Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

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Katishi Maake

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Grip Shipping gives a leg up to the DTC food industry

Since its launch in 2022, Grip said it has delivered more than $1 billion worth of perishable goods.

This logistics company is attempting to give a leg up to the DTC food industry

Jeena Sharma

American Giant founder and CEO Bayard Winthrop stands in a cotton field.

American Giant CEO on the state of ‘Made in USA’

In an exclusive chat with Retail Brew, Bayard Winthrop reflects on the growing opportunities in domestic manufacturing and how things have changed since the pandemic.

Alex Vuocolo

Solo Stove, a home and outdoor lifestyle brand within the Solo Brands (NYSE: DTC) portfolio, expands its fire pit accessories ecosystem with Surround, a heat-resistant fire pit enclosure.

Solo Brands’s new CEO says DTC business ‘can be fixed’ 

Two months after his predecessor stepped down, CEO Chris Metz said changes are needed to scale the direct-to-consumer business.

A human avatar and retail store connected by arrows denoting DTC

Vidhi Choudhary

When you think about where direct to consumer (DTC) came from, it started with a simple concept: Anyone could come up with an idea and create their own online store. Then in the mid-2000s, e-commerce platforms like Shopify made it easier for anyone to launch an online store. And social media giants like Facebook (now Meta) gave brands new ways to reach customers directly, and that’s really where this whole world was born.

During the 2000s, DTC was dominated by massive mail order catalogs and late night TV was a wild west of “as seen on TV” products that promised to change lives. The DTC revolution started when disruptors like Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Casper, and Blue Apron showed everyone that slick websites and cheeky ads plastered all over Instagram feeds and subway commutes was a legit business model. These brands mastered the DTC playbook—-cutting out the middleman, slashing prices, and turning customer feedback into product gold.

The 2010s brought the DTC boom with companies like Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper, and Away, proving that DTC could build massive brands by cutting out retailers and going straight to consumers with clever marketing and subscription models.

Today, DTC has evolved from a scrappy alternative into the mainstream (nearly every major brand has some direct sales component) and is an essential part of how all modern brands operate. Even brands like Levi’s have been 

 on their own DTC channels to present a more revamped brand and direction.

The big challenge facing DTC brands today is the rising cost of customer acquisition, two DTC experts told Retail Brew. However, the impact of AI, particularly ChatGPT, on consumer behavior and advertising strategies is potentially going to be one key game-changer for the future of DTC. While DTC isn’t going away, it’s about to get disrupted in interesting ways.

“We’ve seen a lot of shifts, with [the] introduction of Amazon, or with the introduction of now AI,” Jamie Domenici, CMO at Klaviyo—a marketing platform that enables DTC brands to group all their customer data from their website, email, SMS, social media etc in one place—told Retail Brew. “I think [AI] is that next evolution

While the core principles of DTC remain the same—digital-first marketplace, customer acquisition, and building a great brand—Domenici said, with AI democratizing things like ad creation and image generation, having a great product and elevated brand is a no-brainer to stand out from the crowd.

Abir Syed, co-founder of UpCounting, agreed. “The only really fundamental change might be with respect to AI,” Syed told Retail Brew. Particularly if ChatGPT succeeds in integrating product recommendations directly into their platform. Instead of manually researching products on Google and watching reviews, people might just go straight to ChatGPT for buying decisions, Syed added.

“The rise of Open AI or ChatGPT as an advertising platform,” is the kicker, he said.

 working on a major integration that would allow users to shop directly within ChatGPT without ever leaving the chat interface. It’s the same story for everyone in retail from product research to 

Domenici said the companies she works with, from Skims to Summer Fridays, are actively asking themselves: “How am I going to be the first to be ready for what’s coming next?”

The answer, Domenici said, lies in “thinking about operationalizing all of their channels, all their communication touch points, how they’re there, how they’re thinking about them holistically, and driving that engine across everything they do.”

 Seven years ago, when Syed first got into the e-commerce business, “the dream” was to cut out the middleman and go DTC. However, as competition heated up, ad platforms like Meta, Google, and Amazon ended up becoming the new middlemen, Syed explained.

Meta’s most recent earnings show that average price per ad across Instagram and Facebook went up 9% YoY.

“Each brand that got onto the e-comm train, they were willing to sacrifice more and more of that margin to the ad platforms to be able to acquire the customer. And, in theory, you always just regress to that point of breakeven. And that’s where a lot of the brands that I work with these days are at,” Syed said. “They’re struggling to make money happen from purely a ‘direct-to-consumer through Facebook ads’ type of play.”

As digital ad rates have exploded over the past 20 years—going from practically free to supporting entire billion-dollar businesses—brands are shifting back to a more omnichannel approach to avoid being overly dependent on expensive paid advertising.

“Consumer behavior during Covid-19 changed a lot because obviously people weren’t going to stores, purchasing a lot online. I think that now they are because people can go back to stores. I think it’s kind of moving back a little bit in that direction,” Syed said. “So there are some forces that are continuously getting people more and more comfortable with the online purchasing behavior.”

For smaller DTC brands, the advice Syed offered was to stay organic—and it wasn’t food he was referring to. “It’s easiest to start organic on one channel and just do the best job that they can there, and then diversify after they add traction,” he said.

Domenici agreed that it’s “not an easy place” to be a small brand, but she added that “within change, within disruption, there is an opportunity for you to optimize first.”

 With AI making creating ads super easy, the real gold mine for DTC brands becomes actual humans doing their thing—-creators going live, being messy and authentic in real time, Syed added.

“I think that’s still the opportunity to be able to do better if you’re going to focus on the organic side,” Syed said. “When people get more fed up with the inauthenticity of AI—because there will come a point where people just get irritated at how much fake content there is—the respite will be, I think, [shopping] lives, because that is hard for AI [to replicate], and then in-person.”

Meanwhile, Domenici said in-person or online “disruption” will be key to the future.

“This is a place where people who are set up the right way can really jump ahead at the competition and differentiate, but it’s going to be a battle, and it’s a new battleground where you have to think about every channel, every interaction, how you optimize for this new world,” she said. “Your marketing mix will look very different in this new world disruption.”

What’s next for DTC?

AI is the biggest fundamental shift that will change the way DTC brands serve ads and how shoppers shop from DTC.

Solo Brands, the direct-to-consumer maker of outdoor stoves, kayaks, and swimwear, has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after its stock was trading at “‘abnormally low price’ levels,” according to an 

The outdoor equipment brand went public in 2021 amid a wave of IPO activity from buzzy DTC brands such as Warby Parker and Allbirds.

The latter narrowly avoided a similar fate last April, when the NYSE issued a 

 to the sustainable footwear brand that it needed to raise its stock price or risk getting booted from the exchange.

The delisting is only the latest setback for Solo Brands. Earlier this month, the brand warned in a 

 that “our financial condition raises substantial doubt as to our ability to continue as a going concern.” The warning came on the heels of the company incurring a net loss of $113.4 million in 2024, and an accumulated deficit of $228.8 million. Net sales also fell 8.1% over that period.

In addition to a possible debt restructuring, it’s exploring operational improvements such as a reduction in workforce and the closure of select distribution centers.

Interim President and CEO John Larson told shareholders in March that Solo Brands is executing a turnaround plan to return the company to profitability and growth. While former CEO Chris Metz made similar promises to 

 around the same time last year, this latest plan entails overhauling its cost structure, marketing approach, and pricing and promotion strategies, as well as creating a “metric-based culture to track performance in real time.”

The emphasis on metrics and feedback marks a refinement of the brand’s marketing strategy, which came under fire in early 2024 after a high-profile brand partnership with rapper Snoop Dogg failed to boost sales. This led to the ouster of then-CEO John Merris—even as the merits of the campaign are 

“Although the Snoop ads created good brand awareness last year, we are working to better position spend to be more efficient and tied to the outcomes that align closer to our goals,” CFO Laura Coffey said in a recent earnings call.

As Larson noted, marketing is “our single biggest line item of expenditure,” raising the stakes for getting the strategy right.

Solo Brands delisted from the New York Stock Exchange

The delisting comes as efforts to revive the struggling DTC brand continue, but not fast enough for markets.

Solo Brands delisted from the New York Stock Exchange following bankruptcy warning

Andrew Adam Newman

One notable thing about the resale industry is, ironically enough, just how 

 much of it is. It’s especially true with branded resale, as evidenced by brands as prominent as New Balance and Zara 

 e-commerce resale sites in 2024, with more certain to do so in the year ahead.

So let us dust off the pre-loved crystal ball and, with the help of two industry leaders, predict what lies ahead for the next trip around the sun.

New legislation will be a tailwind for resale

 laws that require brands to manufacture items in a way that consumers and repair shops can fix them when they break have passed in 

 as of 2024, including in Oregon and Colorado, and legislation was introduced in 30 total states last year, according to the Public Interest Research Group.

Along with diverting electronic devices from landfills, extending their life also avails them to the resale market, which is why an electronics resale marketplace like Back Market 

 the laws, and is advocating for more states to pass laws in the upcoming year.

Jake Disraeli, co-founder and CEO of Treet, which has launched resale programs for more than 185 brands, pointed to a recently enacted law in California in September that also is apt to boost resale

 requires brands to join producer responsibility organizations, which must develop plans to minimize the amount of clothing that goes to landfills (including through resale programs), with slackers facing steep fees as penalties.

To minimize those fees, sustainability executives inside companies “have more ammo in their back pocket to approach their exec teams about why they should be running resale programs,” Disraeli explained.

Resale will lure consumers from the off-price industry

Terry Boyle, CEO of Trove—a branded resale service whose partners include Patagonia and Carhartt—had an 11-year run at Nordstrom Rack that ended in 2019. And Boyle has a message for his old colleagues in the off-price world: We’re coming for you.

“I predict that the resale industry is going to take a chunk of the off-price industry,” Boyle told Retail Brew.

The forces, Boyle said, are in evidence among Trove’s resale brand partners, who find that between 50% and 60% of customers who purchase resale are new to the brand, and that among those first-timers, as many as 30% purchase new items from the brand within the year.

In retail parlance, those are the kinds of customer acquisition and long-term value (LTV) numbers that make execs weak in the knees. You see where this is going: More value-oriented consumers are getting religion about resale, which in Boyle’s estimation, will divert them from retailers like TJ Maxx.

, brands increasingly are using their resale channel to sell their overstock and returns, which they’d previously sold for literal bargain-basement wholesale prices to off-price retailers, so that could put the screws to off-price retailers on the supply side, too.

Apparel is a relative no-brainer for resale, at least when it comes to shipping, because no matter how sloppily a reseller stuffs a Lululemon hoodie in a mailer bag, one of the arms is not going to bust off.

The same can’t be said for a set of ceramic mugs, of course, but Treet’s Disraeli predicted that more home goods brands will jump on the resale brandwagon in 2025.

In October, a Treet brand partner, Heath Ceramics, 

 its resale program, Pass the Plate, a peer-to-peer resale marketplace, meaning that the brand is confident that seller “Andrea G” will pack her set of two “moonstone and nutmeg” colored 

 carefully when they fetch their $175 asking price.

Disraeli claimed Heath is the first ceramics brand to launch a resale program.

“It’s pretty unheard of,” Disraeli said. “These are very delicate items. Shipping is very expensive.”

But he said Pass the Plate, which even produced a 

 that shows how to pack ceramics like a pro, had a successful launch, and he said he expects more home goods companies to launch resale programs this year, as well as more electronics, toys, and bedding brands.

“We think there’s a lot of potential in a lot of other categories beyond apparel,” Disraeli said.

Boyle is bullish about other categories making inroads with e-commerce, too.

“In terms of the [resale] categories, luggage, handbags and home are super interesting and starting to come online,” Boyle said.

The potential for branded resale could be as vast as retail itself.

“Our pipeline is more full,” Boyle said. “We’re having more conversations across more industries than we’ve ever had.”

A woman taking a picture of her used shirts with her smartphone to sell online.

Resale’s year ahead: New laws and new players could spur growth

Insiders say more housewares, electronics, and toy brands will enter the fray.

Resale’s year ahead: New laws and new players could spur growth 

We asked our reporters, who play so well with others, to choose a favorite story from 2024 by a Retail Brew colleague.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour may have clocked more than $2 billion in ticket sales, but her latest album, 

became a money spinner for a relatively small DTC brand called Popflex this past summer, as Erin Cabrey reported.

Following Swift’s appearance in a YouTube video wearing a Popflex purple skort, the item quickly sold out. In May, Popflex reported a 700% jump in sales, and received over 10,000 pre-orders for the singer’s purple outfit. For Popflex founder and CEO Cassey Ho, a Swiftie no less, the moment was both cathartic, but also chaotic, as dupes of the item started to gain popularity on TikTok.

Ho’s ultimate support came from Swift’s fans.

As more dupes go up, Ho said she’s beginning to see more Swifities support her: “That is strength in numbers. I don’t have that, like, Taylor Swift has that.” Ultimately, Ho said that while the new eyes on the brand won’t change her approach to the business or her designs, she hopes the invisible string between her and Swift’s experiences will have an impact on duping.

This is a story that covers a laundry list of things this retail reporter would love to write about. In one banger of a piece, Erin covers it all—Swiftie things, activewear, virality, dupes, and more importantly, respect for the art—and does so with ease and fluidity.

Swift’s Eras Tour may have ended with the singer tearing up, but this story left this reporter with a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Taylor Swift wore this brand’s $60 activewear skort. Here’s what happened next.

PopFlex pirouette skort, Taylor Swift, PopFlex Intagram

Retail’s Taylor Swift moment

Swifties, lavender skort, virality, and art come together like an almost perfect pop culture moment, in this story by Erin Cabrey.

I wish I wrote that: Retail’s Taylor Swift moment

The trade of used items is as old as commerce itself, with some Neanderthals no doubt doing a brisk business in pre-loved spears, but when it comes to major brands selling their own used items online, chances are you have T-shirts 

ThredUp tracks the brands with the most active resale programs on its 

 list, which is updated monthly, and as of November, the furthest back any on the list go is 2009, when Eileen Fisher (No. 13) launched its resale program; the next oldest brands on the list date back to 2017, when both Patagonia (No. 12) and REI (No. 29) launched their resale programs.

Brands that hopped on the resale bandwagon (brandwagon?) in 2024 account for 18 of the list’s top 100, including Modcloth (No. 7), Zara (No. 8), and New Balance (No. 27).

Befitting an emerging industry, there is not a consensus yet on what to call secondhand items, as Retail Brew 

 this year. “Resale” now seems to have the most currency, beating other descriptive (“used,” “pre-owned,”) and fanciful (“pre-loved”) monikers.

This year, the industry challenged something no less daunting than the tax code, with retail leaders in both the US and Canada arguing that secondhand items should 

. The argument: The products were taxed when first sold; doing so again is double taxation.

Here, according to three resale CEOs, are some other takeaways from 2024:

Even if you weren’t in the retail trade, you’d notice the challenge of returns, as brands increasingly 

Jake Disraeli, co-founder and CEO of Treet, which has launched resale programs for more than 185 brands, said many of them bemoan returned inventory languishing in warehouses, which if they can’t offload to discount retailers like TJ Maxx, they may have to—gulp—pay for their removal.

“It’s been burning a hole in their pocket for a long time,” Disraeli told Retail Brew, referring to returns. “When we talk to brands, one of the first things they tell us is they have pallets of inventory in their warehouses that they don’t know what to do with.”

But by Q4 of this year, thanks to a tool on the Treet platform called 

, about 60% of its partner brands sell not just returns on their resale sites but also overstock and samples.

Among the value of doing so, according to Disraeli, is the likelihood that brands earn a higher margin on the items than they would selling them wholesale to discounters, and bolstering their resale sites, where shoppers find a better selection.

Resale became more integrated with new inventory

The launching of resale e-commerce sites typically herald a company’s entrée into resale, and brands generally have bifurcated the shopping experiences for new items and resale items—the conventional wisdom being that featuring lower-priced resale items on a brand’s main site could in a sense cannibalize it when shoppers opt for the lower-margin secondhand item over the higher-margin new one.

But Terry Boyle, CEO of Trove—a branded resale service whose partners include Canada Goose, Carhartt, and Patagonia—told Retail Brew that 2024 “was the year where we started to see clients test or commit to put resale inventory alongside new inventory and full-price inventory.”

On Patagonia’s main site, for example, there’s an option on product pages above size and color options to click “Shop New” or “Shop Used.”

Boyle understands why brands have resisted integrating new and used inventory.

“People are always worried about cannibalization, and if they put the product next to the new product, people will choose the resale product and not buy the new product,” he said. But he added that, on the contrary, many brands are finding that shoppers are introduced to brands when they buy used items, and often eventually purchase new ones.

“A lot of our clients see such high penetration of new customers,” Boyle said. “That already suggests there’s not a lot of cannibalization here.”

Interest in brick and mortar resale surged

Brett Heffes, CEO and chair of the board of Winmark Corporation—which owns retail resale franchises including Plato’s Closet, Once Upon A Child, Play It Again Sports, and Music Go Round—said the company’s seen “franchise development activity at the highest level it’s been in over 10 years.”

That, said Heffes, means they’ve had more inquiries from would-be franchise holders, more signed agreements, and ultimately more store openings. While Heffes said that “over 90%” of those inquiries are from existing customers at the stores, he also said that buzz around online marketplaces like Poshmark and eBay is driving interest.

“There’s just so much awareness around the industry that once they understand that there’s a business opportunity here, they’re just coming at us in ways that we haven’t seen in a while,” Heffes said.

Young woman taking photos of secondhand clothes for sale in smartphone app.

How resale grew and evolved in 2024

Zara and New Balance entered the fray, and the wall between new and used e-commerce began to fall. 

Year in review: How resale grew and evolved in 2024

Erin Cabrey

 spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click 

Megan Bailey Darmody has spent more than eight years at e-commerce flower and gift company UrbanStems, serving as VP of brand marketing for the last year.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail?

 I’ve always seen myself as a storyteller. My job is to create distinctive stories about brands, products, and experiences that deepen the customer connection and create differentiation from competitors.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile?

 While my role is primarily marketing, communications, and creative, I have always operated with an awareness of logistics, operations, and execution. I see it as both a part of being an empathetic leader and colleague and as a way to move faster. If you are thinking ahead to how the campaign will affect your team, live in your different channels, or land with your customers, you are less likely to be surprised with an unexpected blocker.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on?

 I have very fond memories of bringing our 

 partnership to life. From being in their offices for the big pitch to hand-packing the press mailer and watching the sales come in—we were a young brand at the time taking a big leap. I’m also very proud of how it has evolved years later and become a symbol of our premium positioning.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why?

 Like many e-commerce brands we are incorporating AI into our customer communications and creative work. I’m excited about how this will give us even more touchpoints to tell our story. But maybe even more importantly, we can use this technology to listen to our customers and respond to their needs.

 My husband and I both work remotely and we are big coffee drinkers, so I typically start the day with fresh ground coffee (Lavazza is our go-to) with a touch of almond milk. If I am buying coffee, my order is usually a cold brew with almond milk.

 While this advice was seen as negative to me at the time, it ended up really shaping my career. I had a boss who was pushing me to mirror the personality and tactics of PR professionals he’d encountered and I felt like the approach was very limiting (and maybe a little stereotypical). Not long after, I started expanding my scope into email and social media and evolved from publicity to brand marketing.

What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now?

 At 15, I was probably in the height of my small purse era. Coach was big in my town because we actually had a store and we would beg our moms to let us get the mini shoulder bags. [Now,] I love to cook and do a lot of it with two small kids, so my favorite retail products now are probably things that help it feel fun (my Caraway set or fancy drinkware).

Coworking with Megan Bailey Darmody

She’s VP of brand marketing at UrbanStems.

One sure sign that brands recognize the importance of customer reviews is how aggressively Amazon and Google have 

 companies that sell fake ones. Even more of a premium: Reviews with photos—which, with clothing in particular, can help shoppers visualize how something will look on them when they see a reviewer with a similar body type modeling it—and as a result reduce the likelihood they’ll 

Eight in 10 Americans find photos in product reviews from other customers more helpful than the brand’s product photos, according to 

 from Power Reviews. One-third of Gen Z and about one-fifth of millennials won’t purchase a product online if it has no images or videos from other purchasers, according to the study.

But a new academic study finds that when it comes to clothing, plus-sized consumers, due to “social and cultural stigma,” are less likely than other consumers to leave any reviews, and even less likely to leave reviews with photos.

The study is by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and the University of Washington.

“If you are a plus-size person who is out there in the world, you have probably experienced some form of discrimination,” Uttara Ananthakrishnan, assistant professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon who co-authored the paper, told Retail Brew.

Sometimes that discrimination is triggered when plus-size consumers post product reviews, she continued.

“If someone says, ‘This dress didn’t fit me at all—it was really cute, but it is not designed for a plus-size person,’ the immediate comment that they could receive is, ‘Well go to the gym, maybe it doesn’t fit you because you are too fat,’” Ananthakrishnan said.

More than half (54.4%) of women in the US wear a size 14 or above, while the most common dress size in the country is a size 16, according to 2024 data from 

, an online community that draws on size information from more than 42,000 US women.

To better understand those consumers’ attitudes about posting reviews, the new study analyzes two years of data from 2021 and 2022 from an unnamed (due to a non-disclosure agreement) US-based subscription women’s clothing rental company. Like websites where products are for sale rather than rent, users pick the items based on product pages with reviews, and have an option to return items for another rental if they don’t fit or they dislike them for other reasons.

Dividing users by size—with medium size 6 to 12, and plus above 12—it found plus-sized users were less likely to post reviews at all and even less likely to post reviews with photos. Plus-sized reviewers rented 48.2% of the items that medium-sized users did, meaning that if those plus-sized users were posting proportionately they’d also account for 48.2% of the reviews, but:

Plus-sized users posted 42.8% of the reviews that medium-sized users did.

, plus-sized users posted only 24.8% of the photo reviews that medium-sized users did.

The study also found that products with photo reviews from plus-sized users increase the demand for those products by 10% among other plus-sized users.

So it would behoove retailers to motivate more plus-sized customers to leave reviews with photos, but the question is how?

Platforms should provide anonymity to users, because not doing so “could lead to self-censoring, particularly among users who routinely experience social stigma,” the report stated.

Ananthakrishnan explained that in practice, that anonymity means enabling users to choose a public name that’s not their given name and to not reveal their faces, whether by blurring, cropping, or the time-honored emoji superimposed over the head.

Such anonymizing strategies are the “kinds of things are really helpful and might encourage that safe space,” Kara Richardson Whitely, author of 

Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds

 and the founder and CEO of The Gorgeous Agency, which helps brands reach the plus-sized market, told Retail Brew.

“What I think this study shows is that there are simple ways to help engage this consumer who has been historically left out of the mix,” Richardson Whitely continued. “When it comes to shopping, particularly apparel, there’s been so much trauma in the marketplace for the plus-size person.”

Woman getting dressed in front of a mirror at home.

DTC

What’s next for DTC?

Solo Brands delisted from the New York Stock Exchange following bankruptcy warning

Resale’s year ahead: New laws and new players could spur growth

I wish I wrote that: Retail’s Taylor Swift moment

Year in review: How resale grew and evolved in 2024

Coworking with Megan Bailey Darmody

Why more photo-reviews from plus-sized shoppers boost sales and reduce returns

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know