Milly CEO Andy Oshrin discusses the brand's pivot from a wholesale luxury model to a direct-to-consumer approach. The episode highlights the necessity for established brands to adapt to shifting retail landscapes, focusing on building proprietary DTC channels, leveraging customer data, and evolving product strategies to remain competitive in a digital-first world.
Key takeaways
Rerouting from wholesale to DTC requires bringing sales and marketing in-house to gain control over customer relationships and data.
Implement targeted capsule collections at more accessible price points and frequent drops to attract new demographics, particularly millennials.
Prioritize customer data collection and analysis to inform product development, marketing strategies, and overall business growth in a DTC model.
Embrace direct retail channels, both online and through brand stores, to recapture growth lost from declining department store traffic.
Be prepared to evolve product offerings and price points to meet changing consumer behaviors and market demands.
Since Milly launched in the early 2000s, the rules luxury brands are supposed to follow have changed. Now that department store traffic is falling and boutiques are struggling to master e-commerce at scale, luxury brands that could once rely on wholesale networks for growth now have to allocate time, money and resources to building up direct retail channels, both in brand stores and online. To recapture stalled growth, Milly has started direct-to-consumer operations and brought sales and marketing teams in house, and will launch a capsule collection later this year targeted at millennials, with more affordable prices and more frequently released pieces. Andy Oshrin, the CEO and co-founder of Milly, joined the Glossy Podcast to share more about the brand’s evolution, the challenges that come with rerouting business and the role customer data plays.
