Ecommerce Playbook: Numbers, Struggles & Growth

By the time Black Friday arrives, Skullcandy wants customers ready to buy. Evin Catlett, Skullcandy’s Global VP of Ecommerce and Growth Marketing, joins Taylor Holiday live at Commerce Roundtable in San Diego to explain how the brand uses TikTok Shop and creator content to build demand ahead of its holiday promotions. She shares what helped TikTok Shop gain traction after a slow start and how her...

Justin Palmer, Founder & CEO of Home Life Brands, joins Taylor Holiday live at Commerce Roundtable in San Diego to discuss Black Friday customer retention and turning holiday shoppers into customers who stay. After 12 years in pet ecommerce, the company behind iHeartDogs and The Hero Company prioritizes acquiring customers in September and October, when they’re more likely to buy again during...

Kyle Yeoman, President of Groove Life, joins Taylor Holiday live at Commerce Roundtable in San Diego to explain why the brand is pulling back on discounts. With profits tripling, Kyle breaks down the changes behind Groove Life’s turnaround, from cutting operating expenses to rebuilding product pages. He also shares the brand’s Black Friday plan: start the Wednesday before, run the sale for one wee...

Kyle Yeoman, President of Groove Life, joins Taylor live at Commerce Roundtable in San Diego to break down one of the most counterintuitive pivots in DTC: committing to fewer discounts and watching profits triple. Kyle shares the exact framework Groove Life used to escape "discount prison" — and the site changes alone that cut their Meta CPA in half. In this episode: How Groove went from...

Tyler and Alex from TBAR just joined CTC — and in this episode, Shack sits down with them right after their first-ever stage presentation at Commerce Roundtable to break down everything they know about building winning TikTok Shop programs. This is the tactical breakdown behind one of the fastest-growing creator commerce agencies in the space: how they built their client roster (Ridge, David Prote...

8 year CTC veteran Garrett Hord sits down with Randall to break down what separates the brands that crush Q4 from the ones that scramble. For many ecommerce brands, 50% of annual revenue and contribution margin lands in a single 30-day window, November 13 through December 13. Most brands treat it like any other month. The ones that win treat it like a machine. In this episode, Garrett walks throug...

CTC just acquired TBAR Partners — the fastest-growing TikTok Shop agency in the country. In this episode, Luke sits down with co-founders Tyler Brechbiel and Alex Rudolph to walk through the origin story, the playbook behind their results, and what this partnership means for ecommerce brands. Tyler and Alex built TBAR from a college dorm room in June 2025. Sixteen months later they're managing...

Black Friday is not won in November. According to CTC data, brands that grow their active customer file by 10% or more this year have a 77% chance of beating last year's BFCM — with a median result of 40% growth. The brands that hold back in September are the ones that underperform in Q4. Topics covered in this episode: Why your active customer file is the single biggest predictor of BFCM perf...

Taylor and Andrew dig into three topics that have more in common than you think: why the supplement industry struggles to build real moats, whether the Dodgers and Clippers crossed ethical and legal lines, and the most important marketing distinction almost nobody is making between influencers and creators. Topics covered in this episode:  Why no supplement brand has a defensible customer acquisit...

One of CTC's earliest hires just returned after years away. He left to build his own media agency, acquired a major email and retention agency, then co-founded a beverage company where mastering subscription economics was the only path to survival. Now he is back, and the skills he forged along the way make him a different kind of asset for 7-to-9-figure ecommerce brands than when he first wal...

CTC's Marketing Moments service is built to create new revenue spikes for 7-figure brands through structured offer testing, targeted landing pages, and high-volume creative. In this episode, host Richard Gaffin sits down with Roberto Fink, Profit Engineer at CTC, to break down exactly how the service works and why every brand that has signed up has seen at least one meaningful unlock. In this...

Most agencies promise results. Few can show you the system behind them. In this episode, Randall Thompson sits down with Jar, a Profit Engineer at CTC who previously built and scaled a multi-7-figure apparel brand, to break down exactly what the Profit Engineer role looks like day to day. From daily contribution margin targets inside Statlas to the 4 levers that actually move paid media performanc...

In this episode Luke breaks down the complete CTC email methodology as part of the Canon series. This is the framework CTC uses to build email programs that generate a median of 22% of total store revenue, with the scaffolding to push well beyond that for brands operating at the highest level. What you will learn: Why an email plan is a revenue forecast commitment, not a content calendar The three...

Richard and Luke (newly promoted President at CTC) break down why channel diversification is no longer optional for 8-figure ecommerce brands heading into Q4 and what creative diversification actually means when you need 1,000-plus ads per month from 100-plus creators. This episode covers the exact tools, platforms, and testing frameworks that changed CTC's position on scaling beyond Meta and...

We connected Claude to our Statlas database and analyzed $1.5 billion in Meta spend across 320 accounts and $100 million in Google spend across 134 stores. The question: do platform bid controls actually deliver what they promise? Tony Chopp, CTC's VP of Media Investment, walks through what we found — and what it means for how you build your paid media foundation. Min ROAS hits its target. Cos...

Our newest ecommerce growth offer comes with a money-back guarantee and a data advantage built in: visibility into what competitors in the same industry are actually bidding and converting at. In this episode, Taylor Holiday and Joy Sharma, who runs this offer for CTC's seven-figure clients, break down what's included: unlimited landing pages and creative tested until they beat CTC's o...

Our President, Luke Austin, just got back from a 3-day fishing trip in Sitka, Alaska: 90 lbs of salmon, halibut, and black cod, with orcas circling the boat the whole time. But the real story is what it taught him about growing ecommerce brands. In this episode, he breaks down the three things that have to be true for any ecommerce brand to know if it's actually winning: a single reliable sour...

Joy Sharma, CTC's Director of Accelerator, walks through a brand-new CPG growth offer backed by a 20% uplift guarantee — or your money back. The strategy combines hourly API-based budget scaling (via a Meta managed service most brands don't know exists) with industry CAC benchmarking from Statlas, full-stack creative and landing page support, and an exclusive influencer whitelist through R...

When results miss at an 8-figure or 9-figure ecommerce brand, a familiar pattern kicks in. Someone asks "why did we miss?" There is no clear owner. Every team points somewhere else. Days pass before anyone agrees on what happened, let alone what to fix. Brian Sakansky, Profit Engine Manager at CTC, calls this the finger-pointing problem. It is not a personality issue. It is a structural...

Taylor and Andrew Faris sit down to debate something every performance marketer has an opinion about but almost nobody has actually tested: do Meta cost controls deliver to the bid you set? CTC reviewed $1.5 billion in Meta spend and ran a formal study on $200 million across 253 accounts from March 2025 through July 2026. The results were surprising enough to change CTC's default bidding strat...

Taylor Holiday and Richard Gaffin break down the Prophit Engine, CTC's system that combines a head of growth, Meta media buyer, and creative strategist into a single profit-engineered role powered by AI, Statlas, and a decade of operational methodology. They cover what you actually get, why it works, what you stop hiring for, and the kind of brand that gets the most out of it. In this episode:...

Adrianne, VP of Performance Creative at CTC, breaks down the CTC Creative Strategy Canon,  the codified methodology behind how 7-figure to 9-figure ecommerce brands structure their creative programs to consistently produce winning ads. This is not a theory session. It is a data-backed framework built from 504 stores, $3.35 billion in Meta ad spend, and years of iterating what actually works. In th...

In this episode Richard and Steve break down H1 2026 performance data from across the CTC client portfolio, covering brand revenue growth, ad spend efficiency, incrementality testing results by platform, and the latest signals from the D2C Consumer Confidence Index. Topics covered in this episode: Median brand revenue growth of 15.2% in H1 2026 Why spend grew 28% while revenue efficiency declined...

Richard breaks down what's holding most 7-figure brands back from crossing into 8-figure territory, and announces CTC's first in-person workshop designed to close that gap. On September 2nd, 2026, CTC is hosting the Seven-Figure Growth Workshop at our Costa Mesa office. Taylor Holiday will deliver the keynote, and founders will rotate through five hands-on workshops covering forecasting, t...

Tony Chopp, VP of Paid Media at Common Thread Collective, breaks down CTC's Google Ads Canon, the complete framework we use to turn Google into a true demand-harvesting machine for 7-9 figure ecommerce brands. Learn how to expand your search frontier beyond product queries, set incrementality-adjusted ROAS targets, and structure campaigns for maximum profitable growth. In this episode: Why Goo...