Content to commerce: how D2C brands can wean themselves off Amazon

The content-to-commerce strategy for ecommerce businesses is a relatively recent model, but I see it shaking up the industry in a big way.

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses that lean heavily on fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) aggregators, in particular, could benefit big time from the model. Let me explain why.

Photo credit: Amazon

How does it work?

The idea with this new model is that you own both access to the customers – i.e. the content – and the products to monetize it.

In typical D2C ecommerce, you own some brands that you sell on a combination of platforms, such as your own site, social channels and marketplaces. FBA aggregators like Branded and Thrasio are highly dependent on marketplaces.

Typically, though, their longer-term goal is to increase the ratio of products sold on their own channels and reduce reliance on Amazon. However, it’s difficult to do this profitably because customer acquisition costs (CAC) are too high with direct acquisition marketing.

Part of the problem is how these companies don’t have this kind of competency, so they need to learn it. D2C companies typically need to drive CAC down by getting better at content marketing and social media as well as building a community of users, among other skills.

With the content-to-commerce model, they solve this from the beginning by owning the customer channel/communities – media assets, access to influencers, and more – from the jump.

The Good Glamm Group

The Good Glamm Group is one of the first large content-to-commerce companies and is considered a pioneer by many in the industry. The firm has raised more than US$250 million to date and its last valuation was over US$1 billion.

Darpan Sanghvi founded the company – then known as a D2C business called MyGlamm – in 2017. But its CAC was too high, so the company experimented with content and acquired POPxo, an influencer marketing platform, in 2020.

The Good Glamm Group is structured into three core units:

• Good Brands: Includes D2C beauty and personal care brands like MyGlamm, Organic Harvest, etc.
• Good Media: Includes digital media brands that generate more than 4 billion monthly impressions and have over 2 million unique users
• Good Creator Co: Includes influencer platform with more than 250,000 creators

In the past couple of years, the company has acquired 12 brands, which I believe puts it close to the aggregator model. The synergies and scale advantages that it aims to give to these brands are almost identical to the approach of aggregator firms.

Form communities via content

Why aggregators will evolve toward this model