Brilliant Commerce

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...

When a premium olive oil brand discovers ChatGPT is driving thousands of dollars in monthly revenue with zero paid spend, it signals a fundamental shift in how consumer education creates both immediate sales and long-term category growth. Samuel Davel reveals how Kosterina's military-disciplined approach to growth measurement exposed agency manipulation while building a repeatable framework for om...

In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, I sit down with Jason Bertrand , VP of E-commerce at Purple , to unpack lessons from his journey scaling D2C operations from Under Armour's early $20M online business to Purple's $450M empire. Jason shares refreshingly honest takes on why chasing complex tech can derail growth, how to build premium positioning in discount-heavy categories, and his team's spec...

In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Tina Gu , CFO & Head of Digital Growth at Sarah Creal Beauty , breaks down the strategic decisions behind building a beauty brand exclusively for women over 40. With M&A experience from Estee Lauder's major acquisition period (Le Labo, Frederic Malle, Glam Glow) and product marketing leadership at Meta, Tina discusses with Bryan why demographic focus...

Ben Grynol , Head of Growth at Levels , offers a counterintuitive approach to commerce: building an entire health category through education rather than conversion-focused marketing. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Ben walks Bryan through how Levels achieved remarkably low customer acquisition costs ($50-80) for a high-consideration, $400 health device by rejecting traditional performance m...

In an industry obsessed with paid media, GR0 co-founders Jon Zacharias , President, and Kevin Miller , CEO, identified a massive blind spot: iconic brands were spending millions on Meta ads without capturing the downstream organic searches they generated. As Jon points out, Theragun was spending $5 million in a month for half a million people to google “Is Theragun legit” or “percussive massage gu...

When your business model relies on cameras inside people's homes, trust isn't optional — it's everything. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan speaks with Logan Dunn , Head of E-commerce at Wyze , about how the smart home disruptor is evolving beyond their initial "too good to be true" pricing strategy. After slashing camera prices from $200 to $20 and sparking a price war, Wyze now focuse...

Forget the idea that direct-to-consumer is dead — it's just getting started. In this debut episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan Mahoney , Co-founder & CEO of Chord Commerce , explores how Born Primitive transformed from a garage startup making padded "snatch shorts" into an iconic fitness brand generating $11 million in veteran medical debt relief through purpose-driven marketing.    Claire St...

The commerce landscape has fundamentally shifted from best-of-breed components to consolidated data platforms — evidenced by brands increasingly requesting systems that eliminate conflicting dashboards rather than adding more specialized tools. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan explores how venture capital firm M13 evolved from backing iconic consumer brands like Bonobos, Daily Harvest,...