The strategy behind Dollar Shave Club’s million-view viral video.Casper’s aggressive SEO strategy to stay on top of 550,000+ monthly mattress Google searches.Lesson #4: Ubiquity and virality are crucial for sales of physical products to take off.Dismantling stigma about feminine care and sexual health helps LOLA bond with customers.Hims & Hers wins customers by helping them skip the trip to the doctor’s office or pharmacy.How Winc reverse-engineered the vine production to revitalize its business.The $100M audience that MVMT reinvented the watch for.How Glossier’s skin tone matcher drives online conversions.Warby Parker’s plan to disrupt the $5B eye exam market.Why Casper makes it $100-$200 cheaper to return their mattresses.The 36,000+ subscriber community of obsessives that has fueled Soylent’s growth.Why Bonobos aims for (and hits) 90%+ “great” ratings on all their customer service emails.Lesson #3: Building an end-to-end brand starts with a great customer experience.How Gymshark used influencer marketing to grow a cult-like following among gym-goers.How Bombas pitched its sock business as a mission.How BarkBox grew its customer base to 600,000 on a shoestring.How Soylent built a food replacement that sells like a SaaS product.Why The Honest Company’s Jessica Alba is the best kind of celebrity founder.The blog-first strategy that got Glossier 1.5M potential customers at launch.How Harry’s signed up 100,000 people to a new razor’s email waiting list.Casper’s media company strategy for redefining the mattress brand.Lesson #2: Building an audience quickly is vital for product launch.Cutting out the middleman allows Brooklinen to made luxury goods affordable.Care/of made getting personalized vitamins as easy as taking a quiz.The engineering problem that pushed Bombas to $100M in annual revenue.The pair of shorts that helped Chubbies become a $40M/year business.How BarkBox built a $150M+/year company with one simple box.How Bonobos turned one good pair of pants into a $310M business.The simple, unadorned sneaker that makes Allbirds a $1.7B company.Why rolling back razor evolution got Harry’s 1M customers in 2 years.

How Casper first sold $100M in mattresses by limiting choices.Lesson #1: When it comes to product design, simplicity is the new luxury.We identified 4 broad areas where these companies set themselves apart - in design, how they launch, the customer experience they build, and how they market themselves.īelow, we’ll show you the lessons exemplified by the best D2C companies: In this analysis, we examine how these once-tiny startups have made it big. These companies have figured out how to use Amazon for (partial) distribution of their products or carved out niches away from Amazon‘s marketplace. Of course, in this space, no e-commerce company stands taller than Amazon, and every e-commerce company must factor the company into its growth strategy. Some of these D2C companies, like Soylent, are building entirely new categories of products. These well-positioned startups are competing with some of the biggest retail brands in mattresses, razors, shoes, and more by rethinking not just the product, but the entire retail model.Ĭasper is taking on the mattress industry Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s are taking on the razor industry and LOLA is dismantling the stigma surrounding feminine care and sexual health products. They don’t need to rely on traditional retail stores for exposure. Unlike their traditional retail competitors, D2C brands can experiment with distribution models, from shipping directly to consumers, to partnerships with physical retailers, to opening pop-up shops. This allows D2C companies to sell their products at lower costs than traditional consumer brands, and to maintain end-to-end control over the making, marketing, and distribution of products. Direct-to-consumer (or D2C) companies manufacture and ship their products directly to buyers without relying on traditional stores or other middlemen.

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