An opinion I've been afraid to share: I think that DTC has failed, overall.

I've helped launch more brands than anyone else so maybe there's something to it.

The brands we hold up as beacons have been unprofitable for years. Every IPO tanks. Acquisitions are quickly sunset. I would gander that Shopify's market cap is significantly more than all brands on their platform combined.

To run a DTC brand today you install 50 different apps and platforms. Leak away all of your margin and more to Facebook and Google.

I've created and helped edit hundreds of decks for myself and other founders that have gone on to raise $500m+ (ok I made this up but it's a lot)

Here are 8 specific ways to fix an ineffective fundraising deck

👇🏽 1/ Titles are for narrative

Avoid “Problem” or “Team” - tell us what to take away. Your titles, sequentially, should form a complete narrative.

“Problem” -> “The world is drowning in spam”
“Team” -> “We built Gmail’s spam filter and blocked billions of spam emails.”

Top of our leadership meeting every week: which of our SF stores were broken into, vandalized, which of our SF employees were harassed, how many windows were broken. Have never mentioned this publicly, but we have stores all over the country and crime/employee harassment in our San Francisco stores (mostly Hayes Valley but now Chase Center as well) is 10x the rest of our stores combined.

At b8ta, we are in the business of physical retail stores. While we sell products online, our stores are the reason for our existence. We encourage our shoppers to touch and try all of the products at b8ta. We are truly in the business of touch and human-to-human relationships. To give you a sense for scale, we have hundreds of retail employees, and, last year, we hosted over 2 million people in our stores. This year, we would have expected around 300,000 people per month. On average, they would interact with around 20 products. So 200k touches per day.