D2C Diaries

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Commercive.

If you're a ecommerce business owner doing a minimum of 10+ orders per day and looking for a smarter and cost-effective way to source and fulfill from china, go to https://www.commercive.co for a free quote and fulfillment audit today.

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Sunna van Kampen built 1.7M followers, generated half a billion views in 2025, and turned Tonic Health into one of the UK's fastest growing supplement brands. Without a single paid ad.

What started as a Covid panic, a Boots listing that fell through and no DTC experience, forced Sunna to figure out how to reach customers from scratch. So he walked into a supermarket with a phone and started exposing what was actually in the products people were buying every week.

That decision changed everything.

In this episode we get into the full story. How Sunna built an organic content engine that runs on two days of filming a month, why he talks about bread more than vitamins, and how a single viral video gave him the insight behind Tonic's best selling product.

We also get into the vitamin industry itself. Why the products on the shelves are underdosed by design, what Sunna found when he went into kids and baby nutrition, and why most supplement brands are built around margin rather than health.

Plus the content philosophy that underpins all of it. Why Sunna's board kept pushing him to sell more, why he kept saying no, and why that decision is the reason Tonic is where it is today.

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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap:  https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0w6mMv0

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by SARAL. 

Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship, all in one place, without any chaos. 200+ brands including Grüns, Solawave, Spacegoods are running their influencer programs on SARAL.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to https://tinyurl.com/3t4d4myx and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you to claim your $500 discount and whiteglove onboarding.
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Chris joined Hambi Media as a creative strategist with no agency experience. One year later, he's been promoted to Senior Creative Strategist working across 7-9 figure DTC brands.

In this episode, the guys break down exactly what separates good creative strategists from great ones - the research process, micro personas, messaging psychology, and how Chris 8x'd hit rate in 30 days by changing just two things.

This episode is for you if:
- You're a founder trying to understand what great creative strategy actually looks like inside an agency
- You're a creative strategist who wants to know what top 1% performance really requires
- You're trying to break into creative strategy and want the most honest breakdown of what the role demands

What we cover:
- Why manual research is the highest leverage activity in creative strategy
- How micro personas unlock incremental reach without changing your frameworks
- The messaging psychology shift that 8x'd hit rate in 30 days
- Why AI creates the biggest opportunity in history to become a creative strategist
- The deep work principle behind every great insight
-  What creative strategy looks like in 2 years

Chris's Substack: https://substack.com/@christopherstavropoulos
Chris's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisstav1/

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0v-BVd0

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Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Commercive.

If you're a ecommerce business owner doing a minimum of 10+ orders per day and looking for a smarter and cost-effective way to source and fulfill from china, go to https://www.commercive.co for a free quote and fulfillment audit today.

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Most brands have a creative volume problem and don't know it.

In this masterclass, Olly breaks down the Creative Forecasting model Soar Group uses across its client base (brands spending anywhere from £100K to £5M a month on Meta) to answer the one question that unlocks scale: how many new creatives do I need to produce each month to hit my spend target?

You'll learn how to pull and classify your ad inventory, run cohort survival analysis to get your real churn rate, calculate your win rate and half-life, and plug those numbers into a demand equation that tells you exactly how many ads to launch each month, whether you're holding spend or scaling to a new target.

Olly also covers why volume without diversity stalls accounts, how to map creative gaps across personas and angles, and the negative spiral most brands sleepwalk into when creative becomes a cost centre instead of a growth lever.

By the end of this episode you'll have a repeatable forecasting process you can run on your own account today.

The cheat sheet resource: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vzzg60

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vzzJ60

00:00 Intro
01:00 Our sponsor: Commercive
02:20 The same trends we're seeing
04:06 The challenges brands are facing
05:20 Creative is the new targeting
06:50 What we're seeing in audits
08:45 How many creatives do we need each month?
19:18 Factors that may impact the data
21:33 What we're trying to avoid
22:33 Personas
25:57 How we help brands

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Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard.

Most founders building high-growth digital companies are stuck doing the same thing: toggling between apps, wrestling with spreadsheets, and manually reconciling expenses - all while trying to actually grow their business.

There's a better way.

Incard is the financial platform built for the way modern digital businesses actually operate. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards with real rewards, and a fully connected banking experience - all in one place.

This dedicated offer gets you:
- 1 month free trial Incard Plus
- All Incard Plus plan features included
- 2% cashback on Ad Spend, Saas, Travel for year one
​
This time-limited offer is only valid until end of May. Take control of your finances with Incard today. T&Cs apply: https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod

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Loukas breaks down the full AI infrastructure he has built on top of Claude, from context engineering fundamentals through to a self-learning creative OS that compounds over time.

In this mastermind he covers why context is the entire game right now and why your prompts matter less than you think, how Claude Skills work under the hood and how to build ones that actually compress your team's best thinking into repeatable systems, the exact 8-phase scriptwriting skill Hambi runs in production, the recursive script grader that scores every script against 10 criteria and rewrites until it ships, and the reasoning trace system that turns Claude from a tool into something that gets smarter the more you use it.

Whether you're just getting started with Claude or you think you're advanced, this is the end-to-end session.

Comment "Claude" below to get the reference files, CSOS template and PDFs referenced in this episode.

Sarah Levinger's article on Valence Zones https://x.com/SarahLevinger/status/2021281038895546761?s=20

D2C Diaries Scriptwriting Masterclass https://youtu.be/dlH4acLpd_g

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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vgMDy0

00:00 Intro
03:27 Incard sponsor
04:20 Why context is the entire game 
08:08 Brand context vs domain context explained
10:16 How to build a context library database
14:14 Claude Skills vs Claude Code vs Claude Cowork
20:38 Claude skills
23:23 The CSOS - single source of truth setup on Notion
26:33 Framework database 
29:50 Skill building workflow
31:00 Scriptwriting Skill 
35:35 Incard sponsor
36:28 8 phases of scripting writing skill
50:22 Reporting skill
53:27 Script Grader 
58:28 Building operating infrastructure

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by SARAL. 

Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship, all in one place, without any chaos. 200+ brands including Grüns, Solawave, Spacegoods are running their influencer programs on SARAL.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to https://tinyurl.com/3t4d4myx and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you to claim your $500 discount and whiteglove onboarding.

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In this episode, Olly and Loukas go deep on the AI systems they've spent the last few months building inside Soar Group - the personal operating systems, the creative production infrastructure, and the internal tooling that's changing how the business runs.

This isn't a conversation about AI tools. It's about the architecture underneath them.They cover:
How Olly built a personal operating system based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern — using Obsidian connected to Claude Code. Call transcripts categorised automatically every day, Slack piped in, reasoning traces stored against every decision made in the business.

How Loukas built his own version in VS Code connected to Claude Code with in-depth context on every brand, every direct report, and every specialism, plus a reinforcement learning loop built into the content pipeline.

The Club Neuro AI operating system - a full web app built as a test case before rolling into the Control Room. Best performing frameworks dashboard, hooks database, one-click reporting, weekly Reddit scrape, and a UI designed to capture operator intuition at the moment it happens.

The four learning loops: performance into hypothesis, hypothesis into correction, correction into rule, decision into outcome.

How they hired an AI videographer targeting 60 unique concepts a month — the equivalent of 15 shoot days replaced by one person.

A mass static generation system with 40-60 framework prompts, brand DNA and personas pre-loaded, ready to generate at scale.

The principle that ties it all together: context compounds. Models don't.

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00:00 Intro
02:05 Our sponsor: SARAL
03:00 Our personal operating systems we've built
21:00 AI as a feedback loop
24:14 Our sponsor: SARAL
25:10 Our foundational context and data engine
30:20 Club Neuro: creative intelligence operating system
35:00 Best in class forecasting process 
39:50 Our internal creative processes
47:28 Business intelligence platform

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/