Looking back five or ten years, almost all new shoe brands were called so -called D2C brands, directly for the consumer, and often made a big point to be like that. Now it seems that the pendulum is about to swing, because many of these brands throw away their original arrangement and also use traditional retailers. Are D2C shoe brands belonging to the past?
Given what this website focuses on and given that it is the industry that I know well, this article looks at quality shoe brands, but much of them is also the same for many other product categories. Looking back on the 20th century, the standard way for every shoe brand could be sold via retailers. It was of course logical, given that to reach people where they had to be, physically and to be able to do that you needed intermediates. Shops.
If you sold internationally, you went through wholesalers or agents, because you still needed an intermediate intermediate on average that there could be closer to the stores that your shoes sold. There were of course exceptions, such as mail order companies that used brochures to reach their customers, really large companies that could run their own stores in many places, but that was mainly how things were done.
This meant that a whole retail system where all required parties received their share in the total price was established. For decades, someone who wanted to start a shoe company did not really have to think about how to run their business, they only had to concentrate on the products and branding if they simplify things.
Enter the internet. Enter e-commerce. Everything was thrown in the air, and after a few years where the shipping companies caught up, the new reality was that everyone from every customer could reach everywhere. This new reality has not only added a new way to sell, it created new ways to run companies. If you did not have to be in physical bricks and mortar shops near customers, shoe companies could skip that step from the retail system and sell it directly to consumers. D2C.
Now there is only a small part of all shoe brands that actually have their own factory, so in reality it can be said that almost anyone who actually sells ‘directly’ are intermediaries. And what is a bit special for the sector of high-quality shoes for men is that it is an industry with a low margin where the mark-ups were relatively low because of the traditional old-school retail system. I have written more in -depth in this article in this article.
Nevertheless, have been looked back in the last ten years, a vast majority of all new quality shoe brands that do not use traditional retailers – whether it sell brick or web shops or web shops – but that only sell through their own channels, of course online and in some cases also through their own physical store (s). And De Standaard has been to notice himself as a “no intermediaries” D2C brand and the point to be more affordable because of fewer parties that have to be paid. They had to ‘disrupt’ the industry and used those graphs that showed how ‘traditional store marking’ meant more than double the price for the same quality product, and so on.
A new development has taken place in recent years. Many of the D2C brands suddenly started to appear at retailers. Could be in high -quality department stores, large online stores with multiple brands and similar. Prices were usually a bit risen on this point, but certainly not double the price, which would indicate the fact in the aforementioned article that was more correct than the marketing of the brands.
The process that these brands go is exactly the opposite of how things were before. In the past, brands that had grown up by retailers, going home more and more from the sale, to get a higher part of the margins themselves, mainly by selling through their own stores. The former D2C brands went the other way around. Started with their own online stores and eventually expanded to retailers.
It is an interesting development. The Old-School Brands and the self-proclaimed Disruptors end up in the same place in the middle. Since many of the more successful D2C brands when it comes to the growing turnover, this often did with a loss, which means that even if you could continue to find new customers, it costs. So a way to keep growing and reaching new customers, hopefully at lower costs, would be represented at large retailers. It is certainly not bad for the brands to be represented with famous retailers, it strengthens them and will probably also increase their own direct sale.
So, will the pure D2C quality shoe brands disappear in the future? Not necessary. It is still more common for new brands that are launched to sell that route only through their own channel (s). For the same reason as the now large former D2C that ever did, it is the easiest way to do it. But it may be very good that the new standard is that the D2C brands that succeed in making a name of themselves in many cases and will eventually go the way to retailers. The “Disruptors” and the old heritage brands become more comparable than one of them.
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