DTC POD: How The Best Brands Are Built

Mark Samuel is the founder & CEO of IWON Organics, a plant-based food company that makes bold, flavor-infused snacks and cereal made from plant proteins like peas, beans and brown rice. IWON's healthy snacks can be found in over 5,000 stores nationwide, including Kroger's, Wegmans, Sprouts, Whole Foods, Vitamin Shoppe, Safeway, Ralphs, Brookshire’s, and online at iwonorganics.com, Amazon and Thrive Market. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokMark Samuel - IWON OrganicsRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

On this episode of DTC Pod, Oriel joins Blaine to discuss the role of creative direction in launching a new brand. They talk about brand formation and topics including coming up with a name, defining your brand's purpose, the power of copywriting, merchandise as a medium, language as a product, how to find your brand's voice, ways to minimize inventory costs, launching and testing new products quickly, the state of voice & podcasting, & much more.7:31Your Name Is EverythingI'm a big believer in naming an idea and the name being very important. And until you've got a name, you don't necessarily have an idea. That kind of came at a moment, it was kind of like a shower thought, that just popped into my head one day when I was thinking about athleisure. And I was like, well what's the opposite of athleisure? What do you wear when you're doing nothing but zoom calls? And “corpleisure” kind of brought that all together.10:26Starting A Business? Do This FirstFor me it really helps when you know your purpose. Right. I spend a lot of time in my day, whether I'm working on corpleisure or anything else, I'm thinking, okay, what is, what is the purpose of like this brand or this piece of communication? Um, and then what's the takeaway that I want people to take from it, you know?17:34Your Brand Starts Here.If I was just going to tell someone in a conversation about this product, how would I do it? And the chances are like, if you're going to tell a friend over drinks or something, or telling someone at a barbecue like that's kind of your natural voice. And probably somewhere within that is your brand. Because when you speak naturally, especially about your own brands and about your own product, that's when you talk with passion, right? And if you could potentially maybe record yourself doing that, you'd probably hear those words that you use when you're excited about telling someone about this new product that you've got, um, and that's kind of your voice and that could be your brand. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokOriel Davis-Lyons - Founder of CorpleisureRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

On this episode of DTC Pod, Sofia & Carolyn join Blaine & Ramon to talk about company building, product marketing, brand marketing, finding product market fit, guidelines for each funding round, syncing marketing & inventory, building a resilient supply chain, building community, & more.9:46Product Market Fit 🎯It was a 90 degree day in Prospect park in Brooklyn. And we literally had a hundred plus parents come to pick up food from essentially complete strangers with unmarked coolers and unmarked cups. And we always laugh that that's when we knew that we had found a white space.22:52Community = Real Growth 🚀I'll give you an anecdote but we started doing these tiny “supper clubs” we called them, these community events with 15 to 25 moms- and they started out in person. It was meant to be a regional event, but we're still seeing that those zip codes perform better than some other zip codes. They became virtual and now we're kind of rethinking that model, but I think this idea of how do you do community or organic acquisition at scale is really intriguing.33:42This Is How You Build Supply Chain 🔗We try to keep a healthy amount of cover for ourselves, just in case something were to go wrong, which kind of brings us back to building for security. It's not a matter of if, but when something will go wrong, because it will. So to have as many backup solutions in our back pocket that we can, whether it's a quick ingredients switch, or a supplier switch, we've got an emergency solution just in case anything goes wrong.39:10Forecasting Demand In 2022 📈Demand forecasting is definitely both art and science, but we use that subscription data and a lot of really detailed cohort analysis to identify which of these marketing moments is the most successful. And when we repeat it and make sure that we're planning for that appropriately. So we use both of those in conjunction to kind of build out our demand forecast models and then we plan production and inventory accordingly. But especially right now, and especially for early founders, you need to manage that with the cash that gets tied up in manufacturing inventory. So it's always a balance that you're trying to strike. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokSofia Laurell - Co-Fonder & Co-CEO of Tiny OrganicsCarolyn O'Hare Batyske - Co-Founder & President & COO of Tiny OrganicsRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

On this episode of DTC Pod, Brian joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about his career in digital commerce, media, and venture capital which has spanned 4 decades. Brian is a seasoned operator and investor, having led investments in companies including Everlane, Snif, Feastables, Caraway, Afterpay, Archive, Disco, & Tydo to name a few. This episode covers topics including the overlap of web3 and commerce, what makes businesses attractive to invest in, the evolution of digital media, learnings from the best brands, what the future of commerce looks like, and how brands can think about evolving loyalty and retention frameworks, social commerce, and more.Wanna Sound Smart? Save This 😉12:30So as many people have spoken about, Web1 was about read only, WEB2 two was about read-write where you can post on social networks, and WEB3 is all about ownership. And to me, ownership from a brand really is about super fans and loyalty, right? Like what can you do with your super fans?13:40Where Brands Should Focus in 2022Brands can't acquire customers efficiently through the paid channels like they used to in the past. Brands need to focus on increasing conversion rate, increasing average order, lowering abandonment, dealing with the traffic that they have now, like 97% of the people that come to your site, don't buy. There's like plenty of opportunities to do things there and I think Novel gives the tools to the brands to help enhance that.32:17The Real Reason Social-Commerce Hasn't Taken OffI don't think shopping is social by human nature. Like I think people pride themselves on them finding and discovering things at good prices at great brands. Like they want to be the person that is wearing it out there first, and then their friends ask them. It's not like you want to go shopping with your friend, and like find the same thing.. and then what are you going to do? Both wear the same dress? I just think inherently shopping, maybe isn't social.35:17THIS is how much to spend on MarketingSo one question we ask is how much money, or what percentage of revenue do you spend on paid marketing? And if that number's like 20 or 25% or greater, it's just not for us. We want a scaled DTC brand to be 12% or less. Okay. If you're spending more than on paid marketing, you have a drug habit, you are addicted to the high of spending money to make money. And it just won't last because your tolerance will just increase and you'll never be able to go to rehab and get off that drug. So spend the money on content creators and content studios, and build like own the house that your audience is in, don't rent the house. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokBrian Sugar - Founder of Sugar Capital Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Sahand chats with Blaine and Ramon about the idea behind Terra Kaffe and building a hardware company. He also discusses decision making frameworks, leveraging market trends, how Terra Kaffe had to pivot from B2B sales to DTC, raising capital, his philosophy on leading and growing a team, and much more (listen in for a surprise!). 11:29 - 11:48The Essential Trait Every Entrepreneur Needs...If there’s one thing I can impart on new founder it is equanimity. Equanimity through it all. Like you’re going to have highs and you’re going to have lows. And I think having that balance is incredibly important. It’s a little Scott Galowayian in a way.. I don't know if that's the right way to refer to that but nothing is ever as good or bad as it seems.38:50 - 39:18Why EQ Is So Valuable For StartupsCompetence is not thinking or infallible, it's knowing you're not and holding yourself in high regard. I think that's an insanely valuable headspace to live in for everybody that's going into a startup and it connects back to that equanimity. Hold your head up, communicate effectively, communicate early, communicate often, be self aware, have that IQ and have that EQ you really need to have that EQ when it comes to a start up. And I think you're gonna do your best work. 19:59 - 20:33Knock On DoorsI still remember you know getting the first two prototypes, and I just actually moved back to the US got to New York, and never lived in New York didn't know much about it, and was just told that cool stores are in Soho. So I had two prototypes, and I knocked on 100 doors inn Soho and said can I serve coffee to weekend crowds? And you knock on 100 doors and 5 people say yeah, and that's how it started and frankly I’m actually weirdly appreciative of that moment. I felt like I was living the pursuit of happiness in reverse, you know he starts off schlepping machines on the subway. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Sahand Dilmaghani - Co-Founder & CEO of Terra KaffeRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Sami Clarke is a certified health, wellness, & fitness trainer who built a large following for her workout videos and holistic approach to wellness. With millions of followers and hundreds of millions of views across Youtube, Instagram, & TikTok, Sami cultivated a strong community before deciding to start her own fitness & wellness platform, FORM. FORM not only offers digital fitness training and community access, but focuses on developing physical products that fit Sami's holistic approach to wellness.Sami Bernstein is Partner in FORM and previously served as SVP of Influencer marketing at Markett and is CMO of Kickback, a social shopping app that incentivizes sharing the brands you love. Sami has collaborated on influencer campaigns with some of the largest brands including Nike, Sephora, Apple Music and worked with thousands of influencers across her roles. 39:56Building Community? Save This.We love love love our community and talk with them all the time. So first and foremost starting the facebook group - literally before launch. Do people still use facebook? Do people still use facebook because I don't, BUT.. facebook is the only place where you can converse back and forth. And our biggest thing is this isn't about me communicating with them but it's more about them communicating together. Because that's going to grow then they're going to meet amazing people that are likeminded - so we're like we have to go to facebook.. AND IT WORKED! 46:45 - 47:20For Brands: Why Scripts ≠ StorytellingThere's a journey into what needs to happen before pressing, you know, complete purchase. And there have been so many different instances for influencer campaigns where all that matters is the ROI and I really encourage brands and founders to take a step back from that and lean into their storytelling through influencers and the way that influencers cannot read a script but really tell their own story on that brands behalf. I really think that brands that can do that well will convert so well.47:26Tell Your StoryAnd have the brand tell their story. People LOVE to know how they got to where they're at, they love the process rather than "hey we made it" and "try our product".. I mean tik-tok get raw with it, share the story!48:34-48:58 How TikTok Saved A Businesses CRISISThey were like "I'll take the crooked".. and i was like "you will?". Thousands of people liked it saying they'll take it. We were so upset we wasted all this money, everything was crooked, here comes tik tok "we LOVE the crooked" "give me the crooked".. so i made a tik tok wearing the crooked and i said "these are live right now, they are crooked, but go get em". We called them the tik tok special. I only put them on tik tok. They sold out in 5 minutes. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Sami Clarke - Founder of FORMSami Bernstein- Partner of FORMRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Cherene Aubert is the Director of Growth at Bobbie, the first European style organic infant formula that meets FDA standards. Bobbie has raised over $50M to take the soon to be 100B+ formula market by storm. Cherene honed her craft and expertise in growth & ecommerce while working for agencies like Human Marketing and Common Thread Collective. In 2021 Cherene joined Bobbie as their key growth director and built Bobbie's growth playbook from the ground up. 13:49 - 14:41The Reason Customer Personas are KEYIt's the least impulsive purchase you can make is infant formula. You actually need to have an infant and you actually need to feed it formula. And there's only a short window of time in an infant's life where it consumes formula, it's the first 12 months. So for us, it's really, so much different than DTC acquisition in other industries, like so many purchases or impulse purchases, and there's ways that you can incentivize and motivate someone to purchase. So much of our purchasing journey revolves around research. I mean, it's a high AOV product, it's high stakes, you need to know what's in it. So when we think about growth, we think about educating people around why this option is the right option for them.An Overlooked Hack for Growth Marketers22:46 - 23:05I will say like for the growth marketers out there, media is such a massive growth channel that you know, PR and media, I feel like it's a little bit underrated by growth marketers, but it you can get spikes in traffic that you will never see with paid advertisingWhy You Need A UGC Strategy27:55 - 28:16it's the UGC that comes from real customers that always does the best. So when we turn back on again, it's I know exactly how we're going to turn the machine on. It's going to be taking that UGC and creating a production house to push it out and continue iterating on it. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Cherene Aubert- Director of Growth of BobbieRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Paul Michaux is the co-founder & head of product at Prose, the DTC customized hair care brand. Michaux founded Prose in 2017 but he built up his expertise and knowledge of product, branding, & consumer goods working at P&G, Christian Dior, and L’Oréal. Prose has achieved immense success and is a leader in hyper-personalization consumer goods. They’re backed by the some of the biggest names in VC like Insight Partners, Forerunner Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. The Unique Strategy That Fueled Prose’s Growth20:38And it was like “No, no, it’s actually great to create friction. And some friction is sometimes useful, this is how we make a sale. And this is how we think of the time to actually close on the sale. As opposed to just click here, you didn’t understand anything about the product, but hopefully you’re going to buy it. So we spend a lot of time creating this funnel and creating the tech stack to, to make it workThe 2 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know22:48 - 23:16And if I have advice for any entrepreneur or anyone thinking about who their consumer is. Like my first is not to listen to advice. That’s my first advice to everyone. But the second one is thinking about the channels and how you want to use It. Like maybe you’re not a direct-to consumer brand. Maybe you’re just like a very cool CPG brand, but you’re not direct-to-consumer. And maybe that’s okay.How This Famous Brand Pulled off The IMPOSSIBLE26:45 - 27:03I think a lot of CPG brands actually outsource their uniqueness. And then it’s hard to experience what makes you unique it’s just like, we all use the same lab, creating more or less the same product, we change the fragrance and the packaging but no, It’s our own chemist, it’s our own lab, it’s all our own tech platform. Again, not because we want it to be that but because we had to come up with a tech platform to create these customized products. And then overall it’s our own platform, our own data too.The Trick To Building Businesses That Last38:35 - 39:01The importance of a direct to consumer brand is not to sell one product and run away, right? Like no one can create a sustainable direct consumer brand with just one sale. It’s the LTV. And if you’re serious about the LTV, of course, you have the retention team. And of course, it’s what we have. And we think about like lifecycle marketing and all these things. But also like just really using the feedback that you have from your customer into the product is so important. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereHave any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Paul Michaux - Co-Founder & Product ProseRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Alex Plugaru is the CTO & cofounder of Gorgias, the customer service tool born from Techstars NYC program. Gorgias now has 9K+ customers (including some of the most well-known brands), $25M ARR, a global team of 230+ people, and $75M in fundraising. Before starting Gorgias in 2015, Alex worked as a web developer at various companies. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates! DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Alex Plugaru - Co-Founder & CTO GorgiasRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Jeff Nobbs is the co-founder & CEO of Zero Acre Farm, an environmentally-focused food company. Nobbs has been an entrepreneur from day 1. As a teenager in 2006, he cofounded cashback shopping website Extrabux. It was acquired by ebates in 2014. In 2015, Nobbs jumped into the food scene and started a healthy, fast-casual restaurant Kitava — which he still owns today. When COVID hit, he co-founded HelpKitchen to combat food insecurity. HelpKitchen has since served millions of free meals to people in need. And in 2020 he decided it was time enter the oil business. At the same time, he cofounded Zero Acre Farms to remove destructive vegetable oils from the food system. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokJeff Nobbs - Co- Founder & CEO of Zero Acre FarmsRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

In this episode of DTC Pod, Oren has a candid conversation with Blaine and Ramon about the social strategy behind the FYRE Festival, why he’s tired of talking about the festival, and how he’s reinvented himself since then. As an expert in branding & social media, Oren also gives us some tips on how to create a solid social strategy and also shares his personal opinion on the state of social media. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Oren Aks - Founder of Atomic Milk MediaRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

In this episode of DTC Pod, we cover a lot like the best way to cook a steak, why serving up ads to customers is pointless, the idea of finding a calling, and more. For the students tuning in, Khosravi also talks about his personal experience and why you should never let grades or your past define you. This is an episode you don’t want to miss. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Darian Khosravi - Founder & CEO of Kosmo’s QRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

In this episode of DTC Pod, Tom discusses the evolution of advertising and why OOH advertising is ripe for disruption. We also dive into how he came up with the idea for Adgile, the revolutionary technology supporting this truck-side advertising, and why DTC & challenger brands are gravitating towards Adgile. Tom also gives us an inside look into how he thinks about sales and why trust is the foundation of any successful relationship. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Thomas Shea - Founder & CEO of AdgileRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

In this episode of DTC Pod, Kasey discusses the art of storytelling on social media platforms, specifically TikTok. We talk about what makes a great TikTok video, a great TikTok hook, and why voiceovers are more important than visuals. Kasey also explains how he’s used TikTok to create brand awareness, attract Shark Tank casting directors, and create retail opportunities - without spending a penny.The Vacation That Changed His Life Forever3:45 - 4:04So when I went to go do this travel part of what I wanted to do, instead of it just being like, Hey, let’s go do this for fun. I wanted to come back with a skill set. And that skill set was to be able to shoot and to edit. So I bought my first camera. And for the first 100 days I shot every day, I edited a video, and I uploaded it to YouTube documenting my travel.This Brand Got 300M Views, Without Spending A Dollar18:29 - 19:01We did finally, I think crack the code of TikTok to what people connect with. And that was what enabled us to grow so fast, so quick. And yeah, it’s been our biggest. Especially now like you’re talking about the troubles that are happening in paid social, like everybody cutting budgets and the CAC to get people now is so high, but we haven’t had to do any paid so far. And so our CAC is like zero, and TikTok has been driven everything from Shark Tank reaching out within the first five days wanting us to come on the show to retailers reaching out. The Framework for Building Viral Organic Content23:26 - 24:09It’s all about there’s this formula. You have a hook. I mean, you have 2 to 3 seconds to get somebody to stay there. You have a hook. You have a conflict that happens. And then you have a resolution or a call to action to that. And so every single video since then has been some sort of a hook. “This is how we failed.” “17 minutes to know if our product was going to make it or not” “The worst phone call since we started our business.” All these things. Not that they’re all bad. But to be honest, some of the negative ones are the ones that seem to perform the best. And then you just talk about that conflict, what happened. Boxes came and we had an a ship but lollipops were broken. And this is the resolution, we stayed up all night, we checked one by one every single lollipop and threw away their broken ones. And we’re going to be able to make it to launch. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Kasey Stewart - Founder & CEO of SuckerzRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Nick joins Blaine & Ramon on DTC Pod to give the audience an inside look into the world of Growth Marketing & eCommerce. Nick talks about he created Every Man Jack’s digital marketing program, the strategy and logistics behind omnichannel commerce, attracting consumers to Every Man Jack’s DTC channel, how he approaches advertising, and the different advertising channels he is excited to experiment with. How to differentiate your DTC channel20:35 - 21:53How I thought about every man Jack is digital, younger, and trial. So this is about me This is first and foremost, we're going to create a great digital experience, where it's not just going to be focused on merchandising, it's going to be focused on education, have to have that right to this is going to be about a certain type of consumer, which is a younger consumer. And we know that if we're going to be if we're going to be effective in digital, then we're going to try and focus on do getting product into your hands. And knowing that as you graduate over, you know, five to 10 years, if we get you early, as you graduate, we're going to have this incredible layer of distribution around you that, you know, once you start running to the store to go pick up things for your kids and your family, like we're gonna be there for you eventually. So it's all about figuring out for at least in my experience, it was about figuring out the real role of the site, not just like, let's get every man jack up online, like what is its place? As a as a channel? Within our overall channel mix?This is the next wave of advertising 42:37 - 43:20 And then in terms of what I'm looking forward to in the future. We're you know, like many brands were were really bullish on on streaming and on CTV and linear. And I think we've been so focused on direct response. It's been, it's been really great for us to really kind of open the floodgates. And we have a we pushed our relationship with with Disney even further. And we're just we're really interested in in buying ESPN media for the back to school campaign. So I think we're really we're really excited about August and September. 49:33 - 51:09 The Q’s to Ask BEFORE Spending Money on Ads And I think it comes down to thinking about your product and the role it's playing. Is this is this brand new technology? Is this a brand new way of doing things that even just the slightest even even just hearing about it causes me to look into it? Versus Is this a brand that needs to be seen? Like does hearing about this brand do anything for the consumer or is it simple And that needs to be seen, or thinking about the demographics of your ideal user? Is this someone who like is this someone that needs to be 18. And they need to see this brand being held or being used by an 18 year old, or an if my core consumers 18 year old, well, then I have a, I have some channels that are ideally suited for that. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Nick Hasselberg - VP of Growth Marketing & eCommerce at Every Man JackRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

On this episode of DTC Pod, Brosnan and Heckman join Blaine & Ramon to discuss the process of creating, scaling, and selling an e-commerce business. They cover topics including how to start an online store, how to validate before investing in inventory, getting started with print on demand options, tapping into sourcing agent networks, what makes a viable partnership with a manufacturer, options for acquisition, how to sell the business, how OpenStore’s credibility and ethos made them the right buyer, what payout and transition looks like, and what opportunities look exciting next.11:27 - 12:15“New Age Entrepreneurship Methodology”I think something unique that that we did, it’s kind of the New Age Entrepreneurship Methodology now is to kind of like pre launch products. So before we actually put $1 into inventory, we launched the entire collection for all the brands that we did. So we have done a sock company, a tie dye company, jewelry company, yoga company, men’s apparel company, a couple other in there, but those were our five kind of most successful brands. Every one of those was pre sold at the start. So we just built out the collection, didn’t have any inventory, just told our customers that we were going to be pre selling. And we just were trying to gauge interest and drive some some traffic and see how well the site converted. See what our cost per clicks were on Facebook and see if we had real traction before we started pursuing the product.24:56 - 25:37Having Trust Saves Time And MoneyThe one piece of advice that I would say is to find one supplier instead of like going through Alibaba, that might be how you have to find an initial supplier, but build a relationship with one supplier that you really trust. Because even if like our jewelry supplier, for example, she didn’t manufacture yoga mats and socks and all that kind of stuff. But she was able to give us recommendations. We’d say, hey, we need to source x, y. And she would say, I’ll introduce you to my friend who has a manufacturer who does this. And cutting Alibaba and the online lists out of the process will save you a ton of time. But in the beginning, it’s kind of necessary to build that first relationship.1:01:30 - 1:02:12Don’t Let Failure Slow You DownWe have had way more failures than we’ve had success. We’ve probably launched 15 to 20 stores. We’ve had 5 successful 5 or 6 successful stores. Like we just move fast test things. The classic move fast, break things, fix it. Especially with eCommerce online business, it’s easy to move fast. You have no excuse not to move fast, and at least test concepts and ideas. And then when you have something you believe in or at least believe that can be a success, then taking the time and investing in the cop (edited) This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Brendan Brosnan and Chris Heckman- Co-founders of YogasteRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

On this episode of DTC Pod, Nish joins Blaine to talk about how he started Arrae with his wife, Siffat Haider. They discuss how to build a DTC brand with a product lens, what it took to get to the first 17K orders, personal touches to drive early sales, how they transitioned into scaling, how they got Hailey Beiber as a mega fan of Arrae, the tech stack that powers their growth, how they think about subscription experience, timing their retail strategy, and how they got into 13 Erewhon locations. 23:01 -23:58Never Underestimate the Power of a SelfieWe wanted people to know that they were buying the product from us. And so everything was hand packaged we never use a fulfillment center in the early days. And every single thing like we would buy custom, tissue wrapping paper, we’d wrap up the products, we would write a handwritten note. And then me and my wife used to take a Polaroid selfie. Every Polaroid would be an authentic one, because we would be taking it ourselves with a Polaroid camera. And so it would it would take about 10-15 seconds per photo. And so we would do that for like 1000s of orders. We didn’t get a fulfillment center until after our first million dollars in sales. And so that all of that was just pure I guess sweat, sweat equity that we put in everything. And that really, really helped because people used to post with it all the time to like who are these people? And why is there a photo of them in the package. And it was actually like kind of cute, like people really, really liked it.12:36 - 13:04Before Creating a Subscription Program, Ask Yourself This. I actually still think that subscription, as great as a business model is, it’s really annoying from a customer perspective, if it’s not a good experience. And so what we try to do is like we first have to find, okay, natively, how are people using the product? How are they like consuming? What’s the frequency on which they’re consuming it? What kind of person is that that requires us this product on subscription? And then we very specifically cater our subscription offers to those kinds of customers.27:10 - 28:00When Hailey Bieber Loves Your ProductI saw the PayPal notification pop up. And then I was like oh wow is this really her? And so I looked it up and I was like, Oh wow that’s really her. So we sent her some product. And we wrote a handwritten note or whatever. And then five days later she orders like five more. And so I was like Oh wow she really likes her product. And then basically, we shipped it out to her. And then her assistant at the very end of it sent me a message being like Hey, I know you shipped the product, but it’s not getting here fast enough because Hailey’s gone tomorrow, and she needs the product today. And so I was in LA at the time. So I was like You know what can I just come and drop it off? And she’s like Yeah you can come up drop it off. Just come to Justin Bieber’s house. I was like Yep I’m on my way there. So me Siff and literally like Siff’s brother and one of our team members, we all loaded up in my car and we just drove over to Justin Bieber’s house to go and hand deliver this product. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Nishant Samantray- Co-founder of ArraeRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Jonah Reider is an NYC based chef, entrepreneur, and writer for Food & Wine. Prior to starting Pzaz, Jonah made a name for himself cooking meals in his dorm room at Columbia which turned into famed supper club and boutique condiments brand, Pith. Jonah hosts the bi-monthly column “Supper Club” at Food & Wine magazine, and has contributed to GQ, Vice, the Food Network, and more around the food & hospitality space. He’s also collaborated with several major brands like Gucci, Hermes, Land Rover, and The New Yorker to create unique dining experiences. Now Jonah is entering the CPG startup world and building an energy empire called Pzaz. Jonah joins DTC Pod to talk about his launch, developing product and form factor, brand positioning, local retail distribution strategy, and how to make a big impression in a crowded CPG landscape.Highlights:32:04 - 32:28Embrace every part of your productPzaz is not a flavor first brand in the sense that I don’t want people to buy it because they think it’s the most delicious, delicate, unique flavor they’ve tasted. It’s functional first. And we don’t have paragraphs and paragraphs on our website about all the functional ingredients. It’s functional in that it wakes you up. If you want to wake up and you don’t want a beverage or you can’t have a beverage, this is the product for you.35:54 - 36:51Most Subscriptions Get This WrongWe only sell subscriptions on our website. If you don’t want to subscribe, if you cancel your subscription, that’s fine. I’m not here insisting on having the lowest churn rate of all time. We’ll catch you somewhere else on Amazon, Go Puff, at the bodega. That subscription version of purchase needs to be so distinct and rewarding from any other type of purchase, you need to get, you know a giant Pzaz tattoo when you order from Pzaz.com. You need to get a little zazz chain to wear on your neck that connects to the cap so you can take it out on your third order. There should be a real reason to join that DTC community for everyone who comes into the fold. And if they don’t, we’ll still keep them as part of our digital community and solicit content that really raises up the amazing retailers who are carrying us in their stores44:03 - 44:55The Ultimate IRL Launch StrategyWe’re at multiple parties going on in the city, multiple clubs, music venues, sporting events, private parties, art openings, you name it there there will be someone with a backpack of Pzaz putting these tubes out in the bathroom, at the check in counter, at the bar, wherever you might stumble upon it. We have a little, all the energy drink companies have cars. Red Bulls got the Mini Cooper. Monsters got this big truck. We have a single electric scooter sort of like you know in New York they’re called Revels, and we’ve decked it out. It’s it’s ridiculously zazzy. It looks like this office. It’s bright yellow. It has like ludicrously bright rainbow lights, a huge Pzaz flag. And we have people driving this scooter every hour of every day of the summer.”50:21 - 50:54Should New Brands Use Distributors?The vast majority of their revenue from just a few huge companies that sell massive quantities, but are giving the distributor a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. So they’ll take on, like almost any. They’ll take on plenty of new brands and not really push you at all, not help that much, take a lot a lot of your margin. And I didn’t want to get caught in that. And I also I think I wanted to have some experience at launching, really understanding what it means to hit the pavement and deliver product and deal with people saying no.56:34 - 57:31Every Startup Needs a Laser FocusConsumer packaged goods in the energy space are really missing a cultural moment and an opportunity to explore new form factors, delivery mechanisms, and of course, branding. And we have a lot of interesting new product ideas, new avenues to take to approach this mission. But I would say we’re, I am and I try to have our whole team aligned on this, really keeping ourselves quite laser focused on launching and remembering what our key objectives are. We want to be in stores, doing well, building a community and driving digital interactions that everybody finds valuable and exciting and fun. And, that’s what we’re really focused on. So I hope anyone listening who’s made it all the way to the end of this. Get your ass to Pzaz.com. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Jonah Reider- CEO of Pzaz.comRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Follow Along on SocialDTC Pod on InstagramDTC Pod on LinkedInDTC Pod on TwitterDTC Pod on TikTokDon’t hesitate to reach out to us on socials or directly to Blaine & Ramon if you have a guest you’d like to recommend, or specific topics you’d like to learn more about in the consumer, creator, and commerce landscape which we can explore with future guests.How did the pod start and where are we going? How Consumer, Creator, & Commerce businesses are builtBring different perspectives that can be applied across business landscapes How has the DTC landscape changed since? Solving for distribution challenges and identifying acquisition arbitrageOrganic reach and leveraging productContent and building brand distributionShopify audiences for shopify plus brandsRetention and cx become top of mind to drive organic growthPrinciples for the right business to work on for youSubscriptions and unit economicsDTC becomes the testnet for CPG & prioritization of retail distributionUsing SMS as a marketerShopify & prospects for continued growth, challenges of the ecosystemData & solving for technical sprawl across more platformsMore enablement solutions looking for limited margin.. only the best core utilities survivePrevious episodes and learnings from DTC Pod guests: Pattern - Emmett Shine & launching some of the biggest brands in DTCTabs - Owning distribution and prioritizing organicLunar, Zbiotics, Ghia - where product meets productionColtyy - how to work with social algorithmsRidge - going from 10-100 millionOpenstore - An option for brands to cash outBite - mission first & founder hustle beyond shark tankProduct finds & whats next: some of the products we’ve discovered through the podThe guide to all the best online & dtc brandsNoowave, Awful, Rosaluna, Zbiotics, Bite, Ridge, Swagup & more

Mélanie chats with Blaine & Ramon about building Ghia. Some topics include how to create a new beverage category, production considerations for a new beverage type, early-stage funding advice and key supporters along the way, customer-led product iteration, building a culinary first brand, design and branding insight, leveraging restaurants and retail as a distribution strategy, Ghia’s focus on retail channels, and much more.2:35 - 7:11 Melanie’s career before Ghia9:39 - 11:56 Selling the idea of Ghia12:57 - 14:09 Adapting to COVID18:12 - 21:42 Formulating Ghia22:52 - 24:35 Fundraising27:04 - 32:47 Creating the branding35:23 - 37:47 Developing new products38:15 - 40:44 Fostering relationships while scalingThis episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Mélanie Masarin- CEO & Co-founder of GhiaRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Growing up, Darrin Willingham dreamed of playing in the NFL. But then he discovered his love for creating content. Darrin discusses how he found himself in the world of YouTube, making videos, monetizing his passion for sneakers, and coming full circle by working with pro-athletes off the field. Darrin also gives some tips on building a strong social media foundation and personal brand.3:59 - 8:14 Discovering ways to make money8:30 - 10:18 Getting banned from YouTube10:39 - 11:57 Building a solid YouTube foundation for brand partnerships14:03 - 22:57 Monetizing your passion24:27 - 26:01 Importance of branding yourself29:57 - 32:46 Creating your own luck & seeking opportunities34:07 -39:44 Diversifying your income stream42:11 - 45:28 Creating authentic content52:18 - 54:00 Goals for the future This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Darrin Willingham - Creator & Host of DNA SHOWRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Blaine & Ramon are thrilled to have Kevin Wong as a guest on DTC Pod and dive into building the first Asian American craft hard seltzer alcohol brand - Lunar. Kevin talks about the early days of home brewing, perfecting the formula, and learning from failed batches and supply chain. He also gets into the business side and talks about selling to restaurants and becoming one of the most in-demand items at Trader Joe's. 2:14 - 5:42 Life before Lunar9:56 - 13:52 Creating Lunar14:56 - 17:57 Early days of Lunar18:21 - 20:22 Navigating regulation in the alcohol industry20:48 - 30:06 Learning to make hard seltzer30:57 - 32:37 The first failed batch34:42 - 42:00 Got to market strategy47:36 - 50:01 Getting into Trader Joe’s This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Kevin Wong - Co-Founder of LunarRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Terry Lee stopped by the DTC POD studio to talk to Blaine & Ramon about building Rosaluna and specifically how he’s established Rosaluna’s culture and values (ex: moving with intention versus just moving fast). Terry also discusses visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, learning about how mezcal is made, and meeting the multi-generational family of farmers who make it. 2:41 - 6:21 Terry’s background8:42 - 19:13 Working at MeUndies19:47 - 25:33 Building a team culture & values25:34 - 34:56 Why build fast and break things is the opposite of Rosaluna’s culture36:40 - 44:13 Hiring and finding talent45:42 - 1:06:18 Building Rosaluna1:07:10 - 1:14:25 Future plans for RosalunaThis episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Terry Lee - Co-Founder of RosalunaRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

On this episode of DTC Pod, Blaine & Ramon chat with Chaz Zayed and Emmit Flynn about how they started Awful Cloth in their dorm room and grew it into a viral brand, collaborating with Barstool on a hoodie, why they’ve seen so much success with influencers (side note: they’ve never paid any influencer to wear their hoodie!), and their plans to grow the brand. 2:06 - 7:59 The Start of Awful Cloth 15:30 - 18:46 Entrepreneurial Mindset from Day 1 19:34 - 23:38 Going Viral 24:32 - 26:19 Influencer Marketing 27:15 - 30:22 Barstool Collab 31:19 - 36:16 Reaching out to Influencers 37:07 - 41:15 The Challenges of Entrepreneurship 42:19 - 46:39 Working on Awful Cloth’s Website 47:01 - 54:49 Future Collabs This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokEmmit Flynn - Co-Founder of Awful ClothChaz Zayed - Co-Founder of Awful ClothRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Tono Mandly stopped by DTC Pod's Miami studio to discuss the current consumer landscape in Latin America and how Riogrande is filling a gap in the consumer market, the startup scene in LatAm, the challenges of building DTC Brands in Latin America, and the incredible potential for this $100 billion e-commerce market.3:47 - 10:22 Tono's background10:36 - 14:22 Ecommerce landscape in LatAm14:28 - 16:47 Challenges in LatAm Ecommerce17:03 - 21:18 What is Riogrande21:21 - 23:46 Consumer landscape in LatAm26:22 - 29:12 Operating in different countries 30:07 - 33:59 Startup scene in LatAm34:17 - 36:12 Fixing the lack of trust between consumers and businesses38:12 - 40:10 Opportunity in LatAm40:12 - 41:53 VCs in LatAM 41:55 - 43:07 Who should join YC This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokTono Mandly- CEO of RiograndeRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Zach Abbott maker of the world's 1st genetically engineered probiotics. Purpose-built to help our bodies handle the diets and environments of modern life joins Ramon & Blaine to discuss the science behind ZBiotics, the challenges of educating consumers on a genetically engineered probiotic, and how to lean it to being genetically engineered registered with customers. 2:02 - 8:24 Idea for ZBiotics14:57 - 20:09 The science of a hangover23:37 - 27:19 Genetically engineerings is easier than you think28:11 - 33:30 Making sure ZBiotics works35:24 - 39:19 How do you sell a genetically engineered prebiotic40:36 - 45:18 Leaning into being GMO 46:24 - 47:26 Working with a marketing and branding agency 47:57 - 49:55 Getting customer feedback49:48 - 51:14 Figuring out manufacturing52:17 - 53:48 Growing since 2021 54:12 - 56:09 The future of ZBiotics57:37 - 58:35 Where to find ZBiotics and Zach This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Zach Abbott - CEO of ZBioticsRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

While Aspen is still in its early days, we’re excited to have Keta Burke-Williams on the pod to discuss the logistics of building a fragrance company. In this episode of DTC pod, you’ll hear Blaine & Ramon talk with Keta about creating a scent, finding a manufacturer, finding her voice when pitching to VCs, optimizing for online and offline sales, being smart with your resources, and tapping into your network. 8:20 - 9:20 The inspiration behind Aspen15:43 - 16:06 Consumer trust is fragile 32:34 - 33:24 Why being cheap is smart19:06 - 19:43 How to sell a scent online26:03 - 26:47 Combatting imposter syndrome 40:10 - 40:49 Don’t underestimate your network! This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Keta Burke-Williams - Founder of Aspen ApothecaryRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

We’re thrilled to have Kristin Toth join Blaine & Ramon on DTC Pod where she walks us through her career trajectory and how she narrowed in on supply chain & ops, being an advisor to multiple startups, why building a circular furniture company is challenging, how Fernish strategically launched in two cities to test product-market, and how Fernish has evolved over time. 1:51 - 5:49 What is Fernish?6:22 - 8:38 The story behind Fernish12:04 - 18:07 Kristin’s career trajectory18:39 - 22:15 Working at Amazon24:07 - 26:53 The role of an advisor26:54 - 31:00 Working at Fernish32:31 - 37:59 The early days of Fernish40:05 - 43:00 Data & Logistics50:48 - 52:48 What Fernish is focusing on now This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Kristin Toth - President & COO of FernishRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Paul Voge speaks with Blaine & Ramon about how creating DIY flavors with his soda stream led to a full-fledge sparkling water business.Paul discusses the challenges of building a CPG brand, being on Sharktank during the height of COVID, Aura Bora’s path into retail stores, why he prefers retail over DTC orders, and more.4:17- 6:06 Starting a CPG brand9:08 - 15:34 Co-packers and distributor15:50 - 17:04 Family & friend investors17:12 - 23:04 Filming Sharktank in COVID24:57 - 29:26 Creating new flavors29:48 - 35:29 Retail over DTC35:37 - 38:29 Watchout for chargebacks43:55 - 49:19 Retail stores that carry Aura Bora This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Paul Voge - Co-Founder of Aura BoraRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Stix makes women’s at-home health essentials like fertility, pregnancy, UTI, and yeast infection products. In today’s episode, Stix cofounder Cynthia Plotch chats with Ramon & Blaine about building Stix, finding investors, talking to customers about difficult subjects, and how her prior experience at Harmless Harvest gave her the confidence to create Stix. 1:10 - 5:52 Story behind Stix8:08 - 8:45 Medical Advisory Board13:19 - 16:56 Raising VC money17:59 - 20:31 Prior startup experience22:37 - 28:57 Understanding the customer29:25 - 38:33 Customer service & conversations39:35 - 43:24 Product & Regulatory Environment45:29 - 46:13 Distribution This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Cynthia Plotch - Co-Founder of StixRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Emily Elyse Miller talks to Blaine & Ramon about building OffLimits and how her creative background has informed the brand. OffLimits is also one of the early adopters of Web3, and Emily dives into how they’re currently using NFTs, what excites her about Web3, challenges with Web3, and what other brands need to consider before jumping into this. 3:16 - 7:42 Emily’s Breakfast Club Series8:06 - 10:46 Writing a Cookbook12:48 - 14:25 Idea for OffLimits15:33 - 17:35 Getting into Web321:06 - 21:52 Finding Your Day 1 Brand Champions22:35 - 25:37 OffLimits Web3 Strategy26:14 - 29:45 Tools Supporting Web330:17 - 33:58 Brands Considering Web338:53 - 41:09 OffLimit’s Cereal Toys42:21 - 44:30 Supply Chain Issues45:38 - 48:17 OffLimits Latest Web3 Project This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Emily Elyse Miller - Founder of Offlimits Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Geoffrey Woo joins Blaine & Ramon on DTC POD to discuss why he started Anti Fund with Jake Paul, what they look for in founders when investing, and where he sees opportunity in Web 3. Geoff also dives into why Anti Fund is not your traditional VC, managing founders’ expectations when a celebrity investor is involved, and why they prefer investing in infrastructure over pure consumer startups. 1:13 - 8:18 What is Anti Fund8:59 - 14:29 Where they’re investing15:23 - 17:38 Anti Fund’s deals18:35 - 23:27 Being in Miami This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Geoffrey Woo - Co-Founder of Anti Fund, Archive, & HVMNRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

On this episode of DTC Pod, Sam Madani chats with Ramon Berrios & Blaine Bolus to discuss how he built Bomani and the ups-and-downs of the entrepreneurial journey. The road to success for Bomani wasn’t easy. They faced a ton of rejection from local brewers, but they persevered and decided to pitch their concept to the biggest brewer in the country, and it worked! But that was just the first step. Sam discusses getting Bomani into customers’ hands, the process of selling to restaurants and bartenders, building brand awareness through the Cold Buzz Crew, adapting during COVID, and expanding Bomani’s retail presence.0:19 - 3:08 What’s Bomani3:51 - 5:41 Launching Bomani6:21 - 10:28 30 questions you should be asking11:32 - 15:58 Partnering with the biggest brewer in the US18:43 - 20:25 Bomani’s first investor20:26 - 22:00 Adapting to COVID22:39 - 23:44 Expanding beyond friends & family24:43 - 29:27 The cold buzz crew29:43 - 36:32 Building partnerships with bartenders and restaurants38:38 - 41:57 Getting into Whole Foods This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Sam Madani - Co-Founder & CEO of BomaniRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Tabs Chocolate is a sexually enhancing dark chocolate founded by two University of Michigan undergrads Jake and Oliver. Blaine and Ramon are excited to have Jake Lewin and Oliver Brocato on DTC Pod to discuss how they designed specifically for TikTok, negotiating and working with influencers, creating viral videos, and making 90K in revenue in just 3.5 weeks after launch. 2:05 - 8:24 Entrepreneur Background17:58 - 19:27 Getting Started with Tabs24:05 - 27:33 Finding the Right Channel28:44 - 31:29 Working with Influencers32:55 - 37:22 Content / Social Strategy38:43 - 42:49 Designing for TikTok51:01 - 51:42 Bootstrapped This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Jake Lewin & Oliver Brocato- Founders of Tabs Chocolate Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Mid-Day Squares is the healthy chocolate bar company that’s built a name for itself through its bold content. Today on the pod, Ramon and Blaine are joined by the architect of Mid-Day’s brand voice & content strategy, Jake Karls, better known as the “Rainmaker” at MDS. As a Rainmaker, Jake is out there developing critical relationships with multiple stakeholders (i.e., press, investors, customers, etc.), cultivating the brand’s personality, and getting people excited about MDS.1:17 - 4:27 Idea for Mid-Day Squares4:55 - 7:38 Forming Mid-Days Content Strategy10:07 - 10:55 Creating a Personality11:48 - 13:32 Highs and Lows of Documenting Everything14:00 - 17:55 Turning customers into fans18:24 - 20:37 Celebrity Package Goods20:58 - 23:42 Jake’s background and being a Rainmaker25:14 - 30:46 Misunderstood and Hershey’s lawsuit31:26 - 34:00 Getting everyone on board and therapy34:45 - 38:00 Financing Content38:13 - 42:33 Motivating young people43:12 - 47:42 Evolution of MDS & DTC sales This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Jake Karls- CEO of Mid-Day SquaresRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Chris Bernard AKA “Bernie” joins Blaine and Ramon to discuss Mindright and working with Rob Dyrdek, learning from previous business mistakes of growing too fast, the importance of building your brand’s community before utilizing celebrity ambassadors, how TikTok is helping Mindright grow, and more. Buff Bake 2:07 -3:03Story behind Mindright 6:44 - 10:12Pitching to Rob Dyrdek 11:03 - 14:12Celebrity investors 16:35 - 17:33Leveraging celebrity investors 18:19 - 19:42Getting into retail 22:31 - 24:01Brand ambassadors and influencers 24:34 - 26:27Building the team 30:14 - 32:15 This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Chris Bernard- CEO of Mindright Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Lindsay McCormick, CEO and co-founder of Bite, chats with Blaine and Ramon about her zero-waste company that makes personal care & hygiene products. Lindsay started Bite with $6,000 dollars and originally hand-made and packaged Bite's toothpaste tablet from her living room in L.A. In 2019, Lindsay went on Shark Tank and turned down offers from Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary. Bite has experienced tremendous growth and continues to be completely bootstrapped and profitable. 9:18-10:12 Visualizing facts11:03-11:45 Pretend your pitching to the sharks 22:28-23:03 Talking to your customers25:33-26:23 Pitching your product in-person to consumer45:50-46:41 Start super niche then expand This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Lindsay McCormick - CEO and Founder of BiteRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Better & Better recently raised a $4M seed round, Blaine and Ramon got the chance to talk to Vlad in-depth about his entrepreneurial journey, the difficulty of pitching a DTC product in a trend-driven VC climate (note: many investors are interested in investing crypto, NFTs, traditional SaaS, etc), competing against legacy brands like Colgate, using customer feedback to relaunch SKUs, and more!RocketHub and Meural 3:08 - 7:20Inspiration behind Better & Better 7:47 - 10:51Proof of concept 12:05 - 14:13Pitching a DTC to VC 14:34 - 15:33Better & Better seed investors 15:36 - 16:47The questions VC’s ask 17:55 - 21:30Advisors, prototypes, and employees 27:24 - 30:34Decreasing CAC for Better Better 32:37 - 33:23Bottom-up pitch vs. Top-down pitch 33:24 - 35:57Challenging legacy brands 41:15 - 43:26Improving the product 49:13 - 50:55 This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Vlad Vukicevic - CEO Better & BetterRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Rob Fraser, CEO of Endur, chats with Blaine and Ramon about how his career as an athlete enabled him to succeed as an entrepreneur and taught him the value of persistence, determination, and the ability to overcome failure. As an entrepreneur of a multi-million dollar brand, Rob discusses the power of bootstrapping & being scrappy (i.e., hitting the pavement & selling directly to customers, getting in-person customer feedback and transferring those learning to the online customer experience), creating a unique business model that allows endur to white-labels socks, maintain cashflow & reinvest that cash into endur or inline inventory, the power of ambassador programs, and how COVID propelled endur to new heights.Being an athlete… 0:56From athlete to entrepreneur… 7:30 - 10:19COVID’s effect on Endur 12:23 - 15:43Avoiding analysis paralysis 16:47 - 17:13Hitting the pavement 17:19 - 21:04Website tips 21:53 - 23:29Brand ambassador program 23:52 - 24:31Identifying brand super powers 25:00 - 27:39Making the first million 28:55 - 30:34The changes after one million 30:36 - 33:16Relentless pursuit of the mission 36:42 - 39:29Endur’s unique business model 39:47 - 43:22M&A 46:16 - 47:41Working in the office 51:13 - 52:07 This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Rob Fraser - CEO & Founder of EndurRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

David Gaylord has had a multifaceted career in ecommerce. He started at Shopify in 2015 as a customer success agent, became an Ops Lead in the Office of the COO in 2020, and a Permanent Merchant in Residence in 2021 where he uses his knowledge & experience founding Bushbalm - a natural skincare brand focused solely on the bikini line - to inspire and advise aspiring entrepreneurs. David joins Blaine Bolus and Ramon Berrios at the DTC Pod and tells us what it’s like navigating the world of ecommerce. Rising through the ranks at Shopify 3:54Resources to learn about business 14:56How Bushbalm increased AOV 20:21Testing out subscriptions 29:21Getting customer feedback 32:51Advice on starting a DTC business today 35:29The anatomy of DTC 43:42Managing ads for wholesale/ retail channels 46:19Finding success in waxing salons 48:18Expanding the team 51:41 This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok David Gaylord - CEO of bushbalmRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Shaun Brandt, co-founder of Oddit, is a designer and brand builder who is an expert at perfecting the customer journey and reducing friction points. His extensive agency experience (Shaun co-founded a product design agency that grew to 80 employees) helping brands grow enabled him to create Oddit. This first-of-its-kind CRO platform helps DTC brands boost conversion & strengthen loyalty. Shaun chats with Blaine Bolus and Ramon Berrios to discuss what makes Oddit unique and common CVR mistakes brands make. Building Trust 22:01 - 22:27If you don't have a ton of reviews, just pulling in one review, right up front and center, instead of even telling customers what it is what your product is just let a customer or a reviewer do it. So things like that, or, you know, instead of listing number of reviews, maybe list how many products you've sold. So maybe you haven't gotten a ton of reviews, because that hasn't been part of your roadmap yet, but you've sold 10,000 units. That's, that's social proof, you know, 10,000 people have trusted youClear Communication33:34 34:27There's so few users that read every piece of your site, look at a heat map, right? Like it's, it, there's there's a reason there's very specific points that are hot and cold. And it's just doesn't happen, very few users are going to read that entire flow. So I think communicating within actions as specifically as possible is really critical. Same thing with on your PDP, when you have a checkout button, or an Add to Cart button. You know, people are like, they always shy away from putting the price on the Add to Cart button. And I mean, maybe if you're if you're really worried about people being price sensitive, I mean, they're gonna ditch it in their cart if they don't know the price anyway. But I think the simple fact of showing that price and the add to cart, it all it does is it make sure the user doesn't have to look back and forth to the top of the screen. And that little millisecond, it has the smallest effect on conversion and the smallest effect on their drop off, because it's just one less thing that they're doing. Landing Page38:59 - 39:34What's unique about a landing page and where where I think brands could do a lot of learning is that by driving traffic to a landing page that's a little more flexible, a single page with storytelling, checkout. Kind of the full flow on a single page is you learn what works and what doesn't really quickly and you can split test a lot easier. And take those learnings back to your actual domain or your primary site and start to implement them on that end. I don't think you need to test them on both. A lot of the traffic is the same and a lot of the places that people get hung up is going to be the same.Humanizing Products24:59 - 25:56For me UGC is meant to look like UGC, it doesn't always have to be this high produced expensive video, it can really be an iPhone video of someone using it. Because when it's positioned the right way in that story the fidelity really isn't as important anymore. And the same goes with your ad strategy. So I think that's one of the main things is visuals. Like, there's something to be said about the brands that have this beautiful Apple feeling of everything is so perfect and rendered exactly with the right shadows and lighting and sizing. And that's great. It definitely makes the product look high end and does build a certain amount of trust. But I think you really can't have that exclusively. I think you have to find a balance of not UGC, necessarily, but just that more organic like hey here's the product actually in use. I think that's something that a lot of brands are missing on at least on the website.Alternative CVRs27:20 - 28:29What about the conversion rate of brand ambassadors, right? Like, you're gonna get a ton of people to your site that may not purchase, but if you make an impression on them there, they still might talk about it. like Graza olive oil is a perfect example. I can't even buy it. I can't order it in Canada, right? I can’t order it. I can't try it. But I know 10 chefs/ home cooks like I have preached that brand so many damn times. And I've never tried it. I don't know what the olive oil tastes like. I don't know how good the packaging is. I'm strictly basing it off of their storytelling on their site. And traditional CRO doesn't account for that. Right? That brand converted me into a brand ambassador without ever actually purchasing and I probably converted sales for them without them knowing or anyone knowing. But that’s CRO in the Oddit lens, right? Where you're telling a really unique story, you're showing a product really interesting. And you're doing it really organically in a way that converts people into brand ambassadors and brand believers without even ever trying the product. And I think that's a huge miss for a lot of brands where they're just like data, data data. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a f

Matt Mullenax, CEO of Huron, chats with Blaine & Ramon about his men's care brand offering A+ body care products for guys everywhere. This is Matt’s second time on the DTC Pod. The first time we spoke to Matt was during Huron’s launch, and a lot has happened since, including a global pandemic. Matt discusses how Huron evaluates their supply chain on a super granular level and how this informs their content and marketing strategy, selling on Amazon, and keeping a super clean & lean tech stack. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Matt Mullenax - CEO & Co-founder of HuronRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Kal Freese, co-founder of Taika chats with Blaine & Ramon about launching the functional coffee brand & how Taika leverages opportunities in Web3 to power brand, community, & product growth.Kal is a lifelong entrepreneur, YC alum, and multiple time VC backed founder who has always had a deep passion & appreciation for coffee. When he was 21, Kal opened a coffee shop in Helsinki and became a champion barista ranked no.9 in the world. Kal wanted to create the perfect coffee that provided people with energy but didn’t make them feel wired or jittery. He ended up creating Taika, a functional coffee made with adaptogens including L-theanine, lion’s mane, and ashwagandha. There are many resources on the internet to learn about Web3. Some of the people and resources that Kal recommends checking out include:Gaby’s Web3 Reading ListTim Ferris’s podcast with Chris Dixon and Naval RavikantJohn Craven’s twitter spacesClub CPGEmily Elyse Miller of OffLimitsSnaxshot by Andrea Hernández Watch the full episode here: This episode is brought to you by OpenStore:Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your ecommerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further? Shoot us a DM, we'd love to hear from you. Kal Freese - CEO of TaikaRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Episode brought to you by Trend & Finaloop.Ariel Vaisbort is the Influencer Coordinator at OLIPOP. After starting off as a part-time employee, Ariel quickly transitioned into running influencer coordination with OLIPOP full-time. Previously Ariel has developed social media for a number of companies including Her Campus Media, BANGS Shoes, and the Heritage School of Interior Design. She is also proficient in working with influencers and selling consumer products via e-commerce. OLIPOP is a beverage company that offers a healthy alternative to soda, focusing on microbiome and digestive health support. 6:48 – Don’t give people a scriptThe audience can tell when an influencer is just reading from a script. If you want people to engage with your product, you have to allow the influencer to speak authentically.“When we work with influencers, we don't give people a script. As a customer, when I see someone reading the script like, ‘Here's the product, I like the product. It is so good.’ Snoozefest. That sucks. That sucks to watch. So for us, as a brand, we don't give people a script. We give people, ‘Here's information about the brand. Here's what you could say, but we want you to talk about what is most impactful to you as a consumer of the product.’ And the biggest thing that we look for when we're working with new people is, does this person know about the product? Have they tried the product? Do they like the product? Because then it's going to come across so much more genuine and so much more real. And so we have people, and we want them to talk more about how the product works for them. Is it getting them fiber? Is it replacing a soda for them? Is it a healthy treat that they switch to instead of drinking wine? And we're trying to lean a lot more into this storytelling aspect and into more genuine stories about why the product is making a difference for people.”8:52 – Trust your influencersInfluencers know what their audience is going to engage with. Trust your partners to speak authentically to get the most interaction from potential customers.“At the end of the day, the creators and the influencers know best what their audience is going to respond and react to. This isn't their first time doing a partnership. They know what their audience is going to purchase, they know what their audience is going to be excited about. And we've had conversations with people where I've said to them, ‘Hey, we want to use this content that you've created on our pages, but I totally understand if it doesn't work out for your page.’ If it doesn't fit with your page and your audience, that's going to be weird. And that's how you lose your audience's trust is by posting things that you think, ‘My audience isn't going to like this.’ That's just how it is. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing obviously that we measure in this industry is your engagement rate, the realness of your audience. So if your audience isn't engaged, and you're posting constantly stuff that they don't care about, nobody's going to want to work with you.”11:31 – Approach influencers for specific needsNo single influencer can target your entire audience. Go to specific influencers so they can speak to specific audience types.“If you're this amazing graphic artist and you're like, ‘Oh, I have this cool thing I could do for the brand.’ And we want to work with you. I'm not going to say to you, ‘Okay, here's your link and your swipe app, post these Insta stories.’ Because that's not going to perform well. So I think a big thing of being a brand is you can't expect everything from everybody, and you can't expect every content creator that you work with to fulfill every single one of your needs. There are going to be people who will have different target markets, there are going to be people of different interests. You're not going to ask a fitness influencer to, I don't know, post a recipe. That would be a little bit weird. You would go to a food influencer for that. So I think it's just playing to people's strengths, and that's something that's super important for me when I'm having these conversations and seeing, ‘Could we do a partnership? How would that partnership look?’ I want to ask people, ‘What are your goals? What do you feel like you're the best at?’ Because if you feel like you're the best at something, that's what I want to work with you on.”13:31 – Work with a broad range of peopleDon’t just focus on high-profile influencers. Partner with interesting people who can broaden the scope of your target audience.“If we're only working with LA influencers or New York influencers, well, the target in Omaha, Nebraska, their sales are not going to be as good. That's just how it is. So we're working really hard to work with more people who are honestly just interesting people. We're looking a lot less than when we started, I think, at, ‘How many followers does she have?’ I look so much at, ‘What's her content like? Is this person someone I'd want to be

Colton Macaulay (@Coltyy), sits down with Blaine & Ramon to detail how he grew his audience to over 10 Million fans on TikTok, 3 Million+ on Youtube, and the creator's perspective on working with DTC brands. For Coltyy, becoming a TikTok star began with a passion for art, photography, and the outdoors. His wildlife photos were getting good attention on Instagram, but the engagement performed much better when he featured himself in the content. From there it seemed a natural step to start producing video, where he could be much less formal—and have fun in the process. Now, it’s not unusual for Colton to spend over 10 hours per day making content for his 10 million+ fans. 00:40 - The “creator house” vibeCreator houses are a unique space where popular creators gather to produce content. The fact that there is high expectation to produce contracted content for brands is a double-edged sword.“Obviously to live in these homes, you've got deliverables to meet. So maybe you’ve got to make a certain amount of videos with that caffeine bar, which is called the Nutrohaler per month, to stay and live in that house. Or you got to make a [inaudible], or we have that long format app that's going to be coming out soon, which is Flick. And we've got to make a certain amount of videos to help promote the launch. And then the last content before that would have been The Go, it was a reality show. That was also a shit show. They were just sucking every penny they could from every brand. And we had to like film six hours a day, and all these videos were heavily promoted with different brands.”08:37 - The first brand dealColton’s first brand deal resulted in a viral video with over 8 million views. He’s extremely thoughtful about which brands he will work with and the content he produces, as each video becomes part of his public profile.“Everything happened very fast. I was putting like crazy hours, like 10 hours a day. In the first two months I got to 72,000. This was 2018, I believe. Two months in around 72,000, and I had my first viral video series two days later. Another viral video series and I was at 450-450,000. I got my first song promo around like 800,000 followers. They just reached out to me. I had no idea what my worth was. I think I was still averaging probably at least 1.5-2 million views, and I think I accepted like $600 bucks, $800 bucks, which I was told was very underpriced. It was like yo, $800 bucks for being on TikTok?? All right. So that was probably my first deal, and that song promo got 8 million views on my video. I do put a lot of time in when it comes to brand deals and things like that. I know I usually can't remove these views from my profile, so I try to make it real good.”9:53 - Producing content organicallyEven when content is part of a paid promotion, Colton’s goal is to work the product or service in as organically as possible.“The last one that I did was one for Yubo, which is an app kind of like Tinder, but almost for friends. And then you play games and stuff on there. So I was like, all right, I'm in Florida. I’ve got to get this video done within like 24 hours if I want to do it. So my head’s just thinking like how can I incorporate maybe meeting a friend on this app, and doing something kind of crazy in Florida? I was like, okay. I just came from LA. I'm going to say that I was on Yubo and I met this other guy who loves wildlife, and he's in Florida. So I decided to go over to meet him and catch iguanas. So the video was just me and him catching iguanas in Florida. And then we both caught one where we brought them back to where like our Airbnb and were bonding with our iguanas, and then making jokes and stuff throughout the video to make it more entertaining. And that was kind of that promo. I just tried to make it feel as organic as possible. I don't want it to seem like it's forced.”11:30 - Vetting brand partnershipsAs a creator, Colton loathes email. He says the best way brands can approach creators is through DMs, where they should clearly state the type of engagement they’re seeking.“Most creators absolutely hate email. I'm sure some are pretty good at answering them, but I know a lot of my friends, including me. Super cluttered. I feel like I answer most of the DMs on Instagram. So if there's a company jumping in there, I'm on my screen all the time, including all my friends. Those are the ones I respond to the fastest, and it just seems more personal. I like texts. I like Instagram. I want something personal. The formal stuff, it's not really my thing. That's why having a manager would be awesome, because we're creators. We're not someone who's trying to do emails all day. So the ones that I respond to on Instagram for sure would be the ones that stand out, or they get straight to the point…I would like to know, like, are they just trying to get like a collab, like free product? Sometimes they won't even say. So you have to send emails back and forth to figure out what that is. Like

Greg entered the tech scene early in his career thanks to a friend who tipped him off on a sales job at a New York startup. He started out by literally sleeping in the office by night and making 150 cold calls per day. Unfortunately, his busy schedule and city lifestyle quickly led to burnout. After buying a one-way ticket to Thailand to decompress, Greg came back to the states and got a job at Twitter as a senior sales associate. Soon, he found himself falling back into his old bad habits, and starting formulating a nootropic beverage that would allow him to do his best work without negative side effects. Next, he worked at Stack Overflow on the enterprise sales team, which dried up during the pandemic. During 2020, he found the momentum he needed to finally become an entrepreneur and found NooWave. 17:56 - Find your “personal monopoly”Thanks to David Perell’s Write of Passage course, Greg found himself talking about his nootropics hobby over and over. A classmate’s interest provided the fuel he needed to get going.“There's this online writing course. I don't know if you guys know David Perell and Write of Passage….The very first week he has this section of the course where it’s called ‘your personal monopoly.’ So, I'm Greg Frontiero. I worked for these tech companies. I love nootropics. I am a professional wrestler. I do MMA stuff. And like, what is this zone where only I can talk about it and nobody else can touch me, right? What's my brand that nobody else writes about but me? And so I would say these nootropics things in these breakout rooms, and everybody had the same question, like what is a nootropic? I would tell that story I just told you, give you an example. Oh, I drink this coffee. And this guy, Robbie Crab who is like a performance speaking coach DMs me in the middle of me giving my speech about it and goes, ‘I want to buy this. Where can I buy this coffee?’ And I was like, oh, like I make it. And he's like, you should sell it. And it was like immediately. So when I tell you I had NooWave in my head for six years, I actually launched the company in six weeks.”21:30 - Tap your networkGreg’s first move was to write a letter about his new venture and send it to his network. The response was absolutely overwhelming, with everyone demonstrating interest in his product.“So I take this one blog post and I launch it to what I think is going to be crickets. No one's gonna care about it. I put it on my LinkedIn. I put it on like Twitter. I put it on whatever. It launches, and I swear to God, it's like a movie where every single person in my entire life like came out of the woodwork. Kids I haven't talked to her since kindergarten, teachers, coworkers, people at my MMA gyms, wrestler friends, everybody. Everybody in my life came out and. And I don't know if they necessarily gave a shit about like a nootropic coffee, but they were backing me and they sorta wrote it for me. It was just such a feel-good moment of, man. All that time in my life was for something, the connections and the people that you met. So we sold out our first run immediately.”25:49 - Cold call manufacturersMost companies require expensive minimums that are out of range for bootstrapped founders. Greg tapped deep into his salesman roots to find a coffee company that would work with him.“I'm also talking to all these manufacturers and how to do fulfillment and all that stuff. And it's a nightmare, right? Like when you're making this product and you have no money and resources and all these companies have giant minimums. And so now I'm looking at this and I'm looking at getting loans and small business loans and all that stuff. So this is what I tell everybody. I think if there's one thing I can tell people that is like the hardest part about starting a CPG brand is like the manufacturing process fucking sucks…The benefit of my experience is I'm so used to making 100 cold calls a day. I'm very used to that. And this is the old school of business. I am making like literally 10 phone calls a day to manufacturers in Seattle and talking to coffee people, talking to cacao people…That's how you have to do it. Honest to God. I'm telling you guys, this is not a thing where you can send an email and they're going to be opening your door, to maybe sell you 100 bags. You’re just not going to get a response. So you have to beat them down and you have to call.”28:31 - Pray for good luckAfter Greg identified a coffee partner, he started getting bad vibes. At the last second, another fulfillment option reached out to him. They remain his partners to this day.“At the fucking last week, we're going here. This company is just waiting for me to write them the check. And side note, I fucking hated our sales rep, hated this guy. Just every conversation with him sucked. He would just speak to me and he'd be like, ‘Yeah, so about the formula, like is this right?’ I was like, no, that's completely wrong. Like it's written down, you're responding in the same emai

Sean Frank was working at a local Los Angeles ad shop in his early 20’s when he and his friend Connor decided to start an agency of their own. The plan was to focus on a small team and high-touch client relationships. It worked so well that one of their clients, The Ridge Wallet, ended up absorbing their talented team entirely. At the time, Ridge was making a couple million dollars a year off Shopify and had accomplished a successful Kickstarter campaign. Sales were good, but they didn't have digital expertise in-house, and didn't want to manage a team. Instead of continuing to outsource to Sean, they ultimately merged. Sean has been CEO ever since. 4:24 - Diversify your ad strategyThe Facebook golden years didn’t last forever, and Ridge succeeded because they saw it coming and put resources into multiple ad channels early in the game.“Those first couple of years were the golden years, where we would just run Facebook ads driving to a Shopify page. The most complex thing was, we need better static photography. This is like 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, where if you were bad at Facebook ads, you got 10x ROAS. The thing that benefited us was we always thought it was going to get worse. I'm just a naturally paranoid person. So we were on the cutting edge of diversification away from paid media channels. So things were going great on Facebook. We were getting 10x ROAS. But it's like, we need to be on Snapchat. So we were the first Snapchat advertiser. If you read the Snapchat earnings report, when they launched ads we are named, because we were the first people doing it. We've been a TV spender for a year. So pre the iOS14 fuck-ups, we've been spending money on TV. We just always thought it was going to get harder. So one of our biggest tips was just diversify quickly.”5:49 - Prepare to pay taxesWhat makes surpassing the $10 million mark challenging for most brands is scaling quickly while also keeping up with your skyrocketing tax responsibility.“I think most businesses can get to that $10 million mark. If you're running right now and you have an ecomm product people seem to like, and you're running Facebook ads, you're doing the basic blocking and tackling, right? You're sending email campaigns. Maybe you're touching SMS right now. The $10 million mark is easy. We had the hardest time at $15-20 million, in that range, the post 10. SO we did $8 million one year, then we did $15 million. So awesome growth, near 100% growth. The next year we did $20 million. So growth slowed. That was the hardest year of the business. What happens is if you're a profitable e-comm brand, you have this problem where taxes are due every year. Specifically if you're doing accrual accounting, which you're supposed to now, I think. So you have this problem where you had a big tax bill, but you just grew really fast. So you need to buy inventory to keep up with that growth. And that's what kills those businesses. That's what really ends up fucking up growth past $10 million.”10:34 - Scoop up agency talentOne tactic to consider if you can’t find talent to support your brand? Buy an agency. That’s what worked for Ridge.“When we did the merger with Ridge, they were getting a full-fledged team, because we had email, search, whatever. But that was built up and subsidized by a functioning agency business at the time. So any advice for any really big brands listening right now is, if you've had a problem finding talent, just buy an agency. I think that's pretty good advice. Now, probably half the company has some sort of marketing role. We have six people, more now, probably have seven people who just do influencer marketing. So if you bought Ridge Wallets and you go on YouTube, or go on TikTok, you might see us sponsor a lot of content. We sponsor like 5,000 creators a year or something crazy. And all of that is done in-house through like seven people at The Ridge signing people all day long. Just to give you an example, we have two people who just do email, we’re probably going to hire a third person who just does email. We have a designer who just designs emails. So it ends up being very, very specialized, the bigger you get.”13:09 - Keeps things personalThe bigger your brand gets, the harder it is to personalize the customer experience. But it’s critical to remember that people buy from people.“Where I think big brands mess up is that people still buy things from people. So even if they're on their website or whatever, this whole idea of brand is like, does this product make me feel a certain way? And people are like the most centric part of feelings. I think one reason we’ve had so much success is our influencer program. And it's because people you trust are showing you this product. They say they love the product. And it mimics personal recommendations, to the highest degree. So I think it's a way we’ve captured a lot of success. And it's like, how do we continue to do that? How do we continue to personalize everything we're doing? And how do

Caroline McCarthy is the Co-Founder at Starday Foods. She started her career at Google in the AdWords arena, worked with clients like ClassPass on marketing strategy, and helped build out the performance marketing function at Slack. She also worked for a data science firm that worked for the Obama campaign, followed by working for the banking app One Finance that has since merged under the umbrella of Walmart. Throughout her tech journey, she has been exposed to strategic branding and design initiatives that aid her current work with Starday. Starday is focused on building a next-gen food conglomerate and has two current products: Gooey and All Day. 1:48 - Taking a data-driven approach to CPGStarday’s data engine uses first and third-party signals to identify gaps in the CPG market.“One of the things that is really important to our model is we have what I call like an in-house data engine that we've built that parses through third and first-party data signals to help us understand where we think that there are gaps in the market, based on either existing or ‘not popular’ foods that we think we could build a really strong brand and product around, that also is able to meet sustainability principles. And also, frankly, something that we think will taste good. We don't want to make a healthy product that no one actually wants to eat. With Gooey, without going into too many of the details with the data model because I don't want to bore everyone, we saw a fair amount of signal around a couple of different attributes. Low-sugar being one, dairy-free being another, sustainable, eco-friendly, plant-based in some capacity as well.”4:51 - Seeking mass-market appealMost CPG brands are led by strong founder stories. Starday is taking the opposite approach: foregoing the emotional appeal in favor of pure mass-market appeal.“There's often a really strong founder story behind a product that has really spoken to people. And I say this as someone with a nut allergy, I've always been very passionate about creating a nut-free cookie brand. It will happen one day, I swear. But the idea was to take a little bit of that sort of emotion out of it, and actually be like, okay. What does a wider swath of consumers want? Because the idea behind our products is that they should really be mass market. We're not trying to be in a really niche group…Part of that plays into it as well when we're looking at these products and the different data. Do we think we can actually build a product that's going to appeal to a larger mass of humans? Is this something where when we talk about going into retail, we're saying we can talk to Kroger, we can talk to Target? Or is this really a product that would only make sense at an Erewhon or a Whole Foods? If it's the latter case, there are plenty of amazing brands that are being developed and incredibly successful in that sort of arena. It's just the approach that we're trying to take.”5:44 - Keeping a similar consumer profileFocusing on products that cater to similar demographics has helped Starday avoid starting from scratch each time they launch a new product.“I oversee all aspects related to growth and marketing. So as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time thinking about our brands and the efficiencies that we can find between them. I would say first, we've maintained similar consumer demographics between our first two brands and expect to do so in the future. It's not just in terms of the cross-branding opportunities, but also in terms of how we are understanding our own data. We're not starting from scratch every time, and that's something that's really important and does go back into how we choose our products as well, back to that sort of consumer demographic that we're looking at. If we launch our third brand and we are talking to a completely different type of audience or consumer, that's a whole lot of work and learnings that we are going to have to start from scratch really. And I would prefer to sleep at night. So I would like to actually be able to learn from our last brand launches.”13:26 - Taking a lean approachKeeping overhead low means foregoing bells and whistles, but allows Starday to confidently repeat their design & launch process.“We have a very lean approach to developing and launching. And while that does mean that some of the bells and whistles that come with a lot of launches in this space, whether it's tons of press coverage or it tons of seating or it's a big influencer or celebrity founder, whatever it may be. We're not necessarily going to be having that on every launch. We might try it out for one or two launches, but we've been able to keep a really lean budget. And so I think that the efficiency that we have there is something that also a huge part of allowing us to keep doing this multiple times over. Because we didn't go and blow a bunch of money on launch A, and now we’ve sort of got to wait for revenue to catch up for another six months.”24:39 - Pitching investor

Brandon Blahnik served as Made In’s Director of Customer Experience from 2020 until early 2022. His role at Made In included overseeing all customer-facing teams such as phone, chat, email, and social, and working strategically with business partners to improve products and solve problems. Prior to Made In, Brandon worked for over a decade in service roles. His career began with the Orlando Magic, where an internship turned into a senior Premium Client Services Manager role. He also served as Head of Service Operations at Corkcicle from 2017-2020. Made In delivers high-quality kitchen tools to home cooks and professional chefs. Their philosophy is simple: better cookware means better meals. 11:16 - Prioritize CX from the top downWhen Made In encountered an extreme holiday backlog, the CEO decided that every employee needed to pitch in.“It was right after Black Friday, Cyber Monday in a year where trying to keep anything in stock was virtually impossible. So long lead times backorders for a lot of the orders. Which, as best as we tried to communicate those lean times to folks and expected ship dates, still led to a ton of questions and problems. So we were sitting on a 4-5 day first response time for a lot of the stuff in the email. We had called a couple of what our CEO titled as ‘snow days’ internally, where we had everyone in the company kind of shut down for a day and attack the queue, including our President, our CFO, all of our leadership team, the accounting team. Whoever was all kind of jumping in and attacking whatever questions we could just to try and get back to folks before the holiday. So really quickly identified that this is a leadership team and a culture that cares about the customer. They're not putting CX off on the side. ‘Good luck, we feel for you, here's some coffee and we'll cater in some food for you guys to try and work hard. Noo. They're in the trenches with us and making sure we had what we needed.”18:06 - Look at where you can improveIt can be easy to relax when CSAT numbers are high. But the winning strategy means looking at unhappy customers to continue to improve the overall experience.“I think at scale it gets easy. It's like, oh man, I'm glad I don't have to touch that and deal with the problems and the ugly stuff. Like, I like seeing the five-star reviews. I like seeing CSAT sitting at 94%. Like that's awesome. That's great. But the 6% is where I feel like a lot of the insights come from that can be a little uncomfortable to dig into, but I think that’s what's really going to drive improvement longer-term. And for us at Made In, it's where I've really credited Chip And Jake, our two co-founders, and Lindsay and Chad our VP of marketing and VP of ops. We sat together every two weeks and have a strategic conversation about what do we need to be working on? And that we didn't get to steady state with really strong CSAT first response time then they gave a pat on the back and thumbs up and said like, Hey, great job, keep it up. And let us run things. No, they still wanted to know where we could continue to improve.”21:05 - Identify specific problems and questionsBrandon’s team is constantly on the lookout for common questions and issues, so that they can brainstorm solutions as quickly as possible.“It all starts with identifying what are the problems and issues that we need to go do something about. What are the questions that are coming in from customers that customers don't want to ask? What are the problems that people are experiencing that we can do something about? We're shipping physical products, so there's going to be issues that happen. Anytime you're shipping products across the country, there's going to be damages. There's going to be stuff that's lost. We're limited in what we can actually do to solve for some of those problems. But there's a lot that we can solve for internally. When we think about issues or bugs or problems on the website, how do we very quickly capture that feedback, those issues, whatever info our web team needs to go try and solve whatever that specific problem is.22:16 - Make data your friendWhen you have data at your fingertips, use it to sift through trends so that you can identify areas for significant savings across the business.“We've got a ton of data on returns, and return reasons, and product defects, and warranty requests, and a variety of feedback, product reviews on, you've had it for a couple of weeks using it. What what's your experience been so far? And so how do we pull all that data together to identify trends, and like, ‘Hey, product team, we're not getting as, or we're seeing a drop-off in performance reviews and ratings across X product. I think we may need to dig in from a QC perspective here,’ or, ‘we're seeing breakage rate up and to the right in some of these SKUs. I think we need to rethink our packaging with a few hundred SKUs, that data can get clunky really quickly. So if you're not digging in and putting in place so

Ashvin Melwani is Co-Founder & CMO of Obvi, one of the world’s fastest growing health & nutrition brands. Since launching in 2019, Obvi has become a pioneering brand in the collagen space, shattering 8 figures in sales with distribution all over the globe. Before Obvi, Ash co-founded Ghost3Media, a digital advertising & growth agency managing over $15M of adspend.09:55 - Form a supportive communityAfter they had a solid customer base, Obvi invited customers to be a part of a Facebook group. With some strategic conversation starters, the group snowballed into a tight community.“Right at that small stage of where that community is just beginning, it's like people are shy. They don't know what to expect from this group. How do you start the conversation? So she would invite people to talk. So it's like you post in the group, ask a couple of questions like, Hey, what recipes are you guys trying today? And people would start to get a little bit more friendly. They start to explain their lifestyle and what's going on with them. And then you start to see this snowball effect of not just employees from our end or admins or mods on our end talking to the customers. Customers are talking with each other. It's like, oh, Hey guys, what do you think about this recipe? And then you'll have 10 other people like, oh, I loved it. But also you should try this or do this. And it just snowballs into this supportive community where it's not even about the product anymore. It's just about how to live a better lifestyle. How do you improve your health? How do you lose weight? How do you find the energy to do things in the morning? What do you do with the kids during the pandemic? Those conversations are happening within our community. And the one thing that just, I guess, connects everyone is the fact that they're an Obvi customer, but when you're in there, it's like you're one big family because everybody's super supportive.”11:33 - Make community the nucleus of your brandBuilding a community gives you a direct line to what your customer wants. Listen and then give it to them. It’s a huge organic channel that many brands aren’t using.“I think that's something that's very undervalued with brands right now because it's all sell, sell, sell, sell, but after a certain point, it's like, you need to build a relationship with your consumers. These are the people that are like going to be the ones that are going to give you the feedback of what new products should you come out with. What flavors are they looking for? If you ignore the obvious conversations that are happening in front of you, then I don't think brands will make it. You as a founder have to put aside your, maybe not ego, but there are certain things that maybe you want to do. Maybe certain products that you want to launch or flavors that you might want to launch. Is that going to resonate with your customer? If yes, great. Then you're both aligned. If not, why do it? You have a direct path to communication with your consumers, utilize it, ask them what they want. Hey, you want chocolate-covered strawberry flavor? We'll do it. And I think that's one of the biggest things that we've leveraged over the last few years. And I think we'll continue to keep that growing because I think it's the nucleus of our brand right now.”16:36 - Get immediate feedbackThe negative feedback you get from a community is what guides you to grow. When Obvi launched a 35 superfoods blend, they learned quickly that the taste wasn’t right and were able to fix it.“What happened was that we launched it. Everybody was excited for it. Everybody got it. And we got the feedback in the group saying, when I drink it, my throat burns. And we're like, what is happening? Why? We didn't get that feeling. What's going on? Did the manufacturer mess up, what's going on? Basically, in the formula there's cayenne pepper. Now certain people may not be used to that spice level. As a South Asian individual, I like spicy food. So I was maybe immune to it. Other people may not have been. And that's where it's like, okay, did we just mess up our launch? So we sold through and we're like, all right, here's the feedback that you got from the community. Go and adjust the formula. All we did was ask them to turn down the cayenne, maybe add a little bit more flavoring and it fixed it. It is now one of our top selling products. It's our top-selling SKU. That would not have happened unless we had those conversations. We would have maybe figured it out later where it's like, okay, interesting. Everybody bought this in January, but nobody bought it again. What's the reason? Then you send out a survey, nobody wants to fill out a survey, then you find out. I'm talking about, you're getting feedback as soon as that customer gets the product in the mail, not two or three months later when you try to realize, oh, why is this not moving anymore?”23:07 - Gamify product launchesCommunity is like a cheat code for successful product launches