Why there still haven’t been more billion-dollar acquisitions for direct-to-consumer commerce startups

Big tech platforms, e-commerce, and retail companies haven’t been acquiring direct-to-consumer brands, keeping a set of well-funded would-be buyers out of the equation.

I’m not sure anyone ever seriously expected Facebook, Google, or eBay to be a buyer of these types of businesses, but they haven’t been. Amazon and Walmart haven’t been active, either. Target has been focused on launching new private-label brands. Nike hasn’t done a DTC roll-up. Shopify, which now powers almost 2 million e-commerce merchants, hasn’... See more

“The era of the billion-dollar brand is over; there’s going to be lots and lots of brands that have much more specific focuses,” Davis summarized when we spoke last month.

The idea is that Chord — built this decade — is designed to power more flexible, customizable shopping experiences than a template-based system, and according to its founders, has better built-in, first-party data tools.

Despite a pandemic that accelerated the shift toward e-commerce, and continued market share shifts away from giant, legacy brands, there hasn’t been a billion-dollar-plus buying spree of direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies.