Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

Four years ago Elysia Krstevski didn't know what ecommerce was. She'd spent 15 years in musical theatre, working her way from receptionist to co-CEO. Today she runs Mekė Baby, the brand behind Australia's first portable milk warmer, she's in the 2026 Top 50 People in eCommerce, and she's the face of Australia Post's national "Big Boss Energy" campaign.
It started with a bad moment. Stuck in a supermarket during Covid, dealing with mastitis and unable to warm expressed milk for her screaming baby, Elysia went looking for a product that didn't exist and decided to build it herself.
In this episode, Elysia sits down with Nathan Bush to break down how she created a feeding category from scratch. We get into why she built the brand before she had a product, why she handed prototypes to high-profile mums instead of waiting for perfection, and the wild story of answering a copycat competitor by borrowing Adrian Portelli's jet for a Black Friday film. Elysia is refreshingly direct about the numbers, why she stopped chasing top-line revenue on Meta and moved into Baby Bunting, why she runs her own ad account, and why she'll never hand customer service to AI. Plus building a brand while raising three kids, and launching the Go-Box while she was in labour.
Brands and tools mentioned: Mekė Baby, Baby Bunting, The Memo, Australia Post, Shopify, Meta, TikTok, Claude
This episode is brought to you with thanks to our partners:
 🛍️ Shopify → https://www.shopify.com/au
📧 Klaviyo → https://www.klaviyo.com/au/
Connect with us on LinkedIn:
 👤 Elysia Krstevski → https://au.linkedin.com/in/elysia-krstevski-b41485b7
👤 Nathan Bush → https://au.linkedin.com/in/nathbush
👤 Rosa Willis → https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-clara-willis-23761066/
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There's a link in ecommerce that mostly goes unsaid, and it's a slightly awkward one: the connection between giving and commercial benefit. When a brand partners with a charity, they're doing it for the right reason. But to get it off the ground and keep it alive when budgets tighten, they usually have to rationalise it commercially, and that's the part that feels a bit icky to say out loud.
It shouldn't. Generosity carries a real commercial upside, and being honest about that is often the very thing that lets the good happen at all. The thing worth chasing is the win-win-win: a win for the retailer, a win for the charity, and a win for the community in need. Get all three and it's powerful. Miss one and it falls over.
Rohan McCloskey, founder of GoGenerosity, a pay-it-forward platform that turns small customer donations at the checkout into full-value gift cards for people in need, without ever touching the retailer's margin. Rohan has since sold the business. This episode was co-hosted by Rosa Willis.
In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about making giving a commercial lever:
Let purpose lead, but give it a commercial backbone so it isn't the first thing cut when the year gets tight
Weave the giving into the problem you're already solving for the customer, rather than a guilt trip at the checkout
Make the impact visible and pick a cause that fits, because alignment plus visibility turns a giving feature into a real relationship
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Making a single ad used to cost half a million to a few million dollars. You poured everything into one hero execution and you had to be right, because that was the bet. That world is gone. Today a brand can make a few hundred ads off an iPhone, put a bit of spend behind each, and let the market decide.
Here's the shift most teams haven't made: finding a breakout ad isn't about one person being braver, it's about how the whole team works. Loosen the approvals so more creative goes live, trust the data over opinion, and let go of the idea that any single Meta ad is your whole brand. Most of them are disposable.
This Playbook is anchored by Mark Broadhead, Head of Creative and Growth at The Lad Collective, who made around 15,000 ads in four years to find fewer than 10 that truly flew, and grew the brand to 200,000 customers and a US launch on the back of it.
In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about finding their unicorn ads:
Take more shots and ring-fence your testing budget from your proven winners, because volume is now a strategy
Change your approvals, not just your attitude, so the default is that ads go live and the data decides
Give your long shots their own budget, because the algorithm optimises for the next sale, not your next unicorn
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Five years ago Rob Ward came on the show as co-founder and CEO of Quad Lock, the phone-mount brand he and Chris Peters bootstrapped from a Kickstarter campaign. Since then he's taken the big exit, Quad Lock sold to Thule for $500M at the end of 2024, and walked away entirely.
He's spent the time since coaching basketball, picking up his kids, and building The DTC Playbook, a free interactive platform packing everything he learned scaling Quad Lock into frameworks any founder can use. This conversation is the post-exit reflection: what he sees now that he couldn't from the inside, the opinions that built the business, and why he gave the whole playbook away for nothing.
We get properly nerdy on the frameworks. Why revenue is vanity and unit economics are the truth, his Three Gates for customer acquisition, why new-customer CAC beats ROAS, and why brand is the only real moat left in a world where a six-month-old brand can look like a billion-dollar one.
In this episode:
Watch customer economics, not topline, because CAC is owned by the whole business, not just performance marketing
Brand is the moat, since products are easy to copy and trust built over years is not
Run leaner than you think, and use the gap between what AI can do and how it's actually implemented as your edge
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In ecommerce we're often asked to build a whole new house while making the existing one bigger and better at the same time. That's a replatform. You're not pausing trade while you move across, you're still hitting the numbers and running the sales while shifting the entire business onto a brand new site.
Here's the thing almost everyone gets wrong: the platform is the easy bit. A big replatform doesn't blow out because of the technology. It blows out because you try to build the shiny new tech while still running and growing the business with the same people. The teams that get through it are deliberate about resourcing the project properly, holding a hard scope and a hard date, and keeping their partners in the room.
This Playbook is anchored by a conversation with Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital at Kathmandu, whose team moved the whole business off Magento onto Shopify Plus in four months and went live in the middle of a flash sale, something their agency had never seen done before.

This episode is brought to you by StudioHawk. Grab the Chosen, Not Clicked white paper, StudioHawk's free eCommerce AI Visibility Toolkit and a personalised SEO & AI Search Masterplan for your brand at http://studiohawk.com.au/add-to-cart
In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about replatforming without stalling the business:
Resource the project properly by splitting into a build crew and a trade crew, don't squeeze it in around the day job
Go live with better, not perfect, hold your date, and let the rest be a little bumpy
Keep your partners in the room solving things on the spot, and let the tickets be the paper trail, not the conversation
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Explore Kathmandu
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