Digital Brands Group

Digital Brands Group is a holding company that curates and accelerates a collection of talented, luxury-lifestyle, digital-first brands. We just acquired Bailey 44 and Harper & Jones. And we're just getting started.

📈 Our CEO built the largest custom men's clothier in the world — from zero to $55M in revenue... in 6 years.

Our management team is world-class — having previously worked at Qualcomm, Coach, Ralph Lauren, and more. We have also worked together at DSTLD, one of the brands we currently own.

💃 Celebrities have worn our clothes.

At DSTLD, we've reached more than 86,400 customers (including celebrities!), because we have the expertise, marketing talent, and connections. Now, we want to leverage this with all of the brands in our portfolio.

📉 The PROBLEM we're solving (with individual D2C brands)

It's true that traditional retail stores (i.e. Barneys, Macy's, J.C. Penny) are dying in a world where e-commerce is thriving. Direct-to-consumer brands (i.e. Away, Warby Parker, Everlane) are taking over. Yet, many D2C brands also die due to high costs.  

According to IBM U.S. Retail Index, the COVID pandemic has accelerated the shift away from physical stores to digital shopping by roughly five years. Department stores, as a result, are seeing significant declines. In the first quarter of 2020, department store sales and those from other “non-essential” retailers declined by 25%. This grew to a 75% decline in the second quarter. The report indicates that department stores are expected to decline by over 60% for the full year. Meanwhile, e-commerce is projected to grow by nearly 20% in 2020.

According to the Q2 2020 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. retail e-commerce reached $211.5 billion, up 31.8% from the first quarter, and 44.5% year-over-year. E-commerce also accounted for 16.1% of total retail sales in Q2, up from 11.8% in the first quarter of 2020. We believe the growth in e-commerce due to the COVID pandemic has set a high bar for what is now considered baseline growth.

According to global market-research firm Coresight Research, retailers are likely to decide to close as many as 25,000 U.S. stores in 2020. From January through mid-August, retailers had announced they would close a total of more than 10,000 stores in the U.S. That has already topped last year’s record 9,302 store closures. In 2019, retailers in the United States announced 9,302 store closings, a 59% jump from 2018, which at that time was the highest number since 2012, when Coresight Research started to track the data.

📈 The HUGE opportunity of grouping these D2C brands 

We bring together like-minded direct-to-consumer names under one portfolio to increase revenues, decrease operational costs, and establish brand longevity. Our vision is to build a portfolio of 50+ brands each with the potential to generate $50M-$100M in annual revenue (though please note that this is not guaranteed).

🏬 Our strategy is NO different than that of major, multinational holding companies

We're talking about the strategy that companies that have been doing for decades with traditional, wholesale, luxury brands. These companies include LVMH (that owns Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, etc), VF Corporation (that owns JanSport, Timberland, North Face, etc), and Tapestry (that owns  Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman).

How we're different? Our brands are 'digital-first', instead of 'wholesale-first'. Why? Because e-commerce is where consumers are going. Digital-first brands win because they own the customer relationship and make the customer journey more personalized. 

📊 We hope to go public this year.

We are using the funds raised on Wefunder to pay for working capital and to place product orders for our Spring 2021 purchase orders from department stores and boutiques for both Bailey's and DSTLD.  We will file our S-1 by 11/20 and plan to IPO in March 2021 order to raise more capital to grow Digital Brands Group.

💫 Join us! Invest in a portfolio of brands

The most successful apparel companies are portfolio companies. All we're doing is modernizing the portfolio approach. We know that we have the right platform to scale.