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.

• Sunday Afternoon did a decent cleanup here with the WNBA Finals logo.

• Dude. The Make Up Archive. Charlotte just interviewed the folks behind the MUA, and boy howdy, these images definitely don’t disappoint. You want to see Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick, right? What about a compact housed inside a stuffed red monkey? This archive is incredible. Not to be missed.

• Stay away from the clams, y’all. Speaking of, do you remember having a mostly functioning FDA? Me neither. Sorry if that question feels like a diarrhea re-run after the great 26’ iceberg-pocalyspe

• I find all of these agentic AI mascots absolutely unnerving. This is spoonful-of-sugar territory, and I don’t care much for it. Infantilized approachability won’t kill us all, but it is deeply insulting and says an awful lot about how these products are marketed to you.

• Welp, this is fascinating. According to Grub Street, upscale grocers like Meadow Lane have seen a sizable uptick in hot prepared goods, as shoppers grow tired of pricey delivery fees and bare-minimum-effort meal kits. Takeout sure does look a lot different these days, and there’s a real opportunity here for a new kind of Blue Apron, i.e., the one you don’t have to unbox and assemble. And, to make this about me, I would say this is also happening at your run-of-the-mill local grocer, too. The hot bar line was packed on my recent Sunday stockup, and I joined about 10 other folks waiting to get their hands on an improbably cheap rotisserie chicken after they were being, uh, un-rotisseried from the oven. Apologies for being unaware of the rotisserie lexicon.

• Guys. Road Dog, aka Fred Hart, just got back from the Canadian trade show CHFA Now and smuggled back some sweet untariffed contraband in the form of 33 newish brands you should watch out for.

• Oh! So the chair of the philosophy department thinks the art of writingain’t all that and prefers engaging in “searching conversation.” That sure does sound like something the head of a philosophy department would say! Jokes aside, he does have a point about the real need to wrestle with ideas and have a dialogue. But you also need to be able to not only clearly communicate your ideas on the page, but do the actual work of thinking something through (without the aid of AI, natch’). Only a philosophy major would agree with this guy. Anyway, nice try. Happy you got that byline for a rage-inducing title!

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.

• Let’s start things off with a massive shout-out to Interact Sustainability Manager Valerie Hawks for kicking off her latest DIELINE column, Trash Talk! I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to see where this one goes, as we’re currently living in an anti-regulatory hellscape and all of those corporate sustainability goals now feel like a fever dream from the past. Sustainability fatigue, greenwashing, and scaling issues are very much real, but we’re also staring down the advent of wider EPR adoption. Follow along, folks.

• But seriously, how amazing would it have been if Love had put “Please Run Brewery responsibly” at the bottom of this adannouncing Brew Dog’s new ownership? Who knows what the James Watt-less future looks like

• One McDonald’s Big Mac will cost you $7.17, but another one, not two miles away, will instead set you back $8.05. According to Reuters, you can thank the QSR’s AI Pricing Engine, which apparently finds the “optimal price” for everything on the menu at every restaurant, franchise, or corporate. In reality, the fast food king is exploiting”customer willingness to pay,” which is an amazing thing to do in this economy.

• Speaking of inflation, PepsiCo is raising prices on some of its offerings.

• Meta’s Muse AI thingamabobber agent cares not for your silly permissions. But I get why you might give it a pass, what with all the cute fuzzy fellas and the Jessica Hische logo. It’s not like Meta doesn’t have a sterling track record when it comes to privacy, amongst, you know, other things.

• Since April, this little ol’ DVD has been traveling across the country in a black case, and might be one of the best movie marketing gimmicks I’ve seen in a long while for an indie.

• Man, I keep finding job opportunities under all these LinkedIn rocks! Anywho, wanna be a packaging designer for Dude Wipes?

• Like, yeah, of course you shouldn’t put Pop-Tarts in the BuzzBallz. Infantilized offerings for elder millennials need to be put in time-out.

• Ah, yes. Rebranding it to SUPER Intelligence (SI) in all federal communications. What an Idea, Dear Leader!

• Poor, Sports Illustrated (not SI).

• No, you actually shouldn’t have left Jhoan Duran in the game. You take him out after he hits Albies.

Grumble, grumble.

-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.

• Everyone should read Chloe’s latest Shelf Life on end-caps and in-store displays, but I would like to offer a completely unreasonable water cooler counterpoint: they are the devil. All you are really doing is diverting product from where it rightfully belongs, and most grocery stores don’t even do a good job of keeping that highlighted in-store display anywhere remotely near where it belongs category-wise. I mostly think they are an eyesore that takes up valuable store real estate, and more than once I have thought, Boy, I sure hope I don’t bump into this elaborate La Croix display designed to look like an angry pumpkin because it will rain down Pamplemousse atop my head and I will be severely concussed.

• Yes, I am a Virgo. Why do you ask?

• JFC: a guy wore one goofy hat 30+ years ago and we can’t STFU about it?

• This piece from Andrew Bell felt like the perfect distillation of how my own ADHD brain works, along with a few helpful tips on adding structure to your routine so you don’t burn yourself out on the ol’ catch-up cycle (and I have burned myself out so, so many times in the past).

• An unequivocal yes to Giorga Lupi’s wonderful New York Times piece from yesterday. AI is absolutely destroying how we think and find solutions. The journey is the process, and when you remove the research and the thinking required to make good work, you are most often left with pablum. Also, I support anything that references Kind of Blue, but naming AI output “visual elevator music” is a chef’s kiss.

• Hidden Valley Black Mold is gonna do serious numbers.

• I would never support anyone “killing mayo” or contributing to the “mayo graveyard” because mayonnaise is the GOAT of all condiments. That said, I do like shouting out the occasional packaging designer gig, and this one is for what appears to be an alt-mayo made from whipped cottage cheese. So go here to apply already, will ya?

• Eye spy Abrahma Lule in The New Yorker!

• Phinal note: the Phillies made the postseason, and we all have some VERY JUSTIFIABLE FEELINGS:

Utah, get me TWO.

-Bill

More precisely, a half-pallet shaped like a sailing boat, designed to hold tins of fish.

Jamet runs sales at Fishwife, but he’s a civil engineer by training, and he admits he can’t look at a pallet display without seeing a tiny building with thoughts of structure, load, and sightlines from across the aisle. His logic was, in his words, almost too obvious: “Every tin of fish starts its life on a boat, and somehow nobody in the category had thought to put the fish back on one.”

He sent the sketch to Jerry Solberg at Vanguard Companies, a corrugated display manufacturer, who replied four minutes later: “Wow, how cool!!!” Yes, that’s three exclamation points, from a guy who works in corrugate, during the holidays. Eight months later, the boat is docked in more than 300 Sprouts stores, drawn in the same bright and slightly giddy visual language as the tins. Shoppers are doing exactly what Jamet hoped they would; they’re stopping, taking a photo, and picking up a tin.

I should say, before anyone in the point-of-purchase industry writes in: I’m aware that there is nothing new about a grocery store display. Endcaps, dump bins, case stacks, and elaborate cardboard fixtures have been around for well over a century. They started as handwritten signs and window arrangements in the late 1800s and grew into the whole self-service merchandising apparatus we now walk past without registering.

What’s new, however, just might be the creativity. And I have a sneaking suspicion about the timing.

A whole class of food and beverage brands broke through around 2020, Fishwife among them, and came of age while the physical world was more or less closed for business. There were no sampling tables, no pop-ups, and no tasting events. Meanwhile, everyone was home, bored and on their phones; U.S. retail e-commerce sales jumped 43 percent in a single year, per the Census Bureau. So these brands did their world-building where the people were, in the feed, and got very, very good at it. They built color palettes and illustrated universes and cult followings, all of it roughly the size of a phone screen. Now they’re arriving in retail, and they’d like their world to come with them. The shift isn’t online-to-offline so much as online-made-physical, the display as a three-dimensional Instagram grid.

Hannah Faust, Studio Director at DarkRoast, designs retail programs for consumer brands and sees it in the briefs. Her clients want the leap from scrolling Instacart or Instagram to walking past the brand in-store to feel like “the exact same high-touch experience.” That means die-cut components and vibrant structures. It also means newer tricks like magnetic skins and changeable graphic panels, which let a brand chase a micro-trend without building a whole new fixture every time the internet decides a flavor is having a moment. Her favorite example is Culture Pop, which rallied behind its Cherry soda when cherry was “trending everywhere.” The brand layered in a Noah Kahan collaboration and rolled out displays across its New England home market and other key regions.

The feed and the aisle are very different jobs, though. Online, the shopper who finds you was already curious enough to click. In a grocery store, you’re one of forty tins of tuna, competing for the attention of someone who came in for eggs and milk and is rushing to a meeting they’re already late for. Jamet puts it perfectly: “A great display stops the shopper who wasn’t looking for you. The shelf only rewards the ones who already were.”

What I like most about the Fishwife boat is that, by Jamet’s own account, it was “way messier than the rendering.” The first retailer they pitched passed. So Casey O’Donovan, Fishwife’s director of sales for the West, took it to Sprouts in February, in an email titled, I am delighted to report, Exclusive Fishwife Boat!” Sprouts buyer Rachel Maher and her team loved it but were refreshingly honest. A boat full of nothing but tinned fish was a hard sell, and they wanted to see velocity numbers before committing. Fishwife brought in Back to Nature crackers, which helped answer the question many American shoppers still have about premium tinned fish: “Okay, but what do I do with this?”

Daniel Miller, the illustrator behind the tins, drew the artwork so the boat and the packaging would read as one world. The whole thing shipped fully built, so a store team could simply wheel it out, and it hit the floor the last week of August, right on time for Sprouts’ Protein Event.

The boat works, I think, because it could only ever be Fishwife’s. “If your display could be for any brand in the category, don’t build it,” Jamet says. Tinned fish is three inches tall, but the boat takes the same illustrations and the same coastal joy and turns them into something you can walk around. It’s also fast. A tin has to be picked up and read. A four-foot boat in the middle of a grocery store says fish, coast, fun in about half a second, to someone who hasn’t read a single word. He calls it “the closest thing we have to a Fishwife store inside somebody else’s store.”

Faust points out that a display has to do all of this unsupervised. No brand ambassador stands beside it, and no founder is on hand to explain the origin story. It has to establish a messaging hierarchy, make the case for buying, and be simple enough for store employees to assemble and restock correctly. For emerging brands still settling into their visual identity, she calls it “a creative design test”: the moment a brand built for screens has to translate itself into corrugate.

The stakes can go well beyond a temporary sales bump. An in-and-out floor shipper, Faust explains, can generate trial and prove velocity to a retailer, which is how a small brand makes its case for a permanent spot in the planogram. Sprouts has become a natural launchpad for exactly this, and Publix offers similar opportunities. Even stores with famously strict clean-floor policies are loosening up: Whole Foods Market, Faust says, is permitting floor displays again for the first time in years. Beverage still rules the off-shelf world, but brands coded around protein, fiber and other diet tribes are fighting hard for floor space. Viral products are using displays to turn TikTok buzz into actual sales, and she points to Fishwife and the recent wave of Dubai chocolate brands.

None of this happens overnight, and display programs are often planned up to a year out, around trade promotion calendars, and even further ahead when licensing is involved. Faust recalls retailers spending more than a year working with brands on Barbie movie tie-ins, fitting displays to store footprints while satisfying strict studio rules, and I would pay good money to read those email threads.

For Fishwife, at least, the boat is not a one-off. Off-the-shelf is now baked into how Jamet’s commercial team plans every account, several national-retailer displays are already locked in, and yes, the boat is coming back to Sprouts. His advice to everyone else is to start with a sketch, and find a manufacturer who says “how cool” instead of “that’s not standard.” Let the buyer change it, because they know their floor better than you do, and sell the number, not the art, because the design “just gets them to open the email.”

The display itself is old, sure, but get ready for an influx of more creative versions.

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.

• One of the great AI fallacies pushed by tech boi CEOs was that these new tools would supposedly free you from the drudgery of repetitive tasks. For designers, that meant more time to be creative, you know, doing the stuff that really gets your juices flowing. Welp, if you were paying attention, this was a tactic conmen like Sam Altman deployed not only to get buy-in from the folks they were forcing these tools upon, but also from other C-suite types who have a real distaste for human labor. So it doesn’t warm my heart to hear that more employees are working on Sundays now. According to a State of Hybrid Work Report cited in this Fast Company piece, 76% of Gen Z workers and 62% of Millennials are clocking in on Sunday because “AI has increased what they’re expected to accomplish in a day, and 46% say it sometimes hinders their productivity.” So whenever your boss says AI is going to help you be your best creative self, don’t confuse that with some romantic idea about the future of work when, in reality, it’s just an extra eight hours that’s now on your plate. Incidentally, the report also cites “meeting fatigue,” and boy howdy is that shit real, too.

• Cutesy campaign from McDonald’s Croatia, but a lot of disappointed children are gonna learn that a McD French Fry cannot pierce the beating heart of a McNugget. Although perhaps you could use a straw to poke holes in those nuggies?

  

• Ugh, stop being so dramatic! As of this writing, I have no idea where this NOT Laughing Cow campaign will go or if it will backfire spectacularly. This whole “We Need To Talk” schpeel feels immensely threatening, so I suppose I’m not laughing either!

• You know, it used to be that you didn’t trust the guys in the suits. Now it’s the guy with a mullet and Balenciaga Crocs. Because, clearly, if you burn all of your half-zips and tech vests (puff piece alert), people will respect you more, right? Right?

• That said, I DO trust the blonde-mulleted guy eating his way through every buffet until he gets food poisoning, likely because he’s doing it in jorts and slides? I couldn’t say, although I want to vomit every time I see him without the aforementioned slides when he’s reviewing the cleanliness of the bathrooms. We’re goonin’ now, boys.

• It’s a little hard watching my boys get beat up by the Brew Crew these past few days, so I don’t even want to remotely rep anything Brewers, but I can’t deny these Miller High Life-inspired jerseys by Pete Rogers.

• Snack brands love infidelity! Like, by a lot. Two weeks ago, we did a piece on HallPass, and now we’ve got grow-ass protein- and fiber-packed faux-Dunkaroos in Sidepiece. All your new-fangled snacks have a wandering eye, and I don’t trust them. Trad-snacks for me!

• By the by, anyone going to Woodsist on Sunday? Toody Cole! Don’t forget your galoshes.

It’s OK.

-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.

• Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Fritz Klaetke for calling out my half-baked ideas about Monopoly and reminding me of its history as the “Landlord Game,” something I 100% memory-holed. The Elizabeth Magie-invented game actually had two sets of rules. Read the Guardian piece about the game’s history, but here’s a little chestnut: “Somewhat surprisingly, Lizzie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her vision was an embrace of dualism and contained a contradiction within itself, a tension trying to be resolved between opposing philosophies. However, and of course unbeknownst to Lizzie at the time, it was the monopolist rules that would later capture the public’s imagination.”

• The silver lining here is that we’ll all have a mirthful hoot when HBO rebrands/redesigns in the next few years (I’m joshin, there is no silver lining).

• Your favorite fake beer brand just partnered with your favorite olive oil brand. But I agree here with Chloe; I don’t know how you put a brewski in a squeeze bottle, but we put a man on the moon. Make it happen.

• I’m fine with an olive oil addition to my fake beer, but please keep your mac & cheese dust out of my fancy sodas, please and thank you.

• Data Centers around the world are struggling to find a new home. Here’s how you can help!

• Whenever you discover a potential client did it themselves with AI instead of hiring you, a human, to do the job, you should absolutely do this and publicly shame them.

• I didn’t need a MSCHF-designed car.

• Design Director Gig alert! Where my design directors at?

• You should 100% support this soon-to-open rescue dog cafe in Los Angeles called Strange Friend. It’s from WFMU mainstay Tom Scharpling and artist and director Julia Vickerman.

I wrote the news today.

-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.

• Rudy just recapped the Best Redesigns of the Summer, and I was shocked - SHOCKED - that there was no Chef Boyardee to be found. Look at that smiling mustached man holding the largest bowl of Beefaroni ever! What’s not to love!

• Monopolies remain bad, and I genuinely don’t know how any band can live off the Spotify grid these days, even when we can seemingly live with founders who have invested in AI weapons. Somehow, that’s not a deal breaker for a lot of folks anymore. Unrelated-but-maybe-kinda-related: is it possible that the board game Monopoly has influenced or tainted much of the global psyche around wealth inequality? Sure, you have to go to jail if you don’t pay your taxes, but the game literally rewards the economic theory of MINE MINE MINE. Granted, the game would likely have no winner, and maybe I’m just the psycho who wants a never-ending Monopoly sesh (kidding, I would rather learn how to play ukulele than endure a 4-hour game of Monopoly).

• Related: I am not ready for the kids to start aping 2005-2011. Please and no thank you.

• JFC, Patagonia alert: Stop trying to pay people to vote! None of this looks good, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on.

• I like the idea behind this limited-edition collection for Dove’s “ice cream parlor,” but use ice cream pints for the packaging or go home.

• Local Massachusetts guy, i.e., me, was quite surprised to learn that Dunkin’ and L.L. Bean HADN’T collaborated before. Anyway, cup sweaters are adorable and can even thaw this cold New England heart that’s almost always swimming in the state’s sarcasm (which is really the state’s primary export).

• 7-Eleven is holding an open call for emerging brands that want to be heroed in one of their stores. Submit your application to American 7-Eleven Idol by October 13th!

• I have zero desire to discuss or analyze the current state of masculinity, and most of my thoughts about men who constantly fret over their manliness can be summed up with a solid Grow Up. There is nothing inherently feminine about owning a cat. That has everything to do with your preconceived notions about gender. Cats, meanwhile, continue to be fucking awesome, but especially my cats. Anywho, this is all to say that I can’t wait for the New York Times to write about performative cat dads a year from now.

Put a little more stomp in your clap.

-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.

• New nightmare fuel! This designer made a tote bag that turns into a life jacket. You know, just in case the NYC Subway floods and you’re trapped in a tunnel full of water.

• Creative Boom just switched me on to Clara Biel. Lovely, colorful stuff.

• Chef Daniel Humm just launched an insta-meal kit called Riff, with packaging by Center. Banner era for celeb chef brands.

• Nathan Fielder and Alex Gibney are hoovering up much of this fall’s doc energy, but I’m more stoked about The History of Concrete. It’s Nice That interviewed John Wilson about the movie, and I am fully stoked.

• The way my stomach turns when I see an NA Beer-flavored C4 with zero sugar.

• I love charging $15 for juice that comes in a bottle with lead paint. Nice job, Erewhon!

• JKR completely overhauled Tropical Smoothie Cafe. Love that palm tree!

• Patti “I can’t stop having wine“ Harrison appreciation post, as she just played every sociopathic billionaire for Wired.

• Man, you know people absolutely detest streaming when actual IRL video stores are coming back with a vengeance. Here’s a new one in Philly opening soon called Little Movie Store.

Have a totally Tuesday.

-Bill

Actually, maybe.

Your first thought might be to ask what that even looks like. Well, picture a label-free embossed glass bottle that lets the raised logo do all the talking. There’s certainly no QR code begging you to “scan for our story” or follow the brand on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Just embossed letters catching the light in the glass at just the right angles and daring you to pick it up and turn it over, which, of course, you will, if you have good taste.

Embossed glass packaging is currently having a moment within the luxury CPG space, even though the design techniques come from 200 years ago, not to mention that it’s more expensive than ever.

Which is just luxury branding in a nutshell. It’s more desirable because it’s an inconvenience.

Before paper labels became the norm, embossed glass bottles were the standard. Pharmacists in the 1800s embossed their names on medicine bottles, an early, durable form of advertising. Dairies also pressed their name and town into their milk bottles along with verbiage like, ”This bottle is the property of the above / It is loaned and cannot be legally used by others.” Because, afterall, bottles used to be returned and reused, a smart (and sustainable) concept we can’t seem to fathom now.

Soda bottlers also embossed the brand name, and according to Bill Lockhart’s chapter for the Society for Historical Archaeology, embossing was the most common way soda bottlers labeled their bottles, even though paper labels were used earlier. “Paper labels were inexpensive, easy to apply, and contained complex advertising messages,” they stated. “The major drawback, however, was that the paper tended to wash off when bottles were cooled in buckets or barrels of ice – the only medium then in general use for cooling soft drinks.”

A bottle had to survive years of reuse, ice water, and handling by people who were, kindly, not gentle. Embossed glass packaging of the past wasn’t necessarily done for decorative purposes. Instead, it was a logical choice.

Paper labels were already the norm by the 1910s, and then in 1978, when Coca-Cola and Pepsi rolled out the first 2-liter PET bottle, plastic packaging became the standard. It was light, unbreakable, and absurdly cheap to produce at scale. Plastic replaced the entire philosophy of packaging, from “built to last, built to return” to “built to be forgotten in a recycling bin five minutes from now.” Nobody needed a glass bottle engineered to survive many trips back and forth from the dairy. We’d entered the golden age of disposability.

And yet, I’m seeing some new brands launch with embossed glass packaging. Nothing about embossing has gotten easier, faster, or cheaper since 1975. So why are luxury brands running headfirst back to it?

I called up the designers behind Madison Blue Water, a premium water brand designed by Makers & Allies, as well as the founder of Ya Albi, an olive oil brand that just spent over a year getting its own embossed bottle into the world, to find out.

“We didn’t want to create another premium water brand that relied on a beautiful label to communicate luxury,” Garrett Deiter, Founder and CEO of Makers & Allies, told me. “We wanted the bottle itself to become the brand, something distinctive enough to recognize across a restaurant or on a shelf without reading the name.” The embossing traces the water’s naturally occurring minerals, a literal, physical link to the brand’s whole thesis, “the minerals that built America.” Glass keeps the water visible, untouched by plastic. “There’s something powerful about that transparency,” Deiter said. “The bottle is bold, but it has nothing to hide.”

This is, structurally, a strategist’s dream and a production team’s nightmare. “Once the identity becomes part of the glass, design and manufacturing have to work together much earlier,” Deiter explained. “Typography, embossing depth, legibility, bottle structure and production tolerances all become interconnected. There’s less flexibility than designing a label, but those constraints can make the work stronger. You’re not simply designing graphics for a package, you’re designing the object itself, so every detail has to earn its place.” Every millimeter, accountable. You can’t just change your mind six months later. You either commit now, or you don’t get to commit at all.

That kind of forced permanence is something we need more of in the CPG space. Rebrands and design refreshes almost don’t feel all that exciting anymore because they’re happening at an unparalleled rate.

But when there’s a sense of intention, consumers certainly notice. “People want to pick it up,” Deiter told me. “They want to turn it around and learn more. Without a conventional label telling you exactly where to look, the bottle creates a sense of discovery.”

I asked whether the design thinking was about sustainability or luxury positioning. “Both, and I think the most successful packaging decisions can accomplish those things together.” Glass keeps the water uncontaminated, unlike plastic, which can leach chemicals into the product over time, glass doesn’t react with its contents; it’s recyclable, and it gives the brand the weight and permanence luxury objects are supposed to have. Going label-free pushes that idea further, stripping away rather than adding, and trusting that restraint reads as more expensive than decoration ever could. “There’s a shift happening in luxury,” Deiter shared, “where restraint can communicate more value than decoration.”

Madison Blue treats embossing as a brand philosophy, and Ya Albi’s founder, Yasmeen Abouremeleh, treats it as something of a personal promise. “The embossing was part of the vision from day one,” she told me. “We wanted the packaging to have the same sense of quality and care as the olive oil itself. Everything else we saw felt very flat and two-dimensional, and we wanted the bottle to feel more permanent, like an object you would want to keep rather than packaging you immediately throw away.”

The phrase “a love letter to Palestine” is embossed directly into the bottle, in both English and Arabic, alongside the logo and “Product of Palestine.” It’s not a temporary sticker just slapped on. “Those weren’t decorative afterthoughts,” Abouremeleh said. “They were built into the object from the beginning.” It’s there permanently, whether it’s convenient or not.

Her framing of the investment stuck with me the most. Developing a custom mold and committing to a minimum run of 10,000 bottles, Abouremeleh said, is “almost like the difference between fast fashion and something made slowly and thoughtfully.” Which, yes, but it’s also, candidly, a financial commitment most brands simply cannot make upfront. That hint of initial inaccessibility is part of what makes this viable for exclusively higher-end brands, whether or not it’s intentional.

But even more than a price tag, embossing forces permanent decisions, and permanent decisions are one of the main things modern branding seems to avoid. The entire industry of rebrands, seasonal packaging, A/B tested labels never has to commit to anything for too long. Embossing turns it all upside down.

Ya Albi initially tried designing the bottle without letting regulatory copy dictate the form, only to run headfirst into the very unsexy reality of nutrition panel size requirements and legal copy placement rules. Their fix was to keep that information in a small, printed, changeable area rather than lock it into the glass forever. “We didn’t want information that might need to evolve permanently molded into the glass,” Abouremeleh said.

“Once the mold is made and the production run is committed, you are locked into that design and those units,” she told me. “We had to be extremely confident before moving forward.” They went through iteration after iteration, shape, proportion, embossed depth, and were deliberate about which elements got to be permanent and which stayed flexible. “Every millimeter mattered. We loved the final design, but we were careful to make only the timeless elements permanent.”

Embossed glass won’t trickle down to the mass market, not because consumers wouldn’t want it (they clearly do; nostalgia sells, permanence sells, etc.), but because the economic model only makes sense at the top of the price ladder. Everything that makes embossing meaningful is also what makes it impossible at volume. For a value brand, that permanence is a liability, but for a luxury brand, it’s the game. We are, it turns out, suckers for things that feel like they’ll outlive us. At least I am.

I’d expect the categories to keep expanding. Spirits, fragrance, and high-end pantry goods all feel like the obvious next stops, especially as more brands chase what Madison Blue called “an ownable physical gesture that creates recognition before someone even processes the logo.” But I don’t expect it to go mainstream, and I’d argue it can’t, really.

Both Deiter and Abouremeleh, unprompted, ended on the same advice: don’t do this because it’s trending, do it because you actually mean it. “I wouldn’t tell every brand to drop its label,” Deiter said. “Label-free packaging is only powerful when the bottle has a strong enough concept to stand on its own.” Abouremeleh’s version was more rooted in logistics: “Be patient and trust your instincts. Before investing in the final mold, physically test everything.” You’ll also want to vet your manufacturer early, as she switched hers mid-process after the quality fell short, and accept that some days you’ll want to quit before it clicks. “There were several points when I felt stuck,” she admitted.

There’s a reason why “polyester” is an insult right now; hopefully, “plastic” is next.

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.

• Please be gentle with me. I live in New England, and I just filled up my oil tank, and the coffers are very much empty. I am now in a fetal position, crying.

• Listen: Chef Boyardee is the equivalent of kids’ dog food. I was raised on oversized cans of Beefaroni, and just like Kraft Mac n’ Cheese, my body just won’t accept these things anymore. That said, boy, this redesign from Little Big Brands goes hard, and it’s maybe one of my favorites of the year. Way to hero the Chef and make it look like he’s holding an extra-large plate of beef ravioli on steroids. Some days, the ravioli eats you! No notes.

• That fancy gelatin brand with the beautiful packaging, Gelee, recently dropped two new flavors, Yuzu and Raspberry with Smoked Sea Salt, and that makes for a pretty tasty (albeit overpriced) dessert.

• I feel like this is the future we were promised, i.e., Big Macs delivered via drone. Instead, we have rising energy costs (see above) and measles outbreaks.

• It’s cool, y’all. We have a very high-IQ president who can monitor the AI landscape without introducing any sort of regulatory oversight. What can possibly go wrong!

• Gee whiz, and here I thought the Guitar Center Contest promising the winner a chance to open for Captain Coward was a hoax.

• Peter Max has passed away. Hopefully his 7UP signs will live for years to come.

• “The largest theft of human labor in history.“ Damn.

• Can I get a Hell Yea? Hogwater is really real now.

• That’s a wrap on Student Week! Here are two more projects I enjoyed: a cicada-starring THC-infused Iced Tea called Nymph, and the cross-stitch-inspired lager Folk. Hire these people.

Friday never hesitate.

-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.

• Holy Tide boxes. Y’all wanna see some Grade-A packaging porn? We sent Charlotte Beach to the Chicago Brand Museum, and her interview with the founders (along with her many, many pictures of expertly crafted packaging from the past) does not disappoint. Somehow they have 15,000 pieces of packaging ephemera on display, and that’s JUST a third of their collection.

• Obviously, I am watching the Phillies fall apart in real time, and I’ve never been much of a football guy anyway, so I’m just learning about this. Anyway, like, yeah, make some kind of law, but the Washington Commanders’ argument about dropping nostalgic throwback merch with the old Redskins logo because they would lose the trademark rings pretty fucking hollow to me.

• As a grown-ass man who occasionally sneaks his children’s Capri Sun pouches, I can firmly attest that the pouch is too dang small, and I felt the same way when I was their age, too. But it does feel like they’re 100% making BIG pouches for the infantilized set over 30.

• Man, I don’t often think about the very, very, very intentional design of Wikipedia, but I’m certainly glad I read this piece on It’s Nice That with the creatives behind the site.

• Uh...yeah, the reason I’ve been ghosting you is because of, uh, a broken business culture. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

• Incidentally, this is me apologizing to everyone I have ghosted in the past. The editor’s inbox is insurmountable. It is not you. It’s just a very busy me.

• Food waste contributes to global warming, and Eva Chistyakova‘s Nativo concept explores that issue through frozen food packaging that incorporates climate maps into the design.

• And speaking of climate change, our data centers apparently burn more natural gas than some nations. So that’s great!

Hi, Frank.

-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.

• Yawn. My guess is that half their employees want nothing to do with this, and the BRDNA Sequencer (bang-up job with the naming, geniuses) will be collecting dust in two years.

• It will never not blow my mind that we don’t protest like this in the US.

• On September 8th, a sinkhole opened up underneath Nic Cage’s home in Malibu, and now you can buy a T-shirt commemorating the pits of hell opening up. May we all be swallowed up by the devil while watching the chainsaw fight from Mandy.

• Colossal just introduced me to the wonderfully weird and Renaissance-inspired world of Sara Anstis’ drawings.

• Director Werner Herzog has some thoughts on AI. Obviously, you will read them in THAT VOICE.

• Incidentally, when was the last time you watched Fitzcarraldo? This is the ultimate argument against AI in filmmaking.

• Double incidentally! When was the last time you watched the documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, the Les Blank-directed Burden of Dreams? The birds are in misery!

• Student week marches on! Loved this adorable little juice brand from Sara Nogaledo. Give me all the bento boxes.

• Here for HOT HONEY SPAM. Like, c’mon, this idea was lying around all this time?

• Shout-out to Valeria Hawks for writing about the Colgate lawsuit over recyclability claims on their HDPE toothpaste tube, because, as it turns out, it might not be all that recyclable to begin with, and MRFs say they can’t distinguish it from the regular old standard tubes.

Hug an alpaca today, if you can.

-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.

• Guys! It’s officially Student Week. Over the next four days, we’ll share plenty of student projects. Today, I was really into the illustrations featured on the secondary packaging for this perfume brand by Katerina Milatova. Fun stuff.

• I have no beef with the Timothy Taylor Landlord redesign, maybe because the brand was completely unknown to me. But you know, shame on me; the UK brewery is over 150 years old. That could explain some of the hand-wringing over this one. Personally, I think the modern look is A-OK, but I do find it hilarious that the entire evolution of the brand can be boiled down to “pub owner gets hair plugs and grows beard.” Anyway, here’s another redesign for the heritage folks to get all worked up over.

• If you are into FOOD FONTS, definitely check out Charlotte Beach’s latest Tour de Type column, as she interviews type designer Valeria Kokur.

• Is green the new GLP-1 and/or protein bat signal? Because Campbell’s protein soups ditched the red for green, which looks all kinds of wrong to me.

• Dudes remain the easiest marks on the planet. Also, this ad wasn’t even remotely necessary, other than courting controversy (which I suppose is the point when you bring in a Sweeney..and her defense of invoking the ESPN Body Issue completely misses the point) and presenting another opportunity for women in sports to be sexualized. Incidentally, all adverts for sports betting apps should be illegal. I don’t know if there will ever be any meaningful regulatory push against the likes of DraftKings, but every celebrity who has endorsed them should be shamed and ridiculed.

• 10-bedazzled-gun salute to Bob Mackie, one of the best to ever do it. Actually saw the Elton John Dodger Stadium get-up at an exhibit on baseball jersey design, and it’s just as sequined and silly and wonderful as you would think it is in person.

• Shocker: the NOT Dr Pepper that prefers the Mr honorific is the fastest-growing in 2026.

You want some jellies?

-Bill

Honestly, it’s disorienting. I used to be able to spot a concept from a mile off, and the signs were obvious, like a category that doesn’t quite exist yet or packaging with no barcode, no fine print, no regulatory disclaimers anywhere on it. Those tells still exist, sure, but they’re getting fainter and fainter, and it’s becoming harder for me to tell whether a brand is real, even with a trained eye.

A decade ago, building a brand, including its identity, packaging, photography, a website, and a tone of voice, took a team and money. You needed a strategist to iron out positioning, a designer to translate that into something visual, a photographer to take pictures, a developer to build it out, and enough money and time that nobody bothered unless there was an actual product behind it, or at least the intention to make one. If you saw a fully developed brand, the odds were good that it was real.

But now, a student with a laptop and a free afternoon can tip-tap away at a concept brand polished enough to pass for a real client project and throw it up on a self-made portfolio website. Figma has become a one-stop shop for the entire process, AI tools handle the so-called monotonous parts of image editing and copywriting, and design school studios are generating portfolio pieces that look like they came out of a top-tier agency.

The barrier to entry for making something that looks professional is minimal. Which means more people, with less access to capital or connections, can show off their skills. And these conceptual brands are often leading to real work.

But it also raises an interesting question for the design industry. When the tools make the end result this accessible, does that undermine the value of experienced creative work? Or does it raise the bar?

Erin Buchanan, a professor at SCAD, has firsthand knowledge of how quickly this workflow has become second nature for students. She sees projects start in Figma, and FigJam spaces are where students collect images, links, and video references and summarize feedback before a project even takes shape. Every stage after that, from lo-fi wireframes and hi-fidelity mockups to final presentations, happens in the same tool, with students constantly trading tips on new features that save time.

AI is now folded into nearly every step of that process. Figma’s built-in AI image editing tool is used constantly to remove backgrounds, change colors, and smooth textures, while tools like Claude and Nano Banana also show up in student workflows. Buchanan mentioned that her non-writing majors lean on ChatGPT to draft concept statements and brainstorm packaging and campaign copy, freeing up time for visual thinking. Pricier resources like Artlist.io for video and audio remain more of a coveted, occasional tool than a default.

Notably, Buchanan is already seeing students self-correct. Through group critique, students are recognizing that quality comes at the expense of expediency; the class is developing its own internal standard for when AI speeds up craft versus ruins it.

The designers doing this at a professional level describe concept work less as a shortcut and more as a discipline in its own right, one that AI has just accelerated.

For Andreea of Irmine Creative, it starts with an interest. “For me, it usually starts with curiosity rather than thinking about it as a pitch. I’ll notice a category, a product, or even just a certain feeling that I want to explore, and then I start building a fictional brand around it.” She treats it like a real client project regardless of whether a client exists. “I think about who the brand is for, what its personality is, how it should position itself, and then translate that into the identity, packaging, imagery and wider brand world.” The commercial upside follows naturally from doing the work well: “I don’t normally start thinking, ‘I want this specific company to hire me.’ It’s more about creating the kind of work I would like to be hired for. The commercial side comes naturally from that, because the finished project shows potential clients not only what I can design, but also how I think.”

Candy Brophy‘s process is even less calculated. “I don’t really pitch to anyone but myself and the universe; I daydream and conjure up ideas I have when I’ve been running or when my head is racing with ideas in quiet moments or from dreams,” she says.

She’s not chasing engagement, either. “I share for the exercise of it and the love of realizing and reviewing my concept in the world to little or no likes, but many saves and inquiries, so someone’s looking, then I’m contacted by people to create either exactly what I’ve imagined or collaborate with them on new brands.” That instinct-first approach became one of her most significant working relationships: with Connor Blakley’s Dropout Company. “He has more than proven to be an absolute capitalist force of nature, and that’s what my concepts need to become realizations and not wasted to the ether. We currently have a few in the pipeline to be launched soon, which is exciting.”

Both point to the same thing separating durable work from disposable content: a genuine idea underneath it. Andreea shares, “I think having an actual idea behind the project makes a huge difference. It’s very easy to create a beautiful logo, put it on a few nice mockups and call it a brand.”

Brophy, however, is more blunt.”The idea itself and the old-school graphics and rules of design can’t be skipped over. They are the WHOLE point. It’s like a cake with decorative icing, but it’s just eggs and flour and has no base. You’ve got to bake that cake properly before you decorate it.”

The flood of accessible, AI-assisted polish seems to be pushing the designers who care about craft to get sharper about what actually differentiates their work.

Andreea frames it as a shift in what wins attention now. “The general visual standard is so high now. I think that makes the idea behind the work even more important. When beautiful presentation becomes normal, having a clear point of view is what starts separating projects from one another.” For her, that’s translating into something bigger than aesthetics. Brands, and by extension the designers behind them, are being pushed to actually connect with people. It’s forcing empathy and point of view back into an industry that could otherwise coast on tools alone.

Brophy’s take on standing out leans into confidence rather than anxiety about competition. “I’m a big believer in the rule of attraction and serendipity. If my style finds the eyes of a future client or brand partner and they love my style, that’s great, and the universe has spoken; it just means they have to scroll through the eye burn for longer now.” Her advice to students who want to break through isn’t about beating the algorithm or the AI tools; it’s “create for the love of creation, not for validation.”

What’s happening right now, however, is a new calibration of how creative work gets done and shows up. A student in Buchanan’s classroom can now build something that would have taken a small studio weeks to produce, and use that speed to run more iterations, get more feedback, and develop a point of view earlier than designers a generation ago ever could.

For the working designers who’ve built real relationships out of concept work, accessibility is helping to clarify what makes their work worth hiring for. Everyone now has access to a beautiful mockup. The system now rewards idea-first thinking that both Andreea and Brophy describe. The flood of accessible polish is making the case for ideas, story, and point of view harder to ignore than ever.

But the tools making all of this possible are worth pausing over. Even the people building them are skeptical. Jacob Coxon, who spent three years working on pretraining at both OpenAI and Anthropic, recently resigned, warning that the industry is racing to build self-improving systems faster than it can guarantee those systems stay under human control. His departure followed another Anthropic researcher’s resignation weeks earlier, in which the outgoing safety lead described the world as being “in peril” and cited the pressure companies face to set aside their stated values in the name of speed.

None of that concern is about Figma plug-ins or quick concept statements drafted by ChatGPT. Still, it’s a useful reminder that using AI might speed things up and change how students and designers showcase their ideas—but just because something is easier doesn’t mean it’s always worth it.

What performs well is essentially smoke and mirrors. Cool wordmarks and interesting color combinations drive likes and shares, but when I look for the why and the strategic spine underneath it, there’s often nothing there. It’s a byproduct of how much of this work is being made. It’s trendy, sure, but it often falls flat..

When a designer leans on a chatbot to write the concept as well as design the mark, you get language that sounds like strategy without strategic thinking. The why has to come from a human who’s actually wrestled with a brand problem.

To be clear, I don’t have a problem with conceptual work; I think boundary-pushing and limitless ability push creatives. What I do have a problem with is that while concept work is getting better, I don’t necessarily think the real work is. A concept has no constraints, and that’s part of the appeal. But IRL brands sold to real consumers have plenty of constraints, and a certain level of depth and research to back it up. While I think the front-end design game is improving, we need to push ourselves to deepen our thinking from a strategic point of view.

Front-end design only wins when back-end thinking excels.

Until next week,

Chloe Cordover

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.

Sorry, everyone. Not the usual Side Salad today, but we’ll be back in Link City on Tuesday.

***.

A few days ago, I got a message from an old college friend asking about a classmate that I had overlapped with who founded an AI company. He was interviewing for a gig. He’s a writer, too, and he wanted to know what I thought of this guy. And while I didn’t really know him and he seemed like a mostly nice guy in college, there were still plenty of red flags, not least of which was founding a company that could potentially upend an industry and put lots of people out of work.

Of course, my friend understands all of this. It’s not something that really even needs to be said. But he also has a family and debt. Which is to say, I get it. To be honest, I don’t know many people who aren’t struggling right now. There are ethical landmines everywhere, and each of us must decide who is worth working for, despite them perhaps being a very bad actor.

And for some of us, those are some mighty big compromises that we have to make.

This past Wednesday, lettering artist, designer, and author Jessica Hische took to Threads to announce that she had worked alongside Meta’s team to create the icon and logotype for their agentic AI, Muse. Acknowledging that people would be “mad because it’s AI and Meta,” Hische sought to explain at least why she had taken the gig in the first place. Obviously, she took some flak for working with Meta. While plenty of comments voiced support, just as many chastised her for even considering the project, which I can mostly sum up as a general narrative thread of “How could you?”

FWIW, it’s pretty rich to criticize someone for working with Meta while you’re very much using a Meta product to issue said criticism. But I digress.

What’s curious here is that I can’t recall a time when I’ve seen a designer simultaneously announce a project while also seemingly apologizing for taking the gig in the first place (her newsletter about Muse had a subject line of “Don’t Be Mad at Me”). Transparency is good, but perhaps she knew that if she had stayed quiet about working with Meta, it would have gotten out eventually. Who can say?

In her Threads post, she talks about her own complicated feelings on AI, in addition to why she chose to work on the project in the first place. She also mentions having worked with other people at Meta before and having a good experience, but also the need to pay her own employees (and help a pregnant employee with a health plan) and keep her various projects going, not to mention that she hadn’t taken on a big brand as a client in some time.

What’s most striking about the series of posts is how defensive it is from the jump. Certainly, by announcing the work you’re going to garner some attention (whether that’s good attention is debatable), but her need to defend it is unmistakable. We can certainly comb through the many justifications here and critique each decision point (like, I dunno, find a better, bigger client to work with?), but I can also say what I told my friend the other day. I get it.

And while most people were keen to point out that Hische is supporting an AI product, I can point to a few recent headlines that are equally troublesome and genuinely merit turning down the work.

For folks who have followed this newsletter, you likely have a sense of where I land on a lot of these things. We cover design and branding, but in our own way, we also cover the brands themselves, and I have always been of the belief that, on some level, most brands are problematic. That Tolstoy line about how each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? You can say the same for brands—they can be uniquely terrible and evil in their own miserable, shitty ways, too. Ultimately, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. It’s nearly impossible to keep our values intact, and the road to a career in art or writing or design is littered with a fuck-ton of compromises.

But I think about these things a lot, and I would wager Hische does, too.

The thing I always tell people is that I’m very pro-designer and anti-brand. Which, I’m sure, a lot of people will think is complete horseshit. I wouldn’t blame them, but I write about brand design for a living. It’s absolutely complicated and compromising. I’ve also published an immense amount of shit in these pages about Bezos, Musk, and ol’ Zuck because, frankly, they are genuinely awful people, and they certainly don’t care about you.

That said, I reckon most of us have a few clients with checkered pasts on our resume.

I’ve written about this before, but Jeff Bezos has a little bit to do with me being able to afford college, because in addition to some scholarships I got through my mother’s employer, I worked at Amazon’s first non-Seattle warehouse in 1998, where, upon being hired, I received Amazon stock as an employee benefit—stock that I sold so that I could pay tuition. Now, this was 1998. This wasn’t the Lex Luthor Bezos eventually channeled, but it was still the same man putting mom-and-pop bookstores out of business.

It was also incredibly hard, soul-crushing warehouse work that was often physically taxing, and your level of productivity was constantly monitored. Overtime wasn’t mandatory, but, you know, it was strongly encouraged. It wasn’t fun, rest assured. Millions of people have walked through those warehouse doors, and I can guarantee you that most of them considered it a toxic environment.

If you look close enough, there is rot everywhere. And boy howdy do we have a lot of bad systems and reprehensible people that all of us must engage with daily. Ethical landmines and moral quandaries abound. And for every designer who shits on working with someone like Meta or Amazon, I can guarantee that your portfolio contains a few doozies as well.

Oh, and before I forget, let me remind you that I am writing to you from Substack.

Regardless, each of us must tangle with the moral complexities of who we choose to work with. And while the bills need paying, we also have to deal with the consequences of our decisions. But you certainly can’t take umbrage with anyone for finding fault with you for having done the work in the first place. Whether you decide to work with ExxonMobil, big tobacco, Starbucks, or, yes, a Mark Zuckerberg-owned company, it’s on you to decide if it’s worth the potential fallout.

My guess is that most of us would do it.

I don’t have a good note to end on here. There’s no tidy conclusion that I can reach that will explain any of this away or put any of this in a good light. I can only tell you that these are things I wrestle with, too. I don’t have an answer, nor can I toss off an easy joke to make any of this better.

But do I get it? Absolutely.

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.

• Good morning! Just wanted to let you know that Anthropic researchers believe there’s more than a 10% chance that AI will kill us all in the next decade, with one of their science leads saying, “We do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.” They also think “Anthropic is trying its best,” which doesn’t inspire confidence at all. Anywho, have a great day!

• PS - FWIW, folks choose how to build these models. And I’m of the belief that many of them are uniquely awful people.

• PPS - I could say the same thing about packaging, menswear guy.

• Amazon remains the worst place to work and allegedly won’t make basic accommodations for pregnant employees.

• Actually, the 7UP 12-pack boxes look tight.

• I love everything about the can for Tutto Passa’s Bicycle Thief, even though I absolutely don’t see the connection to the movie, which I also love.

• A federal judge upheld Oregon’s EPR law. Take that, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors!

• According to The Hollywood Reporter, streaming is out of control, and prices have risen “three times as fast as inflation.” If you want all eight major streamers—without ads—it will set you back $151 per month. Remember when we complained about cable companies? Neither do I.

• Comic Relief teamed with Quality Meats to create a fictional non-profit dubbed “Not Our Problem“ to get more folks involved in tackling childhood poverty. They also released a series of sarcastic outdoor and print ads that give voice to the problem, but satirize the same people who don’t want any part of being involved with any of that. Part of me wants to say that the campaign serves as a pretty comical indictment of the status quo around poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness, but it’s also a stark reminder of how most Americans operate in this world. So, maybe it’s actually not so good and is just depressing? I suppose the proof is in the volunteer numbers.

• Can I get a hell yeah for the Le Creuset Star Trek collection?

• Dear students! Today is the last day you can submit your project for Student Week. Stop procrastinating! And for the love of Pete, please put “Student Week” in the subject line of your email.

Welcome to the jungle, baby, you’re gonna live.

-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 am just a simple editor for a humble packaging website. What could I possibly know about selling merch for one of the greatest living recording artists of our time? Nah, I’m just joshin’ you. Beyoncé has a lot of nerve selling an empty wooden crate for $1,000 so you can store your VINYLS. Rich people are fucking insane. Incidentally, I hate that the youngsters call them vinyls.

• If you’re worried that your very human writing resembles that of AI, here are a few tools you can utilize. I have said it before, but having to reduce my em dash usage has been a genuine joy killer—really.

• Get your Nan Goldin and Ed van der Elsken with the New York Times 25 photos that changed fashion forever.

• Quarter Proof rebranded to Demi, with a complete packaging overhaul from Day Job. It definitely looks more like a spirits brand, but I did like the previous packaging from Regular Practice. That said, all the douche bells go off whenever I read things like “Demi isn’t a low-ABV alternative. It isn’t a wellness product. It’s a premium spirits brand.” Like, no, dude, that’s exactly what it is. You’re 25% vodka. Get real. No amount of branding or copy will change that.

• Kinda stink that we haven’t had a narrative feature from Spike Jonze since Her, and instead, we’re getting De’Longhi commercials with Brad Pitt.

• Liquid Death’s creative team, Death Machine, did the branding for the canned sparkling wine brand Mr. Fancy. I like the tie!

• Love love love Danna Gutiérrez’s ceramic pots.

Don’t say things like happy hump day, please and thank you.

-Bill

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There is a particular corner of American culture that lingers deep in kitchen cabinets, most certainly my grandfather’s, in which the store brand has gone to die. Aluminum foil. Freezer bags. The list goes on. I have yet to convince my husband that any private-label brand has an equivalent to Charmin’s Ultra Soft 3-ply, quilted, scalloped-edge toilet paper, and he’s been unable to convince me that private-label painkillers are the exact same as name-brand ones.

It’s all about perception when it comes to private labels.

However, oddly enough, in the past few years, the generic option has become more coveted.

A new report from the brand and design agency Pearlfisher gives this shift a name: the “cult threshold.” They define it as the moment a store brand stops being a compromise and starts becoming something people seek out.

“The store brand is the new cult brand,” the report states. “Not a consolation. Not a compromise. Cool.” Exhibit A, they claim, is Kirkland Signature, which has achieved the rare feat of making a warehouse logo function as a status symbol full of insider intel and cult pedigree. If I took a shot for every time my dad mentioned that Kirkland Vodka is just Grey Goose, I’d be on the floor. It’s his favorite fun fact, especially whilst making a martini.

If any other agency released this report, I’d be skeptical that it wasn’t just to win over new clients. But if anyone has insight into building private label brands, it’s Pearlfisher. Having worked with CVS Health to revamp its healthcare line, Best Yet, covering more than 1,800 SKUs for the wholesale house brand, Paperbird’s paper goods and household products, and Shoprite’s parent company, among others, there’s a plethora of insights.

According to the Private Label Manufacturers Association, citing data from Circana, U.S. private-label sales hit a record $282.8 billion in 2025, up more than $9 billion from the year before. Store-brand dollar sales climbed 3.3 percent, nearly triple the 1.2-percent growth of national brands over the same stretch, while private-label unit volume actually rose as national-brand units fell.

Kirkland Signature remains the example everyone reaches for, and for good reason. Costco’s in-house label rang up roughly $90 billion in sales in fiscal 2025. But virality doesn’t always require that kind of scale; sometimes a single item is enough to send a private label brand into the cultural conversation. I’ve also seen such a rise in virality for brands like Publix’s subs, Trader Joe’s mini canvas tote bags, and Whole Foods’ Berry Chantilly Cake.The list goes on and on.

There’s also the fact that Walmart’s most loyal store-brand shoppers tend to be high earners, with plenty of them clearing six figures a year. Does designing for someone who chooses the store brand look any different from designing for someone who needs it to? Rebecca Demmellash, Strategy Director of Pearlfisher, who co-authored the report, answered, ”The drivers to private label are not one thing but a combination of things that are fluid. Shoppers are very savvy. They know private labels are sometimes simpler, better ingredients, like Nature’s Promise, or 365, or even some Trader Joe’s lines (Organic, etc). They assume high quality because it’s often produced by the branded product manufacturer, they realize a better price is because the middleman is cut out, or they are driven to it because it’s simply their favorite product.”

There is no longer a single private-label shopper to design for; everybody is at the same shelf for entirely different reasons.

That’s the entire challenge packaging teams and brand designers are working with. A shopper reaching for the store brand because it’s the only thing that fits their budget this week needs packaging that highlights value without signaling deprivation. It shouldn’t look or feel like a “cheap” option, even if price is the whole reason they’re considering it. On the flip side, the six-figure earner reaching for the same product isn’t thinking about price at all; instead, they’re responding to design cues that look considered, minimal, maybe even more design-forward than the name brand next to it. And then there’s the shopper who’s simply loyal to the product itself, who doesn’t think of it as “the store brand” so much as just the brand they buy. How does one design for completely different types of consumers that each value something different?

“I don’t think good design should be calibrated to someone’s purchasing power. If anything, the increasingly broad audience for private-label brands reinforces something I’ve always believed. People across demographics are incredibly design literate today. They may not use the language designers use, but they recognize confidence, clarity and intention immediately,” notes Prachi Sheth, previously contracted as a Senior Brand Designer for Walmart.

She continues, “Working within Walmart has made that especially interesting because the scale is enormous. You’re designing for millions of people with different tastes, backgrounds, and relationships to the brand. The challenge isn’t designing for one archetypal consumer. It’s creating something distinctive enough to have a point of view while remaining intuitive and relevant to a remarkably broad audience”

On TikTok, the #dupes hashtag has racked up billions of views, built on the premise that finding a cheaper stand-in is not something to be shy about. In China, the shopping ritual known as “ping-ti,” sourcing the best possible substitute for a fraction of the price, has, per Pearlfisher’s report, become its own form of social currency, generating billions of views on social media. Frugality, once something people were ashamed of, has evolved into something people want to share and be proud of.

As Pearlfisher’s report puts it, that threshold “doesn’t require a limitless budget. It requires honesty.” What Pearlfisher’s report makes obvious is that the private-label aisle has finally started telling its own story instead of just being the cheaper alternative.

Walmart has streamlined the Great Value redesign, moving away from the label’s dated, budget-coded look. Walmart’s bettergoods line has reached 28% of households with $500 million in year-one sales, launched with a design-forward, editorial identity rather than a discount one. Kroger’s Simple Truth and Whole Foods’ 365 have both proven that higher-quality, better-designed private labels can attract consumers, and Kroger revamped its pet brand, Abound, with redesigned packaging as part of a broader push into what one Kroger executive called “trendy” private-label products. Target updated its Up & Up label in 2024 and has leaned further into chef collaborations under Good & Gather, treating store-brand development less as a cost-cutting exercise and more as product development at any national CPG company. The redesigns are stripping away the design cues that used to say “this is the cheaper option” and replacing them with design language that could sit on a shelf next to, or even instead of, the name brand. What’s more, 67% of Gen Z shoppers believe private-label products are just as good as national brands.

But it’s important to note that this isn’t all about design. Right now, more than ever, the promise of a less expensive option matters, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to what shoppers are living through. Since the pandemic hit, grocery bills have quite literally exploded. Food-at-home prices jumped 9.9% in 2022 alone, the fastest single-year increase since 1979, and meat, poultry, fish, and egg prices spiked 12.6% in a single year as the pandemic tore through supply chains. Plus, the food-at-home Consumer Price Index was still running 2.7% higher year-over-year as of mid-2026, meaning the increases of the last few years haven’t stopped. For many households, it’s exactly why a store brand that can pass as premium is essential. A store brand that looks as premium as the national brand next to it is a win for retailers and shoppers, who no longer have to debate whether price reflects quality (or perceived quality).

I still don’t think I’ll be swapping the toilet paper brand at our house quite yet, but I’ll take the Kirkland Vodka in my martini any day.

Until next week,

Chloe Cordover

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.

• AI companies don’t like to tell you how much energy you’re consuming when you prompt, but agentic AI likely has a heftier footprint. The only upside is that increased energy consumption could potentially fast-track clean energy initiatives. But can you really see that happening in the next two years here in the US? I don’t think so either. As mentioned in the FastCo article, Meta is currently building seven natural gas plants solely to feed a data center in Louisiana.

• That’s one way to deal with the performative male reader.

• Adobe tools are now available in Slack via the platform’s AI chatbot, Slackbot.

• Charlotte interviewed Jamie Stark, and all I can say is that we need more water towers and industrial equipment that look like a gigantic can of tomatoes.

• I really take umbrage at the notion that somehow Target has abandoned its DEI initiatives. Like, look at this adorable “German Army Soldier Adult Costume“ that’s described as “inspired by the 1940s.” Let Stephen Miller moonlight as Target’s personal Spirit Halloween diva that he is.

• Nice work here from Max Hofert and Powerbomb for Kioga, a company looking to tackle the modern inflammation epidemic. Love that little Kioga dude!

• I can get behind Walmart’s rotisserie chicken purse, but - and I mean this respectfully - fuck them for introducing dynamic pricing. That’s just one more tax on consumers who are legitimately struggling. The whole rationale that this helps employees do their job more efficiently and saves them time from changing prices by hand is laughable. Of course they’re going to find new ways to nickel and dime you.

• Some folks will stalk their local Michael’s to get their grubby little hands on a Jack-o-Lantern gumball machine.

• Man, I didn’t know Ebbets Field was making cardigans? Too rich for my blood, but these are sick.

• And the winner for 2026’s Most Egregious and Unexpected Use of Pumpkin Spice goes to Mylanta!

• Against all odds, MapQuest is the #1 app in America.

• Tim Robbins voice: Aw!

It’s a Sammy Hagar 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.

So this little tidbit from the Guardian’s piece on the burgeoning “AI Slop Cleanup” gigs for freelancers is crazy, but also very much expected:

“On Freelancer.com, a contract work platform with more than 88 million users, job listings tagged with phrases such as “correct AI”, “AI hallucination” and “AI error” rose 87% to 10,760 globally between August 2025 and June 2026, according to internal data shared with the Guardian. The jobs were concentrated in graphic design, followed by video editing, proofreading and content writing. Upwork saw AI remediation gigs jump 70% year over year, and Fiverr saw keyword searches for “AI cleanup” services grow more than 20 times between 2023 and 2026, according to data shared with the Guardian.

Look, the title of today’s newsletter is hyperbolic, sure. In fact, you could also say it’s the absolute worst of times, because who really wants to clean up AI slop pixel by pixel? I agree that all of this does sound soulless, but boy, there’s never been a better time to profit off a bunch of dweebs who tried to prompt their way into a brand world.

Anywho, the real reason I’m bringing this up is that I would LOVE to hear from any freelancers who have taken on gigs cleaning up AI-generated work. Comment, because I would love to write about this.

• I agree with everything that The New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson says here about moviegoing audiences wanting something to feel connected to (in addition to great stories). But there’s also some Swiftian logic at play here, too. Audiences also want something they can obsess over and pore through, complete with Easter eggs and Qanon-level conspiracy theories. Backrooms, a world of infinite rooms and vast permutations, gives them exactly that, and the lore behind it hasn’t even been fully fleshed out. There’s an obvious branding lesson in here as well, but I’m trying not to make this gross, so I’ll leave you to connect the dots on whatever this has to do with 7UP.

• Stoked as I am for the Alex Gibney doc on Musk, I genuinely don’t know if it will cause him to fall out of favor.

• Roberta’s Pizza did not have to go this hard.

• Maybe you neglected your Tamagotchi in 1998, but I’m a believer in second chances, so here’s a Tamagotchi ring.

• Cold sheets are the best, but cold pillowcases? That said, this definitely didn’t come from Ben Cohen.

• Patagonia has teamed up with native American and environmental activists to sue President Trump over Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.

Toodles.

-Bill