DTC Podcast

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup This week on All Killer No Filler, we're giving you a preview of Agency Confidential, the new podcast from our co-founder Jeff, and this episode's is a truly killer. Jeff sits down with Nick Shackelford, who's everywhere in DTC. Three agencies (Structured, Konstant, Lucid), an events business, and a decade of showing up on every...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Gifting is one of the biggest reasons people buy online, and most brands never build for it on purpose. Matt Heckathorn runs digital marketing at Wolfe, the company behind Gift Card Granny, PerfectGift.com, and GiftYa. His ICP is close to everyone, which kills the usual narrow-audience playbook and forces a different approach to growth. Wha...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Meta used to let you pick your customer in the backend. Those days are over. Post-Andromeda, the creative itself carries the targeting signal, which means the old spray-and-pray playbook now works against you. Rafael Gi spent a decade in traditional creative agencies, then led marketing at a nine-figure apparel brand, and now runs strategic...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most list-growth advice assumes you have a website people visit. Cove Soda doesn't. They sell zero sugar soda in roughly 7,000 retail doors with no real DTC store, which means no site traffic, no purchase pop-ups, and no easy email capture. Zoe Kahn runs marketing for Cove as interim VP. In this episode she breaks down how a retail-first br...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Google search is changing under everyone's feet. AI overviews are eating the top of the funnel, exact match stopped being exact years ago, and shoppers now type full paragraphs instead of two keywords. Doug, who leads Google at Pilothouse, breaks down what actually came out of Google Marketing Live 2026 and what DTC operators should do...

Most brands expand into the US and treat it like the same business with a different shipping label. Outway learned it is not. Taylor Fraser is the Chief Growth Officer at Outway, the Canadian performance sock brand. In this episode he breaks down why Outway now runs Canada and the US as two distinct businesses, why he dropped retargeting on Meta entirely, and why a sub eight-figure brand cannot op...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Braydon from Pilothouse joins for a fast AI check-in on what the team is actually shipping right now. Not theory. The exact tools, prompts, and workflows behind their current creative output. If you run growth or creative at a DTC brand or agency, this is a look at how one team is collapsing production time on landing pages, video ads, and...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup This episode, Kemberly Gong, VP of Marketing at Contentful, joins Eric to walk through what some marketing leaders are calling “The Great Content Collapse”, and what marketers can actually do about it. The setup: 60% of Google searches now result in zero click-through, and replaced by GenAI models like AI overviews. LLMs already account for...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Origin owns its entire supply chain. The thread, the brass, the leather, the denim, all of it made or sourced in America, in their own factories. That sounds like a constraint. Justin Parker explains why it is actually the brand's biggest growth lever. Justin runs e-commerce at Origin, the American-made apparel brand born in jiu-jitsu g...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most brands are quietly killing themselves with growth hacks. Swapping button colors, chasing this week's ROI, discounting to hit the number. Duncan, Strategy Lead at Pilothouse, makes the case that this is the worst creative strategy there is, and walks through what actually builds a brand that lasts. Duncan runs strategy at Pilothouse...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Recorded live at The Whalies. Enterprise brands are past the prompt-and-generate phase of AI. The conversation has moved to connected data, agentic media buying, personalization, attribution, and the quiet operational wins that actually move the P&L. Eric Dyck sits down with Justin Parker (Origin), Ashley Kick (DÔEN), and Martha Ann Pav...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most founders want to be first in a category. Justin Soleimani and Zach Dannett did the opposite, and built Tumble into one of the standout washable rug brands without raising a dollar. In this episode, the Tumble co-founders and Co-CEOs break down how they entered a category Ruggable created, fixed the product complaints they found buried...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup This Friday on AKNF we're handing over the feed for a special preview of The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. Your email account doesn't break all at once. It rots. Open rates slide, a quarter of your sends quietly route to spam, your list keeps growing while the people who actually click disappear. Jordan Gordon calls...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Recorded live at True Classic HQ in Calabasas the day before the Whalies, this episode brings together two of the leaders most aggressively reshaping how ecommerce gets built. Ben Diamond is the CEO and co-founder of True Classic, the apparel brand that went from zero to over a billion in revenue in seven years and now ships to 190 countrie...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Neuro didn't fight for checkout shelf space first. They built a nine-figure online business through TikTok Shop, creator marketing, Amazon, and DTC, then used that momentum to walk into Walmart, Costco, CVS, and 7-Eleven with demand already proven. In this episode of the DTC Podcast, Eric talks with Brian Evangelista, Chief Commercial O...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup The consideration phase is collapsing thanks to LLM shopping. Awareness still happens on Meta. Conversion still happens on a PDP. But the comparison and research middle, the part brands have spent a decade optimizing, is increasingly happening inside an LLM the customer already trusts. 20% of holiday shoppers used an LLM in their purchase p...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Charlie Cole watched FTD go from a $1.8 billion publicly traded company to a $60 million bankruptcy auction in eight months. His first day as CEO was March 23, 2020, the first day of national lockdown. Before that he ran digital at Tumi, Samsonite, Lucky Brand, and Shift Nutrition. Today he's interim Chief Digital Officer at Thuma. This...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Braydon's back on AKNF with the most tactical AI-for-agencies episode we've recorded. Eric opens with a Jeff Shannon line worth the whole listen: AI right now is a giant stack of two-by-fours that everyone got handed for free. By itself, it's not a chair, it's not a house, it's not a sofa. The value shows up when someone...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Katie Sturino built Megababe with 60,000 followers, two co-founders who'd never had chafe, and an MOQ of 20,000 units stacked in her parents' garage. Eight years later it's profitable, in Target, Walmart, CVS, Nordstrom, Anthropologie, and on Amazon. Never raised a dollar. Never grew less than 33% year over year. In this episode...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Abby and Taylor from Pilothouse settle the loudest debate in media buying right now: does velocity equal strategy? Short answer: no. Long answer: this whole episode. Inside, Abby (art) and Taylor (science) break down what a real creative system looks like under Andromeda, how to spot AI slop in an ad library at a glance, and why the squint...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Get your tickets to The Whalies: triplewhale.com/whalies?i=dtc&utm_source=dtc-newsletter&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=mkt-whaliesdtc-affiliate-426&utm_content=dtc Full Glass Wine Co. Neha Kumar joins the podcast to break down how Full Glass Wine Co. acquired 7 DTC wine companies, integrated them under one operating system, an...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Get your tickets to The Whalies: triplewhale.com/whalies?i=dtc&utm_source=dtc-newsletter&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=mkt-whaliesdtc-affiliate-426&utm_content=dtc Meta attribution has changed, and most brands are still reading performance the same way they were a year ago. Jacob, Head of Socials at Pilothouse, walks through w...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup We surveyed 540+ DTC operators on how they plan and forecast. This episode, we break down the data and see why most brands are stuck reacting. We’re joined by Laura Thompson, co-founder of Three Ships Beauty, one of the few who's figured out how to run a tight, fast, 8-figure brand without drifting into chaos, and Mike Chiasson, Senior...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Get your tickets to The Whalies: triplewhale.com/whalies?i=dtc&utm_source=dtc-newsletter&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=mkt-whaliesdtc-affiliate-426&utm_content=dtc Helen Smith built Roo & You from hand-sewn mask lanyards in 2020 into a 100,000+ customer brand, and didn't touch paid ads for the first 3.5 years. In this...

Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Get your tickets to The Whalies: triplewhale.com/whalies?i=dtc&utm_source=dtc-newsletter&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=mkt-whaliesdtc-affiliate-426&utm_content=dtc Amazon’s AI assistant Rufus is already in ~40% of shopping sessions, and according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, customers who use it are 60–100% more likely to purchas...