Siblings Monica Royer and Andy Dunn’s children’s and maternity apparel brand, Monica + Andy, was founded in 2014 as a purely direct-to-consumer business. But as the DTC market changed, the brand started working with Walmart in 2022 on a line of baby clothes. Now, the brand is going even deeper on its wholesale partnership with Walmart as it launches maternity wear for Walmart’s online store.
Royer, who co-founded the brand after she had her own kids, also hosts the business podcast The Mentor Files. Dunn is the founder of Bonobos and was an svp at Walmart after it bought Bonobos until he left in 2020.
Royer said the last year has brought a major shakeup to how Andy + Monica operates, thanks to its wholesale expansion. When it was a pure-play direct-to-consumer business, the company could produce and deliver products in smaller shipments throughout the year. Wholesale, on the other hand, requires delivering partners’ large orders, in full, at the start of a season. During the pandemic, Monica + Andy switched from working with a smaller manufacturer to a larger one, which made partnering with a major retailer like Walmart possible. Walmart’s support was also key, Royer said. The retailer advised on details including product assortment and material sourcing to ensure the creation of the maternity line went smoothly.
“With [that support], we were able to stand up a significant wholesale business in over a thousand stores in a very short time,” she said.
Monica + Andy has three of its own stores and hosts dozens of pop-ups — at one time, it had 14 open at once. But working with Walmart has put the brand in a much larger number of stores. The products the brand designs for Walmart feature different designs than those selling on its own channels, but Royer said they’re made with the same design pillars of comfort and organic materials. Prices are slightly more affordable for the Walmart line, compared to the main brand.
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Walmart declined to share sales figures for the existing Monica + Andy baby collection. The maternity fashion market was worth $21 billion last year, but that number is expected to grow to nearly $30 billion by 2030.
In its first year of working with Walmart, Monica + Andy didn’t do much marketing of the Walmart line. Royer said the first year was just about figuring out how to work with a large wholesale partner and how that would affect the direct business. But now, as Monica + Andy enters its second year with Walmart, that will change. The brand has continued to add new styles to both its core line and its Walmart line — in total, it now offers more than 4,000 different styles and colors across 164 SKUs.
“Marketing is something we’ll get into more next year,” she said. “Consumer classes and education about parenthood have been a big part of our own experiential marketing, so now we’re thinking about how we can bring that to the Walmart side of the business.”
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Monica + Andy is one of the many DTC brands that, in recent years, have started to partner with the same traditional wholesale retailers they originally sought to disrupt. Brands like Kindly and Adore Me have embraced wholesale in the last year, and Glossy research shows that many DTC brands now see wholesale as a stable growth channel.
But Royer reiterated that moving into wholesale isn’t without its challenges. Another reason that the brand has waited to do more marketing of the Walmart partnership is that it’s still figuring out how to time its advertising with products that will be available in-store at the same time. Of course, that’s much easier to do with owned stores, where you have complete visibility into what product is still in stock.
