How to Win in a Red Ocean — An Acne Brand That Sold a Towel, Not Skincare

Almost every market you can think of is already a red ocean: beauty, home, tech, sports, food, fashion, pets. Slice the categories finer and it's still hard to find one where a new brand survives easily. You're competing with conglomerates, celebrity and creator brands, incumbents and imports.

Enter that fight planning to win with a slightly better product and better marketing and you lose. They're bigger and stronger on every dimension. Raising your survival odds requires a completely different approach — ideally one that avoids direct competition. Category creation is that approach.

Start in the Red Ocean Anyway

Lots of competitors means lots of customers already prepared to spend. A new brand's first goal is to pick one problem those customers have and propose a completely different solution, earning agreement from a minority. Satisfying that minority produces the revenue you need to survive to the next stage.

The playbook:

1. Break down the customer problems big brands in the red ocean are solving
2. Pick one and propose a completely different solution
3. Prove your solution addresses it better, and secure early revenue

The Case: Acne as the Problem, a Towel as the Answer

Prefix, which reached over ₩500 million in first-year revenue in the fiercely competitive beauty market, is a useful example.

1. It focused on acne. Beauty customers have many problems — wrinkles, pores, dryness. Prefix chose acne, primarily a younger generation's pain, and the founding brothers had suffered from it for over a decade themselves.

2. It proposed prevention, not treatment. Instead of the cleansers, creams and serums every brand churns out, Prefix offered a face towel. It redefined the root cause of acne as an improperly maintained towel and developed a disposable, pull-out face towel.

Face towels existed before. But a face towel developed to solve acne was Prefix alone. It built a new niche category and became the first brand in it.

Four Moves That Secured Early Customers

A fresh product enables fresh messaging. But novelty alone doesn't generate revenue — you have to plant the expectation that spending on this product might actually solve the customer's acne.

1) Storytelling that made the industry the antagonist. The founders published their decade-long perspective on the website and Instagram. The argument: companies selling premium creams and serums want you to believe you need their products for good skin, but the truth is that preventing skin problems is far more effective than trying to fix them. So they focused on what they call "step zero" — the towel. It resonated strongly with people who had spent heavily on cosmetics and still had acne.

2) It visualized the severity of the problem. The harm an unmaintained towel does to sensitive skin was expressed vividly, with an attention-grabbing intro, visualization of bacteria and expert citations.

3) The brand absorbed the psychological risk. To reduce resistance to an unfamiliar product, it ran an unconditional 60-day refund policy if the product didn't work — the brand carrying the customer's risk as an expression of confidence.

4) A well-designed FAQ answered real doubts.

• Can't I just wash my towel more often? → Bacteria can survive multiple washes, and a towel's coarse texture also harms sensitive skin
• Isn't this creating waste? → The material is biodegradable, and towel laundering itself consumes water, detergent and energy
• Isn't it expensive? → Compared against the cost of a 10-step routine and premium serums, prevention is more fundamental and more reasonable

Prefix's face towel now carries roughly 80,000 reviews at about 4.7 stars, and 85% of customers use it daily through subscription rather than one-off purchase. Having secured survival revenue and trust, the brand expanded to acne-prevention pillowcases and patches for the same audience.

The Summary

Entering with a similar product and similar messaging to established brands is an unwinnable fight. You have to make people grasp a differentiation that requires lengthy explanation, and persuade them that you're "slightly better" than companies with enormous budgets and trust.

Enter the same problem with a completely different solution and message, and the situation changes. A visibly different product catches attention, and your own perspective and evidence do the persuading. You can gather early customers while coexisting with the giants.

Become the only brand for a small group of customers, then expand gradually on the revenue and trust they give you. Survival first, expansion second. The approach sits in the same family as designing scarcity as structure rather than quantity and the moment where domain knowledge rather than scale becomes the asset.