From one brand to two: how we chose OhCrisp.

For most of 2024 we had one brand, one product, and a pretty clear roadmap. Frozili was working. People were sending us photographs of half-eaten tins. We could have spent another year extending the line — more flavors, bigger formats, holiday tins. We chose, instead, to build a second brand from scratch. This is a note on why.

"A brand is a small world. You can't fit two worlds inside one logo."

The argument for staying.

1. Focus. Most consumer brands are killed by trying to do too much, too early.
2. Compounding. Every dollar spent on Frozili is a dollar that doesn't have to be re-earned.
3. Discipline. A second product is the second-most exciting thing in the world. The first is the third one, and so on.

All of these arguments were correct, and we ignored them anyway. Here is why.

The argument for going.

We had decided early that Vitablabla wasn't going to be a candy company. It was going to be a snack house — a small studio that makes self-contained brand worlds, each with its own sensory idea. Frozili is built around the idea of cold and slow. To put a freeze-dried fruit snack inside the Frozili tin would have meant pretending the icy-coffee-candy world also contained a fruit snack. It does not. They are different worlds.

A brand is a small world. You can't fit two worlds inside one logo. So OhCrisp got its own logo, its own palette, its own tone of voice, and — eventually — its own URL.

What changed once we did it.

The studio got more disciplined, not less. Every decision now has to answer the question: which brand world does this belong to? Some ideas turn out to fit neither, and they go on a shelf for a future drop. The shelf is, increasingly, the most interesting place in the studio.

What we'd tell anyone considering it.

1. Don't split until the first brand has its own gravity. If Frozili weren't compounding without us, we'd have killed OhCrisp on day one.
2. Build the parent slowly. Vitablabla is not louder than its brands. It's the studio underneath, and that's the point.
3. Let each world be different. Same studio, different rules.

If you're a founder thinking about a second brand, write to us — we're easy to find. We will probably ask you the same three questions, in order.