💰 Sean Frank: Most Powerful Lesson Ever

🎁 Connor Rolain: Black Friday Execution

📉 Matt Bertulli: Derisking a 2–3X Opp

🤔 Connor MacDonald: Rolling Reach Q&A

Plus, a roundup of this week’s trending news.

THE SPOTLIGHT

Connor Rolain

Ask the Marketing Operators: Black Friday, Cyber Monday Execution & 2025 Big Bets

On Sep 19th, we’re bringing the Marketing Operators podcast to Motion’s online event series ↓

The 2024 Creative Strategy Summit

Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker, and I will share how our holiday creative + 2025 plans are shaping up at HexClad, Ridge, and Jones Road Beauty.

This will be a live virtual session with lots of Q&A …

Bring your questions for all three of us!

Motion’s line-up is stacked.

You can also attend sessions featuring Ben Yahalom (President at True Classic), Savannah Sanchez, Sarah Levinger, and more.

Can’t make the event live? Register anyway. You’ll get the session recordings.

Get Your Free Ticket

THE OPERATION

Sean Frank

are you a single million dollar ecom product company and want to get to 8 or EVEN 9 FIGURES?

my most powerful lesson ever will take you there ...

(along with getting lucky and hard work)

Introducing Seasonality Into a Nonseasonal Business

Ridge has a product with no inherent seasonality to it.

If you’re in fashion … shorts sell in summer, sweaters in winter. When do wallets sell? We have gift-giving in Q4, and we’ve leaned into Father’s Day.

But is there any product difference between summer and winter gift-giving?

For almost 10 years, the answer was NO.

We’d buy black and carbon fiber wallets …

Sell them at full price all year
Discount for 30 days in the winter
Then again for 30 days in the summer

It made for the world’s simplest business.

Less than 15 styles — two colors launched a year. No products would ever go out of line.

No products ever came off our website.

We’d buy it, make sure it didn’t run out, and keep it forever.

But think …

What challenges did this cause?

It let us get very lazy on inventory buying.

Who cares if we are overstocked?

The stuff is good forever!

Over buy? Buy less next time!

This led to me doing the inventory buying or my director of operations.

We had no buying department, no merchandising strategy, and no real marketing calendar.
It bored and annoyed our wholesalers.

How do you think wholesalers feel about never having newness? Or about us discounting core products they bought and held at full price?

Big-box retailers — Nordstrom, Target, Best Buy, etc. — are used to mark-down cycles. But they aren’t used to limited-time promotional cycles …

Where a full-price item is reduced and then brought back to full price.

The electronic department probably is. At least, they are used to limited coupons.

But fashion and apparel wholesalers don’t have the infrastructure for limited mark-downs.

And the lack of seasonal newness made buyers bored …

(Bored + annoyed wholesalers: Fun!)
How do you up the stakes?

We have literally sold 5 million wallets.

Two million of those are black, grey, or some combo of black and grey.

They last forever. They can be repaired indefinitely. We will warranty any wallet.

So how do we sell the next one? How do we sell more next year?

If our promotional plan is “the exact same as last year, every year,” how do we find incremental buyers?

Our only tool was “spend more” or “discount more.”

How did we solve this? Seasonality.

Create products with a shelf life.

“We need to get our money back from this and exit the program within 9 months” …

Makes you buy better.

Makes you tighter on inventory turnover.

Makes you more creative with your marketing calendar.
This leads to a natural hype-to-discount cycle.

Wholesalers know and understand this.

Even Gucci gets marked down at the end of the season.

If it is a hit, it sells out at full price.

If it isn’t a hit …
We have inventory that we can discount.

What’s the Prime Day sale?

We aren’t doing site-wide anymore. We know we have inventory we want to discount.

It’s not just sales on core, evergreen products.

We can discount the winter stuff in Jan and the summer stuff in Sep.
It makes us create more stuff.

Sure the business was simpler when it was black and grey wallets.

But now we can find new demos, reach new people, grow the overall pie.

And we do that through print and pattern exploration.

To have winter wallets to discount in Jan, we have to make winter wallets.

This has increased the surface area of the brand.

Summary: Beyond $500M

It’s tempting to be a single-SKU company.

AG1 from Athletic Greens got them to +$500M. How easy is that supply chain? How easy is the messaging?

But we are not Athletic Greens.

Our journey past $500M looks more like a fashion house …

New colors
New patterns
New prints
New partnerships
New collabs

We need new products.

And we need those new products to be transient.

In, out, and maybe — if they’re great — they get to return …

Starting the hype chain all over.

THE FEED

How to Run Sales Like a 9-Figure Brand

Twitter Deep Dive: Media Buying, Retargeting & Is There A Place For Cheap Content?

THE ADDENDUM

Matt Bertulli

From E065: Capital, Investment & Politics

We’ve had a few conversations lately about risk management.

It’s timely for me as Pela Case is currently working on some large partnerships with the potential to …

Grow the business 2-3x over the next 12-18 months.

Risk is topical because to grow that much, we would need to invest in expanding our manufacturing capabilities.

This is one serious downside to operating your own facility — especially domestically.

As Sean mentioned, the cost of real estate is far greater in North America vs China. Let alone the cost of everything else related to standing-up manufacturing.

At our size, an investment into expansion is a multi-million dollar decision.

I don’t take these lightly.

If we do this at the wrong time, it could jeopardize the entire business.

If we do it at the right time, it changes everything. And we get the outcome we’re looking for.

We’re working on several options for derisking:

Low-cost debt with long-term repayment
Co-invested channel partners to align interests
Long-term contracts with more than one channel partner to guarantee volume

But the biggest part of this decision is ensuring …

Asymmetry between risk:reward.

We’ve talked about this on the pod in the past as well.

I like to take bigger swings with very high upside potential and low downside. This looks like one of those moves.

But I’d be lying if it didn’t make me a bit nervous!

THE RESOURCE: Q&A

Connor MacDonald

Last week, I shared a Sheet Template and Loom explaining how we look at rolling reach at Ridge.

What it is
Why I like it
How it can suck

In response, a few of you wrote back with questions. One in particular caught my attention …

We’re an eight-figure skincare brand that spends six figures monthly on Meta. Until late last summer, our new reach was around 10%–15%.

Since then, it’s been stuck at 3-5%.

We’ve tried different attribution settings, different funnels, and different demographics.

One tactic that drastically helped was having a campaign for Android users.

New reach jumped to 20–30%. But performance was 10–15% lower than our “usual” campaigns.

What do you think can be done to improve this?

FWIW, I wouldn’t call 3–5% new reach a problem. The way new reach is calculated means it will naturally decline over time.

You can only reach a unique person once.

As you accrue reached people, there are fewer new people out there — a downward trend is essentially guaranteed.

(This is why I kind of hate the metric.)

However, if you’re struggling to acquire new customers …

First, you’re not alone. Second, declining new reach may be a problem. Third, it wouldn’t be the first place I’d look.

Lots of data support ecommerce returning to far more modest growth, especially if you had a high baseline.

If you’re within 10-15% of BAU conversion-optimized campaigns and reaching new people, that’s a win to me.

Ridge is finding new reach through true reach-optimzed campaigns. Proving impact is more difficult.

What do you think can be done to improve this?

Campaigns reaching net-new people shouldn’t be held to the same ROAS as high-frequency BAUs.

I would be more aggressive while continuing to monitor the impact on CAC, aMER, etc.
At eight-figures, you clearly have product-market fit. It may be worth exploring channel expansion.

This way, you can (in theory) get “new reach” and do it with conversion-optimized campaigns on new platforms that may be just as efficient.
I’ve spoken with many brands struggling to acquire new customers over the last 12-18 months.

Continuing to experiment with offer testing and creative angles is likely the highest leverage thing you can do.

You may not even need new reach — just a fresh perspective for people already familiar with your brand.

Hope that helps. Cheers!

THE TRENDS

This week’s top-trending news stories, curated by the editor of CPG Wire

1. Emma Chamberlain Takes Over as Co-CEO: Forbes

After five years as Chief Creative Officer, Emma Chamberlain is now stepping into the role of Co-CEO at her eponymous coffee brand. Her CEO counterpart is Gustav Hossy — who recently served as COO at Chamberlain Coffee. Before joining, Hossy co-founded DTC eyewear brand Christopher Cloos.

2. Butterfly Sells Stake in MaryRuth Organics: Axios

Butterfly Equity has sold most of its stake in MaryRuth Organics back to its founder and her family. Founded in 2013, MaryRuth Organics is a fast-growing brand in the vitamins, minerals, and supplements (VMS) space. Butterfly first invested in the brand in 2021 and helped the company triple in size and quadruple its profitability.

3. L Catterton Backs Alice Mushrooms: WWD

Alice Mushrooms, a purveyor of functional mushroom chocolates, scored an undisclosed amount of funding from L Catterton, Zac Efron, Pedro Pascal, and Kevin Hart. Alice Mushrooms launched in late 2022 and expects to surpass eight figures in revenue this year.

4. HighPost Capital Raises $100M for Early Stage Fund: TechCrunch

HighPost Capital, a consumer private equity firm founded by Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos’ younger brother, has raised $100M for its early-stage venture fund. The firm has already been backed by several consumer startups like Wild Common, Sprinter, RAD, and EverFence.

5. Mars Buys Snack Maker for $35.9B: CNBC

Mars, the global confectionery giant that owns M&M’s, Snickers, and Skittles, is acquiring snack maker Kellanova for nearly $36B in cash. Kellanova, which was spun off from Kellogg in 2023, is home to a number of massive snack brands: e.g., Cheez-It, Eggo, RXBAR, Pop-Tarts, and Pringles.

If the FTC doesn’t interfere, the deal will combine 17 billion-dollar brands under one roof.

Enjoying the newsletter?

If so, please consider sharing about it on social + linking to 9operators.com (where people can sign up).

Not demure, not mindful … but very much appreciated.

Until next time,
The Operators