Every Indian D2C brand sounds the same because sameness is the output of the machine that builds them, not an accident. A recognisable cluster of design studios and growth agencies shapes much of the category’s look, most of the scaled, high-visibility brands chase venture money, and everyone copies the playbook that worked first. Same pastel palette. Same handwritten-font logo. Same “a note from our founder”. Open ten D2C websites in ten tabs and you could swap the products around and nobody would notice. This is not a creative failure. It is a system doing exactly what it was wired to do.
Let me show you the wiring.
What does the template actually look like?
You already know it. You have just never named it.
The hero banner with a pastel background. Usually a dusty pink, a sage green or a butter yellow. A lowercase logo in a soft rounded font. A one-word or two-word brand name that sounds like a feeling. The product shot floating in negative space, lit like a perfume ad.
Then the copy. “We started this because we were tired of the toxic stuff on the shelves.” A founder photo, sleeves rolled up, looking earnest. The words “clean”, “natural”, “no nasties”, “for you and the planet”. A list of things the product does NOT contain, set in a tidy grid of ticks and crosses.
It is a costume. Every brand wears it. And when everyone wears the same costume, nobody stands out.
Why do they all look identical? The agency layer
Start with who actually builds these brands.
A handful of design studios and growth agencies in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi appear to shape much of how new D2C brands look. They are good at their job. They have a process that works, a template that converts and a deck they can reuse.
So they sell the same thing again and again. Same Shopify theme structure. Same packaging grid. Same tone of voice. Imagine you are client number forty. Why reinvent the wheel when the wheel already passed its conversion test?
The agency is not the villain here. It is responding to incentives. A proven template is faster, cheaper and safer to sell. The client wants results, not an argument. So the template wins. And the brand comes out looking like the last nine brands the studio shipped before it.
This is jugaad applied to identity. Reuse what worked. Ship fast. The cost is invisible until you line all the brands up side by side.
Why does investor pressure push everyone to the centre?
Now follow the money.
Most of the biggest names you can think of took venture money, or are chasing it. That changes what the brand is allowed to be. An investor-backed D2C brand is under pressure to show fast, predictable growth. Predictable growth means doing what already works. And what already works is the template.
A bold, strange, polarising brand is a risk. Some people will love it. Some will hate it. That spread scares a growth team that lives and dies by the cost of acquiring a customer. So the brand gets sanded down. The weird edges come off. The positioning moves to the safe, broad, beige centre where the largest number of people feel mildly okay about it.
Here is the trap. The safe centre feels low-risk to each brand on its own. But when every brand runs to the same safe centre, the centre becomes the most crowded and most expensive place to compete. You paid to look safe. You ended up looking invisible.
That is the structural irony. Playing it safe is now the riskiest thing a D2C brand can do.
Why does the “founder’s note” sound the same everywhere?
Because it is doing a job, and everyone copies the brand that did the job well first.
The founder’s note exists to manufacture trust. A new brand has no reputation. So it borrows yours by sounding like a friend who started a thing in their kitchen. “I couldn’t find a product I trusted, so I made my own.” It works. The first time you read it, you believe it.
The hundredth time, it reads like a form letter.
The same logic infects the “clean and natural” claims. Once one brand wins by positioning against “chemicals” and “nasties”, every competitor copies the angle. Soon “clean” means nothing. It is not a claim anymore. It is wallpaper. Everybody says it, so nobody hears it.
This is the same pattern we have written about before in the myth that content is king. When everyone adopts the same supposedly winning move, the move stops winning. The edge was in being early, not in the move itself.
Is sameness actually a problem, or just a vibe?
It is a real, expensive problem. Here is the mechanism.
A brand exists to be remembered. If a customer cannot tell you apart from the next pastel jar, you have no brand. You have a product with nice packaging. And a product with nice packaging competes on one thing only: price and discounts.
That is a brutal place to live. You are now in a discount war you cannot win, because there is always a brand with more funding willing to lose more money for longer. We saw exactly this race-to-the-bottom logic in the quick commerce discount wars. Sameness pushes you straight into it.
Differentiation is not a nice-to-have. It is the only thing that lets you charge a real price and keep a customer who is not just there for the coupon. Without it, your growth is rented. The day you stop spending, it stops.
What does breaking out of the template look like?
It is harder than picking a different pastel. It means making real choices that cost you something.
- Pick a real enemy. A strong brand stands against something specific. Not “toxins” in the abstract. Something concrete that a real group of people genuinely resents. A clear enemy gives people a reason to belong.
- Say one true thing, sharply. Drop the safe list of everything you are. Own one idea so hard it almost annoys the people it is not for. A brand that tries to be for everyone is remembered by no one.
- Have a point of view, not just a palette. Beige design is a symptom. The real disease is having nothing to say. If your founder actually believes something about the category, put that belief at the centre. Let it shape the product, the copy and the price.
- Be willing to repel. The brands that break out are comfortable being disliked by the wrong people. That is the cost of being loved by the right ones.
Look at Asian Paints as a study in the opposite of beige. In my view it did not become iconic by being inoffensive. It reads like a brand that built a specific, owned world and committed to it for decades. We broke that consistency down in the linked piece. Read it as commentary, not as a peek inside their boardroom.
None of this is about a bigger budget. It is about nerve. The template is safe. Standing for something is not. That is exactly why it works.
So who is right, the agency or the founder?
Both, and that is the problem.
The agency is right that the template converts. The founder is right to want growth. The investor is right to want predictability. Every player is behaving rationally. And the sum of all that rational behaviour is a market full of brands that no human can tell apart.
The fix does not come from working harder inside the system. It comes from one founder deciding the cost of sameness is higher than the cost of being disliked. That decision is rare. That is precisely why the brands that make it own the category.
Sameness is the default. Distinctiveness is a choice. Most brands never make it.
FAQ
Why do Indian D2C brands all use pastel colours and lowercase logos?
Because a recognisable cluster of agencies and design studios shapes much of the category, and they reuse one proven template. The look converts, so it gets copied. The result is a market where most brands are visually interchangeable. It is shared design convention, not a coincidence.
Is “clean and natural” branding effective?
It worked when it was new. Now nearly every brand makes the same claim, so it has lost all meaning. “Clean” is no longer a differentiator. It is the price of entry, and it makes you blend in rather than stand out.
How can a D2C brand actually differentiate?
Pick a specific enemy, say one true thing sharply, build around a real point of view, and accept that you will repel some people. Differentiation requires making a choice that costs you something. Looking like everyone else is the safe option, and it is also the most expensive one.
Is sameness in D2C branding a serious business risk?
Yes. If customers cannot tell you apart, you compete only on price and discounts. That is a war the best-funded brand wins by burning the most cash. Distinctiveness is what lets you charge a real price and keep customers who are not just chasing a coupon.
By Amisha, The Brand Crush. This piece is analysis and opinion. It describes category-wide patterns, not the confirmed internal strategy of any single named company. Where we name a brand, treat it as commentary.
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