On this episode of DTC Pod, Roy joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about building one of the largest e-commerce platforms, closing down his services business and betting everything on the Magento opportunity, leveraging open source for early growth, building a community that lives & breathes your product, the ethos around building an amazing product, market timing, building developer first, startup vs. corporate culture, navigating an acquisition, looking back at Shopify vs. Magento, investing at R2, exciting technology trends, building companies again, and more. Past guests & brands on DTC Pod include Gilt, PopSugar, Glossier, MadeIN, Prose, Bala, P.volve, Ritual, Bite, Oura, Levels, General Mills, Mid Day Squares, Prose, Arrae, Olipop, Ghia, Rosaluna, Form, Uncle Studios & many more.Additional episodes you might like:• #175 Ariel Vaisbort - How OLIPOP Runs Influencer, Community, & Affiliate Growth• #184 Jake Karls, Midday Squares - Turning Your Brand Into The Influencer With Content• #205 Kasey Stewart: Suckerz- - Powering Your Launch With 300 Million Organic Views• #219 JT Barnett: The TikTok Masterclass For Brands• #223 Lauren Kleinman: The PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook• ​​​​#243 Kian Golzari - Source & Develop Products Like The World's Best Brands----- This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokRoy Rubin - Was the Co-founder and CEO of MagentoRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Dae joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about the process of launching a successful fashion label. They talk about the inspiration for Sundae School, leaning into taboos & counterculture, the importance of aligning narrative and motifs with brand, the power of creative, what makes creative pop, getting picked up as a staple by Hypebeast, featuring in New York Fashion Week, building challenges to grow community, building campaigns that have done 100M+ views, cross selling across categories, launching DTC channels after going wholesale, and much more. Past guests & brands on DTC Pod include Gilt, PopSugar, Glossier, MadeIN, Prose, Bala, P.volve, Ritual, Bite, Oura, Levels, General Mills, Mid Day Squares, Prose, Arrae, Olipop, Ghia, Rosaluna, Form, Uncle Studios & many more.Additional episodes you might like:• #175 Ariel Vaisbort - How OLIPOP Runs Influencer, Community, & Affiliate Growth• #184 Jake Karls, Midday Squares - Turning Your Brand Into The Influencer With Content• #205 Kasey Stewart: Suckerz- - Powering Your Launch With 300 Million Organic Views• #219 JT Barnett: The TikTok Masterclass For Brands• #223 Lauren Kleinman: The PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook• ​​​​#243 Kian Golzari - Source & Develop Products Like The World's Best Brands----- This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokDae Lim - Founder & Creative Director of Sundae SchoolRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Ben joins Blaine to give an overview of how to generate cash as a DTC brand. They talk about everything from first financial decisions as a founder, to inventory management, financing options, how to think about equity vs. debt financing options, raising a round, speeding up cash conversion, raising the right amount of capital for your business, going omni-channel, tools like revolvers, asset backed loans, factoring, what the macro environment means for DTC businesses, and more. 7:00 Speed This Metric UP!!The cash conversion cycle is literally you buy, inventory, you pay for your suppliers, you put money out, and then there's this period of time when it comes into you, and then you sell it. And then when you sell it, that's the end of the cash conversion cycle. And oftentimes people don't think through that well enough. And the problem is, you have ever increasing money going out before you can generate it yourself.9:50 - The Overlooked SECRET to AMAZON's SuccessWell, the all time hero of this is Amazon, right? Which was able to pull off a negative cash conversion cycle. And so what that means is that they were getting paid in advance of having to buy the inventory. And so when you think about, Amazon, I'm old enough to kind of remember when they sold books, that's all they sold. But, that was like, why they could drive the prices down so low. Because, in effect, they had this cash flywheel and they didn't have to worry about it.34:30 - MATCHING (finance not fashion)The key is matching. That's the thing that's often overlooked. Everybody wants to jump into interest rates and the cost of capital, but you really want to focus on the matching. So what matching means is like, the use of the capital that you're borrowing matches your ability to I said this wrong. The term in which you have to repay it matches your ability to use it. So the way to think about this is like, if you were to go get a bank term loan, and it's like a three year loan, right? You close it and then the next day they wire you that million dollars, and guess what? You start paying interest on it and sitting on your balance sheet.45:30 - Turn Your PO's into $$$And because it's Walmart credit, they're like, oh, well, it could be, like, $0.95 on the dollar or some really high rate on it, because they're basically just taking Walmart credit risk at that point. So factoring can be a terrific way, as you build your, omnichannel business, to find that growth, because everybody faces that problem, right? I got an order from Target. We're going to kill it. And it's like, Holy shit, I got to come up with, like, $2 million of inventory. Now what do I do? ---Past guests & brands on DTC Pod include Gilt, PopSugar, Glossier, MadeIN, Prose, Bala, P.volve, Ritual, Bite, Oura, Levels, General Mills, Mid Day Squares, Prose, Arrae, Olipop, Ghia, Rosaluna, Form, Uncle Studios & many more.Additional episodes you might like:• #175 Ariel Vaisbort - How OLIPOP Runs Influencer, Community, & Affiliate Growth• #184 Jake Karls, Midday Squares - Turning Your Brand Into The Influencer With Content• #205 Kasey Stewart: Suckerz- - Powering Your Launch With 300 Million Organic Views• #219 JT Barnett: The TikTok Masterclass For Brands• #223 Lauren Kleinman: The PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook• ​​​​#243 Kian Golzari - Source & Develop Products Like The World's Best Brands----- This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokBen Tregoe - CEO and Co-Founder of Bainbridge GrowthRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

Adii Pienaar is the Founder & CEO of Cogsy, the operations & inventory optimization platform for e-commerce. Prior to starting Cogsy, he was the Co-founder & CEO of WooCommerce - the e-commerce solution for WordPress, and CM Commerce, both of which resulted in multi-million dollar exits.On this episode of DTC Pod, Adii joins Blaine & Ramon to chat about getting your inventory and operations right from the get go, brands going multi-channel, optimizing across all your sales channels, the importance of data, how to match inventory to demand, automating manual processes away from spreadsheets, building the modern day ERP with ops in mind, major brands winning on Cogsy, the evolution of e-commerce tech, how WooCommerce took off during the WordPress era, founder experience from building several successful companies, thoughts about life, fatherhood, and fulfillment as an entrepreneur. 5:30 - Simple Solution = Big BusinessAnd they kept asking us, hey guys, how do I add a shopping cart to this? And at the time, it just wasn't, there were other plugins for WordPress available, but none of them could essentially meet our very high standards for what we would want to do on the design side of things. So we effectively kind of went, I think we went through three different projects to try and build this ourselves. outsource it multiple configurations before we ultimately, launched WooCommerce. 6:00 - On When Woo Took Off!So the context there is that we were already doing multiple millions in revenue by, the time WooCommerce launched. We were a significant business. I think we were about 15, 16, 17 people on the team at the time. And then WooCommerce became 90% of our revenue within a single year thereafter. So that's a longwinded answer, I hope what everyone hears here is oftentimes the idea or the project or the business that's really successful is not something that was perfectly planned to the end degree from the start. 14:00 - On Why Cogsy, Why Now?Anything from inventory to logistics, to kind of your accounting rate of things, like anything your back office wasn't as sexy. All the money went into email and SMS marketing and marketing attribution, et cetera. So I figured that ecommerce, I'm bullish on ecommerce, and just broadly digital commerce. So what's opportunity there and I figured this was blue ocean. 21:30 - On Over/Understocking As A Business KillerWe help you understand, hey, if shopify is your main warehouse attached to shopify, this is the cadence at which you need to replenish to Amazon to not sell out. The thesis there is that you are to optimally sell. You need to ensure that you've got inventory on both those locations. And again, you can't just like, no one has all the capital to make sure that you just stock millions of units in every single location. That's not it, right? So we try and help you figure out that optimal inventory level for every location already. 26:00 - On Surprising Retail TrendsOne of the most interesting learnings there, Blaine, is that, we're definitely seeing your brands trying to sell in multiple channels much sooner, including retail, right? That's probably one of the biggest surprises beyond that fragmented tech stack, I always thought you would need multiple millions of dollars to even think about selling into, even nationwide chains retail, not just independent retailers. So that's something happening sooner. 45:00 - On *LIFE* ProfitabilityBut the idea was, how can I structure my life so that it creates energy, it creates things like that I can reinvest into other things. So, the way I now talk about that is I think about a, life portfolio in the same way that you think about a stock portfolio, and in the same way that you balance investments in different stocks to get to whatever outcome you want, that's what you should be doing for life. For me, for example, my life portfolio definitely includes my work, but it also includes my family. It includes, my thirst for learning, which is kind of a soft skill. If I'm not learning enough, within any time period, I know I'm not happy. Right. it includes exercising. I know if I don't exercise mostly every day, like, I'm probably going to be grumpy. Right. it includes being able to kind of geek out about wine every now and again. 46:00 - On LifeThere's a quote from Henry Thoreau that says, the cost of anything we do in life is just life itself. And I think that's often what we kind of neglect when we think about our daily lives. And we maybe don't go through it with some kind of element of mindfulness, but anything we do in life has a cost, even if it's just an opportunity cost. ---Past guests & brands on DTC Pod include Gilt, PopSugar, Glossier, MadeIN, Prose, Bala, P.volve, Ritual, Bite, Oura, Levels, General Mills, Mid Day Squares, Prose, Arrae, Olipop, Ghia, Rosaluna, Form, Uncle Studios & many more.Additional episodes you might like:• #175 Ariel Vaisbort - How OLIPOP Runs Influencer, Community, & Affiliate Growth• #184 Jake Karls, Midday Squares - Turning Your Brand Into The Influencer With Content• #205 Kasey Stewart: Suckerz- - Powering Your Launch With 300 Million Organic Views• #219 JT Barnett: The TikTok Masterclass For Brands• #223 Lauren Kleinman: The PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook• ​​​​#243 Kian Golzari - Source & Develop Products Like The World's Best Brands----- This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokAdii Pienaar - Founder & CEO of CogsyRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Dov joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about the early days at Yotpo, the feature that built Yotpo's growth flywheel, inspiration for Tolstoy, the power of video in conversion, the video infrastructure that needed to be served, the success of founder videos for DTC brands, building out video into web, sms, email, and multi-platform customer journeys, the analytics component for iteration, successful brand adoption, why not all video is created equal, and more.Want to try it for free? Check out how brands are converting more with Tolstoy here This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokDov Kaufmann - Co-founder & CEO of TolstoyRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Chelsea joins Blaine & Ramon for a crash course on growth. They talk about setting up your growth engine, working from a source of truth, picking the right channels for your brand, how to think about metrics, google ads & shopping, important updates coming to google analytics (GA4), keeping acquisition & retention in lock step, ad performance across channels, podcast advertising, generating content for organic growth & ad platforms, and more.Wanna try out Ettitude sheets?Use code: 'DTCPOD' for 15% your first order of $150+, now until end of the yearThis episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokChelsea Schulz - Director of Acquisition & Growth for EttitudeRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Benjamin joins Blaine and Ramon to talk about the future of commerce, how brands can build better customer experiences, why removing friction is key, the challenges of selling online versus in retail, thinking in terms of LTV, brands thriving on TryNow, raising capital, founder perspectives, the technical challenges of building the platform, solving for fraud, financing, complex corner cases, and what's next for Try Now. 16:00 - Brands That Do This WinThe challenging part of e-commerce also the most beautiful part of e-commerce, which is that shoppers are never satisfied, they always want more. And so it's this asymptote relationship where you can always get closer to a perfect customer experience, but you will never arrive there. And if you are, and that's why like the greatest force for driving enterprise value is just focusing on the customer.16:45 - Do It For Your Customer's CustomerMost companies will say that they care about the customer, but very few actually do that at every single step of their process. And so I think like that, that to us was paramount because as we think about our two stakeholders, merchants and shoppers, merchants are our main, who we interact with the most, right? Day, day in, day out, we're constantly focused on driving value from merchants. But at the end of the day, like stoppers are, the most important part to both of our businesses18:50 - What Businesses Need To Know About RiskAll businesses are in the business of de-risking their business, de-risking elements of their business. No matter what stage you're at, as you grow, you have a new set of risks and focus, focus on de-risking, is key. It's actually how we manage our annual planning process, so it's very opportune. 30:10 - This Is Karma In BusinessThere is no separation between what's best for the shopper and what's best for the merchant in the long run, in the very long run. But ultimately customer centricity is how you win.  This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokBenjamin Davis - Founder & CEO of TryNowRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Kian joins Blaine & Ramon to discuss the playbook for working with manufacturers to bring products to life. They cover identifying manufacturing partners, how to vet a factories quality, how to establish buying credibility, getting product samples, building your spec sheet, negotiating price and volume, building relationships with your manufacturing partner, pre-shipment samples, tips for your manufacturing agreement, sharing costs, production cadence, avoiding shipping disasters, scaling supply chain, and tips & tricks from a life time working with the biggest names in the sourcing and manufacturing world.Highlights:6:35 - Face-To-Face boosts salesAnd like to your point, doing it in person face to face forces you to build relationships. And honestly, like if anyone's listened to much of my content before, I always preach the importance of you get the best results in this business from building relationships, right? Because as a result of a better relationship, you get a better price, you get a better credit terms, they offer you new products that you're working on, they give you good information about what your competitors are doing.7:30 - What not to do when sourcingAnd where people have really made mistakes is if they just go, they're looking for a product, let's say blue light blocking glasses, they go into alibaba.com and on the website all the products look the same and they'll see it for like, $3 and $4 50 and $7 and $1 80. And they're like, what's the difference here? Because this looks like the exact same product. This is $1 80 that was $7, right? Let me go for like the cheaper one. But in actual fact, like when you're using alibaba.com, the purpose of it is to find the best suppliers, not to find the lowest price. And once you find the best suppliers, then you can start to negotiate the price down.This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokKian Golzari - Global leader in product sourcing & development, manufacturing, and supply chainRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Julie joins Blaine to talk about building one of the fastest growing fitness brands. They talk about starting P.volve in the early days, her background in the entertainment industry and how that experience translated to content development for p.volve, why content is the north star of their brand, building a new market around functional fitness, the first product they took to market (the p.ball), launching products that complement their content, how physical studios play into their growth strategy, scaling studios and programming through franchising, building wholistic customer journeys, and much more. 8:05 - NEVER Get Left In The DustYou have to be able to change with the market. Like, I wasn't gonna be holding onto VHS while the entire industry was moving to DVD and then into digital and talk about a learning curve. But you have to just like stay ahead of all of that8:30 - Content is KING. It Always Has Been.The bigger lesson that I've learned, and it's really helped me here at Pvolve too, is that content is king, period. Like everyone tried to start a streaming service. Everyone, all the major studios, which we're trying to get into it, and at the heart of it, what always wins is content. It's gotta be really great compelling content.28:48 - Marketer? Get Really Good At ThisIt's not easy just to get somebody that's hearing one little snippet about who we are through paid channels, to come in and convert and to understand. I mean, we're really building a brand new modality and so like, we're so proud of it, we're doing it all the right ways. But like, it takes a combination of storytelling and a really, really multi-channel approach.36:00 - Franchising - The Ultimate Hack For ScaleYou have to start sort of slow in franchising because once you're able to make those first seven to 10 locations successful, they become, sort of, this credibility in order to then scale like these guys got it down. So we took the same approach as it related to our own owned and operated. This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptionsPeel Insights- Visit https://peelinsights.com/dtcpod to uncover actionable data insights to drive your brand's growth Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokJulie Cartwright - President of P.volveRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

On this episode of DTC Pod, Oren joins Ramon to discuss what it takes to build a product and take it to market. They cover topics including product development, pros and cons of dropshipping, getting started as an entrepreneur, building around niche audiences, testing market demand for products, pre-sale, validating through Tik Tok and IG organic, building vs. buying your business, dealing with manufacturers, nailing unit-economics, and much more. 5:31 - The fastest way to get started in E-CommerceDrop shipping is great for people who first want to get into just general entrepreneurship. Cause you don't have to actually make or develop a product. You take something that already exists and, and you sell it and you don't even have to have the factory that's shipped right from it. That's the name drop shipping.6:00 - The Dark-side of Drop ShippingBut the downside of that is that usually it ends up being pretty low margin cuz you're making something that a hundred other people could also be selling. and then also you're not making anything that has any real future branded value, right?10:00 - Business Hack: Validating your idea on TikTokBut I think the real indicator, this is why I love kind of TikTok for this, and you can also do similar things on reels and YouTube now, at least for the time being, is if you just post variations of a handful of the same videos that will perform that showcase your product kind of again and again, and continue to tweak it. And you'll see accounts like this that have those where it's like 10 very similar video, they're kind of testing to hit it, and you consistently start getting, okay, if I post something like this, I'm getting five figures of TikTok views and then I'm getting, starting to get tens of subscribers per that, then you're, you have a product that I, that I can you, you, you can say is, is validated enough to consider expanding it.14:00 - When you should buy, *not build* a businessMy friend's wife did this and she bought an existing business for I think it was 40 or $50,000, which you could finance and things like that. And it was existing, it was doing a couple thousand dollars a month, and she didn't wanna build it, she just wanted to run something and grow it. She didn't wanna have to have the initial idea and go through what we talked about of validating it. And so they spent that money, that's not a crazy amount of money. And then now it makes significantly more. I think they're doing, nine, 10 k a month off of it. This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptions Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokOren Schauble - DTC Product & Brand Advisor of Consensus HoldingsRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated