DTC Podcast

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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 episode is a tactical sit-down on what actually drives growth right now in a Meta + AI world.

In this episode:
Why "creative is the new targeting" is only half the answer
The exact death spiral most DTC brands follow on the way to margin collapse (no sale, semi-annual sale, sale page, sitewide 20%, Amazon, done)
How Charlie engineered personas at FTD across customer, consumer, and event
The florist's choice insight: highest NPS in the category, by 20-40%
The 2011 Dr. Oz campaign that nailed funnel congruency before anyone called it that
Why personalization was a misnomer until about two years ago
The three "swimsuit for vacation" shoppers who should never see the same page
Why YouTube is still massively underutilized, and why most brands run it wrong
The product question that decides whether any of this matters

Who it's for: DTC founders and operators scaling from $10M to $250M who want to grow without turning their brand into a discount machine.

What to steal:
Build acquisition around your highest-LTV segments, not your lowest CAC
Treat creative and landing pages as one system, not two teams
Stop letting platforms grade their own homework on attribution
Audit where you sit on the discount death spiral before it owns you

Timestamps:
0:00 Career Journey Into Ecommerce
2:48 Inside the FTD Turnaround
14:20 How Customer Behavior Changed During COVID
23:18 Creative Is The New Targeting
36:05 AI’s Biggest Ecommerce Unlock
43:02 Why Most Brands Test Creative Wrong

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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 actually builds something with it.

Then Braydon walks through what he's been building.

Inside: connecting Claude to Motion to audit ad-to-landing-page mismatches, then having Claude vibe-code a new PDP in HTML in 6 hours instead of a week in Instapage. The Microsoft Clarity connector that nobody's talking about (free heatmaps, free recordings, API access). The Higgsfield connector for generating raw 4K assets through Claude with Nano Banana Pro and Seedance. Why Claude Design is worth experimenting with for brand-sensitive clients. And a peek behind the curtain at Gary and Blanche, the AI media buyer and creative strategist Jeff is running on DTC's own Meta account.

Plus: why the em-dash is dead, the semicolon problem nobody's solved, and the actual reason Claude reads cleaner than ChatGPT for enterprise work.

If you've been "playing with AI" and want to actually build something with it, this is the episode.

Catch the DTC and Pilothouse crew at The Whalies May 19 in LA.

Timestamps:
00:00 AI Is Raw Material
02:36 Why AI Needs Human Builders
04:18 Claude Building Landing Pages
10:02 AI-Powered Heatmap Analysis
16:36 Higgsfield + Claude Creative Workflow

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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 Katie walks through how she built a category that didn't exist. Manufacturers didn't know what chafe was. Press didn't know what chafe was. The Today Show hit on June 30, 2017 and they sold out every unit by July 1. Then the real work started.

Inside: why retail is when the grind begins (not when you've made it), why she still ranks "people just dealing with it" as her biggest competitor, the husband-given marketing fix that solved deodorant aisle confusion in one sticker, the accidental Amazon Super Bowl ad placement, why their hemorrhoid product is a top seller on Amazon, and the moment her sister convinced her soap was worth doing.

Plus the new "I'm Not Fine Index" campaign, why NYC taxi ads outperform every digital channel they run, and the one piece of advice Katie has for anyone shipping a product in 2026.

Catch the DTC and Pilothouse crew at The Whalies May 19 in LA.

Timestamps:
0:00 Building a brand around chafe
2:58 How Megababe started
11:00 Selling out after the Today Show
14:10 Retail growth at Target and Walmart
20:05 Why Megababe started advertising
27:10 Building a real brand voice

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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 test is still the fastest way to audit your output. They get into the frequency spike that hit when one apparel brand over-segmented celebrity drops, why Taylor still runs legacy Advantage+ Shopping campaigns three years later, and how a Nick DiGiovanni partnership ran at 0.5 ROAS on platform but pulled a 6 ROAS once Northbeam's 60-day window kicked in.

Plus: why gifting ads should still target women, three exercises to run on your ad account before Q4, and the difference between feeding the algorithm and spamming the button.

If you're making 50 ads a week and not sure any of them are doing a job, this one's for you.

Catch the Pilothouse and DTC crew at The Whalies May 19 in LA, and our DTC operator dinner May 20.

Timestamps:
0:00 Why velocity isn’t strategy
2:38 The problem with endless ad variations
5:12 Best Meta account structures today
8:07 How to audit creative quality
14:08 Building a real creative system

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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, and scaled to a $200M platform in under two years.

This wasn’t a “buy brands and hope” strategy. Neha explains how COVID-era DTC brands overbought inventory, ignored unit economics, and optimized for growth over profitability — creating one of the biggest acquisition opportunities in modern ecommerce.

For DTC founders scaling from $5M–$50M who want to improve retention, fix unit economics, and build operational leverage across brands.

Inside the episode:
Why subscription models quietly broke a lot of DTC wine businesses
The exact operational changes Full Glass uses to make acquisitions profitable in 60–120 days
How they centralized shipping, finance, SMS, and retention while preserving each brand’s identity
Why retention, not acquisition, became the core growth engine
The hidden downside of emailing subscription customers too often
How Wink’s 7M-email quiz funnel became a massive acquisition asset
Why customer segmentation matters more than product assortment in brand acquisitions
The “three legs of the tripod” framework for building durable DTC companies: marketing, finance, and operations
Neha’s “Year of Yes” mindset shift inspired by Willy Wonka that changed how she built companies

Who this is for:
Operators, retention marketers, DTC founders, PE-backed ecommerce brands, acquisition entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to scale profitably after the cheap-CAC era ended.

What to steal:
Move from monthly shipments to higher-AOV quarterly bundles to fix shipping economics
Centralize infrastructure, not brand voice
Treat retention like the business engine, not an afterthought

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro to Full Glass Wine Co
2:18 Why DTC wine brands struggled after COVID
6:12 How Winc collapsed from inventory overload
8:05 The 3-part formula for profitable DTC brands
10:05 What Full Glass looks for in acquisitions
13:05 Centralizing customer service across wine brands
15:02 Building brands around customer identity
17:42 The Willy Wonka “year of yes” mindset
21:58 What happens after acquiring a company
24:45 Why subscription models don’t work for wine
29:12 Storytelling vs transactional retention emails
32:18 How Full Glass approaches retention marketing
35:05 Managing inventory and cash flow in wine
37:15 Trusting intuition as an operator
40:18 How Full Glass is using AI internally
42:05 Are the next generation of entrepreneurs ready?
45:00 What’s next for Full Glass Wine Co

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