You have not received a newsletter in some time. We are aware. Several of you noticed, two of you asked, and one of you sent an email consisting entirely of a question mark, which has been printed, framed, and hung where we can see it during moments of professional confidence.
The official explanation is an internal holiday. The full explanation is that the send was scheduled, the schedule was confirmed, and the confirmation lived in a shared calendar that has been running on Azerbaijan time since a settings incident nobody will claim. For eleven days the newsletter existed the way a gift card exists in a drawer: technically real, fully funded, helping no one.
We returned to find eCommerce had produced a fortnight of developments without supervision, which is the industry at its most dangerous, and were reminded that this business does not pause so much as accumulate, like interest, or laundry, or the unread channel in your Slack that started as three messages and is now a load-bearing archive of decisions everyone assumes someone else has read.
We have read it all so you don't have to. What survived is below.
And, in non-eCom related news… farewell, sweet Dolly. You were our island in the stream. ✌
Tweet of the Week
Guide: $100k/day with Advertorials
Somewhere in the average CPG marketing org, there is a person gifting product to influencers every month with no system tracking what came back, what got posted, or whether any of it did anything at all. It simply departs, like a package thrown off the back of a moving truck, and the truck does not stop to check.
Influencer marketing, UGC, community, paid social, and organic content are meant to function as one ecosystem. Most brands still run them as five unrelated hobbies, then wonder why the math never closes.
Inside:
Why treating these channels separately quietly costs you the compounding effect of treating them as one
The uncomfortable truth about gifting programs nobody is measuring, and the influencer and social teams still not speaking to each other
Why tiering influencers by what they actually do for the brand, distribution versus perception, beats signing everyone to the same brief and hoping
A new platform closing the loop between creator discovery and verified in-store purchase, for brands currently marketing entirely on vibes
Not glamorous. Extremely likely to be costing you money.
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Quick Shots
Harley Fickelstein AI is the new discovery channel. Both traffic and orders to Shopify stores from AI channels have tripled since last year.
Mehtab | Karta Ventures Want to figure out what your brand is worth?
Peter Quadrel Your Shopify Conversion Rate is LYING to You (It’s probably higher)
Conner MacDonald Ash is right. CAC is dumb.
Jordan West STOP PICKING COMMISSION BACKWARDS
Here for the Memes
Top Headlines this Week
Best from LinkedIn
DedCool is on track for $30M in sales.
The product driving the business isn't perfume. It's laundry detergent.
She sold perfume out of her trunk for seven years.
Then she put it in laundry detergent and built a $30M fragrance brand.
Carina Chaz started DedCool in her dorm room in 2016 with $10,000 of her own money. She ran the business herself until 2022.
I think the interesting part isn't the scrappy origin story.
It's what she did with the purchase frequency problem in fragrance.
Perfume is usually an occasional purchase (I only purchase perfume once or twice a year).
Even if someone loves a scent, there's only so much perfume one person needs.
So DedCool put the same fragrances into things people use constantly: laundry detergent, home products, body care, pet products.
The laundry detergent now accounts for roughly 30% of the business.
And it does something even more useful than creating revenue.
Recommended SaaS & Services
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Stat Attack
That's the fortnight, fully read, decisions included. Go clear your load-bearing Slack channel before it becomes structural.
And if we ever go dark again, send the question mark. It works.
✌
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