Spent last week in Miami and NYC meeting brand founders, and operators from across the DTC space.

And honestly, one thing became very clear:

The brands that will win in the next few years are thinking very differently already.

In today’s newsletter, I break down:

The shift is already happening.
Most brands just haven’t realized it yet.

Let’s go!

A few days ago, I came back from an amazing trip to the US to visit clients and people in the DTC space I had only met virtually.

How cool was it to finally meet them all IRL!

Since we were all under the same roof, most of my conversations revolved around one thing: how to achieve strategic growth for the second half of 2026.

It’s a big, complex challenge.

But over the years, I’ve found a way to break it down into a handful of high-level steps.

If possible, pull an overlapping chart with the monthly revenue from the last 2-3 years.

This should give you a much clearer perspective on your seasonalities.

Good months.
Bad months.
Flat periods.
Unexpected spikes.

You can’t plan growth without understanding the natural rhythm of your business first.

Revenue alone means nothing without context.

Try to remember the key actions you executed during each month and year.

What offers were running?
What ads were scaling?
Did you launch new products?
Were discount codes active?
Did a creator post go viral?
Did inventory issues affect performance?

List those actions for each period.

This is where numbers start turning into insights.

Once you have the data and context ready, analyze it to find patterns.

The goal is simple: identify the actions you should keep doing, and the ones you should stop repeating.

Most brands look at revenue charts.

Very few stop to understand why those numbers happened in the first place.

Honestly, most brands never even go through Steps 2 and 3.

But even when they do, this is where they usually get stuck.

It’s the classic:

“Last year we did $1M. This year we want to do $2M.”

While planning to do almost exactly the same things they did the previous year. 🤯

That might work for a handful of brands.
But most brands need to do better. Way better.

In the previous step, we identified what actions we should keep or stop doing.

The next steps are about something else entirely:

What new actions can help us unlock the next level of growth?

That’s the real question.

In the chart from Step 1, you’ll identify both strong and weak months.

In an ideal world, you’d maximize the good ones and improve the bad ones.

But as we all know, that’s not how it works in practice.

Not every brand can afford to do everything.

There’s always a constraint:

Time.
Money.
Connections.
Operational bandwidth.

So the question becomes:

Among all the possible growth initiatives available to your brand, which ones are actually attainable right now or in the near future?

That’s your leverage.

And finding it matters a lot more than chasing every opportunity you see online.

Aside from Black Friday, Mother’s Day, and a handful of major e-commerce events, you need to create your own reasons for customers to buy.

A few examples:

As mentioned in Step 5, the key is leveraging what’s realistic for your current stage of growth.

For some brands, working with 1,000 creators per month is normal.
Others struggle to partner with just one.

That’s fine.

The goal isn’t to copy another brand’s playbook. It’s to build your own around the resources you actually have.

I love this exercise because it’s so simple, yet most brands have never done it.

This applies to almost every area of business, but let me illustrate it with two examples.

If I asked you how you acquire customers, you might answer:

“Paid ads.”

But in reality, maybe that means:

That immediately opens new questions:

Most brands think they’re diversified.

Until they map things out and realize they’re heavily dependent on one acquisition source.

Now let’s talk about Meta ads.

If I asked:

“Are you running Meta ads?”

You’d probably answer yes or no.

But if I asked:

“What type of Meta ads are you running?”

Things change completely.

If you mapped every ad into a matrix like this one, you’d probably find entire buckets that are either empty or barely explored.

And that’s usually where the opportunities are hiding.

At this point, you’ve:

Now it’s time to prioritize and execute.

If done properly, this exercise should give you a list of strategic actions capable of moving the business forward.

Some books call these “lead measures.”

I just call them the actions that actually create growth.

And yes, if this sounds like a ton of work, it’s because it is.

That’s exactly why many brands stay stuck between $1M-$3M for years, while others go from zero to 8+ figures in a relatively short period of time.

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If this feels too overwhelming for you and your team, the right move might be finding a growth partner who has gone through this process hundreds of times before.

If you think that could be us at BSR, let’s chat.

Over the past few months, we’ve audited over 50 7fig+ brands. 

Most weren’t struggling to grow.
They were struggling to grow efficiently. 

Revenue was there.
Profit wasn’t. 

And in many cases, the same patterns kept showing up:

That’s what keeps brands stuck in plateaus, even while spending more.

Q2 is where this compounds.

You either fix the system…
Or you pay more to get the same results. 

At BSR, we work with 7- and 8-figure brands to identify where profit is leaking across ads, email, and the customer journey, and build a clear roadmap to scale efficiently.

If you’re planning to push growth in Q2, this is the moment to get the foundation right.

On my podcast, we’ve been talking about Agentic Commerce for years.

Now, it’s becoming reality.

This week, Shopify released its new “Agentic Commerce” infrastructure, allowing developers, brands, and AI systems to interact directly with Shopify stores through natural language.

Here’s what it actually means 👇

AI agents can now:

Without the customer ever browsing your website traditionally.

And this is the important part:

The winners won’t necessarily be the brands with the prettiest websites anymore.

They’ll be the brands that are easiest for agents to understand, recommend, and buy from.

That’s a completely different game.

For years, brands optimized for:

Now they’ll also need to optimize for:

This is why I keep saying that commerce is decentralizing faster than most people realize.

The storefront is no longer the only storefront.

Shopping is starting to happen:

And Shopify clearly sees where things are going.

Their new infrastructure, developed in partnership with Google, is built around something called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which basically creates a standardized way for AI agents to communicate with stores.

In simpler words:

Instead of every AI company building custom integrations with millions of stores, everyone speaks the same language.

That changes everything.

Because once shopping becomes standardized for AI agents, distribution changes completely.

The future customer journey might look something like this:

“Find me the best minimalist carry-on luggage under $300 with great reviews and fast shipping.”

And the AI agent handles the rest.

No homepage.
No navigation menu.
No category browsing.

Just intent.

This doesn’t mean websites disappear tomorrow!

But it does mean that the way products get discovered is starting to change right now.

And most brands are still optimizing for a world that’s already evolving underneath them.

So the question is no longer:

“How do we get more traffic?”

It’s slowly becoming:

“How do we become the product AI agents want to recommend?”

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📰 TikTok launches MCP server to let AI agents run campaigns [read more]
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📰 ChatGPT Becomes Top AI Shopping Tool in US [read more]

Brian Roisentul is the founder & CEO of BSR, a growth marketing agency he started in 2013 to help e-commerce brands unlock hidden revenue by identifying misalignments between their marketing and customer behavior. He is also the host of The DTC Insider podcast, where he interviews thought leaders, founders, and directors in the e-commerce space.

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