At Eyk, we love Direct to Consumer. We love the data (a lot!), the products, the brands and their marketing strategies and tactics. So naturally, we monitor what's happening in the market: Who is winning and why. And we share the insights and learnings from what we see with our users and community on an ongoing basis. But as the new year kicks off and brands across the world are re-strategising to win in 2026, now feels like a good moment to summarize some of the learnings from 2025 winners in D2C in this article. As profitability replaced vanity metrics in 2025, the brands we highlight in this article proved that scaling requires more than just big ad spend.
The D2C market by the end of 2025 is unforgiving. Rising acquisition costs on Meta and Google and lagging financial markets forced brands to move toward efficiency. Success now depends on your ability to own your data and understand the incremental value of every dollar spent.
In 2026, the focus will shift even stronger to Unified Marketing Measurement. Brands will move away from platform attribution to base their decisions on. They will prioritize first party data and profit margins over top line revenue. Expect a surge in AI driven personalization and a deeper integration between online stores and physical retail.
The brands below have shown us that, despite challenging market conditions, scaling fast and profitably is still very much possible. Follow along as we highlight two main strategic advantages for each brand that has helped them win in the market and implement your own version of these strategies for your own brand in 2026.
Feastables is a mission-driven snack and confectionery company co-founded in 2022 by Jimmy Donaldson (better known as the YouTuber MrBeast) and Jim Murray (former President of RXBAR).
What began as a "Direct-to-Consumer" (D2C) experiment has quickly evolved into a multi-hundred-million-dollar retail powerhouse, disrupting the traditional snack market through a unique combination of creator influence and high-velocity retail scaling.
Their winning strategies:
1. Creator to Consumer
Mr. Beast has leveraged his massive audience to bypass traditional advertising costs. He simply build products his fans already wanted and used his existing distribution advantage. Besides quick access to consumers, this also creates a tight feedback loop for both product and marketing that systemically lowers customer acquisition costs and increases customer lifetime value.
2. Omnichannel Scaling
Feastables started as e-commerce only but scaled by going omnichannel and building some big retail partnerships. In 2025, they moved into Walmart and Target to capture impulse buyers. After finding product-market fit from Mr. Beasts existing audience, this hybrid model has helped them reach consumers, also beyond his following, when and where they shop and scale fast.
Hims & Hers Health, Inc. is a leading multi-specialty telehealth platform that has redefined how consumers access healthcare for sensitive and chronic conditions. Since its launch in 2017, the company has grown into a public powerhouse (NYSE: HIMS) by combining a digital-first pharmacy with a seamless, subscription-based medical consultation service.
Their winning strategies:
1. Subscription Model Retention
The business at Hims & Hers has been built up as a subscription first model. Not just by offering subscriptions to returning customers, but by making recurring treatments their core product. They invested seriously into creating a seamless subscription experience, resulting in high retention rates. This predictability allows them to confidently invest in customer acquisition at levels that competitors will not dare.
2. Vertical Expansion
After launching with a focus on men (Hims) and offering treatments for sexual health and hairloss, they did not wait around and launched new vertical quickly. Hers was launched in 2018 and more recently they expanded into weightloss and new international markets. Each new vertical leverages their existing brand and infrastructure, but brings in new revenue streams and customers, making every new product more profitable than the last.
Founded by Hailey Bieber in 2022, Rhode has quickly become the gold standard for how to build a high-margin, culturally dominant beauty brand in a saturated market. In August 2025, the brand achieved a historic milestone when it was acquired by e.l.f. Beauty in a deal valued at $1 billion.
Unlike typical celebrity ventures that rely on "hype drops" and a massive catalog, Rhode’s success is built on extreme restraint and operational discipline.
Their winning strategies:
1. Curated Essentials
Rhode manages to keep inventory costs relatively low by offering few products as 'curated essentials' rather than jumping onto every product trend. This focus in products also reduces warehouse complexity and ensures relatively quick turnover for items they carry in stock. Relatively to competitors, this has given the brand more marketing budget to experiment with on their path to scale.
2. User Generated Content (UGC) on TikTok
On top of leveraging Hailey Biebers personal brand, Rhode uses authentic content to drive demand efficiently. They lean into user generated content on TikTok to build trust. This organic reach helps keep their marketing efficiency ratio (MER)_ high while maintaining a premium brand image.
Grüns is a 2025 breakout wellness company that successfully "gummified" the comprehensive nutrition category. Founded in 2023 by Chad Janis (a former investment banker at Summit Partners), the brand hit a $500 million valuation and crossed a $300 million annualized revenue rate within its first 24 months.
The brand's core product is a "snack pack" of 8 green gummy bears that contains over 60 ingredients, including whole-food fruits, vegetables, adaptogens, and prebiotics.
Their winning strategies:
1. Disrupting Powdered Greens
Grüns identified a disruption opportunity in the relatively young and quickly growing supplement market. People disliked the taste and mess of powders, soGrüns solved this with a convenient gummy format, stealing market share quickly from established brands, while also riding the wave of market growth for supplements in general.
2. Focus on Unit Economics
Rather than focusing on ROAS, Grüns scales through a relentless focus on their unit economics. They optimize for a margin based ratio between Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) andonly scale ad spend when their data proves the next dollar spent is incremental. Shipping and packaging are optimiszed to protect and increase margins.
Success in 2026 requires more than a good product. You need to see the truth in your data. Brands that rely on platform dashboards will overspend on the wrong channels. Brands that unify their measurement will find the hidden pockets of profit.
Eyk helps you centralize your data and find these pockets. Stop guessing which ads work. Start scaling with confidence.
Get all your e-commerce metrics together in one overview today.
