The Economics of Boring

Water in a can with a skull on it.

Sardines in an tin on your Instagram feed.

Peanut butter from two lawyers in Wellington.

Chocolate milk with security guards posted at the fridge.

The most exciting brands in consumer goods right now are selling the most boring products imaginable.

Water.

Fish.

Oats.

Nut butter.

Bananas.

Milk.

Not a single one of these companies invented anything.

They didn't create a new category.

They didn't develop proprietary technology.

They didn't solve a formulation problem.

They just made boring things interesting.

And the economics explain exactly why it works.

Proof in the pudding

Two companies. Two of the most boring product categories on the planet.

Two wildly different outcomes from the same playbook.

Liquid Death sells water. That's it. Mountain spring water, originally sourced from Austria, now from US springs, poured into a aluminium ‘tallboy’ with a gold skull logo and the tagline "Murder Your Thirst."

The economics are almost comical. Valuation, $1.4 billion.

The company is in 133,000+ retail stores.

Their first ever marketing video cost $1,500 to make and got 3 million views.

The product is water. Literally just water.

Growth slowed from triple digit to 26% year-on-year, and a drop in valuation so the fizz is levelling off. But that's the point. Even with decelerating growth and a valuation correction, a company selling canned water is still worth somewhere around a billion dollars.

That's the power of the model.

Fishwife sells tinned fish. Sardines, tuna, smoked salmon. The US canned seafood market is worth $2.6 billion. It hadn't been meaningfully touched by a new brand since approximately the 1930s. StarKist and Bumble Bee had zero brand loyalty despite decades of shelf dominance. Founder Becca Millstein called it a "brandless" category.

Fishwife launched in 2020 with colourful illustrated tins and a sustainability story. Revenue went from $750K in 2021 to $2.6 million in 2022 to $7.6 million in 2024. They spent $0 on paid advertising for the first two years. Zero. Their merch line included "Hot girls eat tinned fish" tees that turned customers into walking billboards.

A three-pack of Fishwife albacore tuna retails for $32. The product is canned fish.

Same canned fish your grandma ate.

Neither one changed the product.

Both changed the story.

Water tastes like water. Sardines taste like sardines.

The entire value creation happened at the brand layer.

That's not a coincidence. It's the economics of boring categories. And once you see the structure, you see it everywhere.

Boring Categories = Brand Gold

This is the master class in economic architecture.

Commoditised supply means a massive margin ceiling. Anyone can source water. Anyone can source oats. Anyone can source fish, peanuts, milk, bananas. There are no proprietary ingredients. No licensing fees. No complex supply chains that take years to build. No formulation IP to defend.

That means COGS are rock bottom before you even start.

A can of water costs $0.15-0.20 to produce. A sachet of overnight oats costs cents. A tin of sardines costs $0.80-1.20 to pack. A jar of peanut butter is $1-2 in ingredients.

When your raw materials cost almost nothing, your entire margin is available to invest in brand, distribution, and story. You're not fighting the bill of materials. You're playing with house money.

Fit into this the fact that nobody is loyal to their water brand. Nobody has a favourite fibre supplement. Nobody has an emotional attachment to their canned tuna. Millstein said it herself: StarKist and Bumble Bee had been on shelves for decades with no brand loyalty to speak of.

In most competitive markets, the hardest thing about launching a new brand is breaking existing loyalty. Coca-Cola spent a century building emotional connections. Try launching a cola.

In boring categories, there's no loyalty to break. The emotional slot is empty. You're not fighting an incumbent brand. You're filling a vacuum. The first brand to show up with a compelling story wins because nobody else even tried, all you need is to get it in front of your customer.

When Liquid Death launched, they didn't need to convince retailers to create a water section. The water section already existed. When Fishwife launched, the tinned fish aisle was already there. When Fix & Fogg launched premium peanut butter, peanut butter already had shelf space in every supermarket in New Zealand.

You're not asking for a new aisle. You're not asking for a new category. You're not spending 18 months educating buyers on why this product type should exist.

You're asking for a swap. "Give me one facing where the generic brand used to sit."

That's a different conversation than "Please create space for this new thing you've never heard of." Retailers understand category, consumers the product. All you need to do is give them a reason to pick yours, as long as the product doesn’t fight back.

In categories with real functional differentiation, the product itself creates barriers. You can't just "brand" a better drill. The engineering matters. The performance is measurable. The customer buys on spec.

In boring commodity categories, there's no taste differentiation to defend. No complex formulation to protect. No performance metrics to hit. Water tastes like water. Oats taste like oats. Sardines taste like sardines.

The product is a solved problem. It's been solved for decades, sometimes centuries. All the value creation sits in the brand layer. That's why the margins are insane and why a company selling canned water can be worth $1.4 billion.

NZ Proof

New Zealand has its own textbook examples, and they happened before Liquid Death even existed.

The Milk Mad Country

One Sunday afternoon Peter Cullinane (ex branding at Saatchi & Saatchi) reached for a block of Lurpak in a New Zealand supermarket and thought: why am I, a Kiwi, buying Danish butter in the world's biggest dairy exporting country?

That question became Lewis Road Creamery.

First came the premium butter. Then came the chocolate milk. Cullinane partnered with Whittaker's and the first production run was 1,000 litres.

They were genuinely worried it wouldn't sell.

It sold out immediately.

Demand hit 40,000 litres per week.

The brand hit $4.2 million in chocolate milk sales in the first three months.

Supermarkets rationed it to two bottles per person.

Security guards were stationed at fridges. People resold bottles on TradeMe at 3-4x retail. There were reports of counterfeit chocolate milk.

The product is milk and chocolate.

Two of the most commoditised ingredients in New Zealand. The brand made it a cultural moment. Lewis Road was eventually acquired by Southern Pastures, and the butter is now in Whole Foods across the US.

An ad man saw a boring category with no brand loyalty and thought: I can do something here. That's it. That's the whole playbook.

Peanut butter from Wellington to NASA

Then there are two international corporate lawyer kiwis, expecting their first child, wanting a career change. So they started a premium peanut butter brand. In Wellington. In a category dominated by Pic's and supermarket generics.

Fix & Fogg is now one of the most recognised nut butter brands in the world. They export to the US.

Their peanut butter has literally been to space with NASA.

The product is peanuts, ground up, in a jar.

The COGS on a jar of peanut butter are $1-2 in ingredients. The rest is brand, packaging, story, and distribution. A jar of Fix & Fogg retails for $8-12 depending on the variant. A supermarket generic is $3-4. Same base ingredient.

Same shelf. Completely different economics.

Nobody was emotionally attached to their peanut butter brand.

Nobody.

They walked into an empty emotional category with a strong visual identity, a story about two lawyers who quit to make peanut butter, and a genuinely good product.

That was enough.

All Good, Banana

Bananas are the number one most purchased supermarket product in New Zealand. Kiwis eat 18 kilos per person per year. It is, arguably, the most commoditised fruit on the planet.

In 2010, three founders (one from Phoenix Organics, one from 42 Below) launched All Good Bananas with New Zealand's first Fairtrade and organic certified bananas. People told them nobody would pay $1 more for a bunch of bananas. They sold them out of the back of a car for the first six months.

15 years later, they've sold over 11 million bunches. They've returned $6.6 million to farming families in Ecuador. They're now distributed nationally through T&G.

Same banana. Different story. $1 more per bunch. At scale, that $1 premium on a commodity product built an entire business.

The Next Ones

If you're looking for the next Liquid Death, stop looking at exciting categories. Look at the boring ones. Here's where the brand gap is still wide open.

Fibre

I stole this from My First Million Podcast. Massive health trend. Gut health is everywhere. PepsiCo just paid $1.95 billion for Poppi. The entire functional gut health space is exploding.

But fibre itself? The branding is clinical, geriatric, or invisible. Psyllium husk comes in medical-looking packaging. Fibre gummies look like they belong in a pharmacy. The supplements aisle treats fibre like medicine, not a lifestyle product.

The COGS on psyllium husk, inulin, or fibre gummies are rock bottom. Nobody has made fibre cool yet. Nobody has done to Metamucil what Liquid Death did to Dasani. The brand gap is enormous. Whoever Liquid Deaths the fibre category is sitting on a goldmine.

Electrolytes and hydration powders

Liquid IV got acquired by Unilever for $500 million. Their product is salt, potassium, magnesium, citric acid, and flavouring. The powder costs almost nothing to make. The margins are extraordinary.

In New Zealand, MNRL is having a go at it. Clean, sugar-free, handcrafted positioning. In the US, LMNT built a massive brand around the same basic formula. The category is exploding globally but still has room for regional brands with sharp positioning.

The economics are the same as water. Commoditised ingredients, massive markup, habitual consumption pattern, zero brand loyalty in the existing category. Powerade and Gatorade own the shelf but not the heart. The challenger brands keep winning because the ingredients cost cents and the brand is everything.

Protein overnight oats

Oats Overnight in the US has raised $125 million. They sell sachets of oats mixed with protein powder and chia seeds for $3-4 each. The COGS on a sachet is cents. Rolled oats, a scoop of whey, chia seeds, flavouring.

The product is overnight oats. Something millions of people already make at home for about $0.30 a serving. The convenience plus protein positioning turns a $0.30 ingredient base into a $4 product. That's a 13x markup on a product that is, fundamentally, oats.

In New Zealand, NZ Protein has PR-Oats doing a version of this. Good Mornings is another. But nobody has built the brand around it yet. The category is screaming for someone to take boring overnight oats and give them a Fix & Fogg treatment. Premium packaging, a story, a reason to pick it off the shelf instead of mixing your own.

Cleaning products

The most ignored aisle in the supermarket. Commoditised supply, zero brand loyalty, habitual purchase frequency, razor thin product differentiation. When was the last time you felt something about your dish soap?

Method and Mrs Meyer's cracked this open a decade ago by making cleaning products look good on your countertop. But they barely scratched the surface. The category is still dominated by brands nobody cares about.

Somebody will Liquid Death the cleaning aisle. Make it fun, make it look good, charge a premium for identical chemistry in better packaging with a sharper story. The COGS on dish soap, surface spray, and laundry detergent are laughably low. The active ingredients are largely the same across brands. The only thing separating a $3 bottle from a $9 bottle is the label and the story about what's not in it. The economics are all there. The brand isn't.

When It Breaks

Not every boring category is an opportunity. Some things are boring because nobody cares enough to buy them at all.

The playbook works when four conditions are true:

The product is genuinely commoditised. No real functional differentiation between brands. Water is water. Oats are oats. Sardines are sardines.

The purchase is habitual. People buy it regularly. Water, oats, bananas, cleaning products. You need repeat purchase behaviour to build a brand that sticks.

Existing brands have no emotional connection. Nobody loves their current option. They just buy whatever is there.

The product has cultural surface area. This is the filter most people miss. Would someone post your product on Instagram? Would they talk about it at dinner? Liquid Death works because water is a social act. Fishwife works because food is a social act. Tinned fish on a charcuterie board is content. Lewis Road chocolate milk was a cultural moment.

Some boring products are boring because nobody wants to think about them, talk about them, or display them. Nobody's posting their toilet paper on Instagram. Nobody's building a community around drain cleaner. The product needs to be boring enough that no brand exists, but interesting enough that a brand could exist.

The filter: if nobody would ever post it, share it, or put it on their countertop, it might just be boring for a reason.

So What.

The best brand opportunities aren't in exciting categories with complex products and fierce competition. They're in the aisle nobody looks at.

Low COGS. No brand loyalty to fight. Established shelf space. A product that's been solved for decades.

Lewis Road proved it with milk. Fix & Fogg proved it with peanut butter. All Good proved it with bananas. Liquid Death proved it with water. Fishwife proved it with sardines.

All of them walked into a category where nobody cared, built a brand where one didn't exist, and charged a premium for the exact same product with a better story.

If you're looking for an opportunity, stop scrolling through the exciting categories with complex products and VC-backed competition everywhere you look. Get off YC batch list and tech crunch.

Walk into a supermarket. Find the aisle where every brand looks the same. Where nobody cares. Where the packaging is ugly, the stories are non-existent, and the products are identical.

That's where the money is.

Shout out to all the legends I've ripped info from for this piece:

Tap Twice Digital | Sacra | Fortune | Food Dive | The Spinoff | Wikipedia | The Marketing Society | NZ Business | T&G Global | MNRL | Retail Dive | Prime Unicorn Index | Shopify | PitchBook