Paire opened its first physical store and recouped the investment in 10 months. Nathan's reasoning is that "people just love visiting a store, shopping in the store, they love the service, they love touching the products" — and DTC was never about being online-only.
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Nathan frames the move as going back to first principles rather than chasing a trend: "looking at something at its core concept and just go like, hey, this is what it really is, and let's just do a store, there's nothing wrong with it." He notes the store "can make the investment back in one year — yeah, 10 months to be precise," which he calls lucky, since "in retail some stores will be looking at two to three years," and this was their first store so all their customers came to it. The deeper point is human behaviour: there's "a huge pushback with all these online trends because people like real things, it's just that simple."