“Amazon is designed to commoditize products to the lowest common denominator of what they stand for,” Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds’s co-founder

In a landscape where customer attention is the scarcest resource, Shopify’s very identity as a neutral platform and invisible infrastructure is perhaps both its greatest asset and its greatest limitation.

For a while, the DTC playbook was golden: Start with a commodity product, something like dish soap or underpants. Give it a modern design and wrap it in minimalist packaging. Include a pastel background in the impeccably staged product photos, which splash across a Shopify-powered e-commerce site flanked by sans-serif fonts, punchy copy and a... See more