Happy Sunday!

I hope that you are at home, with your feet up, AC on, sipping on an ice-cold BRĒZ as you wind down during Sunday night and get prepped to attack next week. First off, I wanted to thank everyone who came out to the Ecom Founders Q4 Summit a few weeks ago. We had several hundred marketers and operators in NYC at Webster Hall all sharing tactics and strategies for how we plan to approach Q4 this year. 

The conversation that opened the event was with none other than Aaron Nosbisch, the founder of BRĒZ who’s been building one of the fastest growing new DTC beverage brands in the space right now. But, before we get into that…

Postscript — the best-in-class SMS marketing platform has a BFCM playbook for you.

My friends at Postscript anticipated the Q4 madness and did something awesome to help us all out: they compiled a BFCM playbook with 20 tactics their merchants used over the last two holiday seasons to drive millions in SMS revenue. These are the actual strategies top brands deployed to crush it during Black Friday, bundled into one free guide — and you can grab it on this link.

You know Postscript… they stay laser-focused on just being the best SMS platform to exist. They don’t try to do email or reviews, just SMS; and they do it really well.

If you missed it, Postscript recently rolled out an AI-powered feature called Infinity Testing. In a beta with Dr. Squatch, letting the AI automatically generate and test text variations led to an 11% lift in revenue per message (and a 10% lift in orders per message) versus their normal texts. That’s free money just by allowing Postscript’s AI to optimize your copy.

All those kinds of insights and hard-won tactics are distilled into that BFCM playbook. It’s concise, actionable, and I’m willing to bet at least a couple of the ideas inside will add a 5 or 6-figure incremental boost to your Q4 sales.

Black Friday will be here before we know it. Don’t be kicking yourself in December for missing out on these moves. Check out Postscript’s BFCM guide and thank me later!

This past week on Limited Supply, I interviewed Jerel Blades, the Head of Growth at TUSHY. Not only is he so deep in the world of performance marketing for a brand doing 9-figures in revenue, but he is so great at explaining and teaching the WHY behind what he does. 

If you want to understand how Jerel views growth, listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube — just search, “Limited Supply”.

Since Aaron launched the company, they are about 18 months into their journey and on pace to do $70M in revenue this year. I wanted to take today’s email to run through some of the insights I learned from my conversation with Aaron that I think you can apply to your brand. This email won’t be a tactical email, per say, but it might inspire a thought that could impact your business.

One thing I particularly love about BRĒZ is that Aaron didn't start with market research or paying consultants to help him figure out what problem to solve. He identified a problem that he personally had and decided to figure out the solution. As he put it, he realized that alcohol sucked and he believed that it was slowly poisoning us from the inside. He said that drinking feels great in the moment but the hangovers, headaches, and poor performance that occur the next day weren't worth it for him. Aaron also liked smoking for a different type of high but he found that the sensation it gave him was unpredictable, it often made him tired and feeling anti-social, and obviously smoking itself is not great for your lungs. 

He wanted to build something better that would give him the feeling of alcohol/THC, without the hangovers and in a form factor that was easy to consume in social settings with friends. That’s why he built BRĒZ which is a cannabis, adaptogen, & mushroom infused drink to enhance any moment with the perfect sensation. He learned there are a lot of people just like him that wanted a new alternative and then it was off to the races to develop the actual product and then layer on smart marketing from there.

That leads me to the second point which is around product innovation. While everyone obsesses over creative and media buying, Aaron spent time on actual product innovation from the start. For him, that was all about testing and finding the right THC from hemp + CBD + Lion's Mane then combining it into a beverage with a good flavor profile that consumers would actually enjoy. After that, he had to dial in the strength of each ingredient so that the sensation would hit within 5 minutes and wear off in 90 to 120 minutes. He wanted a true alternative to drinking a cocktail at a bar. 

He had to do a bunch of research and testing to figure out his formulation to come up with something new and unique that had a real advantage vs the status quo from day 1. I always say this but the brands that win the most are led by teams who think about product innovation first. Eight Sleep, HexClad, and SKIMS are all great examples of this. They led with real product innovation, and then layered on great marketing later, not the other way around. If you can make your product genuinely different, and something that people would organically tell their friends about, everything else in your business gets easier; you’re not constantly swimming upstream. Your CACs will be lower, your referral rate will be higher, and it takes less to convince people. If you simply layer on marketing on a commodity product, you end up just fighting an uphill battle for the entire lifespan of your brand.

Another thing Aaron said that I found interesting is how they are building the brand. He compared it to the differences between Apple and Coca Cola. For example, Coca Cola owns Sprite, Fanta, Barq’s rootbeer, Golden Peak tea etc. In that world, each new beverage line has its own logo and branding, with different colors, different aesthetics, and different vibes. On top of that, Coca Cola doesn’t position their different lines as  "Sprite by Coca-Cola" or Fanta by Coca Cola, etc they are all distinct brands. 

Right now, Aaron has several products and he’s taking a different approach with BRĒZ. Instead of giving them all unique brands, he wanted each product to live under the same umbrella just with a different name. He thinks that is more like Apple where you have the MacBook Pro vs Air, iPhone, iPad, etc all with similar design philosophies which are unified under one brand.

BRĒZ isn't just one drink. He wants it to be a collection of feel-good tonics (and likely many other products later on) with different effects for different goals. Right now that’s around the feelings he wants people to experience. Elevate vs Amplify, vs Dream, vs Drift vs Flow. It’s a subtle way in which he’s building out his product ecosystem that other companies can learn from. He’s got taste and that makes his choices around branding, positioning, and his SKU base something to study.

BRĒZ is absolutely crushing it via DTC right now. They did $28M in DTC revenue in year one. But, what's unlocking the next chapter of growth for them isn’t eCommerce, it’s traditional brick and mortar retail and that’s where they’re spending most of their time.

To be successful in 2025, your goal should be to build up a large percentage of your sales coming from retail and large POs. I led DTC at Hint (a multi 9 figure beverage brand) and what I found was that DTC was a massive channel to create awareness, build the brand, and drive direct sales, but it also created this enormous halo effect for us on other sales channels (retail, food service, events, etc.). Every dollar we spent on digital, we made $3 back in brick and mortar/retail stores. I think the reason we did so well was because we really focused on storytelling, with an omni-channel approach. 

Aaron thinks the same way and knows that most people don’t buy beverages online, they buy them in store so he’s been hyperscaling retail partnerships and it’s already adding millions to their top line. He said that when they launched at Sprouts, they gave them 4 months of inventory but it sold out in 2 weeks (which he says was one of the fastest selling product launches in Sprouts history).

The path forward isn’t just about more spend on Meta, it’s about getting BRĒZ into thousands of retail stores in the US and around the world, meeting consumers where they want to buy, which for beverage, usually isn’t online. 

Another thing that fascinates me is how big Aaron’s ambition is for this brand. Aaron realizes that he’s competing with giants and wants the founders in the room to think bigger. As everyone knows there are quite a few billion dollar beverage brands (i.e single product lines worth more than a billion). For example, Coca Cola’s empire does nearly $50 billion in revenue. Monster does over $7 billion per year. Red bull does billions. The bottled alcohol segment does hundreds of billions per year. Although Aaron is excited about where BRĒZ is today, he thinks it can easily be 10-30x bigger based on the comps he sees. He wants to build a household name and what I love about that is the kind of ambition that makes you take bigger, bolder bets. Even if you shoot for stars, you’ll likely end up on the moon just based on that mindset of wanting to build a massive company over time.

Another thing I think is just an evergreen reminder is to always be testing new channels. Aaron reminded the audience that you want to hop on new trends and channels as early as possible. That is your competitive advantage as an SMB and something major corporations simply won’t do. 

I think the entire goal of marketing (and business more broadly) is figuring out where you can allocate $1 of spend to generate the highest possible return. Always about finding the next arbitrage. For marketing, you need to look for underpriced attention that can become a new and efficient channel for you. With that in mind, your marketing department should always be running tests and making small bets on where you might find alpha next. For Aaron, one of those early bets was TikTok shop, and later, AppLovin (until he got banned because of the category).

I think pretty much everyone can agree that the most genius thing TikTok did was enable anyone on their platform to easily become an affiliate for brands. Aaron saw this early on, moved quickly, hired a bunch of affiliates, and became the #1 beverage on TikTok Shop. He basically said that you need to stay plugged into the zeitgeist of what's working right now and immediately start testing new channels if you find something new. I think AppLovin is another one of those channels that brands should be experimenting with. TV ads another. I also just saw that OpenAI is building an ads platform. Clipping. Generative engine optimization. These are the levers you want to be playing with.

According to Aaron, crafting a good offer isn't about slapping on a 20% off discount code, which I completely agree with. It's much more about how you present the value. For example, an offer that’s working for BRĒZ right now is the sample variety pack where they send you one of each of their main SKUs + a few shots to test out. There is no discount but the way it’s presented makes it the perfect option and introduction to the brand for new buyers. This bundle (which is a type of offer) has crushed it for them. Aaron thinks the best way to test is to basically stabilize your landing page, nail the design, then rotate offers weekly until you find what works. So try the discount, try a bundle, try a free gift with purchase or a BOGO or something else. Try them all. Aaron said that the main goal with crafting a good offer is that you always want to make people feel like they're getting the better half of the deal. If you can do that, you will win.

Aaron also told me that his best performing creative was a video of him calling a customer, shot on his iPhone in the corner of a simple room. He thinks people are sick of high production commercials and doesn’t recommend them. He also told me that he flipped a coin on camera to decide if he'd refund a $560 order. It landed on tails and it cost him $560 to refund them. But he used that video as an ad, it crushed, and made BRĒZ another $500K in revenue. He reminds founders and marketers to stop overthinking, pick up the phone they already have and start telling better stories. You can test faster this way and it will likely outperform a highly planned out commercial campaign. 

Aaron also told me that his best performing creative was a video of him calling a customer, shot on his iPhone in the corner of a simple room. He thinks people are sick of high production commercials and doesn’t recommend them. He also told me that he flipped a coin on camera to decide if he'd refund a $560 order. It landed on tails and it cost him $560 to refund them. But he used that video as an ad, it crushed, and made BRĒZ another $500K in revenue. He reminds founders and marketers to stop overthinking, pick up the phone they already have and start telling better stories. You can test faster this way and it will likely outperform a highly planned out commercial campaign. 

Another thing I love is that BRĒZ responds to every social media comment that they can. Aaron said that organic conversations are an invitation for you to be part of the conversation. He said that if people have mean things to say about you, respond to them and deal with them. If you're ignoring your comment section, you're leaving money on the table. Each one of these comments is an opportunity to right a wrong or build more brand loyalty and support for your company. It’s very hard to scale, but it really makes a difference.

Aaron is a believer in merging brand and performance marketing just like I am. He said that a lot of people are either in one camp or the other but marketers and founders need to combine the two. 

Aaron is a hardcore performance marketer at heart, but BRĒZ is also a real brand. They validate their brand work through performance marketing. It’s all part of the funnel and the more you can build the brand (through stories, affiliations, and great high value content without a direct CTA, the more your direct response creative will convert. He also had a one liner that I loved. He basically said that a brand without performance is just an opinion which I couldn’t agree more with. If you aren’t making sales, you don’t have a brand, so these things are closely aligned.

Last year Aaron started Black Friday promotions on October 1st to capture Halloween, Thanksgiving, and BFCM. He said that was a big mistake. He said that the promotion was so long that they just became a discount brand for two months. They felt the BFCM wave and missed it completely and had to pivot strategies mid-day on Black Friday to salvage more sales. He said if you do run early promos, change them BEFORE BFCM hits. Like a big change, not small tweaks. Make it feel novel when Black Friday actually rolls around.

The last one I’ll leave you with is one of my favorites. Aaron reminded us to simply call our customers more. Aaron loves calling top customers to hear their stories. He told me about how one guy stopped drinking alcohol and saved his marriage because of BRĒZ. He also calls customers 5 minutes after they order and surprises them and sometimes refunds them. It’s created an incredible word of mouth, some great ads for BRĒZ and he thinks lifetime loyalty for their product. So next week when you are at work, pick up the phone and call 5 customers and record it and then consider running it as an ad. For him, doing this became one of their top performing ads ever and it’s driven an insane amount of sales.

Alright, that’s it for this week. I hope you got some value out of this one. I really enjoyed talking to Aaron and I’m super impressed by what he’s built. I think he’s going to build this into a multi-hundred million dollar revenue business.

I hope today’s newsletter was an easy read and inspired some strategic thoughts you can implement within the business. Next week I’ll be back with another deep, and tactical, email going into a few new channels that I am particularly excited about (GEO, AppLovin/AXON, clipping, etc.).

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get 9 hours of sleep going into next week. We’re getting into the thick of Q4, so make sure you take care of yourself. Go for walks, call a friend, stay hydrated, get sweaty. 

Have an amazing upcoming week. I’ll see you next Sunday. Same time, same place.

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