Before you pick a new market in 2027, look at where your customers already are

Online acquisition keeps getting pricier, and most DTC brands we talk to are answering it the same way, by pushing offline into retail or wholesale or a mail drop in a city they think looks promising. The question underneath all of it is the same. Which market next.

Most brands answer that with a demographics report. Find the ZIPs that look like your best customers on paper by median income, age and household size, then go there. It's tidy, and it's been wrong often enough that plenty of brands have a dead store or a flopped mailer to show for it. A lookalike tells you where people resemble your customers. It doesn't tell you where they're starting to buy.

The market that's leaning toward you

There's usually a handful of places where your sales are climbing without you having done anything to cause it. No ads running there, no big wholesale account, orders going up quarter over quarter anyway. That's the demand worth expanding on, because it's real money showing up now rather than a profile that might convert later.

We find those places by reading your own order history and taking out the two things that flatter a market, its sheer size and whatever you've spent advertising into it. What's left is the growth you can't easily explain, ranked so the markets genuinely pulling ahead sit at the top. A few of them will be towns you'd never have circled on a demographic sheet, and that's usually where the opening is.

What you do with it

If you're weighing a retail or wholesale move, you can see which metros have real pull before you sign a lease or sit down with a buyer. If you're staying direct, the same ranked list drops into mail, CTV and your other channels, so testing a market costs you a campaign instead of a storefront.

We won't tell you which one to enter. We rank where the momentum is and hand you the map, and a decision that size stays yours. Send us your customer file and you'll have your own version of this within a few days.