A book about the system that once made everyday life feel coherent—and the mechanics that quietly unraveled it.
The Fading Empire of Everyday Things
A structural analysis of how capitalism’s most reliable machine drifted out of alignment
THE PROJECT
This book examines consumer packaged goods as the clearest window into modern capitalism. Not through nostalgia or sentiment, but through the operational logic that built a century of reliable growth—and the incentives that later hollowed it out.
The argument is simple: the system optimized past its own usefulness. Clarity gave way to complexity. Value shifted from usefulness to extraction. Everyday things became symptoms of a deeper structural drift.
WHY NOW
The signals are visible: stalled penetration, fragmented attention, pricing in place of progress, portfolios built for architecture rather than comprehension. These are not category problems. They are structural ones.
This book maps the shift and the path back to coherence.
WHAT THE BOOK PROVIDES
A clear framework for understanding:
how everyday products became casualties of over-optimization
where the system’s incentives diverged from consumer reality
why cultural cohesion eroded as the shelves expanded
what a functioning model of clarity, usefulness, and shared reach looks like now
A rubric for rebuilding growth:
Bet Big on Usability
Simplify at The Center
Rewire to Retail
Commit to Coherence
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Westin Grabow has spent two decades inside the global consumer system, building strategy, innovation, and category architecture for some of the world’s largest brands. The perspective is internal, structural, and focused on how systems behave—not how they are marketed.
FOLLOW THE PROJECT
Updates on publication and related work will be shared here.