Direct to Consumer
In 2010, four Wharton students put in thirty thousand dollars each and started Warby Parker, the eyeglasses company. The spark: one of them lost a $700 pair on a trip and, unable to afford replacing them, went a whole term of graduate school without glasses. Cutting out wholesaler and shop, they delivered directly at $95, and were later called «the godfather of direct-to-consumer». Through the 2010s the model spread from mattresses to suitcases, and a toolbox called Shopify let individuals open shops of their own. The ebb gets written honestly too: Casper, the mattress company, fell from a $1.1 billion private valuation to a $378 million market cap at its 2020 listing, and went private the next year. As long as you deliver direct, the shipping and the advertising are yours to pay — that unglamorous truth is what the wave left behind.
The myth, corrected
D2C is a new invention of the internet age
The D2C industry itself writes that «this is less a novelty than a return». Selling direct without a shop is, on this map, preceded by the mail-order catalog of 1872 — Montgomery Ward's single sheet was doing the same thing 150 years earlier. The post was swapped for the network; the industry's own self-description says as much.