Most product businesses don't have a recall plan. Not because they've decided against it. Just because the moment hasn't arrived yet.

Melanie Nolan built Naternal Vitamins to eight million dollars in four years without running a paid ad for the first two. She built it on trust. Then in April last year, a manufacturing error created iodine variability across fifteen thousand units of her prenatal supplement. The TGA required a full voluntary recall. She refunded nearly three hundred thousand dollars in a single month. And came out the other side still growing, with 95% of her customers still there.

That outcome is not accidental. In this Playbook episode, Nathan unpacks three things every physical product business should do before a recall arrives, not during one.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why recall infrastructure fails when you build it inside the crisis rather than before it [lesson one]
• The four systems Naternal built after the recall: recalls@ email, Google Drive docs, batch tracking, fillable forms [lesson one]
• Why going first on transparency is the commercial move, not just the ethical one [lesson two]
• How 95% of customers stayed after a $300K refund month because of how Mel communicated [lesson two]
• Why the brands that come through a crisis are the ones that move toward the problem [lesson three]
• The $22,000 recall insurance policy that was worth every cent [lesson one]

Explore Naternal Vitamins | Connect with Melanie Nolan | Hear EP620

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The gap between when you say the parcel will arrive and when it actually does is still the biggest unsolved loyalty problem in Australian retail. This is the episode that puts numbers on it.

This episode discusses Shippit’s State of Shipping Report 2026. Download your copy here.

Rob Hango-Zada co-founded Shippit in 2014 and has published the State of Shipping Report three years running. This year's edition is the biggest yet. David Bauer is GM Customer at Amart Furniture, one of Australia's largest furniture retailers with 65 stores, an ecommerce operation, and a weekly leadership review that tracks something they call "broken promises."

The conversation covers the 2026 report's most important findings, what they mean for retailers competing against an Amazon-trained consumer, and why the brands winning loyalty in this environment are doing the work no one wants to talk about.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why only 7% of retailers offer an accurate delivery estimate at checkout, and what it would take to close the gap [13:50]
• How Amart tracks broken promises as a top-line weekly leadership metric [18:24]
• The 2.2-day actual vs 5.2-day promised delivery gap, and why most retailers can't close it [22:23]
• "Your last best experience is your new expectation" and what that means for every retailer competing with Amazon [14:48]
• Why free returns are functionally dead, and what easy returns actually looks like in 2026 [42:08]
• The rattle surcharge, fuel costs, and why disruption is now the default operating environment [36:10]
• Why Amart is building a white-glove delivery tier and what that signals about where premium retail is heading [40:04]

Connect with David Bauer | Explore Amart Furniture | Connect with Rob Hango-Zada | Explore Shippit

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Most brands know what their campaigns are doing. Fewer know whether their flows are actually doing the heavy lifting.

This is the second of three special episodes recorded live at Klaviyo's Sydney event, K:SYD. Nathan put forward a panel instead of a single interview, and the room delivered. Three Klaviyo Champions, three very different businesses, one hour on email, CRM, data and where retention marketing is actually heading.

Lachi Agnew is Head of Technology at July, the Melbourne luggage brand he has helped build from scratch over seven years. Flows are driving close to half of July's Klaviyo-attributed revenue, while campaigns get most of the creative attention. Hani Rifai is Chief Digital Officer at Step One, the ASX-listed bamboo underwear brand chasing $100 million with a team of 50 and one of Australia's sharpest data-first retention programs. Alice Michael is Head of Ecommerce and Operations at APG & Co, running Klaviyo across Sportscraft, SABA and JAG simultaneously with a lean team and three distinct customer bases.

The conversation covers where discounting actually helps versus where it trains your best customers to wait, how to use RFM switches to deploy incentives at the right moment, and why segmentation is a workaround, not the destination.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why flows outperform campaigns on revenue at July, and what Lachi is building to close the gap between the two [12:08]
• How Step One uses RFM category switches to trigger targeted messages at the exact moment a customer starts drifting [21:30]
• Hani's take on Pavlovian discounting: discount to solve a problem, not to plug a revenue gap [22:42]
• How Alice migrated three fashion brands off Salesforce Marketing Cloud and why one bottleneck was driving the whole decision [02:48]
• The Step One experiment using AI search data piped into Klaviyo to generate one-to-one abandonment emails based on what a customer actually asked [46:30]
• Why all three panellists agree segmentation is a workaround, and what true one-to-one communication actually requires [53:00]

Connect with Lachi Agnew | Explore July | Connect with Hani Rifai | Explore Step One | Connect with Alice Michael | Explore APG & Co 

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Live shopping has been "the next big thing" in Australian ecommerce for five years. Grayson White has been doing it for fifteen.

Grayson White started running "breaks" (the trading card version of live shopping) at Cherry Collectables back in 2008. Cherry is now Australia's biggest trading card retailer, and what Grayson has built since isn't a sales channel. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of collectors who trust the brand enough to move 1,600% more product on a single new release than they ever had before.

In this week's Playbook, Nathan unpacks the model behind Cherry's result and what it means for any retailer trying to make live shopping actually convert, including 40-year-old fashion brand Motto, which grew 127% in twelve months on the back of daily 4pm streams, and Oz Hair and Beauty, which deliberately started live before TikTok Shop arrived in Australia.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why live shopping works when buying is one of three reasons people showed up [03:00]
• The three-audience model that took Motto from a COVID pivot to 127% growth [06:30]
• Why most brands kill the room by coming across as a catalogue [09:30]
• How fifteen years of trust earned Cherry the 1,600% activation on a single drop [12:00]
• Why Whatnot works where social live shopping in Australia still doesn't [15:00]
• Why every show needs an event hook, not just a schedule [17:00]

Connect with Grayson White | Explore Cherry Collectables 

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Klaviyo is sitting at $1.2 billion in revenue and 196,000 brands. Ed Hallen says it's 1% done.

Ed Hallen co-founded Klaviyo in 2012 with Andrew Bialecki, off the back of a dinner in Boston where an Australian entrepreneur selling suits online told them he spent three hours a week manually emailing his customer list. They offered to automate it. Thirteen years, a 2023 IPO, and a shift from email tool to autonomous B2C CRM later, that same core idea, understand the customer, act on it, measure it, still runs the company. As Chief Strategy Officer, Ed is now the person thinking hardest about where Klaviyo goes next.

Nathan caught him live at K:SYD in Sydney, straight off a keynote to 600-plus people. Klaviyo is one of Add To Cart's two major sponsors, and this conversation still went straight at the hard stuff: pricing, attribution, the SaaSpocalypse, and what you're probably leaving on the table inside the platform right now.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why the move from email tool to autonomous B2C CRM is really just the original 2012 idea at a bigger scale [05:00]
• The honest story behind the pricing change from contacts emailed to active profiles, and what it means for your database [22:39]
• Why your disengaged list is a segment to talk to differently, not a cost to delete [30:30]
• How Klaviyo thinks about attributing its own value when it's one part of a bigger marketing stack [25:30]
• Where Klaviyo's B2C CRM vision is heading now that service and marketing run through one platform [33:00]
• The single most underused feature on the platform, and why it isn't the newest one [41:00]

Connect with Ed Hallen | Explore Klaviyo

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For most of a decade, the performance marketing edge came from audience strategy. Which targeting, which lookalikes, which exclusions. Media buying was the skill, and creative was just the fuel you fed it. That advantage has quietly disappeared as Meta, Google and TikTok have absorbed the targeting levers into the platform.

Most brands are still organised around the old model: budget and attention pointed at audience strategy, with creative treated as execution. The brands pulling ahead have flipped it. They know the machine now finds the right person, so the only thing left to control is what you put in front of them. The question isn't whether an ad is good. It's whether the pipeline has enough creative in it to keep finding what works.

The brands getting this right do three things differently.

In this playbook, based on a conversation with Justin Babet, founder of Chief Nutrition, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about building a creative machine that finds winners:

• Creative does the targeting now, so the lever that matters has shifted from audience strategy to content production
• A content machine is a system before it's a creative problem, and the fix is finding the blocker that's stalling your output
• Volume only works if new creative gets a genuine test in its own campaign, away from your proven winners

Connect with Justin Babet Explore Chief Nutrition

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Most people know Jess Hatzis from frank body.

The coffee scrub brand built on a $10,000 investment, a genderless persona called Frank, and an Instagram strategy so early they were setting alarms through the night to post manually. Eleven years later, a $100 million valuation and one of the most recognised Australian beauty brands in the world.

What fewer people talk about is what it actually took to build that. The data before the creative. The hard calls on what to kill. The discipline of knowing when to move and when to wait.

Jess is now fractional CMO at Betts, co-founder of Willow & Blake, and building a new consumer brand from scratch. She joined Nathan and Rosa to talk about the unglamorous side of brand building.

This one is for anyone who has ever confused a good-looking brand with a well-built one.

Connect with Jessica Hatzis 

Explore frank body Explore Willow & Blake

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Revenue is still the number most ecommerce founders lead with. It's the easiest to celebrate, the easiest to screenshot, and the one that gets the most airtime in strategy conversations. But it's also the number that tells you the least about whether the business is actually working.

Most operators are chasing a revenue target that has no maths behind it. Nobody has calculated the one number that gives a revenue target its job. Gross profit might be off. Contribution margin might be close to zero. Overheads might be quietly eating through whatever's left. And the founder usually finds out too late, when cashflow tightens or a BAS payment lands.

The brands getting this right do three things differently.

In this playbook, based on a conversation with Matt Byrne, founder of Day One Advisory, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about calculating a breakeven number that actually works:

• Start with the sequence, not the target. Gross profit and contribution margin come before breakeven, and if either is off the breakeven will be too
• The formula takes ten minutes, but it only works if you run it twice. Once with the numbers as they are, then again with subscriptions and full people costs included
• Use breakeven before you make a decision, not after. Discount campaigns, ad spend targets and stock orders should all be stress tested against it first

Connect with Matt Byrne
Explore Day One Advisory

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Grant Arnott built Click Frenzy from his bedroom into Australia's most iconic online sale event. Then one private equity decision cost him nearly everything, including, for a while, his reason to stay.

He chose this conversation over every other request. When Click Frenzy and Power Retail went into receivership in March 2026, interview requests came in from multiple outlets. Grant turned them all down. Add To Cart was the only interview he agreed to do.

Grant founded Power Retail in 2010 as a one-person media business built to champion Australian ecommerce. Two years later he launched Click Frenzy, Australia's original online mega-sale event, modelled on the US Black Friday format before that term had any real currency here. For over a decade he ran both businesses debt-free, funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars through Australian retailers and building the events and publications the industry grew up inside.

Then he took a private equity deal. The business was profitable. It was cashflow positive. He didn't need to. He's since described it as the greatest regret of his life. In this episode, Grant tells that story for the first time.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why Grant took private equity money when Click Frenzy was already flying, what he hoped the partnership would deliver, and the moment in mid-2022 when it became clear the deal had fundamentally changed who he was in the business [12:40]
• The phone call where a board member told him he could return as CEO but only for no salary and only if he repaid his dividends, with Kylie in tears beside him. Why that one conversation became the turning point into the darkest period of his life [29:57]
• Standing at the kerb of a main road after board meetings and calculating his $10 million insurance policy against his debts. Grant describes weighing up, in specific detail, whether his family would be financially better off without him [37:29]
• The morning he burst into tears getting his coffee and knew something had to change, the psychologist he found shortly after, and why getting help was "the best money I ever spent" [40:29]
• Being named industry person of the year at the ORIA’s while privately calculating life insurance payouts. Grant on why public recognition made the shame harder, not easier, and how he learned to deliberately separate his identity from the business. [46:18]
• "I'm out of business prison now": what Grant is building next, why he is a builder not a shopper, and why the AI tools available today make starting fresh more exciting than when he launched Power Retail in 2010 [55:09]

Connect with Grant Arnott 

If you or someone you know is struggling you may contact:
Lifeline: 13 11 14 — https://www.lifeline.org.au
Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 — https://www.beyondblue.org.au

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Most ecommerce brands can tell you their best-converting product. Fewer can tell you whether that product is bringing in the right customer.

There's a difference. A product can have excellent front-end economics and still be filling your database with people who buy once and never come back. The ROAS looks good. The CAC looks manageable. But six months later, the repeat purchase rate is telling a different story.

The brands getting this right do three things differently.

In this playbook, based on a conversation with Sam Moore, founder of PYRA, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about building a hero product as an entry point to the brand:

• Choose the hero product on purpose. Most brands stumble into it by accident
• The gap between purchase one and purchase two is where most brands lose the customer
• If the hero product only gets bought once, build the ecosystem around it

Connect with Sam Moore 

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