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Join Olly Hudson and Loukas Hambi in a laid-back yet insightful podcast, where we dive into the heart of D2C and e-commerce. With a combined experience of managing over £150 million in ad spend across Meta and TikTok and helping scale over 200 brands, we bring you a digestible blend of performance, operational, and creative wisdom.
50 Episodes
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Before pet food was “DTC sexy,” Pure Pet Food was scaling with zero ad spend. In this episode, Matt and Joe unpack how they built early traction through scrappy tactics like event pitching, awards, and PR - not Meta. With just a £300 council grant and no industry experience, they grew the brand to £1M+ in revenue without touching paid media. They share how that foundation led to VC backing and how they leveraged Meta spend, a custom subscription stack, and retention-first thinking to push p...
D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: https://tinyurl.com/4jfc8yej This mission-first ecom brand has fortified 250 million meals without compromising scale. In t...
D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: https://tinyurl.com/4jfc8yej CPMs climbing. Frequency spiking. CAC creeping up... If you’ve felt your Meta ads are “hitting...
D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: partners.wayflyer.com/soar In this episode, Olly sits down with Soar COO Sam to unpack the hard lessons from their early ex...
Black Friday isn’t just another sales weekend, for some DTC brands, it makes up 90% of yearly revenue. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Olly and Loukas break down the exact playbook that drove £45M in sales from £11.5M in Meta ad spend during Black Friday 2024 and reveal how they’ve evolved the strategy for 2025. You’ll learn: - The proven goal-setting framework to anchor your BFCM strategy - Offer strategies that actually convert without overcomplicating - Why creative iteration beats...
CRO is the growth lever 99% of DTC brands are ignoring. In this episode, Olly is joined by Dylan Ander, ex-agency owner, 2x eCom founder, and now the creator of Heatmap.com, the CRO tool quietly powering some of the highest-performing brands online. They break down the post-click strategies the top 1% are using to scale profitably and why your landing page might matter more than your creative. You’ll learn: - Why CRO is the real 80/20 of DTC growth - What metrics actually matter (hint: not ...
Most brands creatives live at the bottom of the funnel, battling over the same small pool of ready-to-buy customers. But 80% of our best-performing ads? They start much higher up. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas shares the exact internal training we run with our creative strategists on the hardest skill in paid social: storytelling. You’ll see how we script for unaware and problem aware audiences (the stages most brands ignore) and why they’re the biggest unlock for scaling cold tra...
Creative strategy is evolving, fast. And Alex Cooper is one of the sharpest minds pushing the industry forward. In this episode, we dig into the intersection of AI and creativity: how brands can scale content that actually converts, why performance-first storytelling matters now more than ever, and what the strategist’s role really looks like in 2025. Alex shares: - How AI is changing the business model of creative agencies - How AI is already reshaping the creative strategists role - What ...
What happens when you give Loukas two weeks, a cleared calendar, and unrestricted access to Google’s new Veo 3? You get a repeatable system for generating scroll-stopping ad hooks, without touching a camera. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas breaks down the exact prompt structure we now use within the agency group to turn ChatGPT JSON prompts into Veo 3-generated ads. Whether you’re scaling a best-performing hook or building a fresh creative system from scratch, this workflow will save...
Matt Kelly is back on the podcast, 9 months after his first episode, and a lot has changed. In this brutally honest conversation, Matt opens up about what it really feels like to scale a wellness brand beyond 8 figures. We talk: – Space Goods has gone from £3.5M to a projected £18M. – Growing from 1 to 15 employees in 9 months – Losing his sense of purpose as the business outgrows him – Why the rebrand feels terrifying (even after 5 months of work) – The reality of copycats launching before...
Back by popular demand, this solo episode is loaded with behind-the-scenes insights on what’s working right now in the DTC performance space. Olly and Loukas get brutally honest about what it actually takes to scale creative, fix performance plateaus, and build a winning system inside a high-growth agency. From a UGC format that’s driving £1M+ in spend, to the playbooks reshaping TikTok Shop and Meta, this one’s a deep dive into what’s moving the needle. They also unpack what’s really going...
In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas is joined by Ash Melwani, CMO and co-founder of Obvi, one of the most transparent and battle-tested operators in DTC. Ash breaks down the exact Meta strategy that took Obvi to $1M/month in revenue, and the moment it all fell apart. You’ll learn: - The Meta playbook Obvi used to scale with static ads - Why Meta performance collapsed overnight (and what they missed) - How Andromeda and health category crackdowns hit hard - Their pivot to creative volume...
In this episode, we sit down with Sam Matanle, co-founder of Batch LDN, the made-to-order menswear brand disrupting fashion’s broken model. Sam breaks down how Batch scaled 2.2x YoY, with 75% of revenue from one physical store and zero reliance on paid media or held stock. We cover: 1. Why fast fashion is financially broken and what works instead 2. The decision to bet big on retail instead of performance marketing 3. What happened when their Covent Garden store got robbed at 5am 4. Why 70%...
How do you handle it when your kitchen-table beauty brand suddenly pulls in £60K before lunch — and you’re still counting stock by hand? In this episode of D2C Diaries, we sit down with Ellie Carlile, the unstoppable founder behind By Ellie, the brand born from a personal skin struggle, a £2,000 investment, and a makeshift label operation in her mum’s garage. Ellie shares the raw, real journey of building a beauty brand that now sells every 10 minutes, is stocked in Sephora, and runs ...
Kristian Hansen (AKA, The Jeans Guy) didn’t plan to build a fashion brand. But after accidentally buying a pair of women’s jeans, he posted a TikTok asking, “Is this really what women deal with every day?” and woke up to 3 million views. Welcome to the story behind slø, a custom denim brand that’s rewriting every rule in DTC fashion. In this episode of DTC Diaries, Kristian takes us behind the scenes of a business that: - Offers 1170 sizes and manages over 900,000 SKUs - Sold $400,000...
In this episode, we sit down with Sarah Levinger, one of the most sought-after minds in consumer insights and behavioural strategy, to unpack the mental models behind performance creative. From understanding generational buying behaviour to why storytelling is outperforming old frameworks, Sarah shares a fresh perspective on what today’s top-performing DTC brands are doing differently. We cover: - Why “hook, body, CTA” is losing effectiveness - The 4 ad types every brand should be running (b...
What do snoods, Amazon, and Sunday League football have in common? They were the unlikely start of Frankie Thorogood’s DTC journey, one that turned a £100 Alibaba order into a 7-figure exit. In this episode, Frankie breaks down how he built not one, but THREE brands from the ground up, including Pott’d, now an 8-figure business. We dive into what most founders get wrong about scaling, the power of Amazon, how to build a brand around your life (not the other way around), and why most ...
D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Triple Whale. Triple Whale is our north star when it comes to data-driven decisions. Whether you're just starting out or running a 9-figure brand, this is the tool that will help you and your team see around corners and move faster. Visit www.triplewhale.com/d2cdiaries to learn more. What does it really take to build a 6-figure TikTok Live? In this episode, we're joined by Daisy, founder of Glow For It, a brand that’s become one of the biggest bre...
D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Triple Whale. Triple Whale is our north star when it comes to data-driven decisions. Whether you're just starting out or running a 9-figure brand, this is the tool that will help you and your team see around corners and move faster. Visit www.triplewhale.com/d2cdiaries to learn more. Rejected by all 6 Dragons, then hit £4.5M in sales. Lucie Macleod walked into the Dragon’s Den asking for £190k. She left with zero offers… and the internet on her side. I...
D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Triple Whale. Triple Whale is our north star when it comes to data-driven decisions. Whether you're just starting out or running a 9-figure brand, this is the tool that will help you and your team see around corners and move faster. Visit www.triplewhale.com/d2cdiaries to learn more. In this episode, Olly and Loukas break down the exact AI systems they’re using across creative, strategy, operations, and personal systems designed to reduce cognitive load,...
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