D2C Cheat Sheet

SUCCESS STORIES ANALYZED

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Product Design
SIMPLICITY IS LUXURY
Product Design
Design
The promise that shaped the Casper brand in the
early days and grew the company was simple —
it made one mattress, and it’s the best. No need
to choose.

Some of this meant revisiting conventional wisdom

around how we sleep. While the traditional mattress
brands and physical retailers were playing a game of
confusing choices and high prices, Casper set out to
fight the idea that multiple types of mattresses are
even necessary.

Choice is built into how consumers think about many

types of products, but companies like Casper endear
themselves to their customers by actually eliminating
“unnecessary” choices.
Product Design
Design
Harry’s knew razors had gotten unnecessarily
complicated over the years. The company’s goal
wasn’t, however, to roll all that evolution back — it
was simply to revert back to the model that had
gotten it the most right for the most people possible.

Harry’s cultivated a brand that embraces simplicity. It

only sells one type of blade, and refills come in at
about $1.87 a cartridge. You can get a rubber handle
to put those blades in for $9, or upgrade to a metal
one for $20. That’s pretty much it. It’s relatively
narrow compared to the product line of a company
like Gillette, which is exactly the point.
Product Design
Design
Allbirds built its brand around the design of the shoe
itself and its nonbranding. The centerpiece of the
product is the shape, look, and feel of the shoe.

That’s by design, as Allbirds co-founder Tim Brown

explains: “The insight that kicked this whole journey
off was, ‘Could you make a very, very simple sneaker
that wasn’t adorned with branding?’ It felt like it was
very, very hard to find.”

The lesson has more to do with branding and

signaling than anything else.
Product Design
Design
Bonobos launched with a very simple premise:
make a better pair of pants. If it sold just that one
product, then it could sell and distribute its product
entirely online. It wouldn’t need a brick-and-mortar
location at all, and so it could immediately sell at
virtually global scale.

The only problem with this was getting over the

hesitancy many people felt about ordering clothes
online, especially when — as is true with pants — fit
can be so fickle. To solve that, they copied Zappos
and introduced free, no-questions-asked returns.
Product Launch
MASS MINDSHARE, QUICKLY
Product Launch
Design
Casper’s founders set out to build a “digital-first
brand around sleep” from the start. It was never just
about a mattress. It focused its marketing efforts on
just two cities:
● New York City: The cultural and financial
capital of the world
● Los Angeles: The arts capital of the world

Casper also reached out to various Instagram

and Twitter influencers, leveraging its Hollywood
connections to get some high-level buzz going
around its mattresses. The company opened a
satellite office in LA with the main objective of
getting more influencers on board.
Product Launch
Design
The basic idea was simple: a waitlist. Those who
shared the campaign with their friends and social
networks would get all kinds of prizes for doing so,
from free handles to razor blades and pre-shave gel.
100,000 people wound up signing up, which generated
a huge list of potential customers for Harry’s.

Sending out free handles and razors to the most

prolific referrers allowed the company to get a sense
for how people felt about its product before releasing
it to a wider audience. Harry’s made various tweaks to
its handles and razors based on what it learned from
those freebie winners early on.
Product Launch
Design
Glossier founder Emily Weiss’ blog has been
invaluable in helping Weiss’ product line grow its
revenue 600% year-on-year.

The blog isn’t just a valuable vector of product

research — it’s a source of more prepared and
enthusiastic consumers in and of itself.

CTO Bryan Mahoney told Digiday that people who

read Into the Gloss are about 40% more likely to
buy products from Glossier than other customers.
Product Launch
Design
Jessica Alba was able to use her celebrity status
to textbook perfection in getting the company
started and evangelizing its story.

Alba can blast more than 11 million people in one

second by picking up her phone. That’s the kind of
reach that Honest used to hit a $1.7B valuation in
just four years after being founded.

A product that is used up and must be replaced

relatively quickly is also a good product to sell
through a subscription model, especially to busy
new parents. The subscription model gave The
Honest Company a further asset — a built-in
incentive to stick with the brand.
Product Launch
Design
The company turned a product that’s fundamentally
food into something that looks more like a software
platform with continuous updates and an
open-source ethos. That lets Soylent get the
benefits of launching (hype, new learnings from
your customers) on an ongoing basis.

Soylent’s customers are eager and enthusiastic

about updates to the formula and changes to the
way the powder tastes. 28,795 Reddit users are
subscribed to the main Soylent subreddit, /r/soylent.
Hundreds are reading about and reviewing different
Soylent shipments at any given time.
Customer Experience
BUILDING THE END-TO-END BRAND
Customer Experience
Design
As a previously unknown brand, Bonobos saw
early on that providing a differentiated customer
experience was going to be important.

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn saw that “the best

way to convince people to regularly buy clothes
from a new online company,” as Business Insider
wrote, “was to primarily focus on a level of
customer service other businesses didn’t offer.”
For Bonobos, that meant cultivating a culture of
ultra-responsivity on its support team.

The company didn’t just make great pants, it

made shopping for them easy.
Customer Experience
Design
With some products, investors are just as interested,
if not more interested, in the community than they
are in the core product’s features and capabilities.
A group of engaged and sincere customers is
something far more rare, and potentially more
powerful, than a good product alone.

With meal replacement startup Soylent, the

Reddit community that emerged in the wake of
the product’s launch was strong enough that it
convinced Andreessen Horowitz to lead a $20M
round in the company.
Customer Experience
Design
One of the core premises behind Casper was that the
way mattresses were moved across the country was
wasteful and inefficient. Thousands of stores and tens
of thousands of salespeople weren’t needed to
distribute something if you could find a way to have
USPS deliver it. Put a bed in a box, and you can ship it.
No store or square footage necessary.

Crucially, the company also offers free returns.

Returns have been a problematic part of mattress
purchasing for years. Casper will come pick up your
mattress for you if you don’t like it within your first 100
days of sleeping on it. It’s a gamble designed to set the
company apart from your traditional mattress store.
Customer Experience
Design
Dollar Shave Club didn’t just decide to sell cheaper
razors than what you could buy at the store. It sold its
customers a subscription package that would save
them time, money, and effort.

The success of this package created a best-in-class

customer retention rate for a consumer-facing product
and helped propel Dollar Shave Club’s growth to a
billion-dollar business.
Customer Experience
Design
Warby Parker has carved an opportunity by saving
its customers a trip to the doctor.

The company managed to eliminate virtually all of

the objections that people normally have about buying
something like glasses online through ingenious
customer experience design and homebrew tools.
Warby Parker knew people didn’t want to get glasses
sight unseen, so it started out by shipping 5 pairs of
your choice to new customers so they could try each
one on and figure out which they liked best.

Then came various experiments with virtual try-on,

using webcams and imaging software to try and make
the home try-on redundant.
Customer Experience
Design
Click on a product like Glossier’s Perfecting Skin
Tint, and if you don’t know which shade you should
be buying for your skin color, you can open the
matcher. Upload a picture of yourself, place the
digital wand over a patch of your face and
Glossier’s tool will tell you exactly which shade
will best match your skin color.

The reason that it makes Glossier such a

high-growth startup is simple—an online skin tone
matcher is far easier and cheaper to create and
maintain than a retail counter inside a massive
department store.
Going Viral
DYNAMICS OF THE INTERNET
Going Viral
Design
The key to Casper’s Google strategy has been
creating customized landing pages for every
conceivable keyword people could be using to
search for and buy a bed.

There are a ton of mattress companies trying to

buy their way into Google’s search results, so being
comprehensive is important to being seen.

Say you want to buy a mattress and you live in

New York City. Casper knows this is a great market
because the company can deliver in hours, not
weeks. So it put a landing page up just for NYC
and made sure that anyone searching for terms
like “buy mattress NYC” would see it at the top of
the search results.
Going Viral
Design
Dollar Shave Club’s viral video made to promote the
launch of Dollar Shave Club has now been viewed over
25M times. It’s a great example of the kind of marketing
that can launch a business, both through the number of
eyeballs it reached and the number or conversations
and referrals that it created for the company.

Behind this viral hit was a whole framework of

preparation designed to amplify and power the video’s
signal. The key to success here is actually producing
something of value.
Going Viral
Design
The company asked all of its customers to make
content promoting the brand, to take pictures and
videos of their different home try-on kit glasses as
they test-drove them.

When looking at customers who never created this

kind of content versus people who do share images
or videos of their home try-ons, Warby Parker found
that those who shared content were 50% more likely
to actually make a purchase.
Going Viral
Design
Glossier is a digital-first cosmetics brand that has used
Instagram as a growth vector better than most other brands
out there. CEO and founder Emily Weiss started the
company as an Instagram handle — @glossier — and began
the product development process by simply posting photos
in a wide assortment of styles and aesthetics, gauging what
her followers did and didn’t like.

Glossier realized that people liked posting pictures of their

deliveries on the platform, and the company saw a
behavior that it wanted to encourage more of.

Glossier started packaging sets of stickers with each

Glossier delivery, encouraging its customers to customize
their deliveries and share an image to Instagram.
Going Viral
Design
In a 2012 Tumblr post tagged “It’s a Fact,” Everlane put
out an infographic detailing the “real cost” of producing
a designer t-shirt.

The infographic, which quickly went viral, both

established the “radically transparent” Everlane brand
and fueled the instantly-sold-out sale of the company’s
very first product.

The post was part of a viral campaign that started on

Twitter. Everlane followed up its Tumblr post by posting
the infographic on Facebook, along with its response to
the controversy. And according to Business Insider, all
of these separate social media campaigns (all with the
same basic content) got Everlane 200,000 organic
users in a year.
Going Viral
Design
The Honest Company has built a resource for
parents who want to understand the chemicals that
are in the products they use everyday.

Its blog serves both as educational content and,

naturally, as lead gen for The Honest Company’s line
of natural, transparently-made health products — and
it drives 100,000+ visitors to their site every month.

A huge number of the clicks to their blog come from

what are essentially pre-qualified Honest Company
customers, making this a powerful strategy both for
generating interested customers and for promoting
the Honest brand.
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