Why a successful product looks as if it's not meant to be sold From 1843mag
et the products sell themselves,” sang the Minutemen, an American punk band, in 1984 in a caustic screed against the “psychological methods” used to stimulate consumer appetite. Looking at The Ordinary, a skincare line produced by Deciem, a Canadian company, puts me in mind of the Minutemen’s slogan – and not just because The Ordinary sounds like the perfect name for a punk band. The company was launched by Brandon Truaxe, a mercurial industry outsider who was frustrated by marketing guff.
His products almost look as if they’re not meant to be sold. Rather than seductive bottles clamouring for consumer attention at a department-store beauty counter, they look like they belong in some austere Swiss mountain clinic run by professional pharmacists. Recalling Henry Ford’s mantra that he’d give a customer a car in any colour they wanted as long as it was black, The Ordinary’s packaging comes in three non-colours: white, black and grey.
This strategy is called “unselling”. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. “Unselling” is just an effective way to sell stuff to one group above all: millennials. According to research from Pew, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings are far more health-conscious than their parents were at the same age and more anxious about what they are putting into and onto their bodies.
“Advertising leads consumers into temptation,” writes design historian Thomas Hines, and “packaging is the temptation.” Compared with the mismatched riot of things in my own medicine cabinet, The Ordinary’s dropper bottles and tubes present a vision of clinical purity.
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