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Logology
Why Everything You Buy Looks Like It Was Made By a Hipster In Brooklyn
From Target to ShopRite, major retailers are co-opting muted pastels, serif fonts, and ampersands
At a slightly run-down grocery store at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, the paper towel shelf is in the midst of a hipster makeover. Next to reams of shouty, Crayola-colored packs of Bounty, calmly sits a new brand of paper towel that looks like it was dreamed up by either the millennial marketing whizzes at Glossier or an Etsy crafter from Portland. It’s Paperbird, styled with a lowercase “p” and accented with a feminine hand-sketched silhouette of a perched creature, all packaged in soothing tones of cream and lavender.
Paperbird is not, however, some homespun artisanal cleaning-products brand. It’s the brainchild of ShopRite, the New Jersey–based grocery store chain that operates nearly 300 stores across the Northeast. Store-hatched brands are hardly a new concept, but as retailers wake up to the shrinking margins of selling other people’s stuff — and competing with private-label savants like Trader Joe’s — they’re aggressively building up or overhauling their own brand arsenal. “I’m not sure I know of many retailers who can avoid it,” says Brian Shoroff, president of the Private Label…
