Why Going At It Alone Is No Longer a Winning Strategy for Many Retail Brands

By Dustin Jones

Every retailer knows the knot, the coiled anticipation. As in any sport, the fourth quarter is where legends are made. Come early November, the end-of-game feeling begins to build: excitement for the most important months of the year. The fourth quarter is usually the busiest and buzziest season, full of the crowning achievements and holiday sales for which retailers prepare for months before.

Then, after Christmas, everything calms down and the quiet conversations begin. It is time to reflect on the year that has passed. And, during that 52nd week of the calendar, no matter how well Q4 goes, another Q1 is just moments away and the strategy and playbook must evolve to compete. It is at this moment of reckoning that some brand leaders will find themselves asking how long they can survive on their own. Recent years have seen the slowing of the eCommerce channel, the rising costs of acquisition, and no net new channel of explosive growth.

A venture exodus from DTC brands left billions in write-downs and dried up growth capital. Venture capital demands hyper-growth; private equity demands predictable EBITDA tied to a short 5-7 year time horizon.  Too often, $20-100M revenue brands fit neither mandate. These conditions beg the question: is going it alone the best way to win? Why is going it alone considered a win at all? Brand founders have worked tirelessly, built solid businesses, poured their lives into their brands, but often have no clear pathway to reap the rewards of their efforts. Most companies won't go public or take large private equity dollars, but they still have a strong currency that they need to consider exchanging in order to maximize the value of time and success that they have realized.

The retail industry, especially fashion, is notoriously volatile. It is an industry many enter out of passion rather than a single-minded focus on maximizing financial gain. For me, I entered fashion out of familiarity: one of the fathers who raised me worked in merchandising. However, my financial approach to it was borne from necessity: I had to support my young family while putting myself through college.

While still an undergraduate, I cut my teeth as an entrepreneur, selling premium American menswear to European customers through a self-built website. In 2002, "online shopping" meant bidding on eBay or buying paperbacks from Amazon. My fledgling cross-border eCommerce business caught the attention of senior leadership at Macy's Inc, where, upon graduation, I got to work on their relatively small but growing digital business.

There, I eventually became instrumental in growing Macys.com to US$7B+. During my tenure, Macys.com became the fourth-largest retail website in the US; I saw the overall business grow from US$9B and 150 stores to US$28B and 880 stores. My mentor, former Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren, eventually tapped me to move to China where I led a joint venture with Macy's and Fung Retailing in partnership with the Alibaba Group-just as it was becoming a global juggernaut.

During my time in China, first while leading the joint venture, and later as Managing Director of Fung Retail, I witnessed a multitude of Western brands try to enter China, and how Alibaba was building ecosystems that enabled brands to win on their platform, rather than enter a new market with completely different rules all on their own. This demonstrated to me that even in a volatile macro environment defined by unprecedented speeds of change, brands can thrive if they are part of a system that gives brands the opportunity to collaborate, to establish winning strategies, and to learn from each other's experience and mistakes.

It was this insight that led me to founding Unified Commerce Group in 2019. My unique perch allowed me to see—well before the pandemic fundamentally changed the game—that investment in DTC brands would inevitably be tempered. Since peaking at $5B in 2021, institutional investment in DTC consumer brands has fallen off a cliff, despite steady increases in consumer spending. I recognized that this DTC lifecycle was simply too short, and ergo incapable of building generational brands, but that within it lay the key to bridging a gap between two plain facts of the market. On the one side, there are reticent investors and, on the other, there are extremely devoted and informed consumers who follow their favorite brands almost religiously, showing early signs of generational potential. I realized that by picking up such quality brands on a down valuation cycle, you could build a portfolio better organized to empower them.

Our goal at UCG was to be a new kind of retail operating company: we would build a growing portfolio of generational lifestyle brands, each one scaling through an ecosystem of shared knowledge, services, and retail experts. The central notion is that, together, each one of those brands gets stronger with every acquisition, in a sort of retail symbiosis. The U in UCG is at the core of our mission: we are unified in our approach across the entire retail ecosystem; I had been using the word to describe this approach both before the pandemic and before it existed as a retail term.

Our portfolio has been built from seizing unconventional opportunities: Spiritual Gangster is a generational brand that suffered from under-management but has continued to have a loyal following. We are on the cusp of bringing it to its full potential. Greats was acquired by Steve Madden Ltd, who eventually found out a smaller DTC upstart couldn't be easily integrated into a $3B behemoth, but we saw potential. And, our largest and most profitable brand, Böhme, has thrived as a regional brand, far below the radar of most industry watchers, and we were the ones to see its potential as a national player.

This differentiated approach to consumer brands provides not only capital, but also crucial operational support that enables a sustainable approach to scale. It gives investors a new way to invest in consumer brands by reducing the inherent risk of betting on one single brand. And it gives brand founders the capital, leadership, and channel expertise they are missing to supercharge their brand's growth. Along with my team and early shareholders, despite these ever shifting retail conditions, I am confident that this approach will enable UCG to scale well over a billion dollars with a foundation of nearly $100M of revenue in brands acquired in the last two years.

Now well into the final countdown of Q4, I am eagerly anticipating the buzzer at the end of 2025, and the new season that awaits us in 2026. To anyone else in the game, I would suggest they ask themselves some crucial questions.

Founders: are you focused on the best economic outcome for your lifetime of work?  Do you need to reset expectations and perhaps redefine winning?

Investors: yes, consumers keep spending, but have you stopped investing? If so, is the problem mostly a structural one that can be solved through examples like UCG?

Retailers: are you the new guard or the old guard in the future of retail? How is what you're doing today supporting the broader success of the industry and its evolution?

As for myself, after 23 years in the game, I am thrilled to bring new brands into our portfolio and build an ever-deeper bench that serves the entire lineup-and to kick off the first quarter of 2026 with a winning game plan.