A few weeks ago, I had a chat with a director of a growing direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand. They’re hitting $10M ARR and on track to double this year. But he looked exhausted.
“We’re scaling fast,” he said, “but everything is slower. Site speed, checkouts, our dev cycles… it’s all lagging. I feel like we’re building a plane mid-flight.”
This isn’t unique.
E-commerce brands often chase scale with a “more is more” mentality: more SKUs, more plug-ins, more features, more third-party tools. But at some point, all that “more” becomes the bottleneck.
Everyone wants the Shopify store that feels like Apple.com. But almost no one is willing to simplify enough to get there.
The Myth of Feature-Driven Growth
Here’s what I’ve noticed after working with a few high-volume e-com brands:
The fastest-growing ones remove more than they add.
They don’t treat every new app as a golden ticket. They don’t overload their pages with heatmaps, countdown timers, and pop-ups. They don’t mistake activity for velocity.
In fact, when a brand starts obsessing over speed (not just site load times), but internal ops, checkout flow, and decision-making, they almost always see a better outcome.
Because the real cost of complexity isn’t just technical. It’s organizational. It slows down every decision, every test, every launch.
What the Big Brands Do Differently
Let’s talk about speed in three critical areas: site performance, ops, and dev velocity, and what major players actually do to stay fast.
1. Site Speed: They treat page weight like budget
High-performers treat every extra kilobyte like it costs them money… because it does.
- Glossier killed off most 3rd-party scripts and focused on custom-built performance-first solutions.
- Allbirds prioritizes mobile load times over visual gimmicks.
- Fashion Nova (love them or hate them) keeps product pages minimal to reduce load and increase conversion.
They don’t just test for speed – they design for it. Every unnecessary request is questioned. Every animation has to earn its place.
If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load on 4G, you’re losing revenue. Period.
2. Operational Speed: They automate the boring stuff
Scaling brands don’t just automate fulfillment – they automate thinking.
- They use dynamic pricing rules instead of manually tweaking discounts.
- They build dashboards that surface anomalies in real time.
- They route tickets using AI so customer service doesn’t become a time sink.
The goal is to reduce friction everywhere: not just for customers, but for teams.
If your team is spending 10 hours a week manually exporting reports or double-checking inventory counts, that’s not “scaling”, that’s administrative quicksand.
3. Development Speed: They know when to say ‘no’
A counterintuitive lesson: the fastest dev teams don’t do more. They do less, better.
Big e-commerce brands:
- Lock in design systems early to avoid “micro-debates”.
- Batch experiments instead of shipping one-off tests.
- Resist shiny tools that don’t integrate natively.
They understand that velocity is about focus, not frantic shipping.
The Mistake Most Founders Make
Here’s where most scaling brands go wrong:
They assume more features = more growth. But most of the time, it’s the opposite.
Adding a new subscription plug-in that conflicts with your cart app? That’s friction.
Introducing a loyalty program before fixing your PDP load speed? That’s premature.
Testing 12 new offers a week without clean tracking? That’s noise, not learning.
Speed comes from subtraction, not addition.
Scaling with Speed: The New Growth Discipline
Want to scale and stay fast?
Ask yourself these questions before adding anything new:
- Does this simplify the customer experience?
- Will this help us move faster in the next 90 days, or slow us down?
- Are we solving for the edge case, or the core revenue engine?
Speed is a competitive advantage. But it doesn’t come from hustling harder. It comes from building leaner.
The brands winning in 2025?
They’re not the ones with the most features.
They’re the ones with the least friction.
That’s all for this week.