Dollars & Sense

Expanding Bridge's Customer Base to Help More Brands

Best of Thymes, an indie store in Iowa, just closed (https://bestofthymes.bridgecatalog.com/news.cfm?id=20645). Hopefully, they’ll continue to operate online and keep using Bridge. Best of Thymes is part of an industry-wide series of closures that is affecting large and small retailers. Due to this, brands are increasing their efforts to go D2C. Brands justify this by saying that there are fewer stores to show their wares. While this is true, surely they are motivated by: 2x the margins. Social media and brand websites make it easier than ever for brands to do D2C. In the past, we’ve told brands that our software can’t be used by them for D2C or registry because Bridge wants indie retailers to receive the orders. Specifically, I remember Annieglass asking us if we offered an online registry service. I said “No” and it signed up with myregistry.com. 

Due to these trends, I believe we have to adapt to this changing market, otherwise, Shopify and MyRegistry will be the winners of Bridge's orthodox indie-first ideology.  We have to expand and promote our D2C and registry services for brands.  Last fall, we created the ability for brands to do D2C and offer a registry.  Since then, we’ve been tweaking the pricing for these services, and we are now ready to expand the number of brands using them. I need to make a plan to promote these new offerings to brands.

Bridge is very well situated to help brands sell online because we’ve been doing this for hundreds of retailers for 10 years. And, we’ve been helping the distributor DeVine and the brand Pickard for more than 10 years do D2C on their parent sites. We have the right software and experience to help many brands in our industry.

Tags:
d2c direct to consumer brands

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