Happy Sunday!

Depending on where in the world you’re reading this, I hope you’re having a great end to your weekend, or a quick-moving start to your new week. I had dinner recently with a few friends who have built very real consumer brands. Different categories, different stages, different playbooks. But the same theme kept coming up. Today’s newsletter is less of a tactical playbook and more of a pattern I keep seeing across brands.

Quick housekeeping before we get into it. On Wednesday, June 25th, we're hosting the Ecom Founders AI Summit at Webster Hall in NYC. A full day with the operators, founders, and brand leaders who are actually using AI to run, scale, and create at their brands... not the AI grifters selling courses. We have brand speakers, as well as real walkthrough’s of setups behind creative systems, finance agents, and more.

Tickets are sold out at retail, but I have a handful of comp tickets reserved for newsletter readers. If you're a brand operator and you want one, apply here and reply to this email so I can flag your application to the team. First come, first served.

Now, before we get into today’s newsletter… a word from one of my favorite partners.

Portless — How 100%+ DTC brands are actually surviving tariffs.

A year after "Liberation Day," Portless surveyed 100+ US eCommerce brands to find out what tariffs are actually doing to the P&L. The numbers are brutal:

92% raised prices

79% still saw margins compress

60% are holding more inventory than ever as a buffer

71% are now considering international expansion specifically because of tariffs

Translation: brands are paying tariffs upfront on inventory they haven't sold yet, tying up cash right when they need it most. And the smartest ones are quietly building a Plan B that doesn't depend on US trade policy.

Direct fulfillment is the lever showing up most in that data. Warehouse near the manufacturer, ship direct to the customer, skip the upfront tariff hit on inventory you haven't sold. Portless brands are cutting lead times by 90%, freeing up 3x cash flow, and 4x'ing the number of countries they sell into within their first year live. One inventory pool, 75+ countries served, no regional 3PLs to babysit.

The full report breaks down the playbooks brands are running to claw margin back, the cash-flow math, and where founders are placing their 2026 bets. Portless put it together because they have a horse in the race... but the data is worth your time whether you ever talk to them or not.

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Back to the dinner I mentioned earlier, the thing those founders kept circling at dinner was this: the more they invested in the brand name itself, the easier the rest of the business got.

Not easy. Easier.

Paid worked better. MER trended up. Branded search climbed. Conversion improved. Repeat purchase had more context. Retail buyers warmed up faster. Creators needed less briefing. None of them said brand replaced performance marketing. The opposite. The stronger the brand got, the better the performance machine worked.

That's the part most people miss. And it's also the part I want to spend the rest of this email on.

The same week, I read Lux Capital's latest LP letter, "The Dilution Delusion." It was written for institutional investors, but the argument maps almost perfectly to consumer. Five companies now represent roughly 30% of the S&P 500's market cap. The top ten exceed 40%. The highest concentration in 50 years. And those top ten contributed over half of the entire index's return.

Now stop reading that as a finance stat and start reading it as a consumer one. In almost every category, the same thing is happening: a few brands are taking the attention, the share of voice, the retailer mindshare, and the margin. The bottom of the category is fine. They have a niche, they have a community, they survive. The top of the category is fine. They have scale, they have IP, they compound. The middle is where brands are quietly dying.

The diluted brands are getting crushed. The concentrated ones are eating.

Here's how I think we got here. The old playbook told you to do everything. Launch more SKUs. Be on every channel. Test every hook. Build a community. Get into retail. Start a podcast. Run Meta, Google, TikTok, affiliates, Amazon, wholesale, retail, subscriptions, loyalty, creators, and now AI. Some of that is useful. But when everything is a priority, nothing compounds.

You end up with a brand that is operationally busy and strategically blurry.

I was on a call recently with a brand doing nine figures in revenue. They came to me frustrated. CAC was creeping, MER was sliding, and they'd been investing in brand for years to fix it. New SKUs, new collabs, new audiences, new visual directions, a podcast, a content team, a creator program. They were doing all the right things on paper, and somehow the brand felt less crisp than it did when they were a quarter of the size.

When we pulled it apart, the answer was obvious in hindsight. They weren't investing in brand. They were investing in brand activity. Two completely different things. Brand activity is motion. Brand strategy is memory.

What they actually had was six hero products instead of one. Four customer personas instead of one. Three visual identities running concurrently across channels. Two founder stories depending on which podcast they showed up on. Branded search had been flat for a year. New launches were leaning harder on discounts to clear. Their landing page CVR hadn't moved in eight months even though they'd shipped three redesigns. The work they thought was concentrating the brand was actually diluting it. And paid was carrying the weight.

The fix wasn't a new agency or a new channel or a rebrand. The fix was cutting. One hero product. One core customer. One visual world. One promise repeated enough times that even non-customers could finish the sentence. Within a few months, CAC started behaving better and branded search started climbing again. Not because of an attribution miracle. Because the brand was finally doing some of the work the ad used to have to do alone.

The brands actually winning right now have all done some version of this:

• David is protein, stripped of everything else.
• Liquid Death is water with an attitude.
• Jolie made a showerhead feel like beauty.
• Starface turned acne into something visible instead of shameful.
• Grüns owns format and habit.
• Cadence owns design-led organization.
• Feastables owns media and distribution.
• Alo owns a lifestyle surface area.

Every one of those brands can expand later, and they do, because the center is clear. They earned the right to diversify before they tried to.

Diversification works after you have something worth diversifying. Before that, it's just distraction.

Brand makes performance work better. Here's why.

This is the part most operators don't fully buy yet, so let me walk through it the way I'd walk through it on a call.

Imagine you're a new apparel brand trying to win on Meta. Your ad has to do everything in twelve seconds. It has to stop the scroll, explain the product, create trust, create desire, differentiate, justify the price, and get the click.

Now imagine you're Comfrt running a Meta ad. The cold customer scrolling that ad has already seen the hoodie in three creators' videos this week, on someone in their friend group, and probably in a "comfort fits" listicle a blogger wrote last month. The ad doesn't have to introduce the product. It has to remind them it's the thing they've been seeing.

Same channel. Same algorithm. Same auction. Completely different unit economics.

Comfrt still needs good creative. But the creative is not doing all the work. The brand and the 500K+ affiliate army are doing the first five jobs before the ad ever runs. By the time the ad shows up, the customer is converting against a feed they've already been warmed up in. And when the LP loads, it's loading for someone who half-decided before the click.

A strong brand name does not magically lower CAC in a clean, linear way. It is not "spend $1 on brand and CAC drops 10%." The relationship is more correlated than directly attributable. But operators can feel it across the business. Better paid efficiency. Higher LP conversion. Lower discount reliance. Branded search creeping up. Retail buyers taking the meeting. A customer choosing you on the shelf because they've seen the name twelve times already. Creators saying yes faster and needing less briefing.

That's why brand gets undercounted. The dashboard wants one source of truth. The customer does not behave that cleanly.

This is the part most operators don't fully buy yet, so let me walk through it the way I'd walk through it on a call.

Imagine you're a new apparel brand trying to win on Meta. Your ad has to do everything in twelve seconds. It has to stop the scroll, explain the product, create trust, create desire, differentiate, justify the price, and get the click.

Now imagine you're Comfrt running a Meta ad. The cold customer scrolling that ad has already seen the hoodie in three creators' videos this week, on someone in their friend group, and probably in a "comfort fits" listicle a blogger wrote last month. The ad doesn't have to introduce the product. It has to remind them it's the thing they've been seeing.

Same channel. Same algorithm. Same auction. Completely different unit economics.

Comfrt still needs good creative. But the creative is not doing all the work. The brand and the 500K+ affiliate army are doing the first five jobs before the ad ever runs. By the time the ad shows up, the customer is converting against a feed they've already been warmed up in. And when the LP loads, it's loading for someone who half-decided before the click.

A strong brand name does not magically lower CAC in a clean, linear way. It is not "spend $1 on brand and CAC drops 10%." The relationship is more correlated than directly attributable. But operators can feel it across the business. Better paid efficiency. Higher LP conversion. Lower discount reliance. Branded search creeping up. Retail buyers taking the meeting. A customer choosing you on the shelf because they've seen the name twelve times already. Creators saying yes faster and needing less briefing.

That's why brand gets undercounted. The dashboard wants one source of truth. The customer does not behave that cleanly.

Small, sharp brands can absolutely win. The middle is where brands go to die.

Dilution looks like:

• too many products before one is famous
• too many customer types
• too many claims
• too many visual directions
• too many channels with no depth
• too much content with no point of view
• too much "brand world" and not enough reason to buy
• too many people pulling the brand in different directions

You can usually spot it in the numbers before anyone admits it:

• creative fatigue shows up faster than it used to
• branded search is flat or trending down
• landing page CVR stops improving no matter how many tests you run
• new launches need heavier discounts to clear
• retail buyers understand the product but not the brand
• creators need too much explaining
• every campaign feels like a new introduction instead of a continuation 

A diluted brand can spend a lot and still not be memorable. A concentrated brand can spend less and still leave a mark.

If you're running a brand, pressure-test it with this:

• What do you want to be famous for?
• What's the one product people should associate with you first?
• What customer do you understand better than anyone?
• What problem do you solve in the clearest possible way?
• What proof makes the promise believable?
• What should your brand name actually mean in someone's head?
• What channel can you actually compound in, not just show up on?
• What are you currently doing only because everyone else is doing it?

If the answers aren't simple, you're probably diluted. And no amount of new creative, new channels, or new hires is going to fix that. The work is to get sharper, not to do more.

Most brands do not need more ideas. They need fewer, stronger ones.

Fewer products to make famous. Fewer messages to repeat. Fewer channels to half-run. Fewer customer types to chase.

The work is not to make the machine bigger. The work is to make the brand sharper so the machine has something to compound.

Pick the one thing your brand should be famous for, then spend this week cutting everything that competes with it. The hard part isn't knowing what to do. It's having the discipline to stop doing the rest.

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get 9 hours of sleep tonight, going into the new week. If you end up staying up late one night, building something really cool with AI, email it over to me! For the rest of y’all, have an amazing upcoming week!

I hope to see many of you at the AI Summit in New York City on June 25th!

Get your brand in front of 57k+ marketers, DTC operators, and founders by clicking here. 

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