It’s Monday, I’m Nithya Sudhir. I collect words, chase patterns, and write about whatever makes me curious.
Less is more
Close your eyes. Remember the 80s.
Power shoulders. Gold buttons. Logos the size of a fist. Shoulder pads that needed their own zip code.
An entire decade of excess by design.
Then somewhere in the 90s, Martin Margiela, Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and Calvin Klein walked in with the opposite instinct. Simple, well-cut, androgynous clothing. A reduced colour palette. Restraint as a statement.
Suddenly, the world was black, white, and grey.
E-commerce reminds me of the 80s, except the excess is quantity, not shoulder pads.
Amazon lists more than 353 million products. Sephora carries nearly 340 brands under one roof. Shein adds up to 3,000 new items a day, and keeps over 600,000 live at any given time. Over 30,000 new consumer products launch every year, most of them chasing shelf space nobody asked for.
I have to confess thought that even the paradox of choice doesn’t really stop me from feeling pampered.
Until, once in a while, a brand shows up with just one product.
And I’m hooked.
It feels like a gush of cold air hitting my face right after I've walked out of a crowded mall in winter.
What is it about single-product brands that makes me feel this calm?
It's Monday. Let's get into it.
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A world of abundance
Let’s talk about the lifecycle of an e-commerce brand. A few years in. The early product worked. Word of mouth did its job. Growth was steady, easy almost.
Then it slows.
A competitor enters the category. A new demographic shows interest. Sales plateau.
The instinctive response is to launch a new variant. Then a new size. Then a new colourway. The cycle repeats until the catalogue has tripled, and nobody can quite explain why.
There's a name for this: SKU proliferation, the pattern of outgrowing a flattening market by adding, rather than refining.
It feels like growth, because more SKUs usually means more shelf space and more chances to be discovered.
But that strategy has a ceiling, and it arrives fast.
The new products stop aligning with what the brand actually stands for. Customers grow confused about its identity. Trust and loyalty decline right along with it.
Researchers studying this pattern call the downstream effect of SKU proliferation, brand dilution.
Which can be a reason why 30% of DTC brands fail in the first year, and 70% by year three.
Superhero to the rescue
Against that backdrop of more, a different kind of brand has quietly proven the opposite works just as well, if not better.
Brands with one product.
Marketers call it a hero product strategy.
Instead of chasing growth through expansion, the brand builds its entire identity around one product, refining it relentlessly while everything else, if anything else exists at all, plays a supporting role.
AG1 is the clearest example.
They started life as Athletic Greens, a daily greens supplement built around a single green powder, sold mostly through subscription, with no second product to point a customer toward.
Since then, AG1 has built a powerhouse brand valued at $1.2 billion, generating an estimated $600 million in annual revenue, with just a single product.
The product has gone through 52 updates in 10 years, which is its own kind of discipline.
The growth came from depth, not breadth.
AG1's CEO, Kat Cole, described the underlying philosophy plainly: "The power in our decisions for years was saying no."
AG1 had every reason to add a second product. It had the brand, the audience, the capital. Instead, it chose 52 updates to one formula. That restraint is the entire strategy, and explains why a single-SKU supplement company is worth $1.2 billion.
One bird, one stone
AG1's growth wasn't an accident. There's real psychology behind why one product outperforms many.
Singularity effect
Did you know that people have the tendency to help a single identified person more than several people experiencing the same need, even when the actual need is identical.
It's driven by affect: we simply feel more for one than we do for many.
We can easily pay close attention to individuals, but that attention loses focus and intensity the moment it's directed at a group, because a group feels psychologically more distant.
Swap "a person in need" for "a product on a shelf," and the exact same wiring kicks in.
A single product gets the full weight of a shopper's attention. It feels specific, considered, almost personal, the way one name means more than a list of names.
Cognitive fluency
According to the processing fluency model, easier-to-process stimuli lead to more favorable attitudes, which means a single, easy-to-grasp product literally feels better to the brain than something complex does.
One product, one decision, one clear story.
Nothing to parse, nothing to compare.
Decision fatigue
Self-control is a finite resource that gets depleted with each act of self-regulation, including every difficult choice a person makes, an idea first identified by psychologist Roy Baumeister.
A shopper comparing forty products is spending willpower before they've even decided whether to buy anything at all, whereas a brand with one product never asks the customer to spend that resource in the first place.
Many marketers point to five to seven options as the sweet spot for human decision-making, enough variety to feel like a choice, not so much that it becomes a chore. Most brands blow past that number before lunch on launch day.
Stack all three together and the picture gets clear: A single product is something a shopper can feel more for, process more easily, and decide on with less effort.
It ‘mattress’ more than you think
Casper figured this out a decade before the term "hero product" was common.
Casper is a sleep brand that launched in 2014 with one mattress, one product, six sizes.
The idea was simple: produce the best mattress possible at an affordable price, sell a single model, and deliver it quickly, for free, with a 100-day trial period.
Within its first month, Casper hit $1 million in revenue.
One mattress meant the company could pour everything, the marketing, the R&D, the customer trust, into a single, specific object.
Casper eventually grew into pillows, sheets, and duvets. They now sell nine mattresses across three lines, the Foams, the Hybrids, and the Maxes, plus a kids' mattress called Snug, and offers a quiz to help customers figure out which one fits them.
Notice how the brand never stopped orbiting the mattress.
Casper's bed-in-a-box model spawned hundreds of imitators. Today there are over 170 DTC mattress brands competing for the category Casper created.
Growth eventually forces every brand to add. What separates Casper from a brand that's diluted itself is whether the new products still answer the original question, or whether they've started asking new ones.
How this works for multi-product DTC brands?
You don't need one product. You need one hero.
A. Find the product your customers already trust most. Let it lead your homepage, your ads, your first welcome email.
B. Audit your catalogue. Ask one question per product: does this still answer the same question your hero answers? If not, it's diluting you, not expanding you.
C. Don't launch new products to fix a sales plateau. When sales slow, the instinct is to add something new. But that pulls attention and resources away from the product that was already winning. Fix the hero first.
D. Keep improving your hero instead of just protecting it. AG1 didn't sit still, it shipped 52 updates in ten years. A better bestseller beats a new SKU.
E. Make every new product deepen trust, not start it over. A new launch should feel like proof customers were right to trust you, not a fresh pitch.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to.
Repeat buyers aren't asking to be surprised, they're asking to be taken care of. A refined version of what already worked feels like the brand listened. A completely new product feels like a risk, like I might lose whatever made the original good in the first place.
While I want choice sometimes, I feel most connected to products a brand has clearly spent years on, the ones I know are being cared for, not just shipped and forgotten.
Do you feel more connected to a brand with one hero product, or one with a wide catalogue?
I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on today's issue.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Apollo
Your next 100 customers are already in Apollo
Find, reach, and close your perfect deals — without juggling five tools or hiring more reps.
Apollo gives you everything you need to build real pipeline, fast. From inbound to outbound, first touch to close.
All in Apollo.
We partner with a select group of brands that we use or admire, allowing this newsletter to remain free and independent. Reach out for your campaign here.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next time,
Nithya
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