Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

Nathan Bush
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Add To Cart is Australia's leading ecommerce and retail podcast, hosted by Nathan Bush. Over 600 conversations with the founders, operators and digital leaders building Australian ecommerce. Episodes cover ecommerce strategy, DTC brand building, omnichannel retail, email and SMS marketing, performance marketing, fulfilment, and the tech stack decisions that shape how retail brands actually sell online. Free community, newsletter and resources at addtocart.com.au. Proudly supported by Shopify and Klaviyo.

  1. 1d ago

    The Self-Built AI Brain Behind Style My Wall's Growth to 22 Staff | #656

    The last time Justin Bausch was on the show, in May 2024, he was leading CRM at Ryderwear and AI meant product recommendations. He's back as a founder, this time with his partner Felisha Mina, and everything has changed. In a year he's grown Style My Wall to seven figures, and he's built his own AI platform to run the whole thing. Style My Wall started as a Facebook Marketplace side hustle selling art while Justin still had his day job. He turned it into a print-on-demand ecommerce business, kept everything in-house, poured the agency savings into profitable ad spend, and went from one employee (his nephew) to 22 in two years. Then he built the tool that runs it: an AI platform, made with Claude Code, that manages his Meta and Google ads on autopilot, scans inventory, runs customer service through Gorgias, and updates shipping windows across Shopify and Klaviyo when dispatch blows out. We get into how he built it, why he thinks most small businesses don't need a paid media agency, the Mattel deal that came from founder-led content, and how he and Felisha Mina now help other small businesses do the same through their agency InHaus Digital. In this episode: Keep it in-house and reinvest the savings into profitable ad spend, which is what took Style My Wall to seven figures in year oneSmall businesses spending under a few grand a day on ads often don't need a paid media agency, they need to understand their own marginsBuild AI into the whole process chain, not just one-off tasks, but roll it out in stages and never straight to autopilotConnect with Justin Bausch and Felisha Mina Explore Style My Wall and InHaus Digital Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    The Self-Built AI Brain Behind Style My Wall's Growth to 22 Staff | #656

  2. 4d ago

    How to Make Giving a Commercial Lever | #655

    There's a link in ecommerce that mostly goes unsaid, and it's a slightly awkward one: the connection between giving and commercial benefit. When a brand partners with a charity, they're doing it for the right reason. But to get it off the ground and keep it alive when budgets tighten, they usually have to rationalise it commercially, and that's the part that feels a bit icky to say out loud. It shouldn't. GoGenerosity carries a real commercial upside, and being honest about that is often the very thing that lets the good happen at all. The thing worth chasing is the win-win-win: a win for the retailer, a win for the charity, and a win for the community in need. Get all three and it's powerful. Miss one and it falls over. This came out of a conversation with Rohan McCloskey, founder of GoGenerosity, a pay-it-forward platform that turns small customer donations at the checkout into full-value gift cards for people in need, without ever touching the retailer's margin. Rohan has since sold the business. This episode was co-hosted by Rosa Willis. In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about making giving a commercial lever: Let purpose lead, but give it a commercial backbone so it isn't the first thing cut when the year gets tightWeave the giving into the problem you're already solving for the customer, rather than a guilt trip at the checkoutMake the impact visible and pick a cause that fits, because alignment plus visibility turns a giving feature into a real relationshipConnect with Rohan McCloskey Explore GoGenerosity Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    How to Make Giving a Commercial Lever | #655

  3. Aug 16

    A Competitor Copied Everything. So She Borrowed a Jet, a Lambo and a Black Dress | #654

    Four years ago Elysia Krstevski didn't know what ecommerce was. She'd spent 15 years in musical theatre, working her way from receptionist to co-CEO. Today she runs Mekė Baby, the brand behind Australia's first portable milk warmer, she's in the 2026 Top 50 People in eCommerce, and she's the face of Australia Post's national "Big Boss Energy" campaign. It started with a bad moment. Stuck in a supermarket during Covid, dealing with mastitis and unable to warm expressed milk for her screaming baby, Elysia went looking for a product that didn't exist and decided to build it herself. In this episode, Elysia sits down with Nathan Bush to break down how she created a feeding category from scratch. We get into why she built the brand before she had a product, why she handed prototypes to high-profile mums instead of waiting for perfection, and the wild story of answering a copycat competitor by borrowing Adrian Portelli's jet for a Black Friday film. Elysia is refreshingly direct about the numbers, why she stopped chasing top-line revenue on Meta and moved into Baby Bunting, why she runs her own ad account, and why she'll never hand customer service to AI. Plus building a brand while raising three kids, and launching the Go-Box while she was in labour. Brands and tools mentioned: Mekė Baby, Baby Bunting, The Memo, Australia Post, Shopify, Meta, TikTok, Claude This episode is brought to you with thanks to our partners:  🛍️ Shopify → https://www.shopify.com/au 📧 Klaviyo → https://www.klaviyo.com/au/ Connect with us on LinkedIn:  👤 Elysia Krstevski → https://au.linkedin.com/in/elysia-krstevski-b41485b7 👤 Nathan Bush → https://au.linkedin.com/in/nathbush 👤 Rosa Willis → https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-clara-willis-23761066/ 🎙️ Want to be a guest or sponsor on Add To Cart? → https://www.addtocart.com.au/contact 📩 Sign up for the free Add To Cart newsletter → https://newsletter.addtocart.com.au/subscribe 💬 Join the Add To Cart Community → https://community.addtocart.com.au/feed Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    A Competitor Copied Everything. So She Borrowed a Jet, a Lambo and a Black Dress | #654

  4. Aug 13

    How to Find Your Unicorn Ads | #653

    Making a single ad used to cost half a million to a few million dollars. You poured everything into one hero execution and you had to be right, because that was the bet. That world is gone. Today a brand can make a few hundred ads off an iPhone, put a bit of spend behind each, and let the market decide. Here's the shift most teams haven't made: finding a breakout ad isn't about one person being braver, it's about how the whole team works. Loosen the approvals so more creative goes live, trust the data over opinion, and let go of the idea that any single Meta ad is your whole brand. Most of them are disposable. This Playbook is anchored by Mark Broadhead, Head of Creative and Growth at The Lad Collective, who made around 15,000 ads in four years to find fewer than 10 that truly flew, and grew the brand to 200,000 customers and a US launch on the back of it. In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about finding their unicorn ads: Take more shots and ring-fence your testing budget from your proven winners, because volume is now a strategyChange your approvals, not just your attitude, so the default is that ads go live and the data decidesGive your long shots their own budget, because the algorithm optimises for the next sale, not your next unicornConnect with Mark Broadhead Explore The Lad Collective Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    How to Find Your Unicorn Ads | #653

  5. Aug 10

    The Best Exit Is the One You Don't Need: Rob Ward on Selling Quad Lock for $500M | #652

    Five years ago Rob Ward came on the show as co-founder and CEO of Quad Lock, the phone-mount brand he and Chris Peters bootstrapped from a Kickstarter campaign. Since then he's taken the big exit, Quad Lock sold to Thule for $500M at the end of 2024, and walked away entirely. He's spent the time since coaching basketball, picking up his kids, and building The DTC Playbook, a free interactive platform packing everything he learned scaling Quad Lock into frameworks any founder can use. This conversation is the post-exit reflection: what he sees now that he couldn't from the inside, the opinions that built the business, and why he gave the whole playbook away for nothing. We get properly nerdy on the frameworks. Why revenue is vanity and unit economics are the truth, his Three Gates for customer acquisition, why new-customer CAC beats ROAS, and why brand is the only real moat left in a world where a six-month-old brand can look like a billion-dollar one. In this episode: Watch customer economics, not topline, because CAC is owned by the whole business, not just performance marketingBrand is the moat, since products are easy to copy and trust built over years is notRun leaner than you think, and use the gap between what AI can do and how it's actually implemented as your edgeConnect with Rob Ward Explore The DTC Playbook Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    The Best Exit Is the One You Don't Need: Rob Ward on Selling Quad Lock for $500M | #652

  6. Aug 6

    How to Replatform Without Stalling the Business | #651

    In ecommerce we're often asked to build a whole new house while making the existing one bigger and better at the same time. That's a replatform. You're not pausing trade while you move across, you're still hitting the numbers and running the sales while shifting the entire business onto a brand new site. Here's the thing almost everyone gets wrong: the platform is the easy bit. A big replatform doesn't blow out because of the technology. It blows out because you try to build the shiny new tech while still running and growing the business with the same people. The teams that get through it are deliberate about resourcing the project properly, holding a hard scope and a hard date, and keeping their partners in the room. This Playbook is anchored by a conversation with Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital at Kathmandu, whose team moved the whole business off Magento onto Shopify Plus in four months and went live in the middle of a flash sale, something their agency had never seen done before. This episode is brought to you by StudioHawk. Grab the Chosen, Not Clicked white paper, StudioHawk's free eCommerce AI Visibility Toolkit and a personalised SEO & AI Search Masterplan for your brand at http://studiohawk.com.au/add-to-cart In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about replatforming without stalling the business: Resource the project properly by splitting into a build crew and a trade crew, don't squeeze it in around the day jobGo live with better, not perfect, hold your date, and let the rest be a little bumpyKeep your partners in the room solving things on the spot, and let the tickets be the paper trail, not the conversationConnect with Craig Mildenhall Explore Kathmandu Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    How to Replatform Without Stalling the Business | #651

  7. Aug 2

    The $30 Million Turnaround That Started With 48 Hours of One on Ones | #650

    Beck Williams took the CEO chair at Seed & Sprout in 2022. A business in decline. A warehouse full of bread boxes nobody wanted. And a plan to fix it that started with people, not spreadsheets. If you've followed Australian sustainable retail over the past few years, you've watched Seed & Sprout climb. Beck came up through corporate, with an apprenticeship at GM Holden, a transformation role at Mercedes-Benz and a stint at Thermomix, before joining founder Sophie Kovic in 2022 to lead the turnaround of the Byron Bay brand behind plastic-free lunchware, kitchen and homewares. She rebuilt it around product, supplier relationships and a fiercely flexible team, and it now turns over $30 million and ships to more than 50 markets. As CEO working alongside a founder, she's also one of the clearer voices going on how that partnership actually survives. Nathan sat down with Beck to dig into how the turnaround really happened: why she ran a one on one with every single person in her first 48 hours, how the team clears dead stock without slashing prices, and why radical transparency, from a $2 fuel surcharge to exactly where they use AI, keeps customers on side. Today, we're discussing: Why Beck started the turnaround with a one on one conversation with every single person in the business, and why she refuses to do them in a group [06:02]The bread box gate cleanup, and how 18 months of dead stock cleared in six weeks as a gift with purchase [13:44]Testing new products in pilot runs of just 500 units using pre-orders and long supplier relationships [15:19]How Seed & Sprout separates a quality customer from a cheap one using AOV, second purchase timing and cross-category buying [27:02]The science behind the deliberately odd 8, 9 and 11 percent discounts [29:13]Why owning the $2 fuel surcharge out loud built more trust than hiding it [42:51]Connect with Beck Williams | Explore Seed & Sprout Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    The $30 Million Turnaround That Started With 48 Hours of One on Ones | #650

  8. Jul 30

    How to Win Back Customers Without a Discount | #649

    Most of us have a segment sitting in our email platform we've quietly given up on. The customers who haven't opened anything in months. And every time the Klaviyo bill lands, someone suggests deleting them to clean up the list. Deleting that segment is one of the more expensive things you can do. Because someone you've stopped emailing isn't the same as someone who's stopped caring, and for a brand with product people actually want, the cheapest way to win those customers back is to remind them what they're missing, not to hand them a discount that trains them to lapse again. This came out of a conversation with Dom Moretti, Head of Ecommerce and Digital at A&S Labels, the home of Tiger Mist and I.AM.GIA. At Tiger Mist, a plain re-engagement flow with no discount, just "here's what you've missed", is now the best-performing flow in an entire region, beating the welcome flow. In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about winning customers back without a discount: Your disengaged list is a segment to talk to, not a cost to delete, so build it a re-engagement flow before you prune itA discount to win someone back costs you twice, in margin now and in training them to only buy on sale, so reach for a product-led trigger insteadA win-back flow only works if the rest of your list isn't burnt out, so protect your engaged base and put a dollar value on every unsubscribeConnect with Dominique Moretti Explore Tiger Mist | I.AM.GIA Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter  SMS us to Suggest a Guest Connect with Nathan Bush Join the Add To Cart Community

    How to Win Back Customers Without a Discount | #649
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About

Add To Cart is Australia's leading ecommerce and retail podcast, hosted by Nathan Bush. Over 600 conversations with the founders, operators and digital leaders building Australian ecommerce. Episodes cover ecommerce strategy, DTC brand building, omnichannel retail, email and SMS marketing, performance marketing, fulfilment, and the tech stack decisions that shape how retail brands actually sell online. Free community, newsletter and resources at addtocart.com.au. Proudly supported by Shopify and Klaviyo.

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