How to Go Direct Without Declaring War on Your Retailers

Published 2023-05-11 · Updated 2026-06-23 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: DTC Strategy, Retail, Product Strategy & Development, E-commerce, Digital Marketing

There's a specific dilemma that pure direct-to-consumer companies never have to face, and that traditional brands wrestle with more or less constantly: how do you build your own direct channel when most of your business runs through the very retailers that channel would seem to compete with? At Munchkin the bulk of the business flowed through the big marketplaces and retailers – Amazon, Target, Walmart. Those partners weren't a side channel that we could afford to annoy; they were the channel, full stop. And yet there was a real, valuable opportunity sitting right there to grow a direct relationship with customers through the brand's own site, and ignoring it would have been its own kind of mistake.

The trap, and I've watched other brands walk straight into it with their eyes open, is treating "going direct" as a war on your retail partners. You undercut them on price to win the sale, you quietly poach their customers, and one morning you discover you've picked a fight with the people responsible for the overwhelming majority of your revenue. That isn't a strategy. That is self-harm with a roadmap attached to it. The reframe that actually makes this work is to build a direct channel that complements the retail relationships instead of cannibalizing them, and it's harder and more disciplined, and it is the only version that doesn't blow up in your face six months later.

Start with price, because that is almost always where the war begins. The naive way to drive people to your own site is simply to be cheaper there. That immediately undercuts your retail partners, who notice instantly (they watch your pricing far more closely than you'd guess), and now you are the vendor competing with the very stores that stock you. So you don't compete on price at all. You compete on value that isn't price – a membership that offers faster shipping, an extended warranty, first access to new products, perks and service that a third-party listing simply can't match. The member gets more without you ever posting a lower number, which means you've handed people a real reason to come direct without handing your partners a reason to be furious with you.

Then there's the question of exclusives, and the discipline turns out to be exactly the same. Exclusive products and early access are powerful levers for a direct channel, no question, but if you use them to strip the good stuff away from your retail partners, you've simply poached again in a fancier outfit. The better move is to develop exclusives and launches that give your direct channel something genuinely special without gutting the assortment your partners depend on, and even, where it makes sense, to develop products specifically with a particular partner in mind, so that the relationship is additive on both sides rather than a slow tug-of-war.

The most counterintuitive part of all this is that your retail partners can actively make your direct business better, if you can stop treating the relationship as a zero-sum game. The marketplaces sit on an enormous amount of data and demand signal. You can use what you learn from partner performance to make your own owned-channel marketing smarter and more efficient. You can optimize your assortment so that your media spend works harder everywhere it lands. You can even structure things so that you only pay to market the products that are exclusive to a given partner on that partner's own surface, which turns marketing cost into shared growth rather than another quiet fight over the same customer.

This is the point where a joint business plan stops being a procurement ritual and becomes the actual strategy. Sitting down with a major partner and genuinely aligning on growth, advertising, merchandising, selection, fulfillment, and co-marketing means you are both pulling in the same direction instead of quietly fighting over margin behind each other's backs. When the partner grows your business and you grow theirs, the direct channel becomes one more way the whole relationship compounds, rather than the thing that poisoned it. The goal, stated plainly, is a plan in which the partner wins, you win, and your direct customers win, all at the same time.

The mental shift underneath every piece of this is to stop seeing your retailers as competitors for the customer and start seeing the whole system as one demand engine that you are tuning together. Pure DTC brands optimize a single channel and call it a day. A brand with deep retail relationships has a more complex but considerably more durable position: multiple channels that, played well, reinforce one another. Played badly, with price wars and poaching, they tear each other apart, and you lose the very advantage the relationships gave you in the first place.

I'll acknowledge the honest tension here, because it's real. There are genuine cases where direct and retail compete for the exact same sale, and pretending the conflict never exists is its own kind of naive. You will have uncomfortable conversations about price and assortment, and you should expect them rather than be surprised by them. The point isn't that conflict never arises; the point is that your default posture should be complement and not compete, because the partners moving most of your product are far more valuable to you as allies than as casualties. Going direct is the right move for almost every brand now. Going direct by declaring war on the retailers who built your business is how you win a single channel and lose the whole company. Build the direct relationship as something that makes the entire system stronger, and you get to have both.