eCom Unity #23 - How to Build a Retail Channel

Deep Dive | Building Brands With Channel Sequencing

We’ve been hosting an event at the Waterdrop store in Berlin a few weeks back. And it made me think about this concept.

Everyone talks about the importance of omni channel.

But if you’re scaling a food or beverages brand today, it’s not about being omni from day one.

It’s about when and why you move into each channel. It’s about sequencing.

Here’s how I’d think about it if I were starting a DTC brand today:

#1 Start online.

It’s the only place where you can:

• Test and iterate fast

• Get to Product-Market-Fit

• Build community & brand love

• Get a >€50 AOV and still convert as a food brand

This is the way to make the economics work.

But more importantly: a strong online presence makes retail 10x easier.

When trying to get into retail, you’re not just another new product. They know you’ve got fans, as your numbers prove it.

And if you’re targeting younger audiences, that’s exactly who supermarkets want walking in.

#2 Then: Supermarkets.

Not because it’s trendy.

But because that’s where people buy food & drinks.

Discovery still happens online. But it’s always easier to grab something while you’re already shopping.

Online will drive your profit for the start. But as retail grows, it takes over at best.

In return, I see many brands shifting their online strategy and running it closer to breakeven, because it consistently feeds awareness into offline.

Retail becomes your monetization layer after you’ve built brand equity online.

And that’s where the flywheel kicks in:

• People see your ads, visit your site, and might hesitate at the price

• Next week they spot you at REWE and decide to give it a try

• If they love it, they might keep buying offline

• Or they come back online for more flavors, other package sizes, or subscriptions

We saw this exact thing when I was CMO at yfood.

Our online spend didn’t just drive DTC. It significantly boosted sell-through at retail.

And then retail fed right back into online.

That’s where you want to be.

#3 Your own stores (if ever).

Own stores are not about volume. They’re about brand experience.

It’s a place your most loyal customers come visit for limited editions.

So you’re building touchpoints and brand love, not a usual sales channel.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t be profitable.

Kevin Breese, Global Head of Retail at Waterdrop, who spoke at our joint event said, that they managed to turn all their owned retail stores profitable.

#4 Two things to watch out for when going offline

1. Adjust pricing and packaging.

You’ll likely need to rethink pricing and packaging when you go from online to retail though.

People don’t spend €50 on your products in a supermarket that you need to turn a profit online.

Going offline likely will mean that you need new products or smaller versions of existing products.

2. Protect your margin

You might be inclined to give up on margin to get your first listing.

Don’t.

This is never something you can walk back from and solid margin are crucial for offline to turn into your cash machine.

Having a strong brand a loyal customers build online give you a much stronger negotiation position to accomplish that.

And for those of you, that already have retail sales and that are using Klar.

Klar allows importing revenue from offline sources to combine them with online in one single view.

That’s how e.g. Holy is getting a single source of truth for revenue and margin across all their channels as they expand across different regions and sales channels.

Brand Breakdown | Rhode’s $1.000.000.000 Exit

Rhode, founded by Hailey Bieber in 2022, recently exited for $1.000.000.000 after less than 3 years.

Selling cosmetics products, a crazy competitive category. It is the perfect example of why creator/founder brands have an unfair advantage in today’s eCom landscape.

So the team & I worked through their entire user journey for you to take a look at:

• Organic Content

• Paid Social Ads across Meta and TikTok

• Influencer Partnerships

• Landing Pages

• Cart & Checkout Pages

• Newsletters

Plus, we dove into the economics of a creator brand that will show you why they have an unfair advantage that lead to this massive valuation.

Check it out here: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVIsiDzKM=/

Community Events | Starting into H2 in Berlin & Cologne

10 Events in the last 6 months, bringing together over a 1000 eCom operators in person.

We’ve met at the headquarters of amazing brands OACE, Snocks, Waterdrop, Bears with Benefits, JACKS beauty line & saint sass, Coffeecircle. Had an amazing OMR Pre-Dinner in the Westwing Store in Hamburg and had edition 1 of high-class Unplugged Event.

In H2 we’re coming back with a lot of new & known formats and brands.

I can already reveal two of them today:

• 🧠 eCom Unity Unplugged | 08 October 2025, Berlin
  Part 2 of our high-class format Unplugged, a full-day event for brands doing $20+ million in revenue for 1:1 exchange between founders and senior execs only. Join for Unplugged here.

• 🥳 eCom Night @ DMEXCO | 17 September 2025, Cologne
  The best way to wrap up your DMEXCO day with with real convos and no booth stress, directly at the fairgrounds. Join DMEXCO eCom Night here.

Thank you for reading :)

I am on a mission to help eCom brands build better, more profitable businesses. If you missed any past issues, you can catch up on all of them here.

I have built one 8-figure and one 9-figure eCom brand in the past, and with Klar, I work with over 1,000 eCom brands today.

If you have specific questions you would like me to cover next, just reply to this email.

Have a great week.

Max ✌️

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