So you got copied. Now what?
What the copying discourse reveals about what a brand actually is
Every few weeks (days?), someone copies someone else’s brand and the internet loses its mind. The timeline goes nuts, takes fly. But the conversation underneath is worth paying attention to, because it reveals something about what we think a brand is.
If someone copies your brand and it works just as well, the visual identity was never the thing doing the work.
Let’s be honest…humans are quite judgy
Think about meeting someone new. You notice what they're wearing, obviously. But that's one data point in a much bigger read. You're clocking how they talk, if they remember your name, how their body language lines up with what they're saying. Do they seem comfortable or are they performing? You're assembling all of it, consciously and unconsciously, into a single gut feeling about this person. You do this in seconds. We all do.
Brands work the same way. Every time someone lands on your website or reads your pitch deck or sees your ad, they’re running that same gut check. Does it feel like it was built by someone who understands their world? Does it feel like it was made for them? Do the people behind it seem real?
A brand is a promise. That’s the oldest definition in the book and it still holds. But to trust a promise, you have to trust whoever’s making it. And that trust comes from whether they feel genuine.
The new baseline for brand authenticity
Polish used to be a decent proxy for genuineness. A clean logo and a website that didn't look like it was built in 2009 used to signal competence. That stuff signaled competence. It signaled someone cared. And because polish was hard to pull off, it actually meant something. The gap between a brand that looked professional and one that didn’t was wide enough to build trust on. Then the gap closed. Today, a two-person startup with Figma and the right AI tools can look indistinguishable from a company doing $50M in revenue. Polish became the baseline, and when the baseline is “everyone looks good,” looking good stops telling you anything useful.
So the gut check adapted. People started reading deeper, past the surface and into the thing that tells you whether a brand is genuinely what it says it is or just wearing the right outfit.
When I launched Off-Menu, another design studio with the same name popped up a few weeks later. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. But over time it became the best illustration of this whole idea. They’ve pivoted their way through every trend, from design subscriptions to AI-native branding, chasing whatever the market is doing that month. Meanwhile, my Off-Menu has meant the same thing since day one. The name is the same but the feeling couldn’t be more different, because for them it’s just a name and for me it’s a point of view. I don’t lose much sleep over it anymore.
You could run the same exercise with Liquid Death. Hand a competitor the full brand guidelines and whatever they produce would look right but feel like a costume. The feeling doesn’t live in the design system. It lives in the accumulated weight of a thousand small decisions that only those specific people would make, informed by their specific sense of humor and their specific read on the world. Copy the output and you miss the source.
The brands that survive getting copied don't flinch. The copy only proves that the thing that made them them was never on the surface to begin with. IMHO, the brands that get rattled by copycats are telling on themselves.
So the next time someone copies a brand and the timeline goes nuts, notice which ones seem unbothered. That tells you more than any brand audit ever will.