Taupe Is Not a Strategy: Why Every Rebrand Looks the Same

Why Does Every Rebrand Look the Same?

The Beige Wave of Branding

My girlfriend in college, Kelly, had a mom named Grace. Elegant woman. Quirky in her way. She had no problem going to her MD, but for reasons none of us fully understood, she refused to see an eye doctor. Claimed her eyesight was perfect. No need.

Kelly and her mom fought constantly—about fashion, furniture, wallpaper, you name it. And the fights always circled back to the same thing: color.

Or rather, one color.

“It’s so dull,” Grace would sigh, waving off a floral blouse or a vivid paint swatch. “I’m so sick of taupe.”

Didn’t matter what it actually was—teal, magenta, burnt orange—if Kelly held it up, Grace called it taupe.

Then one day, Grace came over to my place. I had just painted my office deep burgundy with blue trim. She complimented the walls, then wrinkled her nose.

“Interesting choice on the taupe trim,” she said.

Kelly and I looked at each other.“Grace,” I asked gently, “are you colorblind?”

She laughed. “Of course not. I love color!”

Turns out, she was very much colorblind. A lifetime of snow-covered sight, seeing the world through a palette reduced to soft grays and browns. The revelation didn’t change her vision. It just explained what she couldn’t see.

I thought about that moment a lot over the years. At first, because it was funny. Later, because it wasn’t.

What would it feel like to live in a world where everything distinct—the bold, the strange, the specific—got flattened into one safe shade?

Now I work in branding. And lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m living in Grace’s world.

All the specificity, the singular traits were gone, and now the brand world was just … taupe.

I don’t know when exactly it started, but at some point, all the logos began to blur.

I’d walk past a new café or scroll through an app store and think, Didn’t I already see this brand? Same thin, sans-serif font. Same lowercase letters. Same neutral color palette that says, “We’re clean, minimal, and trying very hard not to offend anyone.”

It’s like every brand went to the same focus group and came back wearing the same plain gray sweater.

What happened to logos that had personality? The ones that stood out, not because they were sleek or trendy, but because they were weird or bold or—God forbid—memorable?

Once upon a time, a brand would redesign to say something. Now it feels like they rebrand just to blend in.

A brand with heart becomes a brand with Helvetica. You see the new logo and think, Yep. That sure is a company.

That’s the thing about this new wave of rebrands—they’re not bad, exactly. They’re just… indistinct. Clean. Polished. Safe. And in a landscape overflowing with sameness, “safe” starts to feel like giving up.

Of course, branding goes through phases like anything else—styles shift, tastes evolve. But this wasn’t evolution. It felt more like erasure.

Logos weren’t just changing. They were dissolving.

And it wasn’t just one brand. It was everywhere. From legacy companies to DTC startups, heritage fonts and quirky icons were quietly replaced with bland, lowercase sans-serifs and a palette that could be best described as “eggshell on oat milk.”

It turns out this isn’t some coincidence. There’s a name for it.

The Rise of Blanding

At first, I thought maybe I was just being nostalgic. Maybe I was the problem—clinging to the past while the rest of the world moved on. But the more I looked around, the more I realized this wasn’t progress. This was mass erasure with a marketing budget.

We didn’t evolve. We standardized. And there’s actually a name for it. Designers call it “blanding.” Not branding. Blanding.

It’s what happens when a brand reboots and sands off every edge that made it distinct. Quirky logos? Gone. Unusual typefaces? Flattened. Strong color stories? Muted into a palette called something like “neutral oat.”

The goal is consistency. Cleanliness. Seriousness. What we get is a design language that feels like it was built in a waiting room. Once you notice it, you can’t stop seeing it.

Pringles lost its goofy charm. Burberry dropped its heritage serif in favor of something that could moonlight as a bank. Even Animal Planet erased its elephant, like it was trying to qualify for a SaaS conference.

And maybe this is petty, but I still mourn the old Tropicana carton. The one with the straw sticking straight into the orange. It was weird. It made no physical sense. It was perfect.

Now? It's a sleek orange orb with a minimalist font that could just as easily be selling probiotic shampoo. It’s like every brand shaved its eyebrows and showed up to prom in the same beige slip dress.

This isn’t just a design trend—it’s a crisis of character. Rebrands used to say, “Here’s who we are now.” Now they whisper, “Please don’t look at us too closely. And the weirdest part? These brands aren’t failing. They're thriving. The rebrands work. The sameness works.

And that’s when it really hits you—this wasn’t an accident. No one tripped and fell into Helvetica. This was a choice.

Why It Happens

So why are so many brands choosing to fade into the background?

A few reasons, and none of them are particularly evil—they're just safe.

For starters, branding today has to work everywhere—on app icons, social banners, packaging, tiny mobile screens, in dark mode, light mode, print, web, and embroidered on a fleece. Simplicity scales. A clean sans-serif can stretch farther than a hand-drawn doodle or a funky vintage logo. It survives the shrinking and shifting.

Then there’s the investor deck problem. A brand needs to look “serious” if it wants to be taken seriously. You’ve got a founder trying to pitch their startup to VCs, and the last thing they want is a whimsical logo that reminds people of a county fair. So they go neutral. Cool. Understated. Market-ready.

And let’s not ignore the committee effect, where branding is no longer led by instinct or identity, but by consensus. And consensus, by nature, kills edge. Every round of feedback chips away at the strange, the bold, the character-driven, until what’s left is… taupe.

“Make it more modern.” “Make it more digital.” “Make it feel premium.” These aren’t evil instructions. But they’re often just code for: “Make it look like everyone else.”

There’s also fear. Fear of offending. Fear of being “cringe.” Fear of standing out for the wrong reasons. And nothing says “we are not a risk” like a safe, modern wordmark in soft blue.

The trouble is, when everyone makes the same safe bet, everyone ends up with the same losing hand. A whole marketplace of brands that feel familiar, frictionless, and utterly forgettable.

And that’s the real problem.

Because if everything looks the same, what happens to how we feel about anything?

That’s where we go next.

The Problem With Playing It Safe

Here’s the thing no one wants to admit about all these safe rebrands: They’re not just forgettable. They’re emotionally bankrupt. They don’t move you. They don’t make you feel anything. You don’t love them. You don’t hate them. You just… glance. Scroll. Move on.

And that’s the real loss.

When brands decide not to risk standing out, they lose the ability to connect. Because connection lives in friction. In surprise. In the weird little details that shouldn’t work but somehow do. A logo doesn’t have to be beautiful. But it has to mean something.

Now? You look at five different brands in five different industries, and they all feel like they were birthed by the same agency using the same four fonts and the same color story inspired by a seasonal latte.

“Is this a bank? A meal kit? A skincare line? A dating app?”

“Yes.”

And if the visual identity doesn’t help you tell one brand from another, how are you supposed to care about any of them?

This isn’t just a design problem. It’s a business problem. Bland brands don’t earn love. They don’t spark nostalgia. They don’t get tattooed on someone’s forearm, or scribbled on a high school notebook, or worn proudly on a hoodie.

They don’t belong to anyone.

And that’s the difference between a brand people remember and one they delete without thinking twice. Because at the end of the day, branding isn’t just what a company looks like.

It’s what it feels like to see them show up in the world. Which means: if your brand doesn’t make people feel something, you haven’t designed a brand at all. You’ve designed absence. So what does good branding look like in a world allergic to risk?

Let’s talk about the ones that got it right.

What Makes a Good Rebrand (Still)

Not all rebrands are tragedies. Some are damn near perfect. Because when a rebrand works, really works, it doesn’t flatten the brand—it reveals it.

Take Burger King’s 2021 redesign. They didn’t reinvent the wheel—they dusted it off. They brought back chunky retro typography and warm, greasy colors that actually made you want a burger. It didn’t scream “modern.” It whispered “home.” It felt familiar in the way that good branding should: personal, nostalgic, even a little greasy.

Or look at Airbnb. When they introduced the Bélo symbol back in 2014, people mocked it at first—called it weird, abstract, even vaguely inappropriate. But now? It’s iconic. Because the story behind it—belonging, global openness, shared spaces—matched the identity. The brand didn’t just change how it looked. It deepened what it meant.

That’s the secret sauce of a great rebrand: It doesn’t erase. It excavates. It digs into who you are, sharpens the edges, and comes back with something unmistakable.

And here’s what the smart brands know: You don’t need to shout louder than everyone else. You just need to sound unmistakably like you.

Because in a world full of clean, clever, correct branding, what cuts through isn’t polish.

It’s personality. A good rebrand is a mirror, not a mask. It shows us what was always there, just waiting to be seen.

And if more brands had the guts to tell the truth instead of chasing trends, maybe we wouldn’t all be living in a world that looks like Grace’s closet. Maybe we’d get a little color back.

Stand Out or Disappear

We’re not just in a branding crisis. We’re in a visibility crisis.

Every scroll, every click, every walk down an aisle or glance at a shelf is a battle for attention. And the brands that win aren’t always the biggest—they’re the ones that can’t be ignored.

That doesn’t mean being loud. It means being clear. It means being you—unmistakably, unapologetically, even weirdly you.

In a world of lowercase sans serifs, the brand with a hand-drawn tomato or a neon-blue dog wins your heart, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real.

The blanding wave has made one thing abundantly clear: Sameness is the default now. If you want to cut through, you don’t need to be louder. You need to be braver. Braver with voice. Braver with visuals. Braver with what you believe and how you show it.

Because today, the safest brand in the room is the one no one remembers.

And that brings us back to where we started. The colorblind world. The taupe takeover. Let’s close this out.

Summing Up

Grace didn’t know she was colorblind. She just thought the world was dull.

And now, I look around at the brandscape and wonder if we’re all living in some version of that, where everything’s been softened, flattened, and filtered into safe sameness.

We didn’t mean to end up here. We just got tired. Tired of taking risks. Tired of being weird. Tired of having to explain what made us different.

But here’s the truth: difference is the point. Distinction is the power. A brand doesn’t need to be louder or cleaner or more minimal. It needs to be more itself.

Because the brands that stay with us aren’t the ones that played it safe, they’re the ones that showed up bold, strange, messy, full of flavor—alive.

At ThoughtLab, we believe branding isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about telling the truth—visually, emotionally, unmistakably. We help brands rediscover what makes them matter and then build the kind of identity that not only stands out, but stands up.

Taupe is not a strategy.

Be the burgundy with the blue trim.