Online retailers aren’t so different

Amid the grim march of the retail apocalypse, the industry has derived some hope in recent years from the rise of scores of digital-centric startups. There is cause for optimism, but there’s also reason to be skeptical of the hype surrounding these brands — not just because their business models aren’t proving durable, but also because many of them are now intertwined with the companies they are ostensibly disrupting.
Consider, for example, the November announcement from supermarket behemoth Albertsons Cos. about the future of meal-kit maker Plated, which the grocer paid $200 million for only two years ago. The company said it was ending the subscription model for Plated and that its products would now simply be part of its private-label business. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a concession that the format is a dud.
And that’s not the only meal-kit business that’s gone cold: Blue Apron Holdings Inc. had only 386,000 paid customers in its latest quarter, down from 646,000 in the same quarter a year earlier and 856,000 the year before that. The decline partly reflects a deliberate shift to focus on its best customers, but it’s also an indication that the long-term market for online meal-kits is just not that big.
Dollar Shave Club’s low-priced, subscription-based model for grooming gear was similarly seen as a disruptive game-changer when it captured attention with a viral YouTube video in 2012. Unilever NV acquired it for $1 billion in 2016, a testament to its growing market share. But Wall Street Journal reported that the digital brand is still not profitable and the consumer-products giant “concluded that selling staples as online subscriptions doesn’t make financial sense.”
Still other 2010s wunderkinds are pursuing growth in ways that don’t look so different than the playbooks embraced by their predecessors.
The result is that the term “digital-native brand” is all but meaningless. How could a startup not be digital-native in the year 2019? How are their hybrid online-and-store selling models any different from what mature brands are doing?
This is not to write off this crop of retailers entirely. They have collectively snatched billions of dollars of market share from incumbents and have made some genuinely alluring products, such as the Allbirds sneakers that have spawned copycats. Mall landlords have been forced to rethink their leasing models and floor plans to accommodate their needs. But, so far, these startups are no more than spoilers for legacy brands. They’re not replacing them.
If digital brands were finding easy paths to profitability and customer growth, many more of them would probably be going public or agreeing to be acquired for dizzying sums. But IPO hopefuls remain on the public market sidelines.
Meanwhile, Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is set to exit a companywide role at Walmart Inc. a little more than two years after the big-box chain acquired his clothing brand, a change that may turn out to be a cautionary tale about the ability of these scrappy virtuosos to apply their skills within retail’s old guard.
All of this leads to a bracing conclusion: The transformative power of the digitally oriented swashbucklers has been overestimated. Would-be investors and entrepreneurs, consider yourselves warned.
—Bloomberg