Memo #000 • Sunday Edition • May 2026.

Interesting Brands Die everyday

Don't Stand out. Opt out.

YELO! Reader —

For those of you who have been here before, this might come as wierd. Recieveing this after a huge gap.

But I have spent a lot of time trying to understand a very specific kind of business tragedy.

Not the obvious kind where the product is weak, the market is wrong, or the founder is trying to sell a napkin sketch with a Stripe link attached.

I mean the quieter one.

The one where a brand is thoughtful, well-made, genuinely different and challenging the status quo… and still somehow gets stuck as just an interesting alternative.

People notice it.

They compliment it.

They might even send it to a friend with a little “this is cool” attached.

And then, when it is time to choose, they go with the safer option.

That is the part I cannot leave alone.

Because the brands that break through are not just lucky.

At least, not only lucky.

They do something specific.

They change what buyers look for.

Let's sail.

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The Ugly Useful Question

Before I go further, let me ask you something.

Have you ever looked at a brand in your space and thought:

“How are they the one getting chosen?”

Not better made.

Just… chosen.

well…I have.

I am not proud of it, but at least it is honest. And honestly, that little ugly thought is useful.

Envy is often just curiosity wearing a bad jacket.

Because underneath it is a better question:

What are they making easier for buyers to believe?

That is where this whole project begins.

The Interesting Alternative Problem

A lot of founder-led challenger brands are genuinely strong.

They have better taste, better products, better instincts, better care.

But the market still treats them like the stylish version of something familiar.

That is not always an awareness problem.

It is often a buying-frame problem.

A buyer rarely evaluates your brand from scratch.

First, they classify you.

Then they make fast assumptions about how risky you are, how credible you are, how premium you are, and whether choosing you would be easy to justify.

Only after that do they start “evaluating.”

Which means a lot of the decision is already being shaped before the serious comparison begins.

That is why so many good brands fall into the same miserable little chain:

compare → delay → price-check → safer option

The Homepage Haircut Problem

Because the pain shows up in the visible places, founders try to fix the visible places.

They sharpen the copy.

They polish the design.

They add more proof.

They post more.

They explain harder.

They make the deck cleaner.

They give the homepage another little haircut and ask everyone to please admire the bangs.

None of that is useless.

But if the buyer is still using the wrong frame, all those improvements are working inside the wrong room.

That is the thesis behind I/KATEGORI.

What I/KATEGORI Is Here To Study

I/KATEGORI is where I am studying, in public, why some challenger brands move from:

interesting → trusted → preferred → category-defining

Not by standing out harder.

By becoming harder to reduce.

Because interesting is not the destination.

Interesting is the lobby.

The wrong path looks like this:

interesting → louder → busier → more generic

That path creates what I have started calling a potato-duck Frankenstein.

A brand assembled from familiar parts.

Recognizable on sight.

Technically alive, maybe.

But weirdly lifeless once you look at it for more than three seconds.

The market is full of those now.

Everyone has access to the same tools, the same templates, the same AI-assisted confidence, the same “proven frameworks,” the same tasteful beige, the same very serious sentence about helping modern teams unlock scalable growth through human-centered something.

It all looks fine.

That is the problem.

Fine is easy to file away.

The Weekly Question

So each week, I will study one brand, founder, category tension, or piece of research through a simple question:

What changed how buyers understood this?

We might look at Liquid Death and how water became entertainment.

Oatly and how oat milk stopped feeling like a substitute.

Ooni and how a pizza oven became a weekend ritual.

Duolingo and how a language app became an internet-native character.

Notion, Patagonia, Basecamp, SULT, A24, Linear, Dr. Squatch, April Dunford, James Clear, Mel Robbins, Codie Sanchez, and others will probably find their way into the files too.

But the point will not be to point at cool brands and say:

“Be more like that.”

That is how the potato-duck gets made.

The point is to understand the mechanism underneath the move.

What did they opt out of?

What did they make buyers care about instead?

What proof made the new frame believable?

What made choosing them easier to justify?

And what can a serious challenger borrow without dressing up in someone else’s costume?

That is the work.

The Bigger Idea

Over time, I want I/KATEGORI to become a body of thought around one bigger idea:

If that feels uncomfortably relevant, stay close.

The next issues will get sharper.

The Reader Desk

Before I go, one question:

Reply with one messy sentence.

Those are usually the useful ones.

I read every reply.

See you Next Sunday,
​
S

P.S. Got a brand, category problem, or buyer-confusion question you want me to investigate? Send it to The Reader Desk here.

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