The next piece in Pour Now's Insights series is for anyone who has sat through the DTC-versus-retail debate one too many times. Our cofounder and CEO Andrew Levy, who has spent twenty-five years on the commercial side of this industry, from the supplier tier to a digital marketplace to the investor's chair, makes the case that it was the wrong debate to begin with. He opens with a single number:

The same person who won't pay for shipping on an eighteen-dollar Tuesday bottle will spend seventy dollars on tequila [at their local store] without blinking on a Friday. Same customer. Different moment. Different money. That difference matters more than almost anything else in this business.

For wine specifically, he puts a hard figure on how much of the market DTC actually reaches:

Direct-to-consumer wine shipments run about $4 billion a year against $28 to $32 billion in total U.S. off-premise wine sales, or roughly 5% of the category, and wine is the easy case.

His argument is not that DTC is wrong or that the industry should stop investing there. It is that DTC is incomplete within the bigger picture: a purchase is driven by the moment a shopper is in rather than the type of channel customer they are, three-tier law quietly shapes the whole channel question, and omnichannel is coverage rather than compromise. He also gets specific about the part most brands skip, the measurement gap that keeps anyone from proving the lift, and what to do about it. The most important takeaway? Supporting omnichannel doesn't mean pulling back on DTC. It means capturing the sales DTC was never built to win, and having the right tools in place to prove it worked.

Read "DTC and omnichannel: an 'and' conversation" at launch.pour.now/insights/dtc-and-omnichannel.

Excerpts from a Pour Now Insights piece by Andrew Levy, cofounder and CEO of Pour Now.