9 US D2C brands you should know

Reproductive health: Aavia and Legacy 

I love this new self-managed fertility trend; there’s Aavia for female fertility and Legacy for male fertility, both are brilliant US D2C companies. Aavia is an app that works with a smart contraceptive pill case to keep track of your medication intake and monitor hormonal cycles. It can make recommendations for all sorts of aspects of women’s health. 

Legacy help men to manage their own sperm health and do family planning. They offer sperm health kits that you can do at home, without any external medical attention. Once collected and analyzed, you get a report and you can also choose to have your sperm frozen. 

Both of these are quite awkward topics but D2C makes it something that you control yourself and gives you huge advantages, particularly when you add large datasets.

Personal care: Bite Toothpaste Bits and SOAPBOTTLE

Bite toothpaste comes in the format of little pills in refillable glass jars. They’re chemical-free, contain all-natural ingredients and aren’t tested on animals. Up until now, we’ve been forced to choose very specific brands of toothpaste in plastic tubes and I think that time has passed. Now you can buy a jar of toothpaste pills that you crunch up in your mouth and you can choose from a whole bunch of flavors. 

Another D2C brand making personal care more sustainable is SOAPBOTTLE. They make shampoo and body wash packaged in bottles made out of soap. Once the liquid content is finished, the bottle can be used as soap and gradually washes away, avoiding plastic waste. Clever!

Home: Judy and Tushy

Judy make emergency kits with everything you need to keep you and your family safe for 72 hours in the event of an emergency like a hurricane, flood or fire. There are four different sizes, the biggest one is called The Safe. There’s also a fanny pack version and a backpack version, for on-the-go. I just love it because it’s a great example of ‘job to be done’ theory. The job to be done is: feel safe. And that’s what they’re selling.

Tushy is a transformational bidet kit for your bathroom. You can give your toilet the craziest Japanese-style bidet features. I don’t know why people buy this but apparently it’s incredibly popular and they’re absolutely crushing it.

Food & Drink: Kuleana, Raised Real and Glyph

In the D2C food space, I really like Kuleana plant-based tuna that you can put into sushi and Raised Real organic baby food. It’s not baby food as we know it; it’s real meals designed for children. They just put it together and deliver it to you. 

Finally, there’s Glyph, which is a molecular spirits brand. They make fake-aged synthetic whiskey and spirits that taste like they’ve been barrel-aged for 21 years, but actually it’s just made overnight in San Francisco – I love that. 

What makes these D2C brands ones to watch?

There are lots of people doing interesting things here but the main themes are:

• Taking away awkwardity
• Adding sustainability 
• Adding customization and choice where you never had choice before
• Jobs to be done; the simplest form of marketing
• Crazy new stuff; just making it easy to try new things

The traits are the interesting things to copy, not the business model. The traits make these brands distinctive and I think that’s the fun part of them.