Cameron Gawley

If you’re running a DTC or retail brand and watching a competitor post eight-figure months, this is where hiring logic starts to drift. This is the behind the curtain thing I see a lot. You see stuff on LinkedIn, you see a commercial, you see a post, and then you see, “wait, they only have a 20-person team.�� But you don’t know what’s behind the scenes. You see a young kid building an 8-figure-a-month consumer brand, but you don’t realize they’ve got 40 people offshore, and somebody who knows how to build and manage offshore teams. And maybe their ads aren’t compliant, but they’re telling a story you can’t tell because you’re venture-backed and you can’t take that risk. So if you look at the outcome and say, “why can’t we do that,” you’re comparing the finish line to your day one. I use the Ironman analogy. You see the picture at the end and you’re like, “damn, I wish I could do that,” but you don’t know the sacrifice. Same with business. People see the outcome and think it was easy. So when a founder says, “I want one person to replicate what this competitor is doing,” the question is, what are you actually comparing. If they’re using three internal people plus three agencies, and you’re hiring one internal person and no agency, that’s not the same.

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TODO VERDE, TUYYO, AND NEMI MERGE UNDER TUYYO FOODS The trio of female-owned consumer brands are coming together: 👉 Todo Verde was founded in 2015 and started selling DTC after the pandemic focusing on taco seasoning blends. 👉 Nemi Snacks was founded in 2019 and sells dried snacks made from Nopal Cactus. 👉 TUYYO was founded in 2020 and produces Latin American inspired beverage mixes. The consolidation reminds me of Bettani Farms acquiring NUMU Food Group, Stockeld Dreamery, and Hungry Planet last month. But with a twist of being oriented to Hispanics. Lots of these food brands that focus on a specific ethnicities are flying high like Bachan's, Dumpling Daughter, and Mother-in-Law's. Neither of the brands have record of raising institutional capital. Curious to see if that's the next move after consolidating portfolio.

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Spent a little time digging through the Startup CPG Shelfie Award winners and noticed a common thread: The best emerging brands aren't asking consumers to choose anymore. It's not taste or nutrition. It's not convenience or quality. It's not indulgence or better ingredients. The products that stood out seem to be delivering all of it at once. Of course, these are startups, not category leaders (yet). But that's exactly why I pay attention to them. They often provide an early look at what consumers are expecting and where founders see opportunity. For years, "better-for-you" products often came with some level of compromise. This year's winners suggest that founders are increasingly designing products around a different idea: consumers shouldn't have to give anything up. Whether these brands become the next household names remains to be seen. But as signals, they're worth watching. #Innovation #Trends #Signals #EmergingTrends https://lnkd.in/gZKFr45f

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🚀 This Week in CPG: AI, Alt-Turkeys, and Cauliflower Crusts Thanksgiving on a budget: Shoppers swap brand-name birds for bargain feasts. With grocery prices still high, most consumers are scaling back Thanksgiving celebrations, buying private-label products, hosting smaller gatherings, and seeking retailer meal deals under $40 from stores like Walmart, Aldi, and Lidl. Walmart supercharges stores with AI, and shoppers are spending 25% more. Walmart is expanding its partnership with OpenAI beyond e-commerce, introducing AI-powered in-store tools that let shoppers find deals, locate items, and build curated lists through its app, and it’s already driving higher spending. TikTok Shop eats up E-Commerce. Food is fast becoming TikTok Shop’s hottest new category, with sales more than doubling year over year as major CPG brands and indie favorites alike turn viral moments into shopping conversions. Cymbiotika raises $25M after hitting $150M in revenue. San Diego–based wellness brand Cymbiotika has raised a $25 million seed round after scaling to $150 million in annual revenue without prior funding, backed by an all-star roster including The Weeknd, Post Malone, and Daymond John. Urban Farmer acquires CAULIPOWER to build a frozen food powerhouse.  Urban Farmer, backed by Paine Schwartz Partners, has acquired CAULIPOWER, the leading gluten-free, cauliflower-crust pizza brand, in a move that merges top-tier manufacturing with a category-defining better-for-you brand. 🔍 What to watch: As consumers lean into value, wellness, and convenience, expect CPG brands to double down on AI-driven personalization, social commerce experiments, and better-for-you innovation to stay top of mind (and in shoppers’ carts) this holiday season.

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CALLING ALL ECOMMERCE BRANDS. Founders. DTC brands. B2B companies. Creators. Agencies. You’ve all fought the same war: Visibility. For years, the playbook was predictable. SEO. Paid ads. Hashtags. Content. Influencers. Months of testing what converts, only for the algorithm to change and yesterday’s winning strategy to stop working. But there’s a much bigger shift happening. Your next customer may never search Google, scroll Instagram, or click your ad. They may simply ask AI: “What’s the best product for me?” And increasingly, AI will research, compare, recommend, and facilitate purchases on their behalf. Traditional SEO isn’t dead. But optimizing exclusively for human search while ignoring AI discovery is like perfecting your Yellow Pages ad after consumers moved online. The next battle for ecommerce visibility isn’t just SEO. It’s becoming AI visibility. And the brands that understand that shift early will have an enormous advantage. ***If you’re an ecommerce founder, brand, creator, or agency navigating this transition, connect with me.*** I have something that can change how your brand gets discovered in the AI era. Not just another SEO tool, but a solution designed to help brands: Increase visibility where consumers and AI agents are actually searching. Open new channels for qualified deal flow. Identify potentially harmful brand language before it costs you trust, visibility, or revenue. And much much more. I’m opening this to the first 10 ecommerce brands. You’ll receive a FREE business audit plus a completely personalized 30 minute demo showing exactly how this could apply to your brand. Comment SEARCH below or DM me to lock in. #seo #ecommerce #b2b #dtc #marketing #agencies #creators #ai #gtm #demo

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🛒📈Retail is not just your next channel. It is your next growth engine. Most emerging self-care brands begin in DTC. It is faster. It gives you control. It builds community and subscription revenue. You own the data and the story. But here is the reality. Nearly two-thirds of health and wellness volume still happens in physical retail. Even digitally native consumers discover, trial, and replenish self-care products in-store. The shift from DTC to retail is not automatic. Retail compresses your narrative into seconds. Your packaging becomes your salesperson. Your benefit hierarchy must be instantly clear. And retailer framing matters more than most teams anticipate. The brands that scale do not treat retail as an add-on, but rather a strategy. They recognize that the physical shelf is where perception is shaped, habits are formed, and growth accelerates. Self-care is about building a brand that is disciplined, clear, and powerful enough to win where decisions happen fastest. 👇Link to blog in comments. 𝐈𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐟, 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝? Ritual, Liquid I.V., CVS Health, Target, Whole Foods Market

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Most CPG brands die chasing retail. Grüns got acquired for $1.2B within 24 months by doing the opposite. The usual playbook: launch DTC, push into retail as fast as you can, back it all with broad brand awareness spend that's supposed to drive both channels. Works for some. But it takes years and a lot of cash to get there, and most brands never make it, mainly because they skip the hard part: actually understanding and building their customer demand engine. Grüns (and some other successful exits in the natural food space) did the opposite. No big retail push. No broad ad spend to manufacture awareness. Instead, Grüns focused on: - Seeding over spending. Every week they sent free product to 500+ micro-influencers, no fee, no contract, just product cost. Ran through an automated gifting pipeline, not manual outreach, so it only took about two hours a week to keep hundreds of relationships moving. Part of why they hit $20M in sales with two FTE's. - Volume became their content engine. That seeding produced a steady stream of real, unscripted content, over 1,500 pieces in a few months, basically a creative library that never ran dry. - Spend followed what already worked. They only put paid dollars behind organic posts that had proven themselves. No guessing at ad creative, just amplifying what people already responded to. (The component I like most...) - One channel at a time. They mastered Meta before touching TikTok. No spreading thin across five platforms at once. So before buying into the standard DTC-to-retail wisdom, go look at how the brands that actually made it got there. Doesn't mean copy the playbook exactly, there's no guaranteed formula. But it'll help you ask better questions before you make that retail leap.

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Two words in a category name can get a peptide store's ad account shut down. Not the product page or the checkout. The navigation menu. We audited a site recently where the categories read like "longevity and regenerative research" and "tissue repair research." On paper, every one of those categories had the word "research" sitting right in it, which felt like the safe move. It isn't. Categories built around a benefit still imply human use, even with "research" attached to the end of the phrase. "Tissue repair research" reads exactly like a product that repairs tissue, just with a compliance word bolted on afterward. Google doesn't parse it as a research category. It parses it as a health claim wearing a disguise. The fix isn't rewording the same categories. It's rebuilding the navigation entirely around compound names instead of benefits. NAD+. BPC. GLP-3. That's also just closer to how buyers in this space actually search, since people shopping for research peptides are typically looking for a specific compound, not a general benefit. That single structural change touches almost nothing else about the site. The products, pricing, and catalog stay the same. The navigation menu just stops accidentally making a health claim on every single category page. Compliance risk in this niche rarely lives in one obvious sentence somewhere on the site. It's usually scattered across small structural decisions, like a menu bar, that nobody thinks to check until an account gets flagged.

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For emerging CPG brands, breaking onto retail shelves and staying there has historically been a guessing game. Brands have thrown immense marketing spend at the wall, while traditional brick-and-mortar buyers rely on backward-looking sales data to make inventory decisions. Enter WeStock. They've built a crowdsourced retail demand platform that enables brands to capture high-intent first-party data directly from their online audiences. By leveraging digital shopper incentives and localized product request mapping, WeStock bridges the gap between digital discovery and physical retail velocity. Take a look: https://lnkd.in/eSChK2cM For more brands changing the game in modern commerce, explore our full portfolio: https://lnkd.in/e5PfSHrP https://lnkd.in/eSChK2cM

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