Brilliant Commerce

Women weren't required in US clinical research until 1993. Priyanka Jain built a company to close that gap. Evvy now holds the world's largest real world data set on the vaginal microbiome. Priyanka tells Bryan Mahoney how community and education became Evvy's entire acquisition strategy, why AI driven search changes how patients find care, and what she thinks is harder, raising money...

What happens when an agency spins its internal tooling into a software company built for one vertical only? Jenna Holcombe tells Bryan how a hard call to focus exclusively on fashion, made around 2019, turned into the company's biggest advantage. Jenna breaks down how Centra pairs headless architecture with an opinionated, all-in-one suite for D2C and wholesale, why the company won't rebrand aroun...

What happens when an agency spins its internal tooling into a software company built for one vertical only? Jenna Holcombe tells Bryan how a hard call to focus exclusively on fashion, made around 2019, turned into the company's biggest advantage.   Jenna breaks down how Centra pairs headless architecture with an opinionated, all-in-one suite for D2C and wholesale, why the company won't rebrand aro...

What if the biggest AI opportunity for retailers is knowing where not to automate? Chris Parsons , VP of Partner Growth and Marketing at Hale , spent 25 years inside retail at Walmart Canada, Ren's Pets, and Home Hardware before moving to the agency side. He tells Bryan Mahoney why he built an AI Moment of Discovery framework, why he still pushes back on the online-to-store cannibalization myt...

Meta's algorithm started rewarding new creative volume, and the industry treated it as a race to publish more. Vincent Bourzeix, Founder and CEO of Superbolt, saw the problem coming. Vincent walks Bryan through why creative diversity outperforms sheer output, how ad platforms shifted from buying audiences to buying outcomes, and the three roles his agency built to make AI actually useful inste...

With nearly two decades in e-commerce and stints at Victoria's Secret, Bed Bath & Beyond, The Children's Place, and Foot Locker, Laurie Falletta brought something most e-commerce leaders don't have when she joined Cole Haan as VP of Ecommerce: a merchant's brain. She thinks in product lifecycles, margin thresholds, and inventory planning, and that shapes every decision she makes on site. In th...

Charlotte Langley built Bloom & Wild's retention engine by paying close attention to complaints too small to register as data, like customers who wanted out of Mother's Day marketing entirely. She tells Bryan how a three-person insights team, AI-powered feedback analysis, and firm limits on unit economics are helping the letterbox flower pioneer expand into food and gifting without losing cust...

What does it actually take to build a brand that earns permission to expand into retail, land cultural partnerships, and grow aided awareness from 1% to 11%? Matthew Morein, Senior Director of Brand and Content at WeCook, has the answer, and it starts with a question most teams never ask: if this company disappeared tomorrow, what would the world be losing? Matthew walks Bryan through how WeCook s...

Summersalt launched from a data set most brands would never attempt to build. The team scanned 10,000 women, made a swimsuit for each, and collected detailed feedback on fit. That pattern library still drives the product engine today, and swimwear brands that earn that trust historically hold 80% of wallet share going forward. Lori Coulter, Co-Founder and CEO of Summersalt, tells Bryan how she and...

Dina Rosenbloom didn't join Hairstory to maintain a brand. She joined to rebuild one and get it to retail. As CEO of a 10-year-old company built on a product that asks customers to stop shampooing, she's learned that category creation isn't a launch moment. It's a long, deliberate accumulation of trust, repetition, and the right advocates. Dina breaks down the affiliate model that predated influen...

Brian Berger came into consumer from a consumer internet background, and that combination is exactly why Mack Weldon was built the way it was: a brand with a direct customer relationship at its core, a data-informed operation, and a product formula applied to a category most brands had written off as commoditized. Nearly 15 years in, he knows where that approach held up and where it cost them. Top...

What separates brand builders who last from those who chase performance forever? Doug Zarkin has spent three decades answering that question across franchise, retail, and direct selling, and his framework is more transferable to D2C than most operators expect. Bryan and Doug unpack the brand value equation, the "thinking human" philosophy, and why the brands that obsess over customer retention alm...

Nearly 50% retention in a category where most brands are lucky to hit half that. That number, which Mila Mendez doesn't deny is in the ballpark, is the clearest signal that True Botanicals has figured something out most beauty brands haven't. As Vice President Digital Commerce and Media at True Botanicals, Mila has spent over a decade building digital commerce across DTC, Amazon, TikTok, a...

Michael Natenshon built Marine Layer starting from a single T-shirt he could not replace, spent a year and a half developing custom fabric from scratch, and then opened a pop-up shop purely to collect email addresses. That pop-up accidentally put Marine Layer on a retail path it never planned for, and today the brand operates more than 50 stores. On this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan Mahone...

Most brands treat their website as the transaction. Dude Wipes treats it as the handoff, routing visitors directly to Walmart, Target, Amazon, and club rather than pushing a native cart. It sounds like leaving money on the table. It isn't. Joey Thomas, VP at Dude Wipes, breaks down the strategy behind that decision: how they capture first-party data and Amazon 1P credentials without owning the...

Draper James cut promotional days significantly last year and saw margin expansion plus AOV increases. VP of E-commerce and Brand Marketing Piper Parsley walked CEO Jeannie Yoo (who joined in October) through the strategy: identify the essential promotional windows when the entire internet is discounting, then spend the rest of the year as a full-price storyteller. The customer base remained engag...

Johnny Russo built digital commerce operations across Canadian retail for nearly 20 years, including running digital at Marks (a $1.3 billion, 300+ store operation under Canadian Tire) and transforming wholesale operations at The Kersheh Group into multi-brand DTC while managing 40+ licenses. He currently serves as Chief Digital Officer at Lamour. His current portfolio spans CEO roles at Zero Lush...

When JP Beeghly, Senior Manager of Martech at Sonos, asks Chord's Commerce Copilot more questions than anyone else in their customer base, it's not because he's looking for basic answers. He's stress-testing whether AI can handle the institutional knowledge that separates a generic query from a Sonos-specific insight. Joined by Josh Maynard, who recently shifted from CTO at Ruggable to GM, Global...

Lance Dobson spent 15 years across agency, Adobe Ad Cloud for search, and commerce brands before landing at Shed , a telehealth weight loss company. His path revealed something counterintuitive: healthcare compliance constraints that require data anonymization and eliminate standard tracking enhancements forced him to build better marketing fundamentals. When you can't rely on algorithmic bidd...

Most commerce leaders have either agency experience or operator experience. Corin Mills spent four years at Wolff Olins as the designated client voice inside a global branding agency, then led a rebrand consolidating 11 brands into one at Currys, the UK's Best Buy equivalent. Now he runs e-commerce at MOO , a $100M+ B2B print and merchandise company that built its business on bringing luxury print...

Ricky Joshi bootstrapped Saatva to nearly $200M in revenue with a 14-person ecommerce team while venture-funded competitors burned capital on customer acquisition. His approach: retail locations as integrated conversion engines that drive 80% higher online conversion rates in their markets. By embedding customer service operations directly into stores, Saatva eliminated traditional call center ove...

Nick Sanetra has spent nearly 20 years identifying what he calls "holes in the bucket." As Director of Marketing at Clove, a footwear brand purpose-built for healthcare workers on 12-hour shifts, Nick deploys a methodical diagnostic process to pinpoint exactly where prospects fall out of the funnel. His approach relies on unglamorous fundamentals that actually work: post-purchase surveys revealing...

When customer acquisition declines, most CEOs blame marketing. When retention drops, they blame lifecycle. Justin Fredlender spent five years as VP of Growth at Ritual learning why both diagnoses miss the point, and why treating growth as anything other than holistic is how brands plateau. After scaling MVMT to nearly nine figures in his mid-20s, Justin joined Ritual where the brand foundation was...

Belkin's Senior Director of E-commerce tested AI chatbots for customer service beyond basic order tracking, then deliberately pulled back to human agents for relationship-critical moments. Jyoti Malik explains why most omnichannel strategies fail (teams treat digital as a retail add-on instead of rethinking the entire operating model), shares her phased approach to channel expansion, and reveals t...

Forbes consistently ranks in the top five most trusted publications in the US, but that credibility means nothing if you can't monetize it. Emily Jackson reveals how Forbes Vetted has had to completely rebuild their revenue model as 40% of Gen Z shifted to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram for product recommendations—platforms where traditional last-click affiliate attribution simply doesn't work. Top...