Building DTC brands to 8 and 9 figures | Founder of Soar With Us & For You Advertising | CMO of JAQ Group

The rules of DTC growth changed in 2025. In 2026, they're set to change again.

The playbook that got you to £10-30M - broad Meta campaigns, a handful of hero SKUs, one creative style across every touchpoint, is now actively working against you. 

Algorithms reward creative diversity. Attention spans demand psychological precision. 
And TikTok Shop has emerged as a genuine high-volume demand creation channel, not just another place to run ads.

The brands winning today are producing high volumes of distinctly different assets across every awareness stage (problem, solution, product), each built on messaging frameworks that actually drive people to buy. 

Not more creative. Better creative, deployed smarter.

I've spent 7 years in this problem space. My agencies have generated £600M+ in revenue across 250+ DTC brands. 

More importantly, we've built systems that compound, so you're not starting from scratch every creative cycle. Data from 70+ brands and over 4,000+ ads per month. 

A few recent wins we've delivered for our clients:
→ Ekster: 40% increase in profit, 75% YoY growth
→ Spacegoods: New customer orders up 86%, NCPA down 33%
→ AKT London: Tripled new customers and cut CPA by 59% in 6 months
→ Nutrition Geeks: 2,200% growth in 12 months

What makes us different: we build context databases that capture your brand DNA, winning angles, and performance learnings across every campaign. 

When the algorithm shifts or a creative fatigues, we're already three steps ahead, not scrambling to figure out what worked.

If you're a CMO or founder at an 8-figure brand feeling the scaling friction, happy to talk through what's working right now. Connect here or email olly@soarwithus.co

Olly Hudson

We’ve packaged what’s working, what’s dead, and what’s next for 2026 into one resource:

🚨 THE 2026 D2C PLAYBOOK: The New Rules of Meta, TikTok, AI & Performance Creative

2026 is the reset year.

If your ads aren’t built for algorithmic feeds and personalised signals, you won’t scale.

Every platform is now fully personalised.
You’re not competing in interest groups anymore 
You’re competing inside each user’s unique feed.
And at the same time…
People crave connection more than ever.
They want emotion and authenticity, not just AI-fed precision.

So what wins in 2026?

Brands that blend machine logic with human insight.

That means:
- Creative systems built to match micro-behaviours
- Messaging that adapts in real time
- Ads that feel made for one, but scale to millions

This is your roadmap to profitable, personalised growth across Meta, TikTok, Google, and AI workflows.

- What’s working
- What’s out
- What’s next

Get the playbook here and build for what's coming: https://lnkd.in/ePapZ29e

If you're a DTC brand looking at 2026 resource/planning, get in contact with us here: https://lnkd.in/eVb3BKbs

The Creative-Led Paid Acquisition Partner Behind £600M+ in DTC Revenue | Meta & TikTok for 8-9 Figure Brands.

Back by popular demand, we're reopening the vault. Get access to our most requested resource: the top-performing brand funnel breakdowns of 2025.

Not just their ads. The full stack:

Paid strategy > Organic > Landing pages > Google ads > Email > Offers

Everything.

Easily the most ripped asset we’ve ever put out.

So we’ve packaged them properly. One folder.

Here’s who’s inside:

– Rhode
– Meshki
– LOOP Earplugs
– Alo Yoga
– IM8
– Refy
– BREZ
– Wonderskin

Use this to cut out weeks of guesswork or get your next winning concept straight from their playbook.

Grab the folder here: https://lnkd.in/exiK3_XK

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BFCM Guide

This is just one page from our 127-page ultimate guide to BFCM. 

If you’d like 126 more pages of ecom gold, join 500+ brands and check this out: https://bit.ly/3RlTHZ4


Plug 1

Newsletter Tease

Ps. Head here if you want to be the first to receive our 2024 ads blueprint this week: https://bit.ly/3YR6HaD


12/03

5 more critical errors to fix: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_use-data-to-fix-your-brands-creatives-and-activity-7168154221719056384-Yn5A?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

13/03

Motion plug

We recommend Motion because it simplifies comprehensive insights.

• Eliminates the guesswork
• Brings quick clarity to your ads process
• Converts your ad data into digestible reports
• Keeps your teams aligned toward a common goal

Get 10% off your first 3 months using our code: SWU10
https://motionapp.com/

Kind Patches are running 3,000+ live ads right now. And not a single one is relying on a hero SKU or one-size-fits-all message.

We just broke down the funnel of one of the most deliberately segmented brands we’ve seen.

→ Every SKU positioned around a pain point
→ Every angle tailored to a specific outcome
→ Every ad mapped to a unique persona

This is persona-led growth, done properly.

Not “here’s our sleep patch” → but “here’s how you solve Sunday night scaries without melatonin.”

We’ve broken down the ads of 10 of their personas

- For those who want better skin and hair
- For those who want less stress
- For those who want better sleep
- For those who want more energy
- For those who want more focus
- For those who want support with weight goals
- For women who want hormone support
- For those who want better intimacy
- For those who travel often
- For men who want to take it to the next level

The breadth of products and persona variations feeds Meta’s Andromeda system with high-volume, diverse signals, improving delivery efficiency and incremental reach.

Want to see our breakdown?
Like this post
Comment “persona” and I’ll DM you.

We’ve scaled to 80+ people, 250+ brands, and £500M+ in tracked revenue.

And everyone in our leadership team is under 30.

Talent and energy got us here.

Structure is what’ll get us further.

We’ve made every classic mistake you’d expect from a young team building fast:

– Hired too late
– Invested in the wrong things
– Moved without the right operational muscle

At some point, you hit a ceiling. You can only build what you know.

We’ve always been good at doing - making ads, shipping strategy, driving performance.

But building a business that lasts is a different game.

That’s why this quarter we brought in Rachel McDonald (ex-Dentsu) to help sharpen our strategy, how we operate, scale and continue to lead the market into 2026.

She’s led global teams. She’s been in the rooms we’re aiming for.

Now she’s in ours.

Because if you want to build a long-term agency with real staying power, you need to balance hunger with experience.

Young teams are underrated.

But young teams with the right support? That’s where things get dangerous (in the best way).

In 2025, TikTok Shop grew 180% YoY, converted at up to 12%, and produced $2.7M LIVE days. In 2026, it’ll feel crowded. This is the playbook most DTC brands will wish they had before that shift.

TikTok Shop is converting at 8–12%, while most DTC sites are still stuck at 2–4%.

That gap is the opportunity and it won’t last forever.

If you’re doing £5M+ in e-commerce and TikTok Shop isn’t on your roadmap yet, you’re probably underestimating what’s happening.

TikTok Shop isn’t a “new channel” anymore. It’s a different operating system for commerce.

It rewards speed, structure, creative volume, and momentum.

The brands winning aren’t chasing one-off spikes, they’re building repeatable systems across affiliates, LIVE, offers, and content that compound daily.

This is a start-to-finish guide designed to help established brands launch TikTok Shop the right way, with the infrastructure, strategy, and execution required to scale without chaos.

Inside the guide, we break down:

- How to build a TikTok Shop foundation designed to scale (not collapse under demand)
- The technical setup and LIVE structures top brands use to keep viewers engaged and buying
- How to select hero products and offers that drive consistent GMV
- The affiliate ecosystem playbook: recruiting, incentivising, and sustaining creator output
- How to use LIVE coupons and flash deals without eroding brand value
- What high-performing TikTok Shop content has in common (hooks, structure, proof, CTAs)
- The host framework for training on-camera talent that can actually sell
- The metrics that matter during LIVE — and how to react when performance dips
- How to turn TikTok Shop into a creative engine for wider paid and organic growth

It’s a practical, plug-and-play blueprint for building a TikTok Shop system that drives consistent revenue and scales with control.

If you’re responsible for growth, creative, or e-commerce performance, this guide is your reference point.

Want it?
Like this post
Comment "tiktok 2026" and I'll send it over.
Make sure we're connected so I can DM you

I received this message from a client saying it’s the best experience they’ve had with an agency in 8+ years of eCom.

We’ve doubled the team this year. Launched new processes. Taken on some of the most ambitious brands we’ve ever worked with.

But through all of that, the thing I’m proudest of? The feeling our team creates for the people we work with.

The trust, reliability, and care that sits underneath it all.

And this note from a client, saying it’s the best experience they’ve had with an agency in 8+ years, says more than I ever could in a pitch.

Massive shoutout to Martyna, Kit and the wider team for the hard work and dedication you bring to our clients every day.

The kind of partnership that gets noticed (and recommended) without ever having to ask.

If I had to sum up how we’ve scaled Soar:

Build it properly. Treat people well. Let the work speak.

Turns out… it’s working.

Here’s to the next chapter.

Next month marks 7 years since we started Soar With Us from a spare bedroom at uni.

Today, we’re a 60+ team, managing 8–9 figure brands, and became Meta’s #1 DTC agency in the UK.

But here are 7 things we did to build in 7 years.

(I probably shouldn’t be posting this. Most agencies would gate-keep it)

1️⃣ Invest in marketing
You don’t have a sales problem, you have a marketing problem.
80% of our pipeline is inbound.
We built a weekly content engine designed to give away the strategy and sell the implementation.

What that looked like in practice:
- 1x podcast/week (D2C Diaries) – brands came in pre-sold, they’d already listened to 10+ hours of us.
- 1x lead magnet/week – frameworks, audits, templates
- Newsletter – built on HubSpot, personalised follow-ups based on downloads
- Founders post 5x/week – LinkedIn + X 
- Events & masterclasses – offline to online flywheel


2️⃣ Proprietary process + unique IP = scale leverage
- Agencies commoditise when they only sell hours. We scaled by building our core IP: Growth Compass, 360 Feedback System, creative frameworks.
- Our audit decks don’t just point out problems, they score, rank, and prioritise fixes using our frameworks
- Every new client runs through our Growth Compass scoring to benchmark performance gaps and build roadmaps


3️⃣ Founder-led organic content
We closed a £35M brand in 30 minutes as they’d already listened to 50 hours of us.
We turned our founders into a content-led growth engine and it changed everything.


4️⃣ Creative + paid = one system
- Merged creative + growth into one unified team by acquiring Hambi Media in 2024.
- Used frameworks to break down customer journeys and optimise every stage.
- Focused creative testing on incrementality, not just ROAS.


5️⃣ Internal culture = growth leverage
You don’t scale by adding clients. You scale by retaining great people and giving them progression and clarity.
I’d rather lose a client than a top team member.
- Every employee has career framework + KPIs tied to business impact.
- Internal culture pillar reviews, “kind candour” feedback loops.


6️⃣ Operational Excellence → margin + moat
We waited too long to bring in experience. A good ops head is a 6-figure unlock.
👉 Build ops early. Don’t wait until you’re 50 heads in.


7️⃣ Aggressive brand positioning + acquisition strategy
We positioned ourselves as the #1 performance creative agency early and backed it with proof.
- Aggressively pursued press, awards, and partnerships (Triple Whale agency of the year).
- Merged multiple agencies under one group to cover TikTok, Meta, and Creative.


It’s also worth saying, we’ve made every mistake you can make.

But we stayed obsessed with one thing: becoming the best growth partner in DTC.

If you’d like to work with us in 2026 as your Creative-Led Paid Acquisition Partner, get in touch here: https://lnkd.in/ew-b7dhN

Soar With Us

Hambi Media

Creative strategy is the most misunderstood (and most impactful) role in a DTC growth team. 

But most brands are hiring them for the first time with no idea of what “great” even looks like.

And the few A-players in the market? Already locked in or demanding salaries that don’t make sense for most teams.

If we could solve one constraint that would unlock growth in our agency, it’s the supply of creative strategists.

So instead of trying to hire them, we built them.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve refined an internal system to turn high-curiosity, high-potential operators into world-class creative strategists.

Now, we’re opening it up - The Creative Strategist Incubator

The 9-month pathway we’ve built from zero to strategist (and why Meta is backing us).

This is the MBA for Creative Strategy.

We’ve broken down the details of what this is in our newest episode and how you can apply.

Episode dropping at 5 pm. 🚀

If you're stuck on how to diversify creative… start here.

We built a creative hierarchy to maximise Entity ID diversity and in doing so, we unlocked:
- Scalable reach
- Lower CPMs
- Net-new audiences

All without increasing budget.

Think of the testing hierarchy as a pyramid.

At the base are the big creative swings, at the top, the small refinements.

When you’re launching:
→ Launch brand new concepts from scratch.
→ Test messaging within those fresh ads, don’t just swap copy into old visuals.
The goal: identify the message, persona, format combo that resonates most.
It keeps learnings clean and avoids grouping penalties.
(Even if variations get grouped under the same Entity ID, a winner will emerge).

When you’re optimising:
Got a winner? Remix it.
→ Change the format or the vehicle
→ Update the hook so it looks instantly different
→ Translate the story to a new style (e.g. founder VSL → third-person VO)

Here’s the hierarchy we use inside every high-growth account:

1. Format
Static / UGC / High-Production
→ Use when you're plateauing or need fresh signals.

2. Vehicle
Founder story / Green-screen / Testimonial / Listicle / Product demo
→ Use to scale a proven message across new personas.

3. Persona
Gen Z female → 40+ mum / Creator → Founder
→ Use to expand TAM or unlock overlooked pockets.

4. Hook
Zoomed-in face / Problem-statement / Unboxing / B-roll
→ Use to ensure Meta sees your ad as net-new.

5. Messaging
Script tweaks / CTA variants
→ Use once a concept is already converting.

If your creative system isn’t built around this hierarchy, you won’t scale in 2026.

We’re entering a new era of ecom.

Google, Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Wayfair, and over 20 others have just dropped UCP: a universal standard that lets any AI agent buy from any retailer in real-time.

It’s now live in Gemini + Google's AI Mode.

Here’s why it matters for DTC 👇

The “Universal Commerce Protocol” (UCP) revolutionises the shopping experience.

Think of it as an open-source checkout layer for the AI era, one that any brand can integrate with, and any AI agent can transact through.

Why it matters:
→ It removes friction from discovery to checkout
→ You stay the merchant of record
→ Customers can buy directly inside AI interfaces (Gemini, Search, ChatGPT, Copilot)
→ Built-in support for Shop Pay, Google Pay, more coming
→ It’s composable: plug in your product catalogue, offers, checkout flow + discounts
→ It’s open-source and backed by Google

The goal? To create one shared language for agentic commerce so agents, brands and wallets can speak to each other instantly.

Just like HTTP did for websites.

Most DTC brands won’t clock this yet. But AI discovery is going to be a commerce channel, not just a research tool.

This changes how products are surfaced, selected, and sold.

It’s the end of the linear funnel. And the start of contextual, agent-led buying.

If you’re a scaling DTC brand:
→ Get your products into the Merchant Centre
→ Integrate the UCP spec (works with any backend)
→ Enable agentic checkout across Google + others

AI agents aren’t a threat. They’re the next growth opportunity.

IM8 Health went from $0 to a $120M run rate in 11 months. Now they're targeting $300M by the end of 2026.

We’ve been pointing to IM8 as best in class for months.

One of the cleanest funnel builds I’ve seen: long-form site, deep education, premium price justified at every stage. 

All engineered by Danny Yeung.

Built with:
- David Beckham as co-founder
- A product that replaces 16 supplements with one drink
- A scientific board from NASA, UFC & Mayo Clinic
- NSF certification + clinical trials from day one

Catch the full episode here, it’s stacked with insights: https://lnkd.in/e85t_ASx

IM8 Health

Investor I CEO I Entrepreneur I Advisor I Astronaut

We break down the creative strategy and funnel plays that drove $40M in Meta spend and 6,000+ ads during BFCM 2025.

If you’re serious about scaling in 2026, this is the episode to start your year with.

Here’s what we cover 👇

Q5 strategy: The most important “quarter” that isn’t a quarter.

Most brands waste this window with hype-led messaging or default evergreen creative.

The sharpest brands? They layer seasonal context into a funnel-led framework and it scales:
✅ 50% to TOF problem-aware “reset” creative
✅ 20–30% to MOF trust-builders + objection handling
✅ Hook variation built to extend shelf-life past Q5
✅ BOF = urgency + relevance, not just discounts
This is how you capitalise on low CPMs, high intent, and minimal competition from the big enterprise players.

Black Friday learnings
We spent $40M on Meta in November (+185% YoY) and shipped 6,000+ ads.

Our top takeaways:
- Start earlier than you think
- Don’t change your offer mid-flight
- Demand gen > discount panic
- Simple > clever (especially for older demos)

Creative strategy in 2026
You’ll either win with:
- Ultra-authentic, native content
- Highly stylised, scripted storytelling
Middle of the road = forgettable.

We also break down:
- Our approach to creative iteration vs net-new
- How to stretch performance from your best hooks
- The key human desires your content needs to hit
- Why volume still matters… but where it comes from matters more

Biggest risks for brands right now
- Poor offer architecture
- Weak mid-funnel
- Not adapting messaging to intent
- Lack of urgency across the team
- Process changes without buy-in

What’s coming in 2026
- M&A activity will ramp up
- Meta spend will keep growing, but TikTok Shop, YouTube, and AppLovin will become serious plays
- Brands will need a deeper bench of channel-ready creative
- “Creative similarity” will punish lazy iterations
- Great products with true retention will win. Everything else gets exposed.

This episode will give you the blueprint to hit the ground running in January and compound into your biggest year yet.

Catch up now: https://lnkd.in/eCja7Gu7

85 people in the room. Talented people. And a voice in my head asking what I'm doing up here.

I thought imposter syndrome would disappear with progress.

More clients. Bigger wins. A growing team. Surely at some point you just... feel like you belong?

But it didn't disappear. It just changed shape.

Now it shows up in different moments. When I'm presenting a new strategy to the team. When someone asks a question I don't have the answer to. When I look around the room and realise how genuinely good the people around me are.

You think you'll feel "ready" at a certain level. But you don't. You just get better at showing up anyway.

Here's what I've come to understand: imposter syndrome doesn't leave. And maybe it shouldn't.

Because the moment you stop feeling it is probably the moment you've stopped growing.

If I'm expecting everyone else to improve with the business, it's non-negotiable that I'm on the same growth trajectory. Not standing still. Not coasting on what got us here.

The voice in my head that asks "what am I doing up here?" isn't the enemy. It's a reminder to stay accountable. To keep the standard high. To not let comfort replace curiosity.

The shift for me came when I stopped trying to get rid of it. Instead, I started using it as fuel.

Being clear, not perfect. Owning what I don't know. Backing the people who do know. Learning faster than the business is scaling.

Because leadership isn't about having every answer. It's about creating belief and showing up when it counts.

Some days the voice is louder than others. But I show up anyway. Not because I've figured it all out. Because the team deserves a leader who's growing as fast as they are.

P.S. Do you still feel it? Or have you found a way to make peace with the voice that questions if you belong?

You'll lose over $90K this year to avoidable fundraising admin, here's how to stop it.

Most founders are still tracking investors in spreadsheets and scrambling to build data rooms the night before calls.

If you're a 100-person company, you're bleeding up to 1,848 hours per year ($92,400 annually) on admin overhead that could be automated.

I switched to an AI-powered fundraising workspace that changed everything: pitch deck, investor CRM, outreach sequences, and data room, all in one place using Notion.

The results:
→ Admin time dropped 80%
→ Pitch iterations 3× faster
→ My calendar freed up for actual investor conversations

The AI Founder's Kit I'm using includes everything you need to go from idea to funded:

- $300 Supabase credit for backend
- $60 in Vercel credits to ship your frontend
- 1 Year Framer launch
- Up to 6 months of Notion Business with AI
- 2,000+ vetted early-stage VCs, incubators, accelerators
- 50 pitch decks from YC, a16z, Sequoia-backed startups
- Tactical fundraising guides from operators

This isn't about working faster, it's about pitching sharper and closing smarter.

👉 Comment NOTION and I'll send you the free toolkit

Personas are the real unit of scale on Meta now.

Meta doesn’t need you to define audiences anymore, creative does that work now.

In this episode, we break down what’s actually driving scale on Meta in 2026: persona-led creative, smarter systems, and AI used as a multiplier, not a shortcut. 

We cover why accounts hit incremental reach ceilings, why one persona always steals spend, and how the best brands are structuring creative and campaigns to scale without burning budget.

If performance looks fine but growth has stalled, this episode will help you reframe the problem

🎧 Full episode out now: https://lnkd.in/encyKp78

Here’s 5 scaling challenges we see in every £30K–£1M/month agency:

- Margin collapse
- Sales team friction
- Delivery bottlenecks
- Founder burnout
- No true peer group

I’m co-hosting an in-person mastermind this March with Jordan Platten that solves all of these in 3 days.

Agency Accession is for agency owners making £30K–£1M+ per month who want to scale profitably without breaking the business in the process.

It’s 3 days of honest conversations, deep dives, and decision-making, with operators who’ve actually scaled past £100K/mo and had to rebuild the systems they broke along the way.

The focus is simple:
→ Profit
→ Client results
→ Happiness

Think founder dinners + fire strategy + clarity you don’t get from group chats.

When: 23–25 March
Where: London, UK (outskirts)
Who: Agency owners doing £30K–£1M+ p/m
Format: Evening kick-off, seminar-style talks, and implementation workshops

Common challenges we’ll break down:
- Hiring sales teams without losing margin
- Systemising delivery without bottlenecking
- Creating predictable acquisition
- Delegating ops while scaling volume
- Embedding AI (the right way)
- Finding a real peer group that’s on your level

This is built for founders who want to scale with leverage, not stress.

Operators who want to simplify, not stack more onto their plate.

If you want to be in the room (or have questions) head here for more details: https://lnkd.in/exKbmhnB

Helping Agencies Around The World Scale

Most DTC brands are hiring creative strategists with no benchmark for what “great” actually looks like.

It’s usually the first time they’ve ever made the hire.

And without reps, they end up either overpaying… or onboarding someone who takes 6 months to add value.

We hire this role over and over, which gives us reference points, systems, and a real understanding of what works.

That’s why we stopped relying on the market to provide talent.

We built a system to create it internally and to cut the time to value down from months to weeks.

If you can’t afford a £90K+ A-player with 5 years of reps, your only option is to build them, fast.

That's why we've created the UK's first creative strategy MBA, more details on this here: https://lnkd.in/e-rJdsBi

You can apply here: https://lnkd.in/eXXfmmMs

Meta changed how it decides which brands deserve scale, and engagement is no longer the deciding factor.

For DTC brands, GEM + UTIS explain why ads that get views no longer scale, and what kind of creative now does.

That changes the practical playbook for DTC brands in two big ways:

1. You’re no longer “feeding the algo” with ad volume. You’re feeding it with signal shape.

2. Organic is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s now part of the ranking surface area for paid.

Here’s what Meta is doing consistently across ads, organic, and Reels:

They’re moving from “What keeps people watching?” to “What genuinely matches what this person cares about?”

That’s the throughline.

Meta has publicly admitted something important: old engagement-based systems were flawed.

Interest-matching precision sat at 48.3% - near random.

So they built UTIS: the User True Interest Survey.

How UTIS works:
- Users are asked directly: “How well does this video match your interests?”
- Thousands of responses are collected daily
- A perception layer is trained on top of existing ranking models

The results:
- Precision improved from 48.3% → 63.2%
- Niche, high-quality content surfaced more often
- Generic viral content was actively demoted
- +5.2% total engagement
- +5.4% high-interest ratings
- –6.84% low-interest ratings

The key insight: interest isn’t just topic. It includes audio, mood, style, motivation, and production quality.

This philosophy directly mirrors what GEM is doing for ads.

GEM is not “a better targeting engine.” It’s a storyline interpreter.

It looks at:
- Sequence behaviour (months → weeks → days)
- Cross-platform actions (IG, FB, Reels, WhatsApp)
- Web behaviour
- Organic and paid interactions
- Creative attributes (format, style, persona, context)

Then it asks: “Does this brand’s creative consistently align with what this person actually cares about?”

That’s why Meta keeps repeating: “Rank both organic content and ads.”

Organic is no longer distribution. Organic is training data.

Meta doesn’t just want more ads.

It wants:
- More distinct interpretations of who your product is for
- More signals of relevance depth
- More evidence of niche alignment

This is why creative is the targeting. And why generic viral content is now actively punished.

UTIS demotes:
- Trend-jacking
- Broad, relatable humour
- “Everyone will like this” hooks
- Empty watch-time bait

GEM rewards:
- Narrow language
- Specific use cases
- Clear persona intent
- Context-rich demonstrations
- Consistent organic + paid storytelling

So when DTC teams ask: “Why are our Reels getting views but ads aren’t converting?”

The answer increasingly is: you trained Meta to think your brand is for everyone, so it’s for no one.

I've published an article breaking this down in more detail: https://lnkd.in/ezy75VeE

Most brands are already planning 2026. Very few are planning Q5 properly.

In the latest episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas Hambi & I break down why the period between Christmas and the first full week of January is the most misunderstood (and most valuable) window in e-commerce, and why how you use it will shape your entire year.

We cover:
 – What we saw spending nearly $40M on Meta in November 
 – Why simple offers still outperform complexity at scale
 – The demand and mindset shift that happens almost immediately after Christmas
 – The short “flash in the pan” motivation window brands either capitalise on… or miss
 – And the biggest changes we expect in e-commerce in 2026
- Plus our 2025 awards & predictions for 2026 👀

If you execute Q5 properly, you don’t just win January - you set momentum for the rest of the year.

Full episode live now 🎧 https://lnkd.in/epNwpMV8

Genuinely one of the things I’m most proud of at Soar: our AI research process.

Very few agencies go this deep but time and time again, it’s the part clients are most impressed by.

We dig into friction points, buyer psychology, emotional nuance, and unseen drop-offs across the entire journey.

Because before we scale anything, we want to know what’s blocking scale.

What’s inside our AI research doc (and why clients rate it):

– Conversion blockers that don’t show up in GA
– Emotional insights to shape messaging, UX, and offers
– New persona unlocks based on real behavioural signals
– Practical fixes that get implemented immediately

✅ One client used it to fix hidden site issues and even rolled out a new feature to catch customers entering the wrong discount codes at checkout.

It’s not just research. It’s one of the clearest reasons high-growth brands choose to work with us.

Joe Marston 🚀

Co-Founder

Scaling e-commerce brands to 7 and 8 figures 🚀 | LU Entrepreneur of The Year Award Winner | Founder of The Leading TikTok Marketing Agency and an Award Winning Full Service Ecom Growth Agency.

3x Agency Founder.

We scale brands to 7 and 8 figures with creative, paid traffic, retention and funnel optimisation.

In 2024, having a great product is one thing…

But scaling a brand to £10M is a another.

You need a simple roadmap for profitably attracting and converting customers, at scale.

Because when you get that right…

- You stand out from competitors in the market
- You build a community around your brand
- You acquire customers at will (profitably)
- You turn customers into raving fans 

Giving you complete control over your growth.

We help our clients do exactly that with our proven system that guarantees growth.

1. Initial diagnostic to identify bottlenecks in your business
2. Developing a bespoke growth strategy for your brand
3. Creative ideation and production 
4. Unique UGC collaborations
5. Targeted advertising (Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat)
6. Email marketing 

And having generated over £100M+ in sales across 200+ brands, we’ve know the ecommerce game inside out.

🚀 Mystery Shirt In A Box grew from £5K to £2.6M in just one year with our help
🚀 The Essence Vault is hitting 7 figure months in its second year since launch
🚀 Vintage Threads tripled their revenue working with us with a 6x ROAS
🚀 AIRfreshh went from 0% to 52% of revenue from email in 2 months!
🚀 Bene Culture saw their revenue grow 6x in 6 months with our help
🚀 The Oodie generated £2M on TikTok alone in their first year
🚀 UN:IK’s first quarter of 2023 was up 88% on 2022
🚀Grew Liam and Co. 500% year on year

Don’t put up with unpredictable, unsustainable or underwhelming growth any more.

If you want to see how we could help scale your brand, send me a DM saying ‘SOAR’

If you're not ready yet, I post daily educational content to give you all the secrets.

Founder

E-commerce growth agency offering bespoke services to online businesses looking to increase their sales and scale their brand.

2026 is a new game entirely - so we’ve distilled what’s actually working for 8–9 figure DTC brands into one huge resource...

📖 THE 2026 D2C PLAYBOOK: The New Rules of Meta, TikTok, AI & Performance Creative

The scroll is now personal.

Every feed is a unique journey and most brands aren’t building for it.

In 2026, you’re not just running ads. You’re feeding machine learning systems with creative, copy, and context, at speed.

The brands winning are the ones who’ve built signal-rich creative systems and message frameworks that adapt to intent.

We’ve pulled together the exact strategies, formats, and frameworks we’re using right now.

- What’s working
- What’s out
- What’s next

Want the download?

→ Like this post
→ Comment “2026” and we’ll send it your way

Building DTC brands to 8 and 9 figures | Founder of Soar With Us & For You Advertising | Triple Whale's "Agency of The Year" Winner

For one last time, we’re releasing our most requested resource of 2025: a folder of the top-performing brand funnel breakdowns of the year.

Their full stack: Paid strategy > Organic > Landing pages > Google ads > Email > Offers

8 of the best brands of 2025.

Here’s who’s inside:
– rhode skin
– MESHKI
– Loop Earplugs
– ALO
– IM8 Health
– REFY
– BRĒZ
– WONDERSKIN

If you want the folder, you know what to do.

Like the post.
Drop “FUNNEL” below.
We’ll send it your way.

Make sure we're connected so I can DM you

TikTok Shop went from an “experiment” to a $15bn GMV channel in the US in under two years, while UK revenue grew 180% YoY.

The question isn’t whether it works anymore. It’s whether your brand is actually set up to capture it.

We’ve seen enough TikTok Shop launches now to spot a clear pattern:

- a strong first week
- inconsistent creator output
- messy LIVE execution
- offers that spike once, then fade
- no repeatable way to scale GMV

That gap is exactly what this resource is designed to close.

We’ve put together a practical, start-to-finish TikTok Shop guide for established e-commerce brands that want to treat the channel as a growth engine, not a side experiment.

It’s built for teams doing £5M+, where execution, structure, and control actually matter.

Inside the guide, we break down:

- How to set up TikTok Shop foundations that support scale (not short-term spikes)
- The LIVE structures and technical setup brands use to keep viewers engaged and buying
- How to choose hero products and offers that drive consistent GMV
- The affiliate playbook: recruiting, incentivising, and sustaining creator output
- How to use LIVE coupons and flash deals without eroding brand value
- What top-performing TikTok Shop content has in common (hooks, proof, CTAs)
- How to train hosts that can actually sell on camera
- The metrics that matter during LIVE — and what to do when performance drops
- How TikTok Shop can double as a creative engine for paid and organic growth

It’s a plug-and-play blueprint based on what’s working in real accounts right now.

If you’re responsible for growth, ecom, or creative, this guide is designed to save you months of trial and error.

Want it?
Like this post
Comment “tiktok shop” and I’ll send it your way
(Make sure we’re connected so I can DM you)

The most productive thing I did this week was stare at a wall for 30 minutes.

Dr Andrew Huberman explains that your ability to focus is driven by the inputs you received in the hours before you sit down to work.

If you scroll Twitter, watch YouTube, or listen to podcasts between work blocks, your brain is still processing that stimulation when you try to focus.

He calls it "dopamine residue."

The fix is simple: boring breaks.

No phone. No music. No input.

Just silence.

I tested it for 3 days. The clarity was immediate.

I now build 10-30 mins of nothing before any writing, strategy, or deep work.

It sounds lazy. It's the opposite.

The less stimulated your break, the sharper your next work block.

This is one of many systems that helped me scale past 8 figures before 28.

(Yes, that's me staring at a wall. I don't actually do this - I normally meditate or sit in silence away from my desk. But I did sit there for 4 minutes just to get this shot, which might be worse so you should give this a like for effort) 

Want the full list of protocols that I’ve tested to 3x my productivity? 

Comment "productivity" and I'll send you 10 protocols that actually moved the needle.

This is what it looks like when persona-led growth is baked into the product, not just the marketing.

Kind patches are selling solutions to 10+ highly specific problems and doing it through 3,000+ live ads at once.

Each product?
→ Positioned to a different pain point.

Each creative?
→ Tailored to a specific outcome.

Each angle?
→ Built for a defined persona.

We’re talking:
• “Sunday scaries” sleep anxiety
• “Skin and hair” glow-ups
• “On-the-go” energy boosts
• “Late-night scrolling” focus drops
• Even “support with weight goals” and “hormonal balance” for women

They’re building mini-funnels that slot into people’s lives. It’s why their paid system scales without fatiguing.

We just broke the funnel down.

Mapped the personas, analysed the creative, and pulled the patterns.

Want the full teardown?
Like this post
Drop “persona” below and I’ll send you the link
(Make sure we’re connected so I can DM you)

Meta just rebuilt the algorithm. And if you're uploading the same 6 statics… you're invisible.

In 2026, scale doesn’t come from more budget.

It comes from creative variety that matches algorithm complexity.

Here’s what’s powering Meta’s backend now:

🔹 Andromeda – learns preference patterns from creative complexity → +8% ad quality

🔹 GEM – ingests billions of data points to personalise delivery → +5% conversions on Reels

🔹 Lattice – connects outcomes across placements + formats → +6% in ad conversions

🔹 Sequence Learning – understands what happens before the click → +3% conversion lift

None of this matters if you're still uploading templated UGC with 3 hooks and a voiceover.

Meta’s system doesn’t need more content. It needs more context.

That means:
- Persona-led narratives, not just “creators”
- Varied format logic (statics, scripts, carousels, reviews)
- Diverse outcomes (AOV, pLTV, incrementality, not just ROAS)

We call this Soulmate Theory: The right creative, for the right user, at the right moment.

The algo can find the match. But only if you give it something worth matching with.

Our process in 2026:
- Creative trees by persona → not linear iterations
- Weekly contextual inputs to train the algo
- Measured by incremental reach and hit rate, not CTR

This is what makes every part of the system work harder.

So if your Meta performance is flat, it’s not fatigue. It’s signal starvation.

Your next growth unlock isn't more budget. It's creative intelligence.

“We could’ve raised at £100million. We didn’t and I’m glad” - Dan Murray🧠

🔥 Just dropped a monster episode with Dan, co-founder of Heights, one of the UK’s most trusted wellness brands (and a brand we’ve been proud to partner with on creative).

Dan gets brutally honest on:

- How insomnia, gut issues and startup burnout led to Heights
- Why he turned down a £100M valuation and raised at £60M instead
- The real impact of celebrity collabs (every one of them a paying customer first)
- How they broke through 2 years of flat growth to hit £25M
- Why he believes in building the best product in the category, not the trendiest
- And how “The Smart Supplement” became Vitals with messaging that finally converts

If you’re building through the mud, chasing profitable scale, or trying to unlock a better narrative for your brand…

This one’s a masterclass in founder clarity, creative strategy, and performance at scale.

🎧 Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eWii754p

We helped Mindful Chef lift conversions by 39% and reduce blended CPA by 26% in 90 days - while maintaining spend

Mindful Chef came to us on a mission to scale efficient new customer acquisition and modernise its paid channel strategy. We needed to ensure that rising platform competition didn’t translate into rising acquisition costs.

The brief was clear: refresh channel strategy, bring AI-assisted optimisation into the mix, and allow creative strategy to do more of the legwork.

‍
👉 Meta
On Meta, we moved from manually stacked interests to letting creative drive discovery, integrating Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) as the backbone of the strategy. A tightly run testing pipeline meant that each new concept had a fast path: validate in a dedicated test environment, then promote winners into core campaigns.

We layered in whitelisting to introduce fresh audiences and add trust signals, expanding reach while maintaining quality.


👉 Google
We streamlined Brand to remove cross-competition between Performance Max and Branded Search. Our bid strategy moved from target impression share to a Max Conversions test (versus manual CPC), unlocking volume and efficiency.

With stronger signal density established, we shifted to a focused target CPA approach, reducing acquisition costs on Google by 49% within the first 4 months of our partnership.


👉 Creative execution
Our first wave of creative translated Mindful Chef’s values into native-feel storytelling, mapped to key personas. We balanced high-production, “sceptic-to-convert” formats to tackle common objections around recipe boxes with UGC-led concepts that play into everyday tension points like back-to-school routine resets.

The result is a modular foundation spanning Problem-Aware to Product-Aware messaging, anchored in Mindful Chef’s USPs: health, convenience, and premium quality.

The Results:
✅ 67% META CONVERSIONS UP
✅ 26% BLENDED CPA DOWN
✅ 49% GOOGLE CPA DOWN

It feels like we're just getting started here, and we're incredibly excited at what's next for our partnership.

In under a year, IM8 Health crossed a $100M+ annualised run-rate and the underlying metrics actually improved as they grew.

With Danny Yeung making an appearance on the podcast this week, it felt like the right time to reshare our funnel breakdown to show what’s actually driving the numbers:

A few numbers worth paying attention to:

- $100M+ ARR pace in ~11 months
- 76% QoQ growth in the latest quarter
- 80%+ of first-time buyers convert to subscription
- $150 AOV, up materially post product expansion
- EBITDA losses now ~$2M per quarter, with breakeven in sight

We mapped IM8’s entire growth system end-to-end in a teardown a few months back, covering:

- Performance media across Meta + Google
- High-converting lander architecture
- Subscription-first funnel design
- Email + retention doing real revenue work
- Ambassador-led distribution
- Strong organic + owned community
- Bundled offers that lift AOV
- Clear, science-backed positioning (without killing brand)

If you want the full breakdown:

1️⃣ Like the post
2️⃣ Comment “IM8”
3️⃣ Make sure we’re connected so I can send it over

Here’s why most entrepreneurs never build anything that lasts:

They chase what’s easy, cheap, and fast, which means it’s easy to copy, and impossible to protect.

From day one at Soar, we asked ourselves:

“What would the best agency in the UK look like in 5 years and what do we need to do today to build that?”

At the time, it was just me and Olly.

Fewer than 5 staff.

No office.

No profit.

But that one mindset shift shaped everything.

We:
- Reinvested every penny instead of paying ourselves
- Hired top-tier people before we could “afford” them
- Built IP, frameworks, and internal systems from scratch
- Never cut corners, even when no one was watching

That’s what built the moat.

We weren’t trying to grow fast.

We were trying to become undeniable in one of the most competitive agency markets in the world.

And we’ve been scaling like that ever since.

Because while most people play the same game, we learned to play asymmetric warfare:

Win by doing what others can’t… or won’t.

If you’re building a DTC brand or service company, make decisions your future self will thank you for.

Short-term advantage is sugar. Moats take longer, but they’re the only way to win long-term.

I consumed 10+ hours of neuroscience-backed productivity content so you don't have to.

Here's the one thing that actually moved the needle:

Boring breaks.

Dr. Huberman explains that your focus isn't decided when you sit down to work. 
It's decided by what you consumed in the hours before.

He calls it "dopamine residue."

If you scroll Twitter, watch YouTube, or listen to podcasts between work blocks, your brain is still processing that stimulation when you try to focus.

The fix: No phone. No music. No input. Just silence before deep work.

I tested it for 7 days. The clarity was immediate.

This is 1 of 10 protocols I pulled from the research.

I put all 10 into a free PDF with step-by-step actions for each.

Comment "focus" and I'll send it to you.

In 2026, the most expensive mistake in paid media is making ads that look familiar.

If your ad account is full of:

– The same UGC setup
– The same pacing
– The same “hook → proof → CTA” flow

Meta doesn’t see 30 assets. It sees one idea, repeated. And that’s why scale stalls.

Because format and vehicle determine how Meta classifies your ads, not how many versions you upload.

Quick example (supplement brand):

UGC video
Creator talking to camera
“Nothing worked for my bloating until this”
Raw, selfie-style
Problem → Solution → Transformation

Static carousel
Clean, Reddit-style slides
“4 reasons your gut health is killing your energy”
Pain points, proof, soft product CTA

Same product.
Same promise.
Different format.
Different vehicle.

Which means:
– Different entity IDs
– Fresh reach
– New audiences unlocked

Format = the structure (UGC, static, high-prod, etc.)

Vehicle = the lens the story travels through (testimonial, expert, founder, education)

We recently changed just two things (format and vehicle) and Meta delivered the ad to a completely new audience overnight.

Nothing else moved.

If you want to win now, you need to mix formats and vehicles intentionally, not accidentally.

That’s how you unlock:
– New demand
– Better CPMs
– Scale that compounds instead of decays

Most brands don’t have a media problem.

They have a creative sameness problem.

We’ve audited hundreds of 8-9 figure ad accounts and the same problem shows up every single time.

Most DTC ad accounts we audit are built backwards are ignoring 3 key stages of the buyer journey:
- Problem unaware
- Problem aware
- Solution aware

All the budget is pointed at people who are already ready to buy.
- Offer overlays
- Product carousels
- Feature dumps
- “X% off today only”

And sure, it works, until it doesn’t.

You can’t scale if you only sell to people who already know you.

What we’re seeing in 7–8 figure audits:
- No context-setting
- No objection handling
- No storytelling or teaching
- No emotional runway

What to build instead:

You need creative that earns attention before it asks for action:
- Explainers: “Why most X don’t work”
- Sceptical UGC: “I didn’t think this would work because…”
- Founder POVs and breakdowns
- Category education or side-by-sides
- Hooks that sell the problem before the product

When you focus only on the most aware, you’re just pitching.
When you build for all 5 stages, you’re telling a story and scaling with depth.

The fastest way to kill Meta performance in 2026? Treat organic and paid as separate systems.

2026 is shaping up to be the year organic makes a comeback, not as a brand nice-to-have, but as an input into how Meta decides which paid ads deserve scale.

Meta’s GEM update (Meta’s new paid ads foundation model) quietly flips the question.

It’s not: “How do we make better ads?”

It’s: “How do we create better signals for paid delivery?”

GEM is Meta’s most advanced ads recommendation model, built at LLM scale to rank and sequence ads across Facebook and Instagram. Instead of judging ads in isolation, it evaluates entire user journeys and decides whether a brand’s creative is worth expanding to new people.

GEM is designed to make sense of:

- what people do over time (their sequence of actions, not just one click)
- the context of those actions (format, placement, device, surface)
- signals coming from across Meta’s ecosystem, not just Ads Manager

So if you’re still treating creative as “new angles” inside Ads Manager only, you’re training GEM (paid) with half the picture.

👉 The practical shift: organic shapes the interest signals GEM uses to decide whether your ads scale.

If people engage with your organic content (views, comments, saves, profile taps), you’re creating clearer interest patterns. GEM learns from those patterns when it decides:

- who to show your ads to next
- how aggressively to expand reach
- and whether your brand deserves cheaper, broader delivery

That’s why organic performance now compounds paid performance.

What to do this week

1. Run one creative strategy across paid + organic.
Same personas. Same objections. Same “why now?” triggers.
   
2. Build signal-saturated assets, not endless ad variations.
  Your goal isn’t 30 ads.
  Your goal is 5–10 distinct concepts that clearly signal who the product is for.
   
3. Make your creative org chart more important than your campaign structure.
   
  If you don’t have:
  - someone briefing
  - someone producing
  - someone tagging + learning
you’re not a performance team anymore. You’re just buying impressions.
  
The winners won’t be the best media buyers.

They’ll be the teams who can produce distinct, high-quality signals at speed across organic and paid and let GEM (paid) do what it’s designed to do.

Curious: are you still treating organic as a brand channel or are you using it as an acquisition input that determines whether paid can scale?

Olly Hudson unpacks the mechanics behind this shift, including GEM and UTIS, in a longer piece for anyone wanting the full picture https://lnkd.in/ej7TqbDF

Meta’s 2025 Andromeda update made one thing clear:

Creative and creator identity are now the targeting.

Meta isn’t relying on interests or lookalikes anymore. It’s matching ads to individual-level preferences in the moment.

Two implications matter:

1️⃣ Meta can support far more creative volume and match assets more precisely.

2️⃣ The brands that win are the ones engineering the strongest signals: relevance, engagement, and clean conversion journeys.

For brands spending multi-6 figures/month, growth rarely stalls because CPAs spike.

It stalls because first-time impression ratio (FTI) drifts down.

You spend more.
You hit the same people.
Top-of-funnel quietly dries up.

As a benchmark, we aim for 10–20% of impressions to be truly incremental each month.

So why do partnership ads win under Andromeda?

Across our accounts, partnership ads are taking a larger share of spend because they:

✅ Drive stronger engagement signals

✅ Feel more human and credible than brand-only ads

✅ Unlock new reach via identity, not just new angles

Same angle. Same format.

Run it through a creator, founder, or third-party identity and you open new pockets of reach without rebuilding the concept.

But, Partnership ads don’t fail at the ad level. They fail post-click.

If the landing page, pre-sell, or CRM doesn’t continue the same voice and story, the signal collapses.

Consistency is the multiplier.

If you’re scaling on Meta and not tracking FTI or incremental reach, you’re flying blind.

And if partnership ads aren’t a default part of your system yet, you'll get lost in the algorithm.

We tore up our entire creative process and rebuilt it for AI-first performance.

These 7 changes are now non-negotiable for scaling 8-figure brands.

2024–25 was about testing with AI.
2026 is about building with it.

Here’s what we’re shifting in our creative ops to scale real reach and win Meta’s AI game:

1. Creative diversity becomes non-negotiable
Meta’s new entity grouping system means if your ads look the same, they deliver the same. No matter how different the copy is.

💡70% of brands we audit are flooding their accounts with 100+ iterations...
But Meta sees them as 5 unique ads.

What we’re doing:
- Visual first, not copy first
- Distinct scenes, styles, formats
- Strategic volume > cosmetic tweaks

2. The AI Videographer becomes essential
We’ve added a Visual Prompt Engineer to every pod. A production multiplier.

🎯 Their remit:
- 10–30 ad variants per brief
- VO hooks, metaphors, transitions, environments
- Studio-level output without studio-level cost
It’s how we hit Meta’s volume bar without burning creative teams out.

3. AI = a second studio
We now run parallel briefs for human and AI production.
Same input, different output.

💡Where AI is outperforming:
- Product in environment
- Visual metaphors
- Explainers and low-prod demos
- Fast iterations on hooks + B-roll

4. Systems > tools
AI makes asset generation cheap.
So your edge isn’t generation, it’s organisation.

What we’re building:
✅ Centralised creative warehouse (transcribed, tagged, promptable)
✅ Context libraries for every format
✅ Performance data piped into feedback models
✅ Automated creative routing to avoid the graveyard problem

5. Feedback loops go automated
AI’s not just replacing creators, it’s coaching them.

We’re using tools that:
- Auto-critique sales calls and 1:1s
- Coach UGC creators on delivery
- QA edits before they hit the ad account
- Provide VO tone, clarity, and brevity suggestions in real-time

6. Video Gen hits mass market
Sora 2, Gemini V3.1, Nano Banana, Runway, they’re levelling up fast.

We’re already seeing:
- Seamless B-roll
- Abstract metaphors (balloons for stress, fire for urgency)
- “AI but not obvious” animations
- Scripted face swaps and founder clones

7. New workflows = new risks
Expect legal firewalls around:
- Creator likeness + consent
- Deepfake disclosures
- Brand safety for AI assets
- Authenticity disclaimers in ATL creative

We’re helping clients pre-empt with consent protocols, asset tagging, and workflow rules.

Bottom line for DTC brands in 2026

The brands that win will:
✅ Build an AI-native production function
✅ Invest in strategic visual diversity
✅ Systemise asset tagging, routing, and prompts
✅ Use AI for creation and performance coaching
✅ Blend AI + human storytelling at scale

The brands that lose will:
❌ Rely on text swaps and tired recuts
❌ Let GenAI files rot in Google Drive
❌ Skip strategic iteration
❌ Ignore how fast video is changing

I spent years thinking I had to figure everything out alone.

That’s what founders do, right?

Then I read Ray Dalio’s approach.

He didn’t build Bridgewater by being the smartest.
He built it by being the most willing to be wrong.

Here’s what he did differently:

He worked for what he wanted.
Not for what others wanted him to do.

He came up with independent opinions.
Then found the smartest people to destroy them.

He stress-tested everything.
Not to prove he was right.
To improve his odds of being right.

He stayed wary about overconfidence.
Because in markets, bad opinions cost everything.

He wrestled with his realities.
Reflected on consequences.
Learned and improved from the process.

Most founders confuse independence with isolation.

They think if they’re truly leading,
they should trust their gut and move alone.

But the best founders I know
don’t just think independently.

They think independently, then test brutally.

They create systems to challenge their own logic.
They seek out people who will prove them wrong.
They remain paranoid about blind spots.

Because you can do a huge amount of work
and still be wrong.

The market doesn’t care how hard you worked.

Independent thinking isn’t about being alone.
It’s about being right when everyone else is wrong.

And the only way to get there
is to test your assumptions with people
smart enough to prove you’re not.

Founder lesson:
Work for yourself.
Come up with independent opinions.
Stress-test them with people who will destroy them if they’re weak.
Be wary about being overconfident.
Reflect on consequences and constantly improve.

That’s how you win.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Q5 is the most important quarter (that isn’t a quarter) and this is how not to waste it.

Most brands go too seasonal or default to evergreen messaging that totally ignores how people actually feel post-Christmas.

The sharpest operators?

They lead with problem-aware creative that taps into the “reset” mindset and they build it to last beyond Q5 with smart hook variation.

- 50% goes to problem-aware + unaware top-of-funnel content
→ Tap into the “reset” mindset but build in hook variations so these ads outlive Q5.

- 20–30% goes to mid-funnel trust-builders
→ Objection handling. Social proof. Clear transformations. Especially important in health & wellness, where everyone’s shouting at once.

We break this all down in the 2026 Ecommerce Playbook: why now’s the best time to reach your hardest to reach customers and the biggest mistakes brands make post-Christmas.

Catch up now: https://lnkd.in/eTdgnNRH

$0 to $120M run rate in 11 months. The fastest-growing supplement brand in the world.

Backed by David Beckham.

Built on science.

IM8 Health is setting the pace for a new wave of consumer health brands, and Olly sat down with CEO Danny Yeung to unpack exactly how they’ve done it.

One of the sharpest operators we’ve ever spoken to.

Watch the full episode → https://lnkd.in/ewauU5yT

We couldn’t hire enough great creative strategists. So we built a system to create them.

🚨 We’re opening applications for the first ever UK Creative Strategist Incubator.

Not a junior role. Not a course.

This is a 9-month, Meta-backed, in-person training ground to fast-track high-curiosity talent into elite creative strategy role, inside one of the UK’s most advanced DTC growth teams.

Here’s why we built it:
– Most brands are hiring this role for the first time
– They don’t know what “great” looks like
– And the A-players are either locked into top agencies or demanding £90k+ salaries

We’ve trained 30+ strategists from scratch over the past 3 years.

Now we’re turning that process into a formal programme and opening it to the public for the first time.

📍 Based in our new London HQ
£100m+ in Meta ad spend in 2025 to learn from
Backed by Meta, including in-person sessions at Meta HQ
Real brands, real feedback loops, and a clear path to promotion

This is the MBA for performance creative

Only 5 spots.

Apply below if you're early in your career, obsessed with how creative drives revenue, and ready to put in the reps.

👉 https://lnkd.in/eHYYPFvy 

📺 Watch the episode where Olly and Loukas reveal all https://lnkd.in/ethEgsKj

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