Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Industry jokes about anemic DTC logos circle a tough truth for digitally native brands: When everything looks and sounds the same, it’s tough to stand out.
One market(place) solution: Get an industry veteran’s stamp of approval. That’s what The Fascination, a new marketplace-meets-magazine built by the founders of Leesa, hopes to offer brands. If anyone knows how crowded a DTC category can get, it’s the bed-in-a-box cohort.
- At launch, The Fascination hosts 100+ brands across footwear, apparel, home, and wellness.
- The Fascination screened each brand for “science” (technical product qualities) and “soul” (founding story). Eventually, each brand’s profile page will be supplemented with in-depth product reviews written by Fascination staffers.
- For now, items are listed with affiliate links. Down the road, the site will have a native checkout experience.
Cofounder Matt Hayes told Retail Brew that appearing on The Fascination should create “validation for your brand that you can’t manufacture yourself.”
- That’s partially through industry veterans’ approval, and partially through listing emerging brands alongside classic DTC examples (Allbirds, Haus, The Sill).
It’s also a form of cross-selling that the free-for-all nature of bigger sites (ahem, Amazon) can’t imitate. “Irrespective of the category, these brands realize that [their] customer demographic and archetypes are the same,” Hayes said.
Seeing triple
The Fascination is the latest site attempting to cut through the Helvetica clutter with brand background checks.
- A sample: Thingtesting catalogs and reviews emerging brands. The Verticale also launched last year to aggregate DTC brands that passed an internal values check.
Brands selected to appear on The Fascination told Retail Brew the site's take on the content 🤝 commerce intersection is valuable for...
Spreading out sales: “We truly believe that the [...] adoption of e-commerce buying habits that we saw in 2020 is permanent,” said Bryan Edwards, cofounder and co-CEO of fragrance brand Snif. So to win online, brands need to diversify their channels.
Boosting legitimacy: “The day we were featured on Thingtesting is still one of the biggest sales days we’ve ever had,” said James Shalhoub, cofounder of pet care brand Finn. “Platforms like them and The Fascination, which are so mission-forward around authenticity and thoughtfulness, legitimize us in a way traditional media can’t.”
My takeaway: Time will tell which marketplace platform shoppers prefer, if any. But even the most story-driven brands now need another platform’s megaphone to get their message (and products) out.