Why Every Brand Suddenly Smells Like Cardboard and Cedar Chips
I don’t know when it started, but I realised recently that almost every brand is trying to sell me a forest.
Not a real one, of course. A metaphorical, mildly Scandinavian one. The kind that comes in matte recyclable packaging and smells faintly of pine needles and self-actualisation. It’s everywhere — skincare, deodorant, gin, note-taking apps. Even the last receipt I got from a coffee cart in Karori had a logo that looked like a rewilded pinecone with a doctorate in anxiety management.
This scratchy aesthetic — lo-fi earth tones, grounded type, glacial compositions that scream quietness — seems to have climbed up from boutique mushroom tincture startups and wrapped itself around mainstream marketing like a weighted blanket. It’s the visual language of calm credibility. But here’s the thing: it’s getting hard to tell one slow-living kombucha brand from another. Authenticity has collapsed into a narrow scent profile and a nicely recycled cardboard sleeve.
To be fair, this isn’t about the decline of design. It’s about what we worship. We’ve decided good brands are quiet, rural, and ideally smell like a freshly whittled bookshelf. That might be necessary marketing respite from the blaring hype machines of the past decade. But at some point, a brand is going to step out of the timber-yoga-cabin aesthetic and ask: what if we stood for something a little... louder? And I, for one, will be ready for it.
Not a real one, of course. A metaphorical, mildly Scandinavian one. The kind that comes in matte recyclable packaging and smells faintly of pine needles and self-actualisation. It’s everywhere — skincare, deodorant, gin, note-taking apps. Even the last receipt I got from a coffee cart in Karori had a logo that looked like a rewilded pinecone with a doctorate in anxiety management.
This scratchy aesthetic — lo-fi earth tones, grounded type, glacial compositions that scream quietness — seems to have climbed up from boutique mushroom tincture startups and wrapped itself around mainstream marketing like a weighted blanket. It’s the visual language of calm credibility. But here’s the thing: it’s getting hard to tell one slow-living kombucha brand from another. Authenticity has collapsed into a narrow scent profile and a nicely recycled cardboard sleeve.
To be fair, this isn’t about the decline of design. It’s about what we worship. We’ve decided good brands are quiet, rural, and ideally smell like a freshly whittled bookshelf. That might be necessary marketing respite from the blaring hype machines of the past decade. But at some point, a brand is going to step out of the timber-yoga-cabin aesthetic and ask: what if we stood for something a little... louder? And I, for one, will be ready for it.