The story of Casper shows there is no DTC ‘revolution’
For all their trendiness and disruptive rhetoric, most direct-to-consumer brands do nothing new, and ultimately rely on traditional marketing and retail channels to scale and grow.
By Mark Ritson
Of all the many annoyances of the marketing decade that has just passed, no other trend generated more bullshit and overstatement than the concept of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.
Barely a month went by without one bright-eyed team of white-shirted millennials or another springing forth with a hot new startup that had a strange, slightly misspelled name, newsworthy origin and hot new design. Crucially, all of them had a “different model for marketing” too.
Leesa, Lola, Winc, Ayr, Nanit, BarkBox… the names and the categories they aimed to disrupt changed but the DTC model each ascribed to was strikingly similar. Gradually, as the army of casually dressed founders multiplied and their stories piled on top of each other, a model for DTC marketing became apparent.
