A taxonomy of taste.

§I 84 brands. Three years.

In the second half of 2025 we conducted an audit of 84 consumer brands launched between 2022 and 2025 across beauty, food and drink, household, and wellness. For each brand we recorded the explicit aesthetic moves its launch material made — typography, colour, photographic language, voice, pack architecture, tone of marketing. The intent was narrow: to identify what is converging, what is tired, and what is still underpriced.

This is not a trends piece. A trends piece asks what is about to come in. This is a taxonomy; it asks what is currently crowded and what is currently quiet, and infers, from both, where the priceable taste moves are. The observations below are primary findings from our own study. The quantitative tables sit in the appendix available to clients.

A short methodological note. Aesthetic moves were coded against a 31-item framework we developed internally — the framework draws on, and departs from, the standard design-semiotics taxonomies. Every brand was coded by two of our designers, and disagreements reconciled by a third. The inter-rater agreement on the 31-item framework was .82.

§II What is converging.

The most saturated aesthetic move in the 2022–2025 cohort is what we would call restrained modernism. Sans-serif display typography, wide letter-spacing, tonal colour palettes built around a single hero colour and a bone-white neutral, editorial photography with generous negative space, and a voice that mimics the register of a considered friend. The move was underpriced in 2019; it is now category-default across at least half of the cohort.

The conclusion is not that restrained modernism is wrong. It is that it no longer buys distinctiveness. A brand launched today in restrained modernism is paying the full price of that aesthetic without its earlier strategic return. The retailer has seen thirty of them this year. The shopper, less explicitly, has too.

A secondary saturation we noted: the friendly brand voice — the soft-sans, the winking parentheticals, the we-talk-like-a-person tonality. This was a 2016 move. It is now universal. Used without extreme specificity of content, it flattens the brand into the indistinguishable centre.

Restrained modernism is not wrong. It is just no longer distinctive. You pay its price without receiving its old return. — Strategy practice note, September 2025

§III What is tired.

Three moves are actively tired. First: the over-set serif, rendered in italic, used as a shorthand for sophistication. This was freshly interesting in 2018. It has now been done by approximately one in seven brands in our cohort, which means it no longer signals sophistication; it signals 'I have seen other brands do this'. Second: the one-word gen-z proposition — a single verb, set at display scale, attempting to own a feeling. Nearly a decade old and everywhere. Third: the typewriter-tonal 'handmade' voice used by brands that are not handmade.

The structural problem shared by the tired moves is that each of them became a category-entry move. Each was adopted not because it suited the brand, but because an investor or a founder-friend had said ‘you need to look like the others in your category’. Category-entry moves decay fast. They become the flavour of the shelf within two years of becoming the move everyone knows to make.

If your brand's aesthetic brief contains the phrase ‘like [named competitor], but for us’, the aesthetic move is already tired by definition, because it has already been reached by the named competitor.

§IV What is underpriced.

Three moves are currently underpriced and therefore buying real distinctiveness cheaply. First: explicit craft typography — custom type, drawn by hand or bespoke-commissioned, treated as the primary brand asset. The ratio of brands in our cohort using bespoke type is now lower than it was in 2017. This is a re-opening.

Second: the declarative voice. Flat sentences; specific claims; no winking. A voice that assumes the reader is an adult. The cohort has drifted heavily into the friendly register; a brand that refuses it now, tastefully, stands out at the packaging layer. Third: structured colour systems — brands that commit to two or three tightly held colours across all communication, rather than the expanded pastel-palette library that became standard between 2020 and 2023.

Each of these moves is available at the price that the corresponding overused move used to command. A brand built around a custom display face, a declarative voice, and a disciplined colour system is, this year, the single cheapest way to buy meaningful distinctiveness at the shelf.

§V How we would use this.

If we were briefing the brand work for a new consumer brand tomorrow, the taxonomy would push us towards three specific moves and one specific restraint. Move one: commission custom display type. Move two: write every pack line as a declarative sentence of fewer than twelve words. Move three: hold the colour system to three colours, with the discipline of a sparse wardrobe.

The restraint: avoid every aesthetic shorthand that can be reached by hiring the same freelance pool that the competition has hired. This is harder than it sounds. The same pool is most of the pool. The solution is not to avoid the pool but to brief it against the defaults — to tell the same designer you would have hired anyway that the default output will not do, and to be willing to sit through the discomfort of the first three rounds while the brief finds a less-saturated position.

None of this is permanent. The taxonomy will be rerun next year. What is underpriced in 2026 will be converging by 2028. The firm's standing instruction to itself is to re-run this study annually, publish it, and act on it fast enough that the findings do not become the next convergence.