What does the tech stack behind a thriving $500M+ cookware brand look like? We’ve got the answer.

🔥 Connor Rolain reveals HexClad’s best-of-the-best tools

🤑 Matt Bertulli explains how small influencers can drive ROI

📊 Jason Panzer invites you to run mobile gaming ads today

And the five top headlines in consumer.

Matt Bertulli CEO, Pela + Lomi

Not All Influencers Are Created Equal

Last year Pela Case grew mid-double digits YoY.

A big part of that was our influencer seeding program. We sent out thousands of gifts per month.

This year we are doing even more.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can't predict which creators will drive results.

We’ve given product to a person with 300 followers and had them drive crazy ROI. We’ve also given product to influencers with massive followings and seen it drive basically nothing.

The important thing is volume of seeding + then a system for identifying and doubling down with winning creators.

​SARAL handles the whole loop:

• Bulk outreach
• Product shipping
• Sales tracking
• Affiliate payouts

All in one place.

Brands are seeing great results.

Poseidn got a 95% post rate from 200+ seeded creators and drove $90K in sales.

Capyera generated $22K in under 24 hours on their first launch with just 50 nano influencers.

Spacegoods scaled from 200 monthly gifts to 1,000+ creator partnerships (with a team of two).

You can watch a 5-min demo of how it works over here.

Then grab 30 minutes with their team. This link is the only place they’re running a 30-day free trial.

Connor Rolain HexClad, Head of Growth

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth and final tech + vendor stack we’ll release — one for each of the Operators’ brands.

We’ve compiled them all into a single database within the Operators Portal: Tech Stack.

No recommendation has paid for placement. Sponsors of the podcasts, however, have been marked with 🤝

 HexClad’s Best-of-the-Best 

Instead of starting with a list of our apps, I asked myself: “What are the most useful tools my team and I use?”

Then, I just started writing about the ones I thought of first.

Our growth team’s work ranges from building funnels to projecting revenue, producing creative to measuring campaigns.

While the technologies below have a wide range of uses, they all have one thing in common. A reason for being!

This reason falls under two buckets.

First, the technology allows us to do something we wouldn’t otherwise be able to — like Rivo powering Hexclad’s sweepstakes web components and entry accounting.

Second, the technology makes something essential easier to execute by orders of magnitude — like Haus turning geo-holdout tests from a weeks-long project into something we launch in an afternoon.

 5-Star ☆☆☆☆☆ Partners 

Point of Sale: Shopify

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: <$1M

I mean, come on, most of us wouldn’t be here without Shopify. I don’t have much bad to say about the technology that’s democratized entrepreneurship.

The front end and back end are easy to use. They integrate well with thousands of applications yet offer the ability to build custom. Shopify is for brands that have done $100 in revenue, $1B in revenue, and anywhere between.

Upsells: Aftersell 🤝

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: <$1M

Post-purchase is the only place on your site where an upsell carries zero risk. It’s pure incremental AOV.

Aftersell owns this real estate for us.

Aftersell runs on their AI relevance engine, so a first-time buyer and a returning VIP see different offers without us building manual segments. We can also split-test offers, layouts, and full funnel paths.

We’ve added $2.3M in incremental post-purchase revenue over 12 months. That’s $4.91 in additional revenue per transaction — with zero changes to our PDPs, cart, or checkout.

Price Testing: Intelligems

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: <$1M

You could have the most optimized ad creative and destinations in the world. If your price point isn’t optimized, it doesn’t matter.

Intelligems is the easiest way I’ve come across to price test for an ecommerce brand. They also have a killer analytics dashboard to easily understand the data you’re getting.

They recently released Intelligems(.)ai, an agentic layer on top of their testing engine that audits your store, proposes experiments, ships them, and validates the results.

We’re excited to try it out.

SMS Marketing: Postscript 🤝

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: <$1M

Postscript is great at SMS.

First off, they’re wonderful to work with. Their entire team helps customers leverage the full product effectively.

Second, the price was much better than what Attentive offered when we negotiated a few years back. Not saying that’s the case across the board for brands of various sizes. But that’s how it played out for us.

Most importantly, Postscript continues to innovate. Their new Infinity Testing feature generates and tests hundreds of on-brand message variants per send, and they prove impact with holdout testing.

We use their SMS Sales product as well. When A/B testing it against static abandonment lifecycle messages, revenue per user (RPU) was 5% higher.

Attribution: Northbeam 🤝

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Northbeam will always have a special place in my heart as the first attribution tool I fell in love with. Nothing makes it easier to look at channels on an apples-to-apples basis.

Facebook, AppLovin, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. all have their own ways of modeling attribution, which means it’s hard to compare Facebook’s reported revenue to TikTok’s.

Northbeam solves this problem by allowing you to toggle through different views independent of how each channel attributes. It’s the backbone of our media buying decisions.

Customer Points: Rivo

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Rivo technologically powers all things customer accounts and points.

• Referral
• Loyalty
• Sweepstakes
• Gamification

It has a great back end and out-of-the-box front end so that brands can market these programs effectively.

About half of HexClad’s sweepstakes web components are Rivo, most being net-new design or development. We’ve used them to power our referral program for over two years.

Server Side Tracking: Elevar

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Being unable to match customer data with website actions sucks. If someone has given you their email and then they add to cart but don’t purchase, you should be able to email them!

Unfortunately, pixel degradation has made event match rates in scenarios like this lower than it’s ever been.

Elevar is a server-side tracking tool with way better event match rates than anything requiring a pixel to load (i.e., client-side tracking). This means your remarketing and lifecycle-owned media marketing audiences are larger, so you can message to more high-intent folks + drive more revenue from them.

The enhanced match rates send more signals to your ad accounts for stronger machine learning and, thus, targeting.

Deliverability: Maverick

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Your email revenue has a silent killer: the Promotions tab. You can write the perfect campaign, and if Gmail files it away with every other brand’s blasts, most subscribers never see it.

Maverick fixes this.

It plugs into Klaviyo and optimizes your emails to land in the Primary inbox instead of Promotions or spam. Setup took minutes, and it runs in the background without adding any work for the team.

For us, better inbox visibility has translated to 28% more placed orders from our Klaviyo campaigns.

Direct Mail: Postpilot

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Everyone abandoned the mailbox for the inbox, which is exactly why the mailbox works again.

Five years ago, we ran a small direct mail test heading into Black Friday. Today PostPilot is a seven-figure channel for us, driving nearly $3M over BFCM alone.

PostPilot’s in-app holdout testing is the gold standard, and it makes decision-making easy.

One caveat: PostPilot themselves recommend ~$3M+ in annual revenue so segments are big enough to read.

Creative Analytics: Motion 🤝

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Ad account naming conventions and creative data visualization are everything for a paid media team.

Motion makes that easy.

As long as your naming conventions are dialed in, you can see any insight you want — food hook versus product hook, Gordon whitelisted versus Gordon brand, etc.

This is probably one of the only tools that is incredibly useful for a brand doing $500k a year or $500M.

Pop-Ups: Alia

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: <$1M

We migrated to Alia after our previous popup tool stalled out. Opt-in rates were stuck at 5% across regions, testing anything beyond the basics was painful, and the experience didn’t reflect our brand standards.

In our first 90 days with Alia, we were running two to three tests per week on messaging, design, and timing. Targeting got highly specific, too — geography, page type, UTMs, visitor behavior — so popups became personalized experiences.

The results compounded downstream. Email opt-in rates doubled, hundreds of thousands of new profiles across our Klaviyo accounts, and 14-day post-signup conversion up from 7% to 12%.

Alia integrates Postscript’s Onsite Opt-In directly into the popup, so subscribers complete SMS signup without leaving the experience. That killed 90% of our SMS confirmation drop-off.

AI Shopping: Siena

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Siena has been powering HexClad’s customer service for a while.

I’m told that last Q4, Siena saved us 10,000 person-hours, and became one of the top performers on the team by tickets closed. CSAT went from the 70–80% range to consistently mid-90s.

Siena handles tier-one volume (where’s my order, address changes, returns) so human agents work the tickets that actually require judgment.

Now we’re rolling out Siena’s Shopping Agent on-site. It will walk customers through product selection and into checkout.

We already get a ton of pre-purchase questions into CX; a proactive agent turns a support cost into more conversions.

Customer Intelligence: OuterSignal

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Your order data tells you what someone bought. It tells you nothing about who they are.

OuterSignal enriches every order with 100+ demographic, professional, and behavioral signals pulled from publicly available data. We’ve recently put it to work in three ways:

(1) VIP Detection: It flags when famous people buy from us; celebrities, athletes, executives, micro-influencers.

(2) Persona Building: Instead of guessing at customer personas, OuterSignal builds them from our actual first-party data.

(3) Personalization: Specific personas get specific messaging. The enrichment pushes straight into Klaviyo.

This is a tool where value scales with order volume. The more customers flowing through, the more VIP flags and the sharper the personas.

Post Purchase Survey: Kno

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Attribution, customer insights, product development — all of these can be understood using a tool like Knocommerce.

Kno powers our post-purchase survey, where we ask people where they heard about us, how long they knew about us before buying, which of our competitors they use, and more.

These insights contribute to our day-to-day decision-making.

We also use Kno for one-off surveys.

If we want to know how often our customers engage in a certain activity to inform product development, we can craft the survey in Kno, create the segment in Klaviyo, send out the survey, review the data, craft insights, and start to take action … all in under a week.

To top it off, it’s quite affordable. Plus, they have a fantastic customer success team!

Incrementality Attribution: Haus 🤝

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $10M-$50M

There is no way to test channel efficiency in a more scientific way than through geo-based holdout testing. Haus makes it incredibly easy to run these tests.

Set up the test design in-platform; platform spits out inclusion demographics in the form of a CSV file; inclusion audiences are added to ad platform campaigns by your media buyer; test is launched; results are pulled into Haus.

Quick, easy, actionable for something that takes a lot of work to set up manually. They also have an amazing customer success team to help brands get the most value possible.

CTV: NeonPixel 🤝

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $10M-$50M

There’s no other way to put it … NeonPixel has been game-changing for CTV advertising.

We used a different partner prior, and after switching to NeonPixel, all of our data points improved — more PPS responses, better PPS efficiency, and a stronger correlation coefficient in our MMM model.

Why? NeonPixel partners with data partners to target users based on intent, not based on the network.

It has way better (and more conservative) attribution that pulls directly into GA4, household device matching, and an incredible customer success team.

Order Tracking: parcelLab

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $10M–$50M

parcelLab powers our branded, embedded order tracking.

Customers track their order on our site, surrounded by our content and cross-sell placements instead of a carrier’s ads. The transactional emails are ours too, which turns the highest-open-rate messages in existence into owned media.

parcelLab watches carrier data and messages customers about delays, split shipments, and exceptions, which means fewer WISMO tickets hitting our CX team.

Server Side Tracking: Edgemesh

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $10M-$50M

Edgemesh initially rolled out as a site speed tool powered by server-side tracking, and let me tell you ... site speed matters.

We A/B tested Edgemesh’s site speed tool versus no Edgemesh on some international markets and saw serious improvements in CVR.

Edgemesh realized attribution reliant on pixel loads is becoming less and less reliable, so they built a full analytics and attribution product on top of their server-side tracking.

It outputs click data that’s way more accurate than attribution reliant on a pixel load. This means that a lot of data we used to get from MTAs or GA can now be pulled from Edgemesh, which is a lot more trustworthy.

Podcast Analytics: Podscribe

Score ★★★★★ (5/5)
Annual GMV: $10M–$50M

Podcast advertising has a measurement problem: nobody clicks a podcast.

Promo codes and UTMs only capture a fraction of actual impact.

Podscribe solves this with pixel-based, household-level attribution. They match ad exposure to site visits and purchases even when nobody clicks anything.

It’s also the only third-party, IAB-certified attribution provider in the space. You don’t want the people selling you the ads grading their own homework.

 4-Star ☆☆☆☆ Partners 

Affiliate Marketing: Awin

Score ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

We run our affiliate program on Awin.

It’s one of the largest networks in the world — a million-plus publishers across content sites, price comparison, deal and loyalty players, and creators. Importantly for us, it’s global.

Awin operates across the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and Brazil, with localized programs per market.

You set the commission rate you’re willing to pay, Awin takes a tracking fee on converted transactions, and everything is performance-based.

The reporting gives us publisher-level performance so we can see who’s driving incremental customers versus who’s just intercepting people already on their way to checkout.

Social Listening: Archive AI

Score ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

Every missed post is a missed creator relationship, or a missed piece of UGC your paid team could’ve whitelisted.

Archive is our answer for influencer social listening.

It monitors TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube continuously, and its AI is video-native — it watches the video, listens to the audio, and reads the text, so it catches posts about us even when nobody tagged us.

Creator content already outperforms studio content in plenty of our placements. Archive removed the bottleneck.

CRO Testing: Convert

Score ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Annual GMV: $1M–$10M

We do all of our on-site A/B testing via Convert. It’s way better than Google Optimize, mainly because there’s no limit to the number of tests you can run at any given time.

Four stars (not five) because we’ve seen some discrepancy in our Convert data versus GA, MTA, and Edgemesh.

But I do like the analytics dashboard. It’s easy to see the different KPIs you care about, and it’s easy to add filters — like new versus returning traffic.

ERP: Fulfil 🤝

Score (None)
Annual GMV: $10M-$50M+

I’m not scoring Fulfil because — as the growth leader — I don’t have any direct experience with it. Our ops team does all the ERP stuff, and there’s no real “marketing” component.

Honestly, that’s probably the best thing anyone responsible for growth can say about an ERP. HexClad sells across a ton of retail and online channels in multiple international markets. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories from my friends at other brands with our level of complexity.

I assume Fulfil works and does what it’s supposed to because I don’t notice it. And that’s how it should be.

Jason Panzer President, HexClad

You Can Run Mobile Gaming Ads Right Now, No More Waitlist

One of the channels we’re scaling this year at HexClad is AppLovin. But we almost didn’t.

It’s mobile-game advertising, and the network reaches over a billion daily active users. After the initial beta, my team was skeptical whether we were getting net-new customers.

So, I pushed them. We ran multiple hold-out tests, we looked at it through Northbeam, and the numbers speak for themselves:

• 90% new customers
• 36% higher ROAS
• 27% lower CAC

AppLovin used to be invite-only. That’s gone now. You can create an account and launch ads today, no waitlist.

If you use our link and launch your first campaign within 24 hours, you will get $1k in free ad credits. When you spend $5k, you’ll get another $5k in credits.

THE FEED

​Inside the Affiliate Marketing Strategy Behind BK Beauty’s Growth​

​How to Build a $100M Brand: 8 Rules from Leaders Who Did​

​TikTok Shop Masterclass: Inside Ridge & HexClad Affiliate Programs​

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, the five top stories in commerce and DTC.

1. Vita Coco Delivers in Q2: Vita Coco​

Vita Coco continues to roll. After acquiring Thai manufacturer Copra for over $200M last month, Vita Coco impressed yet again with its quarterly results.

In Q2, Vita Coco’s net sales grew 28% to $216M.

The growth was driven by strong demand for its branded products and a 78% increase in private label volume. Net income in the period more than doubled as well.

2. Vaca Closes $1.5M Round: LinkedIn​

Vaca, a tallow-based organic tortilla chip brand, secured $1.5M in seed funding led by BAM Ventures. Several operators like Brian Lefler, Troy Bonde, Justin Mares, and Nic Jammet participated.

Founded by Brian Gibb and Joshua Haddox in April 2025, Vaca has scaled rapidly via DTC channels and will launch at Whole Foods Market in SoCal in the coming weeks. Vaca expects August to be its first $1M month.

3. TSG Acquires Saltair: Business Wire​

TSG Consumer Partners acquired a majority stake in Saltair, the fast-growing bodycare brand. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Saltair expects sales to exceed $150M this year.

The company was created in 2022 by British model Iskra Lawrence and The Center, the beauty incubator behind two other exited brands: Naturium and Phlur. Prelude Growth Partners backed Saltair.

4. Drizzy Readies for U.S. Launch: Instagram​

Drizzy, the innovative peanut butter brand from Australia, is gearing up for its U.S. launch after securing pre-seed funding from RiverPark Ventures, Nucleus Ventures, and Alexis Ohanian.

Georgia Park and Jason Spyrides launched Drizzy in Sydney around four months ago. Like Graza, Drizzy uses a novel squeeze bottle to deliver its product.

5. Align Ventures Raises $125M: Business Wire​

Consumer-focused VC firm Align Ventures secured $125M for its early stage Fund II. The firm has experienced several exits in recent years, including Coterie, Touchland, Billie, and FIGS.

Align Ventures is also an investor in Starface, OLIPOP, California Naturals, and The Farmer’s Dog. The firm is led by Managing Partners Ben Bryce and Grant Hosking.

We finally found a home for our tool and vendor lists inside the Operators Portal.

All you have to do is create your free account.

Click here to check out the Tech Stacks.

Not only can you sort them by brand, category, or score … you can also be the first to register for our next online event (with the push of a button).

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

P.S. (Disclaimer): Special thanks to SARAL and AppLovin for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

​Read online | Unsubscribe​