Last month, an intriguing accidental discovery sent us down a rabbit hole determined to chase down a hunch and solve a mystery. The tale began with a misplaced Instagram tag. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As some of you know, we helped Julie Mitchell, Parcel’s founder, design the brand for her newest enterprise, Coco Reformer Pilates, which launched in March 2025. A little over a month ago, an accidental Instagram tag exposed another Coco Reformer Pilates. This one is from the UK and launched in September 2025.
Now obviously, two reformer Pilates studios are bound to share some similar language and structure around their offerings. I can even buy into the fact that both have the same colour palette. Browns and taupes have been very much on-trend. But to have the same name? Especially a name like Coco? That started to raise a flag, since Coco isn’t exactly the first name that springs to mind when you think of Pilates. It’s not a riff on the name of a position, nor is it associated with Pilates in any way. It’s just a random word that Julie came up with because she liked the sound of it. To her, it evoked the joyful spirit she wanted the brand to convey.
So there was that. Then to have what amounts to essentially the same logo design, and the similarities begin to look just a wee bit suspicious. How did this UK studio—the one we’ve taken to calling Déjà Coco—come up with a brand design that in many ways could be a dead ringer for Julie’s? You know where this is going. It’s where all of our minds went. Did AI play a role in its creation? Since Déjà Coco is based in the UK, and not directly competing with Julie’s Coco, she’s not pursuing the matter. But the similarity of its branding has continued to cause some confusion on Instagram, because influencer stories meant to tag Déjà Coco still mistakenly tag Julie’s Coco about twice a week.
We asked a journalist to reach out to Déjà Coco on our behalf, to see if they’d answer a few general questions about their branding process: how they defined their brand vision, strategy and values, came up with their name, what guided their choice of logo, colour palette, typography, imagery/photography styles and overall design system, whether they used AI in their branding, if so, what AI tools they used, and where in the process AI assisted them. If they did use AI, we asked if they had any prior concerns about using it, and, if so, to tell us what they were, and how they’d describe the experience of using AI, including its benefits, downsides, and caveats.
“How did Déjà Coco come up with a brand design that in many ways could be a dead ringer for Julie’s?”
I guess it’s not surprising that we didn’t hear back. So the mystery remains unsolved. While I’m still really curious and would love to know the answer, in a way it doesn’t matter if I don’t know. It’s the questions the story raises that are important, since AI is a tool that makes other people’s work easy to copycat, while simultaneously claiming to ‘detect’ plagiarism. (I wrote about this on my Substack.)
As AI candidly explains, it is only as “smart” as it is because it was trained on (and has ingested) the entirety of publicly recorded human output, which consists of the collective wisdom and creativity of history’s greatest minds, and billions of pages of average, mundane or entirely false information. It has scraped the internet and inhaled everything from philosophical treatises and scientific breakthroughs to Reddit comments, social media posts and spam emails. In other words, it’s a parasite. (Sorry, Claude). While, so far, an enormously helpful, cheerful and affirming parasite. But a parasite, nonetheless.
AI doesn’t “know” how to distinguish the greatest creative minds. It mathematically identifies patterns in how words, concepts and images are used together across all of its data and therefore treats Shakespeare’s plays and a random Reddit post with equal structural weight. By learning from both kinds of sources, it can synthesize concepts in a way that mimics profound insight, which creates the illusion it possesses the wisdom of the ages. While AI doesn’t “copy and paste” a file from a hard drive, it can memorize an aesthetic approach, and if it’s asked to create a Pilates brand for another studio, it will use the exact same approach.
In the case of Déjà Coco, it’s entirely possible, AI told me, that an AI branding tool could have ingested Julie’s Coco branding from the internet and served up a near-identical “copy” to the person responsible for Déjà Coco’s branding. If the UK designer typed a prompt like “Create a modern, high-end Pilates Reformer studio brand” into an AI tool in mid-2025, the AI did not think like a human designer. It engaged in a specific, mechanical process, with three distinct steps: Timeline Alignment, ‘Perfect Fit’ Math, and Mimicking Without Meaning.
“An AI branding tool could have ingested Julie’s Coco branding from the internet and served up a near-identical ‘copy’ to the person responsible for Déjà Coco’s branding.”
By September 2025, Julie’s Coco had been online for six months. If the AI tool used a live-web search, or had an updated 2025 training dataset, its scrapers would have crawled Julie’s studio’s website, Instagram and design portfolios. Then, if Julie’s Coco branding generated good engagement (which it did), and matched modern design trends (which it did), the AI’s algorithm would have identified the specific combination—the exact name, specific typography, exact colour palette and photographic style as the absolute “highest probability answer” to what a successful 2025 Pilates studio would look like. Just as AI mimics Shakespearean language by placing words in a poetic order evoking Shakespearean English, it can also mimic a design system by placing colours and fonts in an aesthetically pleasing order. So, if someone did, indeed, use AI to create Déjà Coco, the AI didn’t know that Julie’s Coco existed as a real Reformer Pilates studio in Toronto. It just saw its data as the perfect pattern to replicate.
To a client walking into the studio whose branding was created using AI (or at least visually mimicking it in certain respects), the directly mimicked elements will look intentional and premium. This apparent “advance”, however, highlights the biggest trap of AI design. Because it relies on existing data, it pulls everything towards the average. It’s incapable of creating a new aesthetic and thus pushing the envelope to create a new, exciting future for design. Only human designers can do that. AI can only regurgitate the most dominant aesthetic patterns of the recent past.
Finally—and this is key for our discussion—because AI generates output based on statistical probability and pattern matching, it can’t distinguish between original creative brilliance, a trending aesthetic, or a copyrighted asset. The overarching takeaway here, then, is that if Déjà Coco did use AI in its branding creation– and I have no way of knowing if it did or didn’t—it raises all kinds of questions about the need to protect your brand in this new era.
If AI didn’t play any role in the creation of Déjà Coco’s brand, and a designer or freelancer built it from scratch, then the story of how we discovered the brand still raises questions about the need to protect yours. And if you decide to forgo hiring a designer and design the brand yourself because you’ve been watching all the TikTok videos showing you how great they can look, and the algorithms are feeding you content asking you, Why pay $5,000 to hire a designer when all you have to do is plug in all your prompts and ‘Presto! You can generate a brand in minutes’, then you still have to know how to protect yours. Finally, if AI is scraping the internet and pulling ideas from existing brands, your DIY brand might not be as unique as you think it is.
“AI can’t distinguish between original creative brilliance, a trending aesthetic, or a copyrighted asset.”
Then there’s the flip side of all this: how do you protect your IP? How do you make sure that you don’t find yourself in a situation where your brand is being copied? If you look at Julie’s Coco and Déjà Coco side-by-side, at first glance, at least to the untrained eye, they both seem quite similar: the logos are extremely close and the colour palettes are indistinguishable. So it’s not a stretch to think that one may be a copycat of the other. But if you look more closely, you’ll see differences. Déjà Coco has more of a homespun, grassroots feel. Its photography is dark and looks like it was taken on someone’s phone. Julie’s Coco, on the other hand, looks brighter and considered. And if you look even closer, particularly at both their Instagrams—here’s Déjà Coco, and here’s Julie’s Coco, you pick up strikingly different tones and subtexts from each. And I’m sure if you visited both studios, you’d pick up different vibes from each.
Which brings me to another massively important thing to remember when you’re building a brand: the user experience and subtext have to support its visual expression. Brand building involves far more than your choice of logo or colour scheme. It involves shaping the emotional and psychological connection you want people to experience with your brand. Which is why it’s so important to define its tone, subtext, and audience (the customers or donors you’re hoping to attract) that you think will respond to those elements. Ultimately, it is your values that will lend your brand personality and make it feel distinct. The good news is those aren’t elements that can be scraped or copied.
