The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands.

Every so often, a conversation with a founder reframes how you think about an entire category. My recent conversation with Katie Omstead, President at Lo & Sons— the family-run, direct-to-consumer travel and lifestyle brand founded by Helen Lo in 2010 at the age of 65 — was one of those conversations.

What started as a discussion about a niche bag company quickly turned into a masterclass on how small, focused brands are surviving (and thriving) in a commerce environment that punishes slowness and rewards proximity to the customer.

Here are the three lessons that stayed with me long after the recording stopped.

For years, DTC founders talked about brand, community, and storytelling as their primary defenses against bigger competitors. Lo & Sons reminded me that in 2026, the real moat is speed — specifically, how quickly you can move from customer insight to a finished product on shelves.

When they launched, their product development cycle ran roughly 2 years. Today, it's 9 months. They're actively piloting a 4- to 5-month cycle. That's not an incremental improvement; that's a fundamental rewiring of how a product company operates. And it's a direct response to the "dupe economy," where bestsellers get copied and listed on marketplaces within weeks of launch. If you can't outrun the copycats, you at least need to outmaneuver them — and that requires compressing every stage of development.

The takeaway for operators: audit your product cycle honestly. If it looks the way it did three years ago, you're already behind.

Most AI conversations in consumer brands focus on the customer-facing edges — chatbots, personalization, and generative marketing. Lo & Sons is quietly using AI where it arguably matters more: in the messy operational middle.

They've collapsed "idea to visual concept" from weeks or months into roughly an hour. They're using AI across content creation, marketing workflows, and inventory management. None of this makes for flashy press releases, but it's the kind of compounding efficiency that lets a small team punch well above its weight.

The lesson here is a corrective one: stop hunting for the killer AI feature. Start stacking small AI wins across every workflow you run.

In an era where everyone is chasing marketplace scale, Lo & Sons remains 90% direct-to-consumer and just 10% on Amazon. That's a deliberate, sometimes costly choice — and they stand by it because it preserves their connection to the customer, their data, and their brand narrative.

When customers start mistaking your original product for a copy of a buzzier brand — a perception problem Lo & Sons is actively fighting — that direct relationship becomes your single best defense.

Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead, also joined the conversation. The Lead is a commerce summit taking place in New York City on May 20th and 21st, bringing together roughly 3,000 attendees and 150 speakers. The focus is operator-to-operator: operationalizing AI, the intersection of tech and people, and how brands are actually deploying consumer-facing AI — without the vendor spin. If you're building, operating, or investing in consumer brands, this one's worth your time.

The broader message? In 2026, owning the customer is still the most strategic asset a brand can have.