on the brand’s channels, so the intention isn’t hidden. Both examples lay their cards on the table in very different ways, and provide the audience with the choice of how they want to engage.”

There’s also a harder question underneath this: what happens if we care too much? To reject every staged moment, every engineered viral drop, every papped celebrity, would be to opt out of a significant portion of contemporary culture. For many consumers, the alternative to engaging isn’t a purer, more authentic feed—it’s a smaller, quieter one. And who’s to say that’s not the better kind of feed?

“Often we detect the manipulation but accept it anyway and indeed, share it. There is growing skepticism, but at the same time, brands and everyday life are moving increasingly online. So if we choose to reject it, will we fall out of touch? I think this question is creating a sense of deniability or indifference. I think the majority of consumers still choose to participate, but in the future, I can see the balance shifting,” says Emily MIllar, a freelance brand strategist.

That said, there are limits. We’re less forgiving when the performance feels out of touch, and when the spectacle suggests a carelessness about the audience’s intelligence or mood.

Ultimately, the best brand moments have always understood that emotional truth and manufactured circumstance are not mutually exclusive. You can design a feeling. You just can’t fake having earned the attention around it.

Until next week,

Chloe

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Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Admittedly, I have absolutely dogged Coca-Cola and some of its recent limited-edition “collectibles,” but the World Cup jersey cans are the best promo packaging I’ve seen so far for the FIFA shitshow.

• Speaking of the World Cup, love this campaign, courtesy of designer Arsh Raziuddin, for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall, which draws on sports memorabilia and NYC city signage. How can you not love a Big Apple Soccer ball?

• This is an amazing story about design theft. Two candidates for the US Senate in Alaska, Dan S. Sullivan and Dan J. Sullivan, have what is essentially the same campaign sign. Dan S. has used the same logo for 11 years. Dan J. just entered the race a few days ago. I am so, so confused, and it’s so, so funny.

• “Oh, you’re going to Red Lobster this weekend? I, too, enjoy Red Lobster, the most “AI-forward restaurant company that exists.” This makes me believe the Red Lobster resurrection won’t be real. Red Lobster CEO Damola Adamolekun would have you believe that data and metrics didn’t exist. Headline slop.

• Pizza Hut just brought back the Book It program. I’m a little peeved, too, as a few days ago, if you brought in your Book It pins from the 80s and 90s, adults would get a free personal pan pizza. Oh well.

• Logo lovers, rejoice. The 2026 LogoLounge Trend Report has arrived,

• First summer mix is in the can. If I had a kiddie pool, the wife and I would be drinking spaghett all weekend.

Go pool hopping this weekend.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• My grandmother wasn’t a very good cook, but there is still very much a part of me that longs to eat a dry chicken breast or pork chop smothered in Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, because that was her game plan for dinner most nights, which was certainly a byproduct of her era (no disrespect, Connie!). The Campbells CREAM OF WHATEVER line certainly delivers on the convenience factor, but our tastes have also collectively evolved, and those flagship flavors feel immensely dated. It’s not the 1960s anymore, but what about a Thai Curry or a Butter Chicken Sauce? That I can get behind that (even though the pallet of coconut milk I have in my basement, purchased from Costco, is giving me side-eye as I type).

• Daniel Mason and Matthew Cooper have designed special packaging for the reissue of the Happy Mondays’(best) album Pills ’N’ Thrills and Bellyaches. The limited-edition comes housed in a pill that comes with a rave whistle, acid blotter art, and a mock MDMA purity-testing kit. Chef’s kiss! Apparently, they based it on a barely-seen promotion for the 1990 album, packaged inside a first-aid kit complete with bandages and condoms.

• Love that New York is saying that if your ad uses AI actors, the content must be labeled as having “synthetic performers.“ Now do this on a federal level.

• Rudy interviewed Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul about Dos Hombres tequila, the brand he co-founded with Bryan Cranston, and his role as its creative director.

• I genuinely had no idea men could get breast cancer.

• The Heinz x Heinken 6-pack isn’t as galaxy-brained as most both brands would have us believe. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but Heinz doesn’t even bottle ketchup in glass.

• “Celebrate Responsibly” doesn’t feel like the takeaway from the Coors Light “Tallerboy.” There are 14 Os there!

Ta-Ta, pals.

-Bill

Show clients what the packaging looks like — without leaving your design tool

Design your label in Kittl, see it on a photorealistic product mockup, and export CMYK-ready files — all in one place. No switching tools, no render wait. Just the visual they need to say yes, and the production file ready to go. Use code DIELINE for 25% off any subscription.

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Subscribe now

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Do I like the Pirate’s Booty redesign? I could give it the ol’ college try and put down a few hundred words on what works and what doesn’t, but ultimately, I’m not the intended audience. Here’s what I mean by that: I see the Pixarification of animation and illustration. It stands to reason that if your brand was founded in 1987, as Pirate’s Booty was, and you make a lunchbox staple for kids, you’re going to have an illustrated mascot that’s of its era. Think Toucan Sam and every other cereal mascot you’ve ever seen. Captain Bob had a MAD Magazine/Sergio Aragonés style, which made sense at the time. But if modernity is top of mind for the brand, then yes, you will try to match current animation styles to win over today’s kids. So while you might dislike the heritage-busting approach, it might actually make enormous sense for the market. It’s easy to dunk on this one, and I get that, but you’re not 7 years old either. This is likely fine, though I haven't checked LinkedIn in a few days for the DISCOURSE. That said, it does look like the eye patch switched sides in a side-by-side comp, and it feels worth pointing out. This is wildly offensive to the eyepatch community!

• Beautifully designed box set from Penguin Random House compiling Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. Worth remembering that JK, awful human being that she is, never had shit on Ursula and HER wizarding school...

• Papa loves a good Iron Maiden-themed beer.

• Good Nut is not a good brand name. But if it were anyone other than Tom Brady, I would probably give it a thumbs up. Such is life!

• Hello Kitty SPAM coming in hot.

• Noah Kahan isn’t really one of my guys, but his patch game is on point.

• I genuinely don’t have much to say about the Barron Trump-backed yerba mate brand, Sollos, other than that I strongly disagree with the contention that there was no single beverage that really synthesized the “Florida lifestyle.” Young man, Four Loko exists. And have you ever danced to the Doobies with a Jack + Tab in hand? Your shocking lack of curiosity about the world around you is matched only by your father’s.

That’s all for today, kids. Have a DAY.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• I don’t know if the robot butler thing is gonna really take off with the well-to-do, especially if they keep kicking children.

• Ah, yes, who amongst us doesn’t cherish “translating automotive DNA into scent?”

• Crayola and CamelBak made crayon-shaped water bottles.

• Base Design brought together 100 designers to create Marou chocolate wrappers that benefit Saigon Children’s Charity.

• I love it when we get press releases from the Flexible Packaging Association (FPA), announcing that the “unreasonable New York packaging EPR bill” has “fail[ed] again.” That some grade-A petty hater shit for a trade association that serves as a mouthpiece for a bunch of manufacturers producing packaging that isn’t widely curbside recyclable and, at best, store drop-off.

• So, now music venue calendars are getting the Coachella poster treatment, too? These posters for Baby’s All Right are all right, I guess, but whatever happened to dates, when doors open, and, heaven forbid, ticket prices? I suppose it might inspire folks to dig a little deeper with an AI-powered Google search, but this makes me miss Trocadero flyers from the 90s (sorry that you didn’t get to see Jawbreaker for $6, kids).

• It takes some real balls to do an anti-plastic campaign like this.

• Good post from illustrator Sebastian König about relying less on Instagram to show off your work. That time would be better spent on other things, he says, like drawing. At this point, I think we all understand that the algorithm is broken; it’s pretty much reels and ragebait getting the shine on Instagram. I saw a Subway Take a little while ago about how we need to figure out how to finally get off Meta-related products, and it’s increasingly clear that this is necessary work.

• Aside from the whole death of journalism thing, this interview offers a pretty good primer on how not to manage people.

Brands that launch products outside their usual grocery store aisle have always fascinated me.

We have Graza, an olive oil brand, launching chips. David, the protein bar brand, is pushing an ice cream and cod. There’s also Beyond Meat releasing a protein drink, all in the span of six months. Some of these expansions feel right, while others, like David, feel like a desperate attempt to stay relevant.

Which is not to say that David won’t be successful, but the company’s branding has certainly helped push its protein-packed mission.

On the surface, the motivation feels twofold. A brand is either grasping at straws as its core business slips, or it’s deliberately engineering new ways to show up everywhere possible. The VC instinct to stretch a brand as far as it will go is definitely there, but I don’t think what’s happening now is just a money story.

In February 2024, Graza launched a limited-edition bag of extra virgin olive oil potato chips made from Galician potatoes, fried in the brand’s own EVOO. The drop sold out multiple times, with customers calling them “the world’s best potato chips.” I have yet to try.

By May of this year, Graza had turned that moment into four permanent chip flavors, including Classic Sea Salt, Sea Salt & Vinegar, Zesty Caesar, and Hot ‘n Sweet, launching exclusively at Target, with wider retail to follow. The brand has also added mayo and wine, collaborated with Ithaca Hummus, and become the fifth-largest national olive oil brand in the country. It doesn’t feel like a brand tossing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, but I am curious about the range of extensions. The chips might be popular, but why wasn’t the mayo launch as well-received? And why wine?

I feel similarly about David’s protein ice cream. If your entire brand is built around reframing indulgence, it does make sense. But if people are complaining about the general taste of the bars (negatively), then why not fix that before launching the marketing stunt of boiled cod and ice cream?

Beyond Meat’s protein drink is a different story entirely. The brand spent years trying to convince people that plant-based meat could be just as satisfying as the real thing, and a protein beverage was launched for what? Relevance? That can’t be working. And look, I get that Beyond is now positioning itself as a “plant protein company,” but I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around going from chicken, meatballs, and ground beef to a protein drink. According to Food Navigator, in Q1 of this year, the brand’s revenue was $58.2 million, a year-over-year decline of 15.3%, with product volume down 19.5%. If those numbers reveal anything, it’s that a protein beverage was launched as a Hail Mary.

I spoke with Keith Bordelon, who spent a decade at Costco before moving to Whole Foods, where he ran plant-based, dairy, and fermented categories. He was the person deciding which brands earned shelf space and which didn’t, and he’s seen enough expansion pitches to know the difference between a brand with a story and a brand with ulterior motives.

“If you’re going to go into a different category, there needs to be a story behind it and a purpose,” he says. “Americans are consumers of stories. They want [a story] sold to them.”

And then there’s the funding picture in emerging CPG, which makes this harder than it looks. Early-stage founders are navigating what Food Navigator called a “constrained funding environment.” Investors now want proven retail traction and clean unit economics, not just a portfolio full of bets. A brand that spans multiple categories can generate incremental revenue and become genuinely unavoidable. A shopper who buys Graza olive oil, grabs the chips, and spots the mayo in the condiment aisle has had three brand interactions in a single trip.

But every new SKU also adds to the cognitive load that grocery shopping already demands, and that load is already breaking people. Myself included. What do you mean I have to choose between small, medium, and large curd cottage cheese, not to mention fat percentage and flavors?

According to the Consumer Pulse Survey 2024, 73% of consumers feel overwhelmed by too many choices. 74% have walked away from a purchase because of it. More options, counterintuitively, produce less buying. This creates a risk for expanding brands, a point Bordelon is blunt about. “Who are you exactly trying to pitch to with your fourth flavor? At what point are you just creating to create?”

He points to Nielsen data showing that in most categories, the original product is the number-one seller by a significant margin, followed closely by one or two adjacent flavors. Everything after that is fighting for diminishing returns.

His benchmark for a successful category expansion is brand coherence. Does the new product make sense within the brand’s existing story? He points to Blue Stripes, a brand that takes discarded cacao, waste material normally unused in chocolate production, and transforms it into trail mixes, chocolates, and pantry staples. The expansion was unusual enough to require five Whole Foods category managers in a single meeting, but it worked because every product traced back to the same founding logic.

Fermented Foods Holdings, parent company of Wild Brine and Bubbies Pickles, is another example he respects. “They care about the treatment of the fermented products,” he says. When the brand did an exclusive Wild Brine chickpea launch with Whole Foods, it was an extension of what the brand already stood for. “Some of these companies have investors that are like, ‘We need to see that something’s growing,’” Bordelon says. “The buyer can feel the difference. And so can the shopper.”

There’s also a behind-the-scenes dimension to category expansion that’s all about the buyer relationship. Given two brands of similar size pitching the same idea, Bordelon says he’d give shelf space to the $50M brand with a great partnership history over the $55M brand that’s been difficult to work with. “They’ve shown that they actually care,” he says. “Even if they go into some random category, that’s who they are as a brand.”

Exclusivity matters too. Graza’s chip rollout launched through Target before expanding to wider retail, making the retailer a true partner in the story.

The brands that extend well are those whose expansion feels like the natural extension of the story they’ve begun to tell. I’m all for innovation and creative thinking, but I also believe that brand extensions have to be more strategic and aligned, not a desperate attempt to gain relevance or boost sales. Consumers can know the difference.

What we’re seeing in CPG right now is a collision between brand purpose, retail economics, and a consumer psychology fractured by too many choices. The brands that expand well are the ones that make every new place they show up feel inevitable.

Otherwise, you’ll become as much of a laughing stock as Colgate’s beef lasagna, Cosmopolitan’s yogurt, or Bic’s underwear.

Until next week,

Chloe

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• RIP Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis remains one of the very, very best graphic novels ever made.

• I don’t think Land should design every beer can (or, in this case, an NA beer can), but I’m not entirely opposed to it either.

• Ponyo wants ham (but in a cookbook).

• The Spurs nuns > Timothy Chalamet and Ben Stiller.

• Psssst. Mattel is looking for a senior packaging designer.

• Stumbled across the Hamptons Edition of Feed Me (which had a real gem of a quote on $150 sweatshirts), but I love the packaging for Jon & Vinny’s Pancake Mix. Incidentally, I still think about the hamachi collar from their now dearly departed LA restaurant, Son of a Gun.

• Get ready to see Epigrama’s reuse symbol more.

• Cincinnati Association for the Blind & Visually Impaired (CABVI) and West Side Brewing have once again teamed up for Braille Ale, a raspberry gose brewed to raise awareness. Incidentally, West Side Brewing is one of the first breweries in the US to use braille on its beer cans. On that note, would it really be that monumental a lift to have Braille on all beer cans?

• Going to a World Cup match this summer? Don’t forget to forget your water bottle.

• The only way I would ever drink a Zero Sugar Dubai Chocolate Pepsi is if they convinced Netflix to revive The OA.

• Taking my kids to see Backrooms this weekend, and then giving them copies of The Haunted Woman and House of Leaves.

That’s that. Have a weekend, y’all.

-Bill

Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.

• Sherwin-Williams’ “Loneliest Color of the Year,” aka its least-loved shade, is a COY I can get behind. This year’s color is Offbeat Green SW 6706. Put some respect on its name!

• What I love most about the Parm Bar—aside from its Power Bar-aping skivvies—is the overall withering commentary on protein-packed everything. We are not a nation of bodybuilders. We do not need to turn Acme into GNC. Protein-rich foods already exist, and I wish optimization culture and its intrinsic toxicity would vanish like a fart in an open field.

• Half-baked side tangent—is the American drive for constant self-perfection really about having some kind of control over something (anything!) when society as a whole has become untethered from reality and chaotic? Everyone is poor and overworked, and when things fall apart or feel wildly out of control, do we choose to lock in on self-improvement and its various forms to feel like we have some command or power over the direction of our lives? Again, a half-baked idea, but the concept of Gainz feels like a reaction to everything being pretty awful across the board.

• I finally tried Grillo’s PBR. Dearest Reader, I hate to report that it is pretty rank. Just add your favorite pickle juice to a High Life or PBR and call it a day.

• Et tu, Marty?

• I’m a fan of the Bero Shandy line. Looks pool-ready.

• Goodbye, Amazon AI leaderboard and token maxxing, which was likely due to employees cheating and gaming the system.

• Reminder that Drake is a nerd.

• Know who can turn out a gosh-darn good label? Menta.

• Was reading the latest Express Checkout (shoutout Nate Rosen) on all these new Erewhons, “affordable” luxuries, and buying overpriced smoothies for “social capital,” and I no longer want to live on this planet. My not-at-all accurate prediction is that, with the exception of the Erewhon, the cockroach of overpriced grocery stores and shoppy shops, these places won’t exist in 5 years.

Anywho, that’s all, folks. Drop a line and let me know which packaging projects caught your eye this week!

-Bill