The current trend in launching new brands is to go direct-to-consumer while ignoring wholesale.

Building an e-commerce business focused on direct-to-consumer selling can give you higher margins and the ability to quickly respond to the market. There are a ton of advantages to direct-to-consumer.

But if you're ignoring the wholesale sales channel you're missing out on some big wins.

Build a symbiotic relationship with direct to consumer and wholesale sales channels.

When you have both sales channels firing you can leverage each of them to the advantage of the other.

Retailers are always looking for a crystal ball that can tell them what products they should be selling to their current customers. The data you've collected with your e-commerce business allows you to tell a potential wholesale customer how much browsing traffic from their region that you get as well as how much revenue is already being generated from your products in their region.

By leveraging your e-commerce data, you can build out a strong wholesale channel by delivering a pre-built audience to retailers.

Strong wholesale sales can increase your e-commerce margins.

Many brands start with direct-to-consumer for the potential of higher margins.

This makes sense because you're cutting out the middle-man. There are definitely types of products where this is the only sustainable business model. But this isn't true for many product categories and nothing can move the revenue needle more than large wholesale orders.

With large wholesale orders in hand, you can now negotiate better pricing and terms with your suppliers which, in turn, increases your margins.

Launch with direct-to-consumer, dominate with wholesale.

There's a reason why some of the most famous e-commerce darlings have grown to include a wholesale channel. Wholesale sales offers economies of scale that can grow your brand to a household name and help you dominate a market.

Dollar Shave Club. Magic Spoon. Native. All of these brands successfully launched with direct-to-consumer and then grew to dominate through wholesale sales.