Salif S.

Direct Response Creative For eCommerce Brands | Clients Include Setu, eComm Scaling Secrets, True Classic, FitTrack, Laura Geller, Perk, Alpha Lion, Glow25, PetLab, KraveBeauty, and more...

Siba Consulting is a lean eCommerce agency that helps 7-9 figure brands scale their new customer acquisition through Meta and YouTube ads. 

Our partners include Omnilux, Laura Geller, True Classic, Obvi, FitTrack, Solawave, PetLab and more...

We specialise in end-to-end performance creative development, media buying and multi-funnel testing.

Check out our work -> https://www.sibaconsulting.com/

Book an intro call with me -> https://calendly.com/sibaconsulting/discoverycall

Founder

Founder of a boutique performance marketing and creative agency for high-growth eCommerce brands and info-products.

We specialise in direct response creative and landing page development.

Learn more here: sibaconsulting.com

I'm hiring another creative strategist to join my agency 🚨

Base Retainer + % Of Ad Spend.

Only apply if:

- You worked for/with 8-9 figure DTC brands
- You've made ads that spent $100k+ and you have proof to show
- You're serious about growing with a lean team

If you want to apply, send me a DM with your portfolio.

We're growing fast so looking to hire someone within 7-10 days.

Salif S

Founder @ Siba Consulting | Lean creative agency for 7-9 figure DTC brands

Chris Nawrocki

Ecommerce Consultant | Director | CMO | CCO & Founder @ Heur

Co-founder at Heur - an award-winning DTC-as-a-service ecommerce agency.

We run end-to-end ecommerce for ambitious brands, owning strategy, trading, digital marketing and retention. In practice, that means becoming your senior ecommerce team on demand and taking responsibility for performance, not just activity. We currently operate and grow some of the world’s most ambitious B2C ecommerce businesses.

I’m a hands-on ecommerce and digital growth operator with 17+ years’ experience across international luxury, lifestyle and FMCG. I’ve worked brand-side, agency-side and alongside investors, with deep, practical exposure to scaling ecommerce businesses across markets.

Previously, I’ve worked with brands including H&M, Lyle & Scott, Vivobarefoot, Drake’s, Resident Home, Derek Rose, Jaded, The Ragged Priest, Duke & Dexter and Tangle Teezer.

Today, I work directly with founders and leadership teams in CMO, COO, Growth Director and NED capacities. Typical mandates include rebuilding ecommerce foundations, restoring growth momentum, professionalising teams and trading models, or preparing businesses for investment or M&A.

My experience spans full ecommerce ownership: P&L accountability, multichannel acquisition and retention, marketplaces, CRO, tech stack decisions, and the operational realities behind the storefront - from procurement and fulfilment through to delivery and customer experience.

I specialise in designing and executing growth strategies that are commercially rigorous, scalable and profitable. I’m comfortable operating from board level through to hands-on delivery, translating complexity into clear decisions, and building systems that stand up under pressure.

Director Of Ecommerce Strategy

End-to-end Ecommerce and marketing growth agency. Delivering managed Ecommerce and fractional growth support for growing brands.

Working with clients such as H&M, Union Coffee, Drakes and Jaded London.

I expected AI to shrink creative teams... because once production becomes cheap and instant, it feels like the “making” part of marketing stops being a bottleneck.

What has actually happened is the opposite. Output has exploded, so direction has become the constraint. When everyone can generate ten variations in an hour, the competitive edge shifts to having an eye for what belongs, what is off-brand, and what will work commercially.

It is similar to photography going digital. Cameras got better and cheaper, and suddenly everyone could shoot. The winners were not the people with the fastest shutter finger. They were the ones who could frame a shot, set a mood, and build a consistent point of view across a whole body of work.

You can see it in paid social now. One brand uses AI to flood the channel with average assets (This is the MUDDY MIDDLE) and watches blended CAC drift upwards as frequency rises and response weakens. Another keeps a tight creative direction, uses AI to iterate around it, and ends up with better learning, cleaner spend, and more contribution per session.

The trade-off is uncomfortable. Creative direction is harder to hire for and harder to measure, which means the best people cost real money.

AI reduces production costs. It increases the premium on taste, judgement, and commercial creative leadership... this is what interests me now!

Founder & CCO @ Heur | Fractional Ecommerce Consultant

Hiring an in-house ecommerce team looks like control.

For many growing brands, it is concentrated risk.

We now run managed ecommerce for 10+ brands. The common thread is not capability. It is risk appetite. Building an internal team means fixed salaries, hiring errors, management load and the quiet cost of underperformance while you work it out.

A useful comparison is portfolio management. You can place one large bet on a single stock and hope you hired the right manager. Or you can access a diversified fund with specialist operators across disciplines, already working as a unit. The second model spreads risk and compresses learning curves.

In ecommerce, mis-hiring a Head of Performance or Ecommerce Director can cost six figures before you see the damage in margin. Add recruitment fees, onboarding time and opportunity cost, and growth slows while payroll stays constant.

Managed ecommerce changes the structure. You access a senior trading brain, performance expertise and operational governance without carrying the employment risk. Incentives are aligned around contribution, not job titles. It also gives you access to CMOs and senior consultants for the BIGGER questions a traditional team would not be able to navigate.

It is not about outsourcing responsibility. It is about structuring it properly. For brands where D2C matters, reducing execution risk is often the most underrated growth lever.

Building teams can work - Outsourcing ecommerce has a much higher chance of success!

Most ecommerce reporting is overbuilt.

Too many KPIs, not enough understanding.

I regularly see dashboards with 25 metrics tracked weekly, yet no one can clearly explain what actually drives contribution. Traffic is up, conversion is down, AOV is flat, ROAS looks acceptable. The board still cannot answer a simple question: Are we creating profitable growth?

In finance, no serious CFO manages a business through 30 ratios at once. They obsess over a small set of drivers and understand how they interact. Revenue quality, gross margin, operating leverage, and cash conversion. Everything else supports those.

Ecommerce is no different. If you truly understand blended CAC, repeat rate, gross margin and contribution, you can diagnose most performance issues quickly. You can see when discounting is masking demand weakness. You can see when paid efficiency is deteriorating before profit collapses.

The problem is not data availability... they give comfort.... It feels safer to discuss many surface metrics than a few hard commercial truths.

Depth beats breadth here. Knowing five KPIs inside out, including their drivers and trade-offs, gives you control. A vague grasp of twenty-five gives you noise.

I'd choose clarity over volume every time.

Shopify’s reporting update that pulls in meta fields looks small. It is not!

For years, most brands treated meta fields as decoration. Useful for merchandising, filtering or PDP detail, but disconnected from commercial reporting. Now that data can sit inside native reports and be sliced properly.

This changes how you should think about structure.

In finance, adding a new line to the chart of accounts does not create value on its own. It creates clarity. You can finally see which cost centres actually drive profit. Meta fields in reporting work the same way. They expose product attributes, drops, materials, collections or campaign tags directly inside revenue and margin analysis.

If your product data is messy, this update will surface it quickly. Inconsistent tagging, vague naming, and duplicated attributes. The reporting becomes unreliable, and decisions get softer.

If your data is disciplined, you gain leverage. You can see the contribution by fabric, by hero feature, by launch cohort. You can make buying, pricing and paid media decisions with sharper intent.

The mental model is simple. Reporting does not fix strategy. It reveals whether your foundations were commercially serious in the first place.

The next 6 months + are for brands to fix your data/feeds/product information. 

This will feed everything... Focus on this now!

International expansion is where margin quietly goes to die... when approached wrong.

It often starts with a healthy domestic DTC model. Strong blended CAC, stable contribution margin, and cash conversion that works. Then someone sees traffic from Germany or the US and decides to “lean in”.

The problem is not demand. It is economics.

Expanding internationally without structural readiness is like opening a second restaurant before the first one has a repeatable kitchen system. Revenue shows up quickly. So do new costs. Local returns, higher shipping, FX leakage, local payment fees, compliance, and customer service complexity. The top line looks exciting. The P&L gets thinner.

Most brands underestimate two things: working capital and operational drag. International stock sits longer. Forecasting error compounds. Marketing becomes less efficient because creative, language and seasonality differ. The model that worked at home does not automatically travel.

The decision lens is simple. Only expand where you can see a clear path to local contribution margin parity within 6 to 12 months, and where operations can scale without manual firefighting.

International growth rewards preparation. It punishes optimism funded by cash you do not have.

Marketing costs are rising. That is a given.

Everyone talks about optimising your marketing... but the real lever is how well you trade your website.

If your unit economics are solid, the site becomes a force multiplier. Conversion rate, AOV, mix of full price to discount, repeat cadence. These are trading decisions. They determine how much contribution you generate from the traffic you already paid for.

Think of it like retail shelf space. Two supermarkets can have identical footfall. The one who understands product placement, margin mix and basket drivers will generate more profit from the same volume. The footfall matters, but the trading matters more.

Most teams default to buying more traffic when revenue softens. It feels active. It shows intent. But if your product mix is skewed toward low-margin SKUs, if discounting is doing the heavy lifting, or if your PDPs are leaking conversion, you are amplifying inefficiency.

Strong trading discipline changes the equation. You improve full-price sell-through. You protect gross margin. You lift AOV through intelligent bundling rather than blunt discounting. Now every pound of media works harder.
Poor trading erodes brand and margin at the same time. Good trading compounds both.

Traffic buys opportunity. Trading turns it into profit.

You wouldn’t leave your ad account with an intern. Why treat ecommerce any differently?

Most brands obsess over paid media. ROAS is watched daily. Budgets are tight. Tests are structured.

Then you look at the ecommerce engine behind it.

- Slow optimisation processes
- Weak decision-making
- Discount-led trading with no margin plan
- Stock decisions made in isolation

And somehow that’s acceptable.

Ecommerce is just as sensitive as paid media. Small changes in site speed, UX, pricing or stock have a direct impact on revenue and profit. If those levers aren’t being actively managed, you’re paying a tax on every click.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about rigour and process.

The brands that win treat ecommerce like the commercial system it is:

- Processes linked to revenue drivers with commercial outputs
- Decision-making linked to OKRs to drive a business agenda
- Trading tied to margin, not just volume
- Stock and demand planned together

There is the right way to approch ecommerce and a wrong way. 

My advice? Audit your ecommerce setup with the same seriousness you apply to paid media. If you wouldn’t trust an intern with your ad budget, don’t let your trading engine run on autopilot. If you want guidance on this, talk to my team at Heur - we do this day in and day out!

DTC As A Service | Ecommerce Consultant | Founder @ Heur

Revenue hides problems. Cashflow exposes them.

You can post record months and still be fragile.

Topline growth looks healthy. Feels like momentum. Then suddenly, cash is tight, and everyone’s asking why.

Revenue tells you demand exists. Cash flow tells you whether your model actually works.

In ecommerce, the weak spots are predictable:

- Stock bought too deeply, trapping working capital
- Suppliers paid before customers pay you
- Margin that looks fine until returns and discounting hit
- Growth funded by spend, not contribution

You don’t feel this in the good months. You feel it when you can’t reorder bestsellers or when a “great” campaign creates a bigger cash hole than expected.

That’s structural, not seasonal.

My view? At the very least, you need to tie your marketing and stock plans to a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast. If growth creates strain instead of strength, fix the mechanics before chasing more revenue.

Growth makes alignment harder... but not impossible.

The bigger the team, the easier it is for priorities to drift. This is totally natural and part of growing fast.

In the early days of an agency/businesses, everyone sits close to the numbers. You feel cashflow pressure together. You know which clients matter. Decisions are made against a shared understanding of margin and risk.

As you scale, that proximity fades. More roles, more specialisation, more interpretation. People optimise for their function because that is what they see. Performance marketing chases ROAS. Delivery chases utilisation. Sales chases top line. All rational in isolation.

It is similar to a rowing crew. When there are four people in the boat, you can sense if someone is slightly off rhythm. With eight, misalignment compounds quickly. If the stroke rate is not clearly set and reinforced, effort increases but speed drops.

Alignment drifts because prioritis and information fragment over time. The leadership still sees the whole P&L. Most of the team only sees a slice... but this is what needs to happen as you scale! 

The fix is not more meetings. It is clarity around what actually matters commercially and repeating it until it becomes muscle memory .

You will hear me say muscle memory a lot in the context of ecommerce - build the reflex for things that matter most.

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