Brand-To-Consumer: The Evolving Landscape of D2C Strategies and Experiential Retail

As retail evolves, so do many of the business models and strategies that are crucial to its success. Direct-to-consumer, or D2C, is the model that ensures that retailers sell and distribute their products directly to consumers. This allows them to avoid any other parties in the process. As a result, many brands are also shifting how they do business.

What are the brands doing to evolve D2C in retail?

Discussed on “Retail Refined,” host Melissa Gonzalez interviewed Sonal Gandhi, the Chief Content Officer at The Lead, on how D2C is helping change and evolve the landscape of retail.

Gandhi says retailer owners are not immediately looking into storefronts as they used to and are opting to explore the various channels of retail. She added that this trend has fully transformed the retail landscape and D2C.

“I think a lot of the brands are going e-commerce, wholesale, and then maybe physical now. So, the order has changed because the younger brands are finding it a little bit overwhelming to own a store because that’s not how they started out, but I think a lot of them are starting now, the traditional way of going to pop-ups, showing up at different events and different places where their customers are, and then they’re expanding into physical presence, and their expectations of the physical presence is also changing,” said Gandhi.

Gonzalez and Gandhi further discussed …

1. The meaning of D2C and other components of it
2. How brands can experiment with various forms of selling to consumers
3. How retailers can leverage having a physical store

“Just having a physical store gives brands an opportunity to try different product assortments, what works in a store doesn’t work online. So, trying those things out, new products, new way [sic] of assorting the stores, so that they can then take that and work it into their assortment strategy with their wholesale partners,” said Gandhi.

Sonal Gandhi is the Chief Content Officer at The Lead. She has been with the company for nearly four years now and previously held the role of Head of Product. Prior to that she was the VP of Content Strategy at Shoptalk.