Olivia Fuller is an eCommerce leader driving DTC growth at Jellycat, with prior roles at Nestle Health Science Vital Proteins and Cisco. Agile certified, she unites strategy, product, and marketing to deliver customer‑centric experiences and sustainable revenue growth.

In an exclusive interview with Retail Tech Insights, she shared invaluable insights on how direct‑to‑consumer sites must evolve into brand experience hubs, unifying storytelling, data, and cross‑functional alignment to drive sustainable growth.

DTC as the Brand’s Operating System

Direct-to-consumer brands sit at a crossroads. Consumer expectations are rising, acquisition costs keep climbing, and AI is changing how consumers shop across increasingly fragmented channels. While many retailers fixate on the DTC channel as just a revenue driver, or conversely as just a marketing vehicle, the brands winning in 2026 and beyond are those treating their DTC site as both a high-performing sales engine and the central operating system of the brand experience designed for consumer and AI consumption.

This dual-role approach isn’t widely adopted, yet it’s essential. The global DTC eCommerce market is accelerating rapidly and is expected to reach $595B by 2033 driven by consumers seeking more personalized brand experiences. But growth alone isn’t enough. Without a unified DTC strategy, brands risk creating disjointed journeys that erode trust and limit retention.

Over the past several years leading DTC and digital product teams in CPG and retail organizations, I’ve learned that the real unlock comes when the DTC site becomes more than an online storefront. It’s when it becomes a brand experience hub, aligning product, marketing, data, and content around a single narrative, that scale can be realized.

The DTC Site as a Sales Engine

At its foundation, the DTC channel must be accountable for revenue growth, profitability, and continuous optimization. This is table stakes; however, many organizations still under-resource this side of the function.

In previous organizations like Vital Proteins and Nuun Hydration, driving the DTC P&L meant owning all channel inputs, everything from CRM to merchandising to subscription and loyalty programs, and deep coordination with brand experience. This coordination enhanced the DTC team’s insights from other stages of the consumer journey, which informed more cohesive changes. By improving site experiences through iterative UX enhancements, we delivered predictable YoY conversion rate lifts and returned flat or declining DTC businesses to growth.

These wins underscore a truth: DTC performance is built on systematic, cross-functional iteration, not one-off activations.

The DTC Site as the Brand Experience Hub

Where many brands fall short is treating DTC as a siloed revenue channel rather than the gravitational center of the entire customer journey.

Today’s customers discover products on TikTok, validate on search engines, browse via email, and convert wherever friction is lowest. Social commerce alone is projected to exceed $100B in US revenue in 2025. But this channel explosion has a hidden cost: inconsistency.

  ​Winning brands treat their DTC site as revenue engine and brand experience hub, aligning data, storytelling, and discipline to drive retention and sustainable growth.   

Recently, while enjoying my morning coffee, I read a study which found that brands with a unified approach to brand storytelling retain over 85% of customers, compared with less than 35% retention for brands with disjointed channel execution. This retention gap is the difference between sustained growth and constant reacquisition.

To solve this, the DTC site must become a brand’s “source of truth” and govern:

• Storytelling across product pages, lifecycle flows, and creative

• First-party data orchestration, which is increasingly essential as third-party data deprecates

• Experimentation, where insights from owned channels inform paid, retail, influencer, and wholesale strategies

• Cross-functional alignment, ensuring that paid, CRM, content, and product teams build from the same narrative

DTC is the only platform where brands have 100% control over their presence. With AI relying on sources with the strongest, clearest, and most complete information, brands must be the place where educational, fact-based, longform, and category-building content lives.

I’ve experienced tangible shifts in performance when DTC gained a seat at the brand’s leadership table. By unifying category, channel, and performance data to be leveraged by marketing, product, and media teams, everyone is enabled to work from the same set of insights and build more cohesive strategies. This alignment increased brand visibility, revenue pacing, and enhanced profitability.

Why This Model Matters Now

More and more, the industry is recognizing that DTC is no longer simply a direct sales channel. But the next wave of DTC growth will not come from “more channels.” It will come from better orchestration.

My stance is this: The next competitive advantage in DTC is not performance marketing, channel expansion, or even AI. It’s the operational discipline to run the DTC site as the brand’s real-time experience engine.

When the DTC channel becomes the operating system for the brand, three powerful things happen:

1. Every channel strengthens every other one, from TikTok → homepage → email → loyalty.

2. Product, content, and commercial strategies become connected, not competing.

3. Retention compounds, creating profitability that paid media alone can’t deliver.

DTC’s dual role as a revenue engine and a brand experience hub is not a tension to navigate. It’s a strategic advantage waiting to be unlocked.

Brands that operationalize both sides with discipline, data, and cross-functional alignment will not only win in 2026, they’ll define the next generation of eCommerce.