Every eCommerce brand has a spreadsheet called something like "Master Tracker" or the more ironic "Source of Truth v4" that is, in practice, the actual O/S of the company. It lives in deep catacombs of a Google Drive folder owned by a user associated with a team member who no longer works there.
Starting fresh, no one could hope to find it without a direct link. This is fine because everyone has it bookmarked.
It was built during a period of great organizational optimism by a person of considerable Excel competence who has since departed for reasons described at the time as "exciting new opportunity" and understood now, with the benefit of hindsight, as entirely predictable.
They left without a handover document. For who, indeed, needed one? There was a handover meeting. It lasted forty minutes and covered approximately 11.3% of this most crucial spreadsheet.
It has seventeen tabs. Four are color-coded in a scheme that made obvious sense to the person who built them. Three contain data that has not been updated since Q2 of the year before last. One is called "OLD - DO NOT USE" and is in fact, currently being used.
And then there is column K.
Nobody touches column K. Column K does something important. What it does is contained entirely within a formula referencing three other sheets and a named range called "adj_baseline" that does not appear to exist anywhere else in the document. It has been there for two years. It has never been wrong, as far as anyone can tell. It persists, like a load-bearing wall in a renovation nobody wants to start, quietly doing its thing, requiring nothing.
Two people on the current team have, at separate points, attempted to understand column K. Both retreated. Neither mentioned it afterward. The column continues to populate correctly every Monday morning with the calm self-sufficiency of a system that stopped requiring human involvement some time ago and would prefer to keep it that way.
The job ad that filled the last three roles in this department described the spreadsheet as requiring "strong Excel skills." This was accurate the way "fast-paced environment" is accurate: technically true, emotionally insufficient, and specifically designed to ensure the candidate does not fully understand what they are agreeing to until it is too late to negotiate.
And now, the news.
Upcoming Events
The retention event is a stable genre: a hockey-stick keynote, a panel where four people agree that brand matters, a sponsored lunch eaten standing up, and a closing framework that worked beautifully for one brand under market conditions that expired in 2023.
The Retention Roadshow has declined to participate. One day, a room capped at 75 to 100 growth and scale-stage DTC operators, and an agenda on lifecycle marketing and LTV run by people with actual retention programs rather than a deck about one.
Four cities Two more cities in June: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Austin. Attend the nearest one, leave with something you can use before the feeling wears off.
A retention event about retaining things. The bar was on the floor, and someone stepped over it.
Tweet of the Week
The only 10 brands worth copying for creative strategy...
At some point in the life of every DTC founder, they consume just enough about a channel to brief an agency with complete confidence on a strategy they cannot evaluate, cannot benchmark, and will not recognize as wrong until approximately the third invoice. One podcast episode is usually sufficient.
This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and it runs in both directions. The inexperienced end produces the founder who has watched forty minutes of YouTube on Meta creative strategy and is now the most authoritative voice in the room on why the ROAS dropped. The expert end produces the PDP written in language the formulator would recognize, the supplier would respect, and the customer will scroll past on the way to a competitor who simply wrote "it makes your skin look good."
Katelyn Bourgoin explains both ends, and why you are not as informed as you feel, and your customers are not as informed as you assume.
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Quick Shots
@Seanfrank The end state of consumer is maximum money on ads.
@IstvanicMarin Multiple of my accounts experienced a 150-350% drop in ROAS yesterday
Peter Quadrel The 7 advertising laws that separate $100K brands from $10M brands:
@DavidSacks Jobs apocalypse narrative taking a beating.
Sarah Levinger THIS 👇 AI gave us unlimited analysis capabilities...
Here for the Memes
Top Headlines this Week
Best from LinkedIn
There's this clothing brand called Brandy Melville. They literally only sell ONE size: a women's 0/2
Run that by any "legacy" player in the apparel industry, and they'll tell you that you've lost your mind.
Why would you exclude a huge segment of the market by only selling a single size?! It goes against all category conventions in fashion/apparel.
But you can look at it another way: Brandy took a category with major inventory risk and huge return rates driven by fit issues, and dramatically reduced those costs in one move.
Was this controversial? Oh yeah. There is even a documentary called "Brandy Hellville" about how this brand is "toxic".
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Stat Attack
That is the week. The spreadsheet predates most of it and will survive all of it, updating quietly every Monday with the indifferent permanence of a system that stopped waiting for permission some time ago.
Touch nothing in column K.
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