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The DTC Podcast

by Eric Dyck

What does it take to build and scale a successful direct-to-consumer brand? DTC Podcast, hosted by Eric Dyck, delivers practical e-commerce growth strategies from founders, operators, and marketing experts. Explore DTC marketing, customer acquisition, performance marketing, paid media, conversion rate optimization, customer retention, creative strategy, AI, and brand growth. Hear what works, what fails, and how leading consumer brands adapt and grow. Subscribe for actionable insights to help you build a stronger, more profitable e-commerce business.

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Episodes

  1. How to Get Your CFO to Approve a Bigger Marketing Budget: CAC, Meta and Brand Spend | Harness the Halo 5/6 

    How do you get your CFO to approve a bigger marketing budget for a DTC brand? Drew Fallon, former CFO of Mad Rabbit, says finance is watching one number, CAC, and that brand spend only gets funded once direct response is efficient enough to pay for it. Drew is now CEO of Iris Finance, a finance...

  2. DTC to Retail: How Flex Reached 30,000 Stores After Turning Down Target Twice

    When should a DTC brand move into retail? Flex founder Lauren Schulte Wang said no to Target twice, and retail is now over 60% of revenue. She waited until her supply chain and her marketing engine could handle it, and she went because customers told her every month that they wanted to buy the...

  3. AI Agents for Ad Creative: The Workflow Saving a Pilothouse Strategist 5.5 Hours a Week

    How can AI agents speed up ad creative for a DTC brand? Braydon, a creative strategist at Pilothouse, has agents build his swipe file every Monday and Claude write his design tickets, which saved him five and a half hours last week. Braydon joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to walk through...

  4. The New Fundamentals of Brand Strategy (While Shipping Hundreds of Ads a Week), With Eugene Healey

    Brand strategist Eugene Healey on DTC marketing at high creative volume: why creative is the new targeting, why brand books fail with creators, and how teams approve hundreds of ads a week. How do you keep a DTC brand coherent when you're shipping that much creative? Eugene says the fundamentals…

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  5. Black Friday Discount Strategy for DTC Brands Hooked on 30% Off | AKNF

    How do you run Black Friday when your DTC brand is already hooked on discounts? Split your customers into new and repeat, keep the coupon-trained cohorts on their deal, and use the Black Friday offer to bring in new customers who have never seen your 30% off. On the second DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck…

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  6. How to Test Connected TV for a DTC Brand: $20K a Month for 60 Days | Harness the Halo 4/6

    Carve Designs gave connected TV 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum before deciding it worked, which is about as clean a test as a DTC brand runs on a new channel. The lift showed up first in direct traffic and search, and conversion rates rose across channels for customers who had seen the ads....

  7. How Terra Kaffe Pre-Sold 10,000 Espresso Machines With No Reviews

    How do you grow a DTC brand without a big brand awareness budget? Terra Kaffe founder Sahand Dilmaghani pre-sold 10,000 espresso machines from a single page with no reviews, and word of mouth has been the top reason customers buy every month for five years. On the DTC Podcast, Sahand tells Eric...

  8. Meta Partnership Ads Now Make Up 30 to 50% of the Ads on Our Biggest Accounts

    What are Meta partnership ads, and how should a DTC brand test them before Q4? They run through a creator's handle with your brand tagged, so Meta combines both accounts' engagement signals, and Pilothouse typically sees lower CPMs on them than on ads from the brand handle alone. Jacob Geary runs...

  9. Raising Prices in DTC: How Last Crumb Sells a $140 Cookie Box

    How do you raise prices on a DTC brand without killing demand? Derek Jaeger founded Last Crumb in 2020, priced a box of cookies at $110, then moved it to $140. He says that is when the company took off. Eric Dyck gets the full DTC marketing story on the DTC Podcast: pricing as positioning,...

  10. Google Ads Brand Keywords: Cut 80% of Brand Spend, Buy New Customers Instead

    How much of your Google Ads budget goes to your own brand name? Most DTC marketing teams cannot answer that, and the brands defending an ambiguous brand term are paying for customer acquisition they already had. Wildflower Cases is spending the large majority of roughly $3,500 a month on the…

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  11. Under $50M: Half the Trade Budget Goes to Retail Media | Harness the Halo 3/6

    To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup A brand doing under $50 million a year is putting roughly half of its combined retail media, trade, and shopper marketing budget into retail media. At larger companies that share drops toward 30, 20, then 15 percent. Mike Chiasson works...

  12. Bonus: Send Less, Earn More: What Brevo's Data Says About Email Volume and Conversion

    To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most ecommerce brands are paying for every contact in the database, including the tens of thousands they have not mailed in a year. Then they mail them anyway, because they are paying for them. Channing Ferrer argues both halves of that...

  13. Ep 646: Neil Patel: Why Your Leads Are Down 40% and Your Revenue Is Up

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-646&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup npdigital.com Eric told Neil Patel that Pilothouse is now getting about 30% of its inbound from ChatGPT, with higher close rates and bigger deals....

  14. Ep 645: DTC Rundown: "Don't Run Ads Until $10M?," Evergreen vs Campaigns, and Sites Built for the Wrong Customer

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-645&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co "There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing five to ten million in revenue." That was Codie Sanchez,...

  15. Ep 644: 77% of AI Shoppers Want a Recommendation: Phillip Jackson on the New Bottom of the Funnel

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-644&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Phillip Jackson has spent 22 years in ecommerce, first building the software, then running agency strategy, and now running Future Commerce...

  16. Ep 643: Amazon Fees Hit 40%: How to Claw Back Margin and Stop Wasting Ad Spend (Pilothouse)

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-643&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co In 2020, Amazon's fees ran about 26% of your product cost. Today they run 34 to 40%, and once you add advertising most brands are at...

  17. How Once Upon a Farm's DTC Ads Grew Its Retail Business | Harness the Halo 2/6

    To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Once Upon a Farm did $85.4 million in Q2, up 42% year over year, and reached 6.2% of US households against 5.0% a year earlier. Some of that growth traces back to a campaign that was never supposed to produce it. They were running...

  18. Ep 642: Kick or Keep These Trends with DÔEN's Ashley Kick: AI Creative, TikTok Shop, Amazon, and Branded Resale

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-642&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Ashley Kick runs ecommerce at DÔEN (shopdoen.com), the Los Angeles apparel brand founded by sisters Margaret and Katherine Kleveland. Eric met her...

  19. Ep 641: Creator-Handle Ads Ran 70% More Efficient: Aves on Creative Coverage and Hyper Relevant Ads

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-641&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co DTC Twitter has spent the last few months arguing about volume versus strategy. Aves from Pilothouse thinks both camps are answering...

  20. Bonus: $65M Exit, Zero Employees: How Olauto Automates Everything Except Customer Service

    To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup 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...

  21. Ep 640: 2x LTV From Loyalty Without Discounting: Carve Designs on Retention, Direct Mail, and CTV

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-640&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs (carvedesigns.com), the Northern California swim and apparel brand founded in 2003 and...

  22. Ep 639: "The Creative Is the Brief": Pilothouse on AI Storefronts and a 20-21% Conversion Rate Lift

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-639&utm_medium=podcast To Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup 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...

  23. What Brands Really Spend on Marketing: 15% at $10M, 2% at $1B | Harness the Halo 1/6

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup 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…

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  24. Ep 638: Life After the $260M Exit: Hiya's Adam Gillman on USANA, Target, and Going Global

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-638&utm_medium=podcast Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Adam Gillman co-founded Hiya Health (hiyahealth.com), the kids' vitamin brand that launched in March 2020, stayed bootstrapped, and sold to USANA at...

  25. Ep 637: "Find Them Now, Sell Them in November": Pilothouse's 8-Week Black Friday Prep Playbook

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-637&utm_medium=podcast Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co Every year around this time, Eric and Jacob record some version of this episode. This is their seventh Black Friday together, and the...

  26. Ep 636: Inside Kiyoko Beauty's Organic Content Machine: 15 Videos a Day, Sub-$1 CPMs, 8 Figures in Sales

    https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-636&utm_medium=podcast Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Fifteen videos in a shoot day. A writer's room where creators cross-edit each other's scripts. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe walkthroughs before anyone...

  27. Ep 635: "Sit With the Panic": Meta Volatility, Pausing Ads, and AI Cognitive Debt with Pilothouse (After Hours)

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co Meta has been up and down since the outage a few weeks back, and the timeline is full of advertisers feeling it. So Eric pulled three of Pilothouse's most senior people onto the after-hours couch: Abby and Aves from the...

  28. Ep 634: 10,000 Orders in 6 Months Selling Protein Couscous: Bar Bruhis on Launching Boostcous

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Bar Bruhis spent ten years building SaaS for Shopify brands. He helped start one of the first email capture tools in 2015, then co-founded KnoCommerce, the post-purchase survey tool 6,500 brands use. In December he finally took his own…

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  29. Ep 633: Why Your Winning Meta Ad Dies in 8 Days, and What to Test Instead

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Liam Robinson and Nate Vankoughnet were two of Pilothouse's first employees and spent years scaling some of its biggest accounts on Meta. Now they've spun out Marlbank Digital (website coming soon), a Meta-only agency built for the brands...

  30. Ep 632: SheFit on TikTok Shop's Hidden Costs and Why Your New Customer Numbers Are Wrong

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Melissa Dusendang ran a summer contract at SheFit to "manage the chaos" for one marketing director. She never left. Years later she runs ecommerce and operations, and her actual job is stopping the company from lying to itself with its own...

  31. Ep 631: Cracking Profitable, Incremental Scale on Applovin with Pilothouse

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup AppLovin just opened to everyone, and most DTC operators still do not know how it actually works. Jacob runs Meta at Pilothouse, which has spent on AppLovin for nearly two years, back when it was invite only. He breaks down what he sees in...

  32. Bonus: How One Brand Recovered $1.5M in Amazon Sales From Unauthorized Sellers

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most brands treat unauthorized sellers and copycats as a cost of doing business. Mario Simonyan treats them as your biggest untapped revenue source. Mario is a former Amazon seller turned brand protection attorney. He started selling...

  33. Ep 630: "The Best Ads Say Nothing" | Ari Murray, Chief Digital Officer at Salt & Stone

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Ari Murray runs DTC, Amazon and customer experience at Salt & Stone. She came from Sharma Brands, and before that worked on influencer and celebrity brands including a Kardashian line and Halsey's beauty brand. She started as a customer...

  34. Ep 629: 85% of Your Email Revenue Comes From One Segment (And You're Ignoring It)

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Jordan Gordon runs CRO and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. He has audited somewhere in the range of 400 to 500 brands and been inside more Klaviyo accounts than almost anyone in DTC.…

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  35. Bonus: The CTV Blueprint for DTC Brands: Build in Summer, Convert in Q4 (Paramount Ads Manager)

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most DTC brands put the bulk of their paid budget where attention is thinnest. Viewers spend about 99 minutes per session on Connected TV and 8 minutes per session on social, yet only 9% of standard marketing budgets go to CTV. This…

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  36. Ep 628: How Unbound Merino Bootstrapped to Nine Figures Selling $90 T-Shirts

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Dan bootstrapped Unbound Merino from a Reddit-fueled obsession with merino wool into a brand approaching nine figures in lifetime revenue, with a warehouse sale, a growing women's line, and zero outside funding. In his second appearance on...

  37. Ep 627: Why Nick Shackelford's Personal Brand Saved His Cash Flow | Agency Confidential Preview

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup This week on All Killer No Filler, we're giving you a preview of Agency Confidential, the new podcast from our co-founder Jeff, and this episode's is a truly killer. Jeff sits down with Nick Shackelford, who's everywhere in DTC. Three...

  38. Ep 626: How Wolfe Sells Gifting to Everyone: Top of Funnel Testing, CTV, and AI

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Gifting is one of the biggest reasons people buy online, and most brands never build for it on purpose. Matt Heckathorn runs digital marketing at Wolfe, the company behind Gift Card Granny, PerfectGift.com, and GiftYa. His ICP is close to...

  39. Ep 625: Brand Salience for DTC: Turning Creative Into Your Targeting Layer

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Meta used to let you pick your customer in the backend. Those days are over. Post-Andromeda, the creative itself carries the targeting signal, which means the old spray-and-pray playbook now works against you. Rafael Gi spent a decade in...

  40. Ep 624: How Cove Soda Builds an Email and SMS List With No DTC, Trading Full Cans for Signups at Events

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most list-growth advice assumes you have a website people visit. Cove Soda doesn't. They sell zero sugar soda in roughly 7,000 retail doors with no real DTC store, which means no site traffic, no purchase pop-ups, and no easy email…

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  41. Ep 623: Your Google Product Feed Is the Most Overlooked Lever in AI Shopping (with Pilothouse)

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Google search is changing under everyone's feet. AI overviews are eating the top of the funnel, exact match stopped being exact years ago, and shoppers now type full paragraphs instead of two keywords. Doug, who leads Google at Pilothouse,...

  42. Ep 622: How Outway Runs Canada and the US as Two Separate Businesses

    Most brands expand into the US and treat it like the same business with a different shipping label. Outway learned it is not. Taylor Fraser is the Chief Growth Officer at Outway, the Canadian performance sock brand. In this episode he breaks down why Outway now runs Canada and the US as two...

  43. Ep 621: Anything is possible now – The AI Creative Stack

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Braydon from Pilothouse joins for a fast AI check-in on what the team is actually shipping right now. Not theory. The exact tools, prompts, and workflows behind their current creative output. If you run growth or creative at a DTC brand or...

  44. Bonus: Top of Funnel Collapse: How AI & AEO Are Changing Consumer Behavior & How Marketers Can Adapt

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup This episode, Kemberly Gong, VP of Marketing at Contentful, joins Eric to walk through what some marketing leaders are calling “The Great Content Collapse”, and what marketers can actually do about it. The setup: 60% of Google searches now...

  45. Ep 620: How Origin Runs E-Commerce With AI Agents, From Media Buying to Diagnosing Defects

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Origin owns its entire supply chain. The thread, the brass, the leather, the denim, all of it made or sourced in America, in their own factories. That sounds like a constraint. Justin Parker explains why it is actually the brand's biggest...

  46. Ep 619: Stop Growth Hacking Your Brand to Death with Duncan From Pilothouse | AKNF

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most brands are quietly killing themselves with growth hacks. Swapping button colors, chasing this week's ROI, discounting to hit the number. Duncan, Strategy Lead at Pilothouse, makes the case that this is the worst creative strategy…

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  47. Bonus: How DÔEN, Origin & Universal Ads Actually Implement AI w/o Losing Their Brand | Whalies Panel

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Recorded live at The Whalies. Enterprise brands are past the prompt-and-generate phase of AI. The conversation has moved to connected data, agentic media buying, personalization, attribution, and the quiet operational wins that actually…

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  48. Ep 618: Inside Tumble – Scaling a Nine-Figure Rug Brand

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most founders want to be first in a category. Justin Soleimani and Zach Dannett did the opposite, and built Tumble into one of the standout washable rug brands without raising a dollar. In this episode, the Tumble co-founders and Co-CEOs...

  49. Ep 617: How to Fix a Pooched Email Account: 10 Steps to Recover DTC Deliverability [TWBERP Preview]

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup This Friday on AKNF we're handing over the feed for a special preview of The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. Your email account doesn't break all at once. It rots. Open rates slide, a quarter of your sends quietly route to spam,...

  50. Bonus: 100% Agentic on Meta at a $1B Brand | True Classic's Ben Diamond & Triple Whale's Maxx Blank

    Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Recorded live at True Classic HQ in Calabasas the day before the Whalies, this episode brings together two of the leaders most aggressively reshaping how ecommerce gets built. Ben Diamond is the CEO and co-founder of True Classic, the...

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ABOUT THIS SHOW

What does it take to build and scale a successful direct-to-consumer brand? DTC Podcast, hosted by Eric Dyck, delivers practical e-commerce growth strategies from founders, operators, and marketing experts. Explore DTC marketing, customer acquisition, performance marketing, paid media, conversion rate optimization, customer retention, creative strategy, AI, and brand growth. Hear what works, what fails, and how leading consumer brands adapt and grow. Subscribe for actionable insights to help you build a stronger, more profitable e-commerce business.

HOSTED BY

Eric Dyck

CATEGORIES

business marketing

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes does The DTC Podcast have?

The DTC Podcast currently has 789 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.

What is The DTC Podcast about?

What does it take to build and scale a successful direct-to-consumer brand? DTC Podcast, hosted by Eric Dyck, delivers practical e-commerce growth strategies from founders, operators, and marketing experts. Explore DTC marketing, customer acquisition, performance marketing, paid media, conversion...

How often does The DTC Podcast release new episodes?

The DTC Podcast releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 789 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.

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Who hosts The DTC Podcast?

The DTC Podcast is created and hosted by Eric Dyck.
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