> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.livain.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Nobody needs another me-too product. Unless you already own the customer. - URL: https://www.livain.com/blog/unless-you-already-own-the-customer/ - Published: 2026-08-11T07:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-11T06:59:59.000Z - Description: An investor asked why a home and living brand would enter a commodity category at all. The case has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with who already owns the buyer. - Author: Remco Livain - Tags: Strategy, E-commerce, Furniture, Growth An investor asked me a good question this week about a home and living brand I look after. We'd been talking about range extension, and he pushed back on one category in particular: it's a me-too market, prices are low, margins are low. Why would we go anywhere near it? He's right about the category. It's the kind of product where a dozen sellers list something visually identical, the specification sheet is nearly the same, and the only visible lever is price. On the product itself, there is no story to tell. The answer I gave him has nothing to do with the product. ### The asset isn't the item, it's the access Everyone who buys our main product is, by definition, in the market for this second one. Same room, same week, often the same delivery. We already know who they are, we already have their attention at the exact moment the need exists, and we already carry the freight to their door. That's not a product advantage. It's an access advantage, and it's the one thing the twelve interchangeable sellers can't copy, because they're all still paying to find the customer we already have. This isn't a new idea, it's just an unfashionable one. Chris Zook and James Allen's work at Bain, [published in HBR](https://hbr.org/2003/12/growth-outside-the-core?ref=livain.com) and built on years of tracking adjacency moves, found that roughly three-quarters of moves into adjacent markets fail — and that the ones that work tend to be built off a genuinely strong core rather than off an attractive-looking new market. [Their summary of the research](https://www.bain.com/insights/growth-outside-core/?ref=livain.com) puts it plainly: the best place to look for an adjacency is inside your strongest existing customers. Which reframes the question. It stops being "is this product differentiated" and becomes "do we already own this buyer, and does serving them again cost us less than it costs everyone else." ### Enter at the top, not at the bottom The second thing I said was where to enter. Not with the cheap version — with the technically demanding one, the powered variant, where the purchasing relationships and the product competence already sit. The basic version still belongs in the range, because a customer choosing between two options wants to see both. But it's range width, not a profit product, and the moment you plan it as a profit product you've talked yourself into the me-too market you were trying to avoid. > In *Blue Ocean Shift*, Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim call these businesses settlers — offerings that compete by making incremental changes to a product or its price, converging with the rest of the industry. Settlers only grow if the industry does. That's the trap of a lookalike category: you can be in it, you just can't build the plan on it. ### Margin lives in the mix The third point is the one that gets lost in every range discussion I've sat in. Nobody buys a line item. They buy a basket. If you judge each product on its own contribution margin, half the things that make a basket work get killed — the accessory, the second unit, the thing that makes the delivery worth scheduling. The question isn't what this product earns. It's what the order earns when this product is in it, minus what the order earned before. That's also why I've stopped trusting channel-level stories about where growth comes from. It's the same failure of resolution that made me [assume we'd spent our way to a revenue increase when we hadn't](https://www.livain.com/blog/the-revenue-climbed-i-assumed-we-spent-our-way-there/), and the same reason a marketplace can look like it's growing when it's really [harvesting demand somebody else built](https://www.livain.com/blog/the-marketplace-didnt-grow-it-harvested/). Aggregate numbers are very comfortable and very often wrong. ### The part most people skip: say out loud what would make you stop I gave him a condition along with the case. If the basket maths doesn't carry the contribution-margin corridor we run this business on, we don't do it. Not "we'll revisit", not "we'll optimise later" — we don't do it. Naming the abort condition before the work starts is the cheapest governance there is. It costs one sentence, and it converts a decision that would otherwise drift into sunk cost into something with an actual exit. And I told him which number I expect to kill it, if anything does. It won't be the purchase price — that's the number everyone examines, because it's the one on the offer sheet. It'll be logistics. In this category volume is the killer: a bulky, low-value item eats its own margin in pallet space and last-mile cost long before purchasing does. Four to six weeks to verify that, with the two people who actually run the buying and the warehouse, then a yes or a no. ### What this looks like from the outside From the outside it reads as "brand adds a boring product". Nothing about it will make a trade headline. Inside, it's a bet that the expensive part of this business — earning the right to be in someone's bedroom for a considered, weeks-long purchase decision, which is [how people actually buy furniture](https://www.livain.com/blog/people-spend-weeks-choosing-a-sofa/) — has already been paid for. Everything that rides on top of that access is cheaper for us than for anyone starting from an ad impression. Differentiate the product where you can. Where you can't, differentiate the distance to the customer. ### Sources & further reading **External** [Growth outside the core](https://hbr.org/2003/12/growth-outside-the-core?ref=livain.com) — Chris Zook and James Allen, Harvard Business Review, on why most adjacency moves fail and which ones don't. [Growth outside the core](https://www.bain.com/insights/growth-outside-core/?ref=livain.com) — Bain & Company's summary of the underlying research. **Related posts** [People spend weeks choosing a sofa. Most furniture brands sell like it's one visit.](https://www.livain.com/blog/people-spend-weeks-choosing-a-sofa/) [We cut the top-of-funnel and the marketplace 'grew.' It was harvesting demand we'd already built.](https://www.livain.com/blog/the-marketplace-didnt-grow-it-harvested/) [The revenue climbed. I assumed we'd spent our way there. We hadn't.](https://www.livain.com/blog/the-revenue-climbed-i-assumed-we-spent-our-way-there/)