Just a moment...

Firstly, people will increasingly identify with and trust other people rather than starting with a specific type of product or impersonal brand. We're putting the individual’s brand and their company’s brand forward. We compare Shopify and Etsy—there’s a difference in how overwhelming it is to go to somebody's Shopify store that you trust, vs. goin... See more

If commerce is a transaction between buyer and seller, the face of the seller is evolving with new tools for discovery and purchase that allow for a personal relationship between creator and customer. Beyond a corporation or mass retailer, the seller is now frequently a person or small business. We are seeing a new long-tail retailer learning how t... See more

Now-established players have learned that Instagram advertisements and influencer campaigns only scale to a point: they can net no more than a few hundred thousand of a brand’s “first best” customers. This has driven a shift toward physical retail and prompted founders to agonize over if and when to peddle their wares on Amazon, making direct to co... See more

Direct-to-consumer brands have typically relied on disparate sources to solicit feedback from their most engaged customers: Google Docs, Slack bases, DMs. Try Your Best aims to streamline that process, and to route marketing dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, where Ms. Haney said that soaring costs have made it harder for emerging brands to ... See more

In a saturated market where new direct-to-consumer startups are popping up left and right, customers “want to feel that they’re getting something superior,” said Krystal Melissa Wu, a community manager at Shopify. “Community is not something you can replicate or cultivate overnight.”

Geneva was born out of this same momentum. The founders not only see a title wave of direct with consumer brands coming but also believe community should be the default GTM and customer discovery strategy for early-stage internet and DTC businesses.

As we were all downloading TikTok, learning about NFTs, stumbling upon new brands via our favorite influencers, and diving down the rabbit hole of online potential, we were also ushering in the next revolution in commerce powered by the seller.

When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping expe... See more