Congratulations! You look like everyone else 🥳

I've been thinking about olive oil a lot lately.

I wish it were for a dish we would be making, but more specifically about the Graza brand. They launched in 2022 with a squeeze bottle and a bright green label. No rolling Tuscan hills. No heritage serif typography. Just a squeeze bottle, a bright color, and a foundational brand with copy that sounded like a person wrote it.

Within a month of launching, they had $500k MRR; within three years they became the fifth-largest olive oil brand in the United States—driving nearly a quarter of the entire category's growth.

What gets me isn't just that they succeeded. It's what they were willing to risk to get there.

The dark glass olive oil bottle does more than just elevate the look, it serves a functional purpose. UV light degrades the oil—dark glass protects the product. It exists for a real reason, yet Graza chose plastic anyway. I don't believe it was because they didn't know better, but because they understood their customer well enough to make a deliberate bet: ease of use in the kitchen would matter more to the person they were building for than the preservation trade-off. The squeeze bottle made olive oil easier to cook with. That was worth more to their customer than the signal that dark glass had always carried.

They didn't ignore the convention. They understood it well enough to decide consciously.

That distinction matters more than it might seem.

When I was working at a brand and advertising agency in Tampa, we had Alessi as a client. They were working on their packaging, and I remember the direction they chose for their tomato sauce labels was a Tuscan cityscape.

It made complete sense at the time.

The product was Italian. The ingredients came from there. The visual communicated provenance, authenticity, quality—everything they wanted the market to know. That imagery was doing real work. It not only decorated the jar, but it was also a business decision made for good reasons, by people who understood their market.

But here's what happens over time. If that decision resulted in sales or positive feedback, it becomes the benchmark that every other business in the category uses when they're trying to signal the same things. Provenance; Authenticity; Italian-ness. So they reach for the same visual language. Rolling hills. Serif heritage type. Not because they're copying—because it worked. Because the category trained consumers to read those cues as trustworthy.

Nobody set out to look like their competitor. They all just looked at what was already working.

That's industry gravity.

Every industry develops its own unofficial patterns. The colors that feel right, the tone that sounds credible, the imagery that signals quality. Businesses absorb these cues from the established players—the ones who built the category, who trained the market—and use them as a starting point.

The instinct is rational. If it worked for them, it should work for us. And in the short term, it often does. You get accepted as legitimate. You don't get rejected for looking like what the category looks like.

But acceptance isn't differentiation. And somewhere in the logic of fitting in, the thing that makes you distinct gets quietly traded away.

Research confirms what most founders feel but can't name: 72% of consumers say brand messages feel more generic than they did five years ago. And 40% of business leaders reject differentiation out of fear—they want to be seen for what the business is, but standing apart feels like a gamble they can't afford to lose. When brands deviate too far from the patterns customers are used to, it can create confusion rather than intrigue. So the fear isn't irrational. But it’s overblown.

Industry gravity doesn't just pull. It punishes the ones who don’t resist it.

AI is accelerating this.

When you use an AI tool to write your website copy or generate brand ideas, what comes back is weighted toward the center of your industry. It has absorbed what already exists in your category and learned what patterns look right. That's the capability—and the trap. When you ask it to help you sound credible, it gives you the average of what credibility already looks like in your space.

The pull that used to require years of passive imitation can now happen in an afternoon.

Not that you can’t use AI, but it is worth knowing before you blindly hit copy.

To add more to this, here's the part that gets complicated (and where I think most conversations about brand differentiation go wrong).

Some patterns exist because they reduce cognitive load. Things like navigation placement, search behavior, how a checkout works, how a service is explained. These conventions developed because humans learned them—across the internet, across industries, across years of repeated use—and now expect them. Fighting them doesn't make you distinctive. It makes the experience harder for the person trying to use it.

And some patterns are industry-specific for the same reason. There are things people used to do manually that digital experiences had to mirror closely enough to feel intuitive. A reservation system needs to feel like the phone call it replaced. A medical records interface needs to reflect the mental model clinicians already carry. Breaking those patterns doesn't signal originality—it creates friction and erodes trust.

The key is understanding why a pattern exists. Because patterns that were built to serve users should be kept until they stop serving users. And some of them already have.

The floppy disk was the save icon for decades. It worked because people knew what a floppy disk was and what it did. Then a generation grew up that had never seen one—and suddenly the icon became an arbitrary symbol that had to be learned rather than recognized. The pattern survived past its reason.

The same thing happens to brand conventions. The Tuscan countryside made sense when Alessi used it, and it still might be doing what it was intended for them. Whether it still makes sense for every Italian brand today is a different question—one most of them never stopped to ask.

This is where brand strategy and UX thinking converge in a way most studios don't fully reckon with. (but we f♥cking do)

In UX, we focus on the end user—understanding their needs, their mental models, their behavior. Not as a snapshot but as a living practice, because behavior changes. Life keeps happening. What people bring to an experience shifts over time. The patterns that served them five years ago might be creating friction now. The only way to know is to stay close to the real person on the other side.

The same discipline applies to brand. The expressive choices—color, typography, tone of voice, the overall feel—are where identity lives. They're also where industry gravity pulls hardest, because they're the most visible and the easiest to copy. But they're not sacred either. They need to be revisited. Not constantly, not reactively—but with intention, and with real understanding of whether they're still doing the work they were built to do.

Nothing is sacred, yet everything has a reason. Your job is to know the reason—and then decide whether it still holds.

Graza didn't succeed because they ignored their industry. They succeeded because they understood it well enough to know exactly what they were trading away—and decided the trade was worth it for the customer they were building for.

That's the work, not rebellion for its own sake, nor differentiation as a brand value. Just the honest, ongoing practice of asking: why does this exist, who does it serve, and is that still true?

Most businesses never ask. Not because they don't care—because nobody built time into the process for it. The patterns are right there. It's fast, it's safe, and it more or less works. Until it doesn't.

The brands that stay distinct are the ones that treat that question as part of the work—not a one-time exercise at launch, but a periodic checkpoint. And we are not suggesting a rebrand! Just a genuine look, done in good faith, at whether the decisions you made still serve the business you've become and the customers you're trying to reach.

At Tropical Year, this is the work that sits underneath everything we do—whether that's a full brand engagement that takes the time it needs, or a faster starting point for a business that needs to move now. Before we design anything, we do the work of understanding why things are the way they are. For your specific business, your specific customers, your specific moment.

Because the most beautiful brand system in the world won't help you if it's built on someone else's gravity.