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My online shopping starts with a deep Google search and Instagram comment sweep to confirm where I really want to spend. Now, there’s a marketplace that wants to do some of that vetting for me.
Introducing The Verticale, a dropship marketplace for 50 values-driven brands that launched this week. Founder and CEO Jaclyn Grauman described it to Retail Brew as “Net-a-Porter but evolved for the Allbirds generation of consumers.”
- All brands listed on The Verticale have to meet strict values criteria spanning product materials, founder diversity, and community impact.
- Those brand stories are repurposed into on-site content to draw in shoppers—along with e-comm gold standards like free shipping and returns.
Bar = raised. “Candidly, it did take us some time as a team to work through the category definitions and criteria, and yes, we did have to bump brands out of the mix as a result,” Grauman said.
What a brand wants
The Verticale isn’t the first online marketplace targeting extremely online brands and folks with a minor in shopping ethics. So what convinced companies to join this brandwagon?
Missions first. “We've spoken with founders of about 100+ DTC brands,” Grauman told me. “When you ask them to identify the problem with existing retailers you get the same answer every time: the loss of their brand story.”
Measured growth. Veronica Armstrong, CEO of luxury candle brand Isle de Nature, said that The Verticale’s “sustainable and believable customer acquisition and scale-up strategy” drove her interest in the platform. “While The Verticale is not our first marketplace experience, it is one of the newer marketplaces I am most bullish on,” she told Retail Brew.
Nice neighbors. Caraway, a nontoxic cookware brand, sells across nearly a dozen sites. But founder Jordan Nathan told me a DTC focus makes a difference.
- “Many direct-to-consumer brands share the same customer demographic,” he said. “Being able to leverage a marketplace like The Verticale where customers can add all those same products to a single checkout experience is a great opportunity.”
Looking ahead...The Verticale is currently bootstrapped, but investors could come calling. Retail investors are eager to back DTC-driven marketplaces, Modern Retail reports.
But first, The Verticale needs to make shoppers as enthusiastic as its partner brands. Values or no values, that’s a challenge in an era with So. Many. Online. Options.