DTC and omnichannel: an "and" conversation

Here's the whole debate in one data point. The same person who won't pay for shipping on an eighteen-dollar Tuesday bottle will spend seventy dollars on tequila without blinking on a Friday. Same customer. Different moment. Different money. That difference matters more than almost anything else in this business.

I'm not a DTC operator. I've spent twenty-plus years on the commercial side of this industry, at the supplier tier, inside a digital marketplace connecting brands to retailers, and evaluating beverage businesses and deals from an investor's chair. That vantage point makes me suspicious of a certain kind of pitch, and DTC-first has become that kind of pitch.

I'll say this plainly, since it should shape how you read what follows. Pour Now sells the infrastructure that connects buying options, including DTC and all retailer methods, with marketing spend to what actually sold at licensed retail, so I have a stake in this argument. Weigh it on the evidence below, not on the byline.

DTC has been the industry's article of faith for ten years: build the direct relationship, keep the margin, own the data. No one needs to convince me that a direct customer relationship has value. I've run commercial teams that depended on it.

The strongest benefits of DTC first deserve their due before I argue past them. A tenth of a brand's volume can be a third of its profit, because DTC margin runs well above wholesale. It's the cleanest source of first-party data in a post-cookie world. Wine club members carry real, predictable lifetime value. And shelf space isn't free: a small brand often can't buy distributor attention at any price, so DTC is sometimes the only door open at all. None of that is wrong. It's just incomplete.

But belief and reality aren't the same, and that gap is where I've watched a lot of smart, experienced executives get stuck.

The beverage alcohol industry has spent a decade chasing the DTC dream: websites, email lists, loyalty programs. All of it built to protect that direct relationship and the margin behind it, for good reason. DTC gives you data. It gives you the relationship. It gives you better economics. But it still leaves out most buying moments. But it does not give you the full market.

It doesn't give you most of your customers. Direct-to-consumer wine shipments run about $4 billion a year against $28 to $32 billion in total U.S. off-premise wine sales, or roughly 5% of the category, and wine is the easy case. In spirits and beer, three-tier law keeps DTC volume close to zero.

Why not

I've sat with finance and strategy teams many times and heard the same explanation: the "barbell economy." The idea is that spending splits between premium and value, while the middle disappears. It's a neat story. But neat stories are often the ones nobody has really tested while becoming industry shorthand, and that matters here because this argument depends on what actually drives a purchase. I don't think this one holds up.

What actually drives the purchase, in my experience, is not who the customer is. It's the moment they are in.

Here's what that looks like in real life. A shopper wants a bottle of your product tonight. She goes to your website, but the only option is DTC shipping, so she gives up and buys a competing brand at the supermarket instead. Or she sees your ad and clicks it, exactly like you hoped. But she wanted to pick the product up at a store on her way home, and you only offer DTC shipping. Either way, that's a lost sale, and you already paid for the ad that lost it.

There's a bigger reason this isn't just about occasion, and most pieces like this one skip it: three-tier law. Wine can ship to consumers in most states with the right permits. Spirits DTC is a rounding error nationally. Beer barely exists as a DTC category. For a tequila or RTD brand, "DTC-first" usually isn't an aggressive strategy choice; it's not legally available at scale in the first place. That's not a plumbing problem someone was lazy about. It's a structural feature of a regulated market, and it's also why beverage alcohol omnichannel isn't just CPG omnichannel with different bottles on the shelf. It's the legal context that makes the channel argument land the way it does.

Big group parties are also giving way to smaller moments: a couple of drinks at home, something casual with snacks instead of a full dinner, a drink on the road or at a game instead of at a bar. High Noon and Surfside are built for exactly that: portable, convenient, sessionable, designed for the cooler and the patio rather than the bar cart. That's exactly why ready-to-drink cocktails have grown so fast. They're built for the moment, not for a type of customer. And most of those purchases are decided and bought the same day they're consumed. Almost nobody plans that three days in advance. Put that occasion on a ninety-five-degree afternoon, and DTC has a second problem on top of timing: it cannot serve it at all without cold-chain shipping, which costs so much that almost no one offers it for an everyday purchase.

That's the second reason the DTC-first argument keeps missing the mark, after three-tier. DTC is the right channel for one kind of moment: planned, worth the wait for shipping, or for a product a shopper can't find nearby. It was never the right channel for the moment that comes together two hours before guests arrive, or the bottle someone grabs on the way home. No loyalty program changes that, and that is the core point.

So most of the sales happening in stores were never "leaking" away from DTC. That business was never DTC's to lose in the first place. I'd push back on anyone in a planning meeting who says otherwise.

Here's a part of the problem I've seen play out inside companies. When DTC, brand marketing, and retail digital sit in separate teams, with separate goals and separate budgets, none of them is actually built to win the moment. Direct ecommerce cares about direct sales and has no reason to think about the shopper standing in a store. Brand marketing chases reach and impressions with no real accountability for whether any of it leads to a sale. Retail digital gets treated as a minor task instead of a real strategy, and it only reaches a small group of buyers. Everyone hits their own goal. The company still loses the sale. And everyone can point to a report that says it wasn't their fault. That separation is why the earlier argument needs an omnichannel answer.

A newer version of the same problem is coming, and it deserves a real mechanism, not just an assertion. More shoppers now use AI tools to research what to buy. Those tools will generate an answer from whatever product and availability data they can find across the web. A brand whose pricing, stock, and availability look different on its website than at its retailers gives the AI system conflicting signals, so the system is less confident recommending that brand as a clean answer. A brand with consistent data across every channel is more likely to get recommended. That's not just a wasted ad dollar. It's losing the sale before the customer even opens a search bar, to a competitor whose product shows up as available the way the shopper wants it. Most commercial and finance teams don't know this risk exists yet, which is why it belongs in the same conversation as the rest of the channel debate.

Omnichannel isn't a compromise. It's coverage.

Here's what omnichannel actually means: it's a strategy where a brand sells through more than one channel, DTC and retail, at the same time, and makes those channels work as one team instead of competing for the same budget. It is not just running some ads for your website and some ads for stores. It means using the same brand message and the same media dollars to show up everywhere a customer might want to buy (including DTC), and letting her pick the channel that fits the moment. It's more efficient because much of your marketing spend is now shared dollars, and it's exponentially more effective because the same customer shows up differently depending on the moment. Only one of those moments can wait for a package in the mail. One qualifier: everything here is about off-premise retail, the grocery store, the bottle shop, the delivery app. On-premise, bars and restaurants, run on a different sales motion with their own economics, and it's not what this piece is arguing about.

Even before you plug in a specific campaign, the logic holds on its own: you're not stealing sales from one channel to feed the other. You're finally reaching sales that were always out of DTC's reach.

Here's the catch, and it's the one I'd put in front of any executives asking for proof before they move a budget. Most brands can't actually see that gain. Media dollars point people toward the shelf, but the sales data stops at the retailer's door. That's not a structural problem someone was lazy about. It's what you'd expect in a regulated three-tier market where the retailer, not the brand, legally holds the sales data. So the lift shows up in category-wide numbers, not in a number anyone can defend in a budget meeting. Closing that gap by connecting marketing spend to what actually sold at licensed retail is what turns the omnichannel case from a good argument into a proven one. That distinction matters more to me than it might to a pure marketer. I've spent my career in rooms where a number nobody can prove doesn't survive the meeting.

So what do you actually do Monday morning? Three things. First, put DTC, brand marketing, and retail digital on one shared metric, total sales influenced across channels, instead of three separate numbers that each look fine in isolation. Second, name one person who owns the moment: someone accountable for whether a customer can buy your product however she wants to, not just for whichever channel their team happens to run. Third, closing the loop means connecting what you spent on retail media to what actually sold at licensed retail, at the SKU and retailer level, not just the category level. If you can't do that yet, that's the first project, before the next campaign.

Both, not either

The future isn't DTC or retail. It's both, and not as a safety net. It's both because the same customer shows up in different moods, on different days, with different amounts of money to spend. No single channel can cover it all.

Keep investing in the website. It's still the right place for the planned purchase, but also one of the first places someone looks where to buy. But the bigger opportunity, the one I keep coming back to after twenty-five years of watching brands leave it on the table, is showing up in retail, in the moment, with the right product, before the customer moves on to something else.

Supporting omnichannel doesn't mean pulling back on DTC. It means going after the sales DTC was never built to win, and having the right tools in place to prove it worked. Keep the direct relationship. Add the reach. Connect the two so the results are something you can show, not just something you claim.

The future has always been both. This is an "and" conversation. Anyone still treating it as an "or" isn't just leaving sales on the table; they don't understand why the customer bought in the first place.