DTC Podcast

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 i...

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 mov...

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 nowhe...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

How do you run Black Friday when your DTC brand is already hooked on discounts? Split your customers into new and repeat, keep the coupon-trained cohorts on their deal, and use the Black Friday offer to bring in new customers who have never seen your 30% off. On the second DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jordan Gordon, who leads email and retention at Pilothouse, and Rafael Gi, who works on pa...

Carve Designs gave connected TV 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum before deciding it worked, which is about as clean a test as a DTC brand runs on a new channel. The lift showed up first in direct traffic and search, and conversion rates rose across channels for customers who had seen the ads. Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs, the coastal apparel brand that grew out of sw...

How do you grow a DTC brand without a big brand awareness budget? Terra Kaffe founder Sahand Dilmaghani pre-sold 10,000 espresso machines from a single page with no reviews, and word of mouth has been the top reason customers buy every month for five years. On the DTC Podcast, Sahand tells Eric Dyck how he left investment banking to bootstrap a super automatic espresso machine, what he cut to get...

What are Meta partnership ads, and how should a DTC brand test them before Q4? They run through a creator's handle with your brand tagged, so Meta combines both accounts' engagement signals, and Pilothouse typically sees lower CPMs on them than on ads from the brand handle alone. Jacob Geary runs Meta accounts at Pilothouse and joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to lay out how partner...

How do you raise prices on a DTC brand without killing demand? Derek Jaeger founded Last Crumb in 2020, priced a box of cookies at $110, then moved it to $140. He says that is when the company took off. Eric Dyck gets the full DTC marketing story on the DTC Podcast: pricing as positioning, ecommerce growth without a repeat purchase, and why he killed the weekly drop model that made the brand famou...

How much of your Google Ads budget goes to your own brand name? Most DTC marketing teams cannot answer that, and the brands defending an ambiguous brand term are paying for customer acquisition they already had. Wildflower Cases is spending the large majority of roughly $3,500 a month on the single term "wildflower," according to SEMrush. Pilothouse Senior Google Media Buyer Zav audits t...

To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup A brand doing under $50 million a year is putting roughly half of its combined retail media, trade, and shopper marketing budget into retail media. At larger companies that share drops toward 30, 20, then 15 percent. Mike Chiasson works on Keen's models, which cover $45 billion in marketing investment, and his read on where that mone...

To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most ecommerce brands are paying for every contact in the database, including the tens of thousands they have not mailed in a year. Then they mail them anyway, because they are paying for them. Channing Ferrer argues both halves of that are costing you money, and he has his own company's data to back the second half. Brevo studied it...

https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-646&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup npdigital.com Eric told Neil Patel that Pilothouse is now getting about 30% of its inbound from ChatGPT, with higher close rates and bigger deals. Neil's response: "I guarantee your leads are down overall. Would you confirm or disagree...

https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-645&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co "There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing five to ten million in revenue." That was Codie Sanchez, and the post went wide enough that DTC marketers spent a week arguing about whether...

https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-644&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Phillip Jackson has spent 22 years in ecommerce, first building the software, then running agency strategy, and now running Future Commerce (futurecommerce.com), where the operating thesis is that commerce is culture. If you are a founder, brand...

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...

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 tom...

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...

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...

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 gu...

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 digit...

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 th...