Curation Without a Point of View Is Just a Catalog

Published 2020-06-15 · Updated 2026-06-23 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: Consumer Goods, Performance Marketing, E-commerce, Product Strategy & Development, Digital Marketing, Beauty & Wellness

The thing that makes a curated brand valuable is surprisingly easy to misidentify, and I think most people who run them misidentify it at least once. The assumption is that the value lives in the selection, the specific set of products on offer, the assortment itself, and it does not live there at all. Selection is the output, the visible residue of something else (the trail, not the thing that made it), and the actual asset is the opinion sitting behind it – a trusted point of view that quietly tells a customer this was chosen, by someone whose taste I happen to follow, for an actual reason. Strip the opinion out of it and you no longer have curation at all. You have a catalog with a nicer font and better photography, which is to say you have what everyone else already has.

goop is, at its best, a curation business. It earned its audience by holding a genuine, specific point of view about beauty and wellness and style, a voice opinionated enough that people actively wanted to know what it thought before they decided what they thought. When I looked closely at the digital experience, though, I saw something that happens to nearly every successful curated brand as it grows, and it is subtle enough to miss for a long time: the selection had steadily expanded while the opinion had quietly thinned. Everything was still expertly curated, I want to be fair about that. It was also, increasingly, just a great many things, assembled with real skill but no longer carrying the strong point of view that had made the curation matter in the first place. Here is the mechanism, because it is genuinely worth understanding how a brand loses its opinion without ever once deciding to lose it. You do not lose it in a single bad call that you could point to afterward. You lose it one reasonable revenue decision at a time. A new category looks like growth, so you add it. A partnership arrives with real revenue attached to it, so you take it. Each addition is perfectly defensible on a spreadsheet, and each one asks the brand to have an opinion about something a little further from its actual core conviction, until one day you are presenting things that were chosen because they would sell rather than because the brand genuinely believes in them. The customer cannot always articulate what changed – they rarely can – but they feel it all the same, and the voice that used to feel like a trusted friend with great taste starts to feel, subtly, like a store.

The reason this is so dangerous, rather than merely a shame, is that selection is commoditized now and opinion is not. Anyone can assemble a good-looking assortment today; the tools and the supply and the photography are available to everyone with a budget. What cannot be copied, what no competitor can simply buy, is a point of view that a specific audience has come to trust over years, and that trust is the entire moat. So when you dilute the opinion in order to broaden the selection, you are trading away the one genuinely defensible thing you have for the one thing that everyone else already possesses, and it feels like growth while it is actually erosion – just slow enough that the quarterly numbers never quite flag it for you. The discipline that protects against this is genuinely uncomfortable, because it means leaving money on the table on purpose, repeatedly, while people who do not understand the moat ask you why. Curation is editing, and editing, at its heart, is mostly about what you choose to leave out. A real point of view requires saying no to categories you could profitably enter, partnerships you could profitably accept, and individual products that would sell perfectly well but simply do not belong, because they would each cost you a small amount of the conviction that makes everything else you offer worth more. The hardest word for a growing curated brand to say is no to good revenue, and it is precisely the word that keeps the brand worth following in the first place.

There is a tension here I want to be honest about, because "just keep your pure point of view" is easy to say from a stage and naive in actual practice. Businesses have to grow, and a brand that flatly refuses to ever expand its opinion will eventually become a museum of its own past taste, admired and irrelevant. So the answer is not to freeze. It is to expand the point of view deliberately, to enter new territory because the brand has genuinely developed a conviction worth sharing there, and not simply because the category happened to carry a good margin. The test for any addition is not whether it will sell – almost anything will sell with enough placement and budget behind it. The test is whether the brand actually has an opinion about it worth a customer's trust, and that is a harder and far more useful question to sit with. Growth that extends the point of view strengthens the brand. Growth that borrows against the point of view to hit a number weakens it, even when the number on the slide looks great that quarter.

This generalizes well past wellness and fashion, which is part of why I keep returning to it. Any business built on trusted judgment – a publication, a shop, an advisor, a brand of nearly any kind – faces the same slow pressure to convert that hard-won trust into broader revenue, and the same quiet risk that doing it carelessly spends the trust faster than the revenue can ever replace it. The audience came for the judgment. The moment the judgment starts to look like it is for sale, the thing they actually came for is gone, and the catalog left behind has to compete on price and selection like everyone else, which is the one fight a curated brand was built specifically to avoid. So the question I would put to any curated brand chasing its next category is not whether it can sell the thing, because that question almost always answers itself. The question is whether the brand has something real and trusted to say about it. If it does, expand with conviction and do not apologize for the margin. If it does not, then you are not curating anymore; you are just adding inventory and quietly hoping nobody notices the opinion has gone. They notice.