I deconstruct world-class brands to help build your brand. ✈️ Chief Brander @ eBrandBuilders | 📘 Amazon Best Seller | 🎙️  Host @ eBrandCast

Here’s why 90% of consumer brands fail in their first two years.

You're grinding non-stop, but your marketing feels like hitting a brick wall. You launch products, optimize funnels, run ads... and then some competitor undercuts your price by 10%. Game over.

This happens when you sell products without building a brand. Period.

Here's the question: Do you know your brand's core identity? Or do you hope people will buy your stuff because it's "better"?

I'm Neil, and I've cracked the code for building consumer brands that last.

After my MBA, I spent a decade managing $100M+ brands for Citibank, BMO, and Desjardins. I was the guy in the Brooks Brothers suit with the Herman Miller chair, climbing that corporate ladder in easy mode.

But I had an itch to build something from scratch.

So I resigned and jumped headfirst into eCommerce. And promptly failed. Twice.

I went from "Real Kobe Beef" to "Ramen" in 12 months. I was that entrepreneur batting at every shiny object - new Facebook ad techniques, conversion-optimized Shopify themes.

My daily mantra? Three simple letters: "W...T...F?"

But I'm no quitter. I dusted off my stretchy-waist tracksuit and went back to basics. From this failure, I distilled the 7Cs of branding, a process that helped me launch 3 DTC brands to a bona fide exit.

My biggest breakthrough came from studying 200+ DTC brands and asking: "What makes customers choose one brand over another when the products are virtually identical?"

The answer? Psychology. Not features. Not benefits. Pure psychological positioning.

In recent years, I've:
* Analyzed 200+ DTC brands
* Created 70+ brand breakdowns
* Developed the 7C Framework
* Published the Amazon bestseller "Checkout"
* Worked with Amazon, Starbucks, and Porsche

Here's what happens when you have a brand that sells itself:
* Your entire brand strategy fits on a single page, guiding all decisions
* Your marketing feels effortless because it speaks to your audience's core desires
* You wake up knowing exactly what to do to grow your brand

Here's how you can start building your distinctive brand today:

* If you have 3 minutes daily: Subscribe to my FREE Newsletter oneliner.io - One line, One visual, One lesson from top consumer brands.
* If you have a weekend: Get the One Pager BrandBuilder and follow my 7C framework to document your brand strategy on a single page.
* If you're ready for transformation: Join BrandBuilder X and let me guide you through building a brand that stands out, scales up, and eventually sells for a premium.

Let's talk: https://call.ebrandbuilders.com/strategy

Neil Verma

Jessie Healy

eCommerce Growth & Facebook Ads Marketing Consultant

Building DTC brands to 7 & 8 figures. Co-Founder of Webtopia. Founder of Ecomm Rockets. Podcast host - Ecommerce Impact. $50M spent on Meta & Google Ads. Ex-Etsy. 1X Exit.

My mission is to help you build a profitable, successful DTC brand through better advertising strategies.  Different stages of DTC growth need different types of support: Hitting your first 100k month is the first milestone. Putting in place the systems to get to $10M is a different kind of hard. For each stage in your eCommerce path, I have a solution for you. 

*Not Quite At 7 Figures - But Ambitious to Grow? Ecomm Rockets is my accelerator for early-stage eComm brands that provides growth marketing to get you to your first $100k months, for the next generation of iconic brands. A combination of mentorship, consultancy and teaching, this programme is perfect if you are ready to learn how to get the most out of your Meta and Google Ads. We can also include done-for-you ads management. 

*Established brand - keen to scale up? I have a range of consulting options and a network of partners, as well as very limited slots for full ads management - let me help you find the right fit for your brand's growth and Advertising challenges. 

Agency and Consulting: www.ecommgrowthcollective.com
Personal Website: www.jessiehealy.com

Accelerator: www.ecommrockets.com

Book a free strategy call: https://calendly.com/d/4dk-87x-f84T
The agency I founded and sold in 2023: www.webtopia.co

About Me: The $50 million I have spent on digital advertising for brands like Etsy, RealPlayer, Farfetch, Totter &amp; Tumble, ilabb, Baukjen and Candy Kittens has helped me crack the code to creating profitable ads and growth marketing strategies that convert.After a career spent working for consumer brands like Etsy - I struck out on my own as a freelancer in 2017, and then launched an agency which I grew over 5 years to 7 figures then sold it in 2023. I now work hands-on with brands again.

Not ready to chat just yet - why not sign up to my newsletter? https://ecommercecoach.beehiiv.com/

eCommerce Agency Founder & CEO | eComm Coach | Paid Social & Google Ads & Klaviyo Specialist

My Agency, Webtopia specialises in providing eCommerce businesses with highly optimised digital advertising on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok & Google, as well as Email Marketing with Klaviyo. Our team of 20 eCommerce experts focus on real results driving betweeen 3X and 15X return on investment for  our clients.
We make magic happen like: 

🌟15X ROAS for TWO YEARS (and counting) for an interior brand consistently
🌟Scaling a new brand to £150k a month spend and driving £600k in monthly revenue
🌟3 of our clients turning their side hustle into a million-pound-a-year business.

Jessie Healy 🎨

How to tell if your media buyer is still in 2020... 

1. Open Meta
2. Check if campaigns are set up with BOF/MOF/TOF

If yes... 

I am sorry but they are old school. 😖 

Convince me I am wrong!

Growing DTC brands to 7 & 8 figures. $50M spent on Meta & Google Ads. Ecommerce Marketing Coach & Consultant. Webtopia Founder (now acquired). 1X Exit. Podcast host - Ecommerce Impact Podcast. Ex-Etsy.

Just had devastating meeting with an eComm founder paying through the nose for a terrible rip off agency. 

This time $4K a month in agency fees. On a traffic campaign and a brand awareness campaign. 

Zero strategic advice. 

No creative strategy. 

No landing page help. 

No forecast. 

And campaigns optimised for traffic - which we all know doesn't work. 

All in the $5k bought her maybe 2 hours work for a junior agency employee to upload some ads that look like they were done in Canva. 

Agencies that take on these startup brands and then rinse them like this should be shot. 

There is a better way for new brands, and I am building it. 

My DMs are open if you are sick of this and looking for a solution.

🚨Meta just changed something that will affect how every performance marketer reads their ad results. 🚨

Click-through attribution now only counts actual link clicks.

Every other interaction has moved into a new bucket called Engage-Through Attribution. This replaces the old engaged-view metric and now applies across all formats, not just video.

The engaged-view threshold for video has dropped from 10 seconds to 5 seconds.

Meta’s internal data shows 46% of Reels purchase conversions happen within the first 2 seconds of attention 🤯

That stat alone explains why the change was overdue.

Here is what this means in practice.

Previously, a chunk of conversions that came from clicks on ads (not just outbound link clicks) were sitting inside click-through reporting. Now they are being separated. The click signal becomes cleaner. Engagement signals get their own lane.

In theory the total number of reported conversions should not change much. What will change is where those conversions appear inside the attribution breakdown.

If you want to understand the shift inside your own account, check two places inside Ads Manager:

- Compare Attribution Settings
- Breakdown by Attribution Setting

Both will show you where conversions are moving between click-through and engage-through.

So your data may look different because of this change which will make optimisation messy for a bit. 

Keep monitoring your overall blended ROAS and CAC and don't make any drastic account changes until it settles down.

I haven't jumped in here to tell you how the new agency is going behind the scenes....

3 months since launching officially we are carefully adding one client per month - and we are loving how things are rolling so far.

Our first client is already 33% up year-on-year.

And yes, that’s real Shopify revenue, not Ads Manager numbers.

So how do we drive the growth?

There’s no single silver bullet, it’s about getting the foundations right and staying relentlessly focused on what moves the needle.

Here’s what’s working:
- Creative testing that actually pushes boundaries
- The right set up in Meta to let the algo do it's thing
- Deep understanding of the customer — not just demographics, but motivations
- A strong partnership with the client that gives us room to move fast and try bold ideas

Excited to see where we can take things with our other new clients.

This feels totally different to my first agency - I am flying a plane I have already built before, rather than flying the plane as I build it.

I have said it before, but I will say it again.

If you are a new eComm brand and you haven't yet generated at least some sales by advertising your products to strangers on Meta, Google or TikTok, then you're not ready to hire someone else to do marketing for your product.

If you hire an agency to run a channel you have no understanding of, your chance of getting ripped off is very high.

Opened X this week and the DTC echo chamber is losing its mind over the Manus to Meta Ads Manager integration.

Hot take: I am not ready to hand Meta (Manus) my ad account.

Let me explain.

AI will absolutely change the media buyer role. It already is. Creative testing, reporting, budget shifts, anomaly detection. A lot of the repetitive work is on borrowed time.

But here is where I struggle.

Why would I blindly trust a Meta owned AI platform to tell me how to run ads on Meta?

Meta’s objective is clear. Increase advertiser spend. Increase revenue per advertiser. 
Improve platform yield.

My objective is different. Maximise profitable growth for the brand I represent.

To do this I have to exploit the algorithm better than my competitors, do things a bit differently, find loopholes and sweet-spots, I am not going to this by drinking the Meta Cool Aid.

It is the same reason I do not use Google Analytics as the single source of truth for Google Ads performance. Platforms grade their own homework.

As media buyers, our job is not just to push buttons and maximise platform ROAS, or even just contribution margin. There are often myriad, nuanced and competing objectives to balance.

Our job is to understand:
- How the algorithm behaves
- Where attribution breaks
- How cash flow impacts scale
- What inventory constraints look like
- What margin actually allows

No AI sitting inside the ad platform has full visibility of that context.

Will I test Manus? Of course!

If it can automate reporting, surface patterns faster, or suggest creative angles, that is a win.

But fully autonomous campaign optimisation?

I am sceptical.

The platform does not own that context. I do.

So convince me I am wrong.

Would you hand full control of your ad budget to an AI built by the same company that profits from your spend?

This year marks 10 years since I first hired someone to teach me Meta ads (and 20 years since I started on Google ads!)

It's wild to me that I am still opening up accounts and seeing stuff like this:

Brand spending $20k/month across 14 campaigns, 40+ ad sets. Most campaigns are stuck in learning. Half the ads have under 500 impressions. No signal, no scale, just noise.

Another account stuck with the same 5 ads since summer. Frequency is over 9. CPAs are rising fast. They're still running the same static image with the same hook, wondering why performance is falling off a cliff.

One DTC brand has 40% of their spend hitting past customers... inside their “prospecting” campaign. No exclusions. Creative with no information or benefit messaging.

They're paying Meta to re-sell to people who already bought and scratching their heads at high CAC.

The tactical fixes aren’t complicated. An experienced media buying can restructure an account like this in a few hours.

Yes - it's true - the creative strategy, landing pages and messaging have got harder with increased competition and ad-cost.

But what is wild to me is the fact that the basics aren't even there in so many accounts, still.

I'll say it again though - in case you have still missed it:

Meta rewards simplicity, signal density, and creative testing.

Stop over complicating media buying set up. Start launching more creative tests.

"Meta completely ignores audience exclusions.” True or false? 
Meta have finally confirmed the answer in their latest developer update...

Meta does NOT ignore exclusions, but they are now only a signal, albeit a stronger one than 'interests'. 

This is how it actually works now: 

Meta have said they essentially have hierarchy of 'signals' that they take into account. CRM and pixel data are at the top.

Interest targeting sits way down the bottom of their signal hierarchy, and is now really just loose guidance for when other signal is weak.

Interests, demographics, even gender targeting are no longer hard rules. 

My experience plays this out in reality - when you exclude past customers, website purchasers, or CRM lists, you absolutely reduce delivery to those people. 

I have seen the data. The overlap drops meaningfully, but not completely. It's a signal Meta is taking seriously. 

Meta’s targeting system is built around your objective, with your signals woven in. 
If you select Purchase, the algorithm is scanning for people most likely to purchase based on:

👉️ Your pixel data
👉️ Your conversion history
👉️ Your creative content, style, setting, layout, creators 
👉️ Your copy, headlines and keywords in your video 
👉️ Behavioral signals across the platform

It reads your ad. It interprets intent. It matches message to person.

So how does this shift impact campaign setup?

I always use exclusions when I want to reach new customers. That is non negotiable.

What I do not do anymore is create five ad sets split by micro interests thinking I am “controlling” audience targeting.

When business friends become real friends. This is Mike Koziol.
 
He coached me when I was in the early stages of my agency, only making 200K a year, right up to when I became a seven-figure agency and in the top 1% of female-owned businesses in the UK.

Mike was there for me on every step of the journey, warts and all.

He coached me through the highs and lows and helped me grow a sustainable business that I was able to then sell and have a successful exit from a couple of years ago.
 
I was lucky enough to meet up with Mike in Portugal last year and then this year he came all the way to New Zealand to visit me.

Here we are in Queenstown, having the best time ever, talking a bit too much shop but also talking life, relationships, philosophy, and everything in between.

We even managed to get to a gig and dance in a vineyard under the sun. He met my family, my friends IRL.

Business at the end of the day is about connection, and shared values.

So glad we met by chance all those years ago in an online community!

ps. we walked on foot from lake level up to this viewing platform while others took the easy route in the gondola - a bit of a metaphor there on how we both approach life.

I don't use engagement pods to grow. 

27k people decided to follow me because I (try to) have something useful to say. 

I am not here to hack the algorithm, not the Meta one or this one. 

I believe in sustainable marketing, not BS tricks. 

The End.

Are you still using Ads Manager metrics to measure your creative? 😬 
You are already behind. I was too, watching: CTR. Engagement rate. CPM. Conversion rate.

I believed if the numbers looked good, the creative was good.

Then everything changed.

Meta is not just looking at hard metrics anymore.

The GEM/Andromeda system is actually watching your ads.
Understanding what they are about.
Assessing whether they are unique.
Deciding who they are for.
Choosing when to show them.

If you are only looking at Ads Manager numbers to judge your creative, you are already behind.

After 15 years in eCommerce, I have learned that you have to run to keep up. Creative analysis is no longer manual pattern spotting in a spreadsheet. The algorithm is interpreting context, themes, repetition, and differentiation at scale.
So I started testing a tool that keeps me a step ahead of Meta: 

Aggero. 

This thing is wild. 

It analyses creative in a similar way Meta does.

It has been trained on 7 million hours of content.

And the most interesting part is its “Drivers and Drainers” feature.

It tells you:
• What elements are driving engagement
• What is quietly killing performance
• Which hooks actually hold attention
• Where viewer drop-off happens

As of this week, it plugs directly into your ad account. You can analyse live ads and see exactly what needs to change to get them working harder.

This is where creative strategy is heading.

Not guessing. Not colour-coded spreadsheets.

Machine-level pattern recognition applied to your own ads.

You can keep analysing the old way.

Or you can understand how the platform is really judging your content.
If you want to test the tool, comment 'CREATIVE' and I will ping you the details. 
@Aggero, #AggeroPartner

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Myths about DTC eComm:

- You can't scale if your AOV is less than $30
- You shouldn't enter a category that is already competitive 
- You can never compete against established players with huge budgets 
 
Reality:
 
✅ Native Deoderant has a price point of $13 and scaled to $100M in two years 
✅ True Classic entered one of the most competitive fashion categories - basic tees, and has done $250M in revenue since launching in 2019
✅ HiSmile competes against toothpaste giants and is set to hit $200M in revenue. 
 
Don't believe everything you read - know your customer and your category and you can prove the rule makers wrong.

Spicy debate topic alert! 

Is anyone using the traffic objective to drive top of funnel awareness to feed ASC and other conversion campaigns? 

An account I'm auditing is doing this - with 0 conversions coming from traffic campaigns but very high ROAS in the ASC. 

Some would say turn off the traffic objective, it's driving garbage traffic that is of no value - and that is certainly what I would have said this until very recently. 

But as Meta no longer lets us limit our conversion campaigns to truly cold audiences, I am wondering if there is some validity to using traffic to build out a full funnel and have more cold traffic for the ASC and conversion campaigns to convert. 

But the question then becomes, how do you test whether the traffic campaigns are helping your funnel - aside from doing a test that keeps all other variables the same, and monitoring for 30-60 days to see if your overall funnel performance declines without the upper funnel spend.

What does everyone think? Are traffic campaigns now a valuable part of a DTC funnel? If so, how do we track their efficacy?

Until recently - I thought the only thing holding back a product brand from growing was hitting a profitable customer acquisition cost (CAC) or ROAS. 

Once you hit that number, you can theoretically start to print money by scaling. 
 
It's why we love eComm - as long as your addressable market is big and you solve a big problem, once you crack ads it is off to the races. 
 
Right? I thought so! 
 
But I have been super shocked discover a tonne of businesses actually suffer from the oposite problem. 
 
They are hitting a great CAC and acquiring customers profitably. 
 
But they don't grow because they see media spend as a cost instead of as a growth lever, or they don't feel confident in which channel will actually give a profitable ROI. 
 
Example - a brand doing $80k in monthly revenue, spending $2000 per month paid ads with a 8X tracked ROAS and a blended ROAS of 40X. 
 
This might sound crazy - why don't they just scale spend so they can make more money? I'ts wild. I have seen this in multiple businessses now, particularily those that started out in wholesale or retail where marketing is seen a cost. 
 
They simply haven't grasped that in DTC, the more you spend, the more you make. 
 
The problem seems to be that they don't feel confident enough in their agency to give them more money and they lack the knowledge to know what is working. 

The result - for every business that can't seem to crack ads, there is another business sitting on a goldmine with no idea what they have, and not mining it all. 
 
Has anyone else come across this?

Most brands build ads backwards and it’s exactly why they stay stuck. Instead of starting with the customer, they start with guesswork.

If your ads feel random right now, go back to the source: your buyer.

That’s where the answers and the revenue are hiding.

Which path are you taking right now: the shortcut, or the strategy?

2 ways to create ads, only 1 builds an iconic brand

Last week, Google announced that products from Etsy and Wayfair will now be shoppable directly within its agentic AI search experience.

For anyone in eCommerce, this is not just another product update. It is a structural shift in how discovery, consideration, and purchase happen.

Years ago, I worked at Etsy running Google Shopping. One of the biggest challenges we tackled was making an enormous catalogue of one of a kind products actually discoverable by Google’s crawlers.

We were not dealing with 5,000 SKUs neatly organized into standardized attributes. We were dealing with millions of unique, handmade, vintage, custom items. Each with its own nuances. Each needing to match to a real user query like:

“14k gold minimalist ring under 200”
“Mid century walnut credenza 60 inches”
“Personalized leather anniversary gift”

The heavy lifting was in organising the feed. Making sure Google could understand not just that a product existed, but exactly who it was for and when it should appear.

The goal was to surface the most relevant unique product at the exact moment of intent.

What is changing now is where that moment happens.

With agentic AI search, Google is not just returning links. It is interpreting intent, curating options, and enabling checkout within the experience. That compresses the funnel dramatically.

Discovery, comparison, and transaction are converging.

For marketplaces like Etsy and Wayfair, if the last decade was about ranking in search results and Google shopping queries, the next one is about being structured in a way AI can interpret, trust, and transact on your behalf.

And the same goes for eComm brands - your product data is not a back office function. It is a growth channel, and this update makes this even more the case. 

What are you doing to be ready for this shift?

Meta creative testing structure we start with on most accounts: 

1. Winning creative - running in Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns (ASC) 

2. Testing creative - CBO, broad audience, very few exclusions. Each persona gets its own ad-set. Once a creative starts to perform - scale 'in place' - because moving creative can kill the winning streak, but duplicate into the ASC. Add new creatives into this structure and new ad-sets when you have a net-new concept or persona with a set of ads. 

3. Set up new creative testing ad-sets within the CBO to ensure creative diversity. 
 
Continue to increase budget to winning campaigns. 
 
Does this work for you? What other structures do you use for testing?

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."

The Middle East situation was the punch we didn't expect in eComm this week. 

Mike Tyson said it about boxing. It also applies to global supply chains rn. 

What looked like another Red Sea style disruption has turned into something far bigger for global commerce.The Strait of Hormuz is now declared a closed military zone.

For operators this is what it means right now:

- The Suez Canal is now blocked. Carriers are already planning routes around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 10 to 15 days to transit times and burning far more fuel.

- Air freight demand is surging. When sea lanes slow down, high value categories move to air. Electronics and pharma capacity is already being bid up.

- Oil pushing past $85 feeds straight into the cost stack. Packaging production, freight surcharges, and even the last mile van all get more expensive.

This becomes a margin and cash flow situation. 

What can you do now to stay front footed? 

1. Do not wait for delivery delays to happen. Update shipping pages and post purchase emails now. Customers handle the truth far better than surprises.

2. Think about freeing up cash flow to order more stock now, so you have a big buffer if delays happen down the line. Build more buffer into your timelines. 

When supply chains get punched in the face, the brands that stay calm, communicate clearly, and protect stock levels are the ones still standing when things settle.

What else are you doing to prepare or react? 

ps. I know this is a business post - but my thoughts are with anyone currently living in a conflict zone.

With all the changes lately - I wanted to share the Meta Ads Structure that is working for my clients right now. This works for eComm brands from $0-$

Open article: Steal My Exact Meta Media Buying Structure in 2026 by Jessie Healy 🎨 • 2 min read

Steal My Exact Meta Media Buying Structure in 2026

Low AOV doesn’t just hurt your margins.

It makes paid acquisition feel “impossible”.

Here’s a quick AOV boosting idea that you should incorporate into your email + CRO strategy: 

👉 Make your default path a bundle (and send traffic + emails to the bundle page, not individual products).

Most brands do the opposite:

- Ads land on a single product
- Email pushes a single product
- The bundle is hidden in a menu (if it exists at all)

If you want higher AOV, you have to stop treating bundles like an optional add-on.

Make the bundle the default:

“Starter bundle” as the hero
“Best value” bundle (anchor it)
“Deluxe bundle” for price anchoring
Clear comparison table
One-click add to cart

Then align your email:

Abandoned cart flows for bundles
Post-purchase cross-sell built around “complete the set”
Campaign emails that sell the bundle outcome, not the SKU
Bundling is one of the cleanest levers in eComm.

Because it makes the same traffic worth more. The key thing to monitor though is to raise AOV without tanking conversion rates. Figure out the break-even conversion rate and make sure you are above that. 

If you already have bundles: are you actually sending traffic to them, or just hoping customers find them?

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The Battle

Neil Verma

Jessie Healy 🎨

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