Some of the best-performing brands of the last five years would fail an MBA exam on strategy.
Liquid Death sells canned water with a horror-movie aesthetic and outgrew most legacy beverage brands in their first three years. Erewhon turned a grocery store into a clothing brand. Glossier built a billion-dollar company off pink and a vibe. Aimé Leon Dore stitched together New York nostalgia and a Mediterranean dad and now operates one of the most copied wardrobes in menswear.
The strategy decks for these companies, if they exist, are short and probably embarrassing. The vibe is doing the work.
What vibes actually do
A category that has converged on a visual default has also converged on a price ceiling. Every brand in it looks roughly the same. Every brand competes on roughly the same axes. Nobody breaks out because the visual codes are signalling membership in a club where nobody is allowed to charge more.
A brand that arrives with a new aesthetic re-categorises itself. It exits the comparison set. The customer who would not have paid four pounds for canned water at the checkout will pay four pounds for canned water that looks like a heavy-metal album cover, because the comparison set is now "merchandise" not "water". Liquid Death's pricing is not because canned water costs a lot. It is because they moved themselves into a different aisle of the customer's brain.
The vibe is not decoration. The vibe is positioning rendered visually, fast enough that you do not have to read the manifesto to absorb the bet.
Why most B2B cannot pull it off
Vibes work in categories where the purchase is partly identity. Drinking it, wearing it, eating there, being seen with it. The aesthetic is doing public work for the buyer. They are signalling membership in a tribe the brand has manufactured.
Most B2B purchases are not identity. The buyer is signalling competence to a procurement committee. Aesthetic-led positioning, applied here, mostly produces an awkward design system that an enterprise buyer finds suspicious. Cluely is the rare B2B brand that successfully ran an identity play. Most that try fail not because the work was bad but because the category was wrong.
There are exceptions. Developer tools are a B2B category where aesthetic operates as competence signal — Linear, Vercel, Raycast, Arc. Creative software is similar — Figma, Notion, Framer. Anywhere the buyer also identifies as a builder, taste maps onto trust, and a strong aesthetic compounds. Outside those pockets, B2B brands that try to win on vibes alone usually win on niceness instead, which is a much smaller prize.
When to bet on each tool
A short, useful test before commissioning the work.
- Does the buyer carry, wear, eat, or be-seen-with the product? If yes, vibes earn their place. The aesthetic is doing public identity work for them.
- Is the category visually converged? If every existing player looks the same, an aesthetic move is high-leverage. If the category is already aesthetically loud, you need argument, not more noise.
- Are the buyers and the users the same person? If the buyer is an individual choosing for themselves, vibes scale. If the buyer is a committee deciding for someone else, argument scales.
Vibes are not the absence of strategy. They are strategy compressed into a feeling, deployed in categories where the audience reads images faster than sentences.
How vibes scale, or don't
The hard thing about a vibes-led brand is the second act. Liquid Death has to keep being weirder than the increasingly-weird competitors copying its trick. Glossier had to discover that pink could not also be the strategy for a tenth product category. Aimé Leon Dore is a few years away from the moment every retro-Mediterranean reference is exhausted.
The companies that survive the second act either evolve the vibe deliberately, every year, in small visible passes, or they layer a craft and product story underneath the aesthetic before the aesthetic gets copied. The ones that fail are the ones that thought the vibe was the whole company. It rarely is.
For a creative studio briefing a vibes-led project, the right question is not "do we like this aesthetic". The right question is "will the rest of the company still be interesting in three years if we make this aesthetic the front door". If yes, run hard at the visual. If no, the brand needs an argument first and an aesthetic second.