Every commodity is a re-engineering opportunity in disguise
"Commodity" is one of the most expensive words in business — not because commodities are cheap, but because the label tells everyone to stop looking.
When an industry calls something a commodity, it's making a quiet claim: that this product has been figured out, that all the meaningful innovation is behind us, that the only remaining game is price. A mattress cover is a mattress cover. A team jersey is a team jersey. A sheer curtain is a sheer curtain. Once that label sticks, capital leaves, talent leaves, and attention leaves — everyone goes off to chase the exciting new thing, and the "commodity" is left to a race to the bottom on cost. And that, precisely, is when it becomes the most interesting thing in the room.
Because "commodity" is almost never a statement about the product. It's a statement about the imagination of the people currently making it. It means no one has re-examined the thing in a long time. The assumptions it's built on have gone unquestioned for so long they've fossilized into "the way it's done." And a market full of unquestioned assumptions, drained of competitors who are actually trying, is not a dead end. It's an open goal.
The label is a description of neglect, not of the product
Think about what has to be true for a product to be a genuine commodity — truly interchangeable, truly optimized, truly a pure price game. It would mean every dimension of the product has been pushed to its limit: performance, cost, the customer experience, the supply chain, all maxed out, nothing left to improve. That's almost never actually the case. What's actually happened is far more mundane: the category got good enough, everyone relaxed, and improvement stopped. "Commodity" is what we call a product that people gave up on, not one that reached perfection.
And the tell is always the same — it's the pile of things everyone in the industry has agreed to accept. The minimum order quantities no one questions. The lead times everyone quotes and no one fixes. The tradeoff everyone treats as a law of nature: you can have breathable or waterproof, sheer or insulating, fast or custom, but never both. Every one of those accepted limits is a fossilized assumption. And a fossilized assumption is just an invitation with the RSVP card still in the envelope.
The pattern, three times
I've now run this play in three completely different "commodity" categories, and the shape is identical every time. You find the thing everyone accepts, you refuse to accept it, and you go re-engineer the product or the system until the accepted limit simply isn't true anymore.
Take mattress encasements. The whole category had "solved" the bed-bug problem the same tired way — with parts from the sewing room. Foam, fabric, Velcro, a flap sewn over the zipper. Everyone reached for the same drawer, which is exactly what a commodity looks like: a shared, unquestioned toolkit and no one asking whether it's the right one. But a fabric-and-Velcro flap has a fatal flaw: you can't see through it. There's no way to verify the zipper pull is actually closed all the way, which leaves the user in doubt and makes real compliance impossible to confirm — and every unverified gap is an opening for bed bugs to get in or out.
The answer didn't come from the sewing room at all. It came from my living room floor, playing Hungry Hippos with my daughter. I was watching the toy hippo's jaw open and snap shut over the marbles, and it clicked: I didn't need a better flap — I needed a device that swallows the zipper. That became our patented Zip N Click closure — an enclosure that snaps over the slider like a mouth and, because it's made of clear plastic, lets you actually see that the pull is fully closed and locked in place, sealing off entry and exit for good. It's an anthropomorphic design, borrowed straight from nature, and it's the core of my zipper patents. The moment I stopped reaching into the industry's drawer and started borrowing from a plastic hippo, the "commodity" became an invention.
The other two ran the same way. Team apparel was a "commodity" ruled by batch and minimums — of course you have to order dozens, of course there's a deadline, that's just how decorated apparel works. So we rebuilt the whole system around an order of one and a store that never closes. Sheer window fabric was a "commodity" where everyone knew a sheer couldn't insulate — so we engineered a weave that does. Same move, three times: the word "commodity" was pointing directly at the opportunity, like a sign that reads nothing to see here nailed over an unlocked door.
None of this required inventing a brand-new category out of thin air. That's the counterintuitive part. The opportunities weren't in some frontier no one had discovered; they were sitting inside old, boring, "solved" markets that everyone had stopped examining. The frontier and the fossil are often the same place — it just depends on whether you're willing to look at a tired category and ask the questions everyone else stopped asking a generation ago.
How to actually look
So when someone tells me a market is a commodity, I don't hear "stay away." I hear "no one competent is paying attention here anymore," which is one of the most attractive things you can say about a market. The practical method follows directly: don't ask what's new and exciting. Ask what's old and accepted. Go find the category everyone has written off, and then interrogate the assumptions the incumbents treat as permanent — the minimums, the tradeoffs, the lead times, the "that's just how it works" answers that no one can quite justify when you press.
Then ask the only question that matters: is that actually true, or is it just old? Most of the time, when you get down to the physics and the economics of it, the limit turns out to be a leftover — a scar from an old process, a habit from an era of different technology, an assumption no one has stress-tested in decades. And the moment you can prove the accepted limit isn't real, you don't have a commodity anymore. You have a product no one else can make, in a market no one else is watching, with incumbents who've forgotten how to fight.
The most valuable real estate in business isn't the shiny new category everyone's crowding into. It's the tired old one everyone's abandoned — mislabeled "commodity," left unlocked, waiting for someone with enough manufacturing knowledge and enough stubbornness to walk in and re-engineer it. I've found three of those doors so far. The world is full of them. Most people just can't see past the sign.