Memo: Anatomy of a DTC Acquisition

We strive to have a rhythmic and healthy heart. Athletes push for lung capacity. The consumer packaged goods industrial complex champions the importance of one’s gut health. And here we are, ashamed of the way our own brains work.

There is a pang that I feel when I allude to my own mental health struggles in public. There is a stigma associated, an acknowledgment that none of us are as strong or as tough or as sound as we believe ourselves to be. Ten years ago, I would have thought it was a failure to express any thoughts on the matter, publicly or privately. Five years ago, I would have burdened my best friend for help at the risk of an intensity in responsibility that isn’t healthy to distribute or accept. But today, I try to communicate to those who listen that it’s just a part of being a human being, a creator, a parent, an entrepreneur, and a soul.

I have had dozens of head injuries and resulting neurological issues. I suffered from post traumatic stress, crippling social anxiety, and a depth of depression that I wouldn’t wish on my worst foe. Many young women and men are taught to train to peak physical performance and to ignore any signs of mental or emotional weakness. Some coaches say things like, “Silence the brain.” Imagine thinking this way for three decades. It is, above all else, an acknowledgment of our failures as a society that the body adapts to work and rest and nutrition. This is all changing and it will continue to in the years to come.

Your brain deserves the same attention as the rest of your organs and the world is finally catching up to the fact that it can be as injured or as malfunctioning as any outwardly visible muscle, bone, ligament, or tendon. Enter one of the quiet but meaningful acquisitions of the past year: Hyperice’s deal with Core Meditation. For the first time in an industry overcrowded by health and wellness devices, one company chose to marry physical recovery with mental improvement. From the acquisition announcement:

Core is designed to help people find calm, improve focus and inner strength. Unlike other meditation apps, Core is both an app and a handheld meditation device designed to track heart rate and stress levels

Sarah McDevitt, CEO and co-founder of Core, is a friend of mine. The 5’11” guard and former New York University basketball player is one of those quiet and steady stoic types who rarely wears her weaknesses on her sleeve. Over the few years that we’ve known one another, I have observed how she’s handled her own pressures. She must have been under incredible stress for a time. Her growth plans were halted by a once in a century pandemic. Her team turned over. And the conversation around the importance of meditation was on the fringes of the health and wellness industry. Few took it seriously before recently.

Core was incubated within the walls of Bolt VC in San Francisco (also an early believer in Tonal) by co-founder Brian Bolze and McDevitt. The value of Bolt’s early involvement was priceless: the access to facilities, technical designers, and developers helped to establish Core as an entrant into a field rarely pursued by independent operators. In a 2019 memo, I covered the prospect of her success:

Core is launching a meditation device that actively measures its effects by tracking HRV, a measure that allows consumers to quantitatively measure the strain on their central nervous system. Entrepreneurs and other high risk professionals have used this measure to discuss their levels of stress and depression for a time; however, HRV’s interest is growing quickly in non-athletic spaces.

But adoption was always going to be a problem without tens of millions in capital to spend on demand generation. She simply didn’t have that. She also didn’t have much luck. Her meditation trainer was well-designed and well-received, winning an honor at 2020’s CES convention. But the question has long been: how does Core compete with meditation apps and less capable but wider-known physical devices? The antidote for anonymity is usually the highest visibility partnerships you can purchase, which is buy-in from professional athletes and entertainers. It is not customary for venture firms (outside of perhaps A16Z) to be able to provide such introductions. And at a certain point, there isn’t a venture raise that can fund a company’s way into the world of professional sports. At just $4 million raised since 2016, the company was undercapitalized and underappreciated. But on occasion, luck and timing do begin to work in your favor.

The Luck and Timing of Now

By the time that Naomi Osaka had announced her decision to sit out at Wimbledon, McDevitt and team were already in conversation with Hyperice CEO Jim Huether. Another fortuitous connection would emerge. Jason Stein of SC Holdings is a fierce advocate and board member at Hyperice. He’s also an NYU basketball alum. Sometimes, luck swings in your favor and the shared experience between the McDevitt and Stein certainly helped.

In many ways, Osaka jump-started the current national conversation around mental health when she announced in May that she would not participate in mandatory press conferences ahead of the French Open. She later withdrew from the tournament, explaining that “I am not a natural public speaker and get huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media” and that she had faced “long bouts of depression” since 2018. [1]

Several weeks later, Simone Biles announced that she would be bowing out of her upcoming events at the 2020 Olympics, shocking fans and citing the need to prioritize her mental health. In one statement, she disappointed many of those observers simply by doing what was right for her. The online chatter around both Osaka’s and Biles’s personal decisions was insatiable: cable news hosts lamented them as figures with poor character. Trolling was even more relentless from gentlemen who might have once scored a single basket or remembered catching a single, JV touchdown pass back in high school.

But what these very public displays of defiance represented was a shift away from the shame of mental health concerns. Two of the strongest and most accomplished athletes in sports chose to mend the invisible scars. Just a decade prior, it would have been unlikely to see athletes make these decisions at the tops of their games. Now here we are, with mental health atop the list of athletic concerns. And as the national conversation continues to develop, Core has a new resource in Hyperice to bridge the divide between the mental and physical. More importantly, Hyperice and Jason Stein offer access to elite athletes and entertainers. Just a year ago, Stein’s SC Holdings invested in Mav Carter and Lebron James in Springhill Company, for instance.

When I was notified of the company’s decision to join Hyperice, I was ecstatic. Not only for Sarah McDevitt and team, her previous investors, and her new business partners but for the message made to the greater athletic community. The timing of the marriage between physical and mental health disciplines are long overdue. The shame around it is still dissipating; you can still sense the hesitancy in athletes. A recent statement by Aaron Rodgers:

The mental side of it is so important for all of us athletes. I don’t think it’s talked about enough. But taking time to work on yourself is, I think, the best gift any of us can give ourselves.

In three years’ time, athletes like Rodgers will no longer tip-toe around the anguish of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. He will give a full-throated analysis of his mental health, no differently than he’d discuss a strained MCL or tendinosis. The commercialization of mental healthcare will be viewed as before and after its stigma and 2021 will be a pivotal year in that story. The Hyperice acquisition of Core will be remembered as a part of that change. A little company with $4 million in funding and fewer than 10 employees lived up to its original goal of impacting a greater industry. Its original investors and supporters should be proud that the Core team set aside the ego and thought big enough to partner with one of the prominent and well-connected companies in athletics. It’s a category that will be redefined.

By Web Smith | Editor: Hilary Milnes 

No. 336: The ‘Cycle of More’

There is a subtle trend bubbling beneath the Rothys and Veja’s of urban dwelling millennials. There is a rise in 20 and 30-something workers who choose to take mental health days off from work, citing burnout. CBD-based goods are commonplace throughout specialty retailers’ checkout lines. Meditation apps and hardware are tipping into the mainstream. Rather than the consumption of more and more goods, high-earning millennials are choosing to take time off instead. This shift in priority is in-line with another: the boom of companies pursuing valuation arbitrage by identifying new paths to growth. WeWork, perhaps the case study par excellence of this business cycle crashed –  on demand  – with the help of an angry, financially-free NYU Professor with nothing to lose.

Two trends lead this report: (1) the shift towards mental minimalism and (2) the shift away from the business cycle of more. In a January report in BuzzFeed News, the first of the two began to pick up steam in the mainstream media:

So what now? Should I meditate more, negotiate for more time off, delegate tasks within my relationship, perform acts of self-care, and institute timers on my social media? How, in other words, can I optimize myself to get those mundane tasks done and theoretically cure my burnout? As millennials have aged into our thirties, that’s the question we keep asking — and keep failing to adequately answer. But maybe that’s because it’s the wrong question altogether. [1]

Each daily task, job, extracurricular event, and hobby shares many of the same traits with one another. Bigger, more, faster, more, better, and more. Rarely is any daily occurrence simple, small, or inconsequential. And it’s beginning to show. If you’re reading this, you’re likely thriving in an environment where you Peloton or Tonal before work, Uber Black while answering emails on $2,000 MacBooks, micro-dose to become “limitless,” intermittently fast to optimize for your fitness, and then work twelve hour days to pay for those $3,500 monthly leases. Frankly, we are all burnt out. And there is a connection; brands are beginning to reflect the empathy towards this behavioral undercurrent.

It’s easy to understand, then, why so many of us are so angry. The WeWork’s of the world were built on an ethos of positive vibes and unity — replete with what tech analyst Ranjan Roy calls “high-minded, burning man-esque self-actualization language” that, today, feels offensively out of sync with people’s lived realities. So why would Pattern, or any company that applies a superficial layer of burnout-conscious buzzwords to its products, be different? [2]

Consumer psychology involves the interest in lifestyle, behavior, and habit. It’s an all-encompassing study that considers our idiosyncrasies, our temperaments, and even our subtle personality traits. These are the variables that influence our behaviors as consumers. Psychographic segmentation is the analysis of a consumer cohort’s lifestyle with the intent to create a detailed profile. [3]

Pattern Brands, the group behind Gin Lane (RIP), is at the forefront of this trend identification. The legendary creative agency that developed the mold for millennial consumption by advising Hims, Harrys, Dia & Co, Ayr, Bonobos, Shinola, Stadium Goods, and Rockets of Awesome is pulling back on the messaging that influenced the “business cycle of more.” With a bit of hindsight, it makes sense that Recess and Haus were two of Gin Lane’s final DTC projects. It’s as if they were telegraphing their plans to focus on a new era of messaging by concluding their successful run with two “mindful” brands.

What does this mean for DTC brands?

In the last months, Everlane launched its impact-free shoe, Allbirds released a Rothy’s look-alike, Rhone launched a credible competitor to Mizzen+Main and Ministry. And Away began laying the groundwork for a consumer packaged goods (CPG) operation. It was once common for brands to believe that they could build a defensible growth path by identifying one product-need and one consumer identity. [4]

Scale fast, scale there, scale now. This is the executive mantra of many of today’s top digitally brands. Many product manufacturers began with a single, key product. They then expanded into a growth path befitting that of a traditional category brand. Though, most DTCs have done so prematurely. In contrast, successful traditional brands expanded beyond their initial focus after a decade or more in business.  In this era of retail, the move from product-to-category happens in just a few years. Founders hire product talent to stay atop a growing diversity of SKUs – many of which were barely intended upon the start. Imagine a shoe company designing luggage or a luggage company designing dress shirts, for instance. For a generation of consumers, the business cycle of more isn’t just student loans, rising rents, or WeWork’s demise. It’s also representative of the brands that we consume. Every brand seems to be out to get bigger, faster, and stronger – a subsconscious reminder that we are to do the same. This is beginning to change.

In a recent conversation between AdWeek’s Ann-Marie Alcántara and I, we discussed these concepts in a marathon of off-the-record discussion. To combat the hyper-growth narrative required to achieve venture funding, the early stages of  today’s upstart brand would resemble more of a publisher or community than a retailer. The rationale is simple: a customer is fleeting, a community lasts. This is most often reflected by brands with stronger organic presences. Brooklinen is the example of the hour.

Brooklinen: A “Bedroom” Brand

No longer just a bedding brand, Brooklinen wants to own the bedroom much like Away aims to own travel. Their strategies diverge from there. Brooklinen is in a class of digitally native bedding companies to include: Parachute Home, Buffy, and Hill House Home Inc. Founded in 2014, the company reported nearly $60 million in 2018 sales; the wife-husband duo has only raised $10 million to date, a capital constraint that likely influenced their growth path from product company to category presence. In this case, capital constraint proved an effective growth mechanism.

Screen Shot 2019-10-28 at 3.51.34 PM
From: earthy-minimalist at Brooklinen

In contrast with many of today’s top digitally native brands, cofounders Rich and Vicki Fulop shunned the traditional “category expansion” playbook in favor of a two-way marketplace format that compliments the aforementioned trend undercurrents.  Consumers will reward the brands that offer value without trying to do it all. As such, the launch of the Spaces marketplace gained wide media attention thanks to savvy messaging from the founding team and public relations work by Ogilvy’s Lindsey Martinez, Brooklinen’s public relations firm on record.

Spaces will feature 100 products by 12 partner brands (in addition to the total 89 products created by Brooklinen). Designers will include some independent artisans, as well as recognized brands such as Simply Framed, The Sill, Floyd and Dims, among others. [5]

The launch piqued the curiosity of a number of industry observers who weren’t yet familiar with Brooklinen’s marketplace partner RevCascade or the SaaS company’s tech stack. Rather than expanding beyond the brand’s 89 SKUs by developing or white labeling other in-category products, Brooklinen partnered with RevCascade to launch a two-sided marketplace. With a monthly average of 600,000 – 650,000 visitors with purchase intent, offering complimentary products from fashionable brands like The Sill accomplishes a few things: it monetizes existing traffic while rounding out the consumer’s interpretation of how Brooklinen fits within their lives.

Brooklinen expanding to a marketplace isn’t necessarily a new concept, according to Web Smith, the founder of retail research platform and community 2PM. It’s what Smith calls linear commerce, in which a brand uses an existing audience to monetize further revenue, growth and traffic. [6]

Is Brooklinen any less of a category brand than Casper? The short answer is no. In fact, the market may reward the bedding company for its two-way market strategy. RevCascade provided the tools necessary for Brooklinen to launch a hybrid marketplace that featured (1) wholesale (2) direct (3) and drop-shipped merchandise. In this way, Brooklinen’s approach is reflective of the Law of Linear Commerce.

With so many new brands in different categories, it’s difficult for any company to “cut through the clutter,” Fulop said.

Brooklinen’s founding team paired an existing audience (of 600k MAU) with an additional commerce opportunity. In their case, they did so without any additional hiring, development, or marketing hindrances associated with new product launches. With their approach, they offer new products while maintaining their focus on the production of quality textiles.

In a comment to 2PM: Josh Wexler, cofounder of RevCascade:

RevCascade enables any retailer, eCommerce merchant, or publisher to launch their own curated marketplace or dropship program to elevate their brand, better serve their consumers, and generate new revenue with zero inventory risk. Brooklinen’s approved brands (aka sellers or suppliers) use RevCascade’s “onboarding wizard” to create their profile, upload inventory, and set shipping preferences. In parallel, by leveraging RevCascade’s automated Shopify integration for product data, inventory updates, and transaction data, Brooklinen was able to launch their marketplace in less than 30 days

Anchored by a strong affinity for the company’s core products, Brooklinen gained a competitive advantage by both measures: DTC and marketplace. Consider Verishop, a popular, well-led, and well-capitalized marketplace that launched in July of 2019:

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Whether we are discussing Pattern Brands’ approach to remedying burnout culture or the cycle of more’s influence on an ever-crowded market of high-growth brands, Brooklinen’s partnership with RevCascade may serve as a path forward for many of their counterparts. Consumers have grown weary of companies that are looking to grow for the sake of growth. To these consumers, it’s a reminder of their own fast-paced, high-pressured lives.

Consumerism will always exist in some form or the other, but the clutter of brands looking to grow to the next milestone may fall out of grace with many. From Marie Kondo to Core Meditation, clutter culture has become a catalyst for burnout remedies. Experiences that provide ease, value, and simplicity will be rewarded in today’s market. It is a brand’s responsibility to contribute to the solution and not to the cycle of more.

Read the No. 336 curation here.

Report by Web Smith and edited by Tracey Wallace | About 2PM

No. 311: Whoop and The Flywheel

Image: courtesy of Gear Patrol

It was a saturday morning in Columbus and Central Ohio was on its last day of hosting the Arnold Classic. Arnold Schwarzenegger hosts an annual event for athletes across fitness, strength, and endurance in town and while we avoid most of it, there was one meeting that I had to take. Alexis (my oldest daughter) and I met for brunch with Iceland’s Katrin Davidsdottir, one of the most recognizable alternative athletes in the world, a two-time “Fittest on Earth”, and family friend. The two athletes discussed the typical sports topics: hard work, diligence, and resilience. Katrin is at the top of her craft and Alexis is an athlete in her own right. The conversation was between two top competitors who recognized each other’s talents, drive, and natural abilities. In this part of the conversation, I was just a bystander.

We quickly moved to more practical matters: the economics of commerce and product marketing. Davidsdottir is also the most marketable athlete in her field and one of her sponsorships is with Whoop. Whoop is a physical band that measures athletic analytics like: strain, depth of sleep, and heart rate variance (HRV). The band allows you to subscribe to an athletics analytics SaaS. In a recent podcast with Whoop, Davidsdottir discussed her journey from a small country to a lucrative, American lifestyle as a competitive athlete. She swears by it; so do I – but for different reasons.

When we recognized the distinct-looking bands wrapped around our respective wrists, we began talking about our affinity for the product. We viewed Whoop from two vantage points: she’s an elite athlete and I’m an entrepreneur – both career paths are stressful to the body, mind, and central nervous system. We went on and on about how often we see the in-app metrics and how it influences our daily decisions. I knew that Whoop would be a force, this conversation confirmed it.

Linear commerce is a core tenet of 2PM’s understanding of the commerce ecosystem. It’s the active prioritization of audience-growth. Product manufacturers typically seek to outsource demand generation. Brands, that are ahead of the curve, emphasize their audience’s growth as much as they address their physical product’s development. And vice versa, digital media companies that follow linear commerce prioritize organic and loyal growth over commodity clicks. By building a system that allows peers to privately compare their lives, Whoop has – perhaps mistakenly – developed its most effective flywheel.

A flywheel is a device that stores and distributes energy. Retail management will use  the term to describe the sociology of keeping customers engaged, allowing engaged customers to attract like-minded consumers.

Jonathan Poma is the Founder of Loop and the Chief Evangelist Officer at Brand Value Accelerator; he recently stepped down from the Chief Executive role to spend more quality time with his family. Part of this decision was stress-driven. He’s also an avid technologist. Poma was in the first 1,000 users of Slack, an early Uber user, and when he finally joined Whoop – I knew that it was only a matter of time before he began to maximize the platform’s functionality. In a recent conversation with him, we discussed the platform’s latest development for us non-athletes. A consumer will be hard pressed to find Whoop branding or messaging that represents consumers like us. When Poma made the request to Whoop for group reporting access, Whoop allowed him to use the “team” functionality for a test group of colleagues. After a few weeks of this using this group setting, Poma chimed in:

Whoop is 100x cooler than I even thought it was two weeks ago.

Prior to this in-app solution, we found that we’d screenshot our best fitness and recovery days and send them to one another via iMessage. Our Whoop group began to grow until we averaged 1-2 new buyers per week; we’d often pitch our friends on buying one so that we’d be able to compare our data. All high risk entrepreneurs, Whoop’s ability to track fitness, sleep, and strain on the central nervous system became a necessity for early-adopting entrepreneurs – a group that traveled often, slept sub-optimally, and works long hours. Our crude iMessage format evolved into an ability to check, compete, and support colleagues.

Through the mobile and desktop applications, we have full visibility of one another’s holistic health. It drives conversations around work ethic, reduction of alcohol / sugar, and improving physical capacity. In this way, Whoop has successfully duplicated the value of the group fitness experience and replaced it with personal software. In essence, the grouped colleagues are always working towards health and training goals in concert.

Despite a selection of elite athletes as sponsors and a top podcast, Whoop is primed to jump the chasm by promoting this functionality for its civilian consumer. In this way, Whoop’s latest offering may become its greatest (and most timely) marketing asset. Why? Data suggests that consumers are evaluating their relationships with: health, community, and luxury – at scale.

2PM Data: On Telemedicine

In a recently published index, 2PM tracked 45+ of the top companies in telemedicine on the DTC Health Index, a list that comprises a list of companies that are privatizing the healthcare industry. Whoop, a company that’s raised $49.8 million, is part of a larger trend towards consumers owning more of their own health and wellness. It is showing, Whoop’s on-site traffic has doubled in the last six months. Of this traffic, only 6% of is by way of paid customer acquisition. The flywheel is spinning.

On desktop and mobile web in the last 6 months

Anticipated growth in digital health systems and analytics are driving a lot of this interest. For instance, Apple recently innovated around this effort to democratize consumer care with its ECG app. And Core is launching a meditation device that actively tracks its effects by tracking HRV. Whoop is one of a handful of platforms that tracks heart rate variance, a measure that allows consumers to quantitatively measure the strain on their central nervous system. Entrepreneurs and other high risk professionals have used this measure to discuss their levels of stress and depression for a time; however, HRV’s interest is growing quickly in non-athletic spaces.

What is HRV? It is the delta between successive heart beats. The heart’s irregular rhythm causes heart beat timing to change. It was initially used by emergency room healthcare professionals to predict patient mortality rates post medical emergency. The application of HRV is now being studied as a measure of physiological response to stress and exercise. The higher the number – on your 30-day baseline – the more recovered the body.

2014-2024: digital health market size ($ billions)

2015-2020: projected CAGR for the global digital health market

On Health and Modern Luxury

In a recent report by Business of Fashion: “The Future of Luxury is Freedom” , the magazine’s resident retail prophet discusses the changing definition of luxury. Doug Stephens writes:

Today, luxury is evolving once again and brands are wrestling with the fact that consumers are increasingly shifting spend from products and services to experiences. This is especially true among young consumers in the West. According to a 2018 Harris Poll study of US millennials, 78 percent say they’d rather spend money on a “desirable experience or event over buying something desirable.”

In No. 265, we discussed this in the context of Peloton, the in-home cycling and media phenomenon that shares a somewhat similar target consumer with Whoop.

It’s no longer sufficient to define luxury products by how difficult they are to attain. Time is the scarcest resource and the ultimate luxury. Being a modern luxury brand is about being self-aware. These brands sell time as a scarcity and then build products around it.

Health and wellness – a scarce resource measured by time and ability – is emerging as one of the most foremost American luxuries as traditional healthcare costs skyrocket. For direct to consumer (DTC) healthcare companies like Whoop, their platform has somewhat accidentally entered the conversation. While designed for athletes working to peak their physical performance, Whoop has found its software co-opted by normal consumers who use the software to measure the markers that influence the scarcity of a consumer’s time and ability.

Whoop is a company of about 100 workers who more than likely train, sleep, and work with the band that they’re helping to build, improve, and market. As the trends around healthcare, luxury, and self-quantification continue to converge in the company’s favor – consumers will will see more of HRV in the context of quantification.

In this way, Whoop and its community are contributing to more than its own marketing flywheel. The long-tail effect of the popularization of HRV means that we’re bound to see more products that address one of the top questions in Whoop’s community: “how do I improve my HRV?” This is the question that will launch its own consumer product sector.

Read the No. 311 curation here.

Report by Web Smith | About 2PM