Explore every episode of the podcast The DTC Podcast

How should DTC brands use AI for growth strategy? Rafael Gi and Duncan Ferguson of Pilothouse use Claude to diagnose why a brand stopped growing, then make the call themselves.

Raf is head of strategic growth at Pilothouse and runs the audits behind new client pitches, five to twelve of them every two weeks at peak. Duncan leads strategy on the delivery side and builds the systems the team operates. They walk through how a nine-figure brand's growth flatlined, why one client's AOV fell from $40 to $32, a regional market maturity model that took two weeks instead of six months, and what happened when Duncan ran Pilothouse's strategy process in Claude without his own inputs.

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WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Your growth flatlined and nothing changed. A brand that had just hit nine figures came to Pilothouse with no idea why growth stopped. Raf found 70% of its media going into three markets. Meta kept spending where the brand already had customers, and there were no new ones left to reach there.
• You want AI to find the problem for you. Raf pulls eight to fifteen reports across platforms, then forms a hunch from experience. A frequency of 140 in one area usually means overinvestment, so he asks his knowledge base to validate it or prove him wrong.
• Your AOV dropped and you can't see why. One client's AOV fell from about $40 to $32 after it launched a $20 product. Without budgets set by product, Meta spends toward the cheaper item because it moves more volume. Raf confirms it by pulling the spend split between the two products over time.
• Your AI setup breaks between teams. If sales and delivery each define a client's "goal" differently, the agent pulls the wrong section of the wrong document. Pilothouse aligns object definitions and the naming of files, folders, agents and skills across departments, and Raf and Duncan share skill files to keep context in sync.
• Your audit is too long for anyone to act on. Pilothouse's CEO calls it Claude food and human food. Claude gets the raw data, and the strategist's job is turning a hundred-page output into a ten, five or one-page version a client can absorb and act on.
• A data project needs a data scientist and six months. Raf built a regional market maturity model for a nine-figure brand in four workshops over two weeks, doing the processing in Claude on a 178-megabyte dataset. The numbers went through the brand's CFO.
• You're wondering whether AI can run strategy on its own. Duncan turned Pilothouse's scaling growth system into a set of Claude skills, then ran it with his own inputs removed. It didn't reach the same conclusions, and it made persuasive arguments that were technically wrong.
• Your strategy dies after the handoff. Duncan calls it seagull strategy: the plan ships, hits reality, and the strategist isn't there to see the results. Pilothouse strategists stay to operate the systems, down to finding a JavaScript snippet in a Shopify backend that was distorting how AOV registered.
• Customer research costs too much. Raf uses AI for semantic mapping, grouping the words people use when they react to a product, work that used to mean an expensive focus group and people coding transcripts by hand.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Rafael Gi is head of strategic growth at Pilothouse. Duncan Ferguson leads strategy at Pilothouse. https://pilothouse.co

STAY CONNECTED

DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

TIMESTAMPS

02:30 How AI is transforming marketing strategy

08:00 Building connected AI workflows across teams

13:00 Using AI to identify ecommerce growth bottlenecks

20:00 Why human judgment still matters in AI strategy

28:00 The challenges of scaling AI automation

What ROAS should a DTC brand target when it sells a high-priced product? Dayne Rusch, co-founder and CEO of Vyper Industrial, used to demand a 5 ROAS on the first order and now calls that target stupid. Vyper sets a new customer CAC goal, checks it every day and keeps scaling while it holds.

Vyper makes premium shop chairs, carts and creepers in Wisconsin, with its flagship chair at $625, and calls itself the Yeti of the garage. Two and a half years after his first visit, Dayne is back with a new 65,000 square foot facility, a new CRO and performance team, and a plan to spend 2027 on brand: national TV, collaborations with Ford, an event that drew more than 5,000 people and a full-time human calling abandoned carts.

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WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• You set a high first-order ROAS target and growth stalled. Dayne says chasing a 5 ROAS suffocated Vyper's growth and didn't bring in enough revenue to cover operating costs. The target now is a new customer CAC, checked daily, and when Vyper is under it during the holidays, they spend more.
• Your product is too expensive for subscription-style LTV math. Vyper is profitable on the first purchase. Its ideal customer buys one chair to test the quality, then comes back for four more. Others come back for accessories that run $200.
• You keep testing new channels. Dayne puts the budget into the three he knows work, TV, Meta and email, and says $100K on an unproven app can get you nothing.
• Your TV ads sell too hard. Vyper is moving from problem-and-solution spots to brand spots built on collaborations with Ford, Hendrick Motorsports and Realtree, because a partner everyone recognizes lends credibility.
• Your site is cluttered with what you think customers want. Vyper rebuilt its pages from reviews, forums and on-site questions about what nearly stopped people from buying. Dayne's LinkedIn post put the lift at 37% on mobile and 67% on desktop with sessions flat.
• You want to use AI without sounding like everyone else. Vyper's team uses Claude to cut a two to three hour image task to 15 minutes and to spark design ideas, but keeps the copy human. After a trial of AI replies to abandoned cart texts, Vyper hired a full-time person to call and text abandoned carts.
• You can't justify an event on ROI. Vyperfest drew more than 5,000 people. Dayne counts local brand, hiring and team morale as the return, and a second one is planned for next September.
• You can't measure brand spend. Dayne watches branded search, organic and direct traffic, and whether new customer cost is falling. He doesn't trust post-purchase surveys on their own.
• You are running the same Black Friday as last year. Vyper gives every sale period its own brand look across ads, email and site, splits discounts into blocks and brings back limited editions for one weekend.
• Your giveaway prize is eating the budget. Vyper swapped six-figure trucks for a UTV that costs it $20,000, with free email entry to build the list before Black Friday.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dayne Rusch is co-founder and CEO of Vyper Industrial, which he runs with his brother Dylan. https://vyperindustrial.com

STAY CONNECTED

DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Building Vyper into a premium automotive brand

05:00 How Vyper increased website conversions

12:00 Why Vyper is investing heavily in TV

21:00 Using AI without losing brand authenticity

30:00 Vyper’s Black Friday strategy

Should DTC brands cut ad spend after Cyber Monday? Jacob says no. Black Friday customers often come back to buy gifts, the big retailers pull back so CPMs tend to dip, and the first two weeks of December can outperform the end of November.

On the third DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jacob and Abby from the social team at Pilothouse. Each topic runs on a timer. They start with rising Meta CPMs and the product browsing default Meta switched on this week, then get into whether the offer or the creative matters more on Black Friday, what a late Thanksgiving means for your sale, why December still pays, and whether a founder should fire their agency two weeks before Black Friday.

Get an audit from Pilothouse: https://pilothouse.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

Your Meta costs keep climbing. Meta CPMs are running higher than last year, with Q4 and the US midterms both pushing prices up. Brands that fed the pixel with cold traffic earlier in the year are the ones seeing it pay off now.

Meta just put a shopping page between your ad and your site. Jacob explains why Pilothouse will test product browsing before opting out, including what opting out could do to your opportunity score.

You can't decide between the offer and the creative. Abby keeps the offer front and center in every Black Friday ad and wins on how she says it. One cookware brand in her portfolio saw CPMs go down this year after a flood of new video content.

You run the same ads to everyone. Jacob hammers the offer to retargeting audiences and leads with variety and messaging for cold traffic, then narrows to what works three or four days into the sale.

Thanksgiving is late and your window is short. Launch early to mid November, then stack an extra 5% or add countdown timers if the promo starts to fizzle.

Your ads say 20% off and the sale is pacing behind. Abby leaves the creative alone and lets shoppers find 25% on the site, a happy surprise that helps them pull the trigger.

Your discount isn't deep enough. A jewellery brand moved from 30% off sitewide to "up to 50%" by adding more products to its clearance section.

You plan to pull back on December 2nd. Keep your Black Friday ads running through Cyber Week, have gifting ready to go, and push until your shipping cutoff.

Your gifting ads launch with no learnings. Abby launches evergreen gifting ads during Black Friday so they already have data when the sale ends.

Your shipping cutoff has passed. Gift cards, discounted gift cards and expedited shipping keep the last days of December selling.

Your brand doesn't fit gifting. Use a self-gifting angle: you did your holiday shopping, now it's your turn.

You're not planning Q5. Health brands can ride new year resolutions, and jewelry brands should build their Valentine's Day creative before January ends.

You skipped top of funnel in October. Abby explains how she fills the funnel in October with brand-building video, then drains it in November with heavy Black Friday messaging.

Your founder wants to fire the agency on November 15th. Jacob would ride it out unless the agency has checked out, and Abby lists the red flags that make switching worth the risk.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Jacob and Abby work on the social team at Pilothouse, a performance marketing agency for DTC brands. https://pilothouse.co

STAY CONNECTED

DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

Want to be on the Rundown? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Black Friday creative strategy

03:00 Rising Meta CPMs

07:00 BFCM offers vs. creative

18:00 Why you should keep spending after Cyber Monday

30:00 When to fire your marketing agency

Should a DTC brand cut its marketing budget for 2027? Greg Dolan, CEO of Keen Decision Systems, says cutting is the biggest mistake he expects to see, because a brand that goes dark pays more to get back to where it was.

Greg co-founded Keen 16 years ago after a decade as a CPG brand marketer, waiting six to eight months for a marketing mix PowerPoint that didn't help with the next decision. Keen's database now covers 450 brands and $48 billion in media spend. In the final episode of Harness the Halo, he explains how the loop of measuring, planning, buying and reconciling works, why he thinks a brand of any size should invest in top of funnel, and why he would never hand the marketing budget back to the CFO.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Tariffs are squeezing your margin and marketing looks like the easy cut. Greg's advice is to cut non-working dollars first and keep the lights on, because coming back from dark costs more than staying in market.
• You've been told to wait on brand marketing until you're bigger. Greg disagrees. He says top of funnel spend acts as cover fire that makes your middle and bottom of funnel more effective, and that a brand living on bottom of funnel spend pays more for the same result over time.
• You're scaling inside one platform. Greg's data favors spreading spend across channels that reinforce each other, like Meta and Amazon, and judging each one on what the next dollar returns in profit.
• Someone told you a channel doesn't work. Greg calls blanket channel verdicts a broad generalization. What matters is the brand's objective, where its customer is, whether you can buy the channel efficiently, and when you spend.
• You're relying on Google's or Meta's free marketing mix model. Greg calls them myopic, says they grade their own homework, and says they need a data science team and constant experiments to calibrate.
• Your business is seasonal and your budget piles into the peak. Greg's biggest client bet was a century-old seasonal brand that spent less during its peak season and more around it, and grew top line and profit.
• Your CFO only looks at CAC. Greg would show the CFO the net present value of marketing, so it gets judged as an investment the way any other capital spend is.
• Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Greg says the CMO should, as long as the CMO learns the CFO's language and is held to profit.
• You plan once a year. Keen starts from two years of data, updates the model as new data arrives, produces a week-by-week buying plan, and checks actuals against the forecast.
• You blame creative when results swing. Greg says only great creative shows up as a big effect in the model, and that where and when you spend usually matters more than people think creative does.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Greg Dolan is co-founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com

HARNESS THE HALO

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is the final episode.

STAY CONNECTED

DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

SPONSOR

Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 AI-powered marketing measurement

06:00 Using AI to optimize marketing spend

09:00 Why top-of-funnel investment matters

19:00 Marketing budgets during economic pressure

26:00 The future of autonomous media buying

What do investors look for in a DTC brand before they fund it?

Norwest partner Lisa Wu, an early investor in Jet, Ritual, and Remedy, walks through the 10 attributes her team uses to spot a breakout consumer brand. She covers why a well-built consumer brand should only need one or two rounds of capital, why replenishment categories need gross margins north of 60%, and why supplements and personal care can sell for five times revenue while apparel can trade at one times. If you run a $5M to $50M brand, use her list as a scorecard and mark yourself green, yellow, or red on each attribute.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Key takeaways:

- Know which of the 10 attributes your brand is weak on before you raise, so you fix the reds instead of pitching around them.

- Avoid funding a consumer brand like a tech company. Too much capital at rising valuations buys mercenary customers and forces you to chase targets your unit economics can't support.

- Be first-ish instead of first. The later mattress-in-a-box brands drafted off the category education the early, venture-funded players paid for.

- Build clinical proof into the brand from day one. Science washing (adding a dermatologist, a survey, and a claim once you notice the trend) is something customers can sense.

- Cut acquisition costs with a distribution advantage others haven't found yet, like a trusted clinical voice whose audience includes other creators who look up to them.

- Make paid acquisition work by pairing it with strong retention. Natural replenishment categories let lifetime value cover what you spend to acquire.

- Price for the premiumization of mass, and keep investing in brand, because a cheaper competitor is always coming.

- Protect gross margin early so wholesale and retail stay open without a reformulation later.

- Choose a category acquirers want to buy. A $100M brand at five times revenue sells for $500M. At one times, it sells for $100M.

- Win with one product first, then expand into adjacent products where the customer already trusts you.

About the guest:

Lisa Wu is a partner on the venture team at Norwest, where she has invested in consumer brands for more than a decade. Her investments include Ritual, Remedy, and Jet, which was acquired by Walmart. Norwest runs venture and growth equity on one platform, so it can back founders from seed through profitable scale. Reach Lisa at lw@nvp.com.

https://norwest.com

Stay connected:

The DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Timestamps:

02:10 Why Health and Wellness Is Booming

08:45 How Ritual Built Consumer Trust

14:05 10 Attributes of Breakout Consumer Brands

24:05 Building a Distribution Advantage

40:55 Consumer Trends Investors Are Watching

How should DTC brands prep for Black Friday on Amazon? This year's Prime Day events show where ecommerce growth is coming from: shoppers stocked up on consumables while big-ticket categories lagged.

Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse. He walks through what June and October Prime Day showed. Some consumable brands Pilothouse manages grew 150% or more year over year during October Prime Day, a few sold more in that two-day event than in the four-day June event, and average order value dropped. He explains what that means for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, how premium brands should position for shoppers who wait for deals, and what to set up on Amazon now.

Work with Pilothouse: https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse

Key takeaways:

- Know which shoppers are waiting on you. Paper products, household cleaning, personal hygiene and pet food jumped on deal days, while headphones, tablets, wearable tech and TVs lagged.

- Sell on value. Shoppers want the product they already like at a better price, so make your differentiator easy to find and quick to understand on the listing.

- Build awareness before the deal day. Shoppers do their research ahead of the sale, so get in front of them in the weeks before Black Friday and retarget them on the day.

- Test your listing images with care. Amazon once required white backgrounds, and lifestyle and annotated images exist because sellers kept pushing. Deal-day hints in images are a gray area, and a removed listing means missing the event entirely.

- Be available where your customer shops. More shoppers compared Walmart, Target and DTC sites during deal days, and if your competitor is listed there and you are not, they get the sale.

- Plan a review push after Black Friday. Amazon's new Review Requests ads let you pay per click to ask recent buyers for a review. A click does not guarantee a review.

- Start ranking for your Black Friday keywords now. Put the keyword in your title, highlights, bullets and description, give it its own campaign, and use placement modifiers to hold top of search into the deal day.

About the guest:

Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse, a full-funnel performance marketing agency for DTC brands.

https://pilothouse.co

Stay connected:

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Sponsors:

Advertise on DTC: https://dtcnews.link/advertise

Timestamps:

00:03:36 Amazon Prime Day trends

00:05:00 Consumables surge during deal days

00:07:40 How shoppers define value

00:12:30 Positioning premium products for BFCM

00:16:40 Omnichannel holiday shopping behavior

Do influencer partnership ads lower customer acquisition costs for DTC brands, or just move them?

They lower CAC on Meta, but rev-share creator deals send a big share of that saving into a new line on the P&L. Yash Chavan, founder and CEO of Saral, the team behind the Sathi affiliate platform, walks through the math on an $80 AOV supplement brand and lays out how to build a creative flywheel instead: an influencer affiliate program where affiliate revenue covers the cost of seeding product, and the posts that win organically become the ads you boost on Meta and TikTok.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Key takeaways:

- Work out whether partnership ads are cutting your CAC or relocating it, using Yash's worked example of an $80 CAC dropping to $68 while creator and platform fees add $9.20 back.

- See why creator payouts tied to GMV grow as a variable cost when you scale ad spend, and how capping the payout on any single ad stops one viral video from costing you $10,000.

- Build a creator pyramid: seed creators who already post in your niche, turn the ones who post into affiliates, give the top sellers bigger deals, and run the top performers by views as partnership ads.

- Let organic performance choose your ad creative, with rules like boosting a reel on Meta once it passes a view threshold inside 48 hours.

- Raise your affiliate activity rate by rewarding the steps before the sale, like a free product when a creator joins and a small cash reward when they post.

- Catch leaked codes, leaked affiliate links, and affiliates bidding on your brand keywords before you pay commission on those sales.

- Plan a creator push in mid October that can still produce ad creative and affiliate revenue before Black Friday.

About the guest:

Yash Chavan is the founder and CEO of Saral, an influencer marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Before Saral he ran an influencer marketing agency. His team also built Sathi, an affiliate platform for creator-led brands with fraud protection and gamified rewards.

Saral: https://getsaral.com/

Sathi: https://www.mysathi.io

Stay connected:

Website and newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Sponsors:

This episode is sponsored by Saral and Sathi. Saral matches your brand with creators who already make content in your niche, and Sathi turns the creators who post into affiliates, with fraud protection and gamified rewards built in. Start a free trial at https://getsaral.com/

How do you lower customer acquisition costs for a DTC brand? Bobby Bitton, co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, says TikTok Shop did more for his CAC than any other channel.

He launched it as a side project in November 2023, and within 30 days one SKU went from $2,000 a day to $70,000 a day.

Bobby walks through how O Positiv runs more than 100 ads a week through an in-house creative team, how they move what works on TikTok Shop over to Meta, and why retention now gets the same attention as acquisition.

He also explains why the brand waited until it was a $100 million business to go into retail, why linear TV beat streaming in their geo tests, and the brand architecture decision he would make differently.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Key takeaways:

• Lower CAC with TikTok Shop by sending samples generously and recruiting affiliates every week. Bobby set a goal of 1,000 affiliates and did the outreach himself on Sunday nights.
• Start TikTok Shop simple. Get affiliates posting before you touch GMV Max, paid campaigns, or contests.
• Get more usable creative by briefing creators less. O Positiv's brief is the product, what it does, what creators can say, and what they can't.
• Feed Meta with TikTok Shop learnings. The winning creator content runs on Meta, and the creators get paid extra for it.
• Test for creative diversity instead of running ten copy variations on one static image.
• Hold Meta to an allowable CAC and move spend up or down with the strength of your creative.
• Grow lifetime value by planning for life stages. A PMS customer who gets pregnant should reach for your pregnancy product, then your menopause product.
• Launch products customers can feel working. O Positiv's fiber gummy stuck and its immune gummy didn't, and that became the product rule.
• Go into retail with a big DTC business behind you, push for endcaps and out-of-aisle displays, and fly out for the buyer meeting.
• Expect retail to break your attribution. When Meta ads drive store sales, your Shopify CAC climbs while the business grows, so build omnichannel measurement early.
• Decide early whether you are a house of brands or a branded house, and keep it simple.

About the guest: Bobby Bitton is the co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, the women's health brand he started with his sister Brianna Bitton in 2018. O Positiv makes FLO, URO, and MENO, and sells through its own site, TikTok Shop, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and CVS.https://www.opositiv.com

Stay connected: Follow The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

What's the best DTC marketing strategy on Meta when every competitor makes the same claims?

Liam Robinson, co-founder of Marlbank, says to stop arguing features and lead cold prospecting with your brand's growth story. On this episode of All Killer No Filler, he walks through how that switch got a supplement brand built by chemists scaling on Meta after months of feature-led ads went nowhere.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Key takeaways:

- How to sell a product that's better than the competition when the reasons don't show up in an ad

- Why feature-led ads turn into a shouting match in cold Meta prospecting

- How to imply product quality through your brand's growth story instead of claiming it

- What to use when you don't have big numbers yet: a first farmers market, a first hire, a first customer

- How to build a then-and-now prospecting ad from your own camera roll

- How Marin Skincare and Vyper Industrial pair a product distinction with a founder story

- How to turn a Dragons' Den appearance into an ad, whether you got a deal or walked away without one

- Which brands this angle won't work for

About the guest:

Liam Robinson is co-founder of Marlbank, a Meta-only agency for early-growth ecommerce brands, built in partnership with Pilothouse. Before Marlbank, he was one of Pilothouse's first media buyers. Reach Liam at liam@marlbank.co or his co-founder Nate at nate@marlbank.co.

Stay connected:

Subscribe to The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Get the DTC Newsletter at https://directtoconsumer.co

Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

How do you get your CFO to approve a bigger marketing budget for a DTC brand? Drew Fallon, former CFO of Mad Rabbit, says finance is watching one number, CAC, and that brand spend only gets funded once direct response is efficient enough to pay for it.

Drew is now CEO of Iris Finance, a finance platform for CPG and DTC brands, where he sees the books of 200 brands, most of them between $20 million and $300 million in revenue. He joins Eric Dyck and Claudia Lauture, VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, to work through the argument between marketing and finance, including who should own the budget and when a brand can afford upper funnel. You walk away knowing what to bring into the budget meeting and how finance will score it.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• You don't know what finance is judging your plan on. Drew's answer is CAC. If CAC, retention and LTV to CAC land where his model has them, he says he does not care how much you spend or what you spend it on.
• You need money for a bet that won't pay back this quarter. Drew wants one of two cases made: that it raises MER and contribution margin, or that the upside is big enough to be worth the risk.
• You want to start brand marketing and direct response is only just carrying the business. Drew says there is no room yet. Most companies he sees don't start brand work until somewhere past $30 million in revenue, and he would not do it at $10 million.
• You think you have topped out on Meta. Drew says Meta takes a brand farther than most operators expect, and that you can probably ride it to $100 million.
• You are looking for the next channel after Meta. Across the 200 brands on Iris, Drew has not seen one scale AppLovin spend and make more money. The pattern he describes is a brand that reaches $50 million on Meta, puts $200K a month into AppLovin and watches its margin go away.
• Your upper funnel keeps getting cut to hit the quarter. Claudia's team at Keen runs both plans out two and three years, so the cost of the cut is on the table next to the short-term number.
• Your cash position keeps surprising you. Drew builds a bear, a base and a bull case, then tests the base at 40% over and 40% under. Beating plan by 60% can still run a brand out of money, because of inventory.
• Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Drew says it is usually the marketing lead and should be the CFO, on the condition that the CFO understands growth marketing, which he calls rare.
• Your agency bill is being questioned. At Mad Rabbit, Drew let go of an Amazon agency he liked because it cost roughly $60K a month and he could hire two full-time people for two thirds of that.
• You are planning Q4 the way you did last year. Drew is hearing more brands pull back on TikTok after losing money there last year, and supplement founders tell him they are waiting for January because Q4 brings higher returns, more churn and discount shoppers.
• You are reporting platform revenue to finance. Both guests named it as the number they stopped trusting. Drew: "It's all higher than what you get on your P&L."

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Drew Fallon is co-founder and CEO of Iris Finance and the former CFO of Mad Rabbit. https://irisfinance.co

Claudia Lauture is VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com

HARNESS THE HALO

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is episode 5 of 6, and a new episode drops every other week.

SPONSOR

Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

When should a DTC brand move into retail? Flex founder Lauren Schulte Wang said no to Target twice, and retail is now over 60% of revenue. She waited until her supply chain and her marketing engine could handle it, and she went because customers told her every month that they wanted to buy the product in a store.

On the DTC Podcast, Lauren tells Eric Dyck how Flex got from a landing page with 200,000 emails and no product to 30,000 retail doors and more than 185 million menstrual discs sold. She covers the DTC strategy behind the timing of the retail move, how connected TV and subway ads lift every other channel, and what she is doing about a category that only 3% of people have heard of.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• A big retailer wants your product and you are not sure you are ready. Lauren turned Target down two years running until supply chain, manufacturing and margin-based LTV to CAC were dialed in, because a marketing engine that cannot scale before retail will not scale once you are on shelf.
• Your subscription keeps missing the moment customers need the product. Flex changed pack sizes, changed frequencies and opened fulfillment centers on both coasts. The fix was in the customer research the whole time: people wanted to buy it in a store.
• Your product needs explaining before anyone will buy it. Flex ads without an education piece perform worse, so the answers to "will it get stuck" and "is it messy" go inside the ad itself.
• You are about to spend real money on your first TV campaign. Flex hired a big agency, shot a high-production spot Lauren had doubts about, and had to spend out a contract on ads that did not perform. The rule since then is that nothing runs on TV unless it has already worked on YouTube.
• Your category has almost no awareness and you cannot outspend the giants. With unaided awareness of menstrual discs at 3%, Flex added CTV, New York subway ads and campus marketing so that a friend's recommendation, a subway poster and a TikTok from a small creator all reach the same person.
• You do not know which content will move retail sales. A plain YouTube video explaining how the Flex Cup's pull tab works went viral and lifted Flex's velocities at Walmart by double digits.
• You launched to a huge waitlist with no way to fulfill it. Flex could not ship in the US yet, so the founders flew to Europe on cheap Iceland fares and hand-packed discs at local post offices. They had $80,000 in pre-orders before demo day.
• You found a competitor's patent on the product you wanted to make. Lauren pitched the company, got turned down, designed around the patent, and then acquired that company while she was still in Y Combinator.

ABOUT LAUREN

Lauren Schulte Wang is the founder and CEO of The Flex Company, the period care brand behind the Flex Disc, the Flex Cup, Softdisc and Softcup. She started Flex in 2015, went through Y Combinator in 2016, and coined the term "menstrual disc." Flex products are sold in 30,000 stores including Walmart, Target and CVS. https://flexfits.com

Instagram and TikTok: @flex

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TIMESTAMPS

00:00 How Flex turned viral attention into growth

08:00 Why doing things that don’t scale works

12:00 How retail became Flex’s biggest growth channel

17:00 Why product education drives performance

32:00 What makes TV and YouTube creative work

How can AI agents speed up ad creative for a DTC brand? Braydon, a creative strategist at Pilothouse, has agents build his swipe file every Monday and Claude write his design tickets, which saved him five and a half hours last week.

Braydon joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to walk through the full workflow. Grok Bot handles the research with a chief of staff agent that manages a team of sub-agents. Higgsfield turns the references he picks into on-brand mockups. Claude writes the tickets for the designers, who still make the finished ad. He also explains why he is not bullish on AI-generated ad creative right now, and why some of his clients have asked for zero AI in their ads.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• You trigger every AI task by hand. Braydon sets up a chief of staff agent in Grok Bot that manages sub-agents on a schedule, so the research is waiting for him on Monday morning.
• Competitor and creative research eats your week. His agents go through Pinterest, the ad library and Motion, and one run came back with a swipe file of around 70 creatives relevant to the brand.
• You write the same design tickets over and over. Braydon loads his internal processes into Claude, hands it the ideas he picked, and it writes the ticket descriptions for the designers.
• You can't tell where AI belongs in the creative process. He uses it for strategy, references and mockups, then gives the work to designers for the finished product.
• Your AI images look like AI. Braydon starts from a reference photo taken on a phone or a real UGC image, which gets the output closer to an iPhone shot.
• Your client has banned AI creative. Eric shares what he heard from larger brands, who test AI creative on a separate third-party brand page instead of the main account.
• You copied an AI ad trend and it stopped working. Braydon on Pixar-style video ads and why formats like that grab attention for a moment and then fade once everyone runs them.
• Your team keeps building the same AI tool three times. Braydon and Eric talk through shared context, token bills and what Pilothouse is building internally to fix it.

ABOUT BRAYDON

Braydon is a creative strategist at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC. To talk through this workflow with him, fill out the form at https://pilothouse.co and ask for Braydon.

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TIMESTAMPS

00:00 How AI workflows save hours every week

05:00 Building an AI agent team

08:00 Where AI creative works best

16:00 Using AI as a personal assistant

22:00 Building shared AI workflows for teams

Brand strategist Eugene Healey on DTC marketing at high creative volume: why creative is the new targeting, why brand books fail with creators, and how teams approve hundreds of ads a week.

How do you keep a DTC brand coherent when you're shipping that much creative? Eugene says the fundamentals of brand still hold. The job around them has moved from controlling every campaign to orchestrating hundreds of pieces of creative the brand no longer controls.

Eugene lectured in marketing and brand management at the University of Melbourne, runs a brand strategy studio, and is an equity partner in the brand tracking platform Tracksuit. On his second DTC Podcast appearance he tells Eric Dyck where brand strategy goes when media becomes the key variable, and how a team builds the judgment to approve work at volume.

Eugene's live cohort course, The New Fundamentals of Brand, starts October 12. It runs seven weeks, with live sessions, studio groups of five or six people in your time zone, and interviews with brand leaders from Hinge and Nothing. Final-release seats are limited: https://thenewfundamentals.co

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Your team ships more creative than any approval chain can review. Eugene's model has senior people approve the overall pattern while juniors and mid-levels own the day-to-day sign-off.
• Your brand book can't govern creators, partners and communities. Why you hand third parties a suite of assets that can travel into their context, instead of 80 pages of logo rules.
• Your team still works strategy, then creative, then media. Creative has to be conceived inside its distribution, which is why on Meta the creative has become the targeting.
• All of your brand knowledge lives in one long-tenured person. How to spread that judgment across the team by debating why a piece does or doesn't feel right.
• AI is producing work nobody on the team has read. Tobi Lütke's "slop grenades," and why saving money on copy makes little sense when media costs more than it ever has.
• Your brand keeps trying to make memes. What Gap and the studio Invisible Dynamics did instead, bringing back music video culture with dance covers people remix on their own.
• Your positioning sits in the aspirational middle. What Everlane's sale to Shein says about brands whose promise is that tomorrow can be a little better than today.

ABOUT EUGENE

Eugene Healey is a brand strategist and co-founder of The New Fundamentals of Brand, a seven-week live course for marketers and brand leaders. He previously lectured in marketing and brand management at the University of Melbourne and is an equity partner in Tracksuit. https://thenewfundamentals.co

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eugbrandstrat

00:00 Cold open: the funnel is now a tornado

00:22 Two years of making content, and what changed

01:51 Why he turned it into a course

03:50 The central thesis: from control to orchestration

04:50 Salience in the Andromeda era

05:39 Creative is the new targeting

06:56 Walter Cronkite and the creator model of trust

08:51 Everlane, Shein and the death of the middle

12:16 What happened to the analog revival

15:23 Private social and the entertainment platforms

17:26 Creative velocity and who approves the work

19:39 Slop grenades and human discernment

22:56 Can AI hold the brand's judgment?

25:06 Hiring top screenwriters for UGC scripts

25:45 Stop making memes and become the meme: Gap

29:08 Tracksuit, queryable brand tracking and Hall

30:17 Sydney Sweeney and why we let ourselves get rage baited

34:54 Inside The New Fundamentals of Brand

38:02 Seats, and where to sign up

38:30 Wrap

How do you run Black Friday when your DTC brand is already hooked on discounts? Split your customers into new and repeat, keep the coupon-trained cohorts on their deal, and use the Black Friday offer to bring in new customers who have never seen your 30% off.

On the second DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jordan Gordon, who leads email and retention at Pilothouse, and Rafael Gi, who works on partnerships and client strategy there. Each topic runs on a timer. They start with a brand that has run 30% off sitewide five times this year, move to why Meta keeps spending in the markets you have already saturated, and finish with the worst things Pilothouse finds when it audits a brand's email program.

Get an audit from Pilothouse: https://pilothouse.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Your customers only buy when there is a coupon. Jordan separates the coupon-addicted cohorts, keeps showing them their price through email, and controls the offers new customers see so they settle on a new normal.
• Your Black Friday offer is the same one you ran all year. Push it to 35%, or lead with an "up to" offer on a door buster that is not your most important product.
• You treat your discount as a flat rate. Rafael budgets discounts like media spend, with a goal for each offer, such as a one-day drop on your best seller to capture new customer emails.
• You give away margin in Q4 and get nothing back in January. Set an AOV threshold that earns a gift card customers can only redeem in Q5.
• Your early access list waits weeks for the deal. Give them the Black Friday offer the day they sign up, then use the flow to sell them on buying from you all year.
• Meta keeps spending where you are already strongest. In one Pilothouse audit of a nine-figure brand, two regions near where the company was founded held 8% of its addressable market, produced 40% of its revenue, and were being over-delivered by 20 to 30%.
• Every region carries the same ROAS target. Set targets by market maturity instead: higher efficiency in saturated markets, break even or a small loss in new ones, and something in between for markets that are emerging.
• Your email program is turned up to maximum. Jordan found one brand with 700 live flow messages sending up to four campaigns a day, and another using 30-day open attribution that credited email for sales driven by ads.
• You do not know what email earns on its own. A control group that only receives the first welcome email shows you the incremental revenue.
• Your SMS budget looks expensive. At one brand, email click-through sat at 0.09% while SMS reached 2.5%, and an SMS click cost 25 cents against roughly $1.30 for Meta and Google retargeting.
• The algorithm narrowed your brand to one message. How a testosterone supplement ended up with a site built around libido, and why the fix meant rebuilding creative, site and email together.
• Your pricing sits behind a quiz. At one subscription brand, only 3% of people who went through the quiz checked out.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Jordan Gordon leads email and retention at Pilothouse and hosts The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-worlds-best-email-and-retention-podcast/id1772940578

Rafael Gi works on partnerships and client strategy at Pilothouse, a performance marketing agency. https://pilothouse.co

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Want to be on the Rundown? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

00:26 Raf's hamstring and Jordan's white belts

04:49 Budget your discounts like media spend

07:15 Do bundles and gifts with purchase fix it

16:06 How a market matures

27:16 The supplement the algorithm turned into a libido brand

33:08 The subject line typo the investors saw

34:20 Budweiser Red Light and the Bud Light UFC promo

37:36 The $10,000 retreat ticket paid in Bitcoin

Carve Designs gave connected TV 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum before deciding it worked, which is about as clean a test as a DTC brand runs on a new channel. The lift showed up first in direct traffic and search, and conversion rates rose across channels for customers who had seen the ads.

Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs, the coastal apparel brand that grew out of swim. She joins Eric Dyck and Jesse Math of Keen Decision Systems to walk through the bets that take months to pay back: direct mail, connected TV, TikTok and whitelisted ads, plus the Pinterest test that never worked. You walk away knowing how to size a first test, where to look for the halo, and how long to wait before you cut a channel.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Your direct mail gets credit for every buyer on the mailing list. Jesse's question is how many of them would have bought anyway. Carve answers it with holdout panels, including tests that also suppress email and paid social for the held-out group.
• You can't tell whether to mail more. Carve tracks contribution per piece, tests catalog count, page count and size, and reweights audiences between 0 to 12 month and 13 to 24 month buyers.
• Your average ROI says spend more. Jesse's example: a $2 return on $1 million tells you nothing about the next dollar, because the first dollars into a channel return more than the last ones.
• Your other channels swing around the catalog drop. Carve plans spend in every other channel around catalog in-home dates.
• You don't know what a first connected TV test costs. Carve ran 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum, with a fixed window, set objectives and targets, and landed on target or slightly ahead of it.
• You can't find where connected TV sales land. At Carve they land mostly on the site as direct traffic, with a small portion on Amazon, and GA4 shows higher conversion rates for customers who saw a CTV ad and then clicked an email or a paid social ad.
• Your CTV attribution looks too good. Jesse sees brands arrive with platform numbers their CFO doesn't believe. The question to ask is whether you are buying new customers or buying inventory your existing customers already watch.
• You judge upper funnel on a 14 or 30 day window. For brands buying CTV for awareness, Jesse says Keen sees roughly 30% of the measured impact in the short term and roughly 70% over time.
• You're about to kill a channel at month three. TikTok took Carve about six months to gain momentum, and whitelisted ads took close to 18 months before they became a top performer.
• You treat every test as a pass or a fail. Jesse's alternative is to find the 30% that worked, pare back the rest, and keep going.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Hannah Fleming is Performance Marketing Director at Carve Designs. Shop the collection or request a catalog at https://carvedesigns.com

Jesse Math is VP of Strategic Partnerships at Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com

HARNESS THE HALO

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is episode 4 of 6, and a new episode drops every other week.

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SPONSOR

Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

How do you grow a DTC brand without a big brand awareness budget? Terra Kaffe founder Sahand Dilmaghani pre-sold 10,000 espresso machines from a single page with no reviews, and word of mouth has been the top reason customers buy every month for five years.

On the DTC Podcast, Sahand tells Eric Dyck how he left investment banking to bootstrap a super automatic espresso machine, what he cut to get it shipped with $2.5 million already spent, and why Terra Kaffe now puts its money into community and performance marketing instead of brand awareness. Terra Kaffe has 70,000 machines in homes today.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

You sell a high-ticket product and cannot seed it to a thousand creators a month. Sahand built word of mouth by calling customers himself, and it now drives well over a third of Terra Kaffe's orders.

Your brand awareness budget is too small to register. Why $15K to $20K a month will never make you a household name, and when to hold that money for one campaign big enough to count.

Your best video flopped on Meta. A $30K shoot that never converted on Instagram or Facebook became one of Terra Kaffe's strongest performers on CTV.

Your investors want proof of demand before the product is finished. One pre-order page, a teaser campaign, an email to the subscriber list and a booth at a New York coffee festival produced 10,000 orders.

Your product is over budget and behind schedule. The features Terra Kaffe cut in a do-or-die meeting to ship in six months, and which ones came back later as a fast follow.

Your outside partner has spent double to go half the distance. How Sahand replaced his engineering firm mid-build while it still held most of the product knowledge.

You cannot afford tooling or a production deposit. The trade he made with his manufacturer on the first machine's design rights, and what it cost him later.

ABOUT SAHAND

Sahand Dilmaghani is the founder and CEO of Terra Kaffe, the Brooklyn-based maker of super automatic espresso machines, including the TK-02 and the Demi. Before Terra Kaffe he worked in investment banking and at an electric vehicle startup. https://www.terrakaffe.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrakaffe

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00:49 From Wall Street banker to "barista"

02:25 Carrying a 30 pound espresso machine on the subway

04:40 The only espresso brand anyone could name

05:22 The Larry David campaign idea

06:13 Building complex hardware during COVID

08:52 $2.5 million in, with no guarantee it ships

09:09 Funding one milestone at a time

10:42 The meeting where the features got cut

13:36 Replacing the engineering firm mid-build

16:33 Giving the manufacturer the V1 design rights

20:44 Answering the dropship accusations

21:32 The investor test: does anyone want this

23:22 10,000 pre-orders from one page

25:11 The Terra Kaffe manifesto

26:16 What a super automatic machine does

29:39 Why people bought before they could try it

32:33 70,000 machines in homes

33:25 Word of mouth, every month for five years

36:28 Brand spend versus performance marketing

38:23 The three problems every operator hits

40:39 Why a small brand awareness budget is a trap

41:15 Coming for Nespresso

42:37 CTV and the $30K shoot that flopped on Meta

46:34 Survival by a thousand band-aids

47:34 Raising $2.6 million in 13 days

48:03 You are going to get punched in the face

What are Meta partnership ads, and how should a DTC brand test them before Q4? They run through a creator's handle with your brand tagged, so Meta combines both accounts' engagement signals, and Pilothouse typically sees lower CPMs on them than on ads from the brand handle alone.

Jacob Geary runs Meta accounts at Pilothouse and joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to lay out how partnership ads work in practice. On the larger accounts his team runs, 30 to 50% of the ads now go out as partnership ads, and most of the creators behind them are micro-creators. You walk away with a test plan for a brand spending $50K to $100K a month on Meta: the budget, the number of creators, the formats to brief, and the metrics that decide what scales.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Your customers have seen your brand ads so often they scroll past them. The same message from a creator's handle, with your brand tagged, gives them a fresh face and tends to deliver at a lower CPM.
• You don't know where to find creators. The Partnership Ads Hub inside Meta suggests creators in your vertical, surfaces people already posting about you, and hands you the ad code once both sides approve.
• You don't know what to brief. Jacob's starting formats are "why I switched" problem and solution videos, holiday gift guides, and raw unboxings shot on a phone.
• You don't know what to pay. Jacob's range is $100 to $300 per creator for a few videos and 60 days of usage, and some creators will take the exposure from your ad spend without a fee.
• You assume you need big names. Micro-creators make up 80 to 90% of what Pilothouse runs, with performance Jacob describes as very similar and a faster testing cadence.
• Your Q4 creator ads die the day the sale ends. Brief creators three to four weeks ahead and have them mention the sale in general terms instead of reading out a discount and a date.
• You don't know how big the first test should be. At $100K a month on Meta, Jacob puts 10% toward three to five creators with one or two videos each, then builds toward 20% by month three.
• You're not sure how to judge the results. Use the same purchase conversion rate and ROAS benchmarks as any new creative test, with a little more patience in month one.

ABOUT JACOB

Jacob Geary is a Meta media buyer at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC, where he runs paid social for ecommerce brands. To talk partnership ads with his team, go to https://pilothouse.co and ask for Jacob.

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00:49 Intro: Jacob from Pilothouse on Meta partnership ads

01:28 What partnership ads are, versus whitelisting and dark posts

02:53 The Partnership Ads Hub as a creator discovery network

03:53 Why they matter: combined signals and ad blindness

05:17 Are partnership ads incremental?

06:30 Why partnership ads get cheaper CPMs

07:34 Fresh looks, Andromeda and ad sequencing

08:59 Formats that work: why I switched, gift guides, unboxings

10:30 Gifting angles for each creator's audience

11:24 Usage rights and how creators get paid

12:10 Deal structures: affiliate, paid per video, or free

13:32 Planning creator volume for Q4

15:40 Briefing sale language that won't expire

16:12 What share of Meta ads run as partnership ads

17:37 Test budgets for brands just starting out

19:38 Micro-creators versus mega-influencers

21:17 Post-click: when a dedicated landing page earns the build

22:06 Creator communities and leaderboards

23:06 Setup steps, and why to get permissions before November

25:11 A test plan for a $5M brand spending $50K to $100K a month

27:58 The metrics that decide a winner

29:43 Close and how to reach Jacob

How do you raise prices on a DTC brand without killing demand?

Derek Jaeger founded Last Crumb in 2020, priced a box of cookies at $110, then moved it to $140. He says that is when the company took off. Eric Dyck gets the full DTC marketing story on the DTC Podcast: pricing as positioning, ecommerce growth without a repeat purchase, and why he killed the weekly drop model that made the brand famous.

Get the DTC Newsletter: directtoconsumer.co

Get your brand on TV today: https://www.universalads.com/dtcpromocode?utm_medium=email&utm_source=dtc-newsletter&utm_campaign=issue-takeover

WHAT THIS EPISODE SOLVES

Your premium product is not moving and you are about to discount it. Derek tested upward instead. At $110 Last Crumb was fine, at $140 it had a differentiator, and the drops started selling out in one second.

You cannot hold a high price on packaging alone. He built the box as shipper and gift box in one, tested the angle each cookie sits at, and landed on 35 degrees with 90% of the lettering visible on open.

Scarcity launched you and has become your ceiling. Why a drop model cannot stay a value pillar forever, and how moving to evergreen was the test of whether he had a real company or a hype company.

Your customer acquisition cost will not clear on a single order. No subscription, no natural repeat, and a product that mostly gets gifted. What carried ecommerce growth when paid could not.

You are paying creators for content that does not perform. Last Crumb briefs nobody. They watch for organic posts that already work, whitelist those, and run the same asset on Instagram and YouTube. One repurposed video pulled 300,000 views.

You lose control of the product the moment it ships. The last seventy two hours in a UPS truck, and why owned retail at $8.50 a cookie fixed what ecommerce marketing could not.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Derek Jaeger is the founder of Last Crumb, the luxury cookie brand he started in Los Angeles in 2020 and has since moved to New York, with production in Brooklyn and its first store in Williamsburg. He still writes every recipe himself. lastcrumb.com

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RECORDING TIME | CHAPTER00:00 Two ex-affiliates sitting down01:18 The affiliate years, penny clicks and dollar CPMs02:44 Walking away from performance marketing03:33 A year of brand building before a single box shipped04:38 The brief: the opposite of every mom and pop bakery05:47 Pricing as position one06:53 The box, the pull tab, and the 35 degree cookie angle08:45 Liquid Death on the vision board10:01 The Monday noon drop model11:28 Why he banned paid ads at launch12:35 Fifty boxes in LA, and the move from $110 to $14014:01 Chrissy Teigen posts and it goes ballistic15:15 People posting receipts before the box arrives16:43 Sifting flour in the original kitchen17:26 Investors show up, and 1,500 orders left in carts19:16 Building the cap table20:22 Where the first money went21:18 Killing the drop model22:26 Why paid media does not scale on a gifting brand23:34 The company today, 16,000 square feet in Brooklyn24:20 Why he has never been CEO25:58 Managing the operator you hire27:20 Building a smaller pack for TikTok Shop28:53 The last 72 hours you cannot control30:38 A unique dough for every flavor31:59 What he kept from affiliate marketing33:09 Moving the company to New York35:17 Retail pricing and the Levain comparison36:52 Retail as top of funnel38:33 Whitelisting organic creator content39:59 Product as the reason any of it worked41:56 Where the brand goes next43:01 The Crumbl lesson45:40 Why GLP-1s might help a premium cookie brandhttps://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-648&utm_medium=podcast

How much of your Google Ads budget goes to your own brand name? Most DTC marketing teams cannot answer that, and the brands defending an ambiguous brand term are paying for customer acquisition they already had. Wildflower Cases is spending the large majority of roughly $3,500 a month on the single term "wildflower," according to SEMrush.

Pilothouse Senior Google Media Buyer Zav audits that account with Eric Dyck on the DTC Podcast. Brand clicks at twelve to fifteen cents, a 21,000 subscriber YouTube library with no connection to the ad account, and a word that belongs to Tom Petty, Billie Eilish, a 2022 film and every florist in the country. You walk away knowing your own brand versus generic split and what to move the money into.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Get your brand on TV today: https://www.universalads.com/dtcpromocode?utm_medium=email&utm_source=dtc-newsletter&utm_campaign=issue-takeover

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Your brand keyword is cheap and converts well, so you cannot tell if it is working. Zav explains the account math that makes a brand campaign look like your best performer.
• You do not know your brand versus generic split. There is a ten minute check in the search terms report, and a percentage to keep it under.
• Your budget is fixed and nobody will raise it. Zav reallocates $3,500 a month on air with no increase.
• Your ROAS will fall when you cut brand spend and somebody will ask why. He gives you that answer before you need it.
• Your collab partners drive search demand you are not bidding on. Charli XCX and Slushy Noobz fans are already looking.
• Your generic ads all land on the homepage. Specific query, specific collection page.
• You have a YouTube library doing nothing for paid. Performance Max and Demand Gen take those videos as they are.

ABOUT ZAV

Zav is a Senior Google Media Buyer at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC, where he runs paid search and shopping for ecommerce brands. He wrote the Wildflower Cases search breakdown for the DTC Newsletter. If you want his team to look at your account, go to https://pilothouse.co and ask for Zav.

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00:00 Who Zav is and what he does at Pilothouse00:47 Why Wildflower Cases became the case study01:17 A brand name that means five other things02:21 Tom Petty, Billie Eilish, and a 2022 movie03:54 Searching "cool iPhone 17 case" live on air04:49 Why their sponsored result sits at the bottom of the page05:22 What decides where your ad places06:46 The case for reallocating a $3,500 monthly budget07:20 Where the money goes instead: shopping plus generic search08:40 Landing pages, and why every ad points at the homepage08:56 Turning collab partners into keyword coverage10:34 The "are they worth it" searches Reddit owns12:23 A 21,000 subscriber YouTube channel with no link to the ad account12:39 Feeding existing video into Performance Max and Demand Gen13:59 24 hours, no extra budget, what changes first14:29 Cutting 80% of the brand spend15:42 Why ROAS falls and revenue rises16:53 The one situation where brand defense earns its budget17:57 The metric agencies over report to clients18:56 Whether $3,500 a month is enough for a brand this size20:19 The brand versus generic diagnostic to run this week20:35 The 20% rule of thumb22:31 What to monitor after you make the cut23:26 How to get Pilothouse to look at your account

https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-647&utm_medium=podcast

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A brand doing under $50 million a year is putting roughly half of its combined retail media, trade, and shopper marketing budget into retail media. At larger companies that share drops toward 30, 20, then 15 percent. Mike Chiasson works on Keen's models, which cover $45 billion in marketing investment, and his read on where that money comes from is the part worth sitting with. It is mostly net new, sourced out of trade rather than pulled from Meta and Google, which is why so much of it sits with sales teams and never gets measured the way media does.

If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what the retail media line in your budget is actually buying, and which part of it is buying customers you already had.

If you own the media budget: Chiasson makes the case that the untapped return in retail media is upper funnel, inside retailers where almost everyone is still only buying search.

What he gets into:

• Where the money comes from, and why trade budgets rather than media budgets explain retail media's growth
• The benchmark: about half the retail media, trade, and shopper marketing bucket at brands under $50M, versus 15 to 30 percent at large ones
• Why small brands with a narrow distribution footprint default to bottom-funnel search, and what that costs them
• The Amazon question: whether retail media spend compounds on a retailer's algorithm the way it does on a listing, and why brick and mortar has no real equivalent
• Retail media ads that carry no visible association with the retailer at all, and why targeting is the actual product
• Walmart, Vizio, and streaming video as the moment upper-funnel retail media became buyable
• Retail media social, which he calls very small and rapidly growing, with returns he thinks reflect how early the curve is
• The two flaws in ROAS, and why the return on your next dollar is the only version of the number that helps you plan
• Bayesian priors, and how Keen gives a brand a response curve for a retailer it has never advertised with
• Patience as a budgeting problem rather than a virtue, and why cash-strapped brands structurally cannot buy upper funnel

Who this is for: operators whose product is landing on shelves in more places every quarter, and whose retail media invoices are growing faster than their ability to explain them.

What to steal: find out which budget your retail media is actually coming from. If it is trade, the people approving it are measuring a retailer relationship and the people spending it are measuring sales. Those are different jobs and almost nobody has reconciled them.

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 was the market read. Episode 2 was the first brand. This one maps the fastest-growing line in the budget.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why retail media is becoming a major growth channel

04:00 Where retail media investment is growing

08:00 Why retail media ROI is outperforming other tactics

13:00 The upper-funnel opportunity in retail media

17:00 Why marginal ROI matters more than ROAS

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Most ecommerce brands are paying for every contact in the database, including the tens of thousands they have not mailed in a year. Then they mail them anyway, because they are paying for them. Channing Ferrer argues both halves of that are costing you money, and he has his own company's data to back the second half.

Brevo studied its customer base and found the brands sending the least email posted the highest conversion and click-through rates. The heaviest senders were worse on conversion, worse on click-through and worse on opens. Brevo bills by the message sent, so telling customers to send less costs them revenue. They say it anyway.

For a retention lead, a lifecycle marketer, or a founder still building the sends themselves, this is a conversation about where the money actually goes in a retention program. Channing spent six years at HubSpot running sales strategy through the run from $200 million to $1.5 billion in revenue, then ran sales at Semrush and led Brandwatch back to growth.

Discover More: https://www.brevo.com/solutions/enterprise/?utm_medium=partnership&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_term=enterprise&utm_content=dtc-podcast-0926

What you get in 38 minutes:

• What changes when you stop paying for stored contacts and start paying for messages sent
• The mobile wallet as a retention channel, including how a loyalty card gets pushed a new offer and changes appearance on the lock screen
• Salomon's use of a wallet pass, and how the same mechanic works for a brand with no physical stores
• What Channing puts on a dashboard for a $20M ecommerce brand, and why send volume belongs near the bottom of it
• How Brevo customers run campaigns through Claude and ChatGPT over an MCP connection without opening Brevo at all
• The three ways a customer outgrows a pricing tier, and how Brevo handles each one
• Why loyalty points should reward a social post and not only a repeat purchase

Who this is for: retention leads, ecommerce founders, lifecycle marketers, and anyone weighing a move off Klaviyo or Mailchimp.

What to steal: pull volume off your primary dashboard and replace it with open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate and revenue per send. Then look at what your platform charges you for and ask whether it is charging for the list or for the work.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why personalized messaging converts better

05:00 How Brevo is using AI agents

07:00 Turning mobile wallets into a loyalty channel

14:00 Why sending fewer emails can drive better results

25:00 Building loyalty through customer advocacy

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npdigital.com

Eric told Neil Patel that Pilothouse is now getting about 30% of its inbound from ChatGPT, with higher close rates and bigger deals. Neil's response: "I guarantee your leads are down overall. Would you confirm or disagree with me?"

Down about 40%. Revenue up.

Neil explains why that pattern is showing up everywhere. Someone used to run a Google search, click six blue links, fill out four forms, sit through screening calls, then pick. Now they ask an LLM, filter down inside the conversation with follow-ups, and go to one website with their mind already made up. Same intent, same buyer, one visit instead of seven.

The rest of the episode is what to do about it.

What's inside:

• The real search market: Google at 5 trillion searches a year and 27% share, Instagram at 6.5 billion a day, Amazon and YouTube at 3 billion each. Neil's point is that 73% of search is not Google.
• Whether Google's ad revenue is actually getting hit by AI Overviews (his answer is more specific than the headlines)
• GEO and SEO are two different scores. Domain authority carries SEO and means nothing to GEO. GEO looks at the last 30 to 60 days.
• The single highest-leverage GEO tactic he's seeing for ecom, and it isn't Reddit
• Why he'd skip Reddit if he ran an ecom brand, and what he'd do instead
• His five-step visibility audit: where you rank now, technical SEO and content freshness, the questions people actually type, review recency, and monthly mention volume
• The trust study across 100 eight-figure businesses, and the gap between what those operators thought built trust and what buyers actually weighed
• Discounts versus bundles, and what discounting does to LTV
• Why he reversed his position on personal brand after building one of the biggest in marketing
• The Zappos story about a guy named Jason, a first date, and a shoe pun that got him two-day shipping
• His most expensive mistake, on air, with numbers

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators watching organic traffic fall while close rates climb, and anyone trying to work out where GEO actually fits next to their SEO budget.

What to steal: audit your review recency this week. If your best reviews are five years old, the LLMs are reading a version of your brand that no longer exists, and a smaller competitor with fresh coverage will get recommended over you.

Timestamps:

00:00 How AI is changing product discovery

04:00 Why ChatGPT leads convert better

07:00 Search has multiplied beyond Google

15:00 How brands can rank in AI recommendations

25:00 SEO vs. GEO for AI visibility

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pilothouse.co

"There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing five to ten million in revenue."

That was Codie Sanchez, and the post went wide enough that DTC marketers spent a week arguing about whether they should be doing their jobs at all. Eric came back from vacation, saw it, and used it to launch a format he has wanted to make since the beginning of this show.

The Rundown is Pardon the Interruption for DTC. A few topics off the week, three people, everyone gives a take. First panel is Jordan Gordon, who runs post-click and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, and Rafael Gi, who works partnerships and client strategy.

What you get:

• Both sides of the Codie Sanchez take. Jordan defends the free traffic position: if twenty percent of your traffic is organic and your total margin is twenty percent, that organic traffic is your profit. Rafael's counter is that paid media is a muscle, and a brand that waits until $10M to build it has to relearn its culture, team, and workflows at exactly the wrong moment.
• What paid media does: accelerate. Good product grows faster. Bad product fails quicker.
• The wastage Rafael sees most across ten to fifteen audits a week. Brands paying to reach customers who were buying regardless, the platform taking view-through credit for purchases with no click, and that false signal then deciding which creative gets scaled.
• Marketing is downstream from business, and business is downstream from markets. Jordan on why your marketing mix is often not your decision to make.
• Why "evergreen versus campaigns" is the wrong framing past seven figures, and what demand creation looks like next to demand capture.
• "Shift our thinking from tests to bets." Rafael on what changes once you have proof, and why the change is philosophical before it is tactical.
• Audience hygiene as the precondition for everything. Until existing, engaged, and net new are defined across every channel, none of your tests are valid.
• Advertising is vertical, email is horizontal. Jordan on campaigns for launches, flows for evergreen, and why someone who re-enters your world nine months later still needs to be sold your core product.
• Acute versus routine entry points in supplements and beauty, and the cross-sell each one opens.
• How to spot a brand that has the ratio wrong: growth decelerating quarter over quarter while the new-to-returning revenue ratio inverts. On the email side, campaign-heavy, flow-light, with Klaviyo revenue low against Shopify.
• Unique opens are brand impressions. The argument for email as an advertising layer sitting just below reach.
• The IKEA tote bag, and campaigns that exist to buy eyeballs rather than revenue.
• The car category rule that applies everywhere. If you are not one of the three brands already in someone's consideration set, your revenue and your fame do not matter.

Who this is for: founders and operators between seven and nine figures, media buyers, and anyone who owns both the acquisition and retention number.

What to steal: the audience definition audit, the growth-versus-new-customer-ratio chart, and the absolutes-not-rates rule for judging new customer work.

Timestamps:

00:00 Should brands wait until $5M to run paid media?

05:00 Building organic traffic alongside paid growth

10:00 The hidden problem with scaling paid acquisition

13:00 Evergreen marketing vs. campaign moments

22:00 Audience targeting and wasted media spend

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Phillip Jackson has spent 22 years in ecommerce, first building the software, then running agency strategy, and now running Future Commerce (futurecommerce.com), where the operating thesis is that commerce is culture.

If you are a founder, brand lead, or growth operator trying to figure out what AI traffic is actually doing to your store, this one is worth the 50 minutes.

What's inside:

• The Future Commerce study: 77% of shoppers want AI to recommend and nothing more. No booking, no buying, no agent acting on their behalf
• What that shopper does when they land: converts about 3x more often, spends about half as much, does zero browsing
• Why the fix is counterintuitive. You now have to add friction back into the buying process and tell more brand story on a product page
• Nike's decline read from someone with a partnership inside the turnaround: streetwear over sport, owned channels over retail partners, and the running category handed to On and Hoka
• "Ma," the Japanese cinema concept, applied to brand. Nobody wants to hear from you constantly, and the brands that never rest never get a cultural high point either
• Proof of work: Dr. Martens selling pre-broken-in secondhand boots at Brewer Street, Levi's repair, $1,200 Pope tees, and why patina is now the product
• The agentic reader. Future Commerce stopped treating a human as its primary audience for discovery
• Cannes Lions and the collision of retail media with the traditional ad ecosystem, plus what that means for creator strategy in 2026

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators watching LLM referral traffic show up in their analytics and not knowing what to do about it, plus brand people who want a sharper vocabulary for what is happening to culture.

What to steal: rebuild your PDP for answer engine traffic. That visitor arrived pre-sold on one SKU and will not browse unless you give them a reason.

Follow Phillip: futurecommerce.com

Timestamps:

03:00 Why Commerce Is Culture

06:00 How Brands Participate in Culture

24:00 Why Consumers Can Spot AI Content

32:00 How AI Is Changing the Marketing Funnel

44:00 The Rise of Consumer Sovereignty

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pilothouse.co

In 2020, Amazon's fees ran about 26% of your product cost. Today they run 34 to 40%, and once you add advertising most brands are at 50 to 60% before they reinvest a dollar. For the first time in years, the number of sellers on Amazon is shrinking.

Tyler, head of Amazon at Pilothouse, is back to explain what he calls the Amazon paradox: you can't afford to be on Amazon, and you can't afford not to be.

If you sell on Amazon, buy Amazon ads, or keep putting off the decision to launch there, this is the operator's version of the math.

What you get:

• Where the 40% actually goes, and which parts of it you can still fight
• The hidden fee stack (long-term storage, inbound, freight, returns, chargebacks) that quietly takes another 5 to 8% of margin, one fraction of a percent at a time
• Reimbursements: Amazon loses and damages inventory and wrongly charges you for it, and will pay it back if you dispute it. Most brands never do
• AGL / AWD, shipping straight from your manufacturer into Amazon's fulfillment network, and the 2 to 5% freight savings that comes with it
• Why the April 15 change (Amazon pulling ad spend out of your disbursement instead of your credit card) is a cash flow problem, not an ad problem
• The death of the middle: half of Amazon's GMV now sits with roughly 8,000 sellers, down from 15,000, and what changed in the algorithm to cause it
• Cosmo and what comes after A9: why external traffic into your listing now reads to Amazon as brand authority
• Nike showed up. What happens to the small sellers who used to feast on big brands' unconverted branded search
• TACoS as a vanity metric, and the three-report method (SQP, Helium 10 rank, ad spend) that shows whether your ads are driving incremental sales or paying for organic ones you already had
• Rufus is now Alexa for Shopping, most people use it on the product page rather than in search, and what that means for your listing copy
• What Tyler expects out of Amazon Accelerate 2026

Who this is for: Amazon sellers, DTC founders weighing the channel, and anyone managing Amazon ad spend.

What to steal: the reimbursement audit, the AGL freight move, and the zero-sale keyword sweep on your last quarter of ad spend.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Amazon Paradox

04:00 Why Amazon Is Getting More Expensive

10:00 Hidden Amazon Fees Hurting Margins

15:00 Why Brands Still Need Amazon

21:00 How to Make Amazon Ad Spend More Profitable

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Once Upon a Farm did $85.4 million in Q2, up 42% year over year, and reached 6.2% of US households against 5.0% a year earlier. Some of that growth traces back to a campaign that was never supposed to produce it. They were running lower-funnel media to their own site, a clean shop-now call to action, the kind of campaign you judge by tomorrow's site revenue. What moved was the retail business. Instacart got more efficient. Programs with accounts picked up momentum. Jennifer Berglund has spent the years since trying to see that effect properly instead of guessing at it, and now she is watching paid search at one retailer lift sales at another, and that's where Keen is worth its weight in premium baby food.

If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what happens to your job when the sale stops closing anywhere you can see it, and what you measure instead.

If you own the media budget: Jennifer walks through how a one month TV test in 2021 turned into always-on upper funnel, including the matched-market holdout testing she used to defend it before she had a model.

What they get into:

• The early signal: lower-funnel DTC media running, and the retail business taking off instead
• The finding out of Keen that surprised her most, paid search at Kroger or Target showing an effect on a different account entirely
• Why she treats ROAS as an education problem inside the company rather than a KPI
• The trap in "new to brand" at a retailer, and why she takes it with a grain of salt
• How she built the case for TV: 2021 test, then TV plus social plus out of home, then geo tests against comparable holdout markets, then always-on
• Streaming TV and YouTube, and Brad on buying top of funnel through retail media DSPs so the money still funnels to the retailer
• Why every retail media network's conversion methodology is different, and what she uses those platform numbers for instead
• The moment a brand should stop putting every dollar into working media and start paying for measurement
• Brad on awareness as the leading indicator of household penetration, and household penetration as the leading indicator of revenue
• Amoeba marketing, which Brad coined live on the recording and Jennifer immediately claimed for her LinkedIn

Who this is for: operators whose business has outgrown the channel their reporting was built for. DTC brands going into retail, retail brands building ecommerce, anyone whose media now shows up in someone else's numbers.

What to steal: the biweekly omnichannel meeting. Jennifer runs one across her media team and sales leadership. Sales says "I see this happening here," she says "we were running media during that time." That meeting found the halo before any model did.

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 was the market read. This is the first brand.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Halo Effect of Digital Marketing

07:00 Measuring Growth Across DTC and Retail

15:00 How Marketing Channels Influence Each Other

21:00 Streaming TV and YouTube Opportunities

37:00 Why ROAS Can Be Misleading

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Ashley Kick runs ecommerce at DÔEN (shopdoen.com), the Los Angeles apparel brand founded by sisters Margaret and Katherine Kleveland. Eric met her at the Whalies giving hot takes on stage, so this episode is a new format built for exactly that: World Cup themed, 15 ecommerce topics, kick it or keep it.

If you run a premium brand and you are tired of advice written for a $30 AOV, Ashley draws lines most operators are still arguing about internally.

What's inside:

• AI generated ad creative, kicked as hard as anything gets kicked on this show: "they didn't fall in love with the clanker generated things"
• Her pendulum argument: everything used to be human made, the swing to AI has been fast, and the vacuum it left is the differentiation opportunity for brands willing to keep humans on the work. DÔEN has hired novelists to write copy
• Why she will not trade a discount or free shipping for an email address, with the list math behind it: a million names sending at 20%, or 300,000 sending at 60 to 70%
• Hand Me DÔEN, the resale program that runs on Treet: trade in for store credit, quarterly resale events, and an answer to the dupe sellers, because buying from the program is how a customer knows the piece is real
• The AOV line where she thinks TikTok Shop stops making sense, and why discovery on TikTok still matters for the brand through user generated content
• Losing money on the first order to win it back on LTV, kicked. Her hero products are chosen as the best first experience of the brand, and they are not loss leaders
• Where she is happy to let algorithms work: media buying, placements, and Klaviyo send-time optimization
• AI for customer service, kicked. If someone wants to talk about the fit of a dress, that is a person
• Retail as an experience play, including a roughly 20% brand awareness lift in a market when a store opens, plus wholesale through boutiques with an aligned aesthetic
• Amazon, extended sizing, and buy now pay later, each with a verdict

Who this is for: operators at premium and considered-purchase brands, retention and email leads, and anyone building the argument for keeping humans on creative.

What to steal: the email capture stance. Stop buying addresses with 15% off and measure your list on deliverability and send rate rather than raw size.

Timestamps:

00:03:00 AI Shopping Agents

00:05:00 TikTok Shop for Premium Brands

00:10:00 Branded Resale and the Circular Economy

00:14:00 AI-Generated Creative and Brand Identity

00:24:00 Wholesale, Amazon and Discount Strategy

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pilothouse.co

DTC Twitter has spent the last few months arguing about volume versus strategy. Aves from Pilothouse thinks both camps are answering the wrong question. Eric brings her back for an all killer no filler on creative coverage: what it means now, how she decides what to make next, and the system she spent her summer building.

For anyone who briefs creative, buys media, or signs off on either.

What you get:

• Why a thousand Grok ads in a month spikes CPMs and stops finding your audience, and why one precious video every two weeks fails for the opposite reason.
• The three layers of coverage that matter now: right people, right product, right angles. Sizes and placements should be second nature by now.
• Persona coverage past your bread and butter. If the answer is always "a woman in her twenties," you are not covering the audience you need in order to grow.
• Product coverage, the layer most teams skip. Cross-referencing which SKUs bring people in cheapest against which ones are most efficient to ship, then testing returning-customer-only products at top of funnel to find margin nobody was looking for.
• Diagnosing by problem rather than format. Heavy cart abandonment usually means a trust gap, which points to whitelisting first and conversion-friction statics behind it. Creator-handle delivery ran 70% more efficient than the same creative from the brand.
• Selling the cloud when the economy tightens. Aspirational is outperforming pure problem agitation right now.
• Hyper relevancy. The echo chambers have gotten small enough that a meme Aves sees every third video is one you've never heard of, so the ad has to match the exact font, the audio they've been hearing, even the camera angle. She ran "kinda chic" in ads without ever learning what it means.
• Nobody is watching. Most people are lurking, and most of them are half-watching from the toilet or a waiting room. Aves watched a woman scroll Instagram through the entire Odyssey.
• Creative is the new targeting, five years of everyone saying it, and the spaghetti metaphor that finally explains it.
• Landing pages as the insurance policy on all of it. Spend two thousand dollars on a t-shirt and it still looks bad wrinkled.
• Ad copy. Aves writes hers first, before any visual, and uses no AI for it. One emoji-only ad carried by copy alone did over six figures in a weekend.

Who this is for: creative strategists, media buyers, and founders heading into Q4 wondering why more ads stopped working.

What to steal: the product coverage audit, the cart-abandonment-means-trust diagnosis, and starting your brief with copy instead of a visual idea.

Timestamps:

00:03:00 Creative Volume vs. Strategy

00:05:00 Building Better Creative Coverage

00:10:00 Creative for Full-Funnel Performance

00:20:00 Why Creative Is the New Targeting

00:28:00 Why Ad Copy Matters More Than Ever

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Tyler Handley sold Inkbox to BIC for $65 million. His new company, Olauto, sells a $33 car air freshener, launched last September, is already profitable, and has zero employees. Four people, some contractors, and AI running the back office. The one thing they refuse to automate: when a customer emails, a human answers. Every time.

The guy who built the software behind that is Mike Maleszyk, Tyler's friend since high school, who started HumanTouchCX after a support chatbot swore it was human but couldn't say what it had for lunch.

If you run CX for a Shopify brand, or you're deciding right now which parts of your business AI should touch, this episode is the two of them drawing the line in public.

Want the setup Olauto uses? HumanTouch is taking on its first 100 Founding Merchants, with white-glove onboarding and 24 months of locked pricing.

What's inside:

• Why Braden reviews every automated reply "from hi to buy," and the one automation he had to be convinced to allow (off-hours only)
• Deflection rate, and what the merchants bragging about theirs are actually counting
• Product questions as the worst place to put a bot: those customers are low funnel with a cart open
• The Inkbox moderation story: 13 to 20 CX agents, custom tattoo uploads in a gray area no AI could judge, and the customer emails that started "why do you want this?"
• Article 50 of the EU AI Act, live since August 2nd: transparency, record keeping, and audit logs for every AI touchpoint if you sell into the EU
• Tyler's vibe-coded ERP: why it hooks into Shopify and nothing else
• "Friend founding," and how four people split brand, supply chain, CX, and ads
• Hewie, the AI that helps train your first CX hire off your own past tickets instead of your calendar

Who this is for: DTC founders and CX leads between launch and $100M who are being pitched full automation from every direction.

What to steal: Braden's rule. Automations answer the 65% (shipping status) during off hours only, and a human still has eyes on every single reply before the relationship is on the line.

Timestamps:

00:00 Building an AI-powered brand without losing the human touch

05:00 Why AI customer service needs transparency

12:00 The problem with optimizing customer support for deflection

21:00 What the EU AI Act means for ecommerce brands

28:00 How a four-person team uses AI to scale an ecommerce brand

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Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs (carvedesigns.com), the Northern California swim and apparel brand founded in 2003 and acquired by Komar Brands in December 2025. Before Carve she spent years at Amer Sports on the digital team behind Salomon, Atomic, Suunto, Arc'teryx and Wilson.

If you run retention or growth at a brand with a seasonal core product and a loyal base you have not fully mined, this one is for you.

What's inside:

• The retention rebuild: what was already working at Carve after 20 years, and the one thing they were not doing with their customer data
• Mapping the full customer journey in Figma, then finding the gaps where nobody was talking to the customer and the places where they were talking too much
• RFM segmentation as the floor, then layering category purchase behavior on top to move a swim buyer into denim
• The cohort analysis that changed the media mix: dresses and accessories produced the highest-LTV customers, so those categories now lead the creative and seed the look-alikes
• Direct mail as a performance channel: 5 to 6 catalogs a year to prospects and past buyers, plus programmatic postcards that only drop if the email win-back does not convert
• Employee-generated content, and how one test turned into a full content pipeline with the organic social team shooting UGC-style video on the catalog shoots
• Connected TV without a commercial budget: an agency turns UGC and EGC into the spot, the founder does the voiceover, and success is measured on cost per site visit with MMM picking up the Amazon halo
• Loyalty built on early access and product feedback instead of percent-off, with roughly 2x the LTV of a non-member
• Q4 without heavy discounting: point multipliers and added value inside the tentpole moments
• What she is using AI for right now, from LTV dashboards in Moby 2 to Orita surfacing customers when they are most likely to buy

Who this is for: retention and lifecycle leads, growth marketers at seasonal brands, and operators who moved from a big portfolio company to an SMB.

What to steal: run LTV by first-purchase category before you plan next season's creative mix. And give partnership content 6 to 12 months before you call it. Hannah says that is how long it took at Carve before influencer content started working.

Follow Hannah: LinkedIn, Hannah Fleming | carvedesigns.com

Timestamps:

00:00 Building Loyalty Beyond Discounts

05:00 Using Customer Segmentation for Retention

10:00 Direct Mail as a Performance Channel

16:00 Building a High-Value Loyalty Program

24:00 Testing Direct Mail and Connected TV

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Media owns the traffic. Brand owns the site. The page in between belongs to nobody, and it's been sitting in a Notion doc called landing page priorities Q3 since 2022.

Eric brings Daniel from Pilothouse back for an all killer no filler on the post-click experience: why it stayed generic for a decade, what changed in the last twelve months, and what the team is seeing in its pilots with Black Crow AI.

For media buyers, creative strategists, and founders whose ads are working and whose conversion rate isn't.

What you get:

• The middle child problem. Media assumes brand is loving the page, brand assumes media is, and nobody has touched it since 2022.
• Why this was never a priority question. Personalizing creative is cheap. Personalizing destinations used to mean five pages through design, dev, QA, and deploy, which took literal months. So teams built one page, pointed everything at it, and updated it once a year.
• The 65-inch OLED analogy. You walk into a store, tell the salesperson exactly what you want, and they hand you the catalog. That's what a generic PDP does to someone who just clicked a very specific ad.
• The creative is the brief. The ad unit becomes the input for the storefront: the copy, the image, the targeting, the interests, all of it read and matched.
• What the pilots are showing: roughly 20 to 21% lift in conversion rates, on storefronts now taking about half the budget rather than one test ad set off in the corner.
• Where Black Crow adds something a general purpose model doesn't. Persistent ID across sessions means the page knows you're back and can serve a different experience.
• The technical prerequisites that actually gate this: Shopify, and enough Meta budget to test a difference. Brand and creative prerequisites matter less.
• Brand safety. These aren't fully dynamic pages. You can lock images and titles and adjust on the fly.
• Which brands it suits so far: a few concentrated top SKUs rather than a long tail catalog.
• The third party cookie, revisited. Daniel's verdict on the biggest talking point of 2022: what a nothing burger.
• Why the strategist now owns this. No IT ticket, no web team queue. That's the difference between now and twelve months ago.

Who this is for: performance marketers and DTC founders who have solved pre-click and never touched what happens after.

What to steal: treating your best ad as the brief for its own landing page, and the Shopify plus testable budget prerequisite check before you invest in any of this.

Timestamps:

00:03:00 Why the post-click experience matters

00:07:00 Personalized landing pages lift conversion rates

00:10:00 AI-powered landing page personalization

00:15:00 Matching landing pages to ad creative

00:21:00 Using ad creative as the landing page brief

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A brand doing $10 to $15 million a year puts 15 to 20 percent of revenue back into marketing. At $100 to $500 million it drops to roughly 8 to 10 percent. Past a billion it is 2 to 3 percent. Justin Jefferson has a view across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment, and those numbers are the opening for a harder conversation about where the money should go.

If you run growth: this is the episode about defending a slow-payback bet to a finance team that closes books quarterly.

If you sit closer to the P&L: Justin explains discounting future marketing revenue back to present value, so marketing and finance can argue about the same number.

What Justin gets into:

• Spend-to-revenue benchmarks at $10 to 15M, $100 to 500M, $500M to $1B, and past $1B
• Marginal ROI against blended ROI, and why a 1.4 return can hide a next dollar worth 60 cents
• The brand that went zero to a hundred on top of funnel, lost sales volume in year one, cut budget in response, and then had nothing left to capture the demand it had created
• The golf apparel brand that moved deliberately into CTV, linear, and audio: roughly flat in year one, about 23 percent growth in year two
• Why Amazon search is often the most overspent line in a budget, and where he sees real incrementality on Amazon instead
• The gap he sees between top and bottom of funnel returns: roughly 180 against 120 to 140
• Why brands growing 5 percent or more changed their channel mix significantly more year over year than flat ones

Who this is for: operators between $10M and $500M who have squeezed Meta and Google as far as they go and need a defensible case for spending where the attribution is fuzzy.

What to steal: report return on the next dollar by channel alongside blended ROI. Most teams have only ever seen the second number.

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 sets the state of the market. The next five are the bets themselves, told by the operators who made them and the people who signed off.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Marketing Mix Modeling Is Changing

03:00 Why Meta and Google Are Getting Harder to Scale

07:00 When Brands Should Invest in Top-of-Funnel

13:00 How to Measure and Predict Marketing Performance

19:00 How the Marketing Halo Drives Growth

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Adam Gillman co-founded Hiya Health (hiyahealth.com), the kids' vitamin brand that launched in March 2020, stayed bootstrapped, and sold to USANA at the end of 2024 at a reported $260M valuation. He and his co-founder Darren still run it, and 2026 is the year Hiya finally hit retail shelves at Target.

If you're a founder or operator building a subscription DTC brand, this episode is a start-to-exit walkthrough from someone who did it without a single VC check.

What's inside:

• The "single SKU phase": why Hiya sold one multivitamin for 2.5 years before launching anything else, and what had to be true before product two
• Attacking gummies head-on: porous form factors that kill vitamin content, and sugar as "candy in disguise"
• How new SKUs stayed accretive instead of cannibalistic as the catalog grew
• Why influencer was the backbone of a channel mix that hit 25% month-over-month growth in stretches from 2023 to 2025, including creators Hiya has worked with for 3 to 4 years
• "We want this to sit on your counter, not inside of your cabinet": the packaging and sticker-pack decision that quietly built enterprise value
• Disney, Barbie, and Marvel collabs done properly: rebuilding the entire customer experience per license, to the point that existing subscribers repurchased product they already had
• The exit itself: open bidding process, why he can't imagine doing it without an investment bank, and the leverage of not needing to sell
• Lightning round: the metric founders obsess over too much (revenue growth), the one they ignore (gross margin to CAC), and the e-commerce trend he thinks has peaked (creative velocity for its own sake)

Who this is for: subscription DTC founders, operators fighting rising CACs, and anyone who wants to see what a bootstrapped nine-figure exit actually looks like from the inside.

What to steal: Adam's channel discipline. Under $20M in revenue, put the majority of your effort into making one channel work before touching the next one.

Follow Adam: @AdamGillman on X | hiyahealth.com

Timestamps:

00:00 Building Hiya From a Single SKU

08:00 Expanding Products Through Customer Trust

18:00 Why Brand Building Creates Enterprise Value

23:00 Scaling Growth With Influencer Marketing

35:00 Creative Velocity, CAC and Sustainable Growth

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pilothouse.co

Every year around this time, Eric and Jacob record some version of this episode. This is their seventh Black Friday together, and the through-line hasn't changed: brands sprint through summer, look up at the end of October, and realize the Halloween sale and Black Friday are on top of them with none of the groundwork done.

If you run meaningful spend on Meta, this is the checklist to work through before the CPM doubling kicks in.

What you get:

• Stocking the pond. Low-cost lead gen and engagement campaigns at 5% of budget (or less), optimized to engagement instead of purchase, so Meta buys you cheap eyeballs now that become warm retargeting audiences in November.
• The giveaway playbook, start to finish: partner bundle (the beer brand and the beef jerky brand), a $750 prize, a squeeze page, leads firing on signup, and an October 15 end date. The FOMO purchases from non-winners are typically what push the giveaway spend into the green before the dripping even starts.
• The audience-window answer: engagement audiences hold up to 180 days, purchaser lists now build to roughly 720. Engage someone in August and you can still recall them for Black Friday.
• Warming the algorithm: start ramping spend two months out, 10 to 15% a week, instead of a 500% budget jump on November 1.
• Value-based lookalikes in the Andromeda era. Export your top 500 purchasers by lifetime spend, upload, build the 1% lookalike. Less central than it used to be, still working.
• The CAPI audit: if your events manager shows a 5 or 6 out of 10, you're not sending enough parameters back. Click IDs, event IDs, name, email, phone. Target an 8 or 9.
• The invoicing trap. Meta has moved brands to monthly invoicing, and an unpaid invoice can pause your account until it's resolved. Check your payment settings and your spend limit now, and set the limit way above what you plan to spend.
• Offer architecture: why tariff-squeezed brands can finally offer again, sitewide vs. tiered thresholds, which catalog shapes suit which structure, and why you test at 5 or 10% off in an end-of-summer sale instead of guessing at 40 in November.
• Creative as the gift guide: "perfect gift for your wife" hooks, unboxing reels, catalog frames with Christmas theming, and countdown urgency tied to real shipping cutoffs. No smoke and mirrors.
• ASC structure: one broad Advantage Plus campaign with the full catalog, plus manual bottom-funnel catalog campaigns per collection so you have levers to pull during peak windows.
• And Lennying a campaign. Eric's Of Mice and Men metaphor for over-managing an account to death, plus Jacob on why human interventions during volatile weeks add to the volatility.

Who this is for: media buyers, retention leads, and founders who want their November spend converting instead of prospecting.

What to steal: the 5% engagement budget, the giveaway structure with a pre-BFCM end date, the CAPI parameter audit, and the payment-settings check you should do today.

Timestamps:

00:00 Pre-Warming Your Q4 Audience

05:00 Building Leads Before Black Friday

11:00 How to Warm Up Meta’s Algorithm

18:00 Testing Your Q4 Offers Early

28:00 Managing Meta Performance Volatility

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Fifteen videos in a shoot day. A writer's room where creators cross-edit each other's scripts. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe walkthroughs before anyone hits record. This is what organic content looks like at Kiyoko Beauty (kiyoko.ca), the curated Asian beauty retailer that hit 8 figures in 5 years, bootstrapped, while all three co-founders kept their full-time jobs.

Gillian Liu walks through the whole machine, from a part-time student's 3M-view TikTok to a production calendar planned a month out.

If you run content, growth, or a retail business on thin margins, this episode is worth a notebook.

What's inside:

• The full production process: concepts and formats planned a month ahead, scripting against a reference hook library, a writer's room because "sometimes you're in it too much by yourself," script read-throughs with talent, then batch shoot days. "It's not vibes at all."
• Her comparison for why the pros post consistently: comedians who have joke-writing down to a science.
• The hiring filter for content roles: "What's your screen time? Show me." Her most recent hire clocks 8 hours a day. Gillian's reaction: "That's it?"
• Where it started: a student with 1,000 followers, found via Instagram DM, told to post three times a week with no direction. Three months in, one video hit 3M views on a niche product only Kiyoko carried, and site sessions 10x'd overnight.
• Platform roles: TikTok reaches strangers, Instagram converts them through stories and community, YouTube Shorts reposts overperform, and Red Note gets Gillian recognized on the street by the Chinese Canadian community.
• The math forcing all of this: retailer margins. A Meta top-of-funnel ad runs ~$10 CPM; organic works out to under a dollar. Paid has been bottom-of-funnel Google only for five years.
• The curation model itself: pay brand premium on COGS, then harvest demand created by other people's marketing budgets.
• Merchandising by data: Amazon US/Canada volume, Korea's top sellers, brand heads-ups on strategic SKUs, and Shopify's "search queries with no results" report.
• Brands as partners: one runs a 50/50 ad split with Kiyoko, others commission content monthly and pay in inventory value.
• The early jank: a $2,000 first order, a free Shopify theme, shipping from a co-founder's basement, and buying out-of-stock items from the Asian grocery store down the street.
• Why three co-founders kept their 9 to 5s (cash flow first, risk second), plus two warehouse moves in five months and the new California fulfillment center.

Who this is for: content leads and founders doing organic at scale, and any operator whose margins can't support paid top of funnel.

What to steal: her writer's room. Have creators cross-edit each other's scripts before anything gets shot.

Visit the brand: kiyoko.ca

Timestamps:

00:00 Building an Eight-Figure Brand While Working Full-Time

06:10 The Organic Content Strategy That Changed Everything

10:02 How Kiyoko Produces Viral Content at Scale

17:07 Merchandising and Choosing Winning Products

28:03 Why Organic Beats Paid for Customer Acquisition

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pilothouse.co

Meta has been up and down since the outage a few weeks back, and the timeline is full of advertisers feeling it. So Eric pulled three of Pilothouse's most senior people onto the after-hours couch: Abby and Aves from the creative and strategy side, and Taylor from the Meta side, for a live conversation about what to do when the platform wobbles.

If you buy media on Meta, or you're a founder whose revenue leans on it, this is the difference between a bad two weeks and a bad quarter.

What you get:

• The tactical spin cycle. Performance dips, panic sets in, and buyers ship 15 more ads built off the ones already dying. That amplifies poor delivery and raises CPMs. "Amplification of what's not working is never the route forward."
• The full list of panic moves to skip: un-strategic ad volume, rushed channel expansion, rescue promos that train customers (and Meta) to expect discounts, account rebuilds, the "fresh pixel" request, and firing your agency.
• The diagnosis question: Meta crumbled, so what part of the business fell through? No new customers points one direction. No conversions points at email and retention first. The gap picks the channel.
• Stocking the pond. Why every brand should already know its next channel, and how to tell a reach problem (Pinterest) from a conversion problem (TikTok Shop) before you spend a dollar.
• The iOS 14.5 precedent: partial blindness, no drastic changes, better measurement on the other side.
• Pausing ads without tanking the account. Fractional touchpoints, checking median customer-journey length in your MTA before making the swing, and why Meta usually has a reason for pushing spend where it does.
• Creative is the targeting. Millennial moms who look identical on paper but speak completely different visual languages by region. Butter yellow instead of white. A luxury brand that sells milestone moments instead of USPs.
• "This is an ad and it's so stupid." Why absurdist, self-aware ads are out-earning earnest millennial branding with marketing-aware customers.
• Where AI belongs (reporting, automation, surfacing phrases from your own data) and where it doesn't (creative direction, insights, your next steps). Plus the term for what happens when you outsource the thinking: cognitive debt.

Who this is for: media buyers, creative strategists, and founders running meaningful spend on Meta right now.

What to steal: the diagnosis question, the pause-decision checklist, and the competitor-review mining tactic for finding customer language.

Timestamps:

00:00 Meta Volatility and Common Mistakes

08:56 Building a More Resilient Growth Strategy

17:45 Should You Pause Underperforming Ads?

21:53 How to Research Customers Better with AI

35:40 AI, Creative Strategy & Content Volume

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Bar Bruhis spent ten years building SaaS for Shopify brands. He helped start one of the first email capture tools in 2015, then co-founded KnoCommerce, the post-purchase survey tool 6,500 brands use. In December he finally took his own leap: Boostcous (boostcous.com), the first protein couscous. Six months later he's about to cross 10,000 orders, bootstrapped, with a team of two.

Try it: boostcous.com. The tagline says it all: "Finally a carb that pulls its weight." (An AI copywriting agent wrote that. More on this below.)

If you're sitting on a product idea you haven't launched, or you're a CPG founder trying to turn DTC numbers into retail meetings, this episode is the working playbook.

What's inside:

• Why couscous: protein pasta has Banza, Brami, and Goodles. Couscous had nobody. Chickpea, lentil, and pea flour, gluten free, protein and fiber naturally derived from the legumes themselves.
• The launch: a front-page story in the local Carbondale paper and free pickup from his garage. The first 400 to 500 orders were handed over face to face, and he asked every customer why they bought.
• First-order profitable on Meta with a product almost nobody has ever bought online. "That doesn't really happen" in CPG.
• The KnoCommerce lessons applied to his own brand: "what almost prevented you from buying today" for CRO, and "which retail stores would you like to see Boostcous in" as ammo for buyer meetings. The pitch: in the last 30 days, this many of our customers asked for your store by name.
• The first one-star review, after 155 five-stars. He emailed her, got on a call, learned she was cooking it wrong, and updated the packaging. She rewrote the review herself as a five-star essay.
• Where AI actually helps a two-person brand (product seeding draft orders, static ads, most of the website photos, sell sheets built from survey and review data) and his warning: "we swung the pendulum a little too far at first." Calling customers stays human.
• Expo West on a $0 badge. He got the ticket by pitching his podcast, and the Gelson's deal came from walking the floor.
• His read on the protein trend: protein soda and protein sprinkles exist now. Naturally derived protein in foods you already eat is the part that lasts.

Who this is for: founders sitting on a long-gestating idea, CPG operators heading into retail, and SaaS people wondering what their skills are worth on the brand side.

What to steal: add two questions to your post-purchase survey today. "What almost prevented you from buying?" fixes your site. "Which retail stores would you like to see us in?" fills your retail pipeline with proof buyers can't ignore.

Try Boostcous: boostcous.com

Timestamps:

00:00 Building a First-Order Profitable CPG Brand

07:24 Launch Strategy That Validated Product-Market Fit

11:50 Using Post-Purchase Surveys to Drive Growth

18:08 Turning DTC Success Into Retail Expansion

31:12 Advice for Launching Your First Ecommerce Brand

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Liam Robinson and Nate Vankoughnet were two of Pilothouse's first employees and spent years scaling some of its biggest accounts on Meta. Now they've spun out Marlbank Digital (website coming soon), a Meta-only agency built for the brands Pilothouse moved past as it went upmarket: pre-launch up to $100K/month.

Want them in your ad account? Email nate@marlbank.co or liam@marlbank.co. No website yet. They've been busy in client accounts.

If you're a founder running your own Meta ads, or the one marketer at a brand doing under $100K a month, this episode is a working session on why your account structure is probably answering the wrong question.

What's inside:

• The Meta hierarchy of needs: unit economics at the base ("you'd be surprised how many people need a 3.5 ROAS to barely break even"), marketing strategy in the middle, creative at the top. Most brands skip the middle.
• Circumstance testing, their replacement for jumping straight to creative: articulate your product's real distinction, find the cultural currents it's relevant to, then map the specific moments it fits into someone's life. Each moment becomes a campaign.
• A full anonymized case study: the ceramic to-go cup brand that couldn't scale on pretty product shots or the eco angle, and unlocked the account with one question: "Would you use a metal mug at home?" Selling an upgrade to existing to-go cup users beat converting the single-use crowd, and the commute became the winning niche.
• What this looks like in the account: open audiences, existing customers excluded, CBO single ad set, 4 to 6 ads per set, creative held constant so circumstance is the variable.
• Why one ad usually takes 80% of an ad set's spend, and how to structure launches around that.
• The four foundations they ask for before a brand spends a dollar: a decent website, email flows, some social presence, and Meta.
• Plus the origin story: the agency is named after the small Ontario town where they spent a summer hand-building tree stands for a bow-hunting brand.

Who this is for: ecom founders and marketers between pre-launch and $100K/month, and anyone whose Meta account is a graveyard of creative tests that never compounded.

What to steal: before your next creative batch, write down your product's distinctions, then list every circumstance where it slots into a customer's day. Test those against each other first.

Work with Liam and Nate: nate@marlbank.co / liam@marlbank.co | marlbank.co

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Meta Marketing Has Changed

02:01 The Story Behind Marlbank Digital

08:14 Why Foundational Marketing Beats Meta Tactics

13:15 The Ceramic Cup Case Study

20:10 How to Structure Circumstance Testing on Meta

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Melissa Dusendang ran a summer contract at SheFit to "manage the chaos" for one marketing director. She never left. Years later she runs ecommerce and operations, and her actual job is stopping the company from lying to itself with its own data.

If you own the P&L, the dashboard, or the customer experience, this one is for you. Melissa sits in the finance meeting thinking about how a tax decision hits checkout, and in the marketing meeting thinking about which numbers are secretly inflated. She calls it being a puzzle person. Eric calls her a silo obliterator.

• Why TikTok Shop can quietly wreck your new-versus-returning customer math. Masked and missing emails on marketplace orders mean Shopify can count repeat buyers as new, so "we 2x'd new customers" can really mean you gave existing customers a discount.
• The attribution question to ask before anyone reports a ROAS or MER number, so two teams aren't arguing about goals while measuring different things.
• How SheFit found its best-selling ad hooks inside customer reviews and comments, and why phrases like "my boobs don't move" outperform copy the team writes.
• The Emerge Sports Bra story: how customer comments drove a custom-strap design (skinny straps on smaller sizes, wider straps on larger sizes) that sold out on launch.
• Why real women feeling the "aha moment" when they lift the straps is SheFit's top new-customer acquisition move, run through micro-influencers and ambassadors instead of a gym-only ad.
• Her honest read on TikTok Shop: better customer control than Amazon, but a margin eroder that can turn a premium brand into a "always on sale" brand.

Who this is for: Ecommerce and ops leaders, founders wearing five hats, CX and community managers, and anyone trying to get finance, marketing, and product to agree on what the numbers mean.

What to steal: Pull your own review and comment language and use it as ad copy verbatim. Before your next growth review, write down which attribution model each number is using. And check whether your marketplace orders are inflating your new-customer count.

Timestamps:

0:00 Why TikTok Shop metrics can be misleading

5:18 Breaking down silos across ecommerce teams

10:01 Why customer language beats marketing copy

15:09 Building products from customer feedback

23:21 Using AI and social listening for better decisions

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AppLovin just opened to everyone, and most DTC operators still do not know how it actually works. Jacob runs Meta at Pilothouse, which has spent on AppLovin for nearly two years, back when it was invite only.

He breaks down what he sees in real client accounts: the product price points that work, the creative volume it takes to scale, and the end card, a full-screen animated step between the ad and the product page that has no equivalent on Meta.

What you get:

• The $50 rule. Why products in the $30 to $150 range win, why below $20 gets tough on margin, and why $1,000 products are a bad fit for someone mid-game.
• The end card. What it is, why it acts like a second landing page, and the basketball-into-the-hoop trick for matching the ad to the app.
• Creative volume. Start with about 10 videos, add 10 to 20 a week, and what the ramp looks like at $50k/day.
• First-hour buying. Around 80% of purchases land in the first hour, and the other 20% almost always convert on a different video.
• The learning phase. Why you confirm tracking, then leave it alone for a week, sometimes two.

Who this is for: DTC operators and media buyers weighing AppLovin as a third channel next to Meta and Google.

What to steal: the creative-volume cadence, the end-card structure, and the measurement discipline to prove new-customer CPA instead of trusting platform ROAS.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:00 AppLovin vs Meta Performance

05:20 Best Products & Creative Strategy

11:10 Measuring Incrementality & New Customers

17:10 Scaling with Creative Volume

23:00 Halo Effect & Campaign Best Practices

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Most brands treat unauthorized sellers and copycats as a cost of doing business. Mario Simonyan treats them as your biggest untapped revenue source.

Mario is a former Amazon seller turned brand protection attorney. He started selling kitchenware and artificial turf doormats out of his driveway during law school, got ripped off, and discovered that not a single attorney he called understood how marketplaces actually work. So he built the firm he wished he'd had.

In this episode he breaks down how one eight-figure fitness brand walked away from 1.5M a year on Amazon after attorneys and enforcement agencies failed them, and how his team got them back to 95% control of their listings. He explains why cease and desist letters get burned in people's fireplaces, why sellers fear account suspension far more than lawsuits, and the three-pillar approach his firm uses to get marketplaces to do the enforcing.

He also goes into the dark side: the seller who allegedly flew a duffel bag of cash to Costa Rica to bribe an Amazon employee, the competitor who planted the word cocaine in a rival's backend keywords to trigger an automatic ban, and the copycat running a cloned website doing a million dollars a month off someone else's brand.

Request a 100% free, custom Brand Audit Report from ESQgo here:

https://esqgo.submitrequests.com/brand-audit-report?utm_source=dtc_newsletter&utm_medium=newsletter_sponsorship

What you'll learn:

• Why 15 to 25% of your revenue may be leaking to sellers you've never heard of
• The trademark material difference argument that removes sellers moving genuine product
• The three pillars: IP, marketplace policy, and regulatory compliance, and why using only one is why most enforcement fails
• Why an unauthorized seller priced higher than you is still an emergency
• How brand protection raises your multiple when you sell the business

Who this is for: Brand owners and operators doing 5M or more who sell on Amazon, Walmart, or any marketplace with a shared buy box.

What to steal: The 500% ROI framing, the material difference memorandum, and the free brand audit at esqgo.com to see what you're actually losing.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:53 How unauthorized sellers steal 15–25% of revenue

4:09 The Amazon strategy that actually removes unauthorized sellers

11:56 Why brand protection is a revenue driver, not a cost

17:47 The 3-pillar framework for Amazon brand protection

31:02 How to find marketplace revenue leakage

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Ari Murray runs DTC, Amazon and customer experience at Salt & Stone. She came from Sharma Brands, and before that worked on influencer and celebrity brands including a Kardashian line and Halsey's beauty brand. She started as a customer service agent.

In this episode she breaks down why the old brand-versus-performance argument is collapsing. Customers now shop with a chatbot in the loop. Those bots read your reviews, your Reddit threads, and your actual customer experience. You cannot hack that, which means product quality and brand protection have become growth levers.

She also gets specific on creative: what "socially native" really means, why she is chasing ads that don't look like ads, and the protein powder ad where the product is the seventh ingredient in someone's recipe.

For: DTC founders, growth leads, creative strategists, retention and CRO teams, brand marketers.

In this episode:

• Why she left the agency side for Salt & Stone
• Why Salt & Stone has never acted like a deodorant brand
• AI visibility, Reddit indexing, and why you can't hide from real customer feedback
• The collapse of the middle of the funnel in agentic shopping
• Why she doesn't feel a desperate need to move spend out of Meta
• How they actually measure incrementality (holdouts, Status, Northbeam, Triple Whale, hunting for an MMM)
• Socially native creative, and why splitting a hook five ways is played out
• Why a brand with boundaries makes better ads
• What makes a brand feel cheap
• What makes a brand deserve to be iconic

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Jordan Gordon runs CRO and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. He has audited somewhere in the range of 400 to 500 brands and been inside more Klaviyo accounts than almost anyone in DTC.

In this All Killer No Filler episode he breaks down why most email programs are structurally backwards. 85% of campaign revenue comes from people who have visited your site recently, and yet most campaigns are sent to anyone who opened an email in the last 180 days. You are risking your entire sending reputation to chase the 15%.

Then he gets to the good part: a flow he says he has basically never seen a brand run, and why it is the most valuable one you can build.

For: ecommerce founders, retention leads, email marketers, CRO teams, agency operators.

In this episode:

• Why free traffic is the "forever job" and paid is the spike
• Why small counts hide truths (nobody hits fold 10, but the people who do are your buyers)
• The 85/15 rule of campaign revenue

• How brands blow up a Klaviyo account: too many campaigns, too-broad segments, and the sunset flow that sends to ten years of dead addresses in one go
• Why recent repeat buyers are whales you should not over-message
• Campaigns are zero-intent messages, so they can only ever be about newness or offers

• The essentials core flow: triggered by site visit, not lifecycle, selling your hero SKU to people who came for something else
• Sending less in a margin-compressed Q4

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Most DTC brands put the bulk of their paid budget where attention is thinnest. Viewers spend about 99 minutes per session on Connected TV and 8 minutes per session on social, yet only 9% of standard marketing budgets go to CTV. This episode is about closing that gap on CTV with the same measurement & targeting you get on social (starting at $7 CPMs!)

Emily Huo built ad businesses at X (Twitter), Reddit, and Spotify, and now runs SMB advertising at Paramount. She walks through how a DTC brand actually gets onto Survivor, Landman, or RuPaul's Drag Race, what to spend, and how to know if it worked.

Sign up for Paramount Ads Manager today. Get your brand on TV tomorrow.

This episode, we get into:

• The seasonal play: build awareness over the summer, retarget in the fall, convert in Q4
• Why you start broad on targeting and let the data tell you who is really watching, not the persona you imported from Meta
• The pixel setup that ties a TV impression to a site visit, a lead, or a purchase
• The geo holdout test for measuring halo effect with no third-party tools
• Why a 30-second unskippable spot changes how you tell a brand story when you are not a household name yet
• Budgeting: carve out 10% as experimental, expect a three-month ramp, scale from there

Who this is for: DTC founders and growth marketers who have maxed out social, anyone planning Q4 now, and operators curious whether CTV is real or just a hot label.

What to steal: the install-pixel-now, build-in-summer, convert-in-Q4 sequence, and the broad-then-narrow targeting approach.

Timestamps:

0:00 Emily Huo's Journey to Paramount

3:10 Why CTV Is Growing So Fast

8:07 CTV Targeting vs Meta Ads

12:14 CTV Budget & Testing Strategy

23:18 Measuring the Halo Effect

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Dan bootstrapped Unbound Merino from a Reddit-fueled obsession with merino wool into a brand approaching nine figures in lifetime revenue, with a warehouse sale, a growing women's line, and zero outside funding.

In his second appearance on the DTC Podcast, the Unbound co-founder gets specific about what actually moved the business over the last three years, why he almost lost 80% of his sales in a single day, and why he now cares more about the product and the friendships than any growth hack.

What you'll learn:

• Why the ads Dan loves flop and the cringe ones scale, and how he made peace with it
• The creative volume system that unlocked Meta scaling in 2023, and why Meta stopped working the same way
• How word of mouth (15% of new customers) and a 50/50 women's line changed the growth model
• The de minimis and tariff shock that nearly ended the company, and the scramble to open a Dallas warehouse before Liberation Day
• How Unbound uses a custom AI wired into Shopify, its ERP, Asana, Slack, and Drive to triangulate why products get returned
• Why 5% of sales now come from ChatGPT and Claude, and what that means for discovery

Who this is for: bootstrapped founders, DTC operators, and anyone selling a premium product who is tired of renting customers from Meta.

What to steal: the reorder-first mindset, the creative iteration loop, and the tariff survival playbook.

Timestamps:

00:00 Building a $90M travel apparel brand

02:12 Scaling Meta with creative volume

08:00 Why product quality beats acquisition tactics

16:00 How tariffs nearly killed the business

32:05 AI as a business advisor and data analyst

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This week on All Killer No Filler, we're giving you a preview of Agency Confidential, the new podcast from our co-founder Jeff, and this episode's is a truly killer.

Jeff sits down with Nick Shackelford, who's everywhere in DTC. Three agencies (Structured, Konstant, Lucid), an events business, and a decade of showing up on every feed, stage, and group chat. Jeff calls him the Coca-Cola of ecommerce. Eric calls him the Drake of DTC.

But halfway through, Nick stops and shares something he says he's never told publicly. Last July, cash got tight and he had to bridge the gap on one of his companies. Not with a loan or a raise, but by getting paid as a public agency owner to talk about SaaS products. Ten years of being a face turned into a cash-flow lever almost no other owner has.

Then it gets stranger. That same decade of posts and videos is now training data for every LLM on earth. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about DTC agencies and Nick, Structured, Konstant, and Geek Out all come up. A personal brand he built to win deal flow quietly became free distribution in a channel that didn't exist when he started.

They get into the real cost of being the face, why building a faceless brand (like DTC and Pilothouse) trades built-in pull for durability, AI in the agency space, and why Nick thinks the market's about to splinter back into specialists.

What they cover:

• The never-shared story of how Nick bridged a cash-flow gap in a rough month
• Why a personal brand is a lever most agency owners don't have
• How ten years of content became free distribution in AI search
• The real cost and risk of being the face of your agency
• Face vs. faceless: durability, transferability, and selling the business
• Where Nick thinks the agency market is heading in 2026

Who this is for: Agency owners, DTC operators, and founders weighing whether to build in public or build something that doesn't hinge on one person's face.

Catch the preview here, and if you like it, go subscribe to Agency Confidential for the full episode.

Timestamps:

00:00 Nick Shackelford on building agencies and personal brands

02:19 How Nick built three agencies and scaled operations

11:59 Why AI is changing agency work and client communication

27:56 How a personal brand became a business advantage

39:18 Why AI will bring back specialized agencies

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Gifting is one of the biggest reasons people buy online, and most brands never build for it on purpose.

Matt Heckathorn runs digital marketing at Wolfe, the company behind Gift Card Granny, PerfectGift.com, and GiftYa. His ICP is close to everyone, which kills the usual narrow-audience playbook and forces a different approach to growth.

What you will learn:

• How a bottom-of-funnel team moved into CTV, programmatic, and out-of-home without losing measurement
• Why CTV retargeting outperformed what Matt expected, and how scale made brand channels measurable
• How Wolfe uses second-tier DMAs to test incrementality before spending up
• How gift card fraud actually works at the physical retail level, and why it shapes the product
• Where Wolfe is drawing its AI line: creative and fulfillment yes, fully agentic media buying not yet
• The cost problem almost nobody is planning for as AI usage scales

Who this is for: DTC operators and growth leads working top of funnel, anyone selling into gifting, and marketers thinking through where AI fits in a real team.

What to steal: The second-tier DMA incrementality test, the recipient-first product framing, and the human checkpoint on agentic media buying.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Future of AI in Marketing

02:12 Reinventing the Gift Card Industry

09:00 How Card-Linked Gifting Works

15:12 Top of Funnel Messaging That Converts

23:12 Building an AI-First Marketing Team

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Meta used to let you pick your customer in the backend. Those days are over. Post-Andromeda, the creative itself carries the targeting signal, which means the old spray-and-pray playbook now works against you.

Rafael Gi spent a decade in traditional creative agencies, then led marketing at a nine-figure apparel brand, and now runs strategic growth and partnerships at Pilothouse. In this one he breaks down why the algorithm is forcing marketers to be good marketers again, and what that looks like in an ad account.

What he gets into:

• Why "creative is targeting" is now literal, not a slogan, and how Meta reads your creative for who to serve it to
• Salience and memory structures: how brands like Volvo, Red Bull, and AG1 got remembered, and how to build the same
• The spend discrepancy that caps scaling brands: 80 percent of budget chasing 20 percent of revenue
• Why structuring an ad account by product instead of by persona burns money and buries your message
• The shift from "all revenue is good revenue" to winning the customer instead of selling the product
• How to evolve one message into new occasions without breaking the memory you have already built

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators between eight and nine figures who are seeing diminishing returns on creative volume and cannot figure out why more ads are not buying more growth.

What to steal: the "one tank of gas, twelve cars" test for whether your budget is spread too thin, and the account-structure fix that lines your media budget up with where your revenue comes from.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Meta's Andromeda Changed Marketing

02:34 Creative Is the New Targeting

05:55 Building Brand Salience That Lasts

14:32 How to Fix Creative Strategy at Scale

24:42 Applying Salience to Better Meta Ads

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Most list-growth advice assumes you have a website people visit. Cove Soda doesn't. They sell zero sugar soda in roughly 7,000 retail doors with no real DTC store, which means no site traffic, no purchase pop-ups, and no easy email capture.

Zoe Kahn runs marketing for Cove as interim VP. In this episode she breaks down how a retail-first brand still builds a direct, owned channel, why she treats in-person events as the acquisition surface, and how she competes in a soda aisle that already has Olipop and Poppi running Super Bowl ads.

What you'll get:

• The event tactic that grows an email and SMS list without DTC: trade a full can for an opt-in
• How to segment by geography so US news goes to US fans and Canadian news goes to Canadian fans
• How she picks which events to sample at, and why marketing assets in a state change the math
• Using Amazon attribution links to test creative and copy when you have no DTC
• A clear take on why an oversaturated category is not a reason to quit
• The early-career mistake that shipped roughly 700 wrong orders, and what it taught her

Who this is for: retail-first and omnichannel operators, beverage and CPG founders, retention and lifecycle marketers, and anyone who has been told they can't build a list without DTC.

What to steal: the can-for-email swap at events, geographic list segmentation, and an event-selection checklist built on demographic fit and asset location.

0:00 Intro

3:16 Building a Canadian Brand in the US

7:55 How Cove Soda Stands Out in a Crowded Market

10:09 Using QR Codes to Grow Email and SMS Lists

17:50 Practical AI Workflows for Marketing Teams

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Google search is changing under everyone's feet. AI overviews are eating the top of the funnel, exact match stopped being exact years ago, and shoppers now type full paragraphs instead of two keywords. Doug, who leads Google at Pilothouse, breaks down what actually came out of Google Marketing Live 2026 and what DTC operators should do about it.

He runs the Google paid side for DTC brands at Pilothouse, so this is the operator read, not the press release.

What you get:

• Why transactional shopping queries still convert while top-of-funnel search moves into AI overviews
• What AI Max for Shopping means for how your products get matched to conversational queries
• Why your Merchant Center feed is the most undervalued performance lever you control
• How far Claude or Gemini can get you on a feed audit, and where you still need a human
• Why "keywordless" is the direction, and what targeting intent looks like now
• The measurement gap on YouTube and demand generation, and what Google is testing to close it
• Who this is for: DTC founders and operators running or buying Google Ads, plus anyone trying to understand AI's effect on Shopping and search.

What to steal: audit your product feed before you touch anything else. Most brands copy-paste their site into the feed or rely on an automated integration and leave half the attributes empty. That is the cheap win.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:47 Google Ads and AI Search Changes

5:30 Biggest Google Marketing Live 2026 Announcements

7:50 Why Google Shopping Feed Optimization Matters

12:04 Why the Future of Search Is Keywordless

15:45 Measuring Demand Generation on YouTube

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