Less logo, more form: the rise of brandless design

Visible logos, oversized labels, the relentless hammering of advertising — everything becomes noise, a visual overload: it’s brand fatigue. A new form of resistance to pervasive branding is emerging in response. On TikTok and Instagram, “visual decluttering” videos show people calmly peeling labels off plastic jars, pouring refill sachets into anonymous glass containers. Domestic shelves turn into minimalist installations: transparent packaging, natural paper, absent or DIY labels.

The concept of being brandless or no-name isn’t new. Back in the 1970s, European chains like Carrefour launched lines of generic products in white packaging with black text, as a response to the oil crisis. Today, many high-end supermarkets such as Erewhon are moving in the same direction.

Industrial design had already sensed it. Around the same time, Dieter Rams, with his Ten Principles for Good Design for Braun, stated that good design is unobtrusive and that it is as little design as possible. His appliances — from the ET44 shaver to the SK4 record player, nicknamed the Snow White’s coffin for its transparent plexiglass lid — were exercises in subtraction: pure forms, neutral colors, logos reduced to the bare minimum. 

Rams’s influence on Apple design is well documented: Jony Ive has often said that Rams’s principles guided Apple’s product development, from the transparency of the first iMac to the monolithic simplicity of the iPhone.

With few exceptions, however, the contemporary market has done the opposite for decades. A 2023 study estimated that the average person is exposed to around 33,000 advertising messages a day — messages that are anything but clean or essential. We are immersed in a saturated visual environment, where distinction becomes impossible and everything blurs into one noisy commercial texture. No matter the medium — television or TikTok — it feels like standing in the middle of Times Square at night, even when flipping through the first pages of a magazine.

In this chaos, the quiet luxury or stealth wealth aesthetic is gaining traction. Brands like The Row, founded by the Olsen twins, or Lemaire, remove visible logos and focus on materials and fluid silhouettes rather than instant recognizability. It is a luxury that hides itself, rejecting ostentation while subtly signaling it to those who know. Even the giants of luxury have embraced the trend: Bottega Veneta has removed its logo from collections, while Phoebe Philo built her aesthetic at Céline precisely on the absence of visible branding.

Others, like Muji, made anti-brand essentialism their identity from the start: brown or transparent packaging, minimal labels, products that emphasize function over image — a consistent, if risky, market position.

A case in point is Brandless, the American startup founded in 2017 that offered unbranded items, all priced at three dollars, with understated packaging and a simple description of contents. Despite its 2020 failure and subsequent 2022 relaunch, the experiment captured a genuine desire: to consume without the symbolic burden of the brand.