What a week! We got to catch up with founders, operators, and builders IRL at the PhillyDTC happy hour last week, and it really filled our cup (both figuratively and literally). More on that below.

Where should we host next? NYC, LA, Austin, Chicago? Drop your vote in and we’ll take it to the party-planning committee.

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• MCo Beauty turned duping into a business model and runaway success story. thinks their smartest move has nothing to do with copying.

• Sephora's 2026 Accelerate cohort has landed: 12 founders, $100K on the table, a WNBA co-founder and a scalp care brand rooted in Korean head spa tradition among them. Watch those shelves like a hawk.

• Cool resource alert: OpenAI just rolled out training programs and pre-built workflows for SMB founders. Data shows attendees save 5+ hours a week, a.k.a. the sweet sound of a free Sunday night.

• Kiki Couchman and Elan Halpern of Sourmilk delivered 8,000 tubs of yogurt by Citi Bike, dubbed it a drug deal, and built a community on IRL chaos (feat. Harry Styles). Follow them for the most entertaining MBA you'll never pay for.

• Reels, deals, all the feels. Founder-led social is becoming a wholesale prerequisite, and the founders crushing it say their unpolished content performs like someone paid for it.

• Is everything an impulse buy now? How AI might be messing with your discoverability and losing you a handful of high intent customers.

• No one was excited to hear about another tariff increase, but reminder that you can bust out our handy tariffs calculator to help figure out how to juggle last week’s surprise 2.5% increase!

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I had the best time at last week’s PhillyDTC summer happy hour! Great drinks and better people.

I get so heads-down in build-mode that sometimes I can forget how much I love a night like this until I'm standing in the middle of one. The PhillyDTC scene is not playing around!

We’re floating a few event ideas in NYC and LA later this year, but scroll up and throw either location a vote if you’d be down for a drink and some shop talk. If you think we’re missing out on a good location we didn’t include in our poll, drop us a line in the comments…

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When Subin Hur's pediatrician told her U.S.-grown rice wasn't safe for her baby, she called her sister Suahn. For most Asian families, rice isn't just an ingredient — it's the first solid food, the thing that's been on the table at every meal across every generation. They could have just switched brands. Instead, the sisters moved their families to Korea and built a new supply chain from scratch. That became BARI, America's first Asian baby food brand.

In this episode, Suahn Hur, co-founder of BARI, walks us through how they built it: organic rice porridges, roasted grain teas, Asian-inspired meal pouches, a 74% reduction in heavy metal levels, and #1 on Amazon in their category. Next, expanding into U.S. retail.

Ever wanted to build something because the existing options weren't good enough? This one's for you.

From where we stand, the product news cycle holds the attention span of someone who just got out of a cold plunge. So naturally, every brand appears to be singing in perfect four-part harmony: where else can we be? 🎤 🎵

The brands grabbing our seven seconds of interest are finding footholds in unexpected territories, and moving so rapidly that no one has time to tell them their ideas are a little weird.

The world’s largest soda company trademarking a word that sounds like a Dad-sneeze, for example. Or shoes and salads carpooling to your place (HOV lane?).

Want to dive deeper into that and so much more? Join us along with fellow founders and operators in Philly tonight! We saved you a seat further down the scroll.

• Would you be strong enough to axe 99% of your assortment and pivot your business to support (and champion!) a single SKU? An interesting look into what happens when you do just that.

• DoorDash just integrated natively into Shopify's App Store, which means any brick-and-mortar Shopify merchant in the US can flip on same-day delivery in about as many clicks as it takes to add a sales channel.

• The 2026 FIFA World Cup was a BIG retail moment, with Bank of America data showing consumer discretionary spending up 6.3% year over year in June and Target moving 2.4x more product in host market stores.

• Brands like P.F. Candle Co. are inviting smaller brands to host pop-ups in its stores, outperforming normal weekends by 34%…A 10% hosting cut doesn't hurt either.

• of Pulse Check walked into Sephora, consulted ChatGPT instead of a store associate, and came home with a big glossy Q for retailers: why are customers talking to their phones instead of your humans?

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The Endless Commerce x Philly DTC Happy Hour is tonight, July 22nd! 🎉

Got a brand? Have questions? Feel like flexing your fluency in EDI? Come on over — no pitches or agendas, just good convos with new friends, drinks, and light bites.

Sign up here, and see you soon!

Chris Kolbe spent 30+ years as a senior executive at Ralph Lauren, J.Crew, Original Penguin, Lands' End, and Kohl's. That means he knows exactly how the industry works, and what it's been getting away with.

After decades of watching apparel shift to petroleum-based synthetics, he left to build HyperNatural: a performance apparel brand made from bio-based materials. The flagship fabric, HyperCool Jade, is built from Supima cotton, jade stone, and crab shells.

If you've ever wondered what it looks like to bet your career on an idea your entire industry has totally ignored, this one's for you.

Anyone else super-attached to their emotional support drink vessel lately? It can’t just be us, so welcome to 💧 HYDRATION WEEK 💧!

If there’s one thing we learned during the FIFA 2026 World Cup, it’s that all 104 matches’ three-minute "hydration breaks" midway through each half were great for everything from advertising to dating to…you know, fending off heat-related illness.

And speaking of worlds and cups, the global electrolyte drinks market alone is valued around $43 billion, and projected to reach $82 billion by 2034. So let’s raise a glass, can, pouch, packet, or your preferred delivery method to hydration breaks of all kinds.

• This summer, we all scream for electrolytes. And who’s cleaning up? Brands selling everything from drinkable IV fluid (“um?” or “yum?”) to our new seltzer: sparkling coconut water.

• And if you think coconut water is played out — Erewhon says no it’s not and also give us a dollar an ounce (coco-WHAT?)

• As an alternative, why not peel open a can of potassium-rich water extracted from heirloom Thai bananas?

• Algae Cooking Club launched a drizzling oil by @MadeByMusashi that’s packed with the essence of charred peak-season tomatoes. Bonus, their signature cooking oil has a higher smoke point than the pavement outside.

• Consumer and social expert dumps a much-needed bucket of ice water over every brand that slapped their logo on that Empire State Building engagement photo.

• French dairy behemoth Danone is guzzling down shake and smoothie brand acquisitions to the tune of $2.7 billion since April. First was UK-based Huel, the DTC-first meal replacement brand. Next came Australian favorite Rokeby Farms Protein Smoothies. Should Chobani be worried?

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Calling all DTC lovers: come join us at the Endless Commerce x Philly DTC Happy Hour next Wednesday, July 22nd. 🎉

We’re throwing a friendly community shindig for e-commerce founders, operators, and partners in the Philadelphia area. No pitches or agendas, just good convos, drinks, and light bites.

Sign up here — and see you there!

Matt Cohen left a decade in finance to co-found pantry staples brand SIMPLi with his wife Sarela Herrada, and if that sounds like a wild pivot, it was. They started with 80 farmers in Peru and have since scaled to 75 products across 13 countries, 2,500+ retail doors including Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Wegmans, and a foodservice business supplying sweetgreen, Daily Harvest, and Splendid Spoon.

Oh, and he won a a NOSH Changemaker of the Year award and a Conservation International investment along the way. Not bad for a guy who used to do derivatives valuations.

Whether you're building a sourcing-first food brand, navigating international supply chain complexity, or figuring out how to make mission and margin work together at retail scale, this conversation is a ground-level look at what it takes to get quinoa from ground to grocer.

Do any other nerds giddily await the release of a new Consumer Trends report from and Coefficient Capital? The 2026 Mid-Year Consumer Trends Report dropped just before 4th of July weekend, ICYMI while eating hot dogs and lighting sparklers.

A few of the learnings to gnaw on:

• If you thought we were at peak protein… we are nowhere near it.

• There’s a new “archetype” of consumer: The Optimizer! They’re wellness, AI, and GLP-1 obsessed.

• Willingness to pay for those expensive optimizations— AI, GLP-1s, and alllllll the added protein— is climbing.

You can read a lot more in the full report, linked below!

The New Consumer (on Substack)

Introducing the Consumer Trends 2026 Mid-Year Report

I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital…

Read more

a month ago · 15 likes · Dan Frommer

• A major CPG brand and a dating app partnering? This might be a first! Breeze and Kraft Heinz collaborated on a new “Marry Me Pasta Sauce,” inspired by the viral recipe.

• From brand builder : Americans are sleeping on Chinese brands, and they’re coming our way. (Plus: a few to get smart on fast!)

• Bath & Body Works and Hilary Duff dropped their new “fruit forward” body care line. Speaking of, here’s a very interesting take on why Bath & Body Works may not be so successful in all their new Ulta doors, from .

• How fun would it be to work on the brand campaign OluKai launched with Hawaiian lifeguards? In addition to shining a spotlight on real Hawaiian lifeguards in their video series, they also provide shoes to all (!) of the lifeguards in the Hawaiian islands.

• Brand founder ’s guide to influencer and affiliate platform ShopMy, and whether or not it’s “worth it” for a brand. (Need more ShopMy takes? Look no further than friend of the pod , who joined us on Commerce is Chaos not so long ago!)

• The LoveShackFancy x Target collab dropped last weekend and apparently Target stores throughout the US were festooned with LoveShackFancy’s signature bows. (Had to take the opportunity to use the word “festooned.”) The partnership expanded to include branded items from Wet Brush, Case-Mate, Wild, and Yoobi. Can’t remember the last time a partnership between a brand and retailer like this expanded to include other brands under its umbrella, can you?

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Happy July European vacation season to all who celebrate! And if you’re planning a more, should we say, American style vacation, allow us to put you on to the most incredible contraption: this laptop shade is light as a feather, folds flat, and is relatively eco-friendly.

Judah Bergman is the Founder and President of Jool Baby, a fully bootstrapped baby gear and child-safety brand he started in 2015 with a single magnetic cabinet lock he designed because no product on the market met his standard.

Since then, he’s grown Jool Baby into an eight-figure Amazon business with distribution across Target, Walmart, Babylist, and TikTok Shop — without a single outside investor or acquisition. (!)

He’s also spent over a decade running a free, vetted seller community now 450+ members strong, with working groups covering Amazon, Walmart, TikTok, warehousing, and tariffs.

Whether you’re building on Amazon, navigating the move into physical retail, or trying to compete on a playing field shaped by tariff volatility, Judah’s frameworks offer a candid, operator-first look at what it actually takes to scale a bootstrapped consumer brand in today’s market.

While we weren’t at Cannes this year (we hear the Croisette doesn’t take Venmo — so we hosted an NYC CPG Cool Down after the Fancy Food show instead!), we’re pretty sure no one in attendance was sipping the electrolyte drink of the summer. That honor belongs to us, courtesy of pickles. For real though, is there anything pickles can’t do? Ditto rocket pops, more on that below…

• Every time we declare “peak pickle,” we end up eating our crunchy, briny words. HOPWTR x Good Girl Snacks launched a limited-edition pickle lemonade. The very notion fills us with electrolytes (and joy). 🍋

• If you thought all supplement gummies were for kids, you clearly haven’t met Grüns…which just rolled out a line of gummies for kids. And before you ask: yes, they come in rocket pop flavor. (As do America’s birthday beans.) 🫘

• Steph Curry signed a $400M deal with Li-Ning, a brand that’s been banned from selling in the US since 2022. The real MVP? 1.4 billion basketball-obsessed Chinese consumers. Did Li-Ning just buy itself a homegrown Jordan Brand? Discuss. ⛹

• Instacart is now its own ad agency — you can find it in the middleman aisle! Brands used to hire an agency, then buy ads, then beg for their own data back. Instacart just rolled all three into one convenient checkout. (Also, AI.) 🥕

• We read on Reddit that Reddit’s data on Redditers indicates fully half of US shoppers validate their AI-recommended CPG purchases on Reddit. So, humans…good? 🤖

• Three ultra-deals this year — Kimberly-Clark buying Kenvue, McCormick scooping up Unilever's foods division, Keurig Dr Pepper nabbing JDE Peet's — added up to $120B. Yup, Ozempic and ingredient panels accomplished what decades of "eat healthier" campaigns couldn't. 📈

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Summer Fancy Food was poppin’ this week! So many samples to eat, so little stomach space… which seems to be the case with almost all the best tradeshows these days.

Ted Repic is the CEO of Rhino USA: the family-owned adventure gear company his sons Cameron and Dylan started in 2015 with a pickup truck and a gap in the market. Cameron was 19. Dylan jumped in with his savings while he was still in high school. Ted came in as CEO to help guide the growth.

A decade later: nine figures in revenue, 300+ products, Walmart, Sam's Club, AutoZone, and one of the most unexpected TikTok Shop success stories out there — the top seller in automotive and motorcycle, with eight figures in platform revenue.

Now they're breaking ground on RhinoWorld, a 182-acre adventure campus outside Austin where the gear gets built, beaten up, and eventually opened to customers, retail partners, and first responders in training.

Ready to shoot videos live in the mud? Cause Ted and the boys are!

Anyway, now that Sam’s back from her delightfully busy Hawaii jaunt, it’s time to bring in the seasonal summer product harvest. In NYC, we’re raising a glass to all things fancy and food.

Sudden thought: the Javits Center probably has killer air conditioning.

• Think beyond the bottle when it comes to sunscreen! Between sun-exposure wearables and derm & doctor formulated supplements to prevent sun damage, this explosive category continues to grow in new and explosive ways.

• The splashiest acquisition of 2026 so far is from an unsexy legacy brand— Breathe Right nasal strips. Unsexy = undervalued in public perception…

• L’Oréal’s collab with OpenAI will give us some interesting signals about what brands can expect from ChatGPT as an ad platform moving forward, starting with Maybelline “try-ons.”

• Would you have guessed that the South is America’s strongest plant-based market? Southern shoppers contribute to 36% of plant-based food nationwide.

• Ulta got in on the TikTok Shop action and beauty brand Polite Society was its first affiliate and co-marketing guinea pig. It’ll be interesting to see how TikTok Shop and affiliate and shopper marketing all coalesce in the coming years.

• Faire has shifted its business model so that non-retail customers can place wholesale orders now — because everything is kind of a shoppy shop these days.

• Crumbl’s new beverage with as much sugar as 19 Krispy Kremes is kinda criminal, yes… but should it actually be illegal, or is it more of a pancreas pandemonium party (enter at your own risk?)

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Calling all New Yorkers! Join us for a happy hour in NYC on Monday night, whether you’re unwinding from a long, delicious day at Summer Fancy Food Show or just looking to meet like-minded geeks, founders, and operators.

Before Jennie Ripps built one of the most talked-about RTD brands in the country, she was convincing Momofuku and Soho House that tea deserved to be taken as seriously as wine. That instinct — that what's actually in your glass matters — became the entire thesis behind Owl's Brew.

She launched it in 2020, right as the world shut down, and grew 918% in year one anyway. No sampling. No playbook. Just a product people actually wanted and a founder who understood her consumer better than most.

In this episode, we pour one out with Jennie, certified tea sommelier, co-author of Wise Cocktails (Rodale), and the person who figured out how to get a clean-ingredient cocktail brand into Disney World, SoFi Stadium, and TD Garden while also landing at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and Total Wine. The brand has 40-plus product awards and counting.

If you’re a fan of tea, lemonade, spiked pop, or Chelsea Handler (yes, that Chelsea Handler), you’re going to love this one. We think it’s one of our best episodes ever!

I still work closely with current founders, wearing a few different hats. Okay, it’s a lot of hats. (Seriously— my team will tell you that I will pick up the phone to help a founder I just met figure out freight forwarding in the middle of our team meeting, much to their chagrin!)

My co-founder and husband Brian and I have been building businesses together since we were in college. After selling GIR and Mvnifest, we founded Hologram Capital, a small PE fund that invests in “special situations” - often distressed consumer brands where Hologram can help them find a new life and a path forward.

Our life’s work is Endless Commerce, the anti-ERP. We are obsessed with sharing the tool that helped us scale our brand, our agency, and our investment portfolio: a supply chain and commerce ops platform that helps big brands manage their chaotic back offices. Agents, battle-tested automations, and a whole bunch of business logic lay the foundation for the modern answer to a traditional tool like an ERP or a messy, distributed tech stack.

Whether you’re a founder or a big brand operator, count us in for helping to solve complex problems with a wink and a smile. We love playing on the giant chessboard.

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There are a few more faces behind the scenes who make this Substack and my podcast, Commerce is Chaos, happen. You’ve met Zoe before, but meet Jess — our new producer and Head of Content! Fun, random fact: both Zoe and Jess worked at Food52 back in the day, though they didn’t know each other.

We love writing about the messy, thorny ops problems that snag so many of my founder and operator friends, but there’s so much going on to keep up with in the brand universe that we thought we’d start sharing a more bite-sized newsletter. Think of it as your lunch reading, hopefully a little inspiration, and at the very least a few links that you can drop into the Slack channel that will make you look very in-the-know.

• The latest trend R&D and marketing teams at beauty brands are focusing on? Longevity. L’Oreal just introduced the concept of “Follicle Biological Age” at the 14th World Congress for Hair Research in Seoul, and apparently made some connections between caring for your hair and anti-aging and mental health… what do you think? Crock of baloney, or does it have legs?

• Protein, but make it savory? This new cheese-forward protein bar brand, Takeaways, boasts 12g of protein and 120 calories with flavors like White Cheddar, Cheese Pizza and Pepper Jack. It’ll be interesting to see if this takes off the way “meat sticks” really have.

• Our buddy wrote a great piece on how to actually gauge AI effectiveness and assess AI spend for your team. This one’s a must-read before you encourage everyone to get AI literate and hand them the keys without much context or training.

• Is Gutter Capital resuscitating the VC accelerator? Because Elbow Grease looks pretty awesome. (Great name, btw.)

• Have tariffs contributed to brands’ growing sustainability fatigue when it comes to packaging? An interesting read on the future of packaging technology.

• DEUX founder ’s 3 tools for getting out of a funk are bookmark-worthy for all founders, especially Tool #1!

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Running a few ventures at once isn’t for the faint of heart. This week it looks like a 4 a.m. start time so I can wrap up meetings early enough to spend time with my family on a trip to see our cousins in Hawaii… maybe not a picture-perfect family vacay, but sometimes the in-between of work and play is as close as we can get! -Sam

Aaron Menitoff and his wife Julie spent over 20 years catering high-end events in South Florida — think Prince Harry and Bruce Springsteen — before the pandemic canceled everything overnight. So they did what any reasonable couple would do, bet the farm and built something entirely new.

The idea was simple: ship fully assembled, catering-quality cheese and charcuterie boards overnight, anywhere in the country. No assembly required. Just open the box.

In their first year, Boarderie shipped 10,000 boards and did $1.7 million in sales. Year two: $65 million. They’ve since landed on Oprah’s Favorite Things list and set a Guinness World Record for the largest charcuterie board ever assembled at 20 by 14 feet and 769 pounds.

In this episode, Aaron pulls back the curtain on how all of it actually works: the assembly line that produces up to 30,000 hand-assembled boards a day, the decision to keep production fully in-house, how they’ve managed explosive growth in a perishable food business, and the employment program that’s become a core part of how they operate.

If you love a great snack board, you’re going to love this one. I think it’s one of the best episodes ever!

There’s a moment on most operations calls where someone goes quiet, opens a tab they were hoping not to open, and reads a number off a spreadsheet. The file is named something like inventory_master_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS. Somebody built it during a stockout in 2022 and it never left. It is now the most load-bearing object in the company.

I think about that spreadsheet constantly, because right now the entire industry is trying to sell the person who maintains it on artificial intelligence.

Open any commerce trend list for this year and you’ll find the same word: enablement. AI enablement, commerce enablement, agentic this, autonomous that. The pitch is seductive and basically identical everywhere. Your operation runs itself. Your forecasts write themselves. Your reorders happen before you’ve noticed you needed them. Demand planning on autopilot, an agent watching your supply chain while you sleep. Wheeeee!

I want it to be true. I also know what’s sitting underneath most of these companies, because I’ve been in the back office, and it’s that spreadsheet.

Here’s the part the enablement crowd skips: every one of those magic capabilities is a function of data you already don’t trust. A forecast based on that garbage is just an over-confident statement about numbers. I see you, you liar. If your on-hand count disagrees with itself across your 3PL, your store POS, and your marketplace listings — and it does, for almost everyone — then the forecast isn’t intelligence, nope nope nope. It’s a very expensive guess, dressed up like a sports official blowing a whistle wearing the number “81” on their jersey (get it, eight-eye? AI?). Ok I’m tired and not at my creative peak, that was a stretch. But the point is:

You can stack the smartest model in the world on top of bad inventory data and all you’ve built is a faster way to be wrong. LOL.

Hear me out. This is a thing operators have always known. AI shillers keep pretending they can get past it. They can’t. Well, I guess they can. But you shouldn’t.

So when people ask me what “commerce enablement” actually means, I’ve stopped giving the brochure answer. Enablement isn’t the AI layer on top. Nope nope nope. Enablement is the boring substrate underneath. One place where your catalog, your inventory, your orders, and your fulfillment agree with each other, in real time, without a human reconciling tabs at 11pm. That’s it. That’s the whole unglamorous miracle. Everything the industry is excited about — forecasting, anomaly detection, agents that route exceptions before they become fires — only works if that foundation is true. Most brands are being sold the roof before anyone’s poured the floor. (That was better than my sports analogy, right?)

You can run the test yourself, and it’s bruuuutal. Pick one SKU. Ask three different people in your company how many units you have right now. If you get three different answers, you are not enabled. You’re hopeful. There’s a difference, and the difference is exactly the gap every shiny tool will faceplant into the second you turn it on.

The good news is that the brands actually pulling ahead this year already figured this out, and they’re not doing anything flashy. They’re not chasing every new agent or channel. They probably simplified. They surely connected the systems that mattered and killed the ones that didn’t. They made sure their numbers were true first, and then the clever stuff started working, because there was finally something solid to be clever about. It’s the least viral strategy in commerce. It also happens to be the one that works.

I think the reason nobody talks about this is that foundation work is unsexy and the AI demo is not. Nobody films a launch video about finally deleting FINAL_v3. But that’s the actual job. The agent doesn’t save you. The clean substrate that lets the agent be trusted with a decision is what saves you. The intelligence is downstream of the plumbing, and it always has been.

So if you’re sitting in budget meetings this year getting pitched enablement, please-for-the-love-of-yourselves push on one question before any of the fun ones: if I asked my own team how much of anything I have, would they agree?

Get that to yes, ok? Then everything else gets easier. And you finally get to close the spreadsheet.

xoxo,
Chaos

A consumer researcher I follow on Substack posted something recently that's been living rent-free in my head:

She’s right. And I’d even go further.

Selling out of a product means you didn't see it coming. Your data wasn't talking to you, or you weren't listening. Either way, someone wanted to give you money and you turned them away. That's a systems problem wearing a muscle suit.

I think about this concept in terms of a fridge.

Stick with me.

A well-managed fridge doesn't have stuff rotting in the back or empty shelves. A great fridge manager (hah!) buys what they'll actually use, rotates it instinctively, and knows what's running low before they're out of eggs on a Sunday morning facing down kids who want pancakes. The goal is the right fridge, with the right things, at the right time.

Your warehouse is your fridge, but bigger and more expensive.

Dead inventory charges you rent every single day: carrying costs, storage fees, opportunity cost. Running out of your hero SKU right when a wholesale account is scaling you up? That's the relationship. Maybe the account.

(I've spent more Sunday nights than I'd like to admit hoping the spreadsheet numbers matched by Monday morning. They often did not.)

Most founders I meet are flying somewhere between those two disasters, adding channels, SKUs, and warehouse locations with gut instinct, a spreadsheet someone made in 2022, and today's vibes. That spreadsheet won't tell you what's committed, what's in transit, or what's not. So you restock reactively instead of intentionally.

It sounds obvious when you say it out loud...but most of the hard operational stuff does.

Here’s the thing: most operators I know aren’t bad fridge managers. They’re actually pretty good ones. They just don’t have a fridge that talks back.

xoxo,
Chaos

Here’s something you learn quickly when you run a CommerceOS company willing to travel with your customers: The actual business is not in the office. It’s in the factory. It’s in the warehouse. It’s in the rental car between the factory and the warehouse. It’s at the diner attached to the hotel attached to the airport.

We’ve been on the road a lot this year. Brian, me, our client teams, whoever else we rope in for a given trip. Factory tours, QC walkthroughs, vendor meetings, the occasional “this was supposed to be a 30-minute stop but now we’re three hours in and someone’s showing us their new line.”

Glamorous? No. Essential? Extremely.

Also, surprisingly fun.

At some point on our last trip (third factory of the day, maybe fourth, I lost count) I looked around and realized the same specific things were happening every single time. Someone pulls out a tape measure. A vendor says “let me be transparent with you” and then says something mildly concerning. A forklift nearly takes out a teammate. We leave with more samples than luggage space.

So I made a bingo card.

Road & Factory Bingo, Field Edition No. 01.

25 squares, point values, house rules (witness required, no backfilling, disputes settled by group vote). A belt for the highest total at trip end.

The team got weirdly into it.

A few hours into the first trip we used it on, people were angling for squares. (I will not name names, but someone absolutely tried to bait a vendor into saying “MOQ” five times on purpose. Respect, though, right?)

By the end of the week we had three contested BINGOs and at least one reversal by group vote...

Here’s the link if you want to play it on your next trip: https://chaos.endlesscommerce.com/road-bingo

Print it. Torture your travel team. Send me your scores.

The larger point, if there has to be one: Operations is chaos. The road is where you see it most honestly. Tape measures, forklifts, handshake deals in parking lots, supplier dinners that turn into product roadmaps. None of it fits in a CRM. All of it matters.

You can’t vibe code the supply chain... but you can make a game of it.

xoxo,
Chaos

If you operate a consumer brand, your real calendar isn’t the one on your wall. It’s the one made of factory pauses, market weeks, freight cycles, and trade shows that decide whether your year sucks or rocks.

I keep two master calendars for myself. I update them regularly. I am sharing them in hopes that they save you so much time and heartache.

🌏 The Global Supply Chain Calendar Chinese New Year, Golden Week, Diwali, Tết, Amazon FBA inbound cutoffs, ocean freight GRI windows — every date that determines whether your inventory lands on time.

🛍️ The Consumer Brand & Trade Show Calendar Expo West, NY Now, Shoppe Object, ASD, IHA, Groceryshop, Magic — every market week and category show that actually moves the industry.

Share with your ops team. Share with your marketing team. Share with whoever keeps asking when Expo is.

Share

Love,
Sam

P.S. These are public Google Calendars — the kind you subscribe to once and forget about. They sit at the top of your calendar, updating themselves while you do other things.

I talk to 8-10 brand founders a week. The conversation almost always starts the same way: “We’re growing fast, things are kind of breaking, and we need to figure out our operations.” Then I ask: “Where does your inventory truth live right now?” And the answer — almost without exception — is some version of: “Well, Shopify has some of it, our 3PL has some of it, we have a spreadsheet that Brian updates every Monday, and the Amazon numbers are FBA so honestly, I’m not sure if they should count or not.”

This is not a failure of the founder. This is a failure of the tools. And it’s so common that I’ve stopped being surprised by it — which, if you think about it, is the wildest part.

Here’s what I’ve learned after building a brand from my kitchen table to local shops to national retail to an exit, and working with hundreds of brands at Mvnifest and Endless Commerce: the operational infrastructure behind your brand matters more than the storefront in front of it. And most founders figure this out too late — right around the time a major retailer sends their first routing guide and the chargeback clock starts ticking.

The Shopify gap

Shopify is genuinely great at what it does. It’s the best storefront on the planet for getting a brand from zero to $3M. No argument. But Shopify is organized around the transaction — the sale, the order, the checkout. The product is secondary. And somewhere between $5M and $15M, that distinction starts to matter a lot.

When you’re doing DTC only, the transaction view is fine. An order comes in, it ships, done. But the moment you add wholesale — a Target PO, a Nordstrom EDI feed, a Williams-Sonoma routing guide — you need a fundamentally different kind of truth. You need to know: what is this product, where is it, how much do we have committed vs. available, and what’s coming in on which purchase order?

Shopify can’t answer that. Not because it’s bad — because it’s not what Shopify was built to do. It’s like asking your car to also be a boat. Technically you could try, but woof.

The spreadsheet era

So what happens? The founder hires an ops person (OMG you guys, I hired my husband for this that’s how desperate I was). The ops person (my husband) builds a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet (thanks Brian!) works for six months. Then it doesn’t — because spreadsheets don’t talk to EDI feeds, don’t reconcile with 3PL warehouse counts, and definitely don’t send ASNs to Target on time.

Then it’s chargebacks. Then it’s compliance penalties buried in deductions. Then it’s a Sunday night spent reconciling three sources of inventory data and hoping the numbers match by Monday morning.

(I’ve lived this. Multiple times. It’s not a good Sunday. Brian and I did not have fun.)

The thing that actually fixes it

The fix is a different architectural foundation entirely — one built around the product record as the source of truth. When the product is your source of truth, everything else becomes a view: orders are a view, fulfillment is a view, demand planning is a view. They’re all looking at the same reality instead of maintaining separate, contradictory versions of it.

Brian made his spreadsheet as rad as it could be, we built an insanely powerful PIM (product information management, look it up it’s interesting), then we graduated to building that into the core feature of actual ops software, because we’re opinionated and generous and have an unignorable itch to share our brainchild with the world.

This is the thesis we built Endless Commerce on — and I’m not going to turn this Saturday reflection into a product pitch, so I’ll just say: if your operational stack is organized around transactions instead of items, you’re going to hit a ceiling. And sure, the timing varies. But there’s a ceiling, somewhere, no matter what.

Anyhow, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’ve just outgrown the tools that got you here. That’s actually a good sign. It means you’re building something real.

The fix isn’t complicated. It just requires making the unsexy infrastructure investment before you have to, instead of after it’s already cost you.

xoxo, Chaos

I’ve got you: here’s a breakdown of how to navigate 2025 domestic holiday shipping, no matter which carrier you prefer!

Carrier cutoff dates for 2025 holiday shipping

USPS (U.S. Postal Service)

• Ground Advantage & First-Class Mail: December 17, 2025

• Priority Mail: December 18, 2025

• Priority Mail Express: December 20, 2025

• Note: For Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and U.S. territories the Ground-Advantage cutoff may be a day earlier.

UPS

• 3 Day Select: December 19, 2025

• 2nd Day Air: December 22, 2025

• Next Day Air (overnight): December 23, 2025

• Ground / Ground-Saver: varies by origin/destination & transit time — use UPS “Time & Cost” tool to check

FedEx

• FedEx Ground Economy: December 15, 2025 (last day for cheapest ground-economy)

• FedEx Express Saver: December 20, 2025

• FedEx 2Day & 2Day AM: December 22, 2025

• FedEx Overnight (First Overnight / Priority Overnight / Standard Overnight / Extra Hours): December 23, 2025

• FedEx SameDay: December 24, 2025 (last-minute same-day shipping)

• FedEx Ground / Home Delivery transit-based ground: depends heavily on origin & destination — check the FedEx transit calculator.

I (and my expert team at Endless Commerce!) recommend…:

• Treat USPS Dec 17–20 as the cutoff window for mail-based shipping.

• For time-sensitive orders (especially slower ground), use UPS or FedEx Express/Overnight up to Dec 22–23.

• Ask customers with remote/distant ZIPs (or Alaska/Hawaii) to place orders at least a week earlier.

• Build in slack — holidays + volume cause delays. If you guarantee “pre-Xmas delivery,” aim to ship a few days before these cutoffs.

There’s still a few days left to get things landed just in the nick of time! Got any peak season questions or ops snafus that you need a little help with? Hit us in the comments or drop me a line here— I can help!

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Lastly, I would so love for you to share this letter— or any of my helpful guides to running a business and getting sh*t done— with a friend who you think could find it helpful. Appreciate you!

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And before you’ve recovered from one show, badges are already printing for the next.

This calendar brings all of it into one place—every major show, category-specific expo, retail reset, and brand moment that shapes sell-in, sell-through, product launches, and planning cycles.

Enter your email and I’ll send you a link to add it directly to your calendar. It stays pinned quietly at the top, giving you an industry-wide view of:

• Major trade shows across food, beverage, beauty, home, and retail

• Wholesale buying cycles and market weeks

• Category and seasonal demand peaks

• Cultural and commercial moments that drive traffic and conversion

• The weeks you should be launching—and the weeks you definitely shouldn’t

Commerce might be chaos, but the trade-show circuit is its heartbeat.

This calendar makes that heartbeat visible.

Add it. Share it. Build around it. And please give it to your ops team so they can land product in time for your biggest retail moments.

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Happy trading!

Love,
Sam

Factories pause for regional holidays. Labor availability swings by hemisphere. Carriers publish rate changes whenever they feel like it. Amazon sets inbound rules that shape your quarter. And freight markets have their own seasons entirely.

This schedule brings all of that into one place. Enter your email and I’ll send you a link to add it directly to your calendar.

This Global Supply Chain Calendar is updated weekly and tracks:

• Major production-impacting holidays across key manufacturing regions

• Seasonal slowdowns across Asia, North America, Europe, and LATAM

• Ocean freight cycles: GRIs, PSS windows, blank-sailing periods

• Air freight spikes around global demand peaks

• Amazon FBA inbound cutoffs

• High-risk weeks for lead times, launch timing, and PO execution

It’s designed to sit quietly at the top of your calendar without getting in the way—an always-on operational layer that helps you plan launches, buffer timelines, and avoid “we should’ve known better” moments.

This is the calendar I wish existed a decade ago. Add it. Share it. Make your marketing team subscribe so they stop asking you to air freight inventory during the most expensive weeks of the year.

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Happy supply-chaining!

Love,
Sam

Somewhere around March or April, someone says, “Let’s launch a new product for the holidays.”

And suddenly the whole team is manifesting a Q4 debut like it’s just a question of “focus” or “hustle.”

But the timeline is almost always completely disconnected from reality — not in a negative way, just in a physics exists kind of way.

Product development has its own pace.
Tooling has its own pace.
Production, freight, compliance, risk testing, packaging, QA — they all have their own immutable clocks.

And when your launch goal ignores those clocks, the outcome is totally predictable:

• Rushed samples

• Rushed revisions

• Rushed production

• Rushed QC

• Air freighting half the PO

• Destroyed margins

• A product that’s “fine” instead of great

All in service of hitting an arbitrary “Holiday launch!” milestone that was unreasonable from day one. 🫠

The irony is that holiday urgency is usually what kills the launch, not what accelerates it.

If you are an early stage consumer brand and if you want a strong Q4 release and if you care about yourself or the businesses that serve you, you need to be thinking about your brand new holiday product launch now, not in April.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition, but ambition without a healthy and educated appreciation for lead times and their predictable unpredictability is just self-inflicted chaos.

If you want to win the holidays, start earlier.
If you can’t start earlier, for the love of pete, just launch later!

And if you’re ever choosing between “rush everything” and “wait and do it right,” there’s only one answer that protects your margins, your brand, and your sanity.

The calendar doesn’t care about your vision, but your customers — and your P&L — will absolutely care about your quality.

My holiday wish for you, my dearest first-time founders, is just to love yourself a little and don’t make a holiday launch the make-or-break for your brand new brand.

PS: I make a big exception here for seasoned, battle-tested teams that know how to play it right. When product lifecycle management was my #1 job at GIR and Mvnifest, our shortest idea-to-launch cycle was 3 weeks (this one time during Covid when the world stopped turning.) And we routinely crushed 3-4 months from idea to market. But that was after years and years of practice, with an entrenched team, an established supply chain, and a vertically integrated fulfillment operation.

For those of you in the peak season trenches, I’m sending you good vibes!

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Don’t forget to drink water! May your BFCM goals be exceeded and your Thanksgiving plates be very full this week. 🦃

"Sam, I'm spending 3 days every month just trying to figure out which products are actually profitable."

"My inventory is scattered across 4 warehouses and I have no idea what I actually have in stock."

"I'm at $2M ARR but I feel like I'm flying blind on every operational decision."

Sound familiar?

Here's the thing:

Commerce is chaos by design. Every platform wants to own a piece of your stack. Every solution promises to be "the one."

And meanwhile, you're drowning in disconnected data and a crumbling ops stack…while trying to scale a business.

I've been getting these exact questions for years—from first-time founders launching their first SKU to operators scaling 8-figure exits.

The problems are remarkably consistent…but so are the solutions!

So I broke down everything (mostly!) that I know about starting, scaling and selling a consumer brand.

Get the answers to my most-asked questions as a serial founder and investor in a 90-minute masterclass, like:

✨ "How much capital do I actually need to launch?" (Spoiler: probably less than you think, but you're budgeting for the wrong things)

🔧 "When do I move from manual processes to automated systems?" (There's a specific revenue threshold that changes everything)

📦 "How do I manage inventory across multiple channels without losing my mind?" (The framework I used to go from Excel hell to acquisition-ready operations)

💰 "What metrics do investors actually care about for consumer brands?" (Hint: it's not the ones you're tracking)

🏢 "How do you handle the operational chaos when you're growing fast?" (The systems that scale from $100K to $10M)

Plus the big one that everyone asks but nobody wants to admit:

🚀 "How do you know when you're ready to sell—and how do you actually do it?"

I'm pulling back the curtain on the exact frameworks, systems, and decision trees that took my business from creative chaos to an 8-figure exit. The same ones I now use to help other founders avoid the operational quicksand that kills growth.

This isn't theory. These are battle-tested systems from someone who's been in the trenches, made the expensive mistakes, and figured out what actually works.

Watch Sam’s CPG Founder Masterclass →

If you're tired of piecing together advice from 47 different sources and ready for a systematic approach to building a consumer brand that actually scales...

You know where to find me.

Sam

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(So much so that my “notes” turned into this unofficial guide to making sense of the madness of contract manufacturing.)

When ecommerce brands start scaling—especially fast-growing DTC brands—they often hit a messy middle: demand is up, internal capacity is maxed out, and it’s time to bring in the big guns.

Enter: contract manufacturing (CM).

But this is where things get dicey—because this process? It’s chaos. 🚩

That “sauce” that Lauryn mentioned getting lost in? I think I can break it down to the ingredients. So here’s my take on all the places founders usually get stuck—and how to navigate it so that you can go back to focusing on the other kinds of sauce (special sauce!) that your business needs to win and dazzle your customers.

Too Many Options, Zero Filters

You Google “co-packer for [insert category]” and get buried in a list of 200 names, half of which look like they haven’t updated their websites since 2008. Without centralized data or a matchmaking framework, brands waste weeks just trying to sort signal from noise.

No Visibility Into Capacity, MOQs, or Lead Times

Most manufacturers don’t publicly list:

• Their minimums

• Current line availability

• Ingredient sourcing models

• Fill formats or certifications

So you’re making decisions based on vague PDFs and slow email chains. You can’t compare apples to apples… because you can’t even find the apples. 🫠

Cost Transparency Is a Black Box

Pricing is elusive. Brands are either over-quoted because they seem “green,” or underquoted just to get them in the door.

Without visibility into line efficiency, setup costs, freight implications, and yields, margins get annihilated before the first unit ships.

Even if you find someone who can make your product, that doesn’t mean they should. A manufacturer used to 50k-unit runs is not the right person to babysit your 5k test batch!

Misaligned incentives lead to:

• Missed deadlines

• Inconsistent QC

• Cost creep

• Burned relationships

Overindexing on Certifications

Yes, being USDA Organic and SQF-certified matters, but it’s not the whole story. Some brands get dazzled by credentials and overlook more practical factors:

• Line changeover flexibility

• Forecasting communication

• Ingredient substitution protocols

Devastatingly, fancy badges don’t fix bad workflows!

Okay, So How Do I Hire The Best Fit??

The right CM is big enough to teach you things, but not so big that you’re just another line item.

When you’re looking to scale beyond your kitchen, you have to be careful not to get dazzled by the options—you want someone scrappy who will work with you.

I feel like the right-sized manufacturing partner for an early-scaling CPG brand has some of the right “bullet points on their resume,” but then has these other really important startuppy things.

• They understand startup scrappiness

• Can handle smaller MOQs but are built for scale

• Offer flexible scheduling or short runs for testing

• Are willing to iterate with you

• Are super super* communicative

*DO NOT IGNORE BAD COMMUNICATION FROM A PARTNER, IT WILL NOT GET BETTER. (It’s possible I learned this from experience.)

This is almost like finding the right employees at a startup, too. Like if you look at that list above, it’s exactly the same as someone you’d want working full-time with you in the trenches.

You should probably wish that your CM could actually be a full-time employee of your business! You want to like them and respect them that much.

There’s another piece, which is trade secrets and ways of working.

If you are interviewing a CM and they tell you all their special secrets, and then you go take that to another CM instead, that sucks for them. So there is often a healthy skepticism at the beginning.

But this goes both ways - you don’t want to tell a CM this rad idea you have figured out and then have them just give it to your biggest competitor.

Lastly, you should definitely not think they they are dumb, and you should not feel like you are taking advantage of them or getting such a good deal on something because they don’t notice how good your pricing (that they gave you, lol!) is. 🚩🚩🚩

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So what do you think? Is it just me or is this where you, too, are right now or have gotten stuck in days past? Did I miss the mark or did you groan when you remembered that one CM that you have PTSD from? If you tell me your headaches, I’ll tell you mine!

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$2M run rate and then... nothing.

She and her team have been stuck at the same revenue threshold for 8 months—despite increasing ad spend! And launching new products!

When we dug deeper, she shared something that she thought was relatively innocuous with me… but I think it’s actually the real issue:

They're spending 3 days every month just trying to figure out which products are actually profitable.

Meanwhile, $50K worth of dead inventory sits in their warehouse—products they bought 6 months ago based on "seasonal trends" that never materialized. (Been there.)

Their customer data? It’s scattered across 7 different platforms.

The same generic newsletter is going to the customer who bought once 2 years ago… AND the customer who places monthly $500+ orders.

This isn't a growth problem.

(Phew!)

It's a visibility problem.

When you can't see what's actually working, you end up making decisions in the dark.

You double down on the wrong products, ignore your best customers, and waste time on manual reporting instead of strategy.

The companies breaking through that plateau aren't necessarily smarter! They just have better visibility into what's actually driving their business. They’re driving a car with a super clean windshield—and your car just needs better wiper blades. 😉

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Ok so if you had to estimate it, how much time do you think your team is losing to data chaos each month?

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If you’re spending more than 1-2 hours on this a month, I’d love to help you (and I think I can pretty quickly and easily). Reply to this note and we can get some time on the books to get you unstuck!

Early stage founders: these are a few of the mistakes I made founding, growing, and scaling companies like GIR, Voltaire, and Mvnifest, and the ones I see consumer founders make now that I’m in the investor seat.

Mistake 1: Over-engineering the first product instead of launching to learn fast (aka, give yourself a break)

An easy mistake to make at the very beginning is actually just trying to be too perfect. You're going to make mistakes. (I’m sorry!)

Step 1 is acceptance—and yes, I know that for most people that’s supposed to be Step 5. But Step 1 is the part where you accept that there will be mistakes, and then give yourself a little bit of grace. Not giving yourself grace can be the biggest start-up mistake of all, because you're about to do something that's fundamentally hard! There’s no way around it.

Sure, this one’s short and sweet. But all the mistakes to come ladder up into it: if you give yourself the freedom to fail, ask “the wrong” questions, embarrass yourself by being curious, persistent, or new to something… then you’re on the right track.

Mistake 2: Burning cash on fancy sh*t like swag before validating market fit

Over-investing in brand at an early stage—especially if you're not really well capitalized—can be a huge bump in the road.

Why? Well, because you need to get in learning mode as fast as you can, and you need customers for that.

Balance is critical here: if you're too rough around the edges, then you don't take the first step into brand, which is to build trust.

You have to have just enough brand equity to start to build trust with your customers or potential customers… but having too much means that you're going to be emotionally—and financially—stuck with what you've got, which will reduce your willingness to learn and experiment. I’m not asking you to anger the design gods or skimp on critical packaging investments. Spend on brand, but spend it wisely.

In other words, accept that there are going to be mistakes and let there be rough edges somewhere…but don't let there be so many rough edges that you don't give yourself the opportunity to start earning people's trust.

Sound tough to balance? It is!

Mistake 3: Trying to be everything to everyone instead of nailing one customer segment

Another mistake that I've made in the past is trying to be everything, everywhere, all at once. (Unfortunately, this has now become a tagline for me as I try to run both our portfolio at Hologram Capital and build a best-in-class ops stack for consumer brands over at Endless Commerce. Oops.)

But we can all see what an easy trap this is for an early stage brand! If you can find a narrow focus, or a single customer, or a single persona to whom you can mean the whole world, then that’s a hell of a lot better than being pretty good for a lot of people.

Want to operationalize that approach?

Imagine an ideal customer. So often for consumer founders, it's yourself, right? You're obsessed with this. Go talk to yourself in the third person and figure out for you as a customer: what would make this just rock? What would make it a no brainer? What would make it worth pulling dollar bills out of your wallet for?

If you can pick one or maybe two very narrow customer personas to play to, and win them, then you can go on and win the next one.

What's really difficult is trying to bifurcate the communication so broadly at the very beginning that you try to speak to everybody's objections.

Just answer one person's objections fully, completely, holistically—with all the juice you’ve got!—and you'll be good to go.

Mistake 4: Not validating your product before going all in on it.

For the love of Pete: before you quit your day job or max out your credit cards, prove that people will actually pay for what you're building. How? Use a pre-order campaign. Ask some not-friends what they’d pay for your hypothetical product. Create “a party that never happened,” which is my code for a realistic-looking product launch - complete website, product photos, the works - for something that doesn't exist yet. If people pre-order or sign up for your waitlist, you know you're onto something. If they don't, you just saved yourself months of building the wrong thing.

If you're a really creative person and you like copywriting and art, then go make an ad. And if you're a little more technical and throwing together a website sounds fun, there you go! It comes down to how much energy you have and what you can mash together with your natural abilities.

The more folks that you talk to and the further degrees of separation they could be from your immediate social network, the better quality data you'll have around your product. The opinions of 20 people you've never met before are way more valuable than the opinions of family and friends. (We love ‘em! But they’re biased.)

What you're looking for is uncomfortable opinions. Because uncomfortable opinions help you validate an idea at a really early stage.

One last piece of advice: throw together a prototype. It's so easy to let the perfect thing be the enemy of scrappy, crappy prototypes. Spatulas are always my example: I cut one out of cardboard just to make sure that the approximate proportions were right. Is cardboard my perfect, final medium? Of course not—but from that cardboard prototype, I realized what I was working with was a little too wide, and I adjusted immediately before spending the next $10 on sculpey and the next $100 on home-cured silicone.

It’s infinitely more efficient to spend $10 protoyping… and then $100 prototyping… and if you’re still really convinced and obsessed at the end of that process, then $1,000 and so on.

If there’s really a business there, you may spend $10,000 on prototypes. But wouldn’t that money be better spent if you’ve tinkered and validated with your lunch money and a few trips to the craft store first?

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If this was at all helpful for you, I’d love to know! Please shoot me a DM or hit us up in the comments, and best of all, consider forwarding to a friend.

Seasoned consumer vets… what mistakes did I miss? Anything you’d add?

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