The tl;dr
Looking at other brands’ location data can be a powerful benchmarking exercise to determine where and when to open
Most DTC brands serve the same customer, just for different parts of their wallets; so it should come as no surprise that they find success in the same markets, and even many of the same destinations
Taking a sample of DTC brands’ location data across those with ranges of locations can give you a decent sense of how brands enter markets over time
But don’t blindly follow others: not everyone is actually doing their homework when it comes to site selection, or, worse, they ignore it. Just because someone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should too
The power of proxies
A while ago I wrote about how to use competitor location data to steal their real estate strategies. This week’s newsletter is taking competitor location data in a similar direction, this time using a portfolio of DTC brands with varying store counts as benchmarks for where to open as you mature your fleet.
Two of the most common questions I hear from DTC brands are:
Where should I open my first store(s)?
When should I open my second store in a market?
The reality is: the answers to both of those questions will vary by brand and over time for a variety of reasons.
However, we can analyze the fleets of DTC brands who are at various stages of their retail rollouts, and use the characteristics of their portfolios to guide your roadmap.
Let’s start with a large sample of DTC “darlings” who have made splashes at some point in their lives:
Location data is very easy to find these days with AI search engines, or my favorite location intelligence vendor ChainXY. You can download and dissect fleet location data for almost every brand out there.
As a reminder, MSAs tend to be great proxies for DTC brands’ stores’ trade areas. This is important to keep in mind because this is we’ll define a “market.” Using the locations’ addresses, we can then map out which markets (MSAs) each of these brands has targeted so far:
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