D2C Diaries

Paul Gedman has been in DTC longer than almost anyone we've had on the podcast - from joining The Hut Group in 2009 with 40 employees, and over nine years scaling it to £1 billion in revenue via ten acquisitions (including Look Fantastic), to now running eComplete, where he's building a model that competes directly with private equity for e-commerce acquisitions.

Paul breaks down why every DTC era is defined by a different arbitrage opportunity, what actually happens once a founder takes on investment (his "5-a-side to 11-a-side" analogy is a good one), and the brutal real odds of a successful DTC exit - he puts it at 1 in 1,600 founders who get out with more than 50% of the value. 

We also get into why 80% of exit processes fail, the prep work founders skip that kills deals months later, and how eComplete is trying to build a hybrid model that gives founders a better shot.


🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wQ_DM0

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Sathi. 

SATHI is the affiliate platform built for Shopify brands that want the truth about their program. Cookieless multi-touch attribution shows you which affiliates drove the sale. AI-powered fraud engine catches leaked codes and self-referrals before your payout goes out. Ambassadors climb commission tiers, earn booster rewards, and see exactly what they need to unlock next. Payouts, invoices, and tax forms happen in one click.

D2C Diaries listeners get 20% off, free migration from their current setup, and onboarding support from their team.

Book a demo: https://mysathi.io/demo?utm_source=soarwithus&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=d2c_diaries

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson

Follow Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-gedman-626b0666/ 

Follow D2C Diaries https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c_diaries / 

https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard.

If you're spending serious money on daily business expenses and getting nothing back on it right now, this dedicated offer gets you 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped.

Sign up for free and use the code SWU2K26 to unlock your cashback https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod

Meta performance has been rough since March and if you're feeling it, you're not alone. Olly and Loukas are back for a solo episode breaking down exactly what's gone wrong on the platform and, more importantly, what's actually working across the 40+ audits they ran in Q2.

They cover the five most common account errors they're seeing right now (most of which are quick fixes), why creative diversity has become the single biggest unlock for scaling spend, and how to run a proper gap analysis across persona, messaging, valence zones, emotional drivers, and vehicle type before you produce another asset.

Krishna Rao, CFO of Anthropic, on Invest Like the Best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEEZPpx8qow

Brian Chesky on Invest Like the Best - AI Founder mode https://youtu.be/eURcW5_uS60

Creative Forecasting resource: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wjPt20

00:00 Intro: news and what we've been watching

17:32 State of Meta: why Q2 has been tough across the board

20:18 5 common account errors (attribution, audiences, funnel coverage, concentration, landing pages)

28:09 What's working: The Hudson Method and creator flywheels

36:36 Creative volume, gap analysis and diversifying across personas, valence & vehicle

48:42 Hit rate case study: micro personas and psychological messaging in action

50:58 Iterations, borrowing frameworks from non-competing brands

55:24 Landing pages, quiz funnels and AOV engineering

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap:  https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wjzrY0 

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson

Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston

Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi

Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/

Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard.

If you're spending serious money on daily business expenses and getting nothing back on it right now, this dedicated offer gets you 2% Cashback for year 1 on Ads, SaaS, Travel and other everyday business expenses. Uncapped.

Sign up for free and use the code SWU2K26 to unlock your cashback https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod 

---

12 months ago AI animation wasn't really a thing. Now it's a fourth creative format sitting alongside static, UGC and high production and the brands that figure it out first are going to have a significant edge.

We got Alex Cooper back on D2C Diaries this week. And a lot has changed since he was last on. We got into everything. 

How we've built an AI videographer role into our production process and why you need a specialist not a generalist. 
Why winning ads right now are either hyper native or elite direct response and why everything in the middle is dying. 
How the pendulum has swung too far toward AI research and why the best strategists are going back to manual. 
Why iterations aren't dead post-Andromeda, they just need to mean something. 
And the brand that scaled from $1M to $45M off the back of one concept.

Check out Parker AI here: https://heyparker.ai/

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap:  https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0wjzrY0 

Follow Alex 
https://x.com/alexgoughcooper
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgoughcooper/
https://heyparker.ai/

00:00 Alex Cooper returns 
02:24 Our sponsor Incard
04:01 The biggest shifts in creative strategy in the last 12 months
05:54 How we built the AI videographer role 
13:25 AI animations are here to stay
16:02 Meta's persona level delivery
20:04 Gap analysis, learnings and data
26:55 Manual research vs AI automated research
30:07 Our sponsor Incard
31:45 Manual research vs AI automated research
33:39 Iterations post-Andromeda
38:26 Ugly vs high prod
48:37 Positive framing
51:22 Complexity bias in ads
55:20 How Alex is using AI
1:02:17 Parker AI

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Commercive.

If you're a ecommerce business owner doing a minimum of 10+ orders per day and looking for a smarter and cost-effective way to source and fulfill from china, go to https://www.commercive.co for a free quote and fulfillment audit today.

---

Sunna van Kampen built 1.7M followers, generated half a billion views in 2025, and turned Tonic Health into one of the UK's fastest growing supplement brands. Without a single paid ad.

What started as a Covid panic, a Boots listing that fell through and no DTC experience, forced Sunna to figure out how to reach customers from scratch. So he walked into a supermarket with a phone and started exposing what was actually in the products people were buying every week.

That decision changed everything.

In this episode we get into the full story. How Sunna built an organic content engine that runs on two days of filming a month, why he talks about bread more than vitamins, and how a single viral video gave him the insight behind Tonic's best selling product.

We also get into the vitamin industry itself. Why the products on the shelves are underdosed by design, what Sunna found when he went into kids and baby nutrition, and why most supplement brands are built around margin rather than health.

Plus the content philosophy that underpins all of it. Why Sunna's board kept pushing him to sell more, why he kept saying no, and why that decision is the reason Tonic is where it is today.

---

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap:  https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0w6mMv0

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by SARAL. 

Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship, all in one place, without any chaos. 200+ brands including Grüns, Solawave, Spacegoods are running their influencer programs on SARAL.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to https://tinyurl.com/3t4d4myx and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you to claim your $500 discount and whiteglove onboarding.

----

Chris joined Hambi Media as a creative strategist with no agency experience. One year later, he's been promoted to Senior Creative Strategist working across 7-9 figure DTC brands.

In this episode, the guys break down exactly what separates good creative strategists from great ones - the research process, micro personas, messaging psychology, and how Chris 8x'd hit rate in 30 days by changing just two things.

This episode is for you if:
- You're a founder trying to understand what great creative strategy actually looks like inside an agency
- You're a creative strategist who wants to know what top 1% performance really requires
- You're trying to break into creative strategy and want the most honest breakdown of what the role demands

What we cover:
- Why manual research is the highest leverage activity in creative strategy
- How micro personas unlock incremental reach without changing your frameworks
- The messaging psychology shift that 8x'd hit rate in 30 days
- Why AI creates the biggest opportunity in history to become a creative strategist
- The deep work principle behind every great insight
-  What creative strategy looks like in 2 years

Chris's Substack: https://substack.com/@christopherstavropoulos
Chris's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisstav1/

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0v-BVd0

---

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Commercive.

If you're a ecommerce business owner doing a minimum of 10+ orders per day and looking for a smarter and cost-effective way to source and fulfill from china, go to https://www.commercive.co for a free quote and fulfillment audit today.

----

Most brands have a creative volume problem and don't know it.

In this masterclass, Olly breaks down the Creative Forecasting model Soar Group uses across its client base (brands spending anywhere from £100K to £5M a month on Meta) to answer the one question that unlocks scale: how many new creatives do I need to produce each month to hit my spend target?

You'll learn how to pull and classify your ad inventory, run cohort survival analysis to get your real churn rate, calculate your win rate and half-life, and plug those numbers into a demand equation that tells you exactly how many ads to launch each month, whether you're holding spend or scaling to a new target.

Olly also covers why volume without diversity stalls accounts, how to map creative gaps across personas and angles, and the negative spiral most brands sleepwalk into when creative becomes a cost centre instead of a growth lever.

By the end of this episode you'll have a repeatable forecasting process you can run on your own account today.

The cheat sheet resource: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vzzg60

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vzzJ60

00:00 Intro
01:00 Our sponsor: Commercive
02:20 The same trends we're seeing
04:06 The challenges brands are facing
05:20 Creative is the new targeting
06:50 What we're seeing in audits
08:45 How many creatives do we need each month?
19:18 Factors that may impact the data
21:33 What we're trying to avoid
22:33 Personas
25:57 How we help brands


---

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard.

Most founders building high-growth digital companies are stuck doing the same thing: toggling between apps, wrestling with spreadsheets, and manually reconciling expenses - all while trying to actually grow their business.

There's a better way.

Incard is the financial platform built for the way modern digital businesses actually operate. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards with real rewards, and a fully connected banking experience - all in one place.

This dedicated offer gets you:
- 1 month free trial Incard Plus
- All Incard Plus plan features included
- 2% cashback on Ad Spend, Saas, Travel for year one
​
This time-limited offer is only valid until end of May. Take control of your finances with Incard today. T&Cs apply: https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod

---

Loukas breaks down the full AI infrastructure he has built on top of Claude, from context engineering fundamentals through to a self-learning creative OS that compounds over time.

In this mastermind he covers why context is the entire game right now and why your prompts matter less than you think, how Claude Skills work under the hood and how to build ones that actually compress your team's best thinking into repeatable systems, the exact 8-phase scriptwriting skill Hambi runs in production, the recursive script grader that scores every script against 10 criteria and rewrites until it ships, and the reasoning trace system that turns Claude from a tool into something that gets smarter the more you use it.

Whether you're just getting started with Claude or you think you're advanced, this is the end-to-end session.

Comment "Claude" below to get the reference files, CSOS template and PDFs referenced in this episode.

Sarah Levinger's article on Valence Zones https://x.com/SarahLevinger/status/2021281038895546761?s=20

D2C Diaries Scriptwriting Masterclass https://youtu.be/dlH4acLpd_g

---
🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0vgMDy0

00:00 Intro
03:27 Incard sponsor
04:20 Why context is the entire game 
08:08 Brand context vs domain context explained
10:16 How to build a context library database
14:14 Claude Skills vs Claude Code vs Claude Cowork
20:38 Claude skills
23:23 The CSOS - single source of truth setup on Notion
26:33 Framework database 
29:50 Skill building workflow
31:00 Scriptwriting Skill 
35:35 Incard sponsor
36:28 8 phases of scripting writing skill
50:22 Reporting skill
53:27 Script Grader 
58:28 Building operating infrastructure

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by SARAL. 

Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship, all in one place, without any chaos. 200+ brands including Grüns, Solawave, Spacegoods are running their influencer programs on SARAL.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to https://tinyurl.com/3t4d4myx and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you to claim your $500 discount and whiteglove onboarding.

---

In this episode, Olly and Loukas go deep on the AI systems they've spent the last few months building inside Soar Group - the personal operating systems, the creative production infrastructure, and the internal tooling that's changing how the business runs.

This isn't a conversation about AI tools. It's about the architecture underneath them.They cover:
How Olly built a personal operating system based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern — using Obsidian connected to Claude Code. Call transcripts categorised automatically every day, Slack piped in, reasoning traces stored against every decision made in the business.

How Loukas built his own version in VS Code connected to Claude Code with in-depth context on every brand, every direct report, and every specialism, plus a reinforcement learning loop built into the content pipeline.

The Club Neuro AI operating system - a full web app built as a test case before rolling into the Control Room. Best performing frameworks dashboard, hooks database, one-click reporting, weekly Reddit scrape, and a UI designed to capture operator intuition at the moment it happens.

The four learning loops: performance into hypothesis, hypothesis into correction, correction into rule, decision into outcome.

How they hired an AI videographer targeting 60 unique concepts a month — the equivalent of 15 shoot days replaced by one person.

A mass static generation system with 40-60 framework prompts, brand DNA and personas pre-loaded, ready to generate at scale.

The principle that ties it all together: context compounds. Models don't.

---

00:00 Intro
02:05 Our sponsor: SARAL
03:00 Our personal operating systems we've built
21:00 AI as a feedback loop
24:14 Our sponsor: SARAL
25:10 Our foundational context and data engine
30:20 Club Neuro: creative intelligence operating system
35:00 Best in class forecasting process 
39:50 Our internal creative processes
47:28 Business intelligence platform

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard.

Most founders building high-growth digital companies are stuck doing the same thing: toggling between apps, wrestling with spreadsheets, and manually reconciling expenses - all while trying to actually grow their business.

There's a better way.

Incard is the financial platform built for the way modern digital businesses actually operate. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards with real rewards, and a fully connected banking experience - all in one place.

This dedicated offer gets you:

• 1 month free trial Incard Plus
  
  
• All Incard Plus plan features included
  
  
• 2% cashback on Ad Spend, Saas, Travel for year one
  
  

This is a time-limited offer valid till the end of this month, April 2026.

Take control of your finances with Incard today: https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod

---

Most people think growing a DTC brand is complicated. It doesn't have to be.

In this episode, Olly and Sam break down the Growth Compass™ — Soar Group's trademarked framework for diagnosing the #1 constraint holding any ecommerce brand back from profitable growth.

4 pillars. 20 sub-factors. One binding constraint. Fix that one first. Everything else is noise.

As promised in the episode — the full Growth Compass™ cheat sheet covering every sub-factor across all four pillars https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ3_v0

If you want us to run the full Growth Compass™ audit for your brand - scored across all 20 sub-factors with a prioritised roadmap - book a call with the team 👉 Book a call https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ4SL0

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

We're back. After a month off, a new office, two London events, and somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 ads launched... there's a lot to catch up on.

In this episode, Olly and Loukas do a full Q1 2026 debrief across creative strategy, Meta attribution, offer positioning, and the frameworks they've been running across 250+ brands.

---

This episode is sponsored by Foreplay. Start your free trial here: https://tinyurl.com/3caahj4w

---

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tvkYy0

---

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Brad Jacobs: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-Few-Billion-Dollars/dp/B0CHTQP25T

Rick Rubin: The Creative Act: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/1838858636

Jason Cohen: A Smart Bear: https://longform.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen/

Oren Johnson (organic content & creator trends): https://www.youtube.com/@orenmeetsworld

The GLP-1 $1.8B four-person business: https://x.com/jonoringer/status/2039759594461839599?s=20

Creative Testing Playbook: comment TESTING below and we'll send it to you

---

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/