Brandless

Brandless sold generic products for $3, betting that eliminating brands would eliminate 'brand tax.' SoftBank invested $240M. But consumers discovered that 'brandless' was itself a brand with marketing costs, and $3 pricing couldn't cover logistics and quality. The company never escaped Amazon's gravity—competing on price against the king of cheap is biological suicide. Like an organism competing for the same resources as a much larger predator, Brandless was out-competed before it reached scale.