Happy Sunday! I hope you're using this weekend to recharge, because Q4 is officially here. BFCM is about 8 weeks out, and if you're anything like the brands I'm working with, the calendar is already packed.

So this week I'm doing something a little different. I went back through every newsletter I've sent this year to see which ones you opened and read the most. One of the top sends of the year was my notes from Hudson Leogrande's eCommerce Mastermind in Miami back in April. Danny Yeung on taking IM8 from 0 to $120M ARR in 11 months. Sarah Lee on building Glow Recipe into a $300M brand. Hudson on scaling Comfrt to $1.4B with zero celebrities.

Heading into the busiest stretch of the year, the lessons in here matter more now than they did in April. If you missed it the first time, here it is. If you read it already, read it again with Q4 eyes.

But, before we get into that...

Vendor of the Week

Tatari — running out of new customers on Meta? BFCM will just make them more expensive.

That was MANSCAPED's problem. Meta and Google were great at converting guys already shopping for a trimmer, but there weren't enough of them, so every holiday they were bidding up the same people.

So they used TV with Tatari to build new demand before the rush: linear for reach, streaming for precision, programmatic for the follow-up, all in one plan with direct publisher access. CTV delivered nearly 5x ROAS, with retargeting at roughly double that. And most of the new demand didn't show up on their site. It landed on Amazon and in retail.

That's why measurement matters. Tatari is one of the only TV platforms that can measure what your ads drive on Amazon, not just on your site.

If you want new customers this BFCM, October is when to start building them. Tatari's 2026 BFCM playbook covers how to plan the buys and measure what's working.

Read Tatari's 2026 BFCM TV Advertising Playbook.

In NYC on October 29th? Tatari is hosting Forward, a free event on customer acquisition with Scott Galloway, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and speakers from Liquid I.V., MANSCAPED, and more. Request your spot here.

Nuggets from a Room Full of Killers

My favorite part in general about going to great eCommerce events is the caliber of people in the room. To my left was Troy Osinoff, to my right was Ben Kickz (Remember the "Business is Boomin" kid?). Across from me was a founder doing $250M in revenue. Next to him, a founder doing $150M between India and the US. The caliber of talent in the room was truly next level. Quite literally, any problem you can't solve becomes solvable. What you feel has your back against the wall with no options, someone next to you has figured out, solved, and is happy to share with you how they did it.

Today's newsletter is a collection of those nuggets I jotted down across the talks. If you have anything you want to go deeper on or want clarification on, reply and let me know; I'm happy to share more! Also, make sure you follow Hudson on LinkedIn to know when his next event is.

Danny Yeung, IM8 Health: 0 to $120M ARR in 11 Months

Danny's story is one of those where you'd think he's exaggerating if you didn't see the receipts. Five-time founder. High school dropout (kicked out of three, actually... all for fighting). Sold mangoes in San Francisco. Built and sold a Groupon competitor in East Asia. Took Prenetics public on the NASDAQ at a billion dollar valuation, then watched it drop to a $40 million market cap in 18 months when COVID testing revenue dried up. And instead of calling it a day, he built IM8.

My favorite nuggets from Danny.

Be a disruptor, not a copycat. Everyone in supplements was doing greens powders. Danny launched a red powder. Nobody knew what a red powder was. That was the point. If you enter a crowded market looking like everyone else, you're already dead. He deliberately chose to be visually, conceptually, and scientifically different.

And on the science side... IM8 ran a clinical trial before launch. Until now, it was unheard of in the supplement industry. 90 ingredients at clinical doses. NSF certification for sport. A scientific advisory board that includes a doctor from the Mayo Clinic and the former chief scientist of NASA. When David Beckham said "promise me it will be the best product in the world," Danny actually went and did it.

The Beckham partnership wasn't a pitch. It was a dinner. Danny's friend casually invited him to dinner with David in London. No deck. No agenda. They got along, Beckham was intrigued by Danny's science background, and the rest happened organically. Beckham had rejected supplement deals for 30 years. The unlock was credibility, not a sales pitch.

Celebrity deal structure matters. Every ambassador deal at IM8 is cash plus equity, minimum three years, with category exclusivity. The equity creates real alignment... if it's just cash, people do the minimum. And the athletes are coming to him, not the other way around. Sabalenka was on the product for three months before she reached out. That's the gold standard.

Here's the counterintuitive one: the best converting ads aren't the athletes. It's the doctors and scientists. The athletes provide the halo effect and the awareness. But trust, the thing that actually makes someone buy a supplement, comes from medical authority. That's worth sitting with.

The 90-day subscription doubled their AOV from $110 to $220. But they couldn't do this at launch. They needed 16,000 reviews and real social proof first. Timing matters. They also added a value-add layer... subscribers get access to a team of doctors and trainers, including Zoom Q&As with Beckham's trainer. The refund rate? Less than 2%.

One more from Danny. He has a $700K AI bounty board inside the company. 50 bounties, roughly $13K each. Anyone in the company can sign up to solve a bottleneck using AI. His logic: "If our retention rate goes from 60% to 65%, that's worth millions. If I give $100K away for that one unlock, it's worth $10M." That's how you get an entire organization to take AI seriously.

Sarah Lee, Glow Recipe: Building a $300M Brand on Authenticity

Sarah spent 11 years at L'Oréal before launching Glow Recipe. But here's what's interesting... she didn't start with a product. She started with a curation site. A mini Sephora for K-beauty. The idea was to earn credibility first. It worked… She helped Sephora introduce K-beauty to the US market. One of the brands she curated became a Sephora bestseller. That trust was the segue. When she finally pitched her own product line, the CMO's response was: "This will be the next Fresh." Why? "You already have a built-in community, and you know how to create product with beautiful ingredients." They launched in all 600 Sephora doors immediately.

$300M in sales in 2023. 35+ markets. One of Sephora's top skincare brands globally.

The blind casting campaign. This was the most powerful thing Sarah shared. They ran a blind casting for a beauty campaign, choosing real people from their community (not professional models). Applicants shared their beauty stories. Names were hidden, replaced with numbers. A diversity board chose the final 10. 8,000 applications in 2 days. From email and social alone.

The 10 finalists included a Down syndrome advocate, a Black model from a predominantly white neighborhood, an Asian gay man... people who never imagined starring in a beauty campaign. Sarah said her team was crying every day reading the stories. They went all out on the media... OOH, wild posting in Miami and London, Times Square, double decker bus ads, Meta, TikTok Shops. Probably their highest investment to date. The result was a massive lift in sales across the entire brand, not just the featured products. And the organic content flywheel was incredible... families reposting, followers stitching, a constant stream of real content.

The "Real Skin Acceptance" pledge. Glow Recipe never retouches or edits any visuals. Real skin texture, pores, everything. They also pledged to never use words like "perfect skin," "flawless," "ageless," or "poreless." They audited all past content to make sure. When they invited other brands to join, some pushed back... their product names literally contained the word "perfect." The engagement from their community was overwhelming. People said: "We needed to hear this from a brand. This is why I will always come back and purchase from you."

Start every Monday meeting with customer care, not numbers. Sarah's team presents community highlights, feedback, and constructive notes before anything else. She still reads customer emails daily. That's how you build a brand people feel connected to, not just one they buy from.

Hudson Leogrande, Comfrt: $16M to $1.4B, Zero Celebrities, Zero Employee Turnover

Hudson built Comfrt from $50K and 3 hoodie colors to $1.4 billion in revenue. 85 employees. Zero turnover. Ever. That's not a typo. Nobody has quit. He's targeting $2.5-3 billion next year and $10 billion within four years. No celebrities. No retail (until now). Completely bootstrapped.

His creator strategy is the engine.

Don't go for the creator with $300K GMV per month. They're loyal to the money, not to you. Hudson finds small creators with great aesthetic and voice. He calls them, gets on the phone, DMs them, explains the vision. He makes them feel like they're building something together, not just cranking out content for a machine.

The incentive structure: "Make me 500 pieces of content and I'll pay you $5K." Lose money early to understand what works. Find the common denominator across every angle... oversized hood, mental health messaging, color, affordability, luxury feel. Then double down on what converts. Never script creators. Make them so much money they never leave.

40,000 people in their Discord. Creators participate in product development calls. Products don't launch without creator and community green light.

Snapchat is the lowest-hanging fruit. Comfrt is one of the biggest Snapchat spenders... $100-150K per day. Most brands aren't even running Snap. Or Pinterest. That's the opportunity. And the way Hudson thinks about it is incrementality, not channel ROAS. The question isn't "what's my return on Snap?" It's "what happens to ALL my other channels when I add Snap spend?"

The tariff ad that made $2M per day. A static ad. About not raising prices during tariffs. Their most lucrative static ad ever. It worked because it was relevant to what people were already talking about. "The marketing has to be relevant."

Retail as a content engine. Hudson is opening his own stores (not wholesale), but his real play is content. Live creator booths in retail locations where creators go live and sales auto-apply in store. Exit interviews with every customer leaving the store... "How was your experience? What did you like?"... then those get turned into ads. Thousands of net new creative pieces per week from real customers.

And the product pipeline is wild. A sensory hoodie with therapist-designed calming patterns inside the pockets. An airplane mode hoodie with inflatable neck and lumbar support. A heated blanket infused with crushed organic lavender that releases scent when you turn it on. This isn't just apparel. It's product innovation that gives people a reason to talk.

The Thread That Ties It All Together

If I had to pull one theme from the entire day, it's this: the brands that are winning right now are the ones that are different, not better.

Danny didn't make a better greens powder. He made a red one. Hudson didn't make a better hoodie. He made one with a therapist-designed sensory pocket. Sarah didn't make another serum. She made skincare joyful and refused to retouch a single image.

And on the AI front... it was a running theme throughout the day. Danny's bounty board, my own workflows, and conversations in between sessions all pointed to the same thing: the ability to construct AI models into your workflows is probably the single highest-ROI skill you can develop in the next three months.

Full disclosure... my team at Sharma Brands worked with Danny and IM8 on the brand launch and built the website. So I got to see a lot of this up close. But that's exactly why I wanted to share it. When you're in the room watching someone execute at that level, the nuggets hit different.

The other big one: community beats celebrity every time. Danny has Beckham and Giannis but his best converting ads feature doctors. Hudson built $1.4B with zero celebrity deals. Sarah's most successful campaign ever was casting real people from her community. Make your audience feel like co-creators of the brand, not just customers.

If you have anything from this you want me to go deeper on, reply to this email and let me know. I'm happy to share more.

That's all for this week

It's Sunday night, so I hope you get a good night's rest. The next 8 weeks are going to fly by...

See you next Sunday. Same time, same place!