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Tag: DTC

  • Disney Accelerating Pivot To DTC-First Business Model

    Disney Accelerating Pivot To DTC-First Business Model

    During yesterday’s earnings call Disney CEO Bob Chapek said it has accelerated the company’s pivot towards a DTC-first business model. “Our recent strategic reorganization has enabled us to accelerate the company’s pivot, towards a DTC-first business model and further grow our streaming services,” says Chapek. “Disney+ has exceeded even our highest expectations, in just over a year since its launch with 94.9 million subscribers. ESPN+ and Hulu have also performed well, with 12.1 million and 39.4 million subscriptions, respectively.”

    Chapek attributes the company’s massive streaming growth to its huge collection of brands. “The wealth of IP from our unrivaled collection of brands and franchises provides us with an incredible breadth and depth of storylines and characters to mine for Disney+ and our other streaming services,” says Chapek. “We have the ability to interconnect these storylines and characters in unprecedented ways as we saw with The Mandalorian and WandaVision tying into the broader Star Wars and Marvel franchises. We’re excited to continue exploring the endless possibilities that this unique ecosystem provides.”

    DTC Results Improved By $650 Million

    “We believe that we’ve got a great price-value relationship,” says Chapek. “I think the best insulation we’ve got (to lower churn) is to keep the price-value relationship very high and there’s no better way to do it than powerhouse franchises cranking out regular new releases on a monthly basis.”

    Disney’s direct-to-consumer results have improved by nearly $650 million versus the prior year. “Last quarter, we guided to direct-to-consumer operating income declining by $100 million versus the prior year under our former segment structure,” says Disney CFO Christine McCarthy. “Our reported results are $750 million higher than that guidance.”

    Lower Disney Losses Attributed To Disney+

    Disney attributes their lower losses to the growth of the Disney+ streaming service. “A lower loss in the first quarter compared to the prior year was driven by subscriber growth partially offset by higher costs due to the launch and expansion of Disney+. With 94.9 million paid subscribers at the end of Q1, Disney+’s global net additions were 21.2 million versus Q4.”

    “Disney+ Hotstar subscriber additions continued their strong growth trend with Disney+ Hotstar subscribers making up approximately 30% of our global subscriber base,” said McCarthy. “We also saw strong additions to our subscriber base from our November launch in Latin America.”

    Disney Happy With Level Of Churn

    Disney is also very happy with its level of churn especially as it relates to subscribers who came into the Disney+ service via their Verizon partnership which helped power its launch last year. “We are very pleased with what we’ve seen so far on the level of churn,” said McCarthy. “And as our product offering matures and we put more content into the service and our subscriber base becomes more tenured, we expect to see our churn rates continue to decline.

    So in regard to the specific churn related to the anniversary of the Verizon launch promotion from last November 2020, we’re really happy with the conversion numbers that we have seen there going from the promotion to become paid subscribers.”

    100 New Titles a Year

    “With Disney+ originals along with the theatrical releases and the library titles, we’ll be adding something new to the service every week,” noted McCarthy. “We are very pleased with the engagement overall. We believe we’re going to reach that cadence of getting content on the service every week within the next few years. We’ve also set that target for 100-plus new titles per year. And that’s across Disney Animation, Disney Live Action, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Nat Geo. And of course, we’ll continue to add more to our library as we go through time as well.”

    “Given the value of growing our sub base, we are continuing to invest in high-quality content,” says McCarthy. “We believe that content is the single biggest driver to not only acquiring subs, but retaining them.”

  • Disney: Less Theaters, More DTC

    Disney: Less Theaters, More DTC

    “We’ve benefited from a tremendous relationship with theatrical exhibition for many years,” says Disney CEO Bob Chapek. “However, there are a lot of consumers that want to experience a movie in the safety, comfort, and convenience of their own home. We want to accelerate our transition to a real direct-to-consumer priority company. Ultimately, the consumer is going to be making the decision in terms of how they consume our media as opposed to some arbitrary decision that we may make from a distribution standpoint.”

    Bob Chapek, CEO of Disney, discusses how Disney is transitioning to a direct-to-consumer company with less focus on the theatrical distribution of video content:

    Accelerating Transition To Direct-To-Consumer Company

    We want to accelerate our transition to a real direct-to-consumer priority company. We’ve got the opportunity to build upon the success of Disney+ which by almost any measure has been far and above anybody’s expectations. We really want to use this to catalyze our growth and increase shareholder wealth. In every territory and every platform, our expectations with Disney+ have been exceeded and exceeded every month. We’re thrilled with the way it’s going. We just think that this reorganization is going to catalyze growth even further.

    I would not characterize (our reorganization) as a response to COVID but COVID accelerated the rate at which we made this transition. This transition was going to happen anyway. Essentially, what we want to do is separate out the folks who make our wonderful content based on tremendous franchises from the decision making in terms of where the prioritization is and how it gets commercialized into the marketplace.

    We want to leave it to a group of folks who can really see objectively across all the constituents that we have and the various different considerations that we’ve got and make the optimal decision for the company. This is as opposed to somehow having it be predetermined that a movie is destined for theaters or that a TV show is destined for ABC. So really what we want to do is provide some level of objectivity and really make it a decision that benefits the overall company and its shareholders.

    We’re Putting The Consumer First

    What it says is that we’re putting the consumer first. The consumer is actually going to be who’s going to make this decision. They’re going to lead us with how they make their transactional decisions. Right now, they’re voting with their pocketbooks and they’re voting very heavily towards Disney+. We want to make sure that we’re going the way that the consumers want us to go.

    Certainly, COVID has impacted all of our traditional distribution businesses. But this is even more than reactionary, this is really progressive. This is looking out with a vision towards where we see the world going and how we see that consumers are interacting with Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu and where it’s going to go in the future in our international business with Star. We’re trying to as they say skate to where the puck is going to be.

    Less Theaters, More DTC

    We’ve benefited from a tremendous relationship with theatrical exhibition for many years. As dynamics change in the marketplace though we want to make sure that we’re giving consumers who want to go to theaters, to experience everything that a theatrical release can give them, we want to make sure that we continue to give them that option.

    At the same time, there are a lot of consumers that want to experience a movie in the safety, comfort, and convenience of their own home for whatever reasons they do. We want to make sure that we put the consumer first. Ultimately, the consumer is going to be making the decision in terms of how they consume our media as opposed to some arbitrary decision that we may make from a distribution standpoint. We want to look at ourselves as consumer enablers.

    Disney: Less Theaters, More DTC

  • OTT is the Next Step in the Digital Revolution for Media Buyers

    OTT is the Next Step in the Digital Revolution for Media Buyers

    OTT is increasingly being tested by advertisers as more inventory becomes available, says Nicole Whitesel, SVP of Enterprise Strategy at Publicis Media. “In the past, OTT was seen as a nascent channel with limited reach,” said Whitesel. “I think now you’re seeing a lot more inventory there available to them to buy. I think their willingness to test things where they’re unsure of outcomes has been increased more than ever before.”

    Nicole Whitesel, SVP of Enterprise Strategy at Publicis Media recently discussed the increased experimentation with OTT by agencies and their clients in an interview with BeetTV:

    OTT is the Next Step in the Digital Revolution for Ad Buyers

    One of the things we’re seeing is clients appetites being larger than ever before to explore. In the past, OTT was seen as a nascent channel with limited reach. I think now you’re seeing a lot more inventory there available to them to buy. I think their willingness to test things where they’re unsure of outcomes has been increased more than ever before.

    We’re really talking about kind of the next step, the digital revolution maybe seven years ago and people were early movers in that space and they had an advantage.

    We’re thinking about the space in a similar way. There’s an opportunity to get in early and test things, build operational muscle between teams that maybe haven’t worked together as closely before. We really see that as an opportunity this year to do a lot of that work.

    Agency Teams Working Together to Buy OTT Inventory

    You have teams where historically broadcast teams and national teams have bought broadcast. Then you have teams that are more precision or audience driven that buy programmatic. You’re seeing a lot of work between those teams now to think about the way we’re buying connected TV, inventory if you will, or OTT.

    You have a broadcast team that might be negotiating as part of an upfront and then you have an activation team who’s actually activating within a quarter against a specific audience, buying that inventory in-quarter.

    Those are teams that historically don’t work as closely together on an ongoing basis outside of upfront. We’re seeing that that’s an opportunity to bring those teams closer together and working more closely with clients who learn these new channels and understand that. That goes as well to analytics and measurement. How are we measuring them? What’s the contribution when compared to historically traditional channels like linear TV?

    Opportunity for Direct to Consumer Companies

    I think there’s an opportunity for direct to consumer companies (DTC) to enter the space through these new channels that didn’t exist before from a linear broadcast perspective. A lot of inventory was sold in the upfront and there was limited inventory available on an ongoing basis. That’s changing with these new channels in inventory that’s available through connected TV or FEP inventory.

    They have an opportunity to buy that in a way that benefits their business model and works with the way that their business has set up to run with retail quarters, seasonality, the things that make sense for them. They don’t have to make a commitment a year in advance. They can do it when it makes sense for their business.

    Getting Smarter With Broadcast Partners

    I think there’s an opportunity for us to get smarter about the way we partner with our broadcast partners. Historically we’ve gone in and we say we want this CPM and this flexibility and this is the programming or dayparts we want to buy.

    I think there’s an opportunity for us to say, hey, we want to buy this from an upfront perspective, but here’s all the other inventory that you manage that we also want to think about buying. We can collectively leverage dollars and get things that are valuable for our brands and our clients that allows them the flexibility to test these new channels.

    TV Attribution – A Big Next Step for Ad Buyers

    I think TV attribution is one of the big next steps for our industry. Being able to understand a contribution of a specific channel and its cost and associated with an outcome the brand’s care about is I think the next big opportunity for us. Then we’ll understand investment in media mix across those different video channels.

    OTT is the Next Step in the Digital Revolution for Ad Buyers


  • DTC Brands Doing Incredible Numbers on Shopify, Says COO

    DTC Brands Doing Incredible Numbers on Shopify, Says COO

    Direct to consumer brands are doing incredible numbers on Shopify, says Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein. He says that Kylie Jenner has generated almost a billion dollars in sales on the platform and many other influencers such as Kanye West, Drake, and most recently Tom Brady are also doing very well.

    “Even if you go beyond just Kylie, you look at companies like Bombas and Allbirds and Tommy John and Fashion Nova, these are brands that didn’t exist five or ten years ago and they’re absolutely doing incredible numbers on Shopify with no slowing down in mind,” says Finklestein. “Shopify was built to help anyone that has an idea start a great business and sell to a global audience.”

    Harley Finkelstein, COO of Shopify, talks about the incredible numbers DTC brands are doing on Shopify, the huge success of Shopify Capital, and their quick acceptance of cannabis stores in Canada and potentially the rest of the world, in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    DTC Brands Doing Incredible Numbers on Shopify

    We’re really happy with how we ended the year and certainly, the quarter was great and we’re really excited about our future. We’ve been at this now for almost 14 years. We’ve grown to 820,000 merchants up from 600,000 merchants a year ago. We have a big top of funnel with brand new entrepreneurs getting started on Shopify for the very first time. We also have some very large brands like the big CPGs and some big direct to consumer (DTC) companies all using Shopify to scale their businesses. We’ve got a really great business model and we’re having a lot of fun.

    It’s amazing. I think the Kylie story ($1 billion in sales) was surprising to a lot of people, not for us because we see so many stories like that all the time. Whether it’s Kanye West launching his Yeezy store on Shopify or Drake’s store or Tom Brady’s new store, we see all of these major brands and huge influencers using Shopify to create authentic products and sell it to the audience. I always sort of think back to if DTC and direct-to-consumer were around when Michael Jordan was creating the Jordan brand with Nike I think Nike would be a supplier and Michael Jordan would be the brand. He would own the entirety of his business as opposed to getting a licensing fee.

    We’re really excited about this. But even if you go beyond just Kylie, you look at companies like Bombas and Allbirds and Tommy John and Fashion Nova, these are brands that didn’t exist five or ten years ago and they’re absolutely doing incredible numbers on Shopify with no slowing down in mind. Shopify was built to help anyone that has an idea start a great business and sell to a global audience. We really do bend the learning curve to make it really easy to get started.

    Shopify Helping Democratize the Entire Business Process

    The ones that succeed, not all of them do, but the ones that do succeed they grow really large with us and over time we want to provide them with more services and more solutions. For example, we launched Shopify Payments a couple of years ago. We went to the payments companies and negotiated rates on their behalf. We launched Shopify Shipping and went to the shipping company and negotiated shipping costs on their behalf. We always are trying to find economies of scale to help democratize the entire business process for these small businesses.

    More recently we realized that a lot of these small businesses also need capital. Because we have so much information on them we’re able to make really quick and very effective underwriting decisions so we were able to go and offer them capital cash advances. We’ve given out hundreds of millions of dollars of cash advances to a lot of these small businesses who if it wasn’t for Shopify would not be able to get this money on their own.

    Entrepreneurs Want to Own Their Audience

    Etsy fundamentally is a marketplace. Etsy is a place where someone who makes a product can go to find an audience. But our feeling is that you know for an entrepreneur they don’t always want to rent the audience. They want to own the audience. They want to have a direct relationship with their customers. They want to own the entire to profit margin. They want to be able to sell and have long-term relations with the people that are buying their products.

    So companies like Etsy do a really good job of curating a bunch of products and renting those customers to those makers. We think the marketplaces are really great but we think ultimately makers and entrepreneurs and merchants want to have a direct relationship with the people buying their products. One of the things that is not well known about Shopify but one way to think about what we do is really this retail operating system. Merchants can start a store with us very easily and they can build a beautiful online store but they can also cross-sell to different marketplaces like eBay or Amazon.

    The idea is that it feeds all feeds back in one centralized back office which is Shopify. That’s where they can run the entirety of their business. Really the idea is let’s become the most important piece of software they use on a daily basis. The first thing they open every morning, the last thing they close every night. So obviously marketplace will play a role there but ultimately merchants want to find customers wherever those customers exist and more and more they want to sell direct to those customers.

    Shopify Facilitating Cannabis Sales in Canada

    The reason we started with Canada was there was clarity in Canada. The Canadian government, the legislature, they were very clear with how they were going to roll out the commercialization and the legalization of cannabis sales on the consumer side. We felt it was really important for us to act quickly and effectively to not only win as much of the Canadian market as we possibly could but also to show the rest of the world as they begin to think about cannabis sales that we are the first phone call that they should be making.

    Whether it’s the province of Ontario or British Columbia or most of the largest licensed producers like Canopy in Canada, Shopify is what’s powering those retail sales. We think that we can do a great job helping other countries and other regions do the same thing.

  • We Want To Be the World’s First Global Sleep Brand, Says Casper CEO

    We Want To Be the World’s First Global Sleep Brand, Says Casper CEO

    “We really consider ourselves the sleep company,” says Casper co-founder and CEO Philip Krim. “Everything we do is about helping our customers sleep better. It’s about getting a great mattress but it’s about everything that could help you sleep. We’re trying to take products to market that are end to end about sleep solutions. We want to be the world’s first global sleep brand and we think we’re well on our way to doing that.”

    Philip Krim, Casper co-founder and CEO, discusses how Casper, a highly successful direct to consumer brand (DTC), is still in the early days of growth in an interview on CNBC:

    We Want To Be the World’s First Global Sleep Brand

    We actually think Casper stands alone. We really consider ourselves the sleep company. Everything we do is about helping our customers sleep better. We think end to end about sleep. It’s about getting a great mattress but it’s about everything that could help you sleep. In January we launched a technology product, a lighting product, that actually helps you wake up better and fall asleep better. We’re trying to take products to market that are end to end about sleep solutions. We want to be the world’s first global sleep brand and we think we’re well on our way to doing that.

    We think we’re really one of the first of our kind. We were a digitally native business, having launched online with Casper.com, but we’re actually now scaling our business offline as well. We’ve opened up 23 retail stores and we have great partners with folks like Target. We believe that we will have a business where no matter how consumers want to shop for our products we have great products and great experiences. We actually think there’s really not a public company comp that’s done that journey.

    Repeat Revenue Increases Dramatically As We Launch New Products.

    Yesterday we launched our hybrid line which is actually the combination of innerspring technology and foam technology. We launched two different models around that. For us, we’re actually still able to compress those mattresses, ship them anywhere in the country, and they’re really phenomenal products that we’re in development for over a year in our Casper Labs program based in San Francisco. From a cost structure, it works just the same way as our foam mattresses. You can compress it, you can ship it anywhere, it’s super fun to open and they sleep really great.

    We make great pillows, we make great sheets, and we make great lighting products. We are seeing higher and higher attachment rates as we launch new products and we’re seeing repeat revenue increase dramatically as we launch new products. We’re only a five-year-old company, actually as of this month. We launched April of 2014. As we get our customers to be a little bit more mature we’re seeing them come back time and time again not just to buy mattresses but to buy our full suite of products. That’s really exciting for us.

    We’re In the Early Days of Scaling

    We actually changed the way that you would return a mattress. In the industry traditionally it’s a huge pain, but with us, you call us up and we’ll pick up the mattress. You don’t even have to pack it back up, nothing. We will come to pick it and up and then we donate it locally. We appreciate that you gave us a shot. We also are changing the way that people shop for the products. We have our Casper.com website where you can learn all about these great products but we have 23 stores that we’ve opened. We’re opening up over a dozen this quarter, two this week in fact, and those stores are a great complement to the online experience.

    We don’t break out profitability overall. Casper has a great product, we have a great business model, and we’re seeing that by taking it to market both online and offline that it’s actually growing our online business in a very efficient way. We think this go to market strategy is working well. We’re in the early days of scaling it and we believe we can keep building this out for years to come.

    We Want To Be the World’s First Global Sleep Brand, Says Casper CEO


  • Direct to Consumer is a Fundamental Platform Shift, Says Tim Armstrong

    Direct to Consumer is a Fundamental Platform Shift, Says Tim Armstrong

    Direct to Consumer, or DTC, is a fundamental platform shift, according to former AOL and Verizon digital properties CEO Tim Armstrong. “There have been a couple times in my career where there has been what is basically a fundamental platform shift,” noted Armstrong. “I felt like direct-to-consumer was something that was going to be a platform shift. Not for probably the obvious reasons, but some of the reasons that were less obvious, but things that I thought were important for the future.”

    Tim Armstrong, former AOL and Verizon Oath CEO and current founder and CEO of The DTX Company, discusses how direct to consumer (DTC) ecommerce businesses represent a “fundamental platform shift,” in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Jason Del Rey at An Evening with Code Commerce in Las Vegas:

    Direct to Consumer is a Fundamental Platform Shift

    About a year and a half ago I started spending a lot more time just on where the underlying infrastructure in the world was changing around the internet and mobile and all the things that we’ve talked about for years. One of the things that stood out to me was there’s been a couple times in my career where there has been what is basically a fundamental platform shift. I felt like direct-to-consumer was something that was going to be a platform shift. Not for probably the obvious reasons, but some of the reasons that were less obvious, but things that I thought were important for the future.

    One was data management, just in terms of things like GDPR and similar things that were happening. I think the power and data is going to shift back more towards the consumer side over the next 10 or 20 years. I thought that would fuel direct to consumer. The second is that the product development cycles that were happening at the direct the consumer companies were much faster and much deeper than what was happening in the normal channels of product development. I think that’s another thing that over a 5, 10, 15, 20 year period these companies are going to have a real advantage in terms of how they develop products and distribute them.

    Customer Communication: Two Way or No Way

    The third thing was just the two-way communication. At DTX we have a growing team, but one of the things we say is two way or no way. Two-way communication with the customer having a direct relationship with companies. The last thing is how the relationships between consumers and companies are going to change. This seems like a really important trend and probably there’s a really big opportunity here. There may not be but that that’s what got me interested in it.

    What we’re doing right now is really kind of two simple things. One is we’re putting investments directly into DTC companies and we’ve done a number of those and we’ll do a few more. The second thing we’re doing is spending a lot of time on an acronym that I hear all the time now which is CAC, customer acquisition cost. Really, on the operating side of the business what we’re doing is not CAC, it’s CRAC, which is an unfortunate acronym, but it’s customer revenue and acquisition cost. Having the balance on the equation of those two things we’re going to be testing things in 2019, some experiences and and other things that will hopefully put the R back in the CAC equation.

    DTC Might Re-Engineer the Entire Way Commerce is Done

    All of my experiences and basically all the stuff I did on the media side was all two-way relationships. The more time I started to think about really what happened was the reason I thought about DTC’s. I started to go back to those memories based on meeting a lot of the DTC founders and of coaching CEOs for DTC founders. I started to think about things like GDPR and some of the things that are happening underneath the surface that I think is going to change long term. I thought wow, this might actually re-engineer the entire way commerce is done and this is a really interesting opportunity.

    There are a bunch of spaces online now you can look at where people are piling money and where there’s probably over investment. But DTC overall, if you went product by product, category by category, industry by industry, in DTC, there are so many companies that you’ve never heard of and rightly so. The Casper’s, the Warby Parker’s, those are amazing companies and they get a ton of notoriety. There are also about 10,000 other categories. They don’t have ten people, they might have one or two, but they’re doing interesting things in them.

    People ask us all the time, is there a DTC ceiling, these companies can only get so big? That may be true but I don’t think it’s true. What will happen is the aggregate of all these things together. If you have ten thousand DTC brands and they’re $10 million or $50 million or $500 million they may not have to look like Google and Facebook right now, but when you add up all of them together over time and what’s likely to happen with a condensing of the market in the next 10 or 20 years (it is significant).

    DTC Could Be an Amazing Transformation

    There are two things that stand out to me. One is every major press article around traditional commerce tends to be negative. Not all the time, but there’s so much angst around what’s happening in retail overall. A lot of it is deserved, but there are a lot of interesting things happening in traditional retail. The second one is the DTC categories that are super hot, the four or five super hot categories, get 90 percent of the coverage and press. What we’re seeing and we have people coming in offices all day doing DTC and there’s just an amazing amount of ingenuity, invention, and innovation happening in different categories.

    I think again it’s one of these things you’re going to wake up 5, 7, 10, or 15 years from now and say, wow, this was like a really amazing transformation. It’s going to be for the reasons that these companies all talk to their consumers all the time. The amount of product innovation that’s happening is truly tremendous. If you take the Beauty category or any category and you dig into all of the DTC brands and micro categories within, if you went to a Procter & Gamble or Unilever and look at all of their products, each one of their products has multiple DTC companies trying to innovate that space.

    I think you’ll end up seeing the recreation of really large consolidated companies. It may not happen for years, but I think it will happen. The reason is not because they were cheaper than what happens in the Unilever Procter & Gamble it’s because the product innovation is hard. Having spent so much time now with DTC companies, the amount of product innovation that happens at that those companies with direct consumer interactions seems to me to be deeper and faster than it is at most other traditional companies.


  • Dollar Shave Club Sells For $1 Billion, What a Remarkable Story

    Dollar Shave Club Sells For $1 Billion, What a Remarkable Story

    Dollar Shave Club (DSC), founded just 5 years ago, has been acquired for a reported $1 billion in cash by U.K. based Unilever. DSC was launched in March 2012 by Mark Levine and Michael Dubin and is based in Venice, California which is next to Santa Monica outside of Los Angeles. Michael Dubin will continue to serve as CEO of DSC. Unilver approached Dollar Shave Club about the acquisition, according to Dan Primack of Fortune.

    Dollar Shave Club had a simple concept that resonated with men, “Shave Time, Shave Money”, and launched with a YouTube video that immediately became a viral hit. As of today, it has been viewed nearly 23 million times.

    If the price is accurate, it will be one of the largest in e-commerce history, with the most expensive acquisition being Zulily in 2015, purchased by Liberty, owner of QVC, for $2.4 billion. DSC had 15% of the men’s razor cartridge market share in the U.S. last year, according to investor David Pakman who is a Partner at Venrock, which was the original investor in Dollar Shave Club. DSC received $163.5 million in 5 Rounds from 21 investors prior to the acquisition.

    Michael Dubin, founder and CEO of Dollar Shave Club, added: “DSC couldn’t be happier to have the world’s most innovative and progressive consumer-product company in our corner. We have long admired Unilever’s purpose-driven business leadership and its category expertise is unmatched. We are excited to be part of the family.”

    The company in less than 5 years has not only transformed the shaving category but has singlehandedly supercharged the consumer products subscription category. DSC has over 3.2 million members with revenue of $152 million in 2015 and on track to exceed $200 million in 2016. The Dollar Shave Club brand has also transformed from a single razor to a multi-products lifestyle brand that includes other branded products such as Wanderer, Big Cloud, Boogies and One Wipe Charlies.

    “Dollar Shave Club is an innovative and disruptive male grooming brand with incredibly deep connections to its diverse and highly engaged consumers,” said Kees Kruythoff, President of Unilever North America. “In addition to its unique consumer and data insights, Dollar Shave Club is the category leader in its direct-to-consumer space. We plan to leverage the global strength of Unilever to support Dollar Shave Club in achieving its full potential in terms of offering and reach.”

    Using Digital Disruption to Establish a Direct Customer Relationship

    David Pakman posted this slide from the original Series A Dollar Shave Club Pitch Deck saying “His plan was grand, but his formula was simple…”

    Screen Shot 2016-07-20 at 2.50.20 PM

    “I’ve been telling the Dollar Shave story lately as a way to describe the disruption possible when a company uses digital technology to establish a direct relationship with a customer,” said Ted Schadler in his blog. Ted is Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. “Dollar Shave Club is in its customers’ daily shower and conscientiousness. It’s a digital disruptor, not because it has a revolutionary product, t’s because it has a revolutionary relationship.” He adds that digital disruption starts with a direct customer relationship.

    “In the age of social media, brands must become direct-to-consumer in order to know their own customers,” said Pakman in a blog post giving his insider take on the business. “Success has many fathers, but in this case, there is only one.”