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The (In)Efficiency of DTC
There is a myth in ecommerce land that DTC (direct-to-consumer) is good for the consumer and good for the brands too. Here is the thinking: DTC helps brands make more money because they are cutting out middlemen (distributors and retailers), and consumers win because they are getting better quality at a better price. Sadly, the…
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Buy or lease your warehouse: Three questions to ask
While we have both leased and owned warehouses in the past, we have a pretty strong bias toward leasing today, and in fact, currently own no warehouses. By the time you finish this post, you will know why, but before we get to that, I do want to acknowledge the two major benefits of owning:…
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Launching a WooCommerce site
Important: While there may be links in this document, we have no affiliate relationships with any vendors and earn no compensation for referrals. Any recommendations we make are solely based on our own experience with the vendor. Synopsis While Shopify dominates the landscape, DTC and Ecommerce businesses should not rule out WooCommerce as their website…
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Weaponizing inventory
Key Concepts Just a few years ago, a concept known as JIT (just in time) inventory was the rage. The basic concepts of JIT are as follows: JIT often goes hand-in-hand with Lean manufacturing, a very valuable way of looking at operations that has influenced us at Capacify. We like Lean and we like JIT,…
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The case for small improvements
I recently read an article by a respected DTC operator who was giving a perspective on improvement. He illustrated his thoughts by discussing a quadrant that looks like this: As you examine this chart, it is pretty easy to see where DTC and E-commerce businesses should ideally be spending their time (upper right) and where…
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The big 3PL question: To use or not to use?
I recently read some survey results that claimed that fast-growing DTC/E-commerce companies tend to use a 3PL. I have no doubt that is true, but I strongly believe that more businesses should run their own operations. I am going to make a case for that in this post. To start, let’s get some background out…
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Why operations improvement is actually marketing
At this point in time, customer acquisition is unquestionably the hottest topic of conversation in DTC and E-commerce. There is a good reason for this: Facebook ads have been performing poorly since 2021, search advertising costs are rising quickly, social media is oversaturated, and coming AI has the capacity to make things much worse. Many…
