Unfinished Business

Tiffany Chao left an 11-year career to go all in on AURORO, the fine jewelry brand she started with $10,000. A year in, she couldn't pay herself, so she did what she thought a real brand was supposed to do. She hired a consultant, built a collection for retailers, and stepped back from social. Then the holidays, the biggest season of the year, never came.

So she threw out the playbook and went back to her own taste, her own stones, and her own camera. AURORO went from $550K in sales to $1M the next year, and today 67% of its customers come back to buy again, many of them sending thousands of dollars for pieces they've only ever seen on a screen.

Alex and Lee dig into how she built that kind of trust online, how she prices custom pieces when the price of gold changes every week, whether a couture trade show is worth the capital, and how she runs the business alongside her co-founder.

In this episode:

- Why following a consultant's retail playbook stalled her first full year

- How she earned enough trust for clients to pay $6,000 by Venmo

- Pricing custom jewelry when gold moves every week, and why she now buys it by the kilo

- What a 67% repeat rate means for customer acquisition

- Couture trade show or direct to consumer: where the capital should go

- Getting comfortable on camera as an extroverted introvert

- Why she introduced lab-grown stones, and where she won't use them

This episode is brought to you by:

Structured Agency: Where strategic guidance meets strong execution. Structured is a growth agency for DTC e-commerce brands, bringing paid media, lifecycle marketing, creative strategy, and CRO together into one integrated system built for profitable growth. Learn more and request a free audit at structured.agency/unfinishedbusiness

Horatio: Horatio builds dedicated, AI-enabled customer support and back-office teams for fast-growing e-commerce, fintech, and healthtech brands. Every team is trained on your brand's voice and workflows, so you can scale support without sacrificing quality. Unfinished Business listeners get $2,000 in launch credits at hirehoratio.com/unfinishedbusiness

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Follow AURORO on all platforms: @auroroworld, auroroworld.com

Chapter Timestamps

00:00 Cold open
01:19 Leaving an 11-year career, then not paying herself
02:05 Hiring a jewelry business consultant
06:51 When the holidays didn't happen
08:51 Building a community on Instagram
10:05 How clients trust a $6,000 Venmo payment
11:56 Couture trade show or direct to consumer
17:35 Pricing when gold changes every week
20:43 From $550K to $1M
23:05 How many customers come back
26:34 Running the company with a co-founder
28:11 Showing the messy side on social
32:21 Designing new pieces, stone first
36:01 The icons and her bestsellers
38:08 Lab-grown stones

Hulken made millions on Black Friday 2025, and Alex and Lee are already planning 2026 differently. Their best campaign last year went only to existing customers, and the Black Friday email that beat their Cyber Monday send had no design at all.

In this solo episode, Alex and Lee open up the Black Friday playbook for a brand that's almost always short on inventory: who gets the deepest discount, which products never go on sale, why their salesy content flopped, and why they'd rather sell a bag at full price in December than on sale in November.

In this episode:

- Why existing customers got 30% off when new customers never will

- Not all sales are created equal: protecting margin when inventory is tight

- The salesy BFCM graphics that bombed, and the reels that actually converted

- Early access by email and SMS a week before Black Friday

- The plain text Happy Thanksgiving email that outperformed Cyber Monday

- Building an SMS list from scratch with Structured

- Why the first half of December brings their highest margin sales

- How they decide whether a new product gets discounted

Make sure you subscribe to Unfinished Business for the exact playbooks on how to run and scale your DTC business.

This episode is brought to you by:

Structured Agency: Where strategic guidance meets strong execution. Structured is a growth agency for DTC e-commerce brands, bringing paid media, lifecycle marketing, creative strategy, and CRO together into one integrated system built for profitable growth. Learn more and request a free audit at structured.agency/unfinishedbusiness

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:12 Two months out from Black Friday

01:47 The best campaign of 2025: VIP early access

02:42 Why existing customers get the bigger discount

03:25 Discounting with limited inventory

05:13 Not all sales are created equal

06:24 Don't change your content strategy for BFCM

07:46 Early access a week before Black Friday

08:40 The plain text email that beat Cyber Monday

10:07 How Structured built our SMS list

12:13 Full price in December over discounts in November

13:15 The first two weeks of December

13:39 Know your numbers

14:15 Discounting new products

Kevin Chen (sells a red light therapy helmet that can cost more than a thousand dollars, takes months to buy, and takes six months to show results. Every DTC playbook says to start with a $30 impulse buy. Kevin went the other way, and he'll be the first to tell you he wouldn't recommend it. It started with his dad's quit-smoking laser clinic, a business where helping customers meant never seeing them again, and a last-ditch pivot into hair loss with the family business one bad bet away from shutting down.

Alex and Lee ask Kevin how you sell an expensive product in a category where "you're snake oil until you're proven." He walks through listing on Amazon six months before he had a website, calling his first 100 customers one by one for testimonials, the ABCD framework he uses to build trust in every ad and email, why he turned down wholesale deals that later sank a competitor, and why he says Costco pays him to advertise to 15 million households.

In this episode:

- Why his dad's quit-smoking clinic was a business you couldn't win

- Starting on Amazon before having a website, and what his first 100 customers were worth

- The ABCD trust framework for health and beauty brands

- Why owning your price and your channels beats fast distribution

- How to market a product with a 2 to 3 month sales cycle

- The Costco math: huge reach, thin margins, and the highest return rate of any channel

- Why he keeps customer service fully in-house

- The marketing playbook he says every 0-to-9-figure brand is running in 2026

- His "who, not how" rule for leading a 100-person team

Subscribe to Unfinished Business for candid conversations with founders who've actually done it.

This episode is brought to you by:

Structured Agency: Where strategic guidance meets strong execution. Structured is a growth agency for DTC e-commerce brands, bringing paid media, lifecycle marketing, creative strategy, and CRO together into one integrated system built for profitable growth. Learn more and request a free audit at https://structured.agency/unfinishedbusiness

Horatio: Horatio builds dedicated, AI-enabled customer support and back-office teams for fast-growing e-commerce, fintech, and healthtech brands. Every team is trained on your brand's voice and workflows, so you can scale support without sacrificing quality. Unfinished Business listeners get $2,000 in launch credits at https://hirehoratio.com/unfinishedbusiness

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:10 Why launch a high-priced product?

02:11 His dad's quit-smoking laser clinic

04:21 Pivoting with no runway left

05:51 Owning your price and your channels

10:23 Selling on Amazon before having a website

11:13 Calling the first 100 customers

13:42 The ABCD trust framework

15:29 Building a 20,000-member Facebook group

18:11 Selling a 1,800 dollar product vs. a 30 dollar one

26:32 Getting into Costco

29:28 The real cost of Costco

34:12 AI and the company brain

45:46 Who, not how

52:59 The 2026 marketing playbook

Hulken pays Structured $8,500 a month. In Q4 last year, the email and SMS channel Structured runs for them drove more than $3.3 million. Even in a dead summer month with barely any inventory, it still brought in over $540,000.

Belynda Murray is the retention strategist at Structured who has run Hulken's email and SMS for the past two years. She sits down with Alex and Lee to open up the playbook: how Hulken went from 4 to 6 emails a month to 10, the two numbers that tell you you're sending too much, why VIPs got a steeper discount than anyone else, and how unengaged subscribers get saved for Black Friday instead of deleted.

In this episode:

- The ROI math behind $8,500 a month and $3.3M in Q4

- Why Hulken sends 10 emails a month, and the two metrics that tell you it's too many

- The spam complaint rate she keeps under 0.01%, and why she'd rather see unsubscribes

- How early access for VIPs became the top campaign of Black Friday

- 11 days, 17 sends, and a quarter that finished up 36% year over year

- The plain-text email from Alex that turned into a new series

- Why a $10 welcome offer beat 10% off

- Red flags when hiring an email agency, including how they use AI

Subscribe to Unfinished Business for candid conversations with founders who've actually done it.

This episode is brought to you by:

Structured Agency: Where strategic guidance meets strong execution. Structured is a growth agency for DTC e-commerce brands, bringing paid media, lifecycle marketing, creative strategy, and CRO together into one integrated system built for profitable growth. Learn more and request a free audit at structured.agency/unfinishedbusiness

Horatio: Horatio builds dedicated, AI-enabled customer support and back-office teams for fast-growing e-commerce, fintech, and healthtech brands. Every team is trained on your brand's voice and workflows, so you can scale support without sacrificing quality. Unfinished Business listeners get $2,000 in launch credits at hirehoratio.com/unfinishedbusiness

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:36 Meet Belynda from Structured

02:09 The play that changed Hulken's email and SMS

04:21 Rethinking VIPs for a bag brand

05:33 How Hulken landed on 10 emails a month

07:41 The two metrics that say you're sending too much

09:33 When customers are ready for a second purchase

11:07 Building SMS from scratch

14:12 Why $10 off beat 10% off

16:15 Black Friday end to end

18:21 11 days, 17 sends, up 36%

20:35 $8,500 a month, $3.3M back

26:27 The plain-text email from Alex

29:18 Agency red flags, including AI

33:16 Klaviyo and deliverability

37:38 Winning back unengaged subscribers

42:22 Why month-to-month works

46:32 Rapid fire: best and worst emails

50:14 Does send time matter?

Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar posted about a pickle company every day for months before they had a single jar to sell. The first videos were trends, and the trends flopped in the way that matters: views came in, followers didn't.

So they changed the format to two women documenting the build, and people started tuning in like it was a TV show. That series became Good Girl Snacks, the brand behind Hot Girl Pickles. Erewhon, Whole Foods nationwide, Forbes 30 Under 30, a $3M seed, and zero dollars of paid media until a few weeks ago.

Alex and Lee go past the founding story and into the machine. What posting every day actually buys you, how a comment section and a packaging breakdown built the community, why Whole Foods made them redesign the jar, how three weeks of retail data closed a funding round in a week, and how two best friends split a company between them without a real fight.

In this episode:

- Why trends get views and never get you followers

- The hook that turned a pickle company into a daily show people watched

- What $0 customer acquisition really costs, and when it stops working

- The three different jobs your feed, reels, and stories should each be doing

- Why Instagram outperformed TikTok for a brand built on raw video

- How organic cucumbers and a single growing season forced a fundraise

- Why they keep every hate comment instead of deleting it

This episode is brought to you by:

Structured Agency: Where strategic guidance meets strong execution. Structured is a growth agency for DTC e-commerce brands, bringing paid media, lifecycle marketing, creative strategy, and CRO together into one integrated system built for profitable growth. Learn more and request a free audit at structured.agency/unfinishedbusiness

Horatio: Horatio builds dedicated, AI-enabled customer support and back-office teams for fast-growing e-commerce, fintech, and healthtech brands. Every team is trained on your brand's voice and workflows, so you can scale support without sacrificing quality. Unfinished Business listeners get $2,000 in launch credits at hirehoratio.com/unfinishedbusiness

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Follow Good Girl Snacks on all platforms: @goodgirlsnacks, goodgirlsnacks.com

Chapter Timestamps

00:00 Cold open
02:30 Posting before there was a product
04:17 Splitting a company between best friends
08:22 The first hire and the outside help
13:15 The marketing stack, and Instagram vs TikTok
16:11 $0 CAC and moving product off real shelves
17:29 Designing a jar for the shelf
22:54 Why posting every day sells product
25:10 The hook that broke them out
30:02 The Forbes comments
33:08 Turning cucumber disasters into content
35:06 Marketing to Gen Z
36:30 Buy into a world, not a product
37:35 Why they raised, and closing a round in a week
42:04 The weekly social plan
47:02 The scariest part is starting

For most of their careers, Alex and Lee believed a bigger team meant a stronger company. Now they believe the opposite, and they've got the receipts: $50M in revenue last year with seven full-time employees and payroll running at just 4%. In this solo episode, they make the case that in the AI era, headcount has flipped from a status symbol into a warning sign.

They break down what they call the "minimum viable company," where maximum revenue per employee beats a swollen org chart every time. The model runs on three layers: lean in-house leadership, a network of agencies for specialized work, and an AI layer where every team member has their own assistant handling the project management that used to go to junior hires and interns. The engine underneath it all is a company "brain" built in Notion that their agents plug into.

In this episode:

- Why Alex and Lee now read "I have 30 employees" as a sign a company is doing it wrong

- The exact numbers behind their claim: $50M, seven people, 4% payroll

- How the AI layer replaced the junior hires and interns they used to rely on

- Why they built their company "brain" in Notion, and how their AI agents plug into it

- The hiring rule they live by: wait until you literally can't, then demand a clear ROI

- Why speed, not headcount, is the real driver of winning (and losing)

- The honest downsides of a tiny team, from taking out the trash to dropped balls

Subscribe to Unfinished Business for candid conversations with founders who've actually done it.

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Katie Lefkowitz was a lifelong Snickers fanatic when a colon cancer scare and a doctor's orders to cut sugar should have ended that relationship. Instead, she went home and started experimenting with date-based caramel in her own kitchen.

Katie is the founder of Harken, the better-for-you candy brand now in nearly 7,000 stores including Walmart, Costco, Sprouts, and Kroger, with Whole Foods launching this fall. Before Harken, she was COO at CAULIPOWER, the original cauliflower-crust pizza brand, and that food-world network is how a printed-out prototype with stickers on it turned into Harken's first national retail deal.

In this episode of Unfinished Business, she walks through how that deal happened (including a calendar invite with no explanation attached), why she skipped the usual direct-to-consumer playbook entirely, and what she's learned running a five-person team through a Costco launch.

Our biggest takeaways:

- How a colon cancer scare turned into a national candy brand

- The unmarked calendar invite that got Harken into Walmart

- Why she walked into her first retail pitch with fake, printed-out packaging

- The case for skipping DTC and going straight to retail

- Running investor relationships through a monthly two-hour office hours block

- Why Harken is overhauling its packaging in Q3, and what drove the change

- The fiber stat she says is moving more product than any ad

Subscribe to Unfinished Business for more unfiltered founder stories. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Every episode, Alex and Lee talk about how fast Hulken is growing. This one is about what that growth actually costs.

For the first time, they get candid about the messy middle of scaling a bootstrapped, vertically integrated brand: chronically out of stock on their bestsellers, rerouting inventory away from their own website to protect retail relationships, and discovering that the model that built them is now the thing holding them back. They get into why being sold out can be both a brand asset and a real liability, why their lowest reviews have nothing to do with the product, and how they're testing new products outside their own factories to keep the core team focused.

It's an honest, mid-sprint debrief on omnichannel growing pains, told from inside the company, with no VC safety net and a Q4 they can't fully announce yet.

What you'll take away:

- Why "we're always sold out" is a harder problem than it sounds

- How they decide which channel gets limited inventory when there isn't enough to go around

- Why retail partners now come before their own DTC customers

- The real reason great products still get three-star reviews

- How tariffs and shipping costs reshaped their inventory decisions

- Why they're launching new products with outside manufacturers

- How they're planning 2027 while fighting to stay in stock this yearNew episodes of Unfinished Business drop weekly. Follow on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts so you don't miss the next one.

Justin Allen co-founded TUSHY a decade ago to solve a problem most Americans didn't know they had. No roadmap, no comparable brand, no playbook… just a bet that if you made toileting joyful enough, people would come around. They did.

Now, ten years in, Justin is asking harder questions: What does brand even mean when the media landscape has completely fractured? How do you build creative at scale without losing what makes you you? And when do you trust the data, and when do you just flip the table and build?

In this episode:

- How TUSHY created a category from scratch and what the "toothpaste out of the tube moment" actually means for retention

- Why Justin went "kicking and screaming" into founder content and what made him change his mind

- The performance creative orchestra: what it is, why volume isn't enough, and what strategic diversity in creative actually looks like

- What brand meant in 2015 vs. what it means today and why Justin has stopped pretending he knows

- Learning velocity vs. just "moving fast"

- When failure is an option, and when (with plumbing under pressure 24/7) it absolutely isn't

- His take on retail, TikTok Shop, and how to innovate for a channel instead of force-feeding itSubscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week.

Two things have been true at Hulken since year one: no dropshipping, and only say yes to collabs that actually earn it. On the eve of launching their most complex product development yet (a full pattern collab with Posh Peanut), Alex and Lee sit down to work out, on camera, what they actually think now.

This is a solo episode. No guest filter, no rehearsed takes. At $50M, the playbook isn't finished. The most honest thing you can say is that we’re still breaking rules we set when we were smaller.

If you're building a product brand somewhere between "we're figuring this out" and "we've figured this out," this is the real version of that conversation.

What's in this episode:

- The reason Alex and Lee said no to dropshipping for years (and the exact conditions that finally changed their minds)

- Alex's 3 non-negotiables for every brand collab

- Why Lee won't say yes to any retailer that won't buy inventory upfront

- How the Beautyblender collab landed Hulken backstage at the Grammys and the Oscars (the bag, not them)

- The "position of power" test that tells you when your brand is actually ready to dropship

Subscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.