Glossary
No one in between.
DTC — direct to consumer — is selling straight to the person who will use the product. You keep the retail margin, and you inherit every job the middlemen used to do.
DTC = your product, sold straight to its end customer
cost to win the order $25
direct nets $50 a unit to wholesale's $25 — $25 more for doing the retailer's job yourself.
The margin and the job
Two neighbouring terms first: B2C means selling to consumers through any channel, and B2B means selling to other businesses. DTC is B2C with the middle layers removed — no distributor buying at wholesale, no retailer taking the shelf's share of the price. The trade is simple to state and hard to run: you keep the whole retail gross margin, and in exchange you take on every job the middlemen were doing — finding the customer, running the storefront, shipping the parcel, answering the email. The biggest new line item is acquisition: the ad spend that replaces the retailer's foot traffic, measured as CAC. What you get for it, beyond margin, is the customer relationship itself — the email address, the order history, the second purchase that costs almost nothing to win. That is why direct brands live and die by LTV rather than by any single order.
When wholesale still wins
Wholesale buys reach without ad spend. A retailer's aisle is distribution you do not pay for click by click: twenty-five dollars a unit with zero acquisition cost, shipped by the pallet against one purchase order, can quietly beat fifty dollars you fight for parcel by parcel — especially in the seasons when ad auctions get expensive and CAC climbs toward the ceiling. That is why most mature brands run both routes: direct for margin, data and full-price sales; wholesale for reach and discovery. The question is rarely either-or. It is how much of each.
Made with care by Astral Commerce