What's up? DTC Pod today it's just me and Ramon and there's been a whole bunch going on in the DTC consumer commerce sort of world in the last couple of months. So we figured we'd do an episode and we just kind of chatter out, chat about some of our favorite topics. So Ramon, I'll let you kick us off. What what do you want to talk.

About taking over here? Alright, well know, recently we did the Pod with Sydney from Lightspeed and we talked about Chinese ecommerce. I've kind of always surfaced Chinese ecommerce, but have never really taken a deep dive. And I think we should talk about it because I was kind of skeptical of live shopping in the US. But then whatnot was like number one in the top rated marketplaces by Andreessen Horowitz? And so that made me take a deeper look. Downloaded the app, still kind of don't get it because I'm like people just randomly pop into these lives of people in their closet. But I guess they do it's the fastest growing marketplace and I don't know many people I found this, I don't know if it was in your LinkedIn or something. You worked for Amazon China?

I did, back in the day. This is when commerce was totally different. When I was there, there were obviously the major players. Amazon was dealing with a tough branding problem because in China, the pronunciation for Amazon is actually Yamashuan, which translates to pile of horseshit. So they were going through a whole yeah, it was like a major struggle. So they were going through a whole trying to rebrand against 360 Buy and Taobao and a couple of these other platforms. So they were going from Amazon to z. CN. But again, this was what, like 2011, 2012? And they stopped operating in that market a while ago. So it's just been interesting to see the evolution. And I think clearly what we're seeing is before D to C brands, they would be called direct to consumer.

Right?

But it was really someone putting a branding play going, finding a Chinese manufacturer, importing the goods as the middleman and selling it online to a consumer. And I think what some of these marketplaces like you're talking about that we're really seeing is it's really like the Chinese factory going direct to the American consumer?

Well, I mean, let's talk about that. Like the stages, right? The first stage is made in China. Everything is made in China. Second stage is it is sold by China. So these manufacturers are saying, wait a minute, we can try and go directly up to these customers. That's when wish started popping up in those kind of marketplaces. And then China itself also doing the marketing and the customer acquisition. There was this app, I forget the name, tin Temu. Actually they had a Super Bowl commercial and that's when I first learned about it. Just crazy cheap prices. I don't know what the quality is like. But what's interesting about that is this marketed by China Concept, that's almost what my friend Jeremy at Italic is doing. So technically he kind of is a middleman, but he's not because he's allowing the manufacturers of high end retailers to sell the goods directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. And he's kind of giving them the entire technology to manage a consumer. It's like shopify b. Two B for Chinese manufacturers. And it's interesting because we've only seen this marketed by China Concept take off with like AliExpress Wish, DHgate, Tamu, Sheen, like only low quality, right? And so what is the markup? What is the price of the higher end and the curation? Is that the differentiator from what italic is doing? And is that something that China themselves can do?