8 Creative DTC Brands Thinking Outside The Box
Most direct-to-consumer brands, ostensibly modern as they may be, quietly follow a standard playbook taken directly from 20th century retail: create a great product; cultivate a great brand; then market the product and brand aggressively.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this model. After all, countless successful businesses have been built without straying too far from these basic tacks. And, indeed, these steps are all still critical: a great product lays the foundation for the business; a unique brand identity helps the business stand out; and marketing campaigns point people's attention in the right direction.
Still, in the modern e-commerce landscape, these avenues alone do not give any guarantee of a path toward explosive growth and a successful e-commerce business. Today, unique brands are table stakes, since every company can access sophisticated resources to quickly create sleek branding. The state of affairs is similar for marketing: even the smallest companies can analyze their campaigns in real time, move marketing dollars to where they'll be most effective, and contract out specific advertising efforts to domain experts.
Paradoxically, the ease of creating an interesting brand and marketing it to the world is exactly what makes it so hard to create a successful brand and to market it to the world effectively.
A select few DTC companies have acknowledged these facts. These companies have realized that there's more to be done than simply optimizing a brand, optimizing a marketing strategy, and then hoping for the best.
At Parade, we've been watching out for brands thinking outside the box to find fun ways to create positive experiences in the interest of acquiring or retaining customers, especially when they are able to build brand equity without a huge budget. In no particular order, here are some of the innovative brands we've noticed recently:
Moody Incense (moodyincense.com)
What they sell: "Real good incense."
How they're innovating: Releasing custom Spotify playlists that pair well with incense-burning sessions.
Why it works: Creating a dedicated "Fun Stuff" page on the website, and putting it smack in between "About" and "Shop" on the main menu, immediately shows the customer what Moody is all about. Moody has hand-crafted a good handful of playlists full of bops. Some are simple, like a morning playlist ("positive, motivating morning vibes") and one for relaxing ("cooking dinner for your mates or reading a book in your favourite nook"). Others are more targeted to their particular audience, like the one for meditation ("a super zen soundtrack [for] your visualisation/breath work/body scanning") or the one for self-love ("dancing round your house getting ready for a date"). Whichever playlist they land on, the customer has a great audio experience to go along with their olfactory one, and they'll be ready to come back for more.
Vacation (vacation.inc)
What they sell: "The World's Best-Smelling Sunscreen."
How they're innovating: Running a summer sweepstakes with offbeat prizes.
Why it works: A sweepstakes doesn't automatically seem like a way to hold people's attention — people encounter countless giveaways and lotteries and don't enter most of them. Vacation, however, added its own unique flair by opting to give away extremely quirky prizes. When's the last time you had the chance to win 80 feet of rope, a photoshoot with a cigarette boat, 10 gallons of massage oil, or a "sauna etiquette lesson"? And aren't you now a bit curious to know what the rest of the prizes are? Vacation is showing that you don't have to have big-ticket prizes to entertain customers while staying on-brand.
Bite Toothpaste Bits (bitetoothpastebits.com)
What they sell: "The only plastic-free and clean way to replace the paste you've used your whole life."
How they're innovating: A minigame tied to a limited-edition flavor.
Why it works: Bite's website starts out looking like any other sleek modern brand, but clicking their CocoMango flavor reveals their creative side. Bite has implanted a skateboarding minigame immediately underneath its "Add to cart" button. It's an extremely simple game — jump the skateboard over the evidently obsolete plastic toothpaste tubes — but it immediately gives the viewer a reason to stay on the site for a few seconds longer. That's plenty of time for Bite to present you with a QR code leading to a "secret level" hidden inside an Instagram lens, a dynamic approach to both keeping the customer engaged and slyly encouraging them to spread the word to friends from their own social media accounts.
Ruby Hibiscus Water (ruby.fun)
What they sell: "Organic, unsweetened, 0 calorie, delicious, refreshing, magical, amazing, spectral red hibiscus water."
How they're innovating: A universe of characters + a brand phone number to text.
Why it works: Ruby has created an entire "Rubyverse" of hand-illustrated alien characters, and provides a phone number right on its homepage that a customer can text to find out what character they are. (Author's note: I'm pretty sure I'm a Blombout, and my co-founder is a Snoolagoo.) With these fun and unique creations, Ruby has gone out of its way to create connections with customers in a way that isn't purely transactional. Ruby shows why it deserves its dot-fun domain, as it delights customers and passersby alike without directly asking for anything in return — a clever way to get customers thinking about a drink they'd likely never heard of before!
Adore Me (adoreme.com) & SPOKE (spoke-london.com)
What they sell: Adore Me: "Lingerie designed by women, for women." | SPOKE: "Better fitting, better looking men's clothes, sold exclusively online."
How they're innovating: Style/fit quizzes to help curate the shopping experience.
Why it works: Adore Me and SPOKE are technically unrelated to one another, but they represent two sides of the same coin. Adore Me makes women's underwear; SPOKE makes men's trousers. More importantly, they've both found a very similar way to encourage customers to trust their sites over their endless competition in the clothing industry. Adore Me encourages you to try their "Elite Experience" beginning with a style quiz asking you what you're looking for before you even start to shop. SPOKE, meanwhile, asks intuitive questions to gather your dimensions as soon as you enter the site to guarantee a tailored fit. In both cases, the customers have a chance for a bit of interactivity instead of immediately being hit with a wall of products to click, and can feel a bit more comfortable while enjoying themselves the way they might in a boutique brick-and-mortar store.
Loot Crate (lootcrate.com)
What they sell: "A subscription box" for "whatever you geek out about."
How they're innovating: A fleshed-out "Loot Rewards" program complete with coins, characters, giveaways, and more.
Why it works: Loot Crate has already gamified the purchasing experience itself by forgoing specific item sales and instead offering its customers a subscription service for surprise bundles of merchandise and other pop-culture items. Zeroing in on what activates its audience, Loot Crate has added an additional layer of gamification with its "Loot Rewards" program, where customers earn coins through various actions that they can exchange for real-world products. It's a highly brand-specific take on the classic rewards program, and with unique prizes and occasional spin-the-wheel giveaways, Loot Crate can make sure customers keep coming back for more.
Mama Joyce Peppa Sauce (peppasauce.love)
What they sell: "A time-tested recipe of explosive Blasian flavor."
How they're innovating: A wild website that hardly resembles a traditional e-commerce store at all.
Why it works: Mama Joyce offers exactly one product, and the website exudes confidence in that product from top to bottom. No other hot sauce store on the internet looks anything like this one — aside from the dozens of "Buy Now" banners throughout the page, you could almost mistake the page for a modern art piece instead of an online store. Clicking almost anywhere immediately brings you to a checkout page asking you to pay for your two bottles of hot sauce. By the time you've realized you can't even change the quantity of your order, you might just be intrigued enough to simply give it a try. In a world of abundant product choices and customer decisions, it would seem impossible to get such a huge fraction of an online store's visitors through to the checkout page in such short order, but Mama Joyce has made it completely frictionless.
Closing Thoughts
Going to an independent online store and seeing exciting branding (or, equally often, minimalist blanding) paired up with the same-old menu of "Shop, About, FAQ, Contact" is...frankly, boring! DTC business owners can choose to make those pages as sleek or as poppy as they want, but making them and then stopping there is beginning to look quaint.
At Parade, we're excitedly awaiting an upcoming paradigm shift in the way online businesses operate. We see the companies above as pioneers — explorers in a new space where stubbornly pouring every dollar into traditional ads will no longer be the status quo. We love when brands forget the templates and invent creative ways to make customers smile. That's why the brands that go out of their way to add an interactive element of fun for the customer are the ones we're keeping an eye on moving forward.
We know there are lots of other small brands innovating in many corners of the e-commerce industry. If you know about a cool DTC brand that's been thinking outside the box, let us know on Twitter @paradecommerce!
Note: This post is not sponsored by any brand. None of the companies mentioned in this article provided Parade with any sort of compensation, financial or otherwise, to write about them, nor did they have any editorial control over what was written.
