Creating value propositions to buy direct
When a brand sells everywhere, its own site has to earn the sale. Across consumer brands, from coffee makers to cruise ships to wellness, I built the reasons to buy direct:1 memberships, consultations, onboard booking and a better checkout. Customers chose to come straight to the brand, kept coming back, and did it in markets around the world.
The situation
Selling direct looks simple from the outside: sell on your own site, keep the margin, own the relationship. In practice, the same product sits on Amazon, at a big-box retailer, or in the corner store, often closer to home and sometimes cheaper.
If a brand’s own site doesn’t offer something the others can’t, customers have no reason to come. Every brand I worked with had some version of that problem.
What I did
- 1
Fixed the basics of buying
I started in consulting, leading commerce teams for Keurig.com. First, the basics: easier discovery and a smoother path from product page to cart to checkout. Then the moments that matter: holiday campaigns and gift subscriptions for the biggest season of the year. And auto-delivery, so customers never ran out and kept coming back.
At Royal Caribbean, I owned the booking flows in a new onboard app,2 so guests could plan and book their vacation from their phone instead of standing in line, and crew had a matching app to serve them.
- 2
Gave people a reason to come direct
At Juul, I owned the bottom of the funnel: checkout and subscriptions. We launched JUUL Pass, a membership for age-verified adult customers that brought people who bought in stores online.
At Equilibria, a CBD brand built around consultations,3 customers got one-on-one advice from dosage specialists that no store shelf could give them. I shaped a product-led roadmap around that experience, so the consultation became the reason to buy direct.
- 3
Took it around the world
These were global businesses. Royal Caribbean’s app sailed with ships around the world. At Juul, adult smokers in different countries had different habits, rules and languages, but a shared goal: finding an alternative to cigarettes.
At Tatcha, I led the company’s first international launch, a homecoming to Japan, the country that inspired the brand,4 and set up its first Asia-Pacific P&L.
All of this while a pandemic moved shopping online overnight, and while the rules for some of these categories were being rewritten.
What I learned
Give people a reason to come to you. Price is rarely it. An experience they can’t get anywhere else is.
The second purchase matters more than the first. Repeat customers tell you whether the reason is real.
Test small and learn fast. A scrappy test beats a long debate.
1 Direct-to-consumer (DTC): a brand selling straight to its customers, through its own site, app or stores, instead of through retailers. ↩
2 Royal Caribbean swapped paper newsletters and first-come sign-ups for a connected app, from faster boarding to personalized plans for the trip. EY case study ↩
3 Founded by women, for women, Equilibria pairs customers with trained dosage specialists who customize their routines. Baird ↩
4 Tatcha, the Unilever-owned skincare brand, launched in Japan in 2021. Its products are made there. Shopify Japan (in Japanese) ↩
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