Midlife Crisis in DTC: Where Millennial-Built Brands Go From Here

A decade later, many early DTC brands face slowing growth, leadership issues, and unsustainable funding, though a few have adapted and continued to see success. Here's what you need to know:

• Several of the early DTC brands that once promised to disrupt retail are now facing slower growth, market cap declines, and identity struggles.

• Heavy VC funding led to inflated valuations and pressured brands to scale quickly, often at the expense of profitability and long-term stability.

• Reformation stayed profitable and trend-relevant with minimal funding. They are on track to exceed $500 million in annual sales. Meanwhile, Everlane and Allbirds saw major declines due to brand confusion and a lack of innovation.

• Brands like Bonobos and Glossier illustrate the risks of scaling without clear long-term strategy. Bonobos sold for a fraction of its earlier valuation; Glossier struggles with consumer focus.

• The next wave of successful brands will blend wholesale and DTC models, prioritize sustainable growth, and learn from the first generation’s missteps.

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The Fastest-Growing Brands Right Now

How can you successfully identify fast-growing DTC brands? Use Charm. 

Charm ranks 5 million DTC brands by growth based on the Charm Growth Score. The Charm Growth Score is a multidimensional score ranking the growth of a brand based on various factors, including the growth of its social media audience size, social engagement, reseller distribution, website traffic, and other metrics.

The score is generated using a proprietary machine-learning model and represents a brand's relative growth compared to other brands in the same product category. For example, a beauty brand with a Charm Growth Score of 85 would indicate that the brand is growing faster than 85% of other beauty brands tracked by Charm.

Let's take a look at some of the fastest-growing DTC brands right now, according to the Charm Growth Score.

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