Bombas built its name by refusing the shelf. For most of its first decade it sold socks straight to its customers, gave a pair away for every pair bought, and grew into Daymond John’s biggest Shark Tank bet. It became the brand other founders pointed to when they called the retailer a middleman worth cutting. Its next leg of growth now runs through Target.

The direct channel still does most of the work. “We have 93% direct-to-consumer,” chief executive Jason LaRose told Glossy, leaving barely seven cents of every dollar to wholesale. He intends to move that number, and his logic is unsentimental: “Your multi-channel customers are your most valuable customers.” The size of that direct business is also leverage, letting a brand this big set terms with the chains it joins. So this autumn it placed its family range in Target and its slippers in DSW.

The arithmetic is unkind to the model Bombas helped make famous. Within its own categories, 65% of sales happen in a physical store. A decade selling direct, and two-thirds of the buying went on without it. So it has opened three stores of its own this autumn, the first in its history. The shelf it once scorned has become the plan.

This is the quiet embarrassment of the direct-to-consumer decade. The promise was disintermediation: own the customer by removing the retailer who stood between you. The numbers now say the retailer was not standing between Bombas and the customer. It was standing exactly where the customer had chosen to shop all along. Cutting out the middleman merely delayed the day Bombas would need one.

Direct-to-consumer was never Bombas’s destination; it was the apprenticeship that earned it a place on the shelf.

Bombas is also late to a migration its own cohort began years ago. Warby Parker, another brand born online, now runs hundreds of stores and has set its sights on nine hundred. The companies that were going to replace the store have become its most ambitious tenants. None of this is flight from direct selling; it is direct selling reaching its logical end.

The company built for the turn. LaRose, a former Under Armour executive, took the top job last year from founder David Heath, who stepped up to executive chair. Heath has said the next phase wanted a retail veteran in charge. That is not a retreat from direct-to-consumer — it is an admission of what direct-to-consumer was always for.

The usual obituary blames the cost of clicks: Meta and Google made direct selling too dear, so the darlings went back to wholesale to survive. Bombas spoils that telling. Heath once described the brand as focused on profitability before it was cool, and it never raised a fortune to chase scale. It went into wholesale from profit, not desperation.

Owning the customer was always the ambition. The customer, it turns out, was at Target the whole time.