Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

Live shopping has been "the next big thing" in Australian ecommerce for five years. Grayson White has been doing it for fifteen.
Grayson White started running "breaks" (the trading card version of live shopping) at Cherry Collectables back in 2008. Cherry is now Australia's biggest trading card retailer, and what Grayson has built since isn't a sales channel. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of collectors who trust the brand enough to move 1,600% more product on a single new release than they ever had before.
In this week's Playbook, Nathan unpacks the model behind Cherry's result and what it means for any retailer trying to make live shopping actually convert, including 40-year-old fashion brand Motto, which grew 127% in twelve months on the back of daily 4pm streams, and Oz Hair and Beauty, which deliberately started live before TikTok Shop arrived in Australia.
Today, we're discussing:
Why live shopping works when buying is one of three reasons people showed up [03:00]
The three-audience model that took Motto from a COVID pivot to 127% growth [06:30]
Why most brands kill the room by coming across as a catalogue [09:30]
How fifteen years of trust earned Cherry the 1,600% activation on a single drop [12:00]
Why Whatnot works where social live shopping in Australia still doesn't [15:00]
Why every show needs an event hook, not just a schedule [17:00]
Connect with Grayson White | Explore Cherry Collectables 
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Klaviyo is sitting at $1.2 billion in revenue and 196,000 brands. Ed Hallen says it's 1% done.
Ed Hallen co-founded Klaviyo in 2012 with Andrew Bialecki, off the back of a dinner in Boston where an Australian entrepreneur selling suits online told them he spent three hours a week manually emailing his customer list. They offered to automate it. Thirteen years, a 2023 IPO, and a shift from email tool to autonomous B2C CRM later, that same core idea, understand the customer, act on it, measure it, still runs the company. As Chief Strategy Officer, Ed is now the person thinking hardest about where Klaviyo goes next.
Nathan caught him live at K:SYD in Sydney, straight off a keynote to 600-plus people. Klaviyo is one of Add To Cart's two major sponsors, and this conversation still went straight at the hard stuff: pricing, attribution, the SaaSpocalypse, and what you're probably leaving on the table inside the platform right now.
Today, we're discussing:
Why the move from email tool to autonomous B2C CRM is really just the original 2012 idea at a bigger scale [05:00]
The honest story behind the pricing change from contacts emailed to active profiles, and what it means for your database [22:39]
Why your disengaged list is a segment to talk to differently, not a cost to delete [30:30]
How Klaviyo thinks about attributing its own value when it's one part of a bigger marketing stack [25:30]
Where Klaviyo's B2C CRM vision is heading now that service and marketing run through one platform [33:00]
The single most underused feature on the platform, and why it isn't the newest one [41:00]
Connect with Ed Hallen | Explore Klaviyo

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For most of a decade, the performance marketing edge came from audience strategy. Which targeting, which lookalikes, which exclusions. Media buying was the skill, and creative was just the fuel you fed it. That advantage has quietly disappeared as Meta, Google and TikTok have absorbed the targeting levers into the platform.
Most brands are still organised around the old model: budget and attention pointed at audience strategy, with creative treated as execution. The brands pulling ahead have flipped it. They know the machine now finds the right person, so the only thing left to control is what you put in front of them. The question isn't whether an ad is good. It's whether the pipeline has enough creative in it to keep finding what works.
The brands getting this right do three things differently.
In this playbook, based on a conversation with Justin Babet, founder of Chief Nutrition, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about building a creative machine that finds winners:
Creative does the targeting now, so the lever that matters has shifted from audience strategy to content production
A content machine is a system before it's a creative problem, and the fix is finding the blocker that's stalling your output
Volume only works if new creative gets a genuine test in its own campaign, away from your proven winners
Connect with Justin Babet Explore Chief Nutrition
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Most people know Jess Hatzis from frank body.
The coffee scrub brand built on a $10,000 investment, a genderless persona called Frank, and an Instagram strategy so early they were setting alarms through the night to post manually. Eleven years later, a $100 million valuation and one of the most recognised Australian beauty brands in the world.
What fewer people talk about is what it actually took to build that. The data before the creative. The hard calls on what to kill. The discipline of knowing when to move and when to wait.
Jess is now fractional CMO at Betts, co-founder of Willow & Blake, and building a new consumer brand from scratch. She joined Nathan and Rosa to talk about the unglamorous side of brand building.
This one is for anyone who has ever confused a good-looking brand with a well-built one.
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Revenue is still the number most ecommerce founders lead with. It's the easiest to celebrate, the easiest to screenshot, and the one that gets the most airtime in strategy conversations. But it's also the number that tells you the least about whether the business is actually working.
Most operators are chasing a revenue target that has no maths behind it. Nobody has calculated the one number that gives a revenue target its job. Gross profit might be off. Contribution margin might be close to zero. Overheads might be quietly eating through whatever's left. And the founder usually finds out too late, when cashflow tightens or a BAS payment lands.
The brands getting this right do three things differently.
In this playbook, based on a conversation with Matt Byrne, founder of Day One Advisory, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about calculating a breakeven number that actually works:
Start with the sequence, not the target. Gross profit and contribution margin come before breakeven, and if either is off the breakeven will be too
The formula takes ten minutes, but it only works if you run it twice. Once with the numbers as they are, then again with subscriptions and full people costs included
Use breakeven before you make a decision, not after. Discount campaigns, ad spend targets and stock orders should all be stress tested against it first
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