Just over a year ago, Jason LaRose became the CEO of Bombas, inheriting a direct-to-consumer (D2C) sock company that had grown to over $300 million in revenue while maintaining its buy-one-give-one mission. For LaRose, however, the company's success only underscored how much room it still had to grow.

Allbirds and Warby Parker built their brands as digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs), cutting out the middleman to offer lower-priced products directly to consumers. Now, they’re confronting many of the same challenges as legacy brands: slowing ecommerce growth, rising customer acquisition costs, and an increasingly crowded competitive landscape.