DTC goes next level - Part 2
Juanita Neville-Te Rito
Managing Director, Retail Expert, Independent Director, CMInstD, Retail Trend and Media Commentator, Keynote Speaker
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Continuing on from Part 1, we explore those DTC retailers who are smashing it out of the ballpark and nailing retail in an incredible way. They have moved beyond being simply pureplay, bricks and clicks retailers into pioneers of new categories or leaders within their categories by solving customer pain-points in relevant, compelling and engaging ways.
Allbirds
Direct-to-consumer brand Allbirds was built to solve a problem by former All White and Kiwi, Tim Brown.
As a professional athlete: too many logos. He set out to design the simplest pair of shoes he could, at the same time prioritising comfort and environmentally friendly materials.
Tipping the assumption on its head that innovation is always about adding something new, Allbirds saw the opportunity for doing less. The result is shoes made with environmentally friendly materials that are both comfortable and have a simple, clean design with no logos, made from materials like wool, trees and sugarcane
Allbirds have now moved into physical stores as people want to try on shoes … a no-brainer. At the conference, Tim said out loud, "I think what we found is that it's the best marketing dollars we can spend." Whether that means a shopper sees the store and purchases the items at home or finds the website and heads to a store to check it out.
Bonobos
Bonobos effectively designs and sells men's clothing. The store has a specific emphasis on the sale of men's suits, trousers, denim, shirts, shorts, swimwear, outerwear and accessories and started exclusively online in 2007.
In 2012, Bonobos diversified to incorporate physical retail locations with the launch of their “Guideshop.”
The purpose of the Guideshop location was to provide a physical space for men to try on Bonobos prior to e-commerce transactions being placed. Within a year, the concept became an integral part of the firm's service and business model.
How it works
Though you can’t walk out with any merchandise, you can place an order, and have it shipped to you for free just like if you ordered from the Bonobos website. It’s basically a showroom for clothing.
The plus side to the Guideshop is that Bonobos can keep all its sizes, colours, fits and fabrics in stock always for you to try on. There’s only one of each item variation on the showroom floor, but because of that there’s enough room to carry every single item that Bonobos sells at once. The two-floor shop separates formal wear and casual wear, with formal taking the top floor.
Upscale service and appointment-shopping
As soon as you walk into the store, one of Bonobos’ helpful employees (called guides) will appear and explain everything. They will also help you find exactly what you’re looking for, whether it takes 30 minutes, an hour, or however long you need. And once you are finished, the Bonobos guide completes an order on their computer. If the customer did not want to make a purchase, he was still emailed his sizes and a log of everything he tried on.
Bonobos figured that men, who typically shop for clothes twice a year, (one-sixth of the time women typically spend) would appreciate the ease of trying something on, ordering something, and then not having to carry it around with them.
In 2017, Walmart acquired Bonobos for the sum of $310 million as a business to learn from.
Away
Led by two former Warby Parker execs, they’ve done for suitcases what Casper did for mattresses, and, what Warby Parker did for eyewear: made a relatively boring necessity into an enviable statement piece at an affordable price.
With limited edition colours and collaborations with celebs like Karlie Kloss which drives waitlists, plus travel influencers splashing their latest purchases on Instagram, Away generates excitement and everyone wants to join the club.
At this point it’s almost impossible to walk through a major U.S. airport and not spot an Away carry-on gliding past you - all in muted shades of navy, forest green or sand, and steered mostly by America’s biggest travel market: millennials. At $225 for a carry-on, it is a first-time investment (though the company bills it as "first-class luggage at a coach price.") It has a lot going for it beyond the hard shell and four wheels (arguably the industry’s last innovation, which occurred some 30 years ago), like colour options for every mood, zippered mesh dividers that keep clothing from getting wrinkled, and distinct pockets for all your tablets and cables.
Away have entered bricks-and-mortar after experimenting with pop-up stores and collaborations with retailers such as Nordstrom.
Glossier
Glossier is disrupting the beauty industry. If you haven’t heard about Glossier, at one point they had over 10,000 people on their waiting list for a new product.
Glossier was started in 2014 by founder and CEO, Emily Weiss - the brains behind the operation. Emily has turned a humble blog into a digital marketing machine.
In 2010, Weiss launched a blog called Into the Gloss, which demystified a lot of aspects of the beauty industry. Before the current era of YouTube vloggers and the Insta-famous, the beauty industry wasn’t so accessible. Beauty brands lacked the context of real women and real experiences, focusing instead on the illusion of perfection.
Weiss started interviewing celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Karlie Kloss, as well as beauty bosses such as Bobbie Brown, to get a glimpse of their beauty routines and see what was on the “top shelf” of their bathroom cabinets. The blog became extremely popular, reaching over 1.5 million unique visitors since its launch.
Weiss noted that even magazines could not afford to share this kind of intimate information and launched Glossier as a response to the feedback she was receiving on her blog.
Glossier launched at the height of the social media craze. With its social media accounts it was able to listen to what its customers wanted, giving it an edge over larger beauty brands.
Glossier has been described as a “people-powered beauty ecosystem with a five C’s key formula.”
Glossier 5C’s: Consumers, Content, Conversations, Co-creation, Community
Glossier has now moved into bricks-and-mortar with a flagship store in Manhattan and pop-ups all over the place.
Leesa Sleep
Leesa Sleep is a direct-to-consumer online mattress company dedicated to delivering American-made mattresses with a twist.
Alongside recognising that new mattress technology could help people sleep healthier (normalisation of blood circulation, maintaining the correct anatomical position of the body, maintaining the optimal temperature of your body), for the founders and members of the team the business had a goal beyond dollars. They wanted to help those in need. Their strategy is that after every tenth mattress sold the next one is given free of charge to someone who needs it but cannot afford it. To date, the company has donated over 30,000 mattresses and goes head to head with Casper.
Leesa Sleep has now expanded into bricks-and-mortar as well as being the mattress of choice sold throughout West Elm and Pottery Barn stores in the US.
Part 3 will highlight some of the newer movers and shaker DTC disruptors making their mark on the world.
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