DTC brands are warming up to off-price retail

In addition to death and taxes, one of the certainties in the retail world is that, eventually, every brand’s products will end up in an off-price retailer. Both name brands and more value-based companies alike have unloaded out-of-season collections at off-price retailers for decades.
But, digitally-native and direct-to-consumer companies were originally marketed as forging a closer relationship with customers. As such, or so the story went, this allowed them to plan more efficiently and resist offloading inventory through sales or off-price retailers like the brands of years’ past.