This email isn’t for everyone.

If you’re happily leading a 6, 7, or 8-figure brand with zero desire to smash the $100M+ barrier, that’s awesome.

And this one isn’t for you.

But if you’re struggling with stalled growth, if you’ve got lofty goals, or if you feel lost — good news.

Today, special guest (fan favorite) Cherene Aubert will guide you stage by stage, channel by channel through …

That’s not all.

Cody Plofker invites you into Jones Road’s SMS secrets, Connor MacDonald reveals Ridge’s newest payment accelerator, and the top-five headlines from this week in DTC consumer news.

Plus, this Friday 🎁 we’re hosting the Operators Black Friday Webinar. You, me, and 25+ DTC speakers!

Cody Plofker CEO, Jones Road Beauty

BFCM’s Coming. Is Your SMS Ready?

We’ve been using Postscript at Jones Road for years.

My favorite part of the partnership? Their team is always pushing the envelope of what’s possible with SMS.

Because no matter how good you think your flows or campaigns are (and ours are good), Postscript knows …

There’s always room to improve.

• Copy
• Popups
• Segments
• Timing
• Compliance

Every missed detail is lost revenue.

I trust them, and they continue to show us things we would’ve missed on our own. Every time, those tweaks have translated into more revenue.

Even if you’re not a Postscript customer, you can still get an SMS audit from their team.

This one-on-one diagnosis will show you the kinds of things we already look to them for help with — how to grow your list, optimize your flows, and sell more.

With Black Friday weeks away, you can’t afford not to.

Cherene Aubert Sr. VP, ILIA Beauty

Cherene Aubert is the SVP of Digital & Ecommerce at ILIA Beauty (X or LinkedIn). She’s appeared multiple times on the Operators Podcast. Cherene will be delivering the first of three keynotes at this week’s Black Friday Event.

Why Most Brands Stall at 8-Figures & What to Do About It: 3 Growth Levers, Stage by Stage

I’m going to be honest with you …

Most brands never make it past eight figures.

Maybe you’re okay with that. Which is totally fine.

If you are, this isn’t for you.

You feel lost. You hate it. You want to break through.

But you don’t know how.

After 15 years in ecommerce and working with 100+ brands, from bootstrapped startups to post-acquisition behemoths, I can tell you exactly why this happens and how to fix it.

First, something that might be a surprise.

Paid media alone will not grow you beyond eight figures.

I know that’s not what you want to hear, especially if you’ve been pouring more budget into Meta and Google, hoping to solve your growth problems.

But it’s the truth. And I can prove it.

The Bobbie Reality Check

Let me tell you about Bobbie, the infant formula brand where I watched this play out in real time as the VP of Growth and Data.

We got to $18 million in year one with very minimal investment in paid. By year two? We hit $100 million.

Bobbie was an outlier. Not every business can do that.

Here’s the wild part …

We actually had to stop acquiring customers because there was more demand than supply.

Our entire model forecasted supply for subscribers and only accepted new subscribers on a weekly basis.

By the time the company was in a good supply position, our customers were churning out because their babies were aging out of the product category. We had more subscribers canceling than we were adding new subscribers.

We’d manufactured a plateau that had to be reversed.

The reversal taught me three overlooked growth levers that separate brands that scale from those that stall.

Three Overlooked Growth Levers

The first lever is brand. Building a bulletproof brand is a moat around your business that can’t be replicated.

Second, offers customers love. Not just discounts, but value propositions that don’t sacrifice points of margin.

Third, an organic flywheel. Experiences so remarkable that customers become evangelists without you asking.

Most brands focus exclusively on paid acquisition, which is like running an upside-down cake business model where your most volatile revenue source is carrying everything else.

The Layer Cake Philosophy

Taylor Holiday at Common Thread Collective has this amazing representation of how you should build a business. He calls it the revenue-layer cake.

At the base is your most predictable revenue, existing customers. In the middle are new organic customers. At the top, paid acquisition, the most volatile for predicting revenue.

If you turn the cake upside down, it completely falls apart.

• Paid
• Organic
• Repeat

Scaling beyond eight-figures requires stacking the layers in the right order and making the right core investments.

For repeat customers, exceptional product and experience.

Think repeat revenue is driven by email and SMS? They’re like the candles on the cake. Those are extras. The base is experiences + products. Then, consistent innovation and category expansion as you scale.

For organic acquisition, content that people love.

Let’s not forget that people hate advertising; no one wants to watch an ad. Your job is to educate and entertain your customers. Then, audience-expanding partnerships and brand campaigns plus top of funnel media.

For paid acquisition, clearly articulate what is new, better, or different. Then, scale what works — the heroes — and full-funnel ads that grow with distribution.

Now, let’s take it stage by stage.

 $5M-$10M  Building Your Foundation

DTC only, create a community of customers who trust your brand and understand what makes you different.

🤑 Paid: Acquisition Offer Testing
🌳 Organic: Influencers & Product PR
♻️ Repeat: Steady Innovation Pipeline

Paid: Acquisition Offer Testing

Many of you want to drive down CAC. Your acquisition offer is the fastest, most effective mechanism to do that.

Get scientific.

What makes someone convert on the first visit versus returning later? What offer structure creates the highest lifetime value customers versus the cheapest acquisitions?

How can you balance CVR and AOV? Do you really have to sacrifice one for the other?

Test everything. Free shipping thresholds, bundle offers, first-time buyer discounts, trial sizes, gifts with purchase.

Organic: Influencers & Product PR

Another way to reduce your CAC is to win customers from non-paid channels. In a sense, every channel is “paid.” They all require capital investment. But you should not be paying Zuck or Google for every net new acquisition.

The reason I put influencer (mirco–mid tier) in organic is because brands get caught up measuring every dollar returned from influencer, especially with this size of business.

Gone are the days when you could directly correlate an ROI to every influencer.

Instead, treat this like an investment in getting praise from the mouths of other people to build traction as a brand.

You need to get in front of audiences where they’re already captive. That’s why I’m suggesting both audience-aligned partnerships as well as product PR.

Audience-aligned partnerships mean finding brands that serve your same customers but aren’t competitive. These partnerships amplify your reach without the direct cost of paid acquisition.

Product PR puts your products in the hands of editors, bloggers, and industry experts who can authentically feature it.

Repeat: Steady Innovation Pipeline

This is when your business should be developing a steady innovation, go-to-market pipeline that will reconvert your existing customers.

How? By having a clear product roadmap that introduces new SKUs, limited editions, or seasonal variations on a predictable schedule. Your existing customers should always have a reason to come back, try something new.

The innovation doesn’t have to be revolutionary. It can be new scents, colors, sizes, or formulations. The secret is consistency, giving customers multiple entry points into your ecosystem.

Key Investment(s)

Build out your data infrastructure + your CX team to get from low to high eight figures.

 $50M-$100M  Expanding Your Reach

From DTC into a second core channel, while maintaining brand integrity + customer experience standards.

🤑 Paid: Acquisition Offer Perfection
🌳 Organic: Macro Influencers & Peaks
♻️ Repeat: Product Journey Strategy

Paid: Acquisition Offer Perfection

You should have perfected or have a very clear understanding of what your acquisition offer is. If you don’t, go nail it. You should also have ad spend to support expanded distribution.

This is incredibly critical as you continue to grow into more purchase channels.

The mistake most brands make is expanding distribution faster than they can support it from a paid media standpoint. Your advertising needs to scale with your distribution.

It cannot lag behind it.

Organic: Macro Influencers & Peaks

Your influencer program has graduated from micros and mid-tier to macros and megas. Your marketing calendar has multiple peaks outside of sale periods. You’ve activated 360-degree launch campaigns and brand campaigns.

Likewise, your PR has graduated from focusing solely on product to corporate communications.

The reason I suggest this is because when your brand can get featured on national TV, it’s been (from what I’ve seen) a sales lift that is comparable to running an actual promotion.

Corporate comms means having a point of view on industry trends, commenting on market changes, and positioning your leadership team as experts worth quoting.

Repeat: Product Journey Strategy

This is where you’re using that amazing data infrastructure to get very crisp + clear on your product journey, how customers move between products.

What are the best products for LTV? How do you convert your customers from hero products into others, then even start to expand into new categories for incremental growth?

Map out how a customer progresses through your ecosystem. What’s their first purchase? Second? Third? How do you guide them along this journey instead of hoping they figure it out themselves?

Key Investment(s)

Go outside of MTA to measure brand awareness. Do audience segmentation research. Incrementality testing. Data sets with competitor sales.

 $100M-$300M  Scaling Your Distribution

Expand with 1–2 retailers, a larger Amazon presence, international proof-of-concepts, and celebrity partners.

🤑 Paid: Differentiation + Full Funnels
🌳 Organic: Celebrities and Events
♻️ Repeat: Loyalty Experiences, Services

Paid: Differentiate Channels + Full Funnel

As you go omnichannel, you need differentiation. When you’re sold across DTC, Amazon, other marketplaces, and retail, your CAC picture looks totally different.

You need a merchandising strategy for each channel, an offer strategy for each channel. You need to understand how that impacts cannibalization.

You need a full funnel media strategy that scales with your distribution, meaning brand media + retail media. You need to build a collaborative media management muscle between growth, sales, and brand.

Use your DTC to test into new international markets before you expand from a retail standpoint.

This requires collaborative media management between growth, sales, and brand teams. Everyone needs to be aligned on messaging, timing, and investment levels.

Organic: Celebrities and Events

You’re growing into celebrity partnerships. You’re actually starting to build a community — an in-real-life (IRL) community — that’s experiential for customers, influencers, and the press.

Celebrity partnerships aren’t endorsements — they’re authentic collaborations that feel genuine to your brand … and to their brand + audience.

Experiential events create memorable moments that generate organic content while strengthening relationships.

Repeat: Loyalty Experiences and Services

Loyalty has to reach beyond the standard (out-of-the-box) Shopify app, truly creating experiences and services that your customers will love.

This might mean exclusive access to new products, personalized consultation services, or community experiences that make customers feel like insiders. The goal is to establish reasons for loyalty that competitors can’t easily replicate.

Key Investment(s)

To reach the next stage, you need a real international team that can produce global (localized) media, launch new markets.

 $300M-$500M  Achieving True Scale

Broader retail distribution, concentrated international expansion with localized expertise for each new market.

🤑 Paid: Brand Awareness, ToF Media
🌳 Organic: Localized International
♻️ Repeat: Channel Fluidity + Belonging

Paid: Brand Awareness with ToF Media

Again, I cannot stress how important it is to grow your brand awareness.

If you want to break a plateau, awareness has to grow proportionate to your sales by developing top-of-funnel media — going outside of product marketing into brand-building advertising.

Safeguard your legacy retailers with channel-specific retail media strategies.

Organic: Localized International

It’s hypercritical to build a localized international influencer, press strategy, really develop the market, have boots on the ground.

This means understanding local culture, local influencers, local media, local customer behavior.

It’s a significant commitment, but it’s what separates brands that scale globally from those that just export their US approach.

Repeat: Channel Fluidity + Belonging

Anticipate channel fluidity. It’s way harder to measure how you’re retaining customers. You know that they’re trading between channels, this is why you need to define an unmistakable reason to believe in or belong to the brand.

Customers might discover you on Amazon, buy from your DTC site, then repurchase at Target.

Your brand needs to be strong enough that customers seek you out regardless of where they shop.

This is where it’s cyclical.

As you move into new international markets, you go back to stage one to run the same playbook as if you’re building a DTC startup again.

Beyond Eight Figures

The brands that make it past eight figures understand something fundamental … growth isn’t spending more on ads.

It’s about something so compelling that customers become your best marketing channel.

These are the three levers that separate brands that scale from brands that stall.

Simple? Yes. The levers are anyway.

Easy? Of course not.

However, your day one investment in brand and organic marketing is the baseline that’ll get you there.

And remember, if you disagree with anything I’ve said here, please complain directly to Aaron Orendorff.

Connor MacDonald CMO, Ridge

The Cleanest Checkout Monetization We’ve Seen

We’re always cautious about checkout changes. Too many tools mess with conversion or feel off-brand.

But Rokt Pay+ is different.

Here’s how it works …

Rokt Pay+ places a brand-safe offer above the payment buttons (PayPal, Apple Pay, etc.), nudges customers toward preferred wallets, and pays you when they use them.

The first adopters are already seeing +$0.10–$0.15 per order. This is only the beginning.

The best part? No new spend. No dev heavy-lift. Just clean, checkout-safe monetization that compounds.

And the revenue hits immediately.

If your team obsesses over margin and doesn’t want to gamble with checkout conversion, Pay+ is a no-brainer for you.

THE FEED

​Confessions of a Consumer Banker​

​How Halfdays Turned Community into a Growth Engine with CEO Ariana Ferwerda​

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s five biggest consumer-news headlines.

1. Garage Beers Scores Growth Investment: PR Newswire​

Garage Beer, the fast-growing light beer brand that Jason & Travis Kelce backed in 2024, just secured a growth investment from Durational Capital Management.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Garage Beer’s valuation jumped to $200M and the company expects sales to exceed $60M this year. In addition, two veterans of the beer industry (Bill Hackett and Rich Pascucci) joined Garage Beer’s board.

2. Elliott Pushes for Change at PepsiCo: CNBC​

Elliott Investment Management, a prolific activist investor, took a $4B stake in PepsiCo and has big plans for a turnaround. Elliott’s chief complaint is that PepsiCo is a global leader in snacks and beverages with 20 billion-dollar brands, yet the company is wildly undervalued due to strategic and operational woes.

Elliott believes PepsiCo should get out of the capital-intensive bottling business, sell a slew of underperforming brands, and dial up its M&A efforts.

3. Magic Mind Raises Over $12 Million: Instagram​

Functional beverage brand Magic Mind raised $12.4M in funding from BFG Partners and Rocana Venture Partners. Founded in 2020 by William Hicks and James Beshara, Magic Mind is known for creating the world’s first mental performance shot.

The company is based in Los Angeles and retails at H-E-B, Sprouts, and a handful of other chains. The functional shot category is growing 22% YoY in the natural channel.

4. Sesh+ Secures Additional Funding: Business Wire​

Premium nicotine pouch brand Sesh+ raised another round of funding, bringing its total funding to date to over $40M. Its most recent round was co-led by 8VC and Troy Link, the CEO of Jack Link’s, and included participation from Electric Feel Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Sesh+ manufactures its products in Ohio and is one of the fastest-growing nicotine pouch brands in the US.

5. Wild Fox Foods Officially Launches: Wild Fox Foods​

Wild Fox Foods, a better-for-you snack brand from the founders of Kevin’s Natural Foods, officially debuted with three product lines: roasted nuts, trail mix, and protein bars.

Its products are high in protein and free from seed oils and refined sugars. Kevin McCray and Kelsie Costa previously launched Kevin’s Natural Foods and sold it to Mars in 2023 for around $800M.

 Want to give me a gift? 

On a personal note, last Tuesday I announced I’m going all in on the Operators Network as their first executive hire!

That’s right, I am officially Sean Frank’s boss — so wish me luck as the Operator’s Chief Content Officer.

In lieu of a congratulatory present …

Then, jump over and sign up for our Black Friday Webinar.

Over 25 speakers. 3 keynotes. Separate trainings for leaders, marketers & finance. 10 lightning panelists.

Plus, a closer who’ll bring you to tears.

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓
Chief Content Officer

Disclaimer: Special thanks to Postscript + Rokt for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

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