For emerging CPG brands, direct to consumer can be much more than a sales channel. It can be a place to build brand equity, understand your customers, and gather data that supports retail growth.
This is the strategy behind DUMO Digital, a Shopify partner focused on helping specialty CPG brands strengthen their online storefronts. Founded by Charlie Dumo after launching his own CPG brand, DUMO has evolved from a broad digital agency into a specialized partner focused on helping CPG brands convert, retain, and learn from their customers.
We sat down with Charlie to talk about what brands often get wrong about DTC, why a solid storefront should come before paid acquisition, and how brands can use their online presence to build a stronger foundation for retail.
Charlie grew up around CPG, with both parents working in food and beverage marketing. He eventually launched his own CPG brand, Charlie’s Crunch, while in college. This gave him firsthand experience with the challenges of building and scaling a consumer brand. This background ultimately led him to start DUMO Digital, where he now helps specialty CPG brands build and grow their DTC businesses.
Today, DUMO Digital is a Shopify partner specializing in DTC e-commerce for specialty CPG brands. The company helps emerging consumer brands improve their Shopify storefronts, increase conversion and retention, and use DTC data to support retail growth.
When a brand comes to Charlie looking to grow their DTC business, his first question is always about their goals.
“If you’re a protein bar company and your goal is to be in 60,000 doors in five years, the big thing is volume,” he says. “How do we really entice volume on this DTC storefront?”
Charlie starts by asking brands to think about the consumer habit behind the product. A protein bar isn’t just a protein bar – it might be the snack someone reaches for after the gym, during an afternoon slump, or as a quick high-protein option.
This line of thinking can also be applied to retention. Rather than focusing exclusively on acquiring new customers, Charlie encourages brands to build systems that turn first-time buyers into repeat customers through subscriptions, email, and deliberate retention strategies.
One of Charlie’s biggest objections to common DTC advice is the tendency to run paid acquisition before the existing storefront is ready.
He compares a website to a bucket and advertising to water, “When you pour money into Meta, you’re pouring water into the bucket. If there are leaks because your store isn’t built right, all of that traffic is just going to funnel out and not buy.”
Before increasing ad spend, CPG brands should audit five areas of their Shopify storefront: purchase options, offers and savings, copy and UGC, product benefits, and ease of use.
Revenue per visitor (RPV) measures how much revenue a websites generates, on average, from each visitor. Charlie encourages brands to look beyond conversion rate and focus on the factors that increase the value of existing traffic.
Rather than bringing in brand new visitors, the goal is to make existing traffic more valuable. Charlie breaks the biggest levers into three pillars:
This is where DTC becomes especially useful for brands preparing for a retailer meeting, “You want to walk in with data, not hope,” Charlie says.
A healthy storefront gives brands the opportunity to test messaging, offers, pricing, and customer segments before taking those lessons to retail.
If he were launching Charlie’s Crunch today, Charlie says he would approach the business differently.
The brand initially focused on local retail, but he eventually realized that customers were buying the product because they liked the stores carrying it, not necessarily because they had developed an affinity for the brand.
Today, he would start with DTC, focusing on building an online community, finding the right influencers, and creating repeat purchase behavior.
“I would be all direct-to-consumer,” he says. “You want to build an army of people online falling in love with your product.”
Data is the next area of opportunity for DUMO.
The company is gathering information on what drives CPG purchases online and working toward giving brands access to broader DTC insights across categories. The goal is to help brands understand what’s working, benchmark themselves against their peers, and make decisions based on data rather than guesswork.
This is the natural next step for DUMO – helping CPG brands build a stronger online foundation, learn from their customers, and ultimately show up in retail with a brand that consumers already know.
About Lunr Capital: Lunr Capital provides inventory financing for emerging consumer brands, helping fund inventory purchases for retailers like Target, Walmart, Costco, Whole Foods, Sprouts, and many others. Lunr pays suppliers directly so brands can fulfill large orders, maintain healthy inventory levels, and preserve cash for marketing and operations.
DTC, or direct-to-consumer, allows CPG brands to sell directly to customers through their own e-commerce storefront rather than relying exclusively on retail distribution. It can also give brands direct access to customer behavior and purchase data.
A strong storefront helps brands convert and retain the traffic they are already generating. Increasing paid acquisition before addressing issues with product education, trust, offers, or ease of purchase can result in more expensive traffic without proportional revenue growth.
Revenue per visitor is the average amount of revenue generated by each website visitor. It can be calculated by dividing the total e-commerce revenue by the total website visitors.
Five important areas are purchase options, offers and savings, copy and UGC, product benefits, and ease of use.
DTC data can help brands test messaging, offers, pricing, customer segments, and retention strategies before applying those learnings to retail expansion.