A new concept called LiveLaunch just opened a 7,100-square-foot flagship in Chicago's Fulton Market district, built entirely around a single premise: let digital-native brands go physical without the traditional barriers. Eleven modular storefronts, no long-term leases, no full buildout costs, no inventory management constraints. The brands inside are online-first brands testing brick-and-mortar for the first time. It is a small story on its own. But it is a clean signal of something much larger that has been building for the past two years.
DTC brands are going physical again, and this time the format is different enough that the previous playbook, the one that produced a string of high-profile failures from Warby Parker to Allbirds when they tried to scale retail too fast, does not quite apply. Lower-commitment formats like shared retail spaces, short-term modular storefronts, and pop-in partnerships with larger retailers have lowered the entry point dramatically. Brands that would never have signed a ten-year lease are now testing physical channels at eighteen months of revenue. The barrier has come down, and the pace of conversion from digital-only to omnichannel is accelerating as a result.
For eCommerce hiring managers, this creates a specific and frequently underestimated problem: the people who built a great DTC business are often not the right people to run a great omnichannel business. And the window between "we're opening physical locations" and "we needed someone in this seat three months ago" is usually much shorter than it looks.
Why the DTC-to-Physical Transition Is a Talent Problem First
Most conversations about DTC brands going omnichannel focus on the strategic and operational questions: Where should we open? What formats make sense? How do we manage inventory across channels? Those questions matter. But they tend to surface the talent gap rather than solve it, and they often surface it later than they should.
The core issue is that eCommerce and physical retail require genuinely different operating instincts. A strong DTC operator is built around speed, data access, and the ability to iterate quickly: test a new acquisition channel, read the numbers, adjust tomorrow. Physical retail runs on a different rhythm. Decisions that a DTC team pushes live in an afternoon, a retail operator has to pre-plan weeks or months out. Inventory errors that are a minor inconvenience in a pure digital model become visible, customer-facing problems on a shop floor. The feedback loops are slower, the margin for error on execution is smaller, and the people management surface area is dramatically larger the moment you have a store team.
A candidate who has run customer acquisition and retention at a fast-scaling DTC brand has real skills. Those skills do not automatically transfer to managing in-store experience, physical inventory, and a team of retail associates. The reverse is also true: a seasoned retail operations hire from a big-box background often struggles with the data-first pace of a DTC brand. The overlap exists, but it is narrower than most hiring managers assume going in.
What Omnichannel Actually Looks Like on an Org Chart
The roles that most commonly become urgent when a DTC brand makes the physical move tend to fall into three tiers, and the mistake most companies make is hiring the third tier first.
The first and most critical hire is usually a head of retail or VP of omnichannel, someone who has already managed the transition from digital-first to physical at another company and understands both the operational build and the cultural negotiation that comes with it. This is a hard hire to find because the people who have done it well are already employed and rarely looking. They also command compensation that DTC brands, used to lean team structures, sometimes underestimate.
The second tier covers the connective tissue of an omnichannel operation: a unified commerce or omnichannel merchandising lead who can manage assortment and inventory logic across both channels, and a customer experience lead who has worked in physical environments without losing the data fluency that a DTC brand expects. These roles are easier to fill than the first but require a more careful balance between the two skill sets than a typical eCommerce hire does.
The third tier, store managers, retail associates, local operations, is where most companies start the conversation because those are the roles that feel most urgent and most visible. They are important. They are also the easiest to hire for later, and filling them before the first two tiers are in place tends to produce a physical operation that is understaffed at the leadership layer while fully staffed at the execution layer.
| Role Tier | What You're Hiring For | Common Mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1: Omnichannel leadership | VP / Head of Retail or Omnichannel | Starting this search after a lease is signed |
| Tier 2: Cross-channel ops | Unified commerce, omnichannel merch, CX | Hiring a pure DTC or pure retail candidate, assuming they'll figure out the other side |
| Tier 3: Store-level execution | Store managers, retail associates | Hiring Tier 3 before Tier 1 and 2 are in place |
The Profile That Actually Works
The candidates who tend to succeed in omnichannel leadership roles at DTC brands share a few things that are worth screening for explicitly, because they do not always show up clearly on a resume.
The first is that they have lived on both sides. Not necessarily at the same company at the same time, but they have spent meaningful time running a digital channel and meaningful time running a physical one, and they can speak fluently about the operational differences rather than the strategic theory. Candidates who have only worked at purely digital companies or only at traditional retail often carry a blind spot in the other direction that is expensive to discover after they start.
The second is that they have managed through a transition specifically, not just an established omnichannel operation. Running the retail function at a company that has had stores for twenty years is a very different skill from setting up a retail function from scratch at a brand that has never operated physical locations. The build-from-scratch experience is harder to find and worth paying for when you find it.
Candidates who have actually managed an omnichannel transition at a DTC brand have a specific answer to this. Something always breaks early, usually inventory visibility, customer data continuity, or the return experience across channels. A candidate who can describe what broke, why it broke, and how they fixed it is a much stronger signal than one who describes a clean rollout. Clean rollouts in first-time omnichannel expansions essentially do not exist.
The Timing Problem Most DTC Brands Get Wrong
The single most consistent mistake we see when DTC brands go physical is starting the senior search too late. The sequence usually goes: leadership team commits to a physical presence, a location or format gets identified, the opening date gets set, and then someone realizes they do not have the person who should be leading the operation. By that point, the search is running under deadline pressure, and deadline pressure is the enemy of a good leadership hire.
Omnichannel leadership roles at DTC brands, particularly at the VP and Director level, run a minimum of three months to fill when sourced and evaluated properly. More commonly four to five months if the brand is selective about cultural fit, which it should be given how visible a wrong hire is in a physical environment. Starting that search after the lease is signed, or after the modular storefront agreement is finalized, almost guarantees that either the search gets rushed or the opening gets delayed.
The brands that navigate the DTC-to-physical transition best tend to have started hiring for it before they were fully certain it was happening. The ones who struggle tend to have treated it as an operational project that needed a team rather than a talent strategy that needed a plan.
What This Means If You Are Building an Omnichannel Team Right Now
If your brand is moving toward physical retail, or even seriously evaluating it, the right time to start thinking about the senior hire is now, not after the format and location are locked. A strong VP of Retail or Head of Omnichannel can help shape those decisions from the inside and will want to have done so. Bringing them in after the strategic decisions are made is both a harder sell and a setup for early friction.
If you are evaluating candidates for any cross-channel role, weight hands-on transition experience over pedigree at established omnichannel retailers. The brand name on a resume from a company that has run stores for decades does not tell you whether that person can build a retail function from scratch, and that is the capability you actually need.
For more on structuring searches that need to move fast without cutting corners, see our posts on how long an eCommerce search should actually take and how to structure a competitive leadership offer. If you are actively building an omnichannel team and want a recruiting partner who knows where this talent sits, reach out directly or learn more about how we work through our direct hire recruiting page.