Operators

How did First Day raise $1M and then build a 9-figure brand?
Alice Li (Founder & CEO, First Day) joins Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) and Jason Panzer (President, HexClad) to unpack how she has sold over half a billion gummies and built a family wellness empire around kids’ vitamins.
After years of turning down retailers, First Day launched nationwide and became the number one kids vitamin in the country.
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“The best Black Friday offers don’t just increase orders, they increase AOV.”
Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge), Matt Bertulli (Founder, Pela Case x Lomi), Jason Panzer (President, HexClad), and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) share the Black Friday & Cyber Monday tips they rely on every year. Every tactic comes from hard-won experience over decades of combined holiday wins and losses.
They break down why every Black Friday deal needs a backup, sometimes even a worse one, ready to launch. Mike explains why spotlight bias makes old creative beat anything new. Matt shares the upsell that added a million dollars. Small moves like these are what separate a good quarter from a record one. 
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“The amount of effort that we put in to start does not have any meaningful correlation with the success at the end.” 
When you get delayed and deprioritized by your co-manufacturer, your timeline slips by almost a year, and you still have zero sales, what do you have to show for 18 months of work? 
Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela & Lomi), Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern), Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge), Curtis Christopherson (Chief Growth Officer, Ammortal), and Cody Plofker (Advisor & fmr. CEO, Jones Road) reunite one month from launch to close the loop on everything that went wrong. 
Physical product is in hand. Five thousand units for their very first purchase order. Now, the hard part. 
Sean raises the question nobody wants to answer: is powder still the right format in 2026? Mike does the math on what 14,000 families means for a nine-figure exit. Cody challenges the team to hit $200 CAC in month one. Then drop it to $100. 
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“We were not going to make payroll next week.” 
How did three ecommerce CEOs turn rock bottom into their biggest lesson? 
Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi), Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern), and Curtis Matsko (CEO, Portland Leather Goods) each share the darkest moment of their ecommerce careers. What came after built the self-awareness that changed how they lead. 
Curtis walks through the week Wells Fargo pulled a $20M line of credit after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. Matt breaks down the hubris that nearly cost him payroll one Christmas. Mike shares the night a two-year venture fell apart. Their comebacks outweighed the crises, driven by a growth mindset none of them had before. 
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“They have just shown how packaging can be so much of a differentiator.” 
What does a professional DTC packaging design process look like in practice? 
Chris Ganz (Senior Creative Director, Trevi) sits down with the Winks team to tackle one of packaging’s hardest problems: standing out on a crowded shelf. The group debates naming, mascots, and color palettes before testing real designs on real families. 
Chris opens with a full competitor audit, sizing up Ollie, Vicks, and Beam. Three distinct concepts turn into five packaging directions, each with its own typography and color story. The team weighs a winking semicolon against a plush sleep monster, and one child’s smile carries real weight. 
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