When your brand becomes just another SKU

I’m sure you’ve seen this.

There are dozens of greens drinks on the market right now.

Powders, gummies, capsules, strips. If you lined up the ingredient lists side by side, most of them would be hard to tell apart.

But AG1, LMNT, and Grind are all growing in the same category at the same time. Same basic product concept. Very different businesses. The difference is positioning, and it's worth breaking down because the pattern applies well beyond supplements.

AG1 owns the "everything in one scoop" angle. Their customer is the person who wants premium, comprehensive nutrition without thinking about it. The price point is high and they lean into that. It signals quality.

Grind went the opposite direction. Gummies instead of powder. Easier, better tasting, lower barrier. They're winning the customer who looked at AG1 and thought "I'm not doing that every morning."

LMNT built around community and specific use cases. Fasting. Endurance training. Performance. Their product is simple, but the identity around it is strong enough that people feel like they belong to something when they buy it.

If any of these three competed on ingredients alone, they'd be interchangeable. They'd be fighting over price. Instead, each one is the obvious choice for a specific type of customer.

This is the commodity trap, and it's where I see a lot of DTC brands get stuck between $5M and $20M. The product is good. Reviews are strong. But growth flattens because there's nothing separating you from the next brand that launches with the same formulation and a lower price.

There are two moves that get you out.

Clarify the outcome, not the ingredient. Most brands describe what's in the product. The ones that escape the commodity trap describe what the customer experiences. AG1 doesn't sell 75 vitamins. They sell "the simplest thing you can do for your health." That's a positioning statement, not a product spec. If your differentiation requires someone to read a label and compare milligrams, you've already lost the scroll.

Build a product line, not a product. One SKU solves a problem. A product line builds an ecosystem. Grind started with a greens gummy, then added a sleep product and an energy product. Now the customer isn't buying a supplement. They're buying into a daily routine. Each product makes the others stickier. The brands doing retention well aren't running loyalty discounts. They're giving customers new reasons to come back because there's something new to try that fits with what they already bought.

The test I'd run on your own brand: if a competitor launched tomorrow with the same ingredients at 80% of your price, would your customers stay? If the answer is "probably not," the product isn't the problem. The positioning is.

Thanks Montreal!

Hosted our Montreal event Tuesday night. Rained the entire time and still had a packed room, which honestly says more about this market than anything I could write in a post.

One thing that kept coming up in conversations: Montreal brands tend to have real operational depth.

A lot of the founders and operators in that room have been in eCommerce for over a decade. They're not chasing trends. They've already lived through two or three platform shifts and they're still here.

What I took away from the night is something I think applies broadly. The brands that last aren't the ones who figured out one channel. They're the ones who built a business that survives when that channel stops working.

That's harder to do. It's also the only version of growth that compounds.

Back next month for round two. If you're in the Montreal eCommerce world and we haven't met yet, come through.

Niket Shah
Co-Founder, Accler8 Labs