DTC Podcast

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pilothouse.co

"There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing five to ten million in revenue."

That was Codie Sanchez, and the post went wide enough that DTC marketers spent a week arguing about whether they should be doing their jobs at all. Eric came back from vacation, saw it, and used it to launch a format he has wanted to make since the beginning of this show.

The Rundown is Pardon the Interruption for DTC. A few topics off the week, three people, everyone gives a take. First panel is Jordan Gordon, who runs post-click and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, and Rafael Gi, who works partnerships and client strategy.

What you get:
Both sides of the Codie Sanchez take. Jordan defends the free traffic position: if twenty percent of your traffic is organic and your total margin is twenty percent, that organic traffic is your profit. Rafael's counter is that paid media is a muscle, and a brand that waits until $10M to build it has to relearn its culture, team, and workflows at exactly the wrong moment.
What paid media does: accelerate. Good product grows faster. Bad product fails quicker.
The wastage Rafael sees most across ten to fifteen audits a week. Brands paying to reach customers who were buying regardless, the platform taking view-through credit for purchases with no click, and that false signal then deciding which creative gets scaled.
Marketing is downstream from business, and business is downstream from markets. Jordan on why your marketing mix is often not your decision to make.
Why "evergreen versus campaigns" is the wrong framing past seven figures, and what demand creation looks like next to demand capture.
"Shift our thinking from tests to bets." Rafael on what changes once you have proof, and why the change is philosophical before it is tactical.
Audience hygiene as the precondition for everything. Until existing, engaged, and net new are defined across every channel, none of your tests are valid.
Advertising is vertical, email is horizontal. Jordan on campaigns for launches, flows for evergreen, and why someone who re-enters your world nine months later still needs to be sold your core product.
Acute versus routine entry points in supplements and beauty, and the cross-sell each one opens.
How to spot a brand that has the ratio wrong: growth decelerating quarter over quarter while the new-to-returning revenue ratio inverts. On the email side, campaign-heavy, flow-light, with Klaviyo revenue low against Shopify.
Unique opens are brand impressions. The argument for email as an advertising layer sitting just below reach.
The IKEA tote bag, and campaigns that exist to buy eyeballs rather than revenue.
The car category rule that applies everywhere. If you are not one of the three brands already in someone's consideration set, your revenue and your fame do not matter.

Who this is for: founders and operators between seven and nine figures, media buyers, and anyone who owns both the acquisition and retention number.

What to steal: the audience definition audit, the growth-versus-new-customer-ratio chart, and the absolutes-not-rates rule for judging new customer work.

Timestamps:
00:00 Should brands wait until $5M to run paid media?
05:00 Building organic traffic alongside paid growth
10:00 The hidden problem with scaling paid acquisition
13:00 Evergreen marketing vs. campaign moments
22:00 Audience targeting and wasted media spend

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Phillip Jackson has spent 22 years in ecommerce, first building the software, then running agency strategy, and now running Future Commerce (futurecommerce.com), where the operating thesis is that commerce is culture.

If you are a founder, brand lead, or growth operator trying to figure out what AI traffic is actually doing to your store, this one is worth the 50 minutes.

What's inside:
The Future Commerce study: 77% of shoppers want AI to recommend and nothing more. No booking, no buying, no agent acting on their behalf
What that shopper does when they land: converts about 3x more often, spends about half as much, does zero browsing
Why the fix is counterintuitive. You now have to add friction back into the buying process and tell more brand story on a product page
Nike's decline read from someone with a partnership inside the turnaround: streetwear over sport, owned channels over retail partners, and the running category handed to On and Hoka
"Ma," the Japanese cinema concept, applied to brand. Nobody wants to hear from you constantly, and the brands that never rest never get a cultural high point either
Proof of work: Dr. Martens selling pre-broken-in secondhand boots at Brewer Street, Levi's repair, $1,200 Pope tees, and why patina is now the product
The agentic reader. Future Commerce stopped treating a human as its primary audience for discovery
Cannes Lions and the collision of retail media with the traditional ad ecosystem, plus what that means for creator strategy in 2026

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators watching LLM referral traffic show up in their analytics and not knowing what to do about it, plus brand people who want a sharper vocabulary for what is happening to culture.

What to steal: rebuild your PDP for answer engine traffic. That visitor arrived pre-sold on one SKU and will not browse unless you give them a reason.

Follow Phillip: futurecommerce.com

Timestamps:
03:00 Why Commerce Is Culture
06:00 How Brands Participate in Culture
24:00 Why Consumers Can Spot AI Content
32:00 How AI Is Changing the Marketing Funnel
44:00 The Rise of Consumer Sovereignty

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pilothouse.co

In 2020, Amazon's fees ran about 26% of your product cost. Today they run 34 to 40%, and once you add advertising most brands are at 50 to 60% before they reinvest a dollar. For the first time in years, the number of sellers on Amazon is shrinking.

Tyler, head of Amazon at Pilothouse, is back to explain what he calls the Amazon paradox: you can't afford to be on Amazon, and you can't afford not to be.

If you sell on Amazon, buy Amazon ads, or keep putting off the decision to launch there, this is the operator's version of the math.

What you get:
Where the 40% actually goes, and which parts of it you can still fight
The hidden fee stack (long-term storage, inbound, freight, returns, chargebacks) that quietly takes another 5 to 8% of margin, one fraction of a percent at a time
Reimbursements: Amazon loses and damages inventory and wrongly charges you for it, and will pay it back if you dispute it. Most brands never do
AGL / AWD, shipping straight from your manufacturer into Amazon's fulfillment network, and the 2 to 5% freight savings that comes with it
Why the April 15 change (Amazon pulling ad spend out of your disbursement instead of your credit card) is a cash flow problem, not an ad problem
The death of the middle: half of Amazon's GMV now sits with roughly 8,000 sellers, down from 15,000, and what changed in the algorithm to cause it
Cosmo and what comes after A9: why external traffic into your listing now reads to Amazon as brand authority
Nike showed up. What happens to the small sellers who used to feast on big brands' unconverted branded search
TACoS as a vanity metric, and the three-report method (SQP, Helium 10 rank, ad spend) that shows whether your ads are driving incremental sales or paying for organic ones you already had
Rufus is now Alexa for Shopping, most people use it on the product page rather than in search, and what that means for your listing copy
What Tyler expects out of Amazon Accelerate 2026

Who this is for: Amazon sellers, DTC founders weighing the channel, and anyone managing Amazon ad spend.

What to steal: the reimbursement audit, the AGL freight move, and the zero-sale keyword sweep on your last quarter of ad spend.

Timestamps:
00:00 The Amazon Paradox
04:00 Why Amazon Is Getting More Expensive
10:00 Hidden Amazon Fees Hurting Margins
15:00 Why Brands Still Need Amazon
21:00 How to Make Amazon Ad Spend More Profitable

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Once Upon a Farm did $85.4 million in Q2, up 42% year over year, and reached 6.2% of US households against 5.0% a year earlier. Some of that growth traces back to a campaign that was never supposed to produce it. They were running lower-funnel media to their own site, a clean shop-now call to action, the kind of campaign you judge by tomorrow's site revenue. What moved was the retail business. Instacart got more efficient. Programs with accounts picked up momentum. Jennifer Berglund has spent the years since trying to see that effect properly instead of guessing at it, and now she is watching paid search at one retailer lift sales at another, and that's where Keen is worth its weight in premium baby food.

If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what happens to your job when the sale stops closing anywhere you can see it, and what you measure instead.

If you own the media budget: Jennifer walks through how a one month TV test in 2021 turned into always-on upper funnel, including the matched-market holdout testing she used to defend it before she had a model.

What they get into:
The early signal: lower-funnel DTC media running, and the retail business taking off instead
The finding out of Keen that surprised her most, paid search at Kroger or Target showing an effect on a different account entirely
Why she treats ROAS as an education problem inside the company rather than a KPI
The trap in "new to brand" at a retailer, and why she takes it with a grain of salt
How she built the case for TV: 2021 test, then TV plus social plus out of home, then geo tests against comparable holdout markets, then always-on
Streaming TV and YouTube, and Brad on buying top of funnel through retail media DSPs so the money still funnels to the retailer
Why every retail media network's conversion methodology is different, and what she uses those platform numbers for instead
The moment a brand should stop putting every dollar into working media and start paying for measurement
Brad on awareness as the leading indicator of household penetration, and household penetration as the leading indicator of revenue
Amoeba marketing, which Brad coined live on the recording and Jennifer immediately claimed for her LinkedIn

Who this is for: operators whose business has outgrown the channel their reporting was built for. DTC brands going into retail, retail brands building ecommerce, anyone whose media now shows up in someone else's numbers.

What to steal: the biweekly omnichannel meeting. Jennifer runs one across her media team and sales leadership. Sales says "I see this happening here," she says "we were running media during that time." That meeting found the halo before any model did.

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 was the market read. This is the first brand.

Timestamps:
00:00 The Halo Effect of Digital Marketing
07:00 Measuring Growth Across DTC and Retail
15:00 How Marketing Channels Influence Each Other
21:00 Streaming TV and YouTube Opportunities
37:00 Why ROAS Can Be Misleading

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Ashley Kick runs ecommerce at DÔEN (shopdoen.com), the Los Angeles apparel brand founded by sisters Margaret and Katherine Kleveland. Eric met her at the Whalies giving hot takes on stage, so this episode is a new format built for exactly that: World Cup themed, 15 ecommerce topics, kick it or keep it.

If you run a premium brand and you are tired of advice written for a $30 AOV, Ashley draws lines most operators are still arguing about internally.

What's inside:
AI generated ad creative, kicked as hard as anything gets kicked on this show: "they didn't fall in love with the clanker generated things"
Her pendulum argument: everything used to be human made, the swing to AI has been fast, and the vacuum it left is the differentiation opportunity for brands willing to keep humans on the work. DÔEN has hired novelists to write copy
Why she will not trade a discount or free shipping for an email address, with the list math behind it: a million names sending at 20%, or 300,000 sending at 60 to 70%
Hand Me DÔEN, the resale program that runs on Treet: trade in for store credit, quarterly resale events, and an answer to the dupe sellers, because buying from the program is how a customer knows the piece is real
The AOV line where she thinks TikTok Shop stops making sense, and why discovery on TikTok still matters for the brand through user generated content
Losing money on the first order to win it back on LTV, kicked. Her hero products are chosen as the best first experience of the brand, and they are not loss leaders
Where she is happy to let algorithms work: media buying, placements, and Klaviyo send-time optimization
AI for customer service, kicked. If someone wants to talk about the fit of a dress, that is a person
Retail as an experience play, including a roughly 20% brand awareness lift in a market when a store opens, plus wholesale through boutiques with an aligned aesthetic
Amazon, extended sizing, and buy now pay later, each with a verdict

Who this is for: operators at premium and considered-purchase brands, retention and email leads, and anyone building the argument for keeping humans on creative.

What to steal: the email capture stance. Stop buying addresses with 15% off and measure your list on deliverability and send rate rather than raw size.

Timestamps:
00:03:00 AI Shopping Agents
00:05:00 TikTok Shop for Premium Brands
00:10:00 Branded Resale and the Circular Economy
00:14:00 AI-Generated Creative and Brand Identity
00:24:00 Wholesale, Amazon and Discount Strategy

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