DTC Podcast

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Tyler Handley sold Inkbox to BIC for $65 million. His new company, Olauto, sells a $33 car air freshener, launched last September, is already profitable, and has zero employees. Four people, some contractors, and AI running the back office. The one thing they refuse to automate: when a customer emails, a human answers. Every time.

The guy who built the software behind that is Mike Maleszyk, Tyler's friend since high school, who started HumanTouchCX after a support chatbot swore it was human but couldn't say what it had for lunch.

If you run CX for a Shopify brand, or you're deciding right now which parts of your business AI should touch, this episode is the two of them drawing the line in public.

Want the setup Olauto uses? HumanTouch is taking on its first 100 Founding Merchants, with white-glove onboarding and 24 months of locked pricing.

What's inside:
Why Braden reviews every automated reply "from hi to buy," and the one automation he had to be convinced to allow (off-hours only)
Deflection rate, and what the merchants bragging about theirs are actually counting
Product questions as the worst place to put a bot: those customers are low funnel with a cart open
The Inkbox moderation story: 13 to 20 CX agents, custom tattoo uploads in a gray area no AI could judge, and the customer emails that started "why do you want this?"
Article 50 of the EU AI Act, live since August 2nd: transparency, record keeping, and audit logs for every AI touchpoint if you sell into the EU
Tyler's vibe-coded ERP: why it hooks into Shopify and nothing else
"Friend founding," and how four people split brand, supply chain, CX, and ads
Hewie, the AI that helps train your first CX hire off your own past tickets instead of your calendar

Who this is for: DTC founders and CX leads between launch and $100M who are being pitched full automation from every direction.

What to steal: Braden's rule. Automations answer the 65% (shipping status) during off hours only, and a human still has eyes on every single reply before the relationship is on the line.

Timestamps:
00:00 Building an AI-powered brand without losing the human touch
05:00 Why AI customer service needs transparency
12:00 The problem with optimizing customer support for deflection
21:00 What the EU AI Act means for ecommerce brands
28:00 How a four-person team uses AI to scale an ecommerce brand

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Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs (carvedesigns.com), the Northern California swim and apparel brand founded in 2003 and acquired by Komar Brands in December 2025. Before Carve she spent years at Amer Sports on the digital team behind Salomon, Atomic, Suunto, Arc'teryx and Wilson.

If you run retention or growth at a brand with a seasonal core product and a loyal base you have not fully mined, this one is for you.

What's inside:
The retention rebuild: what was already working at Carve after 20 years, and the one thing they were not doing with their customer data
Mapping the full customer journey in Figma, then finding the gaps where nobody was talking to the customer and the places where they were talking too much
RFM segmentation as the floor, then layering category purchase behavior on top to move a swim buyer into denim
The cohort analysis that changed the media mix: dresses and accessories produced the highest-LTV customers, so those categories now lead the creative and seed the look-alikes
Direct mail as a performance channel: 5 to 6 catalogs a year to prospects and past buyers, plus programmatic postcards that only drop if the email win-back does not convert
Employee-generated content, and how one test turned into a full content pipeline with the organic social team shooting UGC-style video on the catalog shoots
Connected TV without a commercial budget: an agency turns UGC and EGC into the spot, the founder does the voiceover, and success is measured on cost per site visit with MMM picking up the Amazon halo
Loyalty built on early access and product feedback instead of percent-off, with roughly 2x the LTV of a non-member
Q4 without heavy discounting: point multipliers and added value inside the tentpole moments
What she is using AI for right now, from LTV dashboards in Moby 2 to Orita surfacing customers when they are most likely to buy

Who this is for: retention and lifecycle leads, growth marketers at seasonal brands, and operators who moved from a big portfolio company to an SMB.

What to steal: run LTV by first-purchase category before you plan next season's creative mix. And give partnership content 6 to 12 months before you call it. Hannah says that is how long it took at Carve before influencer content started working.

Follow Hannah: LinkedIn, Hannah Fleming | carvedesigns.com

Timestamps:
00:00 Building Loyalty Beyond Discounts
05:00 Using Customer Segmentation for Retention
10:00 Direct Mail as a Performance Channel
16:00 Building a High-Value Loyalty Program
24:00 Testing Direct Mail and Connected TV

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Media owns the traffic. Brand owns the site. The page in between belongs to nobody, and it's been sitting in a Notion doc called landing page priorities Q3 since 2022.

Eric brings Daniel from Pilothouse back for an all killer no filler on the post-click experience: why it stayed generic for a decade, what changed in the last twelve months, and what the team is seeing in its pilots with Black Crow AI.

For media buyers, creative strategists, and founders whose ads are working and whose conversion rate isn't.

What you get:
The middle child problem. Media assumes brand is loving the page, brand assumes media is, and nobody has touched it since 2022.
Why this was never a priority question. Personalizing creative is cheap. Personalizing destinations used to mean five pages through design, dev, QA, and deploy, which took literal months. So teams built one page, pointed everything at it, and updated it once a year.
The 65-inch OLED analogy. You walk into a store, tell the salesperson exactly what you want, and they hand you the catalog. That's what a generic PDP does to someone who just clicked a very specific ad.
The creative is the brief. The ad unit becomes the input for the storefront: the copy, the image, the targeting, the interests, all of it read and matched.
What the pilots are showing: roughly 20 to 21% lift in conversion rates, on storefronts now taking about half the budget rather than one test ad set off in the corner.
Where Black Crow adds something a general purpose model doesn't. Persistent ID across sessions means the page knows you're back and can serve a different experience.
The technical prerequisites that actually gate this: Shopify, and enough Meta budget to test a difference. Brand and creative prerequisites matter less.
Brand safety. These aren't fully dynamic pages. You can lock images and titles and adjust on the fly.
Which brands it suits so far: a few concentrated top SKUs rather than a long tail catalog.
The third party cookie, revisited. Daniel's verdict on the biggest talking point of 2022: what a nothing burger.
Why the strategist now owns this. No IT ticket, no web team queue. That's the difference between now and twelve months ago.

Who this is for: performance marketers and DTC founders who have solved pre-click and never touched what happens after.

What to steal: treating your best ad as the brief for its own landing page, and the Shopify plus testable budget prerequisite check before you invest in any of this.

Timestamps:
00:03:00 Why the post-click experience matters
00:07:00 Personalized landing pages lift conversion rates
00:10:00 AI-powered landing page personalization
00:15:00 Matching landing pages to ad creative
00:21:00 Using ad creative as the landing page brief

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A brand doing $10 to $15 million a year puts 15 to 20 percent of revenue back into marketing. At $100 to $500 million it drops to roughly 8 to 10 percent. Past a billion it is 2 to 3 percent. Justin Jefferson has a view across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment, and those numbers are the opening for a harder conversation about where the money should go.

If you run growth: this is the episode about defending a slow-payback bet to a finance team that closes books quarterly.

If you sit closer to the P&L: Justin explains discounting future marketing revenue back to present value, so marketing and finance can argue about the same number.

What Justin gets into:
Spend-to-revenue benchmarks at $10 to 15M, $100 to 500M, $500M to $1B, and past $1B
Marginal ROI against blended ROI, and why a 1.4 return can hide a next dollar worth 60 cents
The brand that went zero to a hundred on top of funnel, lost sales volume in year one, cut budget in response, and then had nothing left to capture the demand it had created
The golf apparel brand that moved deliberately into CTV, linear, and audio: roughly flat in year one, about 23 percent growth in year two
Why Amazon search is often the most overspent line in a budget, and where he sees real incrementality on Amazon instead
The gap he sees between top and bottom of funnel returns: roughly 180 against 120 to 140
Why brands growing 5 percent or more changed their channel mix significantly more year over year than flat ones

Who this is for: operators between $10M and $500M who have squeezed Meta and Google as far as they go and need a defensible case for spending where the attribution is fuzzy.

What to steal: report return on the next dollar by channel alongside blended ROI. Most teams have only ever seen the second number.

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 sets the state of the market. The next five are the bets themselves, told by the operators who made them and the people who signed off.

Timestamps:
00:00 Why Marketing Mix Modeling Is Changing
03:00 Why Meta and Google Are Getting Harder to Scale
07:00 When Brands Should Invest in Top-of-Funnel
13:00 How to Measure and Predict Marketing Performance
19:00 How the Marketing Halo Drives Growth

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Adam Gillman co-founded Hiya Health (hiyahealth.com), the kids' vitamin brand that launched in March 2020, stayed bootstrapped, and sold to USANA at the end of 2024 at a reported $260M valuation. He and his co-founder Darren still run it, and 2026 is the year Hiya finally hit retail shelves at Target.

If you're a founder or operator building a subscription DTC brand, this episode is a start-to-exit walkthrough from someone who did it without a single VC check.

What's inside:
The "single SKU phase": why Hiya sold one multivitamin for 2.5 years before launching anything else, and what had to be true before product two
Attacking gummies head-on: porous form factors that kill vitamin content, and sugar as "candy in disguise"
How new SKUs stayed accretive instead of cannibalistic as the catalog grew
Why influencer was the backbone of a channel mix that hit 25% month-over-month growth in stretches from 2023 to 2025, including creators Hiya has worked with for 3 to 4 years
"We want this to sit on your counter, not inside of your cabinet": the packaging and sticker-pack decision that quietly built enterprise value
Disney, Barbie, and Marvel collabs done properly: rebuilding the entire customer experience per license, to the point that existing subscribers repurchased product they already had
The exit itself: open bidding process, why he can't imagine doing it without an investment bank, and the leverage of not needing to sell
Lightning round: the metric founders obsess over too much (revenue growth), the one they ignore (gross margin to CAC), and the e-commerce trend he thinks has peaked (creative velocity for its own sake)

Who this is for: subscription DTC founders, operators fighting rising CACs, and anyone who wants to see what a bootstrapped nine-figure exit actually looks like from the inside.

What to steal: Adam's channel discipline. Under $20M in revenue, put the majority of your effort into making one channel work before touching the next one.

Follow Adam: @AdamGillman on X | hiyahealth.com

Timestamps:
00:00 Building Hiya From a Single SKU
08:00 Expanding Products Through Customer Trust
18:00 Why Brand Building Creates Enterprise Value
23:00 Scaling Growth With Influencer Marketing
35:00 Creative Velocity, CAC and Sustainable Growth

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