The getting was good for fashion’s digital darlings in 2021.
The pandemic supercharged e-commerce, pushing a host of direct-to-consumer companies into the public markets.
But the good times didn’t last with the first-gen dot-coms mostly turning into dot-bombs.
Now a new wave has arrived and Brandon Yoshimura, a managing director in the consumer retail space at investment bank Solomon, argues in a ...
The narrative presents a compelling case for the evolution of digital-native fashion brands, contrasting the speculative excesses of 2021 with the disciplined growth of today’s cohort. The strongest version of this argument—its steelman—is that the first wave of DTC brands mistook digital distribution for product-market fit, leading to inflated valuations and subsequent collapses. The new wave, however, has learned from these failures, prioritizing operational rigor and product quality over grow...