Brilliant Commerce

Women weren't required in US clinical research until 1993.Priyanka Jain built a company to close that gap. Evvy now holds the world's largest real world data set on the vaginal microbiome.

Priyanka tells Bryan Mahoney how community and education became Evvy's entire acquisition strategy, why AI driven search changes how patients find care, and what she thinks is harder, raising money as a female founder or building a brand new category.

Topics discussed:

- Building a category around an overlooked female biomarker data set

- Turning education and community into Evvy's core acquisition strategy

- Why AI powered search is reshaping healthcare discovery

- Fundraising as a founder versus creating a brand new category

- Evvy's prospective study using microbiome testing inside IVF clinics

- Serving 100,000 patients and 2,000 doctors nationwide

- Overcoming imposter syndrome by assembling experts instead of becoming one

- The venture funding gap facing women's health founders today

What happens when an agency spins its internal tooling into a software company built for one vertical only?

Jenna Holcombe tells Bryan how a hard call to focus exclusively on fashion, made around 2019, turned into the company's biggest advantage.

Jenna breaks down how Centra pairs headless architecture with an opinionated, all-in-one suite for D2C and wholesale, why the company won't rebrand around AI hype, and how a wave of new prospects are finding Centra through ChatGPT searches instead of word of mouth.

Topics discussed:

- Betting on fashion-only focus after years serving multiple verticals

- Combining headless architecture with an opinionated end-to-end commerce suite

- Connecting wholesale and D2C in one inventory and back end

- Building omnichannel kiosk experiences for multi-brand retail displays

- Refusing to rebrand as an AI platform despite market hype

- Seeing new prospects discover Centra through ChatGPT and LLM search

- Balancing agency-style customization with productized software for fashion brands

- Scaling from bootstrapped agency spinoff to 300 plus fashion brands

What if the biggest AI opportunity for retailers is knowing where not to automate?Chris Parsons, VP of Partner Growth and Marketing atHale, spent 25 years inside retail at Walmart Canada, Ren's Pets, and Home Hardware before moving to the agency side.

He tells Bryan Mahoney why he built an AI Moment of Discovery framework, why he still pushes back on the online-to-store cannibalization myth, and why self-checkout may be retail's biggest missed connection with customers.

Topics discussed:

●   Building an AI Moment of Discovery framework for retail

●   Debunking the online-to-store cannibalization myth

●   Why self-checkout kills in-store customer engagement

●   Starting AI adoption with small, repeatable tasks

●   Finding hidden product correlations like toothpaste and tuna

●   Holding agencies accountable instead of asking for bigger budgets

●   Using AI as a thought partner, not an autopilot

●   Writing Retail Rewired despite a lifelong learning disability

Meta's algorithm started rewarding new creative volume, and the industry treated it as a race to publish more. Vincent Bourzeix, Founder and CEO of Superbolt, saw the problem coming.

Vincent walks Bryan through why creative diversity outperforms sheer output, how ad platforms shifted from buying audiences to buying outcomes, and the three roles his agency built to make AI actually useful instead of confidently wrong.

Topics discussed:

Superbolt's vertically integrated model uniting media, creative, and data teams

Why creative volume backfired after Meta's algorithm update

Founder-led ads rank among the best performing creative formats

Shift from buying audiences to buying outcomes on ad platforms

High consolidation, high signal framework replacing granular ad targeting

Quarterly learning roadmaps for structured incrementality testing

Three roles agencies need to operationalize AI successfully

Triangulating cross-channel measurement beyond platform-reported ROAS

With nearly two decades in e-commerce and stints at Victoria's Secret, Bed Bath & Beyond, The Children's Place, and Foot Locker, Laurie Falletta brought something most e-commerce leaders don't have when she joined Cole Haan as VP of Ecommerce: a merchant's brain. She thinks in product lifecycles, margin thresholds, and inventory planning, and that shapes every decision she makes on site.

In this conversation, Laurie makes the case for why over-personalization is quietly diluting brand stories, why average UPT across most sites sits around 1.4 and what curation has to do with it, and how Cole Haan is approaching agentic discovery without chasing every platform at once.

Topics discussed:

Why merchandising foundation separates good e-commerce leaders

Margin discipline and the real cost of promotional culture

Balancing algorithmic recommendations with manual curation

Why over-personalization dilutes your brand's seasonal story

Fit technology and why no one has cracked footwear sizing

Agentic commerce, Reddit, and the new rules of brand discovery

Using AI for reporting without losing brand authenticity

Keeping customer connection as the constant through tech change

Charlotte Langley built Bloom & Wild's retention engine by paying close attention to complaints too small to register as data, like customers who wanted out of Mother's Day marketing entirely.

She tells Bryan how a three-person insights team, AI-powered feedback analysis, and firm limits on unit economics are helping the letterbox flower pioneer expand into food and gifting without losing customer trust.

Topics discussed:

- Letting customers opt out of sensitive occasion marketing

- Building customer trust before expanding into new gift categories

- Expanding from flowers into food and gifting categories

- Running a three-person insights team that leans on AI

- Uncovering hidden operational issues through AI-scraped NPS data

- Proactively resending flowers before delivery problems get reported

- Treating delivery delays as the top driver of dissatisfaction

- Building the "Care Wildly" brand platform since 2020

What does it actually take to build a brand that earns permission to expand into retail, land cultural partnerships, and grow aided awareness from 1% to 11%? Matthew Morein, Senior Director of Brand and Content at WeCook, has the answer, and it starts with a question most teams never ask: if this company disappeared tomorrow, what would the world be losing?

Matthew walks Bryan through how WeCook shifted from a purely functional, convenience-driven brand to one rooted in the joy of mealtime, why brand is made of clay and not cement, and how authentic ambassador partnerships with PK Subban and Marie-Pierre Morin drove real brand awareness results in a notoriously difficult subscription category.

Topics discussed:

Moving from functional messaging to emotional brand positioning

Advocating for brand investment when ROI is hard to measure

Building ambassador partnerships based on authentic product love

Growing aided brand awareness from 1% to 11% in Ontario

Balancing AI tools with authentic storytelling in content production

Expanding from DTC subscription into retail and new channel opportunities

Using cultural collaborations to generate earned media and brand heat

Why brand is never finished and must stretch into new channels

Summersalt launched from a data set most brands would never attempt to build. The team scanned 10,000 women, made a swimsuit for each, and collected detailed feedback on fit. That pattern library still drives the product engine today, and swimwear brands that earn that trust historically hold 80% of wallet share going forward.

Lori Coulter, Co-Founder and CEO of Summersalt, tells Bryan how she and her co-founder went from a Chipotle lunch to a top 1% launch in under a year, why she still participates in every fitting, and where AI is actually delivering returns at Summersalt today.

Topics discussed:

Building a fit library from 10,000 digital body scans

Finding a co-founder through professional respect and shared values

Keeping all brand creative in-house from day one

Using post-season return data to improve fit by size

Testing new silhouettes in core solids before scaling

Recognizing A or D products on launch day

Where AI is delivering real efficiency gains at Summersalt

Thinking about agentic commerce as a new channel

Dina Rosenbloom didn't join Hairstory to maintain a brand. She joined to rebuild one and get it to retail. As CEO of a 10-year-old company built on a product that asks customers to stop shampooing, she's learned that category creation isn't a launch moment. It's a long, deliberate accumulation of trust, repetition, and the right advocates.

Dina breaks down the affiliate model that predated influencer marketing, the proprietary HairChat tool that turns hair concerns into personalized product recommendations, and what the transition from CMO to CEO actually taught her about running a business, managing people, and finally getting Hairstory into Ulta.

Topics discussed:

Building a brand on an innovative product with no existing category

Why great brand building requires patience and letting the product steep

Hairstory's affiliate model with independent hairdressers and how it generates passive income

The role of a best-in-class customer service team in category creation

HairChat, a proprietary chatbot built in the voice of a lead hairdresser

Subscription strategy and building a loyalty program designed for retention

Transitioning from CMO to CEO at a startup and leaning on subject matter experts

Getting Hairstory into Ulta as the payoff of a retail-first strategy

Brian Berger came into consumer from a consumer internet background, and that combination is exactly why Mack Weldon was built the way it was: a brand with a direct customer relationship at its core, a data-informed operation, and a product formula applied to a category most brands had written off as commoditized.

Nearly 15 years in, he knows where that approach held up and where it cost them.

Topics discussed:

Applying a performance-fabric product formula to commoditized men's basics

Why multichannel wholesale would have built profitable revenue faster than DTC

Managing the tension between growth investment and a self-sustaining business

Why brand marketing and growth marketing require fundamentally different skill sets

What actually drives repurchase when CRM and email cadence hit their ceiling

Building a data foundation that teams can interrogate and act on rather than just report from

Where AI-generated creative works now for physical product brands and where it still falls short

What Mack Weldon is seeing from agent-based search traffic and how they're thinking about it

Why persona-based dynamic landing pages are an emerging personalization approach worth watching

What separates brand builders who last from those who chase performance forever? Doug Zarkin has spent three decades answering that question across franchise, retail, and direct selling, and his framework is more transferable to D2C than most operators expect.

Bryan and Doug unpack the brand value equation, the "thinking human" philosophy, and why the brands that obsess over customer retention almost always outperform the ones still throwing budget at acquisition.

Topics discussed:

Nearly 50% retention in a category where most brands are lucky to hit half that. That number, which Mila Mendez doesn't deny is in the ballpark, is the clearest signal that True Botanicals has figured something out most beauty brands haven't. As Vice President Digital Commerce and Media at True Botanicals, Mila has spent over a decade building digital commerce across DTC, Amazon, TikTok, affiliate, and performance marketing for some of the most demanding luxury beauty brands in the world. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, she tells Bryan Mahoney that the number isn't a marketing story. It starts with the product.

Mila breaks down how True Botanicals built its retention engine around auto-replenishment, why clean beauty's credibility problem is actually a competitive advantage for brands that can back their claims with science, how she thinks about Amazon not as a threat but as brand defense and demand capture, and why the arrival of agentic AI is not a new problem, just a new channel that rewards the same thing every channel has always rewarded: showing up with a great product, a consistent story, and proof to back it up. The through line across all of it is her concept of harmony, finding the balance across owned channels, retail, Amazon, and now AI-powered search, without losing the thread of what the brand actually stands for.

Topics discussed:

- Building True Botanicals' digital commerce from the ground up

- Why ~50% retention starts with product efficacy, not marketing

- Auto-replenishment as the retention tech stack's non-negotiable

- How True Botanicals navigates the "clean beauty" credibility problem

- Amazon as brand defense and demand capture, not a channel threat

- Managing channel harmony across DTC, retail, and marketplace

- Why LLMs are just the next channel, not a new kind of threat

- Agentic AI and the brand's responsibility to control its own information

Michael Natenshon built Marine Layer starting from a single T-shirt he could not replace, spent a year and a half developing custom fabric from scratch, and then opened a pop-up shop purely to collect email addresses. That pop-up accidentally put Marine Layer on a retail path it never planned for, and today the brand operates more than 50 stores. On this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan Mahoney sits down with Natenshon in person at Marine Layer's San Francisco office to unpack what 15-plus years of building an omnichannel apparel brand actually looks like from the inside.

Natenshon is direct about the constraints that shaped the business: limited capital forced disciplined decisions, and a deliberate pace of five to ten new stores per year built customer loyalty that faster-moving competitors could not replicate. He also shares how Marine Layer is currently approaching agentic commerce, including changes to product descriptions and review strategy, and why his team remains cautious about advertising inside AI chat tools despite the emerging opportunity.

Topics discussed:

-        Pop-up retail as accidental customer acquisition strategy

-        Why capital constraints produce better brand decisions

-        Building 50-plus stores at a deliberate five to ten per year

-        Omnichannel from day one and the inventory tradeoffs

-        Founding partnership dynamics between complementary operators

-        Agentic commerce as the new SEO

-        Adapting product content for AI-driven discovery

-        Skepticism around in-chat advertising models

Most brands treat their website as the transaction. Dude Wipes treats it as the handoff, routing visitors directly to Walmart, Target, Amazon, and club rather than pushing a native cart. It sounds like leaving money on the table. It isn't.

Joey Thomas, VP at Dude Wipes, breaks down the strategy behind that decision: how they capture first-party data and Amazon 1P credentials without owning the fulfillment, why a 64% repeat purchase rate on Amazon gives them the confidence to be margin neutral on TikTok Shop, and how a brand built entirely on personality has become the omnichannel market share leader in flushable wipes. He also gets into how they cracked TikTok Shop after applying the Amazon playbook and watching it fail, where they're placing early bets on agentic commerce, and why cutting their entire grooming line was the move that actually built category dominance.

Topics discussed:

Why Dude Wipes drives website visitors to retail checkout rather than a native cart

Capturing first party data through Amazon 1P integration directly on dudewipes.com

The repeat purchase case for margin neutral customer acquisition on TikTok Shop

How creator farm networks replaced ad spend as the primary TikTok growth lever

Validating omnichannel lift: 40% of TikTok consumers buying at Walmart in store or on Walmart.com

Going dark on Amazon spend to isolate true brand pull from paid performance

Cutting the grooming line to become category king of a single vertical

Why Reddit is central to their early agentic commerce positioning strategy

Where AI is and is not replacing humans in the Dude Wipes operation

Draper James cut promotional days significantly last year and saw margin expansion plus AOV increases. VP of E-commerce and Brand Marketing Piper Parsley walked CEO Jeannie Yoo (who joined in October) through the strategy: identify the essential promotional windows when the entire internet is discounting, then spend the rest of the year as a full-price storyteller. The customer base remained engaged, proving that disciplined brands can train customers to expect value beyond constant discounts.

Parsley's partnership framework filters opportunities through customer affinity data rather than pure reach metrics. The Rustler Hat Co. collaboration (a female-founded Nashville hat company) sold out multiple times because it aligned with documented customer interest in locally rooted brands. Polywood Furniture checked boxes for front porch moments and sustainability (furniture made from recycled plastic milk jugs). Success gets measured holistically: sell-through matters, but so do email click-through rates, press pickup, SMS engagement, and new subscriber quality during teaser campaigns.

On the technical side, Parsley is prioritizing FAQ buildouts on product detail pages specifically for AI search optimization. When customers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for "yellow midi dress with white flowers, sleeveless," brands need structured question-and-answer content that AI tools can parse. She's also testing conversational search on-site to move beyond keyword matching (think "Audrey Hepburn style little black dress" returning relevant results even when product copy never mentions Hepburn).

Topics discussed:

Reducing promotional frequency to expand margin while maintaining customer engagement

Filtering partnerships through customer affinity data versus reach metrics

Measuring collaboration success across sell-through, email engagement, press coverage, and subscriber quality

Building FAQ content on PDPs to improve discoverability in AI search tools

Implementing conversational search that interprets style intent versus exact keywords

Testing CTV for retargeting with significantly higher AOV than other platforms

Using handwritten clienteling to strengthen high-value customer relationships

Positioning agentic shopping as brand discovery versus automation threat

Johnny Russo built digital commerce operations across Canadian retail for nearly 20 years, including running digital at Marks (a $1.3 billion, 300+ store operation under Canadian Tire) and transforming wholesale operations at The Kersheh Group into multi-brand DTC while managing 40+ licenses. He currently serves as Chief Digital Officer at Lamour. His current portfolio spans CEO roles at Zero Lush (non-alcoholic wine), Rush Cycle (master franchise for spin studios), and partner at High Voltage Digital. The common thread: operational frameworks that eliminate inefficiency through structured planning and team context-building that turns complex requests into four-word briefs.

Topics Discussed

Six-month planning system using Life Purpose Playbook: vision board, life purpose statement, two-year plan, and daily/weekly/monthly goals that roll forward when incomplete (80-90% completion rate)

Building agency efficiency where four-word requests replace 17-minute briefings after working with the same team members across multiple brands for 4-5 years

Self-teaching P&L management and accounting fundamentals by dedicating three-month blocks to studying public company filings outside job requirements

Personal development plans with four professional focus areas plus life goals like fitness, based on the principle that personal energy directly impacts work performance

Managing budget decisions in cautious Canadian market where 25% increase requests require chain approval versus immediate US yes/no decisions during performance peaks

Treating Black Friday as two-month cycle starting early November where brands face consumer dollar constraints once allocated budgets are exhausted

AI tool adoption strategy: encouraging team experimentation across all available tools while maintaining human control on media buying and strategic decisions

Evaluating AI-generated marketing presentations by asking detailed questions that expose whether presenters understand underlying strategy or memorized outputs

Zero Lush distribution model targeting BC's premium channels (high-end hotels, restaurants, golf courses, liquor stores) where non-alcoholic menus offer 20 options versus Ontario's five and Quebec's one

Book writing system during four-hour Calgary-Montreal flights: 20 minutes reading to generate notes, alternating one-hour blocks of writing and Netflix across the flight

When JP Beeghly, Senior Manager of Martech at Sonos, asks Chord's Commerce Copilot more questions than anyone else in their customer base, it's not because he's looking for basic answers. He's stress-testing whether AI can handle the institutional knowledge that separates a generic query from a Sonos-specific insight. Joined by Josh Maynard, who recently shifted from CTO at Ruggable to GM, Global eCommerce, MrBeast, this conversation cuts through the AI hype to reveal what's actually working at scale.

Both openly admit their organizations aren't doing enough to train AI properly. And that admission leads to the real conversation: how commerce operators are navigating the gap between AI's promise and the messy reality of implementation.

Topics discussed:

The context problem in enterprise AI. JP reveals how Chord's Copilot must reach across multiple data tables to answer seemingly simple campaign questions, highlighting why institutional knowledge and business-specific context matter more than raw data access. Josh emphasizes that without centralized, structured data, teams uploading different Excel files to ChatGPT will generate contradictory answers.

Why dimensional modeling isn't dead. Despite initial hopes that LLMs could handle unstructured data, the conversation confirms that well-structured data architecture is now more critical than ever. LLMs need to write reliable SQL, which requires data models built specifically to support AI query patterns, not just traditional BI dashboards.

Onboarding AI like you'd onboard junior employees. Rather than expecting immediate production-ready output, both leaders discuss treating AI tools as new hires who need access to systems, training on company-specific terminology, and gradual expansion of responsibilities. The parallel: you wouldn't give a junior employee your most complex task on day one.

The quality control gap. Josh compares AI-generated content to junior engineers copying from Stack Overflow without understanding context. The solution isn't banning these tools but implementing review processes and teaching teams to edit for accuracy, brand voice, and business fit rather than accepting first drafts.

AI as augmentation, not automation. Josh can now draft go-to-market strategies in minutes instead of days, but that speed creates new expectations. The conversation explores how AI compresses timelines for iteration while raising the bar for output quality, forcing leaders to rethink what "good enough" means.

The shift from memorization to ideation. Where previous generations valued information retrieval speed (think: pre-Google library research), and then finding answers quickly (Google era), the new competitive advantage is rapid ideation and iteration. AI tools enable this, but only for people who maintain curiosity and critical thinking.

Brand as fundamentally human territory. JP explains why Sonos can't fully automate customer experience decisions: brands are human by definition, built on emotional connections and nuanced understanding that AI can assist with but never own. The technology helps test variations faster, but brand strategy remains firmly in human hands.

Social skills as the underrated career differentiator. JP's advice for his teenagers extends to junior operators: putting down phones and developing face-to-face communication skills matters more than ever. The ability to present work, challenge assumptions, and navigate tough conversations with managers determines growth more than technical prowess alone.

The non-deterministic problem in business intelligence. When OpenAI's Chief Scientist acknowledges that models won't give the same answer twice, it creates trust issues for business-critical questions. The solution emerging: training AI with approved SQL queries and business rules as context, not expecting it to derive correct answers independently.

Lance Dobson spent 15 years across agency, Adobe Ad Cloud for search, and commerce brands before landing at Shed, a telehealth weight loss company. His path revealed something counterintuitive: healthcare compliance constraints that require data anonymization and eliminate standard tracking enhancements forced him to build better marketing fundamentals. When you can't rely on algorithmic bidding enhancements or third-party retargeting, customer understanding through problem-solution framing becomes the only sustainable acquisition strategy.

The conversation unpacks how privacy-first constraints actually improve marketing discipline. Lance explains his framework for addressing specific customer problems rather than building elaborate persona trees that lead to analysis paralysis. He details Adobe Ad Cloud's pre-walled-garden era when third-party bidding tech could outperform native platform algorithms, why that advantage disappeared, and how SEO practitioners should adapt as search shifts toward agent-driven discovery. For operators building in competitive categories or navigating privacy restrictions, Lance's approach to earning trust through UX design rather than explicit privacy messaging offers a tested alternative to conventional personalization.

Topics discussed:

Career learning models: agency breadth versus brand depth versus ad tech backend knowledge

Adobe Ad Cloud search bidding strategy and why third-party algorithmic advantages eroded as platforms built walled gardens

SEO-to-AEO adaptation through content authenticity and regular external perspective audits to avoid consultant capture

Problem-solution marketing framework versus persona-based segmentation and why the former prevents analysis paralysis

Healthcare compliance constraints that require data anonymization and eliminate standard tracking enhancements

Privacy-first brand trust built through intuitive UX and value exchange rather than explicit privacy messaging in creative

Retention team resourcing typically outweighing acquisition four-to-one across customer service, ops, and email functions

AI replacing one to three analytical and coding roles while maintaining human writers for all customer-facing content

Four-to-one retention versus acquisition team ratio as the hidden reality across most commerce operations

This conversation was recorded while Lance was Senior Director of Marketing and Analytics at Shed.

Most commerce leaders have either agency experience or operator experience. Corin Mills spent four years at Wolff Olins as the designated client voice inside a global branding agency, then led a rebrand consolidating 11 brands into one at Currys, the UK's Best Buy equivalent. Now he runs e-commerce at MOO, a $100M+ B2B print and merchandise company that built its business on bringing luxury print quality to a mass market.

Corin Mills tells Bryan Mahoney why he's skeptical of rebrands as a default solution, even though he's led several. The real blockers to growth are usually product strategy or business architecture problems that brands try to paper over with visual refreshes. He breaks down the structural tension between brand and performance teams: performance marketers cling to last-click attribution because it feels robust, but everyone knows nobody just randomly searches a brand and converts. That false security makes brand investment hard to justify internally, even when awareness spend clearly improves performance results.

Topics discussed:

Ricky Joshi bootstrapped Saatva to nearly $200M in revenue with a 14-person ecommerce team while venture-funded competitors burned capital on customer acquisition. His approach: retail locations as integrated conversion engines that drive 80% higher online conversion rates in their markets. By embedding customer service operations directly into stores, Saatva eliminated traditional call center overhead while improving agent performance through hands-on product exposure.

Bryan Mahoney sits down with Ricky in Saatva's Austin Viewing Room to unpack the execution behind this omnichannel model. Ricky reveals how being bootstrapped until 2018 forced cash flow discipline that became competitive advantage. He explains the retail expansion playbook: opening the first New York City store in 2019, then capitalizing on COVID's retail disruption to lock premium corridor locations at suppressed rents. The conversation covers why Viewing Rooms function as customer service centers and how organic reviews positioned Saatva for AI commerce.

Topics discussed:

Nick Sanetra has spent nearly 20 years identifying what he calls "holes in the bucket." As Director of Marketing at Clove, a footwear brand purpose-built for healthcare workers on 12-hour shifts, Nick deploys a methodical diagnostic process to pinpoint exactly where prospects fall out of the funnel.

His approach relies on unglamorous fundamentals that actually work: post-purchase surveys revealing that over 70% of buyers are switching off major running shoe brands, systematic monthly and year-over-year cohort analysis to separate signal from noise, and a team philosophy of "strong beliefs, loosely held" that values intellectual curiosity over ego.

The real value emerges in how Clove operates in today's fractured attribution environment. With anonymous sessions climbing and pixel-perfect tracking dead, Nick shares how they've rebuilt their measurement stack around Triple Whale for MTA, maintained Google Sheets as a surprisingly resilient BI layer, and weaponized post-purchase survey data as a second opinion that cuts through platform attribution bias. His "mountain climber method" for testing (keep three points of contact stable, occasionally release one hand for a bold move) offers a pragmatic framework for teams caught between incremental CRO and swinging for breakthrough creative.

Topics discussed:

When customer acquisition declines, most CEOs blame marketing. When retention drops, they blame lifecycle. Justin Fredlender spent five years as VP of Growth at Ritual learning why both diagnoses miss the point, and why treating growth as anything other than holistic is how brands plateau.

After scaling MVMT to nearly nine figures in his mid-20s, Justin joined Ritual where the brand foundation was already built. His quick win? Reallocating marketing spend based on proper attribution analysis. But his lasting insight came from watching the same pattern across companies: executives demanding marketing fixes when the real friction lived in product experience, operations, and cross-functional misalignment. Growth isn't a channel problem. It's an organizational one.

Now advising multiple commerce brands after 18 months as an independent consultant, Justin recently chose Chord over building internal analytics infrastructure. The decision framework: Do we have capability to maintain this, not just build it? Will AI advancement make it obsolete in six months? Who internally owns ensuring ROI? That third question, the stewardship problem, matters more than the technical capability ever will.

Topics discussed:

Belkin's Senior Director of E-commerce tested AI chatbots for customer service beyond basic order tracking, then deliberately pulled back to human agents for relationship-critical moments. Jyoti Malik explains why most omnichannel strategies fail (teams treat digital as a retail add-on instead of rethinking the entire operating model), shares her phased approach to channel expansion, and reveals the three-part assessment she uses before investing in first party data infrastructure.

The practical takeaway: before chasing martech solutions or agentic commerce readiness, map your business outcomes two years forward and audit whether you can actually act on the data you collect. Jyoti's team experiments with AI for content creation (a non-creative team member now generates banner assets in ChatGPT), but she's cautious about where automation creates value versus where it damages customer relationships.

Topics discussed:

Forbes consistently ranks in the top five most trusted publications in the US, but that credibility means nothing if you can't monetize it. Emily Jackson reveals how Forbes Vetted has had to completely rebuild their revenue model as 40% of Gen Z shifted to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram for product recommendations—platforms where traditional last-click affiliate attribution simply doesn't work.

Operational separation between editorial and monetization teams - The specific organizational structure Forbes uses to maintain recommendation credibility: content teams operate independently from business development, featuring products regardless of commission potential, with clear processes for when monetization opportunities don't exist

Platform-specific content reformation beyond repurposing - Why Forbes creates entirely different content for social platforms versus search-optimized roundups, including how newsletter content strategy differs from SERP-targeted articles and the conversion implications of each format

Shifting from last-click to influence-based advertiser conversations - How Forbes repositions with performance marketers: moving beyond bottom-funnel attribution to capture branding budgets by demonstrating influence throughout extended consideration cycles, especially for high-ticket items like $2,000 AR headsets

Revenue threshold-based prospect targeting methodology - Forbes targets CMOs at companies under $100 million but shifts focus to VP/Senior Director levels above that threshold, with Emily citing Glossier's CMO remaining hands-on even at $200 million revenue as an exception to the rule

Live events commerce integration for offline attribution - Connecting Forbes' events business with commerce content to reach high-net-worth audiences through activations where traditional tracking methods don't apply, requiring hybrid attribution approaches

AI implementation with content creation boundaries - Specific AI applications Forbes uses: data analysis acceleration, content strategy recommendations, meeting summaries, and deck reviews—while maintaining strict human-only policies for actual product testing and editorial content

Monetization diversification beyond affiliate commissions - The complete revenue mix shift from pure affiliate to branded content, display advertising, video monetization, and newsletter ads as social platform attribution challenges traditional commission models

Product recommendation value thesis in an AI search world - Emily's framework for why trusted human product testing becomes more valuable as AI agents emerge: agents may pre-filter options, but consumers still want authentic human validation for purchase decisions

When a premium olive oil brand discovers ChatGPT is driving thousands of dollars in monthly revenue with zero paid spend, it signals a fundamental shift in how consumer education creates both immediate sales and long-term category growth. Samuel Davel reveals how Kosterina's military-disciplined approach to growth measurement exposed agency manipulation while building a repeatable framework for omnichannel brand expansion.

Strategic pivot from lifestyle to educational UGC content - Sam details Kosterina's complete content strategy overhaul from recipe and lifestyle imagery to educational UGC focused on olive oil quality differentiation (single-sourced, early harvested, polyphenol content). The counterintuitive approach: educating consumers to make better category decisions regardless of brand choice, creating informed buyers who drive overall premium segment growth.

MER implementation as singular North Star metric - Moving beyond platform-reported ROAS to Media Efficiency Ratio (total revenue ÷ total spend) as the primary decision-making metric. Samuel explains how this holistic view caught their previous agency's manipulation: 85% view-through attribution on Meta and branded search terms stuffed into Performance Max campaigns inflating a 12X reported ROAS while revenue remained flat.

Use case repositioning that transforms consumption patterns - Sam Davel's tactical repositioning of olive oil from cooking ingredient to daily wellness ritual. The campaign he expected to fail became their highest-performing January initiative, demonstrating how use case repositioning can unlock entirely new consumption patterns and purchase frequency without product changes.

Advanced agency vetting framework beyond basic credentials - Samuel due diligence checklist: Shopify backend access verification (not just dashboard screenshots), unified Meta/Google strategic alignment (red flag: separate agencies for each platform), new customer acquisition focus verification, and branded search percentage analysis. Ultimate red flag: agencies promising 13X ROAS—a mathematically unsustainable promise that signals fundamental misunderstanding of sustainable growth economics.

Geo-targeted influencer testing for retail velocity measurement - Kosterina's partnership with micro-influencer agency Hummingbirds involves pushing specific geographic markets, then analyzing Target's store-level velocity data to measure pre/post campaign lift. This creates quantifiable attribution between social content and physical shelf performance, solving the traditional retail marketing measurement challenge.

AI-driven organic search monetization strategy - Samuel's discovery of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue from ChatGPT searches (detected through Triple Whale attribution) sparked their systematic approach to AI-crawlable content creation. Focus areas: writing content specifically for AI discovery and preparing for inevitable AI platform advertising rollout in 2026.

Triple Whale attribution methodology for omnichannel optimization - Technical breakdown of their multi-model approach: AI attribution model for business-level decisions, linear attribution for holistic planning, and triple attribution with view-through data for channel-specific optimization. Critical for brands with heavy social spend driving both online and retail conversions.

Strategic retail expansion: shelf depth over door breadth - Sam's framework for retail readiness assessment before expansion: packaging optimization, messaging alignment, and measurable brand awareness thresholds. The critical insight: velocity failures make retailer re-entry exponentially more difficult, making readiness assessment more valuable than opportunity pursuit.

In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, I sit down with Jason Bertrand, VP of E-commerce at Purple, to unpack lessons from his journey scaling D2C operations from Under Armour's early $20M online business to Purple's $450M empire. Jason shares refreshingly honest takes on why chasing complex tech can derail growth, how to build premium positioning in discount-heavy categories, and his team's specific AI SEO implementation that drove measurable traffic growth from Perplexity and ChatGPT in just six months.

Topics discussed:

In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Tina Gu, CFO & Head of Digital Growth at Sarah Creal Beauty, breaks down the strategic decisions behind building a beauty brand exclusively for women over 40. With M&A experience from Estee Lauder's major acquisition period (Le Labo, Frederic Malle, Glam Glow) and product marketing leadership at Meta, Tina discusses with Bryan why demographic focus creates stronger unit economics and how to structure operations for strategic exit potential.

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Ben Grynol, Head of Growth at Levels, offers a counterintuitive approach to commerce: building an entire health category through education rather than conversion-focused marketing. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Ben walks Bryan through how Levels achieved remarkably low customer acquisition costs ($50-80) for a high-consideration, $400 health device by rejecting traditional performance marketing in favor of deeply researched content. The strategy has produced extraordinary results: a 5:1 LTV:CAC ratio despite 60% of conversions happening after a full year of consideration. 

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In an industry obsessed with paid media, GR0 co-founders Jon Zacharias, President, and Kevin Miller, CEO, identified a massive blind spot: iconic brands were spending millions on Meta ads without capturing the downstream organic searches they generated. As Jon points out, Theragun was spending $5 million in a month for half a million people to google “Is Theragun legit” or “percussive massage gun,” but they weren't even looking at what was happening after that. This insight became the foundation for an agency that revolutionized how ecommerce brands approach organic search.

Starting with a laser focus on SEO, they rapidly scaled to $20 million in revenue within their first year, employing 50 people by the 12-month mark. Their approach was fundamentally different: turning SEO into a performance marketing channel with clear revenue attribution. When iOS 14 privacy changes hit and acquisition costs soared, their model proved prescient. As Kevin explains, "It was a healthy correction because the products that didn't need to exist ceased to exist." 

The changing landscape forced GR0 to evolve as well, strategically acquiring complementary agencies to become what Zacharias calls "the phone bill" of marketing services — the last expense a brand would cut when cash got tight. Their candid conversation highlights both the spectacular growth and painful lessons of scaling an agency during turbulent times, offering a masterclass in adaptability for commerce leaders.

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When your business model relies on cameras inside people's homes, trust isn't optional — it's everything. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan speaks with Logan Dunn, Head of E-commerce at Wyze, about how the smart home disruptor is evolving beyond their initial "too good to be true" pricing strategy. After slashing camera prices from $200 to $20 and sparking a price war, Wyze now focuses on security and customer data management as competitive advantages in what Logan calls a "blood ocean" market.

Logan explains how they're implementing end-to-end encryption, two-factor authentication, and rigorous security protocols after learning hard lessons about customer trust. He offers a candid look at the challenges of managing a petabyte of customer data, the implementation of AI productivity tools like Glean, and why maintaining a single source of data truth is critical for any brand's success, especially when preparing for an AI-driven future.

The conversation explores the bifurcation of future commerce between AI automation for commodities and authentic social experiences for discovery, with Logan predicting significant growth in social commerce despite current hurdles in the US market. For marketers and e-commerce leaders, this episode provides valuable insights on balancing operational efficiency with authentic brand storytelling in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

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Forget the idea that direct-to-consumer is dead — it's just getting started. In this debut episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan Mahoney, Co-founder & CEO of Chord Commerce, explores how Born Primitive transformed from a garage startup making padded "snatch shorts" into an iconic fitness brand generating $11 million in veteran medical debt relief through purpose-driven marketing. 

Claire Strohl, BP’s SVP of Marketing & Brand Strategy, shares their internal agency model that outperforms traditional partnerships, their systematic approach to product innovation based on athlete feedback, and their framework for balancing data analysis with brand intuition. 

BP's veteran-founded DNA permeates everything from their talent strategy to their marketing initiatives that create branded moments outside the traditional retail calendar, demonstrating how authentic community connection drives both social impact and business growth with customer cohorts showing equivalent LTV regardless of acquisition channel.

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The commerce landscape has fundamentally shifted from best-of-breed components to consolidated data platforms — evidenced by brands increasingly requesting systems that eliminate conflicting dashboards rather than adding more specialized tools. In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan explores how venture capital firm M13 evolved from backing iconic consumer brands like Bonobos, Daily Harvest, and FabFitFun to investing exclusively in commerce infrastructure. 

Partner Brent Murri shares why M13 initially passed on Chord but later led their funding round after witnessing how iconic brands like Sonos chose Chord's data platform, confirming that trustworthy data has become the non-negotiable foundation for effective AI implementation in an era where Adobe's research shows consumers increasingly use ChatGPT instead of Google for shopping research.

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Welcome to Brilliant Commerce where we get real operators behind iconic brands around a table to discuss what actually makes these brands tick. As our host (and Founder/CEO) Bryan Mahoney puts it: "It's not magic. It's hard work."

In this second episode, Bryan sits down with Ali Weiss (former CMO of Glossier) to explore the evolution of direct-to-consumer marketing from the early days of social media through today's AI-powered landscape. As one of the architects behind Glossier's iconic brand building, Ali shares candid insights about creating authentic customer relationships at scale.

This conversation digs into both strategic and tactical approaches to brand building - from balancing qualitative and quantitative inputs to measuring customer experience effectively. Ali shares specific examples from her decade at Glossier, including memorable campaigns and how the team approached major retail moments like Black Friday.

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Welcome to Brilliant Commerce where we get real operators behind iconic brands around a table to discuss what actually makes these brands tick. As our host (and Founder/CEO) Bryan Mahoney puts it: "It's not magic. It's hard work."

In this first episode, Bryan sits down with JP Beegley (Senior Manager of MarTech at Sonos) and Josh Maynard (Technology Leader at Ruggable) to discuss how they're evolving their tech stacks, managing customer data, and breaking down silos between marketing and technology teams.

This conversation digs into how two leading brands are tackling current commerce challenges - from moving away from third-party data dependence to enabling true self-service capabilities for internal teams. Both guests share candid insights from their transitions from agency life to in-house operations, and how they're approaching the increasing complexity of the marketing technology landscape.

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