Direct-to-Consumer Brands: All You Need to Know (With 35 DTC Examples)

If your Instagram feed is full of ads for things like denim jeans, linen bedsheets and artisanal snacks staged in front of pastel-colored backdrops, then you’re familiar with direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.

Unlike so many brands of the past, DTC brands sell products directly to end users through their own e-commerce sites, cutting department stores and marketplaces out of the traditional retail process. Their marketing is often spotted on social media, subway platforms and podcasts.

What Is a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Brand?

Direct-to-consumer brands sell directly to customers online, bypassing the “middlemen” of wholesalers and retailers. This allows them to control the user experience, collect first-party shopper data and increase margins. DTC brand examples include Allbirds, Casper and Warby Parker.

DTC Brand Definition

Technically, the term direct-to-consumer describes a sales channel rather than a type of company — and it’s not even a new sales channel at that — but colloquially, DTC brands refer to companies that sell their own products exclusively or primarily through their own e-commerce shops.

Depending on who you talk to, the definition may be more specific than that. When Camille Baldwin, a brand strategist and entrepreneur who helped launch dozens of brands, thinks of the moniker “DTC,” she pictures companies that sell products online “using emotionally aspirational storytelling hyper-targeted to [consumers] through social ads with the goal of maximizing growth to return their venture-backed investment.”

“Now, that’s a very particular flavor of DTC,” she added. “I guess the short of it is: DTC is … a brand selling their goods under their own brand name, rather than the name of a retailer, like a department store.”

But since many so-called DTC brands now sell their products in third-party retail stores, while several legacy brands sell directly to consumers online now too, DTC is an imprecise label for the sort of brands we’re describing.

Some people prefer the term “digitally native brands” instead. And others are content calling them “Instagram brands,” according to Mark Johnson, director of internal brands at Boomn, an agency that operates a portfolio of DTC brands. Ultimately, he said, “it’s all semantics.”

More on Direct-to-Consumer BrandsThe DTC Party’s Over. What Happens Next?

DTC Brand History

Around the late 2000s to early 2010s, upstart brands in hyper-focused categories like Warby Parker, Everlane, Dollar Shave Club and Bonobos sprung up online to take advantage of the unprecedented access the internet gave them to customers.

Before, when brands sold their products through department stores, it was the department stores that had the relationships with customers — not the brands. So once brands were able to set up their own e-commerce sites and acquire their own customers through social ads, they could bypass the traditional “middlemen.”

Another big part of what differentiated DTC brands from incumbent retailers was their emphasis on providing premium customer experiences, Johnson said.

That often meant quick-to-respond customer support, personalized emails and delightful unboxing experiences with Instagrammable packaging. That’s all become table stakes for modern direct-to-consumer brands. But a decade ago, it was enough to cause waves.

DTC Brand Examples

Allbirds
Away
Casper
Dollar Shave Club
Glossier
Harry’s
Hims & Hers
Rent the Runway
Stitch Fix
Warby Parker

DTC Brand Strategy

Going direct to the consumer gives brands a couple of key advantages.

First, DTC leads to better margins. At least in theory. By selling straight to customers through their websites — rather than selling to physical retailers at reduced wholesale prices — these brands save money, which allows them to spend a little extra on superior customer experience.

Second, DTC allows brands to collect customer data. By selling directly to individual consumers, they get access to information like email addresses and shopping preferences — data which they can use to encourage repeat purchases, fine-tune marketing and inform product decisions.

Direct-to-consumer brands experience challenges though. They have to go out and acquire customers themselves, rather than relying on the foot traffic places like Target, Walmart and Amazon bring in (which helps explain why most DTC brands eventually partner with such places).

In the early era of DTC brands, it was cheap and efficient to get customers through advertising on social media channels — Facebook and Instagram specifically. But in recent years, the cost of acquiring customers through social media has skyrocketed. So brands that previously relied on running paid ads on those channels are now forced to experiment with other tactics.

Top DTC Brands to Know

Whatever you want to call these brands, there’s no denying that they’ve disrupted and defined the past decade of retail. Here are some notable examples.