Millennials Killed Cracker Barrel. HEAR ME OUT.

This take isn’t in isolation. I’ve heard professionals from music, TV, and fashion describe the same effect, and I think it explains what we’re seeing in branding and advertising too.

To understand it, we have to go back to the Great Recession. Millennials famously came out of school and into the job market just as the 2008 crash hit. Layoffs and budget cuts gutted marketing departments first — because at the end of the day, marketing is vibes-based and not “mission-critical.” When hiring picked back up, who was cheapest? Millennials. My first salary was $35K, and I felt like I won the lottery.

So there was an influx of young, cheap labor into creative departments. But the financial side is only half the story. The other half is technology: smartphones and social media.

In 2007, the iPhone launched. A slow burn at first, but it quickly became clear (thanks, Amazon) that e-commerce was going mobile. Who adopted smartphones fastest and integrated them into buying habits? Millennials.

In 2008, Obama won the “Facebook election.” That campaign proved the grassroots power of social media back when it was free of algorithms. And who knew how to use Facebook? All those cheap, freaky Millennials looking for work.

So two dynamics collided: companies right-sizing budgets and scrambling to scale into new marketing platforms. Execs didn’t know how or why to use these tools — they just knew they had to. And the 20-somethings at the table were the experts.

Marketing departments were full of Millennials, running wild on company accounts. Remember the Oreo “Dunk in the Dark” Super Bowl post? That was the era. It was fun.

But we weren’t just posting. We were also in the web meetings — what we now call UX/UI. The early web was clunky, ugly, and tacky compared to in-store retail. After the dot-com bust, there was resistance to putting serious weight behind online strategy. Meanwhile, the tech giants — then minnows — were moving fast: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix. Corporate brands were chasing them, and we Millennials were the ones tasked with making them look digital-ready.

That meant redesigning logos, rethinking typefaces, streamlining layouts, creating consistency across catalogs, websites, and retail spaces. The digital era ate every part of marketing.

And who was doing it? Cheap, young, freaky Millennials. Which brings us to Cracker Barrel.

What’s wrong with the original Cracker Barrel logo? The same thing wrong with most 20th-century logos: it’s a usage catastrophe. It doesn’t fit in a favicon. It’s not legible on a mobile header. It’s cluttered. It pulls attention away from the product, the email, the “buy now” button.

Over the past 20 years, in pitch after pitch, we choreographed the same dance: if you want to scale into digital markets, your brand has to be simplified. That’s why Millennials recoil at messy 90s aesthetics. We grew up in that clutter, then spent our early careers dismantling it. We built the clean, functional, crisp aesthetic that dominates today. Why do we love grey? Because neutral palettes make the one thing you want seen — the button, the scarf — pop.

Fast forward to 2025. We’re not the cheap kids anymore. We’re leading the teams. We’re the ones telling the next generation: make it fresh, but make it work across platforms. We’re the sensible heads balancing customers and shareholders. We’re the captains now.

That’s why stores are full of Y2K-era fashion — it’s what Millennials remember as cool. That’s why pop music sounds like it did 20 years ago — it’s what we still like. And that’s why brands go minimal — because that’s the aesthetic we built.

I’m not defending Cracker Barrel’s rebrand, and I don’t care to comment on their walk-back. I’m just saying it makes sense.

Is it time for the minimal Millennial brand aesthetic to turn over? Probably. But was it our choice to begin with? Not really. It was born of necessity, a response to forces bigger than us.

What’s sad to me now isn’t the loss of unique brand identities. It’s the loss of talent we’ll see in the AI era. When companies take the wrong lessons from episodes like Cracker Barrel or Bud Light. When they decide they don’t need to hire young, hungry, freaky kids anymore.

Who’s going to respond to today’s challenges and create tomorrow’s aesthetic?

Who’s going to be there in 15 years to sign off on the logo and ask the kids to redesign the world?