It’s a launch phase business
Direct To Customer (D2C) brands are disrupting the retail market, as they have a modern playbook (design, experience, virality and mass communication). In the end traditional brands will buy them.
Samuel Brealey is a marketing expert for small businesses. He thinks that most of D2C brands are about hype. D2C brands rebrand the old terms, coin new names, but not the new concepts. It is the launch phase for the brands today. To succeed they will have to invest in mass retail partners and mass media.
He writes, “DNVB/ D2C is simply a springboard for starters to get started. It’s cheap, sometimes free and you can manage it all by yourself. DNVB/D2C is more about breaking down barriers to entry than it is about competing with global giants.”
Professor of marketing Scott Galloway predicts that D2C mattress brand Casper will have to sell itself to bigger brands such as Walmart or Amazon to survive. Far from hype D2C brands have to work on demand management, e-commerce front end, product design, supply chain, and last mile delivery.
Dig deeper: It has never been easier to launch a new brand. It may be getting harder to build a world-beating one. Link