A founder sent me his packaging deck last month and asked one question. What should we add?
Six claims on the front panel. Four flavors launch at once. Three certifications stacked in the corner like merit badges. A tagline, a QR code, and a call-out box for a giveaway.
He wanted my opinion on whether there was room for one more thing.
My answer surprised him. Take five things off first.
A Book I am Reading, And Can’t Stop Thinking About
I heard about a book called Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz, a professor who studies design and behavioral science at the University of Virginia. I haven’t read it cover to cover yet, so consider this less of a review and more of my opening thoughts.
The premise, from what I’ve gathered, is simple and a little humbling. Our brains are wired to solve problems by adding. Faced with something that isn’t working, we reach for more before we consider less.
One story from the book stuck with me even secondhand. The author, Leidy Klotz was building a Lego bridge with his young son. One side was too short, so Klotz reached for a block to add to it. His son got there first and pulled a block off the taller side instead. Same fix. Opposite instinct.
Leidy’s kid hadn’t yet learned that adding is the default move.
Researchers who study this call it accessibility bias.
The additive option comes to mind faster, so we grab it first and often never look for the other one. In one study cited in the book, people asked to improve a travel itinerary overwhelmingly piled on more stops rather than cutting the ones that didn’t belong.
Only a small fraction thought to remove anything at all.
Youngme Moon Also Talked About this in her Brilliant Book Different.
I wrote about this idea once before, in a post about Youngme Moon’s book Different. She describes what she calls reverse brands, companies that win by removing something the category assumes is mandatory. IKEA is the example everyone remembers. Furniture stores assemble your couch and deliver it to your door. IKEA does neither, and somehow that absence became the brand. You leave with flat boxes and an Allen wrench, and you tell your friends about it.
Subtract and Different are making versions of the same argument from different angles. Moon approaches it from a brand strategy perspective. Klotz approaches it from a behavioral science perspective.
Put them together, and you get a real explanation for why so few brands actually do this, even though everyone nods along when you bring it up in a meeting. It isn’t that founders don’t value simplicity. It’s that their brains don’t reach for it first.
Subtracting takes a second, a more deliberate move that most people skip because the additive idea already feels like progress.
What Subtracting Looks Like for a New Brand
Early-stage food and beverage founders are most exposed to this bias because everyone around them tells them to add. Add a flavor to chase a retailer’s request. Add a claim because a competitor has one. Add a channel because a friend says DTC is where the growth is. Add a certification because it feels like it can’t hurt.
It can hurt.
Every addition cost money, shelf clarity, and operational focus, and early-stage brands have the least of all three to spare.
I tell clients that a front panel has one job. Product form, one key benefit, flavor. That’s the frame. When founders try to fit six proof points onto a two-by-three-inch panel, the shopper standing in the aisle for four seconds absorbs none of them. The brand that says one thing clearly beats the brand that says six things quietly, every time.
The same logic applies past the label.
A founder with one SKU that turns over fast in fifty stores is in a stronger position than a founder with six SKUs spread thin across five hundred stores. A brand that owns one channel well builds the operational muscle and cash flow to expand later. A brand that tries retail, DTC, and foodservice at once in year one usually ends up mediocre in all three.
Subtracting isn’t about being small forever.
It’s about finding the one thing you do better than anyone else and having the discipline to let everything else wait its turn.
Three Key Takeaways
Addition feels like progress, even when it isn’t. Our default setting is to solve problems by piling on. A new flavor, a new claim, a new channel, each one feels like forward motion in the moment. Early-stage brands rarely fail because they did too little. They failed because they tried to do too much before they had proven any of it could work.
Focus is a strategy, not a limitation. IKEA didn’t become one of the most recognized furniture brands in the world by doing everything a furniture store does. It became recognizable by refusing to. The brands that carve out real space in a category are usually the ones with the courage to say what they will not do.
Subtracting requires a deliberate second look. The additive idea always shows up first because it’s the one our brain reaches for automatically. Founders who build a habit of asking what to remove, from the packaging, the SKU list, the channel strategy, before asking what to add, make sharper decisions and spend their limited resources on the few things that actually move the business.
I already know what I’m doing with that founder’s packaging deck and his graphics that are too busy, unclear and confusing.
We’re not adding a seventh thing.
We’re trying to find out which five can go.
Read Subtract.
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Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.
