Name: The Direct to Consumer Playbook
Rating: 4.1 (51 reviews)
Author: Mike Stevens

What’s in it for me? Discover the inspiring stories of four successful DTC brands.

When it comes to understanding how to set up an e-commerce business, there’s no shortage of resources. For every problem you’re trying to solve, there are dozens of books, YouTube videos, or blog posts ready to help. Whether it’s the best way to take payments or how to set up an Instagram advertising campaign, technical knowledge is everywhere.

But there are other areas less covered in those e-commerce resources. One is how direct-to-consumer brands actually come into being. Another is how founders use their backgrounds and experiences to build their businesses – and how they identify problems that need to be solved and subsequently set up brands to do just that.

These questions are the topic of this Blink. We’ll look at how four direct-to-consumer founders made decisions that propelled their brands into the limelight. But it’s not only what the decisions were that’s important – it’s why they were made, and how they impacted success.

The goal of this Blink is to inspire. It doesn’t matter if your brand is already profitable, or if you’re just starting up. The wisdom contained in the stories of these four brands is universally applicable, and there’s something here for everyone.

In this Blink, you’ll learn

why the most unique brands keep manufacturing in-house;
how some DTC brands are helping in the fight against climate change; and
what a “letterbox bouquet” is.

Staying patient and starting small are two good things to consider when founding a DTC brand.

Meet Jane, the founder of Sugru. She knows better than most that waiting is the name of the DTC game. Her product is an award-winning flexible, silicone glue that sets overnight. Jane herself refers to it as “space-aged rubber,” and its uses are potentially infinite. To name a few, you can repair fraying cables, seal holes in leaky appliances, or even make your shoes more comfortable.

But after coming up with the idea, it took Jane six whole years to bring the product to market. Initially, she’d created what is now known as Sugru to use in her university master’s project. Soon after, she realized the potential it had to help others. An investor also realized this potential after coming across her university project in a British Airways magazine.

With funding in hand, the next six years involved making sure the product was perfect. Along the way, she sought out support from leading silicone experts. She assembled a small team to assist her. These long years comprised an important lesson that other entrepreneurs often forget – before your product hits the market, it needs to be able to do what it’s designed to do. No matter how good your initial idea is, a half-baked product isn’t going to go anywhere. So once you have a product in mind, strap in, be patient, and get ready to play the long game.

That’s precisely what Jane did. And after six years, she was ready to launch Sugru into the world. Her initial sales plan? To license the production and distribution of Sugru to larger companies. After working so hard on her product, you can imagine how upset she was when everyone she approached turned her down. Sugru was simply too innovative, and the companies couldn’t see it fitting into their product lines.

But Jane wasn’t deterred. If she wasn’t allowed to start big, then the only option was to go small. This is where the humility of effective entrepreneurship comes in. For a lot of founders, years of development should be followed by launching a brand with gusto, with the goal to scale up as quickly as possible.

Big launches lead to big costs, however. And with big costs comes high risk – and a higher price of failure. One way to avoid this is by adopting the small mindset. By keeping your startup costs low, you lower your risk of failure. And without a high price of failure hanging over your head, you’ll have more freedom and flexibility to try new things.

This is precisely what Jane decided to do. The year was 2009, and the new e-commerce economy was exploding. So she decided to do it alone. With her remaining investment money, her team transformed their development lab into a Sugru factory. They produced a thousand units, filmed a product explainer video, and designed a simple website. Within six hours of the site launching, all one thousand units were sold.

With wind in their sales (pun intended), Jane’s team moved on to phase two – generating PR buzz by sending out free samples to the press. Sure, most were ignored – but those that landed hit big. The Telegraph published a 10/10 review, and from there the positive PR didn’t stop. In 2010, Time magazine listed Sugru in their top 50 inventions of the year.

Jane’s story illustrates the importance of a slow and steady approach to developing your DTC product. “Good things come to those who wait” is a common saying to most. But when it comes to DTC founders, it can strike a nerve. This is because starting an e-commerce business is often a waiting game of trial and error – of defeat and perseverance.

Every DTC brand should put the needs of the customer first.

Not all DTC products have to be innovative, original inventions. Sometimes, entrepreneurs start out by observing existing products and industries. By doing so, they identify customer pain points that could be fixed by improving an existing product or service.

Entrepreneur Aron Gelbard is obsessed with eliminating customer pain points. His quest began while he was working at consulting giant Bain & Company, where he spent a lot of time measuring customer satisfaction levels across different industries. Looking at customer surveys and other metrics, he identified one industry in particular with continuously low customer satisfaction: flower delivery services.

Don’t underestimate the power of data when it comes to driving your business forward.

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important forms of data that DTC brands can harness – but there are more. When all of your business is conducted online, there are a lot of different kinds of data you can analyze about your customers: how long they spend on a page, their purchasing habits, or how highly they rate products they’ve received.

It was this obsession with collecting and analyzing data that drove the founding team of Graze, a snack subscription service. They weren’t food industry insiders; they were tech heads looking to make an impact. When they presented their business model to others in the industry, they were met with scorn. Some even described it as “bonkers.” After all, sending snacks regularly in the mail had never been done at this scale before. How would they make a profit by shipping small amounts of food with high delivery costs?

When it comes to convincing customers, let your product do the talking.

Graze showed the food industry that it was possible to reinvent the process of consuming snacks. One of the reasons why it worked was that people already love snacks – Graze just revolutionized the process of producing and shipping them.

But what about DTCs that want to convince people to try products they don’t already love? Surely this would be a hopeless business venture. What’s the point of DTC convenience if your customers aren’t already consuming the product to begin with?

Kernaussagen in The Direct to Consumer Playbook

Worum geht es in The Direct to Consumer Playbook?

The Direct to Consumer Playbook (2022) takes a look at how some of the world’s top e-commerce brands got to where they are today. Through a series of inspiring interviews with DTC founders, you’ll discover stories of both failure and success – and be much better placed to build your own DTC company.