What Rivian, Meta, Equinox, and Chewy Borrowed From Outside Their Own Playbooks

Category competition is a losing game now. Feature parity arrives within a year. Price parity follows close behind. Whatever took three years of R&D to claim a decade ago, rivals copy in a quarter today. The product moat is a puddle.

So the smartest brands of 2026 have stopped trying to win their own categories. They have stopped benchmarking against the competitor down the street. They are doing something more interesting. They are raiding other categories for ideas and importing what they find.
Four examples tell the story.

Meta Borrowed From Fashion

Meta could not sell smart glasses as Meta. Nobody wanted a tech company on their face. Google Glass proved that a decade ago. So Meta did what most tech companies refuse to do. It stopped competing as a tech brand. It partnered with EssilorLuxottica, took a stake in the company, and put the Ray-Ban and Oakley names on the frames. Seven million pairs found customers in 2025. Triple the prior year. Meta did not invent a category. Meta borrowed nearly a century of Ray-Ban cultural equity and let shape, color, and fashion do the work the Meta logo could not.

The smart glasses are not selling because of AI. They are selling because they look like Ray-Bans.

Equinox Borrowed From Medicine

Equinox Hotels was never trying to compete with other hotels in the first place. It is a fitness brand that put rooms in. The real competition is not Marriott or the Four Seasons. It is your doctor. It is your longevity clinic. Circadian lighting in the rooms. Sleep tracking. Functional nutrition on the menu. Recovery data that syncs to your wearable. Six Senses is running a version of the same play. None of this looks like a hotel amenity. It looks like a medical protocol.

The smart hotel brands stopped asking how to upgrade the room. They started asking how to upgrade the guest.

Rivian Borrowed From Hospitality

Rivian looked at the dealership model and decided to import a different playbook. The Four Seasons playbook. Every Rivian owner gets a named Guide with a direct phone number and email. Not a queue. Not a bot. A person. When the truck needs service, a mobile technician drives to the owner’s house. When the owner wants to see a Rivian, they walk into a Space, which the company itself describes as a playground, not a showroom. Kids welcome. Dogs welcome. Coffee bar. No appointment needed. No pressure to buy.

Tesla has quietly gone the other direction. Owners cannot reach a human. The app replaces the person. The parking lot replaces the conversation. Two EV brands. Two bets. Only one is being built like a hospitality brand, and the brand gap between them is widening fast.

Chewy Borrowed From The Neighborhood Pet Store

Chewy runs an online pet supply business. Amazon should have destroyed them. Instead, Chewy looked past Amazon and borrowed from the pet store on the corner. The kind where the owner knows your dog by name. Chewy answers the phone in four seconds, 98 percent of the time, with a real person, and gives agents no time limit on the call. Chewy sends more than a thousand hand-painted pet portraits a week to random loyal customers, unprompted. When a customer loses a pet, Chewy sends flowers and a handwritten card.

That is not e-commerce. That is main-street retail, at digital scale. Chewy owns more than a third of U.S. online pet supply sales. Amazon does not.

The Same Move, Four Times

Each of these brands faced the same problem. Their own category offered no differentiation left to claim. Smart glasses were dead on arrival until fashion rescued them. Hotels have looked roughly alike for twenty years. Car dealerships have been an industry joke for longer than that. Online retailers all ship in the same brown box.

So each brand stopped playing its own game. Meta played fashion. Equinox played medicine. Rivian played hospitality. Chewy played neighborhood pet store. None of them invented what they borrowed. They each imported a fully formed playbook from a category that had already solved a problem theirs could not.

That is the move worth watching in 2026. The brands that still believe they can out-feature and out-price the competitor down the street are fighting a war they already lost. The brands winning are the ones that stopped looking at the competitor and started looking at a different category entirely.

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This article originally appeared in Forbes.

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