If you’ve been thinking about how brands move beyond pure performance without losing discipline, FIGS is a great example to study.

The brand earned its position by focusing relentlessly on one customer: healthcare professionals. They didn’t reinvent scrubs just to make noise. They made a traditionally overlooked product feel respected, modern, and worth caring about. That clarity is what unlocks everything that comes next.

For the upcoming Winter Games, FIGS became the first ever brand to outfit the medical team for Team USA at an Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. That detail matters. This isn’t a logo slap. It’s a real role tied to performance, trust, and credibility. These are the professionals supporting elite athletes under intense pressure, and FIGS is the brand they’re wearing. So smart.

That move fits cleanly into FIGS’ broader presence around the Winter Olympics. Not as a sales push, but as brand positioning. Excellence. Preparation. Pride in your craft. Those themes map directly back to their core customer.

What’s worth paying attention to as an operator is what FIGS is not doing. They’re not trying to force short-term ROAS out of a global moment. This kind of investment only works when the fundamentals are already strong. Product-market fit is there. Retention is there. Distribution is there.

That’s when brand spend stops feeling risky and starts feeling like leverage. They are playing the long-term game here.

💡Operator Takeaway: Once your foundation is solid, brand partnerships don’t have to chase conversion to be valuable. FIGS shows how deeply aligned moments can reinforce trust and expand reach without losing focus.

The D2C world moves fast. These are the stories worth your attention. The ones showing where strategy, spend, and consumer trends are headed next.

Brands like Beyond Yoga, Mejuri, and Coterie are continuing to invest in brick-and-mortar, but not because ecomm stopped working. Stores are increasingly being used as acquisition, brand building, and retention tools. They give customers a place to experience the product, build trust, and deepen the relationship, while online remains the engine for scale.

💡 D2C Takeaway: Retail works best when it supports LTV and brand equity, not when it is forced to win on four-wall math alone.

🔥Hot Take: Stores are the new top-of-funnel. If you are measuring them like a Shopify channel, you are missing the point.

The Honest Company stepping away from its DTC channel highlights a bigger shift happening across the industry. As wholesale and retail partnerships deliver broader reach and steadier volume, some brands are realizing that owning every channel is not always the best use of resources. DTC can still be powerful, but it is no longer automatically the center of the strategy for every brand.

💡 D2C Takeaway: The next phase of retail is less about experimentation and more about execution. Tools, teams, and processes need to work together or they break under pressure.

🔥Hot Take: The gap between brands that adapt early and everyone else is about to get uncomfortable. 2026 won’t be forgiving to teams that wait for clarity before moving.

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