The DTC Podcast

Eric Dyck
  • 4.4 (38)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Daily

What does it take to build and scale a successful direct-to-consumer brand? The DTC Podcast is a marketing strategy podcast hosted by Eric Dyck, with practical ecommerce growth strategies from founders, operators, and marketing experts. Explore DTC marketing, customer acquisition, performance marketing, paid media, conversion rate optimization, customer retention, creative strategy, AI, and brand growth. Hear what works, what fails, and how leading consumer brands adapt and grow. Subscribe for actionable insights to help you build a stronger, more profitable ecommerce business.

  1. 1d ago

    How DTC Brands Should Prep for Amazon Black Friday After Prime Day

    How should DTC brands prep for Black Friday on Amazon? This year's Prime Day events show where ecommerce growth is coming from: shoppers stocked up on consumables while big-ticket categories lagged. Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse. He walks through what June and October Prime Day showed. Some consumable brands Pilothouse manages grew 150% or more year over year during October Prime Day, a few sold more in that two-day event than in the four-day June event, and average order value dropped. He explains what that means for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, how premium brands should position for shoppers who wait for deals, and what to set up on Amazon now. Work with Pilothouse: https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Key takeaways: - Know which shoppers are waiting on you. Paper products, household cleaning, personal hygiene and pet food jumped on deal days, while headphones, tablets, wearable tech and TVs lagged. - Sell on value. Shoppers want the product they already like at a better price, so make your differentiator easy to find and quick to understand on the listing. - Build awareness before the deal day. Shoppers do their research ahead of the sale, so get in front of them in the weeks before Black Friday and retarget them on the day. - Test your listing images with care. Amazon once required white backgrounds, and lifestyle and annotated images exist because sellers kept pushing. Deal-day hints in images are a gray area, and a removed listing means missing the event entirely. - Be available where your customer shops. More shoppers compared Walmart, Target and DTC sites during deal days, and if your competitor is listed there and you are not, they get the sale. - Plan a review push after Black Friday. Amazon's new Review Requests ads let you pay per click to ask recent buyers for a review. A click does not guarantee a review. - Start ranking for your Black Friday keywords now. Put the keyword in your title, highlights, bullets and description, give it its own campaign, and use placement modifiers to hold top of search into the deal day. About the guest: Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse, a full-funnel performance marketing agency for DTC brands. https://pilothouse.co Stay connected: Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Sponsors: Advertise on DTC: https://dtcnews.link/advertise Timestamps: 00:03:36 Amazon Prime Day trends 00:05:00 Consumables surge during deal days 00:07:40 How shoppers define value 00:12:30 Positioning premium products for BFCM 00:16:40 Omnichannel holiday shopping behavior

    How DTC Brands Should Prep for Amazon Black Friday After Prime Day

  2. 3d ago

    How to Build a Creative Flywheel for Your DTC Brand for Free

    Do influencer partnership ads lower customer acquisition costs for DTC brands, or just move them? They lower CAC on Meta, but rev-share creator deals send a big share of that saving into a new line on the P&L. Yash Chavan, founder and CEO of Saral, the team behind the Sathi affiliate platform, walks through the math on an $80 AOV supplement brand and lays out how to build a creative flywheel instead: an influencer affiliate program where affiliate revenue covers the cost of seeding product, and the posts that win organically become the ads you boost on Meta and TikTok. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - Work out whether partnership ads are cutting your CAC or relocating it, using Yash's worked example of an $80 CAC dropping to $68 while creator and platform fees add $9.20 back. - See why creator payouts tied to GMV grow as a variable cost when you scale ad spend, and how capping the payout on any single ad stops one viral video from costing you $10,000. - Build a creator pyramid: seed creators who already post in your niche, turn the ones who post into affiliates, give the top sellers bigger deals, and run the top performers by views as partnership ads. - Let organic performance choose your ad creative, with rules like boosting a reel on Meta once it passes a view threshold inside 48 hours. - Raise your affiliate activity rate by rewarding the steps before the sale, like a free product when a creator joins and a small cash reward when they post. - Catch leaked codes, leaked affiliate links, and affiliates bidding on your brand keywords before you pay commission on those sales. - Plan a creator push in mid October that can still produce ad creative and affiliate revenue before Black Friday. About the guest: Yash Chavan is the founder and CEO of Saral, an influencer marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Before Saral he ran an influencer marketing agency. His team also built Sathi, an affiliate platform for creator-led brands with fraud protection and gamified rewards. Saral: https://getsaral.com/ Sathi: https://www.mysathi.io Stay connected: Website and newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by Saral and Sathi. Saral matches your brand with creators who already make content in your niche, and Sathi turns the creators who post into affiliates, with fraud protection and gamified rewards built in. Start a free trial at https://getsaral.com/

    How to Build a Creative Flywheel for Your DTC Brand for Free

  3. 5d ago

    DTC Customer Acquisition: How O Positiv Scaled TikTok Shop to $70K a Day

    How do you lower customer acquisition costs for a DTC brand? Bobby Bitton, co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, says TikTok Shop did more for his CAC than any other channel. He launched it as a side project in November 2023, and within 30 days one SKU went from $2,000 a day to $70,000 a day. Bobby walks through how O Positiv runs more than 100 ads a week through an in-house creative team, how they move what works on TikTok Shop over to Meta, and why retention now gets the same attention as acquisition. He also explains why the brand waited until it was a $100 million business to go into retail, why linear TV beat streaming in their geo tests, and the brand architecture decision he would make differently. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: Lower CAC with TikTok Shop by sending samples generously and recruiting affiliates every week. Bobby set a goal of 1,000 affiliates and did the outreach himself on Sunday nights.Start TikTok Shop simple. Get affiliates posting before you touch GMV Max, paid campaigns, or contests.Get more usable creative by briefing creators less. O Positiv's brief is the product, what it does, what creators can say, and what they can't.Feed Meta with TikTok Shop learnings. The winning creator content runs on Meta, and the creators get paid extra for it.Test for creative diversity instead of running ten copy variations on one static image.Hold Meta to an allowable CAC and move spend up or down with the strength of your creative.Grow lifetime value by planning for life stages. A PMS customer who gets pregnant should reach for your pregnancy product, then your menopause product.Launch products customers can feel working. O Positiv's fiber gummy stuck and its immune gummy didn't, and that became the product rule.Go into retail with a big DTC business behind you, push for endcaps and out-of-aisle displays, and fly out for the buyer meeting.Expect retail to break your attribution. When Meta ads drive store sales, your Shopify CAC climbs while the business grows, so build omnichannel measurement early.Decide early whether you are a house of brands or a branded house, and keep it simple. About the guest: Bobby Bitton is the co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, the women's health brand he started with his sister Brianna Bitton in 2018. O Positiv makes FLO, URO, and MENO, and sells through its own site, TikTok Shop, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and CVS.https://www.opositiv.com Stay connected: Follow The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

    DTC Customer Acquisition: How O Positiv Scaled TikTok Shop to $70K a Day

  4. Oct 16

    Founder Story Ads: How DTC Brands Win on Meta Without an Obvious Product Edge

    What's the best DTC marketing strategy on Meta when every competitor makes the same claims? Liam Robinson, co-founder of Marlbank, says to stop arguing features and lead cold prospecting with your brand's growth story. On this episode of All Killer No Filler, he walks through how that switch got a supplement brand built by chemists scaling on Meta after months of feature-led ads went nowhere. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - How to sell a product that's better than the competition when the reasons don't show up in an ad - Why feature-led ads turn into a shouting match in cold Meta prospecting - How to imply product quality through your brand's growth story instead of claiming it - What to use when you don't have big numbers yet: a first farmers market, a first hire, a first customer - How to build a then-and-now prospecting ad from your own camera roll - How Marin Skincare and Vyper Industrial pair a product distinction with a founder story - How to turn a Dragons' Den appearance into an ad, whether you got a deal or walked away without one - Which brands this angle won't work for About the guest: Liam Robinson is co-founder of Marlbank, a Meta-only agency for early-growth ecommerce brands, built in partnership with Pilothouse. Before Marlbank, he was one of Pilothouse's first media buyers. Reach Liam at liam@marlbank.co or his co-founder Nate at nate@marlbank.co. Stay connected: Subscribe to The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Get the DTC Newsletter at https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

    Founder Story Ads: How DTC Brands Win on Meta Without an Obvious Product Edge

  5. Oct 15

    How to Get Your CFO to Approve a Bigger Marketing Budget: CAC, Meta and Brand Spend | Harness the Halo 5/6 

    How do you get your CFO to approve a bigger marketing budget for a DTC brand? Drew Fallon, former CFO of Mad Rabbit, says finance is watching one number, CAC, and that brand spend only gets funded once direct response is efficient enough to pay for it. Drew is now CEO of Iris Finance, a finance platform for CPG and DTC brands, where he sees the books of 200 brands, most of them between $20 million and $300 million in revenue. He joins Eric Dyck and Claudia Lauture, VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, to work through the argument between marketing and finance, including who should own the budget and when a brand can afford upper funnel. You walk away knowing what to bring into the budget meeting and how finance will score it. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE You don't know what finance is judging your plan on. Drew's answer is CAC. If CAC, retention and LTV to CAC land where his model has them, he says he does not care how much you spend or what you spend it on.You need money for a bet that won't pay back this quarter. Drew wants one of two cases made: that it raises MER and contribution margin, or that the upside is big enough to be worth the risk.You want to start brand marketing and direct response is only just carrying the business. Drew says there is no room yet. Most companies he sees don't start brand work until somewhere past $30 million in revenue, and he would not do it at $10 million.You think you have topped out on Meta. Drew says Meta takes a brand farther than most operators expect, and that you can probably ride it to $100 million.You are looking for the next channel after Meta. Across the 200 brands on Iris, Drew has not seen one scale AppLovin spend and make more money. The pattern he describes is a brand that reaches $50 million on Meta, puts $200K a month into AppLovin and watches its margin go away.Your upper funnel keeps getting cut to hit the quarter. Claudia's team at Keen runs both plans out two and three years, so the cost of the cut is on the table next to the short-term number.Your cash position keeps surprising you. Drew builds a bear, a base and a bull case, then tests the base at 40% over and 40% under. Beating plan by 60% can still run a brand out of money, because of inventory.Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Drew says it is usually the marketing lead and should be the CFO, on the condition that the CFO understands growth marketing, which he calls rare.Your agency bill is being questioned. At Mad Rabbit, Drew let go of an Amazon agency he liked because it cost roughly $60K a month and he could hire two full-time people for two thirds of that.You are planning Q4 the way you did last year. Drew is hearing more brands pull back on TikTok after losing money there last year, and supplement founders tell him they are waiting for January because Q4 brings higher returns, more churn and discount shoppers.You are reporting platform revenue to finance. Both guests named it as the number they stopped trusting. Drew: "It's all higher than what you get on your P&L." ABOUT THE GUESTS Drew Fallon is co-founder and CEO of Iris Finance and the former CFO of Mad Rabbit. https://irisfinance.co Claudia Lauture is VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com HARNESS THE HALO Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is episode 5 of 6, and a new episode drops every other week. SPONSOR Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

    How to Get Your CFO to Approve a Bigger Marketing Budget: CAC, Meta and Brand Spend | Harness the Halo 5/6 

  6. Oct 12

    DTC to Retail: How Flex Reached 30,000 Stores After Turning Down Target Twice

    When should a DTC brand move into retail? Flex founder Lauren Schulte Wang said no to Target twice, and retail is now over 60% of revenue. She waited until her supply chain and her marketing engine could handle it, and she went because customers told her every month that they wanted to buy the product in a store. On the DTC Podcast, Lauren tells Eric Dyck how Flex got from a landing page with 200,000 emails and no product to 30,000 retail doors and more than 185 million menstrual discs sold. She covers the DTC strategy behind the timing of the retail move, how connected TV and subway ads lift every other channel, and what she is doing about a category that only 3% of people have heard of. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE A big retailer wants your product and you are not sure you are ready. Lauren turned Target down two years running until supply chain, manufacturing and margin-based LTV to CAC were dialed in, because a marketing engine that cannot scale before retail will not scale once you are on shelf.Your subscription keeps missing the moment customers need the product. Flex changed pack sizes, changed frequencies and opened fulfillment centers on both coasts. The fix was in the customer research the whole time: people wanted to buy it in a store.Your product needs explaining before anyone will buy it. Flex ads without an education piece perform worse, so the answers to "will it get stuck" and "is it messy" go inside the ad itself.You are about to spend real money on your first TV campaign. Flex hired a big agency, shot a high-production spot Lauren had doubts about, and had to spend out a contract on ads that did not perform. The rule since then is that nothing runs on TV unless it has already worked on YouTube.Your category has almost no awareness and you cannot outspend the giants. With unaided awareness of menstrual discs at 3%, Flex added CTV, New York subway ads and campus marketing so that a friend's recommendation, a subway poster and a TikTok from a small creator all reach the same person.You do not know which content will move retail sales. A plain YouTube video explaining how the Flex Cup's pull tab works went viral and lifted Flex's velocities at Walmart by double digits.You launched to a huge waitlist with no way to fulfill it. Flex could not ship in the US yet, so the founders flew to Europe on cheap Iceland fares and hand-packed discs at local post offices. They had $80,000 in pre-orders before demo day.You found a competitor's patent on the product you wanted to make. Lauren pitched the company, got turned down, designed around the patent, and then acquired that company while she was still in Y Combinator. ABOUT LAUREN Lauren Schulte Wang is the founder and CEO of The Flex Company, the period care brand behind the Flex Disc, the Flex Cup, Softdisc and Softcup. She started Flex in 2015, went through Y Combinator in 2016, and coined the term "menstrual disc." Flex products are sold in 30,000 stores including Walmart, Target and CVS. https://flexfits.com Instagram and TikTok: @flex STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer TIMESTAMPS 00:00 How Flex turned viral attention into growth 08:00 Why doing things that don’t scale works 12:00 How retail became Flex’s biggest growth channel 17:00 Why product education drives performance 32:00 What makes TV and YouTube creative work

    DTC to Retail: How Flex Reached 30,000 Stores After Turning Down Target Twice

  7. Oct 9

    AI Agents for Ad Creative: The Workflow Saving a Pilothouse Strategist 5.5 Hours a Week

    How can AI agents speed up ad creative for a DTC brand? Braydon, a creative strategist at Pilothouse, has agents build his swipe file every Monday and Claude write his design tickets, which saved him five and a half hours last week. Braydon joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to walk through the full workflow. Grok Bot handles the research with a chief of staff agent that manages a team of sub-agents. Higgsfield turns the references he picks into on-brand mockups. Claude writes the tickets for the designers, who still make the finished ad. He also explains why he is not bullish on AI-generated ad creative right now, and why some of his clients have asked for zero AI in their ads. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE You trigger every AI task by hand. Braydon sets up a chief of staff agent in Grok Bot that manages sub-agents on a schedule, so the research is waiting for him on Monday morning.Competitor and creative research eats your week. His agents go through Pinterest, the ad library and Motion, and one run came back with a swipe file of around 70 creatives relevant to the brand.You write the same design tickets over and over. Braydon loads his internal processes into Claude, hands it the ideas he picked, and it writes the ticket descriptions for the designers.You can't tell where AI belongs in the creative process. He uses it for strategy, references and mockups, then gives the work to designers for the finished product.Your AI images look like AI. Braydon starts from a reference photo taken on a phone or a real UGC image, which gets the output closer to an iPhone shot.Your client has banned AI creative. Eric shares what he heard from larger brands, who test AI creative on a separate third-party brand page instead of the main account.You copied an AI ad trend and it stopped working. Braydon on Pixar-style video ads and why formats like that grab attention for a moment and then fade once everyone runs them.Your team keeps building the same AI tool three times. Braydon and Eric talk through shared context, token bills and what Pilothouse is building internally to fix it. ABOUT BRAYDON Braydon is a creative strategist at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC. To talk through this workflow with him, fill out the form at https://pilothouse.co and ask for Braydon. STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer TIMESTAMPS 00:00 How AI workflows save hours every week 05:00 Building an AI agent team 08:00 Where AI creative works best 16:00 Using AI as a personal assistant 22:00 Building shared AI workflows for teams

    AI Agents for Ad Creative: The Workflow Saving a Pilothouse Strategist 5.5 Hours a Week

  8. Oct 5

    The New Fundamentals of Brand Strategy (While Shipping Hundreds of Ads a Week), With Eugene Healey

    Brand strategist Eugene Healey on DTC marketing at high creative volume: why creative is the new targeting, why brand books fail with creators, and how teams approve hundreds of ads a week. How do you keep a DTC brand coherent when you're shipping that much creative? Eugene says the fundamentals of brand still hold. The job around them has moved from controlling every campaign to orchestrating hundreds of pieces of creative the brand no longer controls. Eugene lectured in marketing and brand management at the University of Melbourne, runs a brand strategy studio, and is an equity partner in the brand tracking platform Tracksuit. On his second DTC Podcast appearance he tells Eric Dyck where brand strategy goes when media becomes the key variable, and how a team builds the judgment to approve work at volume. Eugene's live cohort course, The New Fundamentals of Brand, starts October 12. It runs seven weeks, with live sessions, studio groups of five or six people in your time zone, and interviews with brand leaders from Hinge and Nothing. Final-release seats are limited: https://thenewfundamentals.co Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your team ships more creative than any approval chain can review. Eugene's model has senior people approve the overall pattern while juniors and mid-levels own the day-to-day sign-off.Your brand book can't govern creators, partners and communities. Why you hand third parties a suite of assets that can travel into their context, instead of 80 pages of logo rules.Your team still works strategy, then creative, then media. Creative has to be conceived inside its distribution, which is why on Meta the creative has become the targeting.All of your brand knowledge lives in one long-tenured person. How to spread that judgment across the team by debating why a piece does or doesn't feel right.AI is producing work nobody on the team has read. Tobi Lütke's "slop grenades," and why saving money on copy makes little sense when media costs more than it ever has.Your brand keeps trying to make memes. What Gap and the studio Invisible Dynamics did instead, bringing back music video culture with dance covers people remix on their own.Your positioning sits in the aspirational middle. What Everlane's sale to Shein says about brands whose promise is that tomorrow can be a little better than today. ABOUT EUGENE Eugene Healey is a brand strategist and co-founder of The New Fundamentals of Brand, a seven-week live course for marketers and brand leaders. He previously lectured in marketing and brand management at the University of Melbourne and is an equity partner in Tracksuit. https://thenewfundamentals.co Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eugbrandstrat 00:00 Cold open: the funnel is now a tornado 00:22 Two years of making content, and what changed 01:51 Why he turned it into a course 03:50 The central thesis: from control to orchestration 04:50 Salience in the Andromeda era 05:39 Creative is the new targeting 06:56 Walter Cronkite and the creator model of trust 08:51 Everlane, Shein and the death of the middle 12:16 What happened to the analog revival 15:23 Private social and the entertainment platforms 17:26 Creative velocity and who approves the work 19:39 Slop grenades and human discernment 22:56 Can AI hold the brand's judgment? 25:06 Hiring top screenwriters for UGC scripts 25:45 Stop making memes and become the meme: Gap 29:08 Tracksuit, queryable brand tracking and Hall 30:17 Sydney Sweeney and why we let ourselves get rage baited 34:54 Inside The New Fundamentals of Brand 38:02 Seats, and where to sign up 38:30 Wrap

    The New Fundamentals of Brand Strategy (While Shipping Hundreds of Ads a Week), With Eugene Healey
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About

What does it take to build and scale a successful direct-to-consumer brand? The DTC Podcast is a marketing strategy podcast hosted by Eric Dyck, with practical ecommerce growth strategies from founders, operators, and marketing experts. Explore DTC marketing, customer acquisition, performance marketing, paid media, conversion rate optimization, customer retention, creative strategy, AI, and brand growth. Hear what works, what fails, and how leading consumer brands adapt and grow. Subscribe for actionable insights to help you build a stronger, more profitable ecommerce business.

Information

  • Creator
    Eric Dyck
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    795
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 352487
  • Show Website
    The DTC Podcast

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