D2C Diaries

🚨🚀 Your creative strategy was built for an algorithm that doesn't exist. In 4 weeks, we'll identify exactly where your creative is leaking money and hand you a roadmap on how to fix it  using a persona-driven strategy that reduces CAC, beats creative fatigue, and scales spend profitably.

4 week sprint. 3 hours of your time. No retainer commitment: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQ-p0

Most brands respond to reach problems by producing more creative. More hooks, more formats, more volume. But if you're speaking to the same emotional states in the same way, more output isn't going to move the needle.

The real unlock is persona diversity — and not just at a demographic level.

In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas breaks down the exact micro persona framework Hambi use across seven and eight figure DTC brands to drive incremental reach at scale on Meta. This is the internal process — from macro persona to micro persona mapping, through to how psychological diversity in your creative signals to Andromeda who to put your ads in front of.

If you're managing serious Meta spend and incremental reach is a constraint, this is the framework to fix it.

Download our persona breakdown board here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQTw0

Loukas published an article on micro personas, you can read that here: https://x.com/LoukasHambi/status/2028854922209374604

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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/H0slb_f0

Most DTC founders have a number in their head. A valuation. An exit. A moment where the work pays off.

What nobody tells you is that the decisions killing that outcome are being made right now, long before you ever sit across from an acquirer.

In this episode, Olly and Loukas sit down with Paul Hanley from the Fortia Group, one of the UK's leading e-commerce M&A advisors, to pull back the curtain on what the exit process actually looks like from the other side of the table.

Paul and his team have seen hundreds of DTC businesses come through their doors — from £400K startups to £50M+ brands — and the same mistakes keep showing up. Paul breaks these down.

Plus Paul launches Beauty Value Labs — a new network built specifically for beauty founders who want to understand where their valuation stands today and what it could be.

About Beauty Value Lab: For beauty brands doing $10M+ in revenue, the most important exit decisions are already being made,  without you realising it. Years before a banker gets hired, through operating choices and reporting discipline.

Beauty Value Lab is a pre-exit value engineering platform built by career investment bankers at the Fortia Group, working with founders 12 to 36 months ahead of a transaction. Membership includes quarterly Buyer-Grade Valuation Memos, ongoing decision support grounded in buyer logic, and direct access to active beauty acquirers through closed-door sessions.

This is not a founder community. It sits upstream of advisors and bankers, engineering the conditions under which future transactions succeed.

If you're a beauty founder building toward an exit in the next 1 to 3 years, find out more at the link below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DfEGtuaRTYMsFYeVoK3CBQf8GH0GJ1dV/view
https://thefortiagroup.com/

Follow Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hanley-4ab64592/
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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/H0s7Jtp0

AI UGC has come on leaps and bounds. In this episode Loukas breaks down the exact workflow he's using right now to generate hyper-realistic UGC style ads, without booking a creator, running a shoot, or spending a fortune on production.

We cover the full tech stack: Claude for prompt writing, Sora 2 for hook footage, ElevenLabs for voice cloning, ChatGPT for subject consistency, Nano Banana for B-roll generation and Kling for bringing static images to life.

Then Olly and Loukas go deep on Claude skills, recursive self-improvement loops, and how they're using AI to grade scripts, review landing page congruency and build self-improving creative workflows across the agency.

Comment PROMPT below and we'll send you the Claude template we use to generate Sora 2 prompts.

Read Sarah's article here: https://x.com/SarahLevinger/status/2021281038895546761

Recursive self improvement loop: https://x.com/vibemarketer_/status/2019435524532904205?s=46 

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
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Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
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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/H0rNf_N0

For this episode, we’re joined by a Meta Creative Strategist working directly with some of the most disruptive brands on the platform. This is someone inside the system, helping fast-scaling brands rethink how they approach creative, performance, and growth.

We unpack how the algorithm actually works in 2026 and why so many brands are still optimising for an outdated version of Meta. From the shift away from interrupting attention toward earning it, to Andromeda acting like a “super intelligent librarian” that reads the entire book rather than judging the cover, this conversation reframes how creative is interpreted at scale.

We dive into why small iterative tweaks stop unlocking growth, how creative diversity fuels learning, and what really separates the top 1% of brands from everyone else. We also explore the real role of partnership ads, why identity changes how the algorithm understands your message, and where brands are over-relying on AI instead of strengthening creative judgment.

If you run Meta ads, lead a DTC brand, or oversee creative strategy, this episode will likely challenge a few assumptions you didn’t realise you were making.

You can download our 2026 Partnership Ads Guide here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rNfZb0

Read our Meta campaign study here: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/creative-customers/1942172

This episode is sponsored by Foreplay. Start your free trial here: https://tinyurl.com/msm5ak8c

Follow Maxime: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxime-menant/
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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/H0rw0Jc0

From the team behind Soar With Us and Hambi Media: http://www.soarwithus.co/

In this episode, we break down Meta’s latest algorithm updates — including UTIs and the next phase of Andromeda and what they actually mean for reach, creative strategy, and performance.

We explore why Meta is moving away from engagement-led optimisation toward interest alignment, how organic content is increasingly training paid delivery, and why generic, broad hooks are losing effectiveness. The conversation digs into creative diversity, persona depth, and how brands should rethink both organic and paid as part of the same system.

We also share how we’re experimenting with Claude Skills, Co-worker, and Claude Code inside our creative strategy team, moving from prompt engineering to codified inputs, context-driven workflows, and structured delegation.

This is a practical, operator-level discussion on how platforms are changing, how strategy needs to evolve, and where AI genuinely creates leverage without the hype.

Read Olly's Meta GEM article here: https://x.com/oliverwhudson/status/2016142894504047008

You can download Olly's Partnership ads guide here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rw5St0

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/