There are only two things that grow a business: (1) your product and (2) the people who buy it.
And yet, most of us are underinvesting in both.
Today, let’s keep the 2024 → 2025 momentum rolling.
Here’s how …
🤑 Connor MacDonald increases your AOV
🪴 Matthew Bertulli on product + people
📊 This week’s biggest consumer headlines
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Connor MacDonald
CMO, Ridge
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Your AOV Needs Help. Upsell Without the Sacrifice.
Online businesses know the meaning of value.
So does Aftersell — the no-code platform that’s optimized upselling for 35,000+ brands.
We use it at Ridge. Both Jones Road and HexClad do, too. Same at Good American, Oh Polly, and Corkcicle … to boost AOV by 30% — from the cart to the confirmation page.
Power your upsell strategies through:
- High-converting 1-click upsells
- Building loyalty + increasing CVR
- Checkout upsells that showcase one or many complementary products
Show the right offer to the right customer at the right time. Effortlessly match your brand to create a seamless experience.
The results?
Aftersell’s customers have seen …
- 11,803% ROI on platform costs
- Up to 35% increase in conversions
- 16.41% average conversion rate
Start creating high-converting upsell opportunities that add value to your customers and watch your AOV skyrocket.
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Matthew Bertulli
CEO, Lomi & Pela Case
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Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series centered on two questions we put to each of the Operators.
What was your biggest lesson from 2024? And what’s your biggest strategy for 2025?
2024: Product > Everything
If we all learned one thing from 2024, I hope it’s this … product is the growth lever staring brands in the face.
One of the cool parts of being in the position I’m in is the visibility into a lot of brands. I probably speak with hundreds of founders and operators in a given year.
This is easily one of my favorite things to do. I guess I just love consumer product.
The podcast we did with Curtis Matsko from Portland Leather Goods put a bow on this idea for me.
Product is the place most brands are underinvesting … probably by quite a margin, too.
Investing in product doesn’t mean inventing some fancy new technology. It comes down to making things that are different.
What Curtis did is very impressive. He invested in product through owned manufacturing — delivering a higher-quality product at a lower price than his competition.
He completely changed the value equation in his category.
Making a different product can be as simple as changing the (1) materials, (2) style, (3) experience, or (4) value.
These four elements give you a lot of leeway to think about product differentiation. Pick one and get to work.
When I look back at the brands that did well in 2024, many of them had new product launches to thank for their growth. Some outliers were about market and channel expansion — international and AppLovin come to mind.
Most were really about product expansion. Either totally new categories or iterating on the thing they were known for.
At Pela Case, we went harder after new product than we ever did before, launching 5-10 new designs every week.
Sound like a lot? It was. But it gave us a lot of shots on goal. Plus, we found a bunch of new winning designs we could then scale through paid channels.
If you’re spending millions of dollars on ads in a year and not spending a few hundred thousand on product development, I think you might be doing it wrong.
2025: People Buy From People
As we look into 2025, I’m most excited about leaning into this core principle as I believe it’s what really makes commerce work.
Pela Case saw 30-40% YoY growth in the back half of 2024, largely powered by the scale-up of our creator gifting + seeding program and the introduction of employee-generated content on our socials — Instagram and TikTok.
In other words, we put more faces in front of our brand, and the outcomes were remarkable.
Not only did revenue grow after an abysmal first half of the year, but we also saw engagement across channels explode.
People started to connect with us again.
It reminded me of the early days of growing Pela Case. A real sense of community started to show again.
In 2025, we’re going to try something totally new in our two brands. We’re going to focus the majority of our content production resources on organic social first.
Instead of making “good” ads, our goal will be making great content.
This is a crazy idea for a company that spends 10s of millions on advertising every year. But I’m high conviction that the future of great advertising gets re-rooted in great storytelling.
Great marketing, not just great ads.
We’re turning our headquarters here in Kelowna (BC, Canada) into a studio. Same with our owned manufacturing facility. We’re going to record our work and share it with the world.
Content is going to pour out of our company from every angle we can find that sounds entertaining, inspiring, or maybe even educational.
We’re going to treat ourselves like a media company first; consumer goods maker, second.
I know this might sound insane, especially for those of you reading this that are pretty hardcore ads people. The data from the last 12 months inside our ad accounts is telling.
Almost all of our best-performing ads were first great organic posts. We noticed that great ads rarely worked as great organic content. The opposite was true.
Great organic content almost always worked as an ad.
In 2024, I noticed more and more people voice their displeasure with Meta’s ability to drive true top-of-funnel awareness for their brands. I saw it all year long in the groups I’m a part of.
The brands who won big last year all had strong off-Meta awareness channels. This is why I’m so damn excited about owned media as a brand.
The muscle you build by getting great at content applies to all channels. I believe every brand is sitting on a goldmine of unlimited stories that customers are dying to consume.
Think about it … at any given time, 95% of your addressable market just isn’t ready to buy the thing you’re selling. Modern ad platforms have over-indexed to target the remaining 5%.
Maybe they’ll adapt.
However, I refuse to rely on hope as a strategy.
Perhaps I’m just an old marketer, but I believe we’re going to see brands lean more into making stand-out content. Content that makes people really feel something.
That’s what great marketing is about.
The Bentist: 7.42M Subscribers
Influencer Marketing Strategy: Product Seeding, Building Partnerships & Measuring EMV
Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s five biggest consumer-news headlines.
1. Flowers Foods Acquires Simple Mills: Food Dive
Last Wednesday, Flowers Foods agreed to acquire Simple Mills for $795M in cash. Founded in 2012 by Katlin Smith, Simple Mills is a purveyor of better-for-you crackers, cookies, snack bars, and baking mixes. The brand is sold at over 30,000 stores and net sales hit $240M in 2024, a YoY increase of 14%.
Flowers Foods is best known for its bread & baked goods portfolio — they own Dave’s Killer Bread, Nature’s Own, Wonder, etc. — and buying Simple Mills offers much greater exposure to the higher margin premium snack category.
2. Wellful Bets on Ancient Nutrition: Business Wire
Wellful, an omnichannel health & wellness platform and a portfolio company of Kainos Capital, acquired Ancient Nutrition from VMG Partners and Hillhouse Investment.
Ancient Nutrition was founded in 2016 and sells a wide variety of protein, gut health, greens, and superfood supplements. According to Kainos Capital, the acquisition of Ancient Nutrition establishes Wellful as the largest independent VMS (vitamin, mineral, and supplement) platform in North America.
3. Instacart Unveils Fastest-Growing Brands of 2024: Instacart
Instacart released a list of their fastest-growing emerging brands of 2024. A number of familiar faces like Belgian Boys, Cerebelly, Clio, IQBAR, OWYN, SkinnyDipped, and Seven Sundays made the cut. Some recurring themes throughout the list:
- Better-for-you snacking
- High-protein snacks
- Gut-healthy beverages
- Nutrient-dense baby foods
- Clean label confectionery.
4. Advent International Buys Sauer Brands: Business Wire
Global private equity firm Advent International acquired Sauer Brands, a leading condiments and seasonings platform, from Falfurrias Capital Partners. According to Bloomberg, the owner of Duke’s Mayo and Mateo’s Gourmet Salsa was valued at $1.5B. Sauer Brands operates four manufacturing facilities across the U.S. and generates around $120M in annual EBITDA.
5. The Equity Studio Backs TRIP: Happi
TRIP, a UK-based purveyor of wellness beverages and supplements, secured an undisclosed amount of funding from The Equity Studio. The company was co-founded by Daniel Khoury and Olivia Ferdi in 2019. In the first week of Dry January, TRIP sold 2 million cans of its CBD-infused beverage.
Interested in sharing your own biggest lesson + biggest strategy? We would love to hear them.
More importantly … I’m sure the rest of the Operators’ audience would, too!
Hit reply and let us know.
We even have a few leftover signed Sean Frank tees to send out if you get picked + put in the work to get featured.
With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓 Executive Editor
PS: Special thanks to Aftersell for sponsoring this week’s newsletter and helping us bring you the best freaking ecommerce content in the world.
