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SHORTLISTED: Business Book Awards 2023 - Start Up/Scale Up
Build your DTC brand by learning from the best. As consumer buying habits continue to shift, more and more brands are turning their attention to e-commerce and selling direct. However, few manage to succeed at scale.
Overcome the challenges of the ever-increasing cost of marketing, the demands of customer service, complicated logistical requirements and the perils of selecting the right technology by learning from the DTC pioneers who have got it right.
Read the founding stories, strategies, failures and eventual success of DTC brands such as Huel, graze, Snag, tails.com, Who Gives a Crap, Casper, Lick, allplants, Bloom & Wild and more to discover:
· How they got started, what worked then and what works now
· The importance of building a community and how to use data
· When to consider going multichannel
· Why you need a bulletproof brand
· Navigating funding, margins, growth, customer service and product development and more
For the first time, the best in class of DTC share their playbooks so that you can understand and build on their successes.
List of contents
- Chapter - 00: Introduction;
- Chapter - 01: In the beginning was graze.com - graze;
- Chapter - 02: From a side hustle to international stardom - Huel;
- Chapter - 03: Unearthing a huge problem hidden in plain sight - Snag;
- Chapter - 04: Measuring satisfaction and why it matters - Bloom & Wild;
- Chapter - 05: Moving with the times and the art of resilience - Cornerstone;
- Chapter - 06: Why bigger is not always better - Sugru;
- Chapter - 07: Using DTC toilet paper to build toilets and ensure access to sanitation for every person on the planet by 2050 - Who Gives A Crap;
- Chapter - 08: Building a community for a higher purpose - TRIBE;
- Chapter - 09: Launching a DTC brand in the 2020s. The new rules of the game - Lick | Clearing;
- Chapter - 10: The importance of an emotional connection with your customers - tails.com;
- Chapter - 11: Using stress and burnout as the inspiration to build a better business - Heights;
- Chapter - 12: How to use your low margin DTC channel as your omnichannel marketing machine - Ugly Drinks;
- Chapter - 13: Overcoming the challenges of a frozen supply chain to accelerate an inevitable shift to plant-based diets - allplants;
- Chapter - 14: How DTC is helping a whole town get its mojo back - Hiut Denim;
- Chapter - 15: Summing up
About the author
Mike Stevens has played key roles in two of the most iconic start up-challenger brands in recent years: Innocent smoothies and Peppersmith plant-based chewing gum and mints. At innocent, he built and ran their supply chain for six years before becoming a country manager and heading up the brand's launch in Scandinavia. In 2009 he co-founded Peppersmith. He is now a consultant for D2C food and drink businesses and is a mentor for Virgin Startup. He is based in Poole, Dorset, UK.
Report
"Very few books are both as inspiring and useful as this. Mike has looked beyond the glossy case histories to the real learning curves of success and failure in DTC and feeds the flame of our entrepreneurial spirit as he does so." Adam Morgan, author of "Eating the Big Fish" and Founder and Partner, Eatbigfish
