The deck is easy to picture because it was everywhere. Cut out the middleman. Own the customer. Keep the margin. A Shopify store, a performance budget, a brand with nice type, and a curve on the last slide going up and to the right. For a few years the deck was right, and the businesses built on it grew fast enough to make the argument for everyone else.
What the deck never said was why it was right. The playbook worked because of a set of conditions: social advertising priced before anyone believed in it, a customer for whom buying direct still felt novel, and capital patient enough to fund the gap while brands learned. Those conditions were the business model. The playbook was just a photograph of them.
The conditions left. The playbook stayed.
Acquisition costs multiplied, privacy changes broke the targeting that justified them, and the capital stopped being patient. The mid-market is where the squeeze shows hardest: fixed costs rising faster than revenue, margins compressed into single digits, and a channel that was sold as liberation behaving like an expensive habit. The playbook, meanwhile, is still being copied, complete with subscription pop-up and founder letter, by brands entering a market that no longer resembles the photograph.
I spent years inside this model at Missguided, when the conditions were real and the growth was too, and I’ve spent the years since advising brands trying to replicate it after the window closed. The pattern I keep meeting is translation failure. A model that worked is copied whole into a context it wasn’t written for, the way a recipe gets followed in a different kitchen at a different altitude and produces something flat. The principle needed translating. The playbook got transplanted.
What direct is actually for now
Strip the ideology out and the direct channel still earns its keep, just differently. It is where you learn fastest: first-party data, real customer conversations, a testing ground for product and price that wholesale will never give you. It is a margin option, not a margin guarantee. And for some brands, with the product economics and repeat rates to support it, it remains the whole business, honestly won. The trap is not going direct. The trap is treating direct as a religion rather than a channel that has to defend its economics line by line, the same as every other route to the customer.
“Cut out the middleman” was never a strategy. It was an arbitrage, and arbitrages close.
What’s left when the arbitrage closes is the question the deck skipped on the way to the curve: why should anyone buy from you, through any channel, at full price, twice? A brand that can answer that has options everywhere, direct included. A brand that can’t has a Shopify store and a rising media bill, and calls it a strategy.