Ecommerce Conversations

Matt Ragland is a 10-year email marketer, first at ConvertKit and now at Good People Digital, the Nashville-based agency he launched in early 2023. His approach to superior email performance is storytelling. He says, "Brands that excel at email marketing frequently tell a story to their ideal audience." In this episode, he addresses storytelling tactics, email design, automation strategi...

In 1962 Arto Alajian arrived in the U.S., having fled Egypt and his shoe-manufacturing business. He became a milkman in Los Angeles, and then a ceramic tile installer, and then a tile maker. That was 1966. Fast forward to 2024, and ARTO, the company, is a global supplier of handcrafted ceramic, porcelain, and concrete products. Armen Alagian, the founder's son, now co-owns the business. In th...

Before Shopify, YouTube, and Facebook, there was OverstockArt. David Sasson launched the company on the Yahoo Store platform in 2002 in Wichita, Kansas. It sells original, hand-painted reproductions of works by Van Gogh, Monet, and more. Much has changed since 2002, but not Sasson's passion and resilience. He has faced legal crises, replatforms, and competitors. Yet OverstockArt thrives. In t...

No one can accuse ecommerce copywriter Chris Orzechowski of mimicking others. In an era of image-heavy emails, he prefers plain text. Amid the Facebook-Google advertising juggernaut, he likes X. Orzechowski is an 11-year writer and marketer, first as a freelancer and then, in 2020, at Orzy, the agency he founded. In this episode, he addresses his keys to successful product copy, frustration with M...

Rabah Rahil first appeared on this podcast in September 2022. He was the chief marketing officer of Triple Whale, an analytics platform. He addressed customer acquisition, attribution, and more. He’s now the CMO of Fermàt Commerce, a SaaS provider of customized customer journeys. Founded in 2021, it has raised nearly $30 million in venture capital funding. In this episode, Rahil discusses Fermàt’s...

The post-Covid ecommerce hangover has hit Roman Khan. He launched his first direct-to-consumer brand in 2013, acquired others, and in 2021 founded Peak 21, an aggregator with equity investors. The outlook was good. Fast forward to 2024, and many ecommerce companies are struggling. Mergers and acquisitions have cratered. Yet Khan perseveres. His team reviews dozens of purchase candidates every mont...

Faraz Kahn began losing his hair at age 21. Years later, when searching for startup business ideas, he focused on own experience. The result is Fully Vital, a direct-to-consumer seller of hair loss serums and supplements that he launched in 2021. In this episode, Kahn addresses his launch of Fully Vital, marketing challenges, and lessons learned along the way. For an edited and condensed transcrip...

BGR is a media site covering consumer technology, such as games and devices. Jonathan Geller launched the company in 2006 and sold it to Penske Media in 2010. He remains its president and general manager. The site has long relied on organic search traffic, which it monetizes with advertising and affiliate commissions. But the tsunami of low-grade AI content has upended search rankings and thus BGR...

Phillip Jackson launched Future Commerce in 2016. The company produces articles, newsletters, and podcasts focusing on coming trends and developments in business. He believes commerce produces a gentler society, one that fosters culture and stability. Commerce is culture, he states. In this episode, he discusses his company's mission, large versus small brands, the maturity of ecommerce, and...

Study a successful entrepreneur, and you'll likely uncover resilience. Take Aaron Marino. Twenty years ago his first business, a fitness center, failed, leaving him with half a million dollars of debt.  Fast-forward to 2024, and Marino is a YouTube celebrity and thriving serial entrepreneur, mainly with men's grooming products. He first appeared on the podcast in 2020. In this episode, h...

Jake Zaratsian is a content creator at Jungle Scout, the Amazon seller platform. He's also a part-time brand owner on that marketplace, selling disposable dinnerware plates made from palm leaves. Curious, we asked him, "Why palm plates?" He cited three reasons. He sought a product with at least 300 monthly sales, a selling price of $20 each, and consumable for repeat buyers. Disposa...

Andrew Faris once managed huge Meta Ad budgets while CEO of ecommerce brands. He still manages huge budgets, but now at his agency on behalf of ad clients.  We asked him for pointers on advertising bread-and-butter commodity-type products. "Directness is the answer," he replied. "The more tightly you communicate your product and what it does, the better." This is Faris's t...

Bryant Jaquez picked a heck of a time to become a CEO. A longtime CMO for direct-to-consumer brands, Jaquez accepted the CEO job early this year for BuddyLove, a Dallas-based women's apparel company coming off a pandemic-fueled boom and a dismal 2023. "The overhead and debt service caught up with them," he said. "Thus far my job has been a lot of restructuring, evaluating expen...

Allen Walton is the founder of SpyGuy, a seller of surveillance cameras from his base in Texas. He's also a world traveler and a seasoned acquirer of airline travel points. Ecommerce merchants who pay with a rewards credit card for advertising, shipping, and other expenses can "rack-up crazy points," he told me. In our recent interview, his third for this podcast, he elaborated on h...

Aaron Orendorff is a chaplain turned writer turned digital marketer. He was the first editor-in-chief at Shopify Plus and then vice president of marketing at Common Thread Collective, an ecommerce agency. He's now head of marketing for Recart, an SMS platform, but his passion is empowering colleagues and clients. "I find joy in bigging others up," he says. In this episode, he shares...

Mike Carroll, a weightlifting buddy of host Eric Bandholz, lost his job last fall. He had been an insurance salesman for 25 years and is now contemplating a new career. Eric asked him, "Have you thought about ecommerce?" He had not. Launching an ecommerce company intrigued him, but he was unsure where to start. Knowing many would-be entrepreneurs with similar concerns, Eric invited him o...

Hosting "Ecommerce Conversations" is a welcome respite from my day job of running Beardbrand, the direct-to-consumer company I co-founded in 2012. I periodically post updates on Beardbrand's performance, hoping the transparency helps other entrepreneurs.  This episode is my recap of 2023.  It was a terrible year for me and Beardbrand — the first year we were in the red. We've a...

Mike Beckham sees the benefits of competitive markets. Simple Modern, a company he co-founded in 2015, sells insulated drinkware, competing against Yeti and other large providers. He says markets are competitive because many consumers value those products. "Capturing a small percentage of a competitive market can make you insanely successful," he stated. Beckham shares his ecommerce jour...

Joe Anhalt is a New York-based copywriter turned designer turned all-around marketer. He consults with direct-to-consumer ecommerce companies on growth strategies, including branding. He emphasizes storytelling and conveying a brand’s point of view. “You can bring shoppers into your world,” he said. “Brand-building is like world-building.” In this episode, he addresses multiple growth tactics, inc...

David Perell helps folks improve their writing skills. His company offers an online course, YouTube author interviews, and a weekly newsletter. But his broader goal is supporting excellence. He stated, "It's worth doing exceptional work with whatever you do. The modern world is polluted with mediocrity." In this episode, Perell addresses writing and speaking and their impact on entr...

Postscript is an SMS marketing provider for Shopify brands. The company launched in 2018 and has since raised a whopping $106.2 million across four funding rounds, per Crunchbase. Alex Beller is Postscript's president and one of three co-founders. Postscript's marketing platform is SMS-only and Shopify-only. To Beller, that translates to "best in class" performance. In this con...

In 2016 David Gaylord was a Shopify employee looking for a side hustle. Then he came up with a funky idea: skincare lotions for hair removal along bikini lines. The business name was even funkier: Bushbalm. Fast forward to 2023, and Bushbalm is booming, selling lotions and trimmers directly to thousands of consumers and wholesale to Ulta Beauty and 3,000 waxing salons. It spends a whopping $200,00...

Merchants often default to China for outsourced manufacturing. Yet competitive suppliers exist worldwide. For Palermo House, a direct-to-consumer provider of luxury furniture, Argentina is a natural source. Marco Ferro is the company’s California-based founder with Argentina roots. He was born there, as were his parents, co-owners of the business. In this episode, Ferro addresses importing goods f...

In 2014 Eric Steckling launched Brio, a Michigan-based direct-to-consumer seller of beard trimmers. In 2022 the company acquired Ollie, a subscription-based provider of teeth whiteners. The brands are seemingly complementary. Both sell grooming products. But merging them was challenging. Having been combined post-acquisition, they now function separately. In our recent conversation, Steckling addr...

Mark Wagner believes the best payment chargeback recovery systems are automated and data-driven. He founded Disputifier, an Austin, Texas-based chargeback software company, on that premise in 2021. He told me, "We've developed an intuitive system over the years. It combines data from the transaction with our testing and identifies an appropriate response." In this episode, Wagner di...