 | Episode Cheat Sheet |
EP662
14 SEP 2026
54 MIN LISTEN
Norm Douglas
CEO, Conni
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THE TL;DR
Conni is a leading reusable incontinence brand. Privately owned and profitable out of North Geelong since 2003.
Most of its customers wish they had never had to buy its products. So Norm sells in plain language with no innuendo.
He runs the Australian store on a customised platform. He wants to own the data behind every decision.
Orders arrive in five different ways. DTC, wholesale, grocery, overseas distributors and the NDIS.
| Watch the Full Episode |
| From Bushy |
It’s very easy to follow the same ecommerce playbook as everyone else. So I always love when I chat to people with more complicated business models and ecosystems they’ve had to design for themselves. That’s what this week is. Norm Douglas runs Conni and calls himself the “lone wolf” of ecommerce. I don’t agree. I enjoyed his challenge of traditional setups and his growth strategy for one of the most undesirable products you can sell. I had to hold back from too many pee and poop puns though.
CHEERS, BUSHY
| 01 Skip To The Good Bits |
Tap any time code anywhere in this cheat sheet and the episode opens on YouTube at that exact moment.
| What Conni actually sells | 4:23 |
| The stigma retailers still hide and how Google flags the ads | 9:00 |
| Push versus pull: marketing to new mums and sudden need | 13:57 |
| The channel that still performs best | 17:22 |
| Why Norm stayed on a custom build he owns | 21:38 |
| Building tech before you need it and the wholesale traffic light | 28:41 |
| Range breadth and fifteen years in the Aldi specials aisle | 39:10 |
| Why you never check your numbers every day | 43:24 |
“The vast majority of our customers wished they never had to buy our products.”
— NORM DOUGLAS | Conni
| 02 The Big Lesson |
STOP CORRECTING THE CUSTOMER. TEACH THE SYSTEM TO INTERPRET THEM.
Conni takes orders five different ways and none of them arrives in the same way. Norm never tries to force his customers down one standard path. Instead, he built systems to transform the order once it comes through.
RULE 01 34:18
Read the order they meant
A large distributor has ordered by the carton for years when they actually mean a single unit. Conni never corrected them and changed its own system to read the order properly.
Why get in their way? There's one in particular who has always ordered a particular product from us. They always order it by the carton. They send us a carton. We know they mean one. What do we do? Do we argue with them, or do we just change our systems to match them? And that's what we've done.
RULE 02 31:44
Put the intelligence where the mess arrives
Wholesale orders arrive as PDFs and get digitised on the way in. A green, amber and red traffic light then grades every order on price and SKU and stock before it reaches the warehouse floor.
We also use what we used to call fuzzy logic. We now use AI to do this, but we've actually had it running pretty well for about five years. It's a methodology of looking at a SKU and trying to guess what they actually mean if it's wrong.
RULE 03 37:49
Fix the mistake before they make it
Conni's underwear carries a waterproof membrane and does not stretch like normal undies. Almost everyone buys a size too small out of habit so the site tells them to size up.
Our underwear has a polyurethane membrane in it that allows it to be waterproof. Underwear of that nature doesn't stretch as much as the undies you'll buy from wherever. So the vast majority of people buy undies too small for themselves. They do it all their life, because undies stretch. So what we have to do is tell customers to size up.
The upside is that by the time an order gets to dispatch, it has been streamlined. A Conni packer enters one field on an order. The box dimensions. Everything else has already been fixed upstream. It’s worth considering how many times a week you ask a customer to do something a particular way purely because it suits your back end. Could you fix your back end instead?
$2,739
The daily online revenue Norm chased to get Conni to $1m a year. A yearly goal is hard to act on. A daily one tells you where you are constantly.
| 03 Steal These Tactics |
1
Adapt your creative to what the platform will actually allow, not what you'd prefer to show. Google flagged Conni's underwear ads as nudity, so the brand shoots torsos, not faces, and drops the imagery it can't run. 11:53
2
Don't build a channel your team can't maintain, borrow one that already exists. Conni skips the on-site subscription and instead sends a pre-filled reorder link, while Amazon FBA handles the subscription for the customers who want it. 36:14
3
Wait three or four days before judging a campaign's numbers. Checking daily performance gets you switching off spend that was actually working. 45:41
4
Don't dismiss the channel that looks old-fashioned if your customer still trusts it. One of Conni's wholesale partners still runs a sizeable mail order catalogue business, decades after "ecommerce" became the newer word for the same thing. 8:05
5
Fight for the placement once, then defend it every year. Conni won its spot in Aldi's specials aisle fifteen years ago and treats keeping it as an annual re-pitch. 40:11
| 04 The Stack |
Conni was early to ads inside ChatGPT. Norm spends very little and is not measuring it yet. He thinks the Australian results are still geo-confused.
The open-source engine behind Conni's Australian store. Norm self-hosts it as the front end of his own data system.
Handles shipping and fulfilment once an order has cleared Conni's internal checks.
Conni's primary stock management system. It sits behind the storefront and feeds inventory back into everything else.
Conni's payments provider. Norm is using its tools to build a subscription in a way that suits the business.
| 05 If This One Landed |
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