BRCC's stock -72%. NYSE delisting warning triggered. $4.3M cash on $398M revenue. Dutch Bros grew 33% on $1.13B in the same year.

+ The Growth-Cash trap

I wrote a $100K check into CoCo this week. Not because we're in trouble. The opposite actually. May was our best month since Holiday coming.

Growth is expensive and I'm the one covering it.

ARR is re-accelerating at 15%+ month-over-month. We're signing larger brands than we ever have. Volume is up across the board.

And that means every cost line is up with it.

Larger brands have blown up our V1 backend and infra costs are up.

Every one of those is a good problem, but while we're in the middle of it, someone has to cover the bills.

That someone is me.

You don't raise big VC dollars at our stage. You write the check yourself. That's the job. So before you fall into the bootstrapping vs. VC debate and think one is better than the other.

The more important question to ask. Is which can I tolerate and afford.

Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here 😉.

Black Rifle Coffee (If ‘Murica had a coffee brand) spent 5 years building a DTC empire. to unwind it at scale because the unit economics don’t work.

They’ve survived the Stock falling below $1, NYSE delisting and torching capital. But there are glimmers of a wholesale pivot turnaround.

Source: BRCC FY2025 10-K -- SEC EDGAR

Dutch Bros grew 33% on $1.13B. BRCC grew 1.7% on $398M. That gap is the cost of the DTC bet.

Competitive Benchmarking (FY2025)

Source: BRCC 10-K (Mar 2026), BROS 10-K (FY2025), SJM 10-K (FY2025)

Founded:

Aha Moment:

Growth:

Model:

Collapse:

Here are the 3 ways we're turning BRCC into a $1B juggernaut.

Quick explainer. A biz like BRCC buys “Green beans” (raw unroasted coffee seed). They purchase, import, process and roast it before they sell it to consumers.

They’re essentially commodity traders who are effected by changing raw ingredient prices.

In 2025 the price of Green coffee 2x’d. BRCC had no hedge (insurance or pre-paid contracts where they locked in their pricing for the year regardless of market fluctuations).

Their Gross margin collapsed from 34% → 27% (-20% YoY). $26m evaporated.

@ $400m in sales it’s time to be big boys and girls call their green coffee importer. Lock in forward contracts.

60-70% of next year's volume at the best price possible so they have enough on hand to forecast the cost to make their product.

Place a purchase agreement yesterday: X pounds, fixed price, delivered over 12 months.

They can double hedge and leave 30-40% of their need floating if prices fall.

It’ll cost them more upfront (They have to buy upfront the 60-70% commit), but it locks in predictable costs for the year.

Takeaway: 1 call to your importer. 1 contract. You don't get ambushed twice.

BRCC openly announced that they’re letting their DTC biz die, no longer funding their Outpost biz and placing their investments in wholesale. And it can’t come soon enough.

Now it’s time to intelligently architect how DTC and Wholesale play together.

Walmart is the main pipeline.

They’re already in every Walmart across the country. Partner as closely together to make BRCC in Walmart the ‘Murica moment machine.

BRCC owns these moments by default. Run the road show every time a new product launches. And make sure the most patriotic ones launch in Walmart.

Costco is the stock-up play.

Small SKU count. Exclusive 5lb bag, Costco-only.

Give patriotic Costco members the bulk buy of their dreams. Deep savings around patriotic holidays and for military members.

Find the 2-3 winners in channel than get into every door. Make it all about volume pricing.

DTC is the test lab.

Subscribe & Save for coffee is a nice idea. Terrible business model.

Yes it’s a habitual product, but it isn’t cheap to ship individual items to consumers. The arbitrage is piggybacking on the ENORMOUS supply chain already built for consumers to buy coffee bags and their new energy drinks.

What DTC is great for. Quickly finding the next product that customer love and keep the hardcore fans coming back.

Run limited drops instead. New flavors. New roasts. Limited collabs.

Get rapid purchase data/feedback before committing to national shelf. What sells in a drop goes to Walmart with confidence. What doesn't disappears quietly.

Once the model works for coffee. Roll it to their energy line which has no biz being a DTC product.

Takeaway: Walmart is the engine. Costco is the multiplier. DTC is the R&D lab.

Shut the Outposts. All 16. Now. They ran the experiment. It didn't work.

DTC had 200k subscribers and the unit economics still didn’t add up.

Turn the Outpost CAPEX ($8-12m) into Marketing investment to turnover as many bags + cans in every Walmart, Costco and convenience store nationwide.

Cut the SKU catalog in parallel. Anything under $2m at retail: gone. Streamline to scale as much as profitable.

Laser in on 3 key product lines.

Manufacturing gets cleaner with fewer SKUs. Cleaner factory runs.

Lower COGS per unit.

Simpler procurement.

Slowly let the DTC subscription die out, while those customers naturally buy the product on shelf.

Then more and more marketing can go into traditional channels to drive Retail volume.

Is it more fun to buy Nielson and Spins data vs. rip another $1m into Meta? Probably not. But we all need to grow up at some point.

Takeaway: Time to master the Wholesale trade.

80% of consumer spend still happens at IRL retail. That data point is slowly changing, but it won’t go to 50% in most of our bizs lifetimes.

While DTC is an amazing channel to launch a brand there are certain industries where you aren’t going to escape the gravitational pull. And for most brands you should really rethink why you want to.

BRCC is the perfect ex of a brand that should have been a majority wholesale brand MUCH sooner.

If they didn’t believe in this DTC biz is better hype they would have

While challenging the status quo is fun and a great way to get off the ground. Eventually you’ll want to swim where everyone else swims. You’ll need to find your way to do it bigger and better than everyone else.

But it’s INCREDIBLY rare (especially for a consumer product brand) to completely overturn how customers buy products.

And for the foreseeable future 80% of the $$$ still flows through IRL retail.