Founders tend to add to a brand, rarely subtract. Another badge on the packaging, another claim on the label, another color in the palette because someone liked it. Each addition feels justified in isolation. The cumulative effect is a brand that's working harder to be understood than it should have to, and a shopper who won't put in that work.
Simplicity is a trust signal, not a style preference
There's a reason the most confident brands in any category tend to be the visually quietest ones. Simplicity reads as certainty. A brand that states one clear thing, clearly, feels like it knows exactly what it is. A brand trying to communicate seven benefits at once feels like it's compensating, like it's not sure any single one of those things is enough to win on its own. Shoppers pick up on that uncertainty even if they couldn't articulate why.
Cognitive load is a real cost at shelf and online
Every extra element, another line of copy, another certification badge, another competing focal point, adds a small amount of processing time a shopper has to spend to understand what they're looking at. On a shelf, that processing time is measured in fractions of a second, and most brands don't have a fraction of a second to spare against a simpler competitor two inches to the left. Online, it's the difference between a page that converts and one that gets closed after a confused scroll.
Simple doesn't mean minimal effort
The confusion here is worth naming directly: simple is not the same as easy, or cheap, or under-designed. Getting a brand down to one clear idea, expressed with restraint, usually takes more iteration than piling everything on, because it requires deciding what to leave out, which is a much harder editorial call than deciding what to include.
The practical test
If you can't explain what your brand stands for in one sentence a stranger would understand in five seconds, the packaging and the site are almost certainly trying to do that explaining for you, with too many words, too many badges, too many colors. The fix usually isn't a new design. It's a harder look at what actually needs to be there at all.