D2C Brands Grew 15% in H1 (But At What Cost)

**Richard Gaffin** (0:00)
Hey folks, before we get into the episode, I wanted to remind all the seven-figure brand owners listening that Early Bird Tickets for our seven-figure growth workshop are closing out today. Couple of details here. The workshop is on September 2nd in person at our offices in Costa Mesa, California. That's down in Orange County. You'll hear a keynote from our CEO Taylor to start out the day, and then you're gonna join a cohort of 10 to 12 other brands rotating through workshop sessions on forecasting, paid media, creative production, hiring, and AI tooling, each one of which is gonna be run by the CTC leader who heads up that discipline. Now, a couple of those leaders include Luke Austin and Tony Chop. Luke Austin, of course, is our Senior VP of Ecommerce Growth here, and Tony Chop is our VP of Paid Media, both of whom have regularly featured on this podcast. They will be there giving their insights into your business. So to grab tickets, all you gotta do is go to commonthreadco.com/earlybird26 or go to the link in the show notes or in the YouTube description. Again, that's commonthreadco.com/earlybird26 to grab your earlybird tickets before the price goes up at midnight Pacific time tonight.

**Steve Riekuck** (1:07)
So brands did continue to grow. So we saw median growth across our brands that kind of qualified for the index, having consistent spend for the last two years and consistent revenue that we can report on.
We've seen about 15.2% was the median that we got for brands. Now there's a large spectrum here where it went from brands sometimes more than doubling and sometimes brands obviously going in the other direction as well.

**Richard Gaffin** (1:34)
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Hey folks, welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today as I've, you've been joining us probably like once every month, once every couple of months, I'm joined by Steve Riekuck, who is our heads up our data science wing here at Common Thread Collective. And Steve is joining us to talk through a big report that we just put out for our monthly D2C index subscribers around essentially a recap of what happened in H1 of 2026 And there's a few different storylines, I think, that are relatively interesting there, both in terms of platform performance, in terms of overall performance across our data set, in terms of some interesting results from incrementality, and then, of course, some interesting trends in terms of consumer confidence based on our D2C Consumer Confidence Index. So we're going to get into all that, but let's start with kind of the big headline here. I'm kind of going off of the report that we just put out, Steve, which is that brands continue to grow in H1, but growth was uneven. So talk a little bit about what that looked like over the last half of the year.

**Steve Riekuck** (3:32)
Yeah, absolutely. So brands did continue to grow. So we saw a median growth across our brands that kind of qualified for the index, having consistent spend for the last two years and consistent revenue that we can report on. We've seen about 15.2% was the median that we got for brands. Now, there's a large spectrum here where it went from brands, sometimes more than doubling, and sometimes brands, like, obviously going in the other direction as well. So that wound up being in total around $280,000 increase was the median that we saw in revenue. That includes a lot of 7-figure brands, so that number kind of gets brought down a little bit more.
When we look at the 8-figure, that is significantly more. Our 8-figure brands were looking at around an increase of $1.2 million for their median, and 13.7% increase in revenue year-over-year.
Gotcha.

**Richard Gaffin** (4:27)