Instead of our normal broadcast, we’re doing something a little different. Will and Tim spend 30 mins chatting about the past week’s most interesting eComm (and beyond) news. Think Pivot meets Morning Brew pod meets The Rest Is History.

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We discuss Tash’s transition from journalism to agency world, opportunities for brands in the current economic climate, why getting back to basics is and always will be a good strategy, building and fostering a community, the challenges of sweat equity and why one needs to take responsibility for their own personal brand.

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We discuss the advantages of starting a brand with agency experience, balancing DTC and retail, why being on draught is the holy grail, the challenges and advantages of finding early adopters, the value prop to pubs for non alc options and why focussing on the boring stuff is a key ingredient to startup success.

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We discuss why Shopify POS was an important service in the early days at Kubix, a day in the life of an agency Ops Director, why brands are likely already using AI but don’t know it, navigating the tech partner landscape and the most challenging aspect of the current economic climate; hiring.

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We discuss the beauty of building and selling something you enjoy, the pros and cons of bootstrapping, the similarity in challenges at each stage of the agency life cycle, value-based pricing, the best uses of AI in an agency context, the importance of cultural fit between a buyer and seller and what life looks like after an exit 🚀

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We discuss how a challenging personal period and extensive experience in the FMCG space led to the creation of the brand, the power of combining beauty and emotional well-being, why barriers to entry in the DTC space are both a blessing and a curse, the pros and cons of celebrity-backed brands and what Namrata is most excited about in 2023.

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We discuss what skills he acquired after the Peoplevox acquisition, why becoming a trusted advisor is an excellent sales tactic, what a dark stack it is and why it’s important, the power of eCommerce tech curation, why software sales experience is an advantage when advising eCommerce brands, balancing work and life and Ollie’s secret business book recommendation 🤫

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We discuss how a last flight out of London at the start of the COVID lockdown kick-started the brand, the advantages of crowd-sourced product development, why embracing a COVID-enforced D2C strategy was so powerful, the process of moving from D2C only to a multi-channel player, using D2C data to inform your retail strategy, why not spending any money on acquisition until the eComm basics were in play was a smart move, why sticking to 0% alcohol, whilst difficult, has been a key ingredient for success and their five year mission to build the world's next great beer business.

We discuss why being exposed to her family fashion business was a stepping stone to a corporate career, the importance of personal values alignment when making career choices, the untapped potential of Web3, Sprint’s investment criteria and process, the current state of financial markets and central bank strategy and advice to anybody considering a pre seed, seed or Series A investment raise.

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We discuss the print services origins of Wiro, pivoting from a platform-agnostic model to Shopify only, his take on Commerce Components and why this additional enterprise layer is useful from a pricing perspective, the similarities of brand expectations and caution between COVID and now, using the current market volatility to their advantage when hiring, why partnerships with bigger agencies is a great growth initiative, why we need to enter a new era of hyper-realistic case studies and his go-to internal agency stack including Slack, ClickUp, Notion, Google Drive, Pipedrive, Quickbooks and Loom.