eCommerce Australia

Most brands think they know who their best customers are. Then they put their online and in-store data together and get a surprise.

Ryan Martin talks with Aaron Luxmoore, Head of Sales and Partnerships at Lexer, about how the platform has grown from a customer data platform (CDP) into an AI customer intelligence layer. Aaron explains why putting ChatGPT or Claude on top of fragmented data just gives you wrong answers faster, and why the same customer can show up as three different people.

He also covers why you shouldn't send every customer the same Black Friday discount, the quickest way to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers, and why Lexer doesn't charge per seat. Plus, how a LinkedIn post turned into Friends in Tech, a networking event with an 850-person list.

In this episode

• Friends in Tech: how one LinkedIn post became an 850-person event list across the east coast, with no sponsors, no pitches and no clients invited
• Lexer's evolution from CDP to an AI customer intelligence layer
• The discover, decide, act, observe and learn loop, and why the platform is now used by CEOs, merchandisers and store teams, not just marketing
• Bringing inventory, margins, store rosters and business context (like store closures) into the data
• What usually brings a brand to Lexer: "we don't really know our customers", a loyalty program launch, or too many hours lost to spreadsheets
• Omnichannel reality check: the customer who spent $2K online and $5K in store, and the "one-time buyers" who've actually bought again in store
• Adding third-party data from Experian (likely income, home ownership, parent status)
• Wrong answers, fast: the problem with putting AI over fragmented data, and the risk of tying everything to one LLM
• How one customer with multiple email addresses can look like three different customers
• Black Friday: why full-price buyers shouldn't get the same discount as everyone else
• Lexi as "the brains behind Klaviyo": insight, then strategy, then the segment (around 75% of Lexer clients use Klaviyo)
• Common objections, and why all-in-one platforms tend to be "jack of all trades, master of none"
• Build vs buy: why building your own customer data layer usually takes two years and more people than expected
• Implementation down from about six months to 6–12 weeks
• Why Lexer doesn't charge per seat, and pricing based on the number of customer profiles
• ROI examples: paying for a year's subscription just by turning one-time buyers into repeat buyers, and feeding top-5% audiences into Meta
• Who buys: head of digital, CMO and CRM manager, and the champions who bring Lexer with them when they change jobs
• Multi-brand groups: cross-selling across Cotton On, Cotton On Body and Typo
• Who it's for: medium to large omnichannel retailers, increasingly smaller and e-commerce-only brands, plus hospitality clients
• How to get a free demo using your own Shopify and email data

What happens when a dietitian and a lawyer start a swimwear brand?

Ryan talks with Lyndi and Les Cohen, the husband-and-wife team behind Fearless Swimwear. Lyndi, known as The Nude Nutritionist, spent 15 years helping women with body image before deciding the swimsuit was a body image problem to solve.

They built in public, let their audience pick the brand name, cuts and colours, and launched to a 15,000-strong waitlist.

The pre-order sold out in 24 hours for $200K.

They also share the $100K sizing mistake that followed, the "magic sizing" that came out of their waitlist data, why they're stepping away from deep Black Friday discounts, and what Lyndi calls the "embarrassment tax" of building on social.

About The Host:

Ryan Martin is Founder of Remarkable Digital, a specialist eCommerce SEO marketing agency working with Australian Brands.

In this episode

• Packing orders at Thread Together, and a humbling start to the chat
• Why a dietitian who specialised in body image decided to start a swimwear brand
• Building an audience by "listening to the data": body image content beat healthy breakfast content
• Co-creation: letting the community choose the name, cuts, fabrics and colours, and why 100 poll votes is often enough
• A 15,000-woman waitlist, a $200K pre-order that sold out in 24 hours, and going straight to a 3PL
• Trademarks: buying the "Fearless" name for $3K, and the risk of trademark squatting in China
• Sourcing in China: 36 hours at Intertextile Shanghai, and why you need a swimwear specialist, not a generalist
• The $50K tech pack lesson, and hiring a head of product with nearly 30 years in swimwear (including the 2000 Olympics swimsuits)
• The $100K mistake: gifting all their stock to Thread Together when the sizing came up small
• Magic sizing: 49% of their waitlist wore a different size top and bottom, so they built one-pieces with mixed sizing
• Long torso styles, and designing for a size 12 to 16 instead of scaling up from a size small
• Using Refundid checkout insurance to let customers try at home
• Custom fabrics vs cash flow: simplifying to shorten lead times and the cash conversion cycle
• Stock planning with no historical data, air freight, and a seven-month lead time on a sold-out style
• Black Friday: last year's tiered 10–60% discounts, and why this year they're focusing on newness and gift with purchase instead
• Swimwear's short selling window (September to December), and why March makes more sense for a sale
• Being "ridiculously honest" with customers about strategy changes
• The embarrassment tax: why your fails outperform your highlight reel on social
• Shooting product on real customers with a $4,000 camera instead of professional models
• Staying close to customer feedback as the team grows
• Mentors and inspiration: Shelley Sullivan (MCoBeauty) and Emma Grede
• Long-form content, brand voice, and being the "chief reminding officer"
• What's next: a ready-to-wear capsule, the US market, and becoming the most recommended swimsuit brand

What if your customers were your cheapest media channel? Ryan Martin talks with Mike Haywood, Co-founder of BrandPay, about "customer media". BrandPay rewards everyday customers, not influencers, with store credit when they post about brands they already love.

Mike explains how a $1-per-like experiment at his AirBnB retreat grew into a world-first build with Meta.

He also covers why AI search runs almost entirely on third-party content, and how brands like LSKD now get a new piece of customer content every 33 minutes. On average, the cost per click comes in at about half that of paid media.

Mike explains how the idea started. During COVID he ran a hinterland retreat and paid guests $1 per like in wine-cellar credit for posting content. Six months later it was named best holiday home in Australia and featured in Vogue.

He also talks about building a world-first integration with Meta, and the psychology that makes customers post (time and effort, not likes). He shares hard numbers on cost per click, spend-back rates and category performance.

• Why BrandPay separates customer media from UGC and creator content
• How a $1-per-like guest experiment led to a Vogue feature and a new startup
• Building with Meta: a world-first API use case and the challenge of fraud prevention
• Why fixed rewards beat per-like rewards: everyday users think in time and effort, not engagement
• How the BrandPay wallet works: store credit in Apple Wallet, worth half its value at other brands, with the other half returned to the rewarding brand
• #ad disclosure, and why customer content doesn't feel like selling
• AI search and third-party content: Google lowered its follower threshold for showing third-party content in search from 300k to 35k to 10k
• The review flow: 48-hour auto-approval for reels (24 hours for stories), and 98% approval rates
• Pricing: a 25% fee on top of rewards, with no SaaS or setup fees
• Attribution: first-degree clicks at about 50% of paid media cost per click, plus the "BrandPay halo effect" measured via Triple Whale
• Why brands with real community (Facebook groups, Klaviyo lists) win first
• 85% of rewards are spent back with the brand, on average within about 5 days
• Which categories perform best: fashion, beauty, skincare, nutrition, pet food, sunnies and furniture
• First-mover advantage and the "infinite half-life" of third-party content
• Product launches: building customer media groups by postcode
• Beyond e-commerce: distributor brands, service businesses, and TikTok coming soon

Cam McNeill spent ten years at Dollar Shave Club — from managing a member

services team in Sydney to running the entire business outside the US. He bought

the brand's first Facebook ads in Australia at a $14 CPA, launched Ruggable into

the Australian market, and is now Head of Growth at Beforeyouspeak Coffee,

taking a nine-year-old Aussie DTC brand into the States.

He was living in a van touring America in 2012 when Dollar Shave Club's $3,500

launch video went viral. He rang a mate and said: I wonder how long it'll take to

get to Australia.

In this episode Cam joins Ryan Martin for a genuinely practical conversation

about cross-border ecommerce — how you know you're ready for a new market, what

the first six months should actually look like, and why Beforeyouspeak chose

the US largely because of one channel that isn't live here yet.

WHAT WE COVER

• The signals that tell you a market is ready for you — hiding in your DMs, your

customer service inbox and your creator requests (and why it's a two-way

street: ask them back)

• Why market expansion deserves the same rigour as a product launch, and how to

build a forecast you feel 80/20 about

• The lowest-cost MVP: finding a beachhead, building a waitlist, and contacting

the people who already contacted you

• Why Beforeyouspeak shipped from Australia at painful margins — and got to

conviction fast because those US subscribers are still with them years later

• Setting a six-month horizon with real exit criteria, without making it binary

• Whether you have to "conquer" Australia first (and Cam's response to that

framing)

• New Zealand as the soft-launch market most Aussie brands overlook

• Why the US comes down to TikTok Shop — and the real difference between an

influencer and a creator who only gets paid on GMV delivered

• Subscription in 2026: the Amazon Prime promise, subscription fatigue, and why

your owned experience has to be equal to or better

• Rising Meta costs, AI-driven attribution, and building creative diversity

across well-defined personas

• Using AI to shorten the distance to a decision, not to generate more noise

• Tech stack: Shopify for multi-market, Recharge, Klaviyo, and the new players

innovating inside the inbox

• Ryan on Microsoft Clarity and internal site search — the highest-intent,

least-watched data on your site

• How much AI traffic actually matters yet, zero-click search, and why commercial

keywords are still safe

• Why AI slop might make great designers more valuable, not less

Nineteen months ago Steph Moore was a nurse with no fashion background, no ecommerce experience and a copy of Adobe Illustrator she'd taught herself after night shifts.

Today Hey Sister Scrub Club sells out drops, has a 6,000-strong email list and was runner-up for Rookie of the Year at the SHE-com awards.

In this episode Steph walks Ryan through the whole build: cold-contacting manufacturers until one agreed to work from her own prints and measurements, the sample sets that came back with head holes too small to get into, and the decision to order 360 units across six prints on nothing more than gut feel and a few colleagues' opinions.

She's unusually open about the parts most founders leave out. August was her biggest month ever. July was her worst — not because demand dropped, but because she sold out of core sizes and had no stock to sell. Her tech stack is Shopify and almost nothing else: no automated flows, no abandoned cart emails, every one of those 6,000 emails written and sent by hand. She bought Klaviyo ages ago and still hasn't set it up.

There's also the shipment that arrived soaking wet after a flooded hangar, the drop where half the orders went out with one print on the front and a different one on the back, and the Pink October collection covered in boobs — designed specifically so a patient would ask "have you checked yours?"

Plus: why she won't use a 3PL, what she wants her future warehouse to feel like, and the line that explains why the copycats flooding the fun scrubs market don't worry her much.

CHAPTERS

(00:40) Meet Steph Moore, founder of Hey Sister Scrub Club

(01:00) From nursing shifts to Adobe Illustrator all-nighters

(02:16) Cold-contacting manufacturers until one said yes

(03:00) Sample problems, and the set that finally worked

(04:32) The first drop: 360 units and six prints on gut feel

(05:14) Where the name "Hey Sister" came from

(07:05) Building an Instagram community before there was stock

(08:00) Why she chose a pre-order: cash flow and capacity control

(11:07) Growth that's been almost entirely organic

(13:01) Global expansion and the US tariff roadblock

(14:11) Biggest month ever, right after the worst month ever

(15:50) Retail Fest, SHE-com, and learning what CAC and ROAS mean

(17:45) An honest look at a very lean tech stack

(21:04) The next 12 months: going casual with nursing

(24:08) The hardest moments, including a shipment that arrived soaked

(28:03) The mixed-print mistake and the "keep it, pay it forward" policy

(30:17) "You can replicate the product, but you can't replicate the brand"

(31:49) The Pink October drop that got people talking

(34:10) Becoming "the Peter Alexander of the scrub world"

(36:41) What's next for Hey Sister Scrub Club

HEY SISTER SCRUB CLUB

REMARKABLE DIGITAL

Shawn Singh was managing 40–50 people at a fintech by day and building a copper drinkware brand between 5pm and 7pm every night. Then Valentine's Day 2025 hit,

250 orders landed over a single weekend, and he and his wife packed every one of them on the living room floor, with 10 pallets of stock stacked in the garage

behind them.

In this episode, Shawn joins Ryan Martin (Host and Founder of Remarkable Digital) to unpack how Copper Culture went from

an off-the-shelf Shopify theme to a multi-market brand selling into Australia,

the US and 17 duty-free markets, and why he'd rather be the best copper drinkware brand outside India than the biggest.

It's an honest one: the money lost learning Meta, the 51% jump in the copper price over 12 months, and a live teardown of a supplier sample that scored "7.5 out of 10" and still got rejected.

WHAT WE COVER

• Why a lunch-and-learn from the Arms of Eve founders was the final push to quit

the day job

• Building to a few million in lifetime sales on a default Shopify theme

• Google first, Meta second: why it took 18–24 months to tame the beast, and

what it cost along the way

• The Valentine's gift set that changed everything, no discount, just better

packaging and a message flip from "you need a copper bottle" to "give your

loved ones a copper bottle"

• The UGC engine: triggering review requests 48 hours after delivery (not 14 or

21 days) and offering a coupon to upgrade a text review to video

• The real science of copper: antimicrobial to 99%+ within three hours, plus the copper toxicity warning Shawn puts on every box

• Copper up 51% in 12 months, 300g in a bottle and up to a kilo in a dispenser, how Copper Culture protected margin without passing on the full increase

• Manufacturing in India's copper cottage industry: why a supplier that tripled

output still can't keep up with a business that grew 6x

• Testing new markets and SKUs: 200-300 unit runs, six-week sell-through rules,

and why Moscow mule mugs fly in Australia but not the US

• Why a real-time profit dashboard is the first thing Shawn checks every morning

(and the mate who did $25k in revenue for $800 profit)

CHAPTERS

00:00 – Cold open

01:27 – Welcome: Shawn Singh, Copper Culture

01:57 – Rebuilding the site with Clever Conversions

02:11 – The first website his wife designed, and the millions it carried

04:42 – Fintech by day, ecommerce by night

05:36 – The Arms of Eve lunch-and-learn that changed everything

06:00 – Google traction first, then 18–24 months learning Meta

07:20 – Valentine's Day 2025: 250 orders packed in the living room

10:22 – The copper pitch — and the toxicity warning

11:47 – How to actually use a copper bottle day to day

12:50 – Hammered vs polished, and why hammering matters

13:37 – Indian grandparents, an Ayurvedic practitioner, and terrible Amazon bottles

15:32 – The Valentine's gift set and the AOV unlock

16:49 – Demand capture on Google vs demand generation on Meta

18:01 – In-house, offshore, then Swann Studio

19:46 – The UGC machine: the 48-hour post-delivery review trigger

23:19 – Copper up 51%: margins, pricing and a lower CAC

26:11 – Live sample teardown: what a 7.5/10 looks like

30:28 – How a copper jug is actually made, from Chilean copper up

31:46 – Supplier at 3x, business at 6x: pre-orders and air freight

33:46 – Australia, the US, and 17 duty-free markets (Dubai and Saudi next)

34:56 – Expanding the range: 200–300 unit tests and fast-moving SKUs

36:13 – Real-time profit, channel decisions and a creative backlog

LINKS

Copper Culture: https://copperculture.com.au

Clever Conversions (Ilan Hurwitz): [https://cleverconversions.com.au/]

Swann Studio: https://swan.studio/

BeProfit: https://beprofit.co

Enjoyed this one? Follow the eCommerce Aus Podcast and leave a review it helps more Aussie founders find the show.

A text message at an airport turned into Australia's biggest retail and eCommerce community in about twelve months:

4,000 members, up to 90 chat groups, and meetups from Ballarat to Dubai.

Dean Salakas (The Party People) and Jethro Marks (The Nile) join Ryan Martin (Remarkable Digital) to explain how Retail Community Group actually works, what it deliberately isn't, and how its members had workarounds in place days before Australia Post announced it was suspending shipping to the US.

Dean built a two-person family business into Australia's largest party supplies retailer, offering click-and-collect in 1999 and becoming Google's first advertiser in Australia in 2003 at one cent a click, before exiting eighteen months ago.

Jethro co-founded The Nile in 2003 and is now building the world's most trusted bookstore, with US and UK launches on the way. Neither of them set out to build a community.

They started a WhatsApp group so they could find each other for a drink at Retail Fest, and it had fifty people in it before Dean's plane landed.

Join the Whatsapp here

In this episode they unpack the mechanics behind the growth: why the group split into interest-based channels for AI, cross-border trade, HR and open-to-work; how the "pitch slap" keeps unsolicited selling out; and why a moderated, free, no-pay-to-play space has become the place Australian retailers go first when something breaks.

They also share what's coming next, including a public events directory, a vendor portal and peer advisory groups for retailers, plus their honest take on the hardest problem ahead: keeping the magic while scaling to a market Jethro estimates at 100,000 people.

If you run an online store, work in retail tech, or you're new to eCommerce and feel like you're doing it alone, this one is a practical guide to plugging into the most collaborative industry in the country.

Join The Retail Community Here

Topics covered: retail community building, Australian eCommerce, cross-border trade and tariffs, Australia Post US shipping suspension, 3PL and fulfilment, retail conferences and events, AI tools for retail, B2B community moderation, thought leadership for service providers.

Running an Australian eCommerce or Shopify store? Your customers have started shopping inside ChatGPT, and shoppers arriving from AI answer engines convert around 1.5x better than any other source.

Melbourne eCommerce Aus Event - Tickets Here.

Online shopping has become… boring? A recent Criteo study found 77% of Australians describe online shopping as unexciting, and that's just the starting point for one of our most forward-looking conversations yet.

Ryan sits down with Matt Hurle from Criteo to unpack the findings of their latest report and what they mean for anyone running an eCommerce business in Australia. Matt brings 20 years in advertising, 15 in digital and 10 in martech, from cold-calling rural businesses out of the Yellow Pages to sitting at the front edge of AI-powered retail media.

The big theme: the path to purchase is no longer linear. Consumers are bouncing between publishers, retailer sites, social platforms and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, and increasingly starting their entire shopping journey inside those answer engines, at the very first spark of an idea. Criteo was the first technology company integrated with OpenAI via API and has already run 2,000+ campaigns in that environment. Early signal? Shoppers arriving from ChatGPT convert about 1.5x more efficiently than any other source.

We also get into the eternal marketer's tension Ryan sums up perfectly: "The thing I love about digital marketing is you can track every dollar. The thing I hate about digital marketing is you can track every dollar." Attribution, brand vs. performance, the resurgence of SEO (or GEO/AIO, whatever we're calling it this week), influencer strategy, and why customer support and honest reviews now beat polished influencer content for building real trust.

Key Takeaways

• The funnel is dead — long live discovery. Consumers now begin shopping journeys inside AI answer engines, far earlier than the traditional mid-to-lower funnel signals marketers relied on. Brands need to show up higher up the discovery journey.
• Commerce data is the new gold standard. Moving away from demographics and guesswork toward real commerce signals — what people add to cart, actually buy, and browse before and after. Criteo observes 1T+ in annual eCommerce transactions across 730M+ daily active shoppers.
• Show up across surfaces, not just your own. Criteo's independence means it serves ads on whichever "surface" (open web, ChatGPT, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, X) is most likely to convert — not a walled-garden's owned inventory.
• ChatGPT shoppers convert ~1.5x better. They've researched and validated inside the answer engine, so trust is high by the time they land.
• SEO/GEO/AIO matters more than ever. As search shifts from keywords to full-sentence, conversational queries, rich product data and verifiable messaging determine whether you appear in AI answers — or get left out of the consideration set entirely.
• Trust beats polish. Verified reviews and genuine customer support now outweigh paid influencer content. 200 five-star reviews can be less trusted than a 4.7 average. Reply to bad reviews honestly. (Ryan's Nero merino example and Matt's Artisan chopping-board recall story both make the point.)
• Match the influencer to the job to be done. Celebrities drive reach and exposure; micro-influencers drive engaged, community-level trust and conversion. Different jobs, different tiers.
• AI answer engines stay out of sensitive categories. OpenAI keeps advertising away from health-related matters, directing people back to their GPs.

If you're building a Shopify store, a DTC label, or an omnichannel ecommerce brand in Australia, this episode is your blueprint.

From selling jewellery at Bondi markets to 13 stores and a booming ecommerce business, Arms of Eve co-founders Kerryn and Aaron Langer show how an Australian DTC brand scales retail without losing its ecommerce edge.

Kerryn and Aaron Langer turned a market stall and a pile of leftover merino wool offcuts into Arms of Eve, now a nine-store (soon to be 13) Australian jewellery and lifestyle brand that's scaled past $20 million in revenue on the back of a genuinely direct-to-consumer ecommerce model.

In this episode of eCommerce Australia, Ryan Martin sits down with the husband-and-wife founders to unpack how they walked away from the traditional wholesale/indent model, why The Iconic marketplace became their unlikely proving ground, and how COVID-era demand for jewellery (turns out that's the only accessory that shows up on a Zoom call) turned a side category into 80% of the business.

For Shopify merchants and ecommerce operators thinking about opening a physical store, this conversation is a masterclass in getting the sequencing right.

Aaron was convinced retail was dead, until their "little experiment" Bondi Beach store proved the opposite, creating a measurable halo effect that lifts online sales in a 10km radius around every new location. They talk candidly about the tech stack behind a fast-scaling DTC ecommerce brand (Starshipit for fulfilment, Okendo for reviews, Profit Peak for profitability data, and an in-house team now "vibe coding" their own dashboards), how they balance agency support with in-house performance marketing, and why their content strategy has swung from polished campaign shoots to raw, iPhone-shot, Tolstoy-powered video that converts better than the highly produced stuff ever did.

There's also a genuinely useful nugget for anyone running ecommerce SEO or content strategy: Kerryn and Aaron explain how customer questions from their retail staff (about materials, tarnish, sizing, warranty) are becoming the seed for on-site content designed to capture organic search traffic, a simple but underused move for any Shopify or ecommerce brand trying to turn support questions into search-optimised product and FAQ pages that rank.

Add in an unfiltered take on celebrity gifting (Margot Robbie, Hailey Bieber and Dua Lipa have all been photographed in Arms of Eve pieces, without a single paid placement), a calculated US relaunch planned for June 2027, and hard-won lessons on hiring, culture and staying "even" as leaders, and this is one of the most tactical founder conversations on ecommerce, retail expansion and DTC brand-building we've featured on the show

About Arms of Eve:Arms of Eve is an Australian jewellery, accessories and resortwear brand founded by Kerryn and Aaron Langer. Starting out selling at local markets, the brand has grown into a multi-channel ecommerce and retail business with nine stores nationwide (growing to 13 by the end of 2026), a wholesale presence in boutiques across Australia, and a fast-growing direct-to-consumer online store.

• Website: https://armsofeve.com/
• Instagram: @armsofeve

Resources & tools mentioned:

• Starshipit: ecommerce shipping and fulfilment platform
• Okendo: customer reviews platform
• Profit Peak: ecommerce profitability analytics
• Tolstoy: shoppable, native video for ecommerce sites
• The Iconic: Australian fashion marketplace

Follow eCommerce Australia for more conversations with Australia's leading ecommerce and Shopify founders on growth, retail strategy, and building direct-to-consumer brands. Subscribe on Spotify and leave a review to help more ecommerce and Shopify store owners find the show.

Will North has led marketing and commercial functions at brands including Meshki, PE Nation, AJE and Superdry UK.

For the last two and a half years he's been at Kulani Kinis, the Australian swimwear brand doing 75-80% of its revenue in the US.

He joined Ryan Martin from Remarkable Digital to talk conversion rate optimisation, attribution, TikTok Shop and the marketing shifts defining 2026.

The Kulani Kinis story. Founded 11.5 years ago by Sydney couple Danny and Alex as a side hustle, the brand found its footing in the US when Alex transferred to EY in LA. Today the US makes up 75-80% of revenue; Australia is just 7%.

CRO is a business metric, not a digital one. Will's Retail Fest keynote ("I Lost the Company $15 Million and Got a Promotion") explored why every untested change to your site is a potential loss. His starting point: survey customers who've purchased and subscribers who haven't, distil 3-4 themes, then run ideas through an effort-versus-upside matrix before testing.

Context kills best practice. Adding "some items in your cart may sell out" drove nearly $2M in annualised revenue at a streetwear brand. The same test lost revenue at a women's fashion brand, because scarcity signalling made shoppers worry about wearing the same thing as everyone else. Customer psychology differs by brand.

The thank you page question nobody asks. Immediately post-purchase, ask: "Was there anything that almost stopped you from buying?" Customers who've just converted will tell you exactly what's broken.

Attribution in 2026. No one does it perfectly. Will's approach is to define the role of each channel across the seasonal cycle and measure a marketing efficiency ratio (spend divided by sales) as a flow, not a fixed weekly target.

TikTok Shop. 72% of fashion revenue on the platform flows through affiliate and creator. The new customer rate is 95%. Will visited the US team last month and TikTok Shop is a major focus for Kulani Kinis in FY27.

What you say now matters as much as how you look. LLMs are changing discovery. If a brand has no content narrative, it won't show up when someone asks an AI for a recommendation. Will's take: GEO, AIO and SEO are all just SEO.

Not all impressions are equal. Kulani Kinis ran direct mail via Post Pilot at a $600 CPM and it outperformed. A postcard on a fridge is a very different impression to a feed scroll-past.

In-person events. A $40,000 Maldives brand trip generated the equivalent of $140,000 in media value from creator and customer content.

Collaborations. A LinkedIn conversation between brand experience leads led to a Lounge Underwear collab that spiked Kulani Kinis' German sales in July 2024. Go in with clear objectives or don't bother.

"Conversion is a business metric. It's not an e-com metric."

"There is no such thing as best practice with CRO. Every brand's customer psychology is different."

"You've got to sell it twice: on site and when they get it, otherwise it's coming back."

• Kulani Kinis: kulanikinis.com
• Post Pilot: postpilot.com
• Lounge Underwear: loungeunderwear.com
• Pura Vida Bracelets: puravidabracelets.com
• Retail Fest

About Will North:

Head of Commercial & Performance at Kulani Kinis. Previously held senior roles at Meshki, PE Nation, AJE and Superdry UK. Retail Fest speaker and Oria Award nominee (International Conqueror).