The Right Way to Steal a Brand
Copying Stripe = bad, Calligraphy class and death metal water = good.
Every brand is stolen from somewhere. The only question is whether you stole from something you love, or something that’s already winning.
In 1972, Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College. He kept auditing exactly one class after that: calligraphy. Serif versus sans serif, the space between letter pairs, what makes a typeface beautiful instead of just legible. None of it had anything to do with electronics. There was no reason for a college dropout obsessed with circuit boards to be sitting in that room.
Ten years later it was the reason the Macintosh had real typography at all, back when a computer meant a terminal and a blinking cursor and nothing else. Every font menu you’ve opened since has a piece of that classroom buried in it.
That’s stealing. Good stealing. There’s a bad kind too, and most software brands are built entirely out of it.
Bad stealing
Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: every brand you admire was stolen from somewhere. Stealing isn’t the sin. Where you steal from is.
Bad stealing looks like this. You’re building a software company and you want it to feel like Stripe. Or Linear. Or whatever won Site of the Day on Dribbble this week. You don’t actually love those brands, not the way you love a band or a film or a place you’ve actually stood. You just think other people will approve of them. So you take the black background, the gradient mesh, the geometric sans, and you call it a brand.
That’s not stealing. That’s photocopying. And there is no honor in stealing what has already been stolen, because Stripe and Linear didn’t come from nowhere either: they were built off muses that had nothing to do with software. Copy them and you’re three degrees removed from an actual idea, wearing a costume everyone in the room already recognizes.
It’s why half of SaaS looks the same. Every one of them stole from the same three sources.
Good stealing
Good stealing looks like what Jobs did with calligraphy. He didn’t take it from another computer company. There wasn’t one worth taking from yet. He took it from a discipline he’d fallen in love with on its own terms, years before he had any use for it, and forced it into a category that had never once been asked to care about beauty.
Mike Cessario did the same thing with water. Water: the most boring category in retail, a straight line of blue bottles and mountain vistas. Dasani, Aquafina, Evian, Fiji. He didn’t study the water aisle. He built Liquid Death out of punk rock, skateboarding, heavy metal, and tattoo culture, the stuff he actually grew up loving with zero commercial angle. A category built on that muse didn’t exist yet. Now it’s a company worth over a billion dollars selling tallboy cans of death metal artwork that happen to contain, still, just water.
We see the same move play out with almost every founder we’ve worked with, and the sheer range of where it comes from is the whole argument.
We had a founder inspired by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, down to a color palette lifted almost literally off her website, for a YouTube thumbnail generation software.
We had a founder inspired by a beach in New Zealand, merged with a Tesla-grade software polish.
My co-founder Corey built his entire brand identity off Childish Gambino’s Atavista.
We’ve had founders steal from Erebor (the Dwarfish Kingdom from the Hobbit).
From a shoe brand.
From Norman Rockwell and the Bauhaus in the same breath.
From the founder's Hajj.
From West Point and 5.11 Tactical.
From Juventus (a Soccer Team)
From a 1980s Porsche ad.
From a laboratory.
From aeronautics.
Not one of those is a software or tech company. That’s the point.
Here’s why it works every time:
muse plus product equals brand. (M + P = B).
The muse has to come from somewhere you already have a pulse for, something you’d defend at a bar at midnight with zero financial stake in the outcome, because that affinity is what keeps you consistent for the three or five or ten years a brand actually takes to compound. And it has to come from outside your own category, because inside your category everyone is drinking from the same well and calling it originality.
There is no honor in stealing what has already been stolen. Steal from what you love. Never steal from who’s winning.
— Zach 🤘
PS, reply and tell me the strangest place you’ve ever stolen a brand from. I collect these.
