A few days ago, some of our team had the pleasure of chatting with the CIO of a large European brand—large, as in, a little short of €1B in revenue last year. We ended up talking about technological innovation in retail and how the narrative has changed over the previous years—a change that was most definitely accelerated by the sharp increase in OpEx for most brands. The conclusion was that we’re an industry that loves a good playbook.
In the early days of DTC, it was all about technology and arbitrage: most brands back then operated like tech startups, producing immense, complicated codebases to power their shopping experiences. At the same time, they were spending millions of dollars on Facebook ads, all while the industry paid lip service to concepts such as community building and omnichannel marketing. This was our playbook—the one true way to launch and operate a DTC brand.
As for the technology, some of it was needed back then to compensate for the lack of flexible, reliable eCommerce platforms: Shopify was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today, and it was still an immature product in many regards. Still, many brands ended up overengineering their digital products, often for the sole purpose of fueling the egos of their builders.
Enter iOS 14.5, the Big Covid Bubble Deflation, and the fairly predictable increase in competition for ad space and customer eyeballs, and our industry has changed dramatically in the span of a couple of years. What was once seen as a strength—custom technology—is now seen as an irresponsible liability, an old artifact from the previous era of online retail. The new playbook has Shopify and wholesale written all over it. Anything else is a costly distraction.
But what if there’s a better way to build? What if we treated our industry’s best practices as a floor and not a ceiling? What if we came to terms with the fact that there is no playbook, just challenges and opportunities that need weighing?
You should not build your checkout from scratch, unless you have a very good reason to. But sparkling some custom code here and there might make the difference between a run-of-the-mill shopping experience and one your customers will talk about for weeks.
You should not rely on Facebook as the only way to acquire customers. But Facebook might very well be one of your many marketing and distribution channels—along with wholesale, influencers, content marketing, and anywhere else it makes sense for your brand to exist.
Here’s a call to action: every once in a while, dare to try something different—something that doesn’t necessarily make sense for the industry but resonates deeply with your customers. Learn, experiment, and iterate.
That’s how the playbooks were written in the first place.