Zeitgeist: How breakout brands got built

Repeated Hit Brands R.J. Melman, CEO of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, shares why some companies stay relevant for decades while others disappear: “Restaurants don’t get tired. Restaurateurs get tired.” Lettuce has built more than 120 restaurant concepts over 55 years. Not one hit, but REPEATED hits! Maggiano’s. RPM. Shaw’s. Bub City. Wildfire. RJ Grunts. Different eras. Different audiences. D...

Barbershop to Billion. Dave Salvant, President and Co-Founder of Squire, built a platform that’s processed over $1B in payments — but it all started with a bad haircut experience. When we sat down for the podcast, Dave told me how he and his co-founder got so frustrated waiting hours in chaotic barbershops that they decided to fix it. But here’s the part that floored me: when their first test clie...

Rashid Ali, Co-Founder & CEO of Chomps , he told us something I can’t forget: 👉 “Our moms were our best customers.” That’s how Chomps started. A frozen steak business that couldn’t scale. No traction. Just moms buying to keep the lights on. Then one day — Trader Joe’s calls . At the time, they were doing only ~$400K in sales. The order was so big they needed to raise $1M in a single weekend j...

What does it take to turn a mortgage company and a sports betting app into cultural icons? Casey Hurbis, CMO of BetMGM and the marketing mind who helped Rocket Mortgage break into the Super Bowl spotlight, reveals the unfiltered truth about building brands that people obsess over. In this conversation with Cameo co-founder Steven Galanis, Casey shares: 🔥 The risks behind Super Bowl ads (and why s...

They tried to cancel Four Loko. It didn’t work. This is the untold story of how one of the most hated , hyped , and misunderstood brands in America refused to die. Jaisen Freeman — co-founder and co-CEO of Phusion Projects — takes us behind the scenes of Four Loko’s rise, rebellion, and resurrection. From a bootstrapped college hustle to a billion-dollar juggernaut, he unpacks: 🔥 How they built a...

Kefir...from $116 to Billion-Dollar Brand...CEO Lifeway Foods, Julie Smolyansky. Julie Smolyansky is the CEO of Lifeway Foods, shares her incredible and inspiring story! Imagine arriving in America as an infant with nothing but one suitcase, $116 in cash, and parents who didn’t speak a word of English. By age 27, she was the youngest female CEO of a publicly traded company in American history. But...

From Uber to Unicorn: Reinventing the $100B booze biz. He started with a Google Sheet and a whiskey collector who didn’t know he was sitting on a million dollars. Phil Mikhailov is CEO and Co-Founder of Unicorn Auctions, the largest wine and spirits auction platform in the U.S., managing $100M+ in inventory and doing $1M in digital bottle trades monthly—without a drop being shipped. No VC pitch de...

What do a Shark Tank smack down and a life-sized foam butt on MTV have in common? They built Dude Wipes—a $200M empire that turned baby wipes into a pop culture phenomenon. In the premiere of Zeitgeist, Cameo co-founder Steven Galanis sits down with Dude Wipes CEO Sean Riley, who didn’t just break the DTC mold—he set it on fire. Armed with frat-boy hustle and zero apologies, Sean turned an uncomfo...