D2C Moat: Buy Attention or Earn It
Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge, on the state of ecommerce post-COVID
The real moat for a modern D2C brand is not the product, it is the ability to keep buying attention without wrecking margins, or to turn creative into free reach. Ridge is built around the first model, with high gross margins, higher average order value, and a large in house influencer operation that supports paid acquisition. Liquid Death shows the second model, using outsized brand voice and social scale to make canned water feel like entertainment, not just a commodity.
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Ridge treats marketing like the main cost center that matters. Sean Frank says clicks rose from about $0.20 in 2015 to $2.50+, that Facebook still gets the biggest share of spend, and that Ridge now needs sub 20% cost of goods and AOV above $150 to leave enough dollars for customer acquisition.
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Getting attention for free does not mean paying nothing. It means making ads that people voluntarily pass around. Liquid Death has scaled that playbook into a large consumer brand, reaching an estimated $333M of revenue in 2024, while also building social surfaces with roughly 7.2M Instagram followers and 7M TikTok followers that amplify each stunt and retail launch.
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The contrast is useful because the products are ordinary in physical terms. Ridge sells wallets and accessories, Liquid Death sells water, sparkling water, and tea. In both cases, demand is created upstream in feeds, creator videos, and brand content before the customer ever types a search or lands on a product page.
This pushes ecommerce toward two durable winners. Brands with premium pricing and lean supply chains can keep renting demand on Meta, Google, and creators. Brands with unusually strong creative can convert culture into unpaid reach. Over time, more consumer companies will try to combine both, using high margin products to fund paid media while building content engines that lower effective CAC.