Offcuts

In this episode, I sit down with Lucas Wasniewski, co-founder and CEO of Flowlife - a Scandinavian recovery-tech brand on a mission to help people reach their full potential through an active lifestyle, enabled by technology. What started as a single product has evolved into an entirely new category within recovery, combining performance, health, and design, while scaling internationally with a strong focus on brand, community, and profitable growth.

What began as Lucas’ frustration with a corded massage cushion at his mum’s house has grown into one of the most interesting consumer brands to come out of the Nordics. From wireless massage pillows to infrared saunas, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, and light therapy panels, Flowlife has quietly built a category at the intersection of recovery, performance, and science-backed wellness.

We explore the brand’s origin story, the shift from product company to lifestyle brand, and how they approach elite athlete partnerships - including Álvaro Morata - not as endorsements, but as true product co-creation.
We then get into AI, and this is where it gets interesting. Lucas isn’t thinking about AI as a cost-cutting tool, but as a shift in how brands are discovered and experienced - especially in a world where physical products become more valuable and people ask LLMs instead of Google.

If you’re building a physical product brand and trying to figure out where AI fits, this one’s for you.

Enjoy the episode.

Most people talk about AI like it's a cost-cutting exercise.

Lucas Wasniewski thinks about it differently.

He's the co-founder of Flowlife - a Scandinavian recovery-tech brand that's worked with Premier League players, La Liga stars, and Álvaro Morata (who didn't just front a campaign - he co-created a product with them).

His take on AI: the more digital everything becomes, the more valuable the physical experience gets. So their last hire wasn't a prompt engineer. It was a brand activator running physical events.

We also got into:- Starting a brand from a corded massage cushion at his mum's house- How Scandinavian winters became a global marketing insight-Rebuilding their website for LLM search, not Google- Why "most recommended" beats "most sold" as a company -target- What hyperbaric oxygen chambers have to do with stem cells and scuba diving.

In this episode, I sit down with Henrik to ask a fundamental question for consumer brands: can you actually trust your data?

Drawing on his experience scaling Babyshop and building Dema, Henrik explains why most brands don’t have a data problem in isolation. They have a decision-making problem. Marketing, inventory, fulfilment, returns, and finance all live in different systems, and once you try to connect them to understand real profitability, trust breaks down.

We explore why this pushes teams back to gut feel, how modern commerce quietly normalises spending money by default, and why it’s possible to grow faster while losing more cash.

We then look at AI and agents, and why they raise the stakes. AI can unlock massive efficiency and insight, but only if the underlying data is clean. Otherwise, it just helps brands make bad decisions faster.

If you’re running a consumer brand and feel stuck between gut feel and dashboards you don’t trust, this conversation will resonate.
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In this episode, I sit down with Ben to talk through Shopify's Winter Editions 2025, now that the dust has settled from the initial announcements.

Ben walks me through how Shopify approaches AI, both internally and for merchants. Inside the company, everyone has access to an internal LLM proxy and cutting-edge tooling. That same thinking flows out to the platform: help brands show up where customers are, which now includes AI chat interfaces, and make operations faster through better tooling.

We spend time on agentic commerce, what it means beyond the buzzword, and why it matters for how people will shop. Ben explains the ideas behind Sidekick's evolution and SimGym, which lets any brand test site changes against Shopify's anonymised consumer dataset before going live.

The standout for me is how these features connect. SimGym paired with the new Rollouts feature, which handles scheduling and traffic management, creates something that previously required multiple third-party tools. Ben also flags the POS Hub, Shopify's hardware connectivity layer, as worth watching for anyone thinking about retail.

Practical, detailed, and useful if you're building on Shopify or just trying to work out what's worth paying attention to in this release.

Checkout Factory here.

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In this episode, I sit down with Luke to unpack why consumer brands are still struggling to turn AI hype into real value.

We break down the big myths, including the widely shared idea that most AI projects fail and whether that was ever true for this industry.

Luke shares insights from more than thirty brand interviews, revealing the same pattern everywhere. Leaders believe AI will reshape operations, but most don’t know where to start, feel overwhelmed by the pace of change, and lack a practical playbook. Public case studies are thin because real experiments are happening quietly inside teams with no time to share them.

We dig into the blockers too: vendor over-promising, fragmented tech stacks, unclear budgets, and rising pressure from shareholders to show progress.

A straight, honest conversation about where brands really are and what it will take to make AI actually deliver.

This podcast is brought to you by Glara.ai - the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform helping ecommerce brands grow through AI search visibility.

👉 Learn more at Glara.ai/offcuts

Checkout Factory here.

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