Why we will never make a hundred and fifty SKUs

The math of too many.

Walk into any wellness brand that has been around for ten years and you will find a catalogue of 150 SKUs. They will tell you it is "for the customer." It is not. It is for the brand. Each new SKU is a hedge. Against a competitor. Against a category they should have been in. Against the version of themselves they were five years ago. The customer ends up confused. The brand ends up bloated. Quality starts to leak.

The math is brutal. The 150th SKU never gets the attention the 1st one did. The formulator is stretched. The packaging is reused. The story compresses. The brand becomes a category. A category cannot have a voice.

What we chose instead.

We picked 41 products. We will go to 60, maybe 75 over the next five years. We will never get to 150. Each addition has to clear a bar that gets higher every quarter. If we cannot say, plainly, what this product does that no other one in our line already does, we do not make it. If we cannot point to a customer who has been asking for it, we do not make it. If we cannot manufacture it to the same standard as the rest of the line, we do not make it.

That is the rule. It is enforceable. It scales the right way: by saying no.

The other version of this essay.

The other version of this essay is the one where I tell you we will eventually expand. That a luxury brand has to. That category breadth is how you protect the moat. I do not believe any of that. The moat is the editorial standard. The moat is who shows up to write the next batch ticket. The moat is the willingness to stay small.

So: no 150 SKUs. The shelf in the house stays uncluttered. The line stays answerable. We will let other brands compete on quantity. We are going to compete on the willingness to do less, better.

— Julian, on behalf of the house