Millennials’ Favorite Brands Are Dying or Becoming Boring Companies

Janel Strachan, a 31-year-old New Yorker, loved her Midea air conditioner. Strachan’s techie boyfriend recommended the model, and she soon became a devotee. She liked its convenient, apartment-oriented features. She could easily use an app to turn it on, and its sleek design made it easier for her to see outside. The unit, which first hit the market in 2020, was acclaimed by Wirecutter, the reviews arm of The New York Times, and developed a cult following among a certain type of consumers: Younger adults who like design and quality and have enough disposable income to throw a few hundred dollars at an air AC, and aren’t in a situation where they can afford or finesse a home or apartment with central air. When her parents came to visit her apartment, they were blown away.

In other words, Midea is a very millennial brand. It came with a particular air of being in the know, through both word of mouth and the more rarified reader and viewership of high-profile recommenders, and modernizing a not-so-sexy but very necessary appliance. It’s an aesthetic that has come to define the generation: Appealing packaging, digital word of mouth in all of the right places, and vaguely purpose-driven (the Midea is also known for its energy efficiency). But a few months ago, Midea owners got majorly in their feels amid a big yikes. Around 1.7 million Midea units were recalled due to the risk of potential mold exposure. For Midea devotees, it was a recall heard around TikTok, X, and, yes, even The New York Times. The bad news even managed to reach my friend, who was traveling on a generally unplugged camping expedition in the Sahara Desert.

“To see that it got recalled, it was a big letdown,” Strachan says. “Everyone hates when tech doesn’t work right.”

Of course, an air conditioner filled with mold is an extreme example, but the demographic it’s tailored toward is having its own consumer reckoning. Glossier is at Sephora; Mideas are having holes drilled in them; their dentists can no longer be replaced with flashy online products. Millennials are waking up to the fact that their beloved, cutting-edge, never-done-before brands are just that — brands. The heady days of pastel-toned websites with quirky ad copy are long gone. What once seemed like a permanent move toward a direct, values-centered relationship with consumers has been exposed as a marketing ploy. The era of the trendy millennial brand is over, and the brands that have settled into just boring old retailers have emerged on top — another signpost that millennials have, just maybe, become old and boring.

The rise and fall of the millennial brand

The turnover of generationally-associated trends and brands is nothing new. Throughout the decades, companies that become associated with one age group face struggles as they grow. Dhananjay Nayakankuppam, a marketing professor at the University of Iowa who studies branding, gave the example of whiskey: In the 1950s and 1960s, whiskey was the drink of choice, but within 20 to 25 years, a generational shift led to whiskey falling out of favor. Whiskey supplier Brindiamo said that, from 1970 to 1990, bourbon lost almost 50% of its market share. The younger generation started pivoting toward wine and lighter alcohols as a healthier alternative. When it comes to a specific company, he pointed to the car company Buick, which had struggled to shake its stuffy, older reputation — younger consumers saw it as a grandparent car, and eventually the older generations started to question if the brand was even for them anymore.

Those are the moments when brands can end up stuck between a rock and a hard place, Nayakankuppam said. If they market themselves as still young and cool, that younger and cooler cohort might look around and see that it’s only their grandparents or parents consuming those goods. At the same time, the older audience might worry that the brand is, in fact, not for them anymore.

“If you have brands which get too tightly tied to a particular cohort or a generation as that cohort and generation ages, it can leave the brand high and dry,” Nayakankuppam said.

There are a few things that make a brand quintessentially “millennial.” One of the hallmarks of the era was the direct-to-consumer model. Casper made the mattress shopping process into a seamless box at your doorstep. Warby Parker made it so that you could try on trendy tortoise-shell frames at home. SmileDirectClub would fix your smile with invisible aligners — until it abruptly shut down, leaving some customers high and dry but on the hook for bills.

When these brands decided to move into brick-and-mortar, they tried to make the shopping experience more interactive or immersive. At clothing brand Reformation’s stores, for instance, customers can pick out an outfit “Clueless”-style on a screen, and have items in different sizes and styles magically transport into a dressing room wardrobe. Millennial corridors — trendy downtown areas where shoppers could peruse goods straight from their Instagram ads — began to appear in urban neighborhoods and offered a sleek, fun shopping experience. This wasn’t your childhood mall; stores were showrooms, and the products were the art. Beyond remaking the shelves, millennial brands made you feel good about consuming: You weren’t just buying cloth slippers or hipster glasses; you were also saving the world. They were packaged in pastel fonts and winky innuendos, showing that you were with the times, or at least in on the ironic joke. In a world where the economic odds were stacked against millennials, these brands reasoned, why not make the essentials have a little bit of fun?.

Much like the generation they cater to, these brands have gone through some growing pains. Some were gobbled up by more established companies, others tried to push the limits of their business models and branch out, with varying degrees of success. The least lucky millennial brands shuttered completely or declared bankruptcy, unable to grow beyond their youthful origins and pandemic-fueled booms. Casualties included SmileDirectClub, trendy wine club Winc, cheap consumer staples maker Brandless, and online retailer Jet.com.

Now, though, run-of-the-mill big box retail stores are already shuttering thousands of locations, and it seems like the DTC brands in trendy locations are doing the same — no one is immune from the retail headwinds or the perils of the rapid-fire growth that grew out of the zero interest rate era. Part of that might also be chalked up to millennials’ own life shifts: After all, many fled their urban lives in the thick of the pandemic and headed to the cheaper and more spacious suburbs. They brought some of their favorite urban brands with them, as suburban retail began to boom.

One big marker that has separated the successful millennial brands from the flops has been the use of “integrity” as a brand differentiator. Some companies sold an undistinguished product and relied on cause or purpose as their main distinction. By contrast, others had a “greater good” mentality, but didn’t solely rely on that to make them stand out, Kevin McTigue, a marketing professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business, said. McTigue said that the brands that succeed offer more than just that appealing concept of purpose — they actually have a product that people want. He gave the example of wunderkind Warby Parker, where consumers valued the quality of products first, and then the purpose-based mission as a nice differentiator. For all of the millennial posturing around different values and a different world, they’re remarkably similar to consumers throughout time: They just want something good.

Then, there’s the best-case scenario for millennial brands: shedding the higher aspirations (or hokey claims, depending on who you ask) and doubling down on making a good product. Take Glossier, arguably one of the epitomes of the millennial branding era. The makeup company started in 2014 as an outgrowth of founder Emily Weiss’s Into The Gloss blog. The brand thrived, even launching a gasp physical location in Manhattan in 2018. But this was the millennial cool version of retail. Going to the store was more than just going out to buy makeup: It was a full experience. In its heyday, I would even drag out-of-town visitors there. Glossier’s perfectly pink, just laidback-enough marketing worked its wonders on me, and lots of other devotees: Everyone wanted to be a cool Glossier girl. The store was multiple stories tall and built to be Instagrammed. Instead of just grabbing something off the shelf, the actual product for sale was tucked away and disbursed via workers holding iPads.

Over the past seven years, Glossier has had its own ups and downs, but it’s settled into a familiar rhythm — one that isn’t as sexy as a multi-story, wonderland flagship. Instead, it’s a good makeup brand sold at a national, visible retailer, and at its own stores. Now, I get my Glossier at Sephora, and the brand successfully capitalized on newer trends: Its “You” perfume, as Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos writes, saved Glossier from the proverbial millennial dustbin of irrelevance. That original Glossier store quietly closed in 2020, although another flagship rose back up in downtown Manhattan in 2023.

“What this is suggesting is that you have a small time window of maybe 10, 15 years where you have to somehow get beyond just being a brand of that generation in some sense,” Nayakankuppam said. “You have to become mainstream enough that your appeal goes beyond just that generation.”

While brands like Midea may have followed the branding rules — clearly, it succeeded at marketing to a specific market segment and sold a lot of air conditioners — the recall of its trendy ACs also points to the larger fact that millennials’ sway has shifted in the larger consumer market. No longer is the once trend-setting generation making headlines about the new shoes, glasses, or apparel company it’s minted as a cool new darling. Instead, it’s now relegated to coronating the next sensible home appliance.

Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Business Insider’s economy team.