📈 Over-ordering unwinds into an inventory glut that craters mid-market retail

“A collection of those Amazon DTC brands, putting them together and trying to have some economies of scale. But when your supply and your demand both get 10x'd in the wrong direction, it's game over.”

“I think it was Thrasio that just announced they're laying off 25% of their employees”

“The DTC space, just anyone in physical goods”

“I'm incredibly worried about the whole DTC brand, the whole DTC space”

“going through almost a perfect storm right now in a really, really bad way, like the movie The Perfect Storm, because ocean freight rates are sky-high ... Walmart announced their costs were through the roof from supply chain and their stock fell 10 percent today, wiping off $40 billion of market cap this morning ... what we're seeing right now is these warehouses are overflowing”

“And so it seems like the bigger companies who have influence were able to manage through it. These smaller companies, to your point, who really do rely on many actors in the supply chain have been really thrown left and right that they probably don't know where demand really is.”

“So I'm really worried that we're going to find out in six months or in some time period in the future here, that people have ordered way too many goods, that these companies expected demand to stay high and keep booming. ... At some point, consumers start going to restaurants and start traveling a lot more. You get pre-COVID consumption patterns, and all these companies get stuck with way too much inventory, that they paid way too much to ship and get delivered and they can't sell it. And so I'd be very worried for like, middle market kind of retail, direct to consumer ecom, these types of businesses that aren't very sophisticated in demand planning and end up with way too much inventory.”