Why Wholesale Brands Struggle Going Direct (And What a Welsh Restaurant Gets Right)

There's a restaurant in Machynlleth, mid-Wales, called Gwen. An open kitchen where the chef, Corrin Harrison, cooks in front of you. A wine bar at the front. You can walk in off the high street and have a cocktail without booking.

Six miles down the road is Ynyshir, a 2 Michelin starred restaurant. Thirty courses. Five hours. No menu. You eat what chef Gareth Ward decides you're eating, and you book months in advance.

Gwen is Ynyshir's sister restaurant. Same team. Same suppliers. Same ingredients. Same obsessive standards.

Completely different experience.

What the team behind both of these places understood is something that sounds obvious but is remarkably rare in practice. The same product, served to a different audience, requires a fundamentally different model. Not a cheaper version of the original. Not a diluted version. A translated one.

Ynyshir is built for someone who seeks out extraordinary food and submits to the experience. Gwen is built for someone to wander in, who wants to feel welcomed rather than tested, who needs the quality to be self-evident rather than ritualised.

The ingredients didn't change. Everything else did.

Same Product, No Translation

I think about this a lot when I work with wholesale brands launching direct to consumer. Because most of them do the opposite. They take the same product, the same presentation, the same assumptions about who their customer is, and they put it on a Shopify store. Same ingredients. No translation.

The website looks fine. The photography is good. The checkout works. But nothing clicks, and nobody can quite explain why.

What's usually happened is they've built a wholesale experience and pointed consumers at it. The product page reads the way a spec sheet reads. The brand story assumes familiarity that doesn't exist. The merchandising follows logic that makes sense to a buyer but means nothing to someone who arrived through an Instagram ad and has never heard of you.

The Four Questions

The question, when I work through this with brands, usually breaks into four parts.

There's pricing. "How do we sell direct without undercutting our retailers?" It's a real tension. But it's almost never the first one that needs solving.

Then there's positioning. Your wholesale customers know you through a buyer who curates, selects, and contextualises your product alongside others. When a consumer lands on your website, that entire editorial layer disappears. They see your product alone, without the context that made it desirable. Most brands don't replace that context. They just describe the product and add a price.

And this is the one that usually determines everything: what are you actually willing to change? Not what you're willing to add. What you're willing to do differently. Are you prepared to build different onboarding, different content, different success metrics, a different retention model? Or are you hoping the product is strong enough to carry a model that wasn't designed for this audience?

Gwen's answer to this question is what makes it work. They didn't just lower the price and reduce the courses. They rethought the physical space, the service model, the relationship between kitchen and diner, the customer experience. They built for the customer they wanted to reach, not the customer they already had.

Most brands I see answer this question differently. They're willing to change the landing page. Maybe the homepage. Perhaps some product descriptions. But the underlying model, the way the business thinks about the customer, doesn't shift. That's not a criticism. But it does change what success looks like, and it's worth knowing that before you point six figures of paid media at a site that wasn't built for the person who clicks.

Channel Experiment or Strategic Decision?

Underneath all of that is the commitment question. Is this a channel experiment or a strategic decision? Because the investment profile looks completely different. A channel experiment needs a test budget and a clear timeframe. A strategic decision needs its own commercial model, essentially a business within a business. Treating one as the other is how brands end up spending serious money and getting ambiguous results.

The brands that make D2C work, in my experience, are the ones thinking carefully about what values and standards translate into a new customer proposition, and which need a new approach. Same quality. Same standards. Same ingredients. But rebuilt for an audience that finds you differently, experiences you differently, and needs something different from the relationship.

Gwen didn't dilute Ynyshir. It translated it. Eight seats on a high street in a market town, and the Michelin inspector still showed up.

The question for any brand going direct isn't whether your product is good enough. It almost certainly is. The question is whether you've translated the experience, or just transplanted it.