Rachel Hanretty pays £500 a month for a tool that fact-checks her marketing agency — and she has opinions about why every seasonal ecommerce founder should do the same.
In this episode, Matt Edmundson sits down with Rachel Hanretty, founder of Mademoiselle Macaron, the Scottish brand shipping up to 25,000 macarons a week UK-wide. Rachel built the business from a St Andrews student flat in 2013 after training in Paris, and thirteen years on she has strong views on attribution, agency accountability, the seasonality trap, and the gulf between what Instagram wants and what authenticity actually looks like. The conversation covers Triple Whale, Klaviyo's tendency to overstate its own impact, a Pinterest wedding ads experiment that burned thousands, a Charlotte Tilbury collaboration that produced lipstick-matched macarons at H Beauty, and why Rachel feels "gaslit by her own business" every April to September.
It is half ecommerce masterclass, half therapy session — and Rachel is refreshingly honest about both.
In This Episode
(01:30) From a Paris kitchen to 25,000 macarons a week
(07:15) The seasonality trap: "gaslit by my own business"
(14:00) Attribution wars — why Klaviyo and agencies overclaim
(17:00) The £500/month tool that fact-checks her agency
(22:00) Everyone needs an Alan: fractional CFOs and complementary hires
(27:00) ROMS — return on macarons spent, and experiential retail
(34:00) How do you do authentic Instagram when your niche is Paris?
Attribution Is Broken, And Every Platform Is Overclaiming
(Around 14:00)
Rachel's biggest challenge is not product or operations — it is knowing which marketing pound is actually doing the work. Klaviyo, she says, is "way too generous" with the revenue it claims. Agencies do the same. Until she started using Triple Whale, she had no independent way to push back.
"When you're being charged thousands of pounds for a service, you're like, no, I'm really sorry, but that number doesn't match up with the number in my bank." — Rachel HanrettyMatt picks up the thread with a story from Neil Hoyne, Google's Chief Measurement Strategist and author of Converted, who once traced a single pair of shoes back through 236 separate customer touchpoints. If every platform claims that sale, the maths does not work. Matt's recommendation (crediting previous EP guest Matt Putra): stop fighting about platform-level ROAS and track blended ROAS — the one number no agency can spin.
The £500 Tool That Coaches Her Through The Data
(Around 17:00)
Rachel pays £500 a month for Triple Whale, but the attribution modelling is not actually what she values most. The real prize is the platform's AI chat — she calls it "MobiChat" — which she uses as a coaching tool.
"I just say, can you explain what's going on with the Meta ROAS? Should I cut the budget? And it throws up the halo effect model of Meta on Google. I'm like, thank you so much for explaining it — because you're not paying by the hour." — Rachel HanrettyOver six to nine months she has used the tool as much to build her own knowledge as to interrogate the data. When an agency sends a report, she pastes it into Triple Whale and asks: is this right? That single habit has changed the power dynamic in every agency conversation she has.
Shopify-only tool (a limitation worth flagging for non-Shopify founders)
Value comes from the coaching layer, not just the attribution model
Used to sanity-check agency claims and reduce reliance on fortnightly calls
"Gaslit By My Own Business" — The Seasonality Trap
(Around 07:15)
October to March is the heroic half of Rachel's year: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Easter. April to September is a different business entirely — different audience, different messaging, different paid media strategy. The same product, but the customer and the context shift underneath her.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm being gaslit by my own business." — Rachel HanrettyHer Pinterest wedding-ads experiment is a case in point. The team put thousands into Pinterest last summer aiming at brides, only to realise that people already getting married that summer had booked their suppliers months earlier. Wedding customers need to be reached a year ahead — not in the season itself.
Rachel's lesson: cost per acquisition, not ROAS, is the number that matters when you are used to seeing 5-8x returns and suddenly cannot.
Every Company Needs An Alan
(Around 22:00)
Rachel started the business at 23 with very little reference point for managing people. Two leadership coaches and one fractional CFO later, she has a working philosophy: hire for the gaps in your own skill set, and do not be afraid when those people outshine you in their area.
Her fractional CFO is called Alan. He builds the dashboards that link a website order to grams of sugar, the cost of a 20% off promo, and the capacity implications of a given campaign. He is, as Rachel puts it, "the adult in the room."
"Every company needs an Alan." — Rachel HanrettyMatt echoes the point with Andrew Carnegie's epitaph: "Here lies a man who knew how to surround himself with people cleverer than himself." The discipline is not just hiring well — it is managing your ego when someone else shines.
ROMS, Charlotte Tilbury, And The Rise Of Experiential Retail
(Around 27:00)
Rachel's framework for the business breaks down into three "moments of luxury": moments of celebration (weddings, birthdays), moments to impress (corporate gifting and brand activations), and moments of thoughtfulness (gifting). The middle category is where the most interesting growth is sitting.
Last year Mademoiselle Macaron worked with Charlotte Tilbury across H Beauty stores, producing thousands of macaron boxes colour-matched to individual lipsticks. The end customer may or may not eat the macarons — they are often photographed and posted on social media alongside the product. Rachel coined a term for measuring this kind of spend: ROMS — Return on Macarons Spent.
"Sometimes I don't even know if the macarons get eaten, frankly. I'm okay with it as long as they were paid for." — Rachel HanrettyThe Freezer Confession (And A Note From Pierre Hermé)
Rachel shared an operational secret that many founders in the fresh-food space will recognise: Mademoiselle Macaron freezes its macarons. Far from being a downgrade, the French pastry chef Pierre Hermé has publicly said that "anyone who says they don't freeze their macarons is a liar — because it improves the texture." Freezing makes the texture more marshmallow-like, and it gives Rachel the operational flexibility to take pre-orders from October and ship fresh-feeling product right up to the last Christmas posting day.
Authenticity vs The Algorithm
(Around 34:00)
Rachel's "question for Matt" was the most honest moment of the conversation: her niche is Paris, which is aesthetically beautiful, so every other bakery brand on Instagram is polished to within an inch of its life. She went to Paris in January, paid for an Airbnb-experienced photographer to shadow her for 36 hours, and hated every minute of it. Her Scottish phrase for how she feels about polished-female-bakery-Instagram: "gie's me the boak" — it makes her feel ill.
Matt's advice: stop trying to be polished. The videos doing one to two million views are shot on iPhones. The accounts winning are the raw, authentic ones. He points to his own son, Zak the Nutritionist, who built 70,000 Instagram followers in six months doing 60-second IBS-help clips filmed in Matt's back garden — and has now turned that audience into a successful recipe book.
"Consistency wins every single day and authenticity wins every single day. It does not have to be polished. People buy you." — Matt EdmundsonKey Takeaways
Fact-check your agencies. Platform-level ROAS from Klaviyo, Meta, and Google are all overstated. Use blended ROAS and an independent tool to sanity-check claims.
Cost per acquisition > ROAS when you move between seasons or audiences.
Long-tail channels need long-tail thinking. Pinterest for weddings works — but the year before, not during the season.
Hire your Alans. A fractional CFO (or anyone filling your skills gap) is worth more than another marketing hire when you cannot read your own numbers.
Experiential retail is a real revenue channel. Brand activation work pays per unit and builds social proof.
Stop trying to be polished. The algorithm rewards authenticity, not aesthetic perfection — even in aesthetically-driven niches.
Resources Mentioned
Mademoiselle Macaron —