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

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.