Birkenstock shares drop, top 100 Shopify Plus brands, Google's Demand Gen campaigns | D2C Digest

Hey there, great people of the D2C community who are building fantastic things! This is your host Berkay writing.

We collected a short list of what’s happening in the D2C market. So here’s your weekly D2C digest.

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📉 Birkenstock share prices drop by 12%

You know, Birkenstock is one of those “consultant comes in and fixes the company” sort of stories, where a former crisis reporter and an executive at a German sports TV station Oliver Reichert took over the company’s management in 2013 and helped the company skyrocket.

Since then, the sales have incredibly increased 5 times from $125 million in 2012 to $1.3 billion in 2022.

In 2016, the company started selling direct-to-consumer through its website. During that time, online channels have grown to constitute 38% of total sales in just 7 years!

And recently, on October 12th, Birkenstock went public at a ~$8B valuation.

The stock price was $46 and everything looked good for the company.

However, on the day of its debut, Birkenstock's share prices plummeted by 12.9% and by the end of the week, it had fallen by 21%, making it one of the worst performances by a billion-dollar deal in a decade according to Renaissance Capital.

As I’m writing this newsletter now, the price fluctuates around $38.4, marking a 16.5% decrease.

Last week, we shared the news of struggling public D2Cs like SmileDirectClub. While Birkenstock is not completely D2C, it’s still true that the company has to navigate through these hard times.

🏆 Top 100 Shopify Plus brands

Recently, Jeremy Horowitz, Sr. partner marketing manager at Gorgias analyzed the top 100 Shopify Plus brands by estimated order volume. The results are interesting!

1. 55 of those 100 top brands are in apparel, beauty, and skincare verticals.

2. There are 23 categories across all 100 stores.

3. There was a balance between celebrity-owned brands and “homegrown” brands.

Some of those top brands are:

1. Kylie Cosmetics by Kylie Jenner

2. Steve Madden (mostly popular with Wall Street people)

3. Manscaped

And brands like Skims (by Kim Kardashian), Glosier, and Olaplex follow.

So you don’t have to be backed by a celebrity to grow, I guess?

🧑‍💻 Google’s new AI-powered Demand Gen Campaigns

Last June, Google introduced two new AI-powered ad solutions. One of them was Demand Gen campaigns, an advanced version of Discovery campaigns. It offers new features and better ad creation options.

Now after 4 months of beta-testing, they finally rolled out Demand Gen globally.

Demand Gen helps advertisers engage new audiences through visual content, including videos like YouTube Shorts.

This tool supports conversions, site visits, and actions on platforms like YouTube, Discover, and Gmail.

It offers flexible targeting, bidding strategies, and various ad formats to reach the right audience.

Google says retailers (thus also D2C brands) can showcase products tailored to user interests by combining videos, images, and text from catalogs.

Demand Gen achieves higher click-through rates and lower costs compared to paid social campaigns.

For success with Demand Gen, Google suggests using the setup guide and following YouTube ad best practices to create strong video creatives. Join our November 14, 2023, webinar for additional tips and insights from product experts.

So another new way of generating traffic to your website. Go give it a try!

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