The New Model for Building DTC Brands

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A new generation of direct-to-consumer brands like Topicals and Parade are finding success with a powerful community-based approach to marketing.

In a fashion and beauty market packed with look-alike labels, a new generation of digitally native direct-to-consumer brands are adopting a new playbook, pushing bolder messages and aesthetics starting with their key differentiator: community. Skincare brand Topicals and lingerie label Parade have turned celebrating their customers’ skin issues and body shapes that don’t conform to traditional ideals of beauty into a powerful and authentic marketing centrepiece.

In this episode of the BoF Podcast, Topicals’ co-founders Olamide Olowe and Claudia Teng and Parade’s co-founder and chief executive Cami Téllez speak with BoF senior editorial associate Alexandra Mondalek on the power of community and the new direct-to-consumer model.

The new generation of community-focused DTC brands are abandoning the increasingly standardised marketing playbook that has resulted in a proliferation of identical-looking “blands.” Instead, they’re finding new ways to identify with their customer base. “We now know that branding is about creatively finding where [the customer] is and centring around reintroducing the customer to self-expression,” Téllez explains.
Consumers particularly respond to products that speak to their issues in a way that’s relatable and fun. Digitally native brands have often made the consumer experience “quite sterile and bland and their product experience was lacklustre,” says Topicals’ Olowe. Instead Topicals is “celebrating the fun of flare ups.”
Authenticity is key to building community with the new generation of DTC brands utilising their founders’ stories to speak about their products as customers too. Topicals brings “a different perspective to the way that people experience the beauty community… [and] speaking authentically with our community in a different kind of way,” Teng says.

The New 4 Ps of DTC Marketing

How Not to Be a Boring Direct-to-Consumer Brand

The New Rules of Going DTC

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion.
0:06.6	Welcome to the B.OF podcast.
0:08.6	Around the time of the Great Recession, a new business launched out of the Wharton School
0:13.1	at the University of Pennsylvania, which paved the way for a direct-to-consumer revolution.
0:18.5	The company was called Warby Parker, and the rest, as they say, is DTC history.
0:23.5	This was the beginning of DTC 1.0. Warby Parker pioneered a unique model that offered value pricing
0:30.5	on eyeglasses that would normally cost us as much as double or triple elsewhere by employing
0:35.5	modern branding and digital infrastructure to make the
0:38.6	business work. Let's call this the beginning of DTC 1.0. Soon this formula was replicated for all
0:44.7	sorts of new companies like away hymns harries and glossier in the beauty category. Well a decade later
0:51.9	another revolution is now afoot. The coronavirus pandemic has been a reality check for direct-to-consumer brands, and now a new wave of purpose-driven companies are taking the DTC 1.0 formula and adapting it for the current times. To go deeper into what this new DTC playbook might look like, we spoke to three entrepreneurs
1:12.3	who are forging a new model.
1:14.7	Based in LA, Claudia Tang and Olamide Olowe are the co-founders of Topicles, a skincare
1:20.5	brand whose products are targeted at the one in four Americans who experience chronic
1:25.2	skin conditions.
1:26.7	And Kamitayez, founder and chief executive of Parade, a new community-first underwear brand
1:32.6	for women.
1:33.3	They spoke to our senior editorial associate, Alexandra Mondaleck, at Voices 2020.
1:39.7	I'm so excited to talk to you today.
1:42.2	Thank you so much for having us.
1:44.0	Let's just jump right in,
1:45.7	you know, thinking about some of the earliest generation of direct-to-consumer brands, some of whom
	...

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