The DTC Podcast

What do investors look for in a DTC brand before they fund it?

Norwest partner Lisa Wu, an early investor in Jet, Ritual, and Remedy, walks through the 10 attributes her team uses to spot a breakout consumer brand. She covers why a well-built consumer brand should only need one or two rounds of capital, why replenishment categories need gross margins north of 60%, and why supplements and personal care can sell for five times revenue while apparel can trade at one times. If you run a $5M to $50M brand, use her list as a scorecard and mark yourself green, yellow, or red on each attribute.

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Key takeaways:
- Know which of the 10 attributes your brand is weak on before you raise, so you fix the reds instead of pitching around them.
- Avoid funding a consumer brand like a tech company. Too much capital at rising valuations buys mercenary customers and forces you to chase targets your unit economics can't support.
- Be first-ish instead of first. The later mattress-in-a-box brands drafted off the category education the early, venture-funded players paid for.
- Build clinical proof into the brand from day one. Science washing (adding a dermatologist, a survey, and a claim once you notice the trend) is something customers can sense.
- Cut acquisition costs with a distribution advantage others haven't found yet, like a trusted clinical voice whose audience includes other creators who look up to them.
- Make paid acquisition work by pairing it with strong retention. Natural replenishment categories let lifetime value cover what you spend to acquire.
- Price for the premiumization of mass, and keep investing in brand, because a cheaper competitor is always coming.
- Protect gross margin early so wholesale and retail stay open without a reformulation later.
- Choose a category acquirers want to buy. A $100M brand at five times revenue sells for $500M. At one times, it sells for $100M.
- Win with one product first, then expand into adjacent products where the customer already trusts you.

About the guest:
Lisa Wu is a partner on the venture team at Norwest, where she has invested in consumer brands for more than a decade. Her investments include Ritual, Remedy, and Jet, which was acquired by Walmart. Norwest runs venture and growth equity on one platform, so it can back founders from seed through profitable scale. Reach Lisa at lw@nvp.com.
https://norwest.com

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Timestamps:
02:10 Why Health and Wellness Is Booming
08:45 How Ritual Built Consumer Trust
14:05 10 Attributes of Breakout Consumer Brands
24:05 Building a Distribution Advantage
40:55 Consumer Trends Investors Are Watching

How should DTC brands prep for Black Friday on Amazon? This year's Prime Day events show where ecommerce growth is coming from: shoppers stocked up on consumables while big-ticket categories lagged.

Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse. He walks through what June and October Prime Day showed. Some consumable brands Pilothouse manages grew 150% or more year over year during October Prime Day, a few sold more in that two-day event than in the four-day June event, and average order value dropped. He explains what that means for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, how premium brands should position for shoppers who wait for deals, and what to set up on Amazon now.

Work with Pilothouse: https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse

Key takeaways:
- Know which shoppers are waiting on you. Paper products, household cleaning, personal hygiene and pet food jumped on deal days, while headphones, tablets, wearable tech and TVs lagged.
- Sell on value. Shoppers want the product they already like at a better price, so make your differentiator easy to find and quick to understand on the listing.
- Build awareness before the deal day. Shoppers do their research ahead of the sale, so get in front of them in the weeks before Black Friday and retarget them on the day.
- Test your listing images with care. Amazon once required white backgrounds, and lifestyle and annotated images exist because sellers kept pushing. Deal-day hints in images are a gray area, and a removed listing means missing the event entirely.
- Be available where your customer shops. More shoppers compared Walmart, Target and DTC sites during deal days, and if your competitor is listed there and you are not, they get the sale.
- Plan a review push after Black Friday. Amazon's new Review Requests ads let you pay per click to ask recent buyers for a review. A click does not guarantee a review.
- Start ranking for your Black Friday keywords now. Put the keyword in your title, highlights, bullets and description, give it its own campaign, and use placement modifiers to hold top of search into the deal day.

About the guest:
Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse, a full-funnel performance marketing agency for DTC brands.
https://pilothouse.co

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Sponsors:
Advertise on DTC: https://dtcnews.link/advertise

Timestamps:
00:03:36 Amazon Prime Day trends
00:05:00 Consumables surge during deal days
00:07:40 How shoppers define value
00:12:30 Positioning premium products for BFCM
00:16:40 Omnichannel holiday shopping behavior

Do influencer partnership ads lower customer acquisition costs for DTC brands, or just move them?

They lower CAC on Meta, but rev-share creator deals send a big share of that saving into a new line on the P&L. Yash Chavan, founder and CEO of Saral, the team behind the Sathi affiliate platform, walks through the math on an $80 AOV supplement brand and lays out how to build a creative flywheel instead: an influencer affiliate program where affiliate revenue covers the cost of seeding product, and the posts that win organically become the ads you boost on Meta and TikTok.

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Key takeaways:
- Work out whether partnership ads are cutting your CAC or relocating it, using Yash's worked example of an $80 CAC dropping to $68 while creator and platform fees add $9.20 back.
- See why creator payouts tied to GMV grow as a variable cost when you scale ad spend, and how capping the payout on any single ad stops one viral video from costing you $10,000.
- Build a creator pyramid: seed creators who already post in your niche, turn the ones who post into affiliates, give the top sellers bigger deals, and run the top performers by views as partnership ads.
- Let organic performance choose your ad creative, with rules like boosting a reel on Meta once it passes a view threshold inside 48 hours.
- Raise your affiliate activity rate by rewarding the steps before the sale, like a free product when a creator joins and a small cash reward when they post.
- Catch leaked codes, leaked affiliate links, and affiliates bidding on your brand keywords before you pay commission on those sales.
- Plan a creator push in mid October that can still produce ad creative and affiliate revenue before Black Friday.

About the guest:
Yash Chavan is the founder and CEO of Saral, an influencer marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Before Saral he ran an influencer marketing agency. His team also built Sathi, an affiliate platform for creator-led brands with fraud protection and gamified rewards.
Saral: https://getsaral.com/
Sathi: https://www.mysathi.io

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Website and newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co
Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Sponsors:
This episode is sponsored by Saral and Sathi. Saral matches your brand with creators who already make content in your niche, and Sathi turns the creators who post into affiliates, with fraud protection and gamified rewards built in. Start a free trial at https://getsaral.com/

How do you lower customer acquisition costs for a DTC brand? Bobby Bitton, co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, says TikTok Shop did more for his CAC than any other channel.
He launched it as a side project in November 2023, and within 30 days one SKU went from $2,000 a day to $70,000 a day.
Bobby walks through how O Positiv runs more than 100 ads a week through an in-house creative team, how they move what works on TikTok Shop over to Meta, and why retention now gets the same attention as acquisition.
He also explains why the brand waited until it was a $100 million business to go into retail, why linear TV beat streaming in their geo tests, and the brand architecture decision he would make differently.
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Key takeaways:
Lower CAC with TikTok Shop by sending samples generously and recruiting affiliates every week. Bobby set a goal of 1,000 affiliates and did the outreach himself on Sunday nights.
Start TikTok Shop simple. Get affiliates posting before you touch GMV Max, paid campaigns, or contests.
Get more usable creative by briefing creators less. O Positiv's brief is the product, what it does, what creators can say, and what they can't.
Feed Meta with TikTok Shop learnings. The winning creator content runs on Meta, and the creators get paid extra for it.
Test for creative diversity instead of running ten copy variations on one static image.
Hold Meta to an allowable CAC and move spend up or down with the strength of your creative.
Grow lifetime value by planning for life stages. A PMS customer who gets pregnant should reach for your pregnancy product, then your menopause product.
Launch products customers can feel working. O Positiv's fiber gummy stuck and its immune gummy didn't, and that became the product rule.
Go into retail with a big DTC business behind you, push for endcaps and out-of-aisle displays, and fly out for the buyer meeting.
Expect retail to break your attribution. When Meta ads drive store sales, your Shopify CAC climbs while the business grows, so build omnichannel measurement early.
Decide early whether you are a house of brands or a branded house, and keep it simple.

About the guest: Bobby Bitton is the co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, the women's health brand he started with his sister Brianna Bitton in 2018. O Positiv makes FLO, URO, and MENO, and sells through its own site, TikTok Shop, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and CVS.https://www.opositiv.com
Stay connected: Follow The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

What's the best DTC marketing strategy on Meta when every competitor makes the same claims?

Liam Robinson, co-founder of Marlbank, says to stop arguing features and lead cold prospecting with your brand's growth story. On this episode of All Killer No Filler, he walks through how that switch got a supplement brand built by chemists scaling on Meta after months of feature-led ads went nowhere.

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Key takeaways:
- How to sell a product that's better than the competition when the reasons don't show up in an ad
- Why feature-led ads turn into a shouting match in cold Meta prospecting
- How to imply product quality through your brand's growth story instead of claiming it
- What to use when you don't have big numbers yet: a first farmers market, a first hire, a first customer
- How to build a then-and-now prospecting ad from your own camera roll
- How Marin Skincare and Vyper Industrial pair a product distinction with a founder story
- How to turn a Dragons' Den appearance into an ad, whether you got a deal or walked away without one
- Which brands this angle won't work for

About the guest:
Liam Robinson is co-founder of Marlbank, a Meta-only agency for early-growth ecommerce brands, built in partnership with Pilothouse. Before Marlbank, he was one of Pilothouse's first media buyers. Reach Liam at liam@marlbank.co or his co-founder Nate at nate@marlbank.co.

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Subscribe to The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
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Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co