Operators

Should you open your own stores, or let the big retailers do the heavy lifting? 

Curtis Matsko (CEO, Portland Leather Goods), Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi), and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) go head to head on one of the biggest channel decisions a consumer brand will face. 

Curtis went from a spite-signed lease to 16 owned stores, while Mike turned a $9 million Sam’s Club bet into 10,000 wholesale doors. This episode breaks down these two different paths and what each model actually costs you in competency, capital, and control, why the wrong channel for your product category is almost impossible to recover from, and what private equity is really looking for when they come knocking on an omnichannel brand. 

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“Whoever can spend the most money is going to win.”

Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge), Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi), Jason Panzer (President, HexClad), and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) audit the first half of 2026. The focus is a sound ecommerce growth strategy for Q3 and Q4. No guests, no fluff. Just what worked, what blew up, and where they’re placing their bets.  

Amazon leads the conversation, with Sean up over 100% year over year on full assortment parity and Mike beating Liquid IV on a $4 blended CAC. Wholesale gets a harder look, with Sean holding a big-three PO and an 18-month runway to shelf. The group then pulls apart margin profile as a competitive weapon, why most consumable brands are quietly heading toward a reckoning, and what it takes to set a spending floor competitors cannot match.  

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“We built our iPhone before we built our Apple.”

How do you scale a hardware brand from $7M to $1.5B without chasing cheap CPMs?  

Jacob Zuppke (CEO, Whisker) joins Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) to break down how a self-cleaning litter box company became a $1.5B brand through US manufacturing, big creative swings, and a deliberate omnichannel strategy.

Jacob breaks down the marketing that fueled a decade of growth, including how TV outperformed Meta for years, and why Whisker held off Amazon until branded search volume made the case impossible to ignore. He also gets into the Whisker app, which logs 4.7 million cat weigh-ins per day, and why that software layer is where the brand’s omnichannel strategy gets its deepest competitive teeth.

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What does Ridge’s annual revenue growth 2025–2026 look like when you launch three new categories at once? 

Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge) joins Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) to get into what it looks like when a founder goes all-in on ecommerce product expansion while navigating new fatherhood, a tough M&A market, and a company that had to reinvent its growth story. 

Sean breaks down the Shark Ninja model. Ship fast, cut losers, never wait on a five-year roadmap. He walks through what made the Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) partnership succeed where a $4 million celebrity deal would have failed. Finally, he gets candid about fatherhood and the DTC acquisition market, where over 70% of deals since 2022 drew zero bids. 

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Is owning your own warehouse worth the headache? Or is it a siren song that will slow your growth? 

Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case and Lomi), Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern), and Curtis Matsko (CEO, Portland Leather Goods) dig into two of the most expensive decisions in ecommerce. Should you own your warehouse or outsource fulfillment to a 3PL? Can a founder ever truly step back from the company they built? 

They break down the owned warehouse versus 3PL debate, covering when flexibility beats cost savings, and why high-growth brands get burned by leases. From there, the conversation shifts to founder identity and succession, what Tim Cook’s Apple exit and Doug McMillon’s Walmart departure reveal about leadership transitions, and why the skills that built your company can quietly become the thing holding it back. 

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“We’ve never had anyone do four deals in 60 days.”

How do you build two nine-figure brands with no outside investors and a Facebook ads background as your only real edge? 

Zach Stuck, founder of Easy Street Brands and co-founder of Hollow and Mars Men, joins Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) and Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge) to break down how he turned an agency into an eight-figure exit and cold-started two nine-figure brands in opposite categories.  

Closing four deals in 60 days and an L Catterton round, Zach’s brand building decisions are laid on the table. He walks through nearly losing Homestead keeping Hollow alive, and lays out the ecommerce strategy for building from zero. He closes on what the holdco model requires to work and why most operators get it wrong.

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Is your incrementality testing giving you accurate data or are you burning budget on a broken signal?

Austin Harrison (CEO, Northbeam) joins Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge) and Katy Mimari (CEO, Caden Lane) to challenge the most repeated advice in ecommerce measurement: that longer tests are always better, holdouts are interchangeable, and incrementality alone is enough to make media decisions. They break down when a growing brand needs incrementality versus MTA, and how running tests inside a noisy environment can produce weeks of data worth nothing.

Sean pulls from Ridge’s own results to show how layering incrementality on top of MTA unlocked YouTube spend that in-platform data never would have justified, while Katy’s botched first test proves clean test conditions matter as much as the tool itself. They also dig into why moving up funnel on Meta is outperforming conversion campaigns at scale, and what separates the fastest-growing ecommerce brands in 2026 on creative.  

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“The obtaining of money is a lot easier than stewarding that money well.”

Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge), Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern), and Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) dig into one of the most-requested topics from listeners: how do owner-operators pay themselves? And what should they be aiming for? The hosts walkthrough salary benchmarks, distribution strategies, and the honest math behind building long-term wealth in consumer.  

The conversation goes deep on the tension between pulling money out now versus betting on the asset long-term, creating a business that outlasts you as CEO, and why chasing one big exit can be the very thing that ruins the deal. They also get personal by sharing what they’d tell their younger selves, the difference between financial security and financial freedom, and why the number you think you need is almost always wrong.  

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Tim Doyle, founder of Eucalyptus and incoming SVP International at Hims & Hers, joins hosts Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) for a wide-ranging conversation on building, scaling, and exiting one of the most ambitious DTC healthcare companies outside the US. 

Tim traces his path from political media buying in Australia to launching a multi-brand telehealth platform across multiple continents and the hard lessons in between. The conversation covers Tim’s “salary cap” approach to talent building, how Eucalyptus turned clinical outcomes into its most powerful marketing asset, and why he believes bold creative scripts remain the most underrated lever in consumer marketing.

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“The right person does nothing but print money.” 

Sean Frank, Matt Bertulli, Curtis Matsko, and Katy Mimari get into a heated debate on the hardest roles to hire in ecommerce. Nobody agrees. And that’s exactly the point. 

The conversation tears through five make-or-break positions: (1) head of product, (2) head of growth, (3) head of Amazon, (4) creative strategist, and (5) head of influencer. Along the way, they expose why CMO is the shortest-tenured C-suite role for a reason, how a wedding photographer became a top-performing CMO, and what it takes to lock down great talent before they go build something on their own. 

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