The Filter

As Macy’s looks to course correct after growing to over 175 million square feet of retail space and experiencing several years of falling sales, it’s reassessing its lower-performing stores and trying to reinvigorate it’s higher-performing ones.…

Last week Comme des Garçons launched CDGCDGCDG.com, the ecommerce site for its first direct-to-consumer-only label CDG. (When the brand was first announced, it was called CDGCDGCDG, now shortened to CDG.) Comme built itself as an 17-label brand…

The internet opened the ecommerce floodgates, offering consumers exponentially more options. But with increased competition, retailers are attempting to gain market share in the short term by reducing prices—as their margins race toward zero.

Returns have always been a gift and a curse for ecommerce. To onlookers, they signify the shortcomings of the online shopping experience for consumers: the inability to try things on, to see items as they are in real life. Ecommerce can also…

Companies and overzealous entrepreneurs have tried to create the “universal shopping cart” since the beginning of ecommerce. But none of them has ever been realized to the degree promised. It turns out that managing the front-end relationship with…

Revolve, the digital retailer founded in 2003, recently filed to go public. Some would be surprised to know that the company has been around for 15 years, but still seems relevant today. The retailer’s S-1 filing reveals a large amount of…

In Part II of our ongoing series on Kylie Cosmetics, we wrote about the recent announcement that the brand would start selling in Ulta this holiday season. We concluded that while the move is clearly beneficial for Ulta, it exposes the potential…

Heritage brands have always held the same promise: We’ve done this for a long time and therefore you should trust our brand and the products we release under it. As the brands continued to push this rhetoric, consumers substantiated it. Many iconic…

The origins of Rimowa, the luxury luggage brand, trace back to 1889 when the company was called Görtz & Morszeck after its two founders. The name Rimowa came about at the turn of the century and has held ever since. The brand debuted its signature…

There’s no mystery as to why Ulta wants to sell Kylie’s products. She created one of the fastest growing beauty brands with very wide appeal and exposure, and her products sit at an accessible price point, aligning with Ulta’s audience. The deal…

The idea of a product speaking for itself—and The Row following this creed—falls apart upon closer inspection. The purest form of letting “clothes speak for themselves” would be to just put the clothes on a rack on the street in Soho and let them…

This week Farfetch, the luxury platform that connects customers, brands and retailers around the world, filed its initial form to go public. The company is one of the few fashion/luxury technology companies to reach a large scale—second only to…

While the emergency of direct-to-consumer brands has been well—if not overly—chronicled, people have paid less attention to wholesale-driven businesses shifting to direct-to-consumer. These changes are occurring across many industries, but consumer…

Some startups such as Casper, Harry’s and Hims have or are spending money on advertising like established holding companies such as Unilever, P&G, Nestle do. They plow a massive percent of operating expenses into marketing and sell equity to do so.…

There is a common refrain that the beauty of ecommerce is the idea of infinite shelf space—that there can be an unlimited number of products for sale on the internet because there are no limits to the size of the shelf. This premise is one of the…

Companies, like people, often experience FOMO—they want to be the opposite of what they are, and sometimes with good reason. One of the most interesting but under-the-radar inversions is between creators (brands or creatives) and distributors…

Forbes recently put Kylie Jenner—member of the Kardashian clan and founder of Kylie Cosmetics, one of the fastest growing beauty brands ever—on the cover of its America’s Women Billionaires issue. The feature, which came with an…

More than 50% of product searches now begin on Amazon. This week we wrote about how the company has won over consumers' wallets by prioritizing convenience and functionality over design—and what other brands should do about it.

Andy Dunn coined the term DNVB—digitally-native vertical brand—in 2016. The clearest possible reading of the addition of the word “vertical” is that it means “control,” akin to the idea of vertical integration, in which a company controls various…

Most consumer product companies, especially direct-to-consumer brands that start out by serving a specific niche audience, sink or swim based on how they position themselves around a target customer. These brands define “our girl” or “our guy” and…

As heavily-funded brands, Honest Company and Harry’s were once thought to be the new guard of digitally-native retail, along with many other companies that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital. But what has become of…

When Kylie Jenner launched Kylie Lip Kits—her first beauty product—in 2015, she made only 15,000 units, which sold out in 20 minutes and grossed around $1 million. In June 2017, her sister Kim Kardashian launched KKW Beauty with one product: Contour…

There are three main ways for startups that raise money to return it to their investors. First, they can stay independent and just exist as private, hopefully profitable companies. Second, they can sell to an acquirer and be part of a larger…

While many of the newest crop of digitally-native, direct-to-consumer brands attempt to democratize luxury in one way or another, they still overwhelmingly attend to young professionals in urban centers like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.…

As more businesses strive to be defensible, competitive and long-lasting, the vast majority nevertheless lose relevance, fall prey to better-managed copycats, or fail to evolve to meet changing consumer needs—evidence that a brand’s status is never…

Last week I wrote about the authenticity of long lines, using Supreme and Everlane as contrasting examples. Long lines and limited scarcity are part of Supreme’s DNA, while they are out of place for a basics brand like Everlane. Either way, I noted…

If you happen to be near a Supreme store on a Thursday around 11am, you’re likely to see hundreds of people waiting in a barricaded line for the latest drop. Just a few blocks away from Supreme, you’ll see a line of one or two dozen people outside…

While debt has proved problematic for bigger companies, it can also be a savior for smaller ones. In the direct-to-consumer horse race, brands are trying to scale faster than their competitors—most companies have turned to selling equity in exchange…

Despite its envious position, Supreme is in an interesting conundrum: to keep growing, it either has to keep making more products or raise the prices of existing ones, but doing so will change the sellout characteristics for the brand. This is…

In a previous edition of The Filter, we presented the concept that Brand and The Brand are two different entities. We defined Brand as “the accumulation of all of a company’s actions to make something meaningful and memorable” and we defined The…

In the mid-2000s, the farm-to-table movement transformed the food industry. Though the food industry is often ahead of others because it sells products that people physically consume, the consumer goods space—fashion, apparel, beauty, CPG and…

This week, after months of rumors, LVMH named Virgil Abloh—Kanye West’s life-long creative director, founder of Off-White, endless brand collaborator, DJ and former Fendi intern—as the new menswear director for Louis Vuitton. The appointment propels…

A Warby Parker pamphlet arrives in the mail. A Glossier billboard hovers above Houston Street. Clones of an Away wheatpaste coat a construction barrier. A Stitch Fix TV ad blares from the television. For a generation of digitally-native brands,…

Gap, Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie and Fitch, J.Crew and Aeropostale have thousands of people on staff, hundreds of retail stores, and complex global supply chains. But having largely failed to deliver shoppers better products, inspiring brands and…

Amazon has an entirely different view of margin than most other companies. One of CEO Jeff Bezos’ most well-known quotes is, “Your margin is my opportunity,” signaling the company’s intention to use its scale to significantly drive down prices for…

Last week Walmart announced that it’s launching two new standalone brands: Allswell for mattresses and other bedding products, and Co Squared for beauty and personal care. These are the first two standalone brands Walmart has launched since its…

Today, consumers are spending more money on experiences rather than things. But despite this shift, the real estate industry’s main answer has been to fall back on its existing business model of renting out space—maybe this time to a restaurant…

The hidden secret of most businesses is that the more boring the business, the better the business—the flashier, the worse. This heuristic is especially true in the consumer goods landscape, where brands run the hazard of seeking attention over…

Standard Oil and General Electric—two of the most successful companies ever—are the go-to comparison for massive, interlinked companies. But those who call Amazon the Standard Oil or GE of the 21st century use a comparison that falls short and…

“The brand is defensible” is a phrase increasingly muttered across the consumer landscape. The challenge with a statement like this is that “brand” usually lacks a definition, further perpetuating an important misunderstanding: people are mixing up…

A single-product company that desires to become a brand needs to diversify its products over time to maintain interest and evolve with the market. But few single-product based companies have been able to build lasting brands with a wide assortment…

“Cutting out the middleman” is a phrase thrown around endlessly across the consumer industry, often without much thought. Particularly catalyzed by the direct-to-consumer and digitally-native brand boom, the concept transformed from a boring…

Wired UK recently published a great behind-the-scenes piece about the company that makes stages and sets for the largest touring musicians around the world. Reading it illuminated a parallel between the music industry’s evolution and that of……

2017 was yet another transformative year for the consumer economy. There were a range of new developments and trends from the last few years that continued accelerating. What follows is a recap of 2017, along with some predictions and…

As online sales rapidly increase, Amazon takes a bigger piece of the ecommerce pie, voice commerce and virtual reality appear imminent and subscription models are revitalized, why do sales associates need to be part of the shopping journey at all?…

In yet another triumph for the rapid ascent of ecommerce, 2017 is the first year that the majority of gifting purchases will happen online instead of in stores, according to Deloitte’s annual holiday survey. Throughout the 20th century, third-party…

How did wholesale end up as the enemy? It’s a question I frequently ponder when looking back at the last five years of the digitally-native gold rush, which has created a new crop of brands—Warby Parker, Bonobos, Outdoor Voices, Glossier, Away and…

For the past few years, various government and media publications have pointed a spotlight on Apple's tax-minimization efforts, which allow it to park over $111 billion dollars offshore. The New York Times published another big piece this week…

Stitch Fix recently filed to go public, giving people the first look at the company’s health, unique characteristics and competitive advantages. While many consider Stitch Fix yet another subscription box company, it is much more complicated—and…

What makes a private label a private label? Is it the products sold under the label, the brand built around it, or the distribution it has access to? In a retail landscape where direct to consumer brands are making a limited number of simple…