Commerce is Chaos

Madalina Defta cofounded Kaizen with her husband Arash — and if you're picturing a slick, well-funded launch story, this is not that. Their first pasta prototype was rolled out with an empty wine bottle and cut by hand in their kitchen, and it took three years (plus a doomed run with almond flour) before lupin flour finally worked. The Kaizen name comes from the Japanese philosophy of change throu...

Olly Dixon started Something & Nothing in 2017 with Rupert Pugsley — basically a side hustle next to the pub he ran and the branding agency he owned. It launched as a “seltzer” in the UK, but between White Claw's hard seltzer invasion and their own boozy spritz line, everyone got confused about what was really in the can. So they renamed the whole thing Premium Soda and killed the alcoholic li...

Sagar Patel runs Yucca Fins, the Costa Mesa brand making swim and body-surf fins out of premium Malaysian rubber — the kind lifeguards and bodysurfers up and down the California coast actually trust with their lives. He spent 22 years in tech before this, most recently in marketing for a healthcare data company, and then jumped into a business his longtime friends Sean Starky and Mike Marshall sta...

Vanessa Phillips is the Founder and CEO of Feel Good Foods, the #1 natural frozen snack and appetizer brand in the country. Her dad owned Chinese restaurants in New York City, and after a celiac diagnosis pulled her out of the hospitality career she'd always pictured for herself, she started making and and delivering gluten-free lasagnas. From there, she opened Friedman's in Chelsea Market, using...

Kate Assaraf is the founder and CEO of Dip Sustainable Hair Care, a plastic-free shampoo and conditioner bar brand she built after 20 years working inside the beauty industry. She launched Dip in October 2021 out of frustration: the plastic-free hair care that existed was made for the crunchy, all-natural consumer, and completely ignored everyone else who wanted salon-quality performance. When her...

Adam Hiner has started five companies — catering, restaurants, an acrobatics festival, hard kombucha, and now bread. He built Boochcraft into the nation's first hard kombucha brand, grew it to $15 million, hired himself out of every role, and went looking for the next thing nobody was doing. He found it when he couldn't source a single certified organic gluten-free bread anywhere in the country. P...

When Subin Hur's pediatrician told her U.S.-grown rice wasn't safe for her baby, she called her sister Suahn and started a company. For most Asian families, rice isn't just an ingredient — it's the first solid food, the thing that's been on the table at every meal across every generation. They could have just switched brands. Instead, they moved their families to Korea and built a new supply chain...

Chris Kolbe spent 30+ years as a senior executive at Ralph Lauren, J.Crew, Original Penguin, Lands' End, and Kohl's — which means he knows exactly how the industry works, and exactly what it's been getting away with. After decades of watching apparel shift to petroleum-based synthetics, he left to build HyperNatural: a performance apparel brand made from bio-based materials instead of plastic. The...

Matt Cohen left a decade in finance to co-found SIMPLi with his wife Sarela Herrada, and if that sounds like a wild pivot, it was. They started with 80 farmers in Peru and have since scaled to 75 products across 13 countries, 2,500+ retail doors including Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Wegmans, and a foodservice business supplying sweetgreen, Daily Harvest, and Splendid Spoon. Oh, and a NOSH Changemake...

Judah Bergman is the Founder and President of Jool Baby, a fully bootstrapped baby gear and child-safety brand he started in 2015 with a single magnetic cabinet lock he designed because no product on the market met his standard. Since then, he’s grown Jool Baby into an eight-figure Amazon business with distribution across Target, Walmart, Babylist, and TikTok Shop — without a single outside invest...

Ted Repic is the CEO of Rhino USA: the family-owned adventure gear company his sons Cameron and Dylan started in 2015 with a pickup truck and a gap in the market. Cameron was 19. Dylan jumped in with his savings while he was still in high school. Ted came in as CEO to help guide the growth. A decade later: nine figures in revenue, 300+ products, Walmart, Sam's Club, AutoZone, and one of the most u...

Before Jennie Ripps built one of the most talked-about RTD brands in the country, she was convincing Momofuku and Soho House that tea deserved to be taken as seriously as wine. That instinct — that what's actually in your glass matters — became the entire thesis behind Owl's Brew. She launched it in 2020, right as the world shut down, and grew 918% in year one anyway. No sampling. No playbook. Jus...

Aaron Menitoff and his wife Julie spent over 20 years catering high-end events in South Florida — think Prince Harry and Bruce Springsteen — before the pandemic canceled everything overnight. So they did what any reasonable couple would do, bet the farm and built something entirely new. The idea was simple: ship fully assembled, catering-quality cheese and charcuterie boards overnight, anywhere in...

David McCormick co-founded Ayoh Foods with Molly Baz, the cook, writer, and food personality who has basically rewired how a generation thinks about cooking and eating. Together they built a chef-driven mayo made with 100% pure avocado oil, and created a condiment that's making sandwich craftsmanship exciting again. The lineup — Original Mayo, Hot Giardinayo, Dill Pickle Mayo, Miso Mayo, and Tangy...

Helen Smith is the Founder and CEO of Roo & You, Canada's largest manufacturer of modular play couches for children. A Kurdish immigrant and former child and youth counselor, Helen built the business from a home office under the stairs: Self-funded, no outside capital, no industry connections. She grew her operations from a silicone teething brand into a design-forward kids' furniture company...

Alison Whritenour has spent two decades turning mission-driven brands into commercially serious businesses — from Colgate-Palmolive to a decade climbing every function at Seventh Generation, surviving its Unilever acquisition, and now leading Unreal Snacks as Chief Commercial Officer. She also teaches the practical application of sustainable business models at the UVM Business School. She knows ex...

Shannon Davenport is the Founder & CEO of Esker Beauty, a clean, plant-based bodycare brand she launched in 2018 after 12 years as a trend forecaster for global brands including L'Oréal, Unilever, and Beiersdorf. She bootstrapped Esker to approximately $1M in revenue before raising outside capital, building a premium retail presence at Bergdorf Goodman, Net-a-Porter, Credo Beauty, and Anthropo...

Caryn Wasser has spent nearly seven years building Little Spoon into the largest direct-to-consumer kids' food brand in the U.S. — scaling from a two-person startup to $150M+ in net revenue across 11 product categories, and recently engineering what Target called its largest food and beverage launch of all time: 23 products across six aisles in 1,800+ stores. Named a Breakout Brand Leader by Ad Ag...

🍦 DANIEL GOETZ // GOODPOP FOUNDER & CEO  Daniel Goetz built GoodPop from a $3,500 investment and a borrowed kitchen at UT Austin into one of the U.S.'s top-performing better-for-you frozen novelty brands — generating over $63 million in gross sales across 10,000+ retail locations including Costco, Walmart, and Whole Foods. In 15 years, he has never taken outside funding, built custom manufact...

Hudson Davis-Ross has spent nearly two decades building and scaling consumer brands, culminating in Plant People — the practitioner-grade supplement brand now ranking as the #1 seller at Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Erewhon. After co-founding RISE Brewing Co., running CROSBY Advisory, and serving on the founding team at ALOHA, Hudson bootstrapped Plant People through a major category pivot, a pandemi...

Nakul Kapoor left a career at the International Monetary Fund to build Lazy Food Co., a brand making authentic Italian one-pot pasta meals that are gluten-free, high-protein, and ready in under 20 minutes. Now available nationwide at Whole Foods Market and on Amazon, Lazy Food Co. was named to Whole Foods' Top 10 Food Trends for 2024 alongside some of the most talked-about names in modern food. 🔧...

Description Ali Kriegsman built Bulletin, the B2B wholesale marketplace, from a side-hustle newsletter at age 24 to a full-scale platform connecting 3,000 independent brands with over 26,000 retailers — before selling to Emerald Holding for roughly $10 million in 2022. Since then, she's channeled that builder's lens into consulting for early- to mid-stage consumer and DTC brands, advising on ShopM...

Brian Rose is Co-founder of Endless Commerce, an AI-powered commerceOS serving consumer brands scaling from $1M to $500M+ in revenue. With nearly a decade at BlueMountain Capital as a Consumer & Retail Investment Analyst, Brian brings a unique perspective combining investment analysis, brand operations as CFO of GIR (sold to Pattern Brands in 2021), and infrastructure building through Mvnifest...

Jake Kouns has built Dead Meat Society into a mission-driven grilling community after founding and scaling Risk Based Security, a cybersecurity company acquired by Flashpoint in 2022. Transitioning from B2B SaaS to consumer products, he's launched a grilling tools brand with a social purpose - fighting the loneliness epidemic by bringing people together around flame, family, and community. Dead Me...

Emily Groden has built Evergreen into one of America's fastest-growing frozen breakfast brands, scaling from a household Vitamix to $9.3 million in retail sales across 8,000+ stores. A Harvard Law graduate who cold-emailed her way from corporate law to General Counsel at three-Michelin-star Alinea, she launched Evergreen in 2020 with zero CPG experience. Now her fruit-and-vegetable-packed frozen w...