Nice 1/5 pull of this stud #SHOPPS

Let's go big boy.

👀

Your “I never win anything” streak ends today

Everyone who signs up at ShoppsCards.com in the next 24 HOURS gets a #SHOPPS pack

Couldn’t have made this happen without @fulfilio and @omnisend 🤝

Your feed could use fewer hot takes and more trading cards

We’re celebrating our first live break with 2 more #SHOPPS packs

Reply to enter or tag someone who’d like one. We’ll randomly pick 2 people, 1 pack each

(But we might get carried away and send out a few more 👀)

Put “card collecting” on your work calendar

@TaylorHoliday and @GrantZanini go live in 15 minutes at 10 AM PST on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube

We've got #SHOPPS packs and surprise players giving away their 1/1 signed cards with prizes attached

See you in the chat!

We'll be at the party, with this in our hand, escorting you out.

POTENTIAL PLOT TWIST: @herrmanndigital might not get into his own insider party... #SHOPPS

We'll take that @deancbrennan .. take your pick from one of these.

For a chance to win this pack, head to the YouTube comments and tell us about your most valuable card or whether you own Taylor’s Bowman Chrome baseball card:

youtube.com/watch?v=csvD_N…

Until then, the pack @TaylorHoliday and @GrantZanini ripped in yesterday's podcast is up for grabs on YouTube.

They pulled:

@JasonPanzer, @andrewjfaris, @ecomchasedimond, Kayti O’Connell Carr, @JohnMRoman, Michelle Miller, @Seanfrank, @moizali, Rytis Lauris, and @SophiaEdelstein

#SHOPPS Andrew doens't find this funny.

forget george. this has to be on 2027's collection.

Some familiar faces are hiding in #SHOPPS packs.

@Seanfrank, @ezrafirestone, or @MehtabKarta could be in yours...

On today's episode of The Ecommerce Playbook, @TaylorHoliday and @GrantZanini share how SHOPPS came to life with help from our partners @fulfilio and @omnisend.
pack, head to the YouTube comments. Tell us about your most valuable card or let us know if you own Taylor’s Bowman Chrome card.

youtube.com/watch?v=csvD_N…

Packs for everyone!

Trading cards for DTC is here!

Introducing #SHOPPS

Celebrating the leaders and innovators changing the game of ecommerce.

From base cards and chrome parallels to ultra-rare numbered cards…

Every pack is a chance to pull greatness.

But only 1,000 packs exist.

And you can’t n one.

Built to lead. Made to collect.

Tune into the full episode here: youtu.be/WSg7lDBT5zM?si…

Montana Knife Company used to sell out over Black Friday and have nothing left for Christmas shoppers.

On today’s The Ecommerce Playbook, @BrandonLHoroho explains how MKC now plans December drops to keep selling through the shipping cutoff.

Tune in here: youtu.be/5XWe_Y4nQRg?si…

Missing purchase data can affect who Meta targets next, even when sales still show up in Shopify.

On today’s episode of The Ecommerce Playbook, Tony Chopp and Steve Rekuc discuss iOS 27 and the tracking gaps to check before Black Friday.

Tune in here: youtu.be/5XWe_Y4nQRg?si…

Across roughly 1.3 million ads we analyzed, the top 5% generated 73% of the measured value.

Because the return is so concentrated, judging winners in isolation can overstate profitability. Their returns also need to cover the cost of producing the ads that didn’t pay back.

Before you tell your team to make more ads, ask what each attempt costs.

At Commerce Roundtable, @TaylorHoliday explains how changing the way a brand paid for creative helped it double spend while holding incremental ROAS.

Tune in here: youtu.be/bqJElruBvjE

A 10-page creator brief can narrow the range of content you get back.

On The Ecommerce Playbook, Luke Austin and Richard Gaffin discuss which boundaries to keep and where to give creators room to experiment.

Watch the full episode here:
youtube.com/watch?v=niwccU…

Higher ad spend during Black Friday can be the right call if the volume justifies it.

The decision gets harder when you’re looking at 47 lines on a P&L.

@TaylorHoliday breaks it into four buckets so you can see where the money goes and what to do next.

The TBAR crew has been keeping busy since joining CTC, and we're loving the extra firepower for TikTok Shop.

We're not the only ones celebrating, either.

A few familiar faces from HexClad, Grüns, Ridge, and Realsy sent some love to @TylerBrechbiel, @alexrudolphh, and the team. 👇

Tune in here → youtube.com/watch?v=HH75fD…

Before adding a free gift to your holiday offer, work out how much a customer needs to spend for the order to stay profitable.

@itslukeaustin breaks it down on today’s The Ecommerce Playbook.

Shoppers shouldn’t need a calculator to understand your Black Friday offer.

On today’s The Ecommerce Playbook, @JoySharma_11 explains why he favors simpler discounts and where offers rank among five holiday prep priorities.

Watch the episode here → youtube.com/watch?v=WPAvZR…

Creative gets easier to scale when the way you produce it is tied to the way you pay for it.

Creator networks can generate more assets without forcing the brand to absorb the same upfront production cost on every attempt. Then, once something proves it can sell, more dollars can
Taylor compares that model to consignment: the brand gets more shots on goal without carrying the full cost of every miss.

Skullcandy wants shoppers choosing their headphones before Black Friday deals arrive, so it’s putting TikTok creators to work early.

On today’s Ecommerce Playbook, Evin Catlett joins Taylor Holiday to share how Skullcandy is using TikTok creators ahead of Black Friday to build est Buy, and its own site.

Full conversation → youtu.be/lbAhVeeAuPI?si…

Once creative production speeds up, the next bottleneck can be getting a new offer live.

A pricing idea can still require a duplicated product page, discount setup, code, landing page, and new ads before it reaches the market.

Shortening that workflow gives the team more nd refine the offer itself, rather than spending all of that extra speed on producing more ads around the same offer.

Home Life Brands doesn’t wait until Black Friday to introduce its holiday offer.

In today’s episode, @taylorholiday and @palmerweb break down how members get early access and discounted pricing first. Then, as inventory on the strongest products tightens, pricing can move up and n.

Full conversation: commonthreadco.com/blogs/ecommerc…

Discounting aged inventory can be a useful way to turn product back into cash.

If that becomes a recurring pattern, it's worth tracing the issue upstream to forecasting, product iteration, and inventory planning.

The sale clears the excess, while the bigger opportunity is excess gets created in the first place.

More on the latest episode of The Ecommerce Playbook:
youtube.com/watch?v=LEYWu0…

If every TikTok Shop sample gets you one video, your sampling budget could be working harder.

In our latest episode, @alexrudolphh and @TylerBrechbiel join @iamshackelford to share how they coach creators to produce 3+ videos per sample.

Tune in here: youtube.com/watch?v=Ghynj9…

Garrett Hord has spent 8 years at CTC through the Facebook boom, COVID surge, post-iOS correction, and every BFCM cycle since.

In today's episode, he shares four Q4 patterns he uses to back-check plans before BFCM.

Watch the episode → commonthreadco.com/blogs/ecommerc…

Proof that @TaylorHoliday, @alexrudolphh, and @TylerBrechbiel made it out of the group chat

And onto the stage at Commerce Roundtable 🎤

Where we got to share more about what CTC can now do in TikTok Shop

P.S., Any Commerce Roundtable photos hiding in your camera roll? Asking ..

The top 10 affiliates can drive 90% of TikTok Shop revenue.

The work is finding them early, keeping them engaged, and getting their strongest content into GMV Max.

@itslukeaustin, @TylerBrechbiel, and @alexrudolphh unpack it in the latest episode of The Ecommerce Playbook.
ttps://t.co/kMGYpzAjE7

An acquisition announcement from the @CommerceRound stage is a pretty good way to spend a Monday.

@TaylorHoliday shared the TBAR news with @alexrudolphh and @TylerBrechbiel in the room.

TikTok Shop has to connect to creative, media, and financial planning.

That’s why we did it. 😎

West Coast, here’s your pre-lunch scoop.

East Coast, grab your afternoon tea.

We’ve got acquisition news.

TBAR Partners is officially part of CTC, expanding our TikTok Shop services. 🎉

Founders @alexrudolphh and @TylerBrechbiel have built a team that’s scaled 40+ brands and thly GMV.

They’ve worked with Grüns, Vita Coco, Ridge, and HexClad, recruiting creators and building affiliate relationships that help products sell.

We’re backing that experience with CTC’s data, software, and financial planning so decisions about creators, content, and ad spend stay connected to each client’s overall profit.

Please join us in welcoming Alex, Tyler, and their team to CTC!

Growth is a lot less impressive when you can’t predict it.

Knowing where the business is headed gives you time to make better decisions about where it goes next.

That’s the kind of growth we’re building for.

Watch Now: youtu.be/KI-ax_q38rc

Today is the last day to register for the 7-Figure Growth Workshop on September 2.

Sales close tonight, and the final seats are going. After today, registration is closed.

If you want in, reserve now.

Reserve your seat → commonthreadco.com/pages/sept-26-…

Every profit plan we build at CTC runs on three proprietary data science models that predict spend, revenue, and retention.

From there, every dollar, every day, and every campaign gets mapped to a single financial goal and tracked daily.

That is what makes it possible to catch to fix it, instead of finding out at the end of the month.

CTC's @TaylorHoliday and @itslukeaustin are taking the stage at Commerce Roundtable San Diego, September 21-22 at Port Pavilion.

They'll be two of 18 speakers talking to a room of 750 operators, marketers, agencies, and SaaS companies right on the water.

What's on deck:
-Over long
-Food, drinks, and evening events both nights
-Real playbooks you can execute immediately

Get your ticket at commerceroundtable.com

Use Code "CTC VIP" for $150 off a ticket today.

.@TaylorHoliday says the job of a playbook is to move the odds across a portfolio of businesses.

Do that well and a 60% success rate becomes 67%, then 72%.

That is what he means by transforming a business.

We're down to the last few seats for the 7-Figure Growth Workshop on September 2, and sales close this Wednesday, August 26.

If you've been planning to come, now is the time to grab your seat.

$1,250 per person. Once we hit capacity or Wednesday arrives, registration closes.
ttps://t.co/gleMJDnT9e

Our President brought back 90lbs of fish from Alaska and a framework for judging whether an ecommerce brand is actually winning.

Watch the newest episode of The Ecommerce Playbook to see how it connects: youtu.be/dNMW8jpaQic?si…

A seat is $1,250.

One bad inventory forecast costs more than that. So does a month of a sloppy ad account. So does missing the AI workflow that saves your team 10 hours a week.

It's not priced against a conference. It's priced against the decisions it fixes.

👉 commonthreadco.com/pages/sept-26-…

A good forecast catches when you are off by more than 10% and gives you enough time to fix it before it costs you.

Once you know that, the real question becomes what is actually worth reacting to.

You can't always tell if a paid channel is working by staring at its own dashboard.

MicroPerfumes ran into this with @Applovin.

They'd been investing in it steadily for over a year, and the platform numbers looked fine on their own.

Then they tested something specific.

They n purpose, just to see what happened to the rest of the business.

The shift showed up almost instantly in their broader DTC performance, something AppLovin's reporting alone never would have caught.

That blended signal is what gave them the confidence to scale the channel back up.

See how MicroPerfumes did it: commonthreadco.com/pages/case-stu…

The brands that win in volatile markets aren't the ones reacting the fastest.

They're the ones who already know where they're headed.

@TaylorHoliday and @RichardGaffin break down how the Prophit Engine makes that possible.

→ youtu.be/yuqZ5ClvE1M

Every unsold-inventory sale writes its own story, whether you mean it to or not.

Discount hard enough and the story tells itself:

You overbought, now you're panicking to clear it.

Cashmas in July hands you a different one to tell. Dedicated to your list, entirely on your terms.

Commerce Roundtable San Diego is back, and this one's bigger.

📍Sept 21-22 at Port Pavilion on Broadway Pier

Here's why you need to be in the room:
- 750 DTC leaders
- Networking right on the water
- The best food at any conference
- Tactical sessions you can use immediately
- ways

Plus a keynote by @TaylorHoliday

Get your ticket at commerceroundtable.com

Use Code "CTC VIP" for $150 off a ticket today.

The 7-Figure Growth Workshop

On Wednesday, September 2nd, Common Thread Collective is opening our Costa Mesa office for a one-day, in-person 7-Figure Growth Workshop.

It's an intensive workshop built specifically for 7-figure ecommerce owners and operators chasing eight figures ff with a keynote from CTC CEO @TaylorHoliday, followed by hands-on breakouts led by the senior CTC operators who run these disciplines daily across hundreds of brands and millions in ad spend.

Reserve your seat: commonthreadco.com/pages/sept-26-…

We're Opening Our Doors to 7-Figure Founders This September

Watch now: youtu.be/5iNXLB7rwR8

We asked publicly last week: what's your Q3 inventory strategy?

83% of you said you don't have one.

Cash tied up in unsold inventory can't go toward acquisition, even in the months your numbers say you should be spending harder.

That's a cost that never shows up as a line echnically went wrong.

Ask us how to free up the cash before the pressure hits.

Most 7-figure brands have product-market fit.

They have real demand. Real reviews. Real repeat customers.

What they don't have is the scaffolding to get to 8 figures.

That's what September 2nd is about.

We're bringing a small group of 7-figure founders into our Costa Mesa f hands-on workshops built around exactly that problem.

Tickets → 7-figure-26-early-bird.netlify.app

Watch Now: youtu.be/RluVPEZ6VqE

Cash on hand is one of the few Q4 levers still fully in your control this late in the year, and the data backs it up.

Brands that generated more cash in Q3 saw stronger Q4 growth across both Apparel and Health & Wellness.

That's part of the thinking behind Cashmas in July.

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Randall Thompson, CTC's VP of Go To Market Design, spent years running his own ecommerce brand before joining the team.

Some summers meant staring at product that didn't sell, with no clear sense of when to finally deal with it.

That tension is what shaped Cashmas in July. e latest Ecommerce Playbook:

commonthreadco.com/blogs/ecommerc…

91% of brands that ran a Q3 cash event held or grew their Q4 margin, with revenue up 48%.

Cashmas in July does it in 30 days, using only your list and paid audience, without touching your public site.

See how it works: commonthreadco.com/pages/cashmas-…

Pulled from our MCP this morning. Data from 170+ brands over the past 2 years:

Q4 CPM vs. Jan–Sep baseline: +27.7% (2024), +17.0% (2025)

BFCM week CPM vs. baseline: +70.7% (2024), +52.1% (2025)

The annual low consistently lands in the second week of September, both years.
r your Q4 stategy?

How Meta actually works in 2026

youtu.be/-BYAC0ALW78

A founder came to a Q&A recently with a real problem: they had invested $40,000 in a video production and their phone-filmed UGC was converting at two to three times the rate.

What they were experiencing is what we see across the portfolio. The creative barbell.

On one end: fulligh volume, TikTok affiliate, UGC. Brand identity is whatever the creator makes it. On the other: luxury brands with deep production competency, where every touchpoint reinforces a premium perception built over years of sustained investment.

The middle is the worst-performing place to be.

The production cost is too high to compete on volume. Too modest to actually shift brand perception. A $40,000 production does neither.

Real luxury brand awareness requires millions in sustained marketing effort. For a 7-figure DTC brand, unaided brand awareness is vanishingly small. Most of the people who could buy from you have never heard of you, which means your brand identity is far more malleable than it feels from the inside.

The brands that accept this while they still have runway will build a profitable creative engine and use those margins to invest in the brand they want to become. The ones protecting an aesthetic their customers haven't been convinced of yet will spend their runway on production with no one to receive it.

If in 18 months you want to be more precise about creative quality, you'll have room to make that shift. But you have to build the acquisition engine first.

34 days on ChatGPT Ads. One account:

$7/day → $1,005/day. 142x spend growth.
~5x ROAS. $4.41 CPC. Both attribution models positive.

High-AOV ($1,000+ AOV) product. The audience on ChatGPT isn't scrolling. They're asking.

"Organic" and "direct" aren't channels.

They're where your attribution model stopped looking.

One brand celebrated a spike in direct traffic for 4 days. We traced it to a creator post with no UTM.

Paid traffic with the receipt lost.

Every customer has a reason they're there. Find it.

Brands come to us convinced they've hit Meta saturation.

We look at the creative portfolio and find: one angle, one visual style, one creator, for 6 weeks straight.

The algorithm didn't run out of audience. It ran out of inputs.

The answer isn't new platforms. It's new angles.

New episode is live: youtu.be/b6mvdK774d4

We track, store and analyze conversations using our MCP at CTC. Finding patterns in conversations across 170+ brands and $3B GMV.

One topic has appeared in more than 50% of our client calls. It has shown up in conversation for six consecutive weeks.

Creative production volume. . Not testing frameworks. The rate at which a brand can move new assets from brief to market, and whether the production system can keep pace with what the algorithm needs to optimize against.

Across our portfolio, average MER fell 7.5% from February to April before recovering nearly 15% by June.

The brands that recovered fastest were not the ones that adjusted their media buying first. They were the ones that had built standing creative production capacity before they needed it. The algorithm will find a way to spend budget. What it cannot work around is creative fatigue.

Recently, we had a brand come to us running $150k a month in ad spend. They had been treating creative as a campaign deliverable, approved on a quarterly basis, not as an operating function with a weekly cadence. By the time they rebuilt the production system, four months of compounding efficiency had already been lost.

The bottleneck in most DTC businesses today is not media strategy, not audience targeting, not budget. It is the rate at which a brand can produce, test, and retire creative. The brands that have solved this structurally have an advantage that does not show up in their media plans. It shows up in their quarter-over-quarter MER trend.

The brands that build creative production as an operating system before Q3 demand ramps will compound through the back half of the year. The ones treating it as a project cost will hit the same ceiling they hit in April.

At CTC we have the creative system to move new assets from brief to market.

BodyBio was never supposed to be a DTC brand.

Watch now: youtu.be/ucK-B1MzLH4

Watch now: youtu.be/agsLE7078qI

Last week we got a room full of brand operators together and reminded ourselves why Zoom will never fully replace this.

@TaylorHoliday introduced The Canon, CTC's living methodology database built from every incrementality test across 170+ brands, and announced that the Statlas ry brand we manage.

Full breakdown: commonthreadco.com/blogs/ecommerc…

Tiger Woods' golf brand is live today at 1PM PST on Models & Moments.

@SunDayRed is walking through how they launched a new product category with no data to model against.

Register to win Sun Day Red gear: commonthreadco.com/pages/models-a…

Watch @TaylorHoliday's full keynote from our 2026 Client Summit. 12 years of ecommerce growth methodology, codified and deployed AI across 200+ brands.

Watch Now: youtu.be/bDJRINefLok

Most brands launch on TikTok Shop asking "how do we grow sales?"

Skullcandy asked "how do we grow content and creator relationships?" and the sales came as an output of that.

It sounds like a small distinction but it changes everything about how you invest, who you recruit, and what you measure.

Every ecommerce brand wants a "repeatable system" for TikTok Shop. Skullcandy actually built one. The secret? They removed sales from the objective entirely. When your KPI is creator relationships and content volume, you build infrastructure. When your KPI is revenue, you build moment you stop spending.

Skullcandy launched TikTok Shop with no model. No benchmark. No agency.

They built it in-house. Scrappy.

The turning point? They stopped treating it like a marketplace and started treating it like a content engine.

That shift took it from virtually nothing to a meaningful w fuels their entire business.

Evan Catlett, VP of E-commerce & Growth at Skullcandy, breaks it all down on Models & Moments

@skullcandy used TikTok Shop to drive omnichannel growth.

Tune in today at 1PM PST on Models & Moments to hear how.

And don't forget to register to win a pair of Method 360 ANCs:

commonthreadco.com/pages/models-a…

Only 1 in 20 ads you make will actually work.

New episode of the Ecommerce Playbook breaks down the system for beating those odds. 👇

youtu.be/P_x7pjB2U6k?si…

That was one full day, and it happens every single day.

The operating loop follows three questions: What is happening (plot actual vs. plan). So what (diagnose root cause). Now what (concrete action, owner, next check-in).

Traditional agencies report variance. Profit Engineers fference is who owns the outcome and how fast the team can course-correct when the plan breaks.

For 8 and 9-figure brands tired of split ownership across vendors, channels, and meetings, this is what unified accountability looks like. [link]

4:30 PM. The day does not end with a status report.

The Profit Engineer closes with tomorrow's risk list: which metric must be checked first, which campaign needs more time, which creative launch is blocked, which client decision is required, which data issue could cause the l is decisions, not activity.

That is one day. Every day. Forecast, media, creative, measurement, client, execution, and risk, all connected by one operator.

3:30 PM. The PE updates the spend plan, briefs the media owner, moves approved creative toward launch, asks the client for the missing asset, escalates a data issue, checks the product page, confirms the promo code, and tells the team what changed and why.

The person making the enough to execution to make it happen. There is no project manager layer, no coordinator bottleneck, no "I'll follow up with the team" delay.

The handoff tax between strategy and execution kills more growth than bad creative or poor media buying.

2:30 PM. The PE asks questions a channel specialist may never consider.

Is inventory sufficient if spend scales? Is subscriber churn outpacing new acquisition? Does the finance team agree with revenue and margin definitions? Are returns, shipping, discounts, and COGS treated orting systems?

The ad account can look excellent while the business loses money. The PE's job is to make the business work, and that means operating at the intersection of marketing and finance where most agency relationships have a blind spot.

1:00 PM. The weekly client meeting starts.

The Profit Engineer walks in already knowing where the business is pacing, which input is creating variance, what has been done, what still needs client input, and which decisions cannot wait another week.

The sequence: business ce, channel diagnosis, creative readiness, measurement updates, calendar moments, decisions needed, owners, deadlines.

When the PE has communicated daily updates all week, nobody is learning the numbers for the first time. The entire meeting becomes strategy and next actions.

11:30 AM. Platform ROAS is not the final truth.

The Profit Engineer uses incrementality studies, holdout testing, business outcomes, and P&L performance to determine whether a channel deserves more capital.

This is why the PE may recommend spend restraint even when platform perfnnel earns scale only when the business signal, measurement signal, and forecast need all align.

The gap between what the platform says is working and what the business can prove is profitable is where the real decisions happen.