We learned a lot in 2021, we got to understand:

- The mechanics of Volume vs Premium play in e-commerce
- The side benefits of having a DTC e-commerce channel
- The importance of having an E-commerce Engine
- That we needed to change our own tech stack to better serve our clients

What do we take away from this year? What will we change going forward?
Here we’ll make the split between the consequences for our e-commerce agency dear digital and our own DTC brand Puzzle in a Bag.

Here we are making two changes.

1. We are going to start implementing Odoo (we won’t go into this any further, we already talked about it here).

2. The role that we will play for our clients might change.

This is mostly a result of the learnings about the side benefits of DTC e-commerce. We believe that we can be most valuable if we take more responsibility over the DTC e-commerce part. Not only executing the digital marketing and building/improving the Shopify store but also proposing and making strategic choices to grow this channel.

By doing this we leave more time to the rest of the team to open up other channels and focus on reaping more of the side benefits that we will generate from the DTC activities.

We are positioned in the premium segment, we’ve seen that it is quite hard to reach short term profitability in this segment. During 2021 we ran some tests in more mass market channels but we see difficulties with our current brand to be successful here, plus we have to be careful to not get stuck in the middle between two market segments.

So we will have to make a decision of where we will position ourselves.
This taking into account:

1. Economic goals & reality: We want to grow fast but we want to be profitable as well.

2. Our brand strategy

3. Our expertise

4. Insights we gather from our clients

Next to this positioning exercise we will also start creating our own e-commerce Engine, for this we will start implementing Odoo as well!

There I said everything I wanted to say about my experience in 2021, what did you think of these learnings?

Do you want to talk about your situation? Feel free to schedule a meeting here!