Add To Cart is brought to you by
Were you forwarded this email? Sign up here to get the next edition.
I've been guilty of jumping to the creative before doing the work. Most of us are. There's a lot more fun in talking about slogans and photoshoots than in spending two months in a spreadsheet figuring out whether you're even chasing the right customer. But the ugly truth is that most beautiful brands usually start somewhere unglamorous.
Jess Hatzis co-founded frank body on a $10k investment and helped build it to a $100M brand over 13 years. Since stepping back, she's rebranded Betts, built For Scale, and continues to run Willow & Blake. Rosa's back this week, too. Between the three of us, we covered customer personas, eventing as an influencer strategy, and the specific calls behind the Betts turnaround that nobody wanted to make.
Cheers
Bushy
EPISODE CHEAT SHEET
⏭️ SKIP TO THE GOOD BITS
Why Jess left Frank Body after 13 years (03:06)
The 134-year-old brand that needed a founder mindset (04:24)
The same problems showing up in every consumer brand (14:44)
Why age-based customer personas are broken (15:33)
Two months in data before writing a single brief (20:37)
Killing school shoes, cutting 700 SKUs, and the calls nobody wanted to make (22:10)
Eventing over influencer deals: the math that makes it obvious (33:05)
One-way doors vs two-way doors: when to swing big and when to experiment (37:55)
💬 QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I don't believe in 'I feel' and 'I believe' sitting in a boardroom. It should be: the numbers show us or the research shows us. Therefore, here is the recommendation."
🧠 THE BIG LESSON
The Numbers Come Before the Brief
Most brand rebuilds start in the wrong place. The logo comes before the logic. The campaign brief arrives before anyone has spent real time understanding who the business is actually serving, and at what cost. Jess Hatzis has done this enough times to know exactly where that leads.
Step 1: Live in the data before you brief anyone
Before Jess wrote a single word of copy for the Betts rebrand, she spent two months pulling apart the business data. Purchase rates. Full price trade performance. Channel mix. What she found was a brand almost entirely dependent on one channel, attracting price-sensitive customers with low loyalty and a low repeat purchase rate. The numbers told her the brand was chasing the wrong customer. Everything downstream changed from that single finding.
"I've always considered that to be the really big commercial difference at Willow & Blake. Our recommendations are built on insight, not just me going: this looks nice, let's go in that direction."
Step 2: Make the calls nobody wants to make
Once the data told her who the right customer was, the next step was clearing the path to reach them. For Betts, that meant removing school shoes, cutting men's, and halving the SKU count from roughly 700 products down to 250-300. These were not incremental tweaks. They were decisions that directly contradicted 134 years of brand history. The case for each one was built entirely on what the numbers said about which customer had the most long-term value for the business.
"You can't do everything and brands that try to do everything just do an average job of all of those things."
Step 3: Build the creative from the insight, not the other way around
Only after the strategic foundation was set did the creative work begin. Betts went from irrelevant to TikTok-viral within six months of the October 2024 launch because the creative had a clear brief, a specific customer, and a direction anchored in both heritage and the insight that Gen Z has a genuine appetite for things that carry meaning. According to research from Tracksuit and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, most purchase decisions are made by people who are not actively in-market. Brands that focus purely on performance miss the compounding value of building with future buyers. Data-first brand strategy addresses that directly.
"AI can't do the big strategic thinking for you and it doesn't offer human insight. Human insight is what makes a brand really strong and honourable and distinctive."
The underlying principle is that the creative that actually lands is not the output of a good mood board. It is the output of someone willing to do the unglamorous work in the months before the brief is written.
✏️ ECOMMERCE ACTION TIPS
Research beyond your own category before briefing your brand strategy. Jess's research for Betts included annual reports, comment sections, and reviews from entirely different industries because your customer doesn't live in a single category. (~23:37)
Define which customer you're prepared to lose before you build an acquisition strategy. The Betts turnaround required deliberately walking away from a price-sensitive, low-loyalty cohort to reach a customer with higher long-term value. (~21:46)
Replace individual influencer deals with a single well-run event. One event with the right people in the room costs roughly a tenth of individual fees, generates more content, and builds real relationships rather than one-off posts. (~36:03)
Test new brand directions in reversible channels first (social, email, performance) before committing to permanent identity changes. Using two-way doors means a wrong call doesn't cost a brand, it just costs a campaign. (~39:53)
If your brand is more than two years old, pull apart your purchase rate and full price trade data before briefing any agency or consultant. Jess's first two months at Betts were spent doing nothing else, and it changed every recommendation that followed. (~20:37)
🎧 OTHER EPS YOU MIGHT LIKE
Do Enough People Hate Your Brand? Why Playing It Safe Costs You | EP595
Jess's Betts data revealed a brand with no clear point of view and an audience that wasn't particularly loyal. Nick Gray makes the case for why real distinctiveness requires making choices about who you're not for, and why trying to appeal to everyone is the fastest way to mean nothing.
The Loyalty Trap: James Hurman on What Really Drives Ecommerce Growth | EP582
The whole Betts methodology was built around acquiring customers who buy more than once at full price. James Hurman makes the case for why ecommerce brands need to stop optimising purely for the customer ready to buy today, and start building demand with the people who will buy next year.
Matt Herbert from Tracksuit: Running the Brand Marathon | EP309
Jess spent months living in Betts data before writing a brief. Matt Herbert makes the case for why brands need to measure awareness and consideration the same way they measure performance, so brand investment is never the first thing cut when budgets tighten.
💬 CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
This episode raises a few questions worth debating: Is a data-first brand strategy realistic for teams that don't have two months to spare before their next campaign? How do you decide which customer segment is worth walking away from? And is eventing genuinely scalable as a channel for smaller brands? Jump in below.
Not a member yet? It's free to join. 600+ ecommerce operators talking shop every week.
