2 Bootstrapped D2C Brands, 1 CEO: How Eric Steckling Built Brio and Ollie

Running Two Bootstrapped D2C Brands at Once: Eric Steckling's Playbook

In the world of ecommerce, it's rare to find an entrepreneur who successfully bootstraps one direct-to-consumer brand. Finding someone who bootstraps two — simultaneously — is rarer still. Eric Steckling is that entrepreneur. As the CEO behind both Brio, a brand specializing in beard trimmers and grooming tools, and Ollie, a brand focused on oral care products, Steckling has built a dual-brand empire without relying on venture capital or outside investors. His story offers powerful lessons for anyone looking to grow a D2C business on their own terms.

What Does It Mean to Bootstrap a D2C Brand?

Bootstrapping means building a business using only personal savings, early revenue, and organic growth — without seeking funding from venture capitalists, angel investors, or private equity firms. For D2C (direct-to-consumer) brands, this path is particularly challenging because it demands careful cash flow management, lean marketing strategies, and a deep understanding of customer acquisition costs.

Most D2C startups that make headlines have raised millions in funding. Bootstrapped brands, by contrast, must earn every dollar they reinvest. This constraint, while limiting in some respects, often forces founders to build more sustainable, profitable businesses from day one. Eric Steckling's approach with Brio and Ollie is a textbook example of this discipline.

Brio: Disrupting the Grooming Market with Smart Design

Brio entered a crowded market — personal grooming tools — and found its footing by focusing on quality, value, and a direct relationship with customers. The brand sells beard trimmers and grooming accessories directly to consumers, bypassing traditional retail intermediaries. This D2C model allows Brio to offer premium-quality products at competitive prices while maintaining healthier profit margins than brands selling through big-box retailers.

The grooming industry is highly competitive, with giants like Philips Norelco and Braun dominating shelf space in physical stores. By going direct-to-consumer, Brio sidesteps the shelf-space battle entirely. Instead, the brand competes on digital shelves — primarily through its own website and platforms like Amazon — where strong product reviews, optimized listings, and targeted advertising can level the playing field against bigger competitors.

What sets Brio apart is its commitment to customer feedback. Bootstrapped brands can't afford to launch products that miss the mark. Steckling has built Brio around iterating on customer reviews and continuously improving its product line, ensuring each new trimmer or accessory addresses the real pain points that consumers experience with competing products.

Ollie: Bringing Innovation to Oral Care

Ollie, Steckling's second brand, operates in the oral care space — another category dominated by established giants like Colgate, Oral-B, and Crest. Yet Ollie has carved out a niche by focusing on a D2C model that emphasizes transparency, quality ingredients, and a direct customer relationship.

The oral care market has seen significant disruption in recent years, driven by consumer demand for cleaner formulations, sustainable packaging, and subscription-based convenience. Ollie taps into these trends, offering products that appeal to health-conscious consumers who are tired of one-size-fits-all solutions from mass-market brands.

Running an oral care brand alongside a grooming brand might seem like an odd combination, but there's a strategic logic to it. Both categories serve the personal care market, both benefit from repeat purchases and strong customer lifetime value, and both lend themselves well to the subscription or auto-replenishment model that is increasingly popular in ecommerce.

The Operational Challenge of Managing Two Brands

One of the most impressive aspects of Steckling's story is the operational complexity he manages. Running a single ecommerce brand involves juggling product development, supply chain management, digital marketing, customer service, and financial planning. Running two brands simultaneously doubles that complexity — and doing it without the safety net of outside funding makes it even more demanding.

Successful multi-brand operators like Steckling tend to rely on shared infrastructure wherever possible. This might include a unified customer service team, shared logistics and fulfillment partners, and overlapping marketing tools and technology stacks. By finding these efficiencies, a single CEO can manage two brands without doubling headcount or overhead costs.

Key Operational Strategies for Multi-Brand D2C Success

• Shared Technology Stack: Using the same ecommerce platform, email marketing software, and analytics tools across both brands reduces costs and learning curves for the team.
• Centralized Fulfillment: Working with a third-party logistics (3PL) provider that can handle inventory for both brands simplifies warehousing and shipping operations significantly.
• Cross-Brand Customer Insights: Data collected from Brio customers can inform marketing and product development decisions at Ollie, and vice versa, creating a compounding knowledge advantage.
• Lean Team Structure: Bootstrapped multi-brand operators often build small, versatile teams where individuals wear multiple hats rather than hiring specialized staff for every function.

Why Bootstrapping Still Works in 2024 and Beyond

The narrative around D2C ecommerce has shifted dramatically in the past several years. The era of venture-backed D2C brands burning cash to acquire customers at any cost has largely come to an end. Investors have grown more cautious, and many high-profile D2C brands that raised enormous sums have struggled to reach profitability. Against this backdrop, the bootstrapped model looks increasingly attractive.

Bootstrapped founders are forced to prioritize profitability and unit economics from the start. They can't afford to subsidize customer acquisition with investor money, so they must build marketing strategies that actually work — whether that's through organic search, word of mouth, influencer partnerships, or highly targeted paid advertising. The result is often a leaner, more resilient business that can weather economic downturns better than its venture-backed competitors.

Lessons for Aspiring D2C Entrepreneurs

Eric Steckling's dual-brand journey offers several actionable takeaways for anyone building or considering a D2C business. First, choosing the right product category matters enormously — markets with repeat purchase potential and high customer lifetime value are ideal for bootstrapped brands because they reduce dependence on constant new customer acquisition. Second, going direct to consumer is only half the battle; the real advantage comes from using that direct relationship to collect data, iterate on products, and build genuine brand loyalty. Third, operational efficiency is not optional when you're bootstrapping — every dollar spent on overhead is a dollar not reinvested in growth.

Perhaps most importantly, Steckling's story demonstrates that you don't need to choose between ambition and financial independence. With the right products, the right markets, and a disciplined approach to operations, it's entirely possible to build not one but two thriving D2C brands — all on your own terms.

Final Thoughts

The rise of platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and social media advertising has made it more accessible than ever to launch a D2C brand without outside funding. Eric Steckling and his two brands, Brio and Ollie, are proof that bootstrapped ecommerce can compete at the highest level. As the D2C landscape continues to mature, the founders who prioritize sustainability, profitability, and genuine customer relationships — rather than chasing growth at all costs — will be the ones left standing. Steckling's playbook is well worth studying.