Five Trends to Make Your DTC Brand Stand Out in 2022

The epidemic has accelerated the penetration and development of DTC, and e-commerce has thus seen rapid growth. In the U.S., e-commerce accounted for 14.4% of the total retail market in 2020 and is expected to be around 15% in 2021. With increased e-commerce penetration, how to stand out has become a challenge to many online sellers.

So let’s jump out of our inertia and examine what trends there are in global DTC development, for our reference and learning!

The cross-industry alliance between DTC brands

For industries with complementary products and similar target audiences, collaborations are an effective way to grow your DTC stores.

For example, the cooperation between Solo Stove, a manufacturer of barbecue grill products, and Outer, an outdoor furniture brand. They have a high degree of audience overlap and similar production values.

Popular personalized and customized marketing programs

Every successful DTC brand puts a lot of effort into its marketing programs and user experience.

A simple example is pushing products that are of interest to customers based on their browsing history. There are even different landing pages based on customers’ geographical location, attracting customers to create their account on the website to get exclusive offers, etc.

Original photos

If you look at major brands around the world, you will find that delicate features, heavy makeup, big eyes, flawless skin, slim body are no longer appreciated by customers, nor is it the aesthetic of the public. What we all pursue is originality, no ps, and true self. Nowadays, customers like to accept imperfections of their own.

This is important for DTC brands, especially in the fashion category. As sellers, we need to refuse stereotyped and repetitive brand values. And then we do serve every consumer group.

Digging deep into a category and saying goodbye to the grocery store

In the DTC1.0, the two keywords “store group” and “grocery store” are indispensable. This lets many sellers earn a lot of money in the early stage. But then came the high advertising costs and a bunch of inventory products that are hard to sell out.

While in the DTC 2.0, DTC online sellers shift their focus to the creation of boutique categories and develop related supplementary categories through boutique categories.

Anker is a typical representative of this. From the initial single product category rechargeable treasure to cell phone-related charging heads, charging cable, headphones, and other 3c products. They effectively curb the decline of certain industries, and also expand their product by relying on the private domain under the previous brand.

“Subscription-based”

What is “subscription-based? For example, if the main product of a store is cosmetics, which is a consumable product, and the seller finds through data that an average woman consumes two bottles a month. Then the seller can offer a subscription system on their website. Those subscribed customers will receive two bottles they need by the end of each month. And this subscription can be canceled at any time.

You can imagine how helpful this would be to improve customer retention and customer lifetime value. Research shows that only about 10% of DTC brands currently offer subscription services, so if your product fits such a profile, you might as well take “subscription-based” and deploy it.

Shopify stores are built by the sellers themselves, and the store rules can be defined by the sellers themselves too. So as a seller, you don’t have to worry about the blocking and restrictions of third-party platforms. You only need to focus on brand building, user experience, the combination of product lines, and brand value enhancement.

Even in the fierce competition which a lot of big brands also in, as long as you can find your store’s positioning, carefully do market research, to meet customer needs, even if a new small brand can also be through the DTC marketing layout in the fierce market competition to break out and occupy a place.