2022: The Year of DTC Brands

By George Eberstadt, CEO, Pixlee TurnTo

Online retail in 2022 is going to be all about the convergence of legacy and native

direct-to-consumer (DTC). The margin and brand community advantages of selling direct will continue to drive legacy brands to expand their DTC offerings (at the expense of their channels). Brands that haven’t yet ventured into the DTC waters (mostly CPG) will take the plunge. Retailers, both for margin and in response to direct competition from their suppliers, will continue to introduce new private labels at a frantic pace, and they will start marketing them directly, rather than just to their captive store customers.

This influx of DTC from established players with structural advantages—known brands and physical presence—will push native DTC brands, especially new entrants, to win on discovery and loyalty. Social media will continue to be the main battleground for discovery, and the most successful brands will be those that figure out how to turn their customer communities into their growth engines. Loyalty will evolve from primarily a tool to incent incremental purchase to a tool to foster community growth. Macro influencers will be a powerful tool for certain brands, but broad-based micro-influencers will increasingly emerge as a vehicle for most brands, with a new generation of tools making it possible to manage such programs efficiently and at scale.

It’s Time to Take Control: Design, Data & Experiences

By Kelly Goetsch, Chief Product Officer of commercetools

Online sales outpaced brick and mortar purchases at the height of the pandemic, and retailers are refining the online experience for their customers this year. For many brands, 2022 is an opportunity to pivot to better ecommerce options that will boost customer satisfaction and competitive differentiation. Take marketplaces, for example. While large marketplaces work well for tech giants and large retailers, this likely isn’t the best option for every brand, as they can’t control the whole shopping experience if products are on a separate platform. Over the next twelve months, more brands may opt to sell their products direct-to-consumer (D2C) so they can curate the experience while minimizing costs.

More brands are also attempting digital transformations on their own—in fact, in 2021, around half of commercetools’ customers were already implementing their platforms without outside help. One way to do this is by investing in better tech talent to build experiences internally, providing more control over the end product that a brand is envisioning. However, the maturation of headless commerce is providing another easy option for brands to build experiences—and it’s gaining a lot of momentum. With headless architecture, the backend of the website becomes separated from the front-end user experience, making it much easier for less technically savvy employees to add elements, change layouts and other options. The biggest benefit of headless commerce is that it’s vendor agnostic, so builders aren’t tied to one solution suite. Instead, commerce components can be switched and swapped quickly, allowing users to build the platform of their dreams—and keep up with the demands of the market.