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When sustainable bedding brand Buffy, launched in late 2017, it looked like the archetypical direct-to-consumer company: online presence, purpose-driven marketing and no middlemen. However, that didn't last very long. In one of their earliest rejections of the direct-to-consumer tropes, Buffy did not take any VC capital. Instead, the founders opted for a few angel investments, and bootstrapped the rest of its funding strategy. According to Paul Shaked, Buffy's co-founder and vp of growth, growing has been at the core of Buffy's mission since day one, so shortly after launch they moved into selling third-party on Amazon, and then into physical retail. Now that the company has reached a point of scale it is happy with, it is starting to explore non-Instagram and more non-digital forms of marketing as a way to continue growing. In this week's episode of Making Marketing, Shaked sits down with Shareen Pathak to discuss the many tropes of a DTC brand, Buffy's approach to marketing and why it's investing in its own editorial platform.