What I learned about DTC e-commerce in 2021 [1/6] ✍️

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Focus 🤓

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Going into 2021 I had a lot of conversations about “focus”.

Keeping my focus has been a tremendous challenge for me in the past few years. Constantly asking myself am I doing the right things? Person X is doing Y, shouldn’t I also start doing that?

The people who have been close to me professionally the last few years are aware of that phenomenon. So that’s why, after only 6 months of our agency dear digital, when we were raising money for Puzzle in a Bag. I needed to have a lot of these types of focus conversations. To be honest it was good to have them.

It made me realise that I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing and just as important: I’m doing it with the right people. So no more looking at others, just focussing on executing our plans.

Still the argument for focus could be made: We wanted to grow both an e-commerce agency and a DTC e-commerce brand.

Now apparently we were able to convince enough people that we can do both, as in 2021 we successfully raised money for Puzzle in a bag and merged dear digital with Bombay Studio of Sam & John, who have had an amazing e-commerce journey themselves.
But convincing people of our ability is one thing, successfully executing all of our plans is something different.

But looking back it has been the most focused year of my career. Working on both dear digital and Puzzle in a Bag has taught me so much about e-commerce and I’m 100% sure I would not have been able to learn so much in only 1 year if it weren’t for both projects:

• We are creating an e-commerce ecosystem
• Helped clients in their amazing e-commerce journeys
• We launched a podcastpodcast (>1.500 downloads so far)
• Expanded the team to over 15 people
• Raised funding for PIAB
• Sold > 10.000 puzzles
• Set up an international supply chain ourselves
  
  Enough intro, what did I learn and how does that apply to your brand?
  Well I tried to keep it a bit structured so I divided it in the following 5 topics:
  
  
• ‍Volume play vs Premium play‍
• DTC side benefits
• E-commerce Engine
  
• Our tech stack
• Our role as an e-commerce agency
  

As always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out.

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