The Definitive 10 Part Guide to DTC From the Team Behind Pattern Brands & Gin Lane
Introductory note: While this may not be truly definitive, it should be a great starting point on DTC fundamentals, and we hope it spurs a larger conversation within the community.
👇
The eComm explosion of the past decade has created one of the largest entrepreneurial opportunities of any generation. Yet, this still-emerging part of the economy does not have a definitive guidebook for sustainably growing your business within the hyper-challenging and fast-changing landscape we operate within today.
We’d like to help change that! Over the next ten weeks we’re going to be sharing the insights and lessons that we (and over three dozen experts we interviewed exclusively for this) have learned from working within the DTC space over this past decade.
Who We Are
By way of introduction, Pattern Brands is a family of brands with the shared mission of enjoying daily life. Pattern grew out of our branding and design agency Gin Lane, which specialized in bringing to market early-stage consumer startups. Over the past decade, we learned a lot about the DTC sector, and how it helps nascent businesses gain important traction. Over the coming weeks, we’d like to share some of our learnings with you.
After launching over 50 brands to market at Gin Lane, and building our first two brands in-house at Pattern, we’ve additionally started acquiring select home goods companies to bring into the Pattern family.
Our first two acquisitions, GIR & Letterfolk, are great examples of the types of businesses we’re bringing on board; strong home goods brands with great business fundamentals that feature beloved products, well designed and thoughtfully produced, that have fostered vibrant communities. We’re proud to uphold the vision of the founders, and to give them the exits they deserve. If you want to learn about your business joining Pattern, talk to us here.
In short, we’ve launched, built, and bought DTC brands and have a learned a ton along the way.
This Project’s Start
Over the past year, we’ve quietly spoken with over three hundred home goods eComm owners and operators across the U.S.A.
Some to explore the possibility of bringing them onboard, some to collaborate and partner with, and many to just listen and learn from. It was a humbling experience to talk openly with so many great entrepreneurs. It’s been a challenging past two years for us all, and the shared conversations often felt cathartic.
Time and again, we heard a desire from the operators and owners we spoke with to learn more about navigating the ups and downs of running your own physical-goods eComm brand.
How and when do you initiate paid marketing? How do you find a sustainable approach to scaling inventory? What do you think of wholesale vs DTC? And what’s the real deal with Amazon?
Throughout it all, we saw, and continue to see, a need to help evolve the small to medium eComm-owner narrative across America.
We saw an opportunity to not only acquire great American eComm brands, but to help equip a fast growing community of talented operators seeking guidance on how to sustainably grow, and potentially exit, their business.
With all this in mind, we’ve taken the most asked topics from our conversations and condensed them into an ongoing series of short, honest, insightful, and (hopefully) memorable lessons that we’ll be rolling out over the coming months right here, on Medium.
Let’s Get Started 🏁
Get your highlighters out! We’re excited to engage with you; so join the conversation and get started. ✨
Dive into each week’s topics right here:
Week 1: Why Great Brands Make Great Businesses
Week 2: The Power of Community & Why Great Brands Have It
Week 3: Mastering Foundational & Performance Marketing for eCommerce
Week 4: How to Build a Great Product
Week 5: Culture & Values
Week 6: Supply Chain
Week 7: What is DTC, Anyway?
Week 8: Should You Sell on Amazon? (Probably, Yes)
Week 9: Distribution x Retention Marketing Unlocks a Halo Effect
Week 10: The Business of DTC
Lastly, if you are interested in learning more about your business joining Pattern, we’d love to hear from you! 👈
Onward and upward!
Pattern Brands
🏡
