DTC Podcast

DTC Newsletter and Podcast
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Weekly discussions between disruptive direct to consumer ecommerce brands and our amazing team about marketing, funnels, and everything scaling related. Subscribe to our newsletter for highlights and step by step tactical insights 👉🏻 📦 directtoconsumer.co

  1. 1d ago

    Ep 643: Amazon Fees Hit 40%: How to Claw Back Margin and Stop Wasting Ad Spend (Pilothouse)

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-643&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co In 2020, Amazon's fees ran about 26% of your product cost. Today they run 34 to 40%, and once you add advertising most brands are at 50 to 60% before they reinvest a dollar. For the first time in years, the number of sellers on Amazon is shrinking. Tyler, head of Amazon at Pilothouse, is back to explain what he calls the Amazon paradox: you can't afford to be on Amazon, and you can't afford not to be. If you sell on Amazon, buy Amazon ads, or keep putting off the decision to launch there, this is the operator's version of the math. What you get: Where the 40% actually goes, and which parts of it you can still fightThe hidden fee stack (long-term storage, inbound, freight, returns, chargebacks) that quietly takes another 5 to 8% of margin, one fraction of a percent at a timeReimbursements: Amazon loses and damages inventory and wrongly charges you for it, and will pay it back if you dispute it. Most brands never doAGL / AWD, shipping straight from your manufacturer into Amazon's fulfillment network, and the 2 to 5% freight savings that comes with itWhy the April 15 change (Amazon pulling ad spend out of your disbursement instead of your credit card) is a cash flow problem, not an ad problemThe death of the middle: half of Amazon's GMV now sits with roughly 8,000 sellers, down from 15,000, and what changed in the algorithm to cause itCosmo and what comes after A9: why external traffic into your listing now reads to Amazon as brand authorityNike showed up. What happens to the small sellers who used to feast on big brands' unconverted branded searchTACoS as a vanity metric, and the three-report method (SQP, Helium 10 rank, ad spend) that shows whether your ads are driving incremental sales or paying for organic ones you already hadRufus is now Alexa for Shopping, most people use it on the product page rather than in search, and what that means for your listing copyWhat Tyler expects out of Amazon Accelerate 2026 Who this is for: Amazon sellers, DTC founders weighing the channel, and anyone managing Amazon ad spend. What to steal: the reimbursement audit, the AGL freight move, and the zero-sale keyword sweep on your last quarter of ad spend. Timestamps: 00:00 The Amazon Paradox 04:00 Why Amazon Is Getting More Expensive 10:00 Hidden Amazon Fees Hurting Margins 15:00 Why Brands Still Need Amazon 21:00 How to Make Amazon Ad Spend More Profitable Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://www.pilothouse.co/?utm_source=AKNF643 Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    Ep 643: Amazon Fees Hit 40%: How to Claw Back Margin and Stop Wasting Ad Spend (Pilothouse)

  2. 2d ago

    How Once Upon a Farm's DTC Ads Grew Its Retail Business | Harness the Halo 2/6

    To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Once Upon a Farm did $85.4 million in Q2, up 42% year over year, and reached 6.2% of US households against 5.0% a year earlier. Some of that growth traces back to a campaign that was never supposed to produce it. They were running lower-funnel media to their own site, a clean shop-now call to action, the kind of campaign you judge by tomorrow's site revenue. What moved was the retail business. Instacart got more efficient. Programs with accounts picked up momentum. Jennifer Berglund has spent the years since trying to see that effect properly instead of guessing at it, and now she is watching paid search at one retailer lift sales at another, and that's where Keen is worth its weight in premium baby food. If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what happens to your job when the sale stops closing anywhere you can see it, and what you measure instead. If you own the media budget: Jennifer walks through how a one month TV test in 2021 turned into always-on upper funnel, including the matched-market holdout testing she used to defend it before she had a model. What they get into: The early signal: lower-funnel DTC media running, and the retail business taking off insteadThe finding out of Keen that surprised her most, paid search at Kroger or Target showing an effect on a different account entirelyWhy she treats ROAS as an education problem inside the company rather than a KPIThe trap in "new to brand" at a retailer, and why she takes it with a grain of saltHow she built the case for TV: 2021 test, then TV plus social plus out of home, then geo tests against comparable holdout markets, then always-onStreaming TV and YouTube, and Brad on buying top of funnel through retail media DSPs so the money still funnels to the retailerWhy every retail media network's conversion methodology is different, and what she uses those platform numbers for insteadThe moment a brand should stop putting every dollar into working media and start paying for measurementBrad on awareness as the leading indicator of household penetration, and household penetration as the leading indicator of revenueAmoeba marketing, which Brad coined live on the recording and Jennifer immediately claimed for her LinkedIn Who this is for: operators whose business has outgrown the channel their reporting was built for. DTC brands going into retail, retail brands building ecommerce, anyone whose media now shows up in someone else's numbers. What to steal: the biweekly omnichannel meeting. Jennifer runs one across her media team and sales leadership. Sales says "I see this happening here," she says "we were running media during that time." That meeting found the halo before any model did. Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 was the market read. This is the first brand. Timestamps: 00:00 The Halo Effect of Digital Marketing 07:00 Measuring Growth Across DTC and Retail 15:00 How Marketing Channels Influence Each Other 21:00 Streaming TV and YouTube Opportunities 37:00 Why ROAS Can Be Misleading Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    How Once Upon a Farm's DTC Ads Grew Its Retail Business | Harness the Halo 2/6

  3. 5d ago

    Ep 642: Kick or Keep These Trends with DÔEN's Ashley Kick: AI Creative, TikTok Shop, Amazon, and Branded Resale

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-642&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Ashley Kick runs ecommerce at DÔEN (shopdoen.com), the Los Angeles apparel brand founded by sisters Margaret and Katherine Kleveland. Eric met her at the Whalies giving hot takes on stage, so this episode is a new format built for exactly that: World Cup themed, 15 ecommerce topics, kick it or keep it. If you run a premium brand and you are tired of advice written for a $30 AOV, Ashley draws lines most operators are still arguing about internally. What's inside: AI generated ad creative, kicked as hard as anything gets kicked on this show: "they didn't fall in love with the clanker generated things"Her pendulum argument: everything used to be human made, the swing to AI has been fast, and the vacuum it left is the differentiation opportunity for brands willing to keep humans on the work. DÔEN has hired novelists to write copyWhy she will not trade a discount or free shipping for an email address, with the list math behind it: a million names sending at 20%, or 300,000 sending at 60 to 70%Hand Me DÔEN, the resale program that runs on Treet: trade in for store credit, quarterly resale events, and an answer to the dupe sellers, because buying from the program is how a customer knows the piece is realThe AOV line where she thinks TikTok Shop stops making sense, and why discovery on TikTok still matters for the brand through user generated contentLosing money on the first order to win it back on LTV, kicked. Her hero products are chosen as the best first experience of the brand, and they are not loss leadersWhere she is happy to let algorithms work: media buying, placements, and Klaviyo send-time optimizationAI for customer service, kicked. If someone wants to talk about the fit of a dress, that is a personRetail as an experience play, including a roughly 20% brand awareness lift in a market when a store opens, plus wholesale through boutiques with an aligned aestheticAmazon, extended sizing, and buy now pay later, each with a verdict Who this is for: operators at premium and considered-purchase brands, retention and email leads, and anyone building the argument for keeping humans on creative. What to steal: the email capture stance. Stop buying addresses with 15% off and measure your list on deliverability and send rate rather than raw size. Timestamps: 00:03:00 AI Shopping Agents 00:05:00 TikTok Shop for Premium Brands 00:10:00 Branded Resale and the Circular Economy 00:14:00 AI-Generated Creative and Brand Identity 00:24:00 Wholesale, Amazon and Discount Strategy Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    Ep 642: Kick or Keep These Trends with DÔEN's Ashley Kick: AI Creative, TikTok Shop, Amazon, and Branded Resale

  4. Aug 28

    Ep 641: Creator-Handle Ads Ran 70% More Efficient: Aves on Creative Coverage and Hyper Relevant Ads

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-641&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co DTC Twitter has spent the last few months arguing about volume versus strategy. Aves from Pilothouse thinks both camps are answering the wrong question. Eric brings her back for an all killer no filler on creative coverage: what it means now, how she decides what to make next, and the system she spent her summer building. For anyone who briefs creative, buys media, or signs off on either. What you get: Why a thousand Grok ads in a month spikes CPMs and stops finding your audience, and why one precious video every two weeks fails for the opposite reason.The three layers of coverage that matter now: right people, right product, right angles. Sizes and placements should be second nature by now.Persona coverage past your bread and butter. If the answer is always "a woman in her twenties," you are not covering the audience you need in order to grow.Product coverage, the layer most teams skip. Cross-referencing which SKUs bring people in cheapest against which ones are most efficient to ship, then testing returning-customer-only products at top of funnel to find margin nobody was looking for.Diagnosing by problem rather than format. Heavy cart abandonment usually means a trust gap, which points to whitelisting first and conversion-friction statics behind it. Creator-handle delivery ran 70% more efficient than the same creative from the brand.Selling the cloud when the economy tightens. Aspirational is outperforming pure problem agitation right now.Hyper relevancy. The echo chambers have gotten small enough that a meme Aves sees every third video is one you've never heard of, so the ad has to match the exact font, the audio they've been hearing, even the camera angle. She ran "kinda chic" in ads without ever learning what it means.Nobody is watching. Most people are lurking, and most of them are half-watching from the toilet or a waiting room. Aves watched a woman scroll Instagram through the entire Odyssey.Creative is the new targeting, five years of everyone saying it, and the spaghetti metaphor that finally explains it.Landing pages as the insurance policy on all of it. Spend two thousand dollars on a t-shirt and it still looks bad wrinkled.Ad copy. Aves writes hers first, before any visual, and uses no AI for it. One emoji-only ad carried by copy alone did over six figures in a weekend. Who this is for: creative strategists, media buyers, and founders heading into Q4 wondering why more ads stopped working. What to steal: the product coverage audit, the cart-abandonment-means-trust diagnosis, and starting your brief with copy instead of a visual idea. Timestamps: 00:03:00 Creative Volume vs. Strategy 00:05:00 Building Better Creative Coverage 00:10:00 Creative for Full-Funnel Performance 00:20:00 Why Creative Is the New Targeting 00:28:00 Why Ad Copy Matters More Than Ever Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://www.pilothouse.co/?utm_source=AKNF641 Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    Ep 641: Creator-Handle Ads Ran 70% More Efficient: Aves on Creative Coverage and Hyper Relevant Ads

  5. Aug 26

    Bonus: $65M Exit, Zero Employees: How Olauto Automates Everything Except Customer Service

    To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Tyler Handley sold Inkbox to BIC for $65 million. His new company, Olauto, sells a $33 car air freshener, launched last September, is already profitable, and has zero employees. Four people, some contractors, and AI running the back office. The one thing they refuse to automate: when a customer emails, a human answers. Every time. The guy who built the software behind that is Mike Maleszyk, Tyler's friend since high school, who started HumanTouchCX after a support chatbot swore it was human but couldn't say what it had for lunch. If you run CX for a Shopify brand, or you're deciding right now which parts of your business AI should touch, this episode is the two of them drawing the line in public. Want the setup Olauto uses? HumanTouch is taking on its first 100 Founding Merchants, with white-glove onboarding and 24 months of locked pricing. What's inside: Why Braden reviews every automated reply "from hi to buy," and the one automation he had to be convinced to allow (off-hours only)Deflection rate, and what the merchants bragging about theirs are actually countingProduct questions as the worst place to put a bot: those customers are low funnel with a cart openThe Inkbox moderation story: 13 to 20 CX agents, custom tattoo uploads in a gray area no AI could judge, and the customer emails that started "why do you want this?"Article 50 of the EU AI Act, live since August 2nd: transparency, record keeping, and audit logs for every AI touchpoint if you sell into the EUTyler's vibe-coded ERP: why it hooks into Shopify and nothing else"Friend founding," and how four people split brand, supply chain, CX, and adsHewie, the AI that helps train your first CX hire off your own past tickets instead of your calendar Who this is for: DTC founders and CX leads between launch and $100M who are being pitched full automation from every direction. What to steal: Braden's rule. Automations answer the 65% (shipping status) during off hours only, and a human still has eyes on every single reply before the relationship is on the line. Timestamps: 00:00 Building an AI-powered brand without losing the human touch 05:00 Why AI customer service needs transparency 12:00 The problem with optimizing customer support for deflection 21:00 What the EU AI Act means for ecommerce brands 28:00 How a four-person team uses AI to scale an ecommerce brand Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    Bonus: $65M Exit, Zero Employees: How Olauto Automates Everything Except Customer Service

  6. Aug 24

    Ep 640: 2x LTV From Loyalty Without Discounting: Carve Designs on Retention, Direct Mail, and CTV

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-640&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs (carvedesigns.com), the Northern California swim and apparel brand founded in 2003 and acquired by Komar Brands in December 2025. Before Carve she spent years at Amer Sports on the digital team behind Salomon, Atomic, Suunto, Arc'teryx and Wilson. If you run retention or growth at a brand with a seasonal core product and a loyal base you have not fully mined, this one is for you. What's inside: The retention rebuild: what was already working at Carve after 20 years, and the one thing they were not doing with their customer dataMapping the full customer journey in Figma, then finding the gaps where nobody was talking to the customer and the places where they were talking too muchRFM segmentation as the floor, then layering category purchase behavior on top to move a swim buyer into denimThe cohort analysis that changed the media mix: dresses and accessories produced the highest-LTV customers, so those categories now lead the creative and seed the look-alikesDirect mail as a performance channel: 5 to 6 catalogs a year to prospects and past buyers, plus programmatic postcards that only drop if the email win-back does not convertEmployee-generated content, and how one test turned into a full content pipeline with the organic social team shooting UGC-style video on the catalog shootsConnected TV without a commercial budget: an agency turns UGC and EGC into the spot, the founder does the voiceover, and success is measured on cost per site visit with MMM picking up the Amazon haloLoyalty built on early access and product feedback instead of percent-off, with roughly 2x the LTV of a non-memberQ4 without heavy discounting: point multipliers and added value inside the tentpole momentsWhat she is using AI for right now, from LTV dashboards in Moby 2 to Orita surfacing customers when they are most likely to buy Who this is for: retention and lifecycle leads, growth marketers at seasonal brands, and operators who moved from a big portfolio company to an SMB. What to steal: run LTV by first-purchase category before you plan next season's creative mix. And give partnership content 6 to 12 months before you call it. Hannah says that is how long it took at Carve before influencer content started working. Follow Hannah: LinkedIn, Hannah Fleming | carvedesigns.com Timestamps: 00:00 Building Loyalty Beyond Discounts 05:00 Using Customer Segmentation for Retention 10:00 Direct Mail as a Performance Channel 16:00 Building a High-Value Loyalty Program 24:00 Testing Direct Mail and Connected TV Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    Ep 640: 2x LTV From Loyalty Without Discounting: Carve Designs on Retention, Direct Mail, and CTV

  7. Aug 21

    Ep 639: "The Creative Is the Brief": Pilothouse on AI Storefronts and a 20-21% Conversion Rate Lift

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-639&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Media owns the traffic. Brand owns the site. The page in between belongs to nobody, and it's been sitting in a Notion doc called landing page priorities Q3 since 2022. Eric brings Daniel from Pilothouse back for an all killer no filler on the post-click experience: why it stayed generic for a decade, what changed in the last twelve months, and what the team is seeing in its pilots with Black Crow AI. For media buyers, creative strategists, and founders whose ads are working and whose conversion rate isn't. What you get: The middle child problem. Media assumes brand is loving the page, brand assumes media is, and nobody has touched it since 2022.Why this was never a priority question. Personalizing creative is cheap. Personalizing destinations used to mean five pages through design, dev, QA, and deploy, which took literal months. So teams built one page, pointed everything at it, and updated it once a year.The 65-inch OLED analogy. You walk into a store, tell the salesperson exactly what you want, and they hand you the catalog. That's what a generic PDP does to someone who just clicked a very specific ad.The creative is the brief. The ad unit becomes the input for the storefront: the copy, the image, the targeting, the interests, all of it read and matched.What the pilots are showing: roughly 20 to 21% lift in conversion rates, on storefronts now taking about half the budget rather than one test ad set off in the corner.Where Black Crow adds something a general purpose model doesn't. Persistent ID across sessions means the page knows you're back and can serve a different experience.The technical prerequisites that actually gate this: Shopify, and enough Meta budget to test a difference. Brand and creative prerequisites matter less.Brand safety. These aren't fully dynamic pages. You can lock images and titles and adjust on the fly.Which brands it suits so far: a few concentrated top SKUs rather than a long tail catalog.The third party cookie, revisited. Daniel's verdict on the biggest talking point of 2022: what a nothing burger.Why the strategist now owns this. No IT ticket, no web team queue. That's the difference between now and twelve months ago. Who this is for: performance marketers and DTC founders who have solved pre-click and never touched what happens after. What to steal: treating your best ad as the brief for its own landing page, and the Shopify plus testable budget prerequisite check before you invest in any of this. Timestamps: 00:03:00 Why the post-click experience matters 00:07:00 Personalized landing pages lift conversion rates 00:10:00 AI-powered landing page personalization 00:15:00 Matching landing pages to ad creative 00:21:00 Using ad creative as the landing page brief Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://www.pilothouse.co/?utm_source=AKNF639 Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    Ep 639: "The Creative Is the Brief": Pilothouse on AI Storefronts and a 20-21% Conversion Rate Lift

  8. Aug 20

    What Brands Really Spend on Marketing: 15% at $10M, 2% at $1B | Harness the Halo 1/6

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup A brand doing $10 to $15 million a year puts 15 to 20 percent of revenue back into marketing. At $100 to $500 million it drops to roughly 8 to 10 percent. Past a billion it is 2 to 3 percent. Justin Jefferson has a view across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment, and those numbers are the opening for a harder conversation about where the money should go. If you run growth: this is the episode about defending a slow-payback bet to a finance team that closes books quarterly. If you sit closer to the P&L: Justin explains discounting future marketing revenue back to present value, so marketing and finance can argue about the same number. What Justin gets into: Spend-to-revenue benchmarks at $10 to 15M, $100 to 500M, $500M to $1B, and past $1BMarginal ROI against blended ROI, and why a 1.4 return can hide a next dollar worth 60 centsThe brand that went zero to a hundred on top of funnel, lost sales volume in year one, cut budget in response, and then had nothing left to capture the demand it had createdThe golf apparel brand that moved deliberately into CTV, linear, and audio: roughly flat in year one, about 23 percent growth in year twoWhy Amazon search is often the most overspent line in a budget, and where he sees real incrementality on Amazon insteadThe gap he sees between top and bottom of funnel returns: roughly 180 against 120 to 140Why brands growing 5 percent or more changed their channel mix significantly more year over year than flat ones Who this is for: operators between $10M and $500M who have squeezed Meta and Google as far as they go and need a defensible case for spending where the attribution is fuzzy. What to steal: report return on the next dollar by channel alongside blended ROI. Most teams have only ever seen the second number. Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 sets the state of the market. The next five are the bets themselves, told by the operators who made them and the people who signed off. Timestamps: 00:00 Why Marketing Mix Modeling Is Changing 03:00 Why Meta and Google Are Getting Harder to Scale 07:00 When Brands Should Invest in Top-of-Funnel 13:00 How to Measure and Predict Marketing Performance 19:00 How the Marketing Halo Drives Growth Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Follow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

    What Brands Really Spend on Marketing: 15% at $10M, 2% at $1B | Harness the Halo 1/6
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5
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About

Weekly discussions between disruptive direct to consumer ecommerce brands and our amazing team about marketing, funnels, and everything scaling related. Subscribe to our newsletter for highlights and step by step tactical insights 👉🏻 📦 directtoconsumer.co

Information

  • Creator
    DTC Newsletter and Podcast
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    776
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 352487
  • Show Website
    DTC Podcast

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