DTC 3.0 Means Knowing Your Customer Everywhere

Hi there,

Bogg Bag, the cooler-tote brand, announced it's on track to beat its 2025 revenue high of $140 million and just added six new retail partners [1].

As a Brij customer, we've had a front-row seat to Bogg's incredible growth. And what's most important for other brands to take away is how Bogg does this without having to choose between scale and the customer relationship.

The brands that are crushing 2026 aren't choosing between DTC and retail/wholesale; they're building the infrastructure to know the customer no matter where the sale happens.

What DTC 3.0 Actually Means

Quick definition, since I lean on this term a lot lately: DTC 3.0 brings ecommerce and physical retail together to build a stronger, more personalized customer experience, not a weaker one.

DTC 1.0 was "sell direct, skip the middleman." DTC 2.0 was when retail/wholesale became a priority, but was more so about surviving through omnichannel. DTC 3.0 moves beyond channel focus to meet the customer wherever they are, and is defined by a deeper customer connection and reliance on first-party data.

Basically, go everywhere the customer already is, retail doors included, and keep the direct relationship anyway.

DTC 3.0 isn't just "sell in more places." It's powered by first-party data and AI doing the same personalization work everywhere your customer shows up, not just on your own site.

So even if a customer buys your product off a shelf at Target or through a TikTok Shop stream, DTC 3.0 infrastructure uses smart packaging, loyalty incentives, and identity resolution to pull that customer into your brand ecosystem.

Retail Is Becoming an Extension of Direct

Bogg isn't focusing on wholesale because DTC stopped working. It's scaling distribution and treating the retail shelf as an extension of the relationship [1].

60% of Bogg's sales run through DTC and Amazon. The other 40% comes from retail partners [1], and that's the number founder Kim Vaccarella wants to keep growing.

Gen Z's affinity for shopping IRL backs this push, too. They still want to see and touch a product before they buy it, wholesale door or brand's own store, doesn't matter which [2].

Every retail partner tends to have "a different customer," Vaccarella said, which is exactly what helps broaden Bogg's reach [1]. And the people showing up in those doors might be customers you don't know at all. Mejuri's CEO and co-founder, Noura Sakkijha, said on a panel at NRF's Big Show: "We assumed a lot of the people who were going to come to our stores were existing customers. But to our surprise, we found that 60% of the people buying in store are net new customers." [2]

Put it together and you get the actual DTC 3.0 playbook: use AI and your own data to extend the relationship and the personalization wherever the customer chooses to shop, so retail stops being a separate, disconnected channel and starts being an extension of direct.

The Maturity Curve I Can't Stop Thinking About

Here's how I've started mapping it. Most brands sit at one of four stages.

Stage 1: Direct-only. You know every customer. Your reach is capped by what you can afford to spend on ads.

Stage 2: Wholesale as pure distribution. Reach grows fast. The second a product leaves your own checkout, you have no idea who bought it. We call it the retail black box.

Stage 3: A capture point. You start orchestrating data capture so a purchase at retail can still identify the buyer. You gather all of the data to know who is shopping where.

Stage 4: Full-loop DTC 3.0. You have the AI infrastructure in place to ensure every retail purchase becomes a known, retained customer, and the data optimizes the same programs your direct customers already get. Retail becomes a true extension of DTC.

That same retail buyer identification makes your brand stronger across retention and acquisition.

Bogg isn't choosing between paid and retail. It's putting more money into TikTok and Instagram ads at the same time it's adding retail doors [1]. Most brands treat those as two separate budgets, one for reach and one for distribution, and never connect them.

But the same purchase data that makes a retail buyer a known, retained customer is the same signal that helps Meta, Google, and TikTok understand who your actual buyers are, not just the ones who happened to check out on your site. Feed that signal into your ad platforms, and every new customer those retail doors bring you makes your ad spend work harder too. That's most of what we're heads-down on at Brij right now: making sure that signal actually reaches your ad platforms in the first place.

Where does your brand sit on the path to true DTC 3.0 right now?

Talk soon,

Kait

A few extras:

Some of my favorite brands are hiring…

1. Bobbie - Interim Marketing Director

Sources:

[1] Modern Retail, "Bogg, on track for record sales, expands into Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie."

[2] Retail Dive, "3 DTC brands on why good old-fashioned retail still works."