Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show
Add To Cart is Australia's leading ecommerce and retail podcast, hosted by Nathan Bush. It features over 600 conversations with founders, operators, and digital leaders building Australian ecommerce. Episodes cover ecommerce strategy, DTC brand building, omnichannel retail, email and SMS marketing, performance marketing, fulfilment, and tech stack decisions. The podcast is supported by Shopify and Klaviyo, and offers a free community, newsletter, and resources at addtocart.com.au.
Episodes
The Self-Built AI Brain Behind Style My Wall's Growth to 22 Staff | #656
The last time Justin Bausch was on the show, in May 2024, he was leading CRM at Ryderwear and AI meant product recommendations. He's back as a founder, this time with his partner Felisha Mina, and everything has changed. In a year he's grown Style My Wall to seven figures, and he's built his own AI platform to run the whole thing.Style My Wall started as a Facebook Marketplace side
How to Make Giving a Commercial Lever | #655
There's a link in ecommerce that mostly goes unsaid, and it's a slightly awkward one: the connection between giving and commercial benefit. When a brand partners with a charity, they're doing it for the right reason. But to get it off the ground and keep it alive when budgets tighten, they usually have to rationalise it commercially, and that's the part that feels a bit icky to
A Competitor Copied Everything. So She Borrowed a Jet, a Lambo and a Black Dress | #654
Four years ago Elysia Krstevski didn't know what ecommerce was. She'd spent 15 years in musical theatre, working her way from receptionist to co-CEO. Today she runs Mekė Baby, the brand behind Australia's first portable milk warmer, she's in the 2026 Top 50 People in eCommerce, and she's the face of Australia Post's national "Big Boss Energy" campaign.It sta
How to Find Your Unicorn Ads | #653
Making a single ad used to cost half a million to a few million dollars. You poured everything into one hero execution and you had to be right, because that was the bet. That world is gone. Today a brand can make a few hundred ads off an iPhone, put a bit of spend behind each, and let the market decide.Here's the shift most teams haven't made: finding a breakout ad isn't about one p
The Best Exit Is the One You Don't Need: Rob Ward on Selling Quad Lock for $500M | #652
Five years ago Rob Ward came on the show as co-founder and CEO of Quad Lock, the phone-mount brand he and Chris Peters bootstrapped from a Kickstarter campaign. Since then he's taken the big exit, Quad Lock sold to Thule for $500M at the end of 2024, and walked away entirely.He's spent the time since coaching basketball, picking up his kids, and building The DTC Playbook, a free interact
How to Replatform Without Stalling the Business | #651
In ecommerce we're often asked to build a whole new house while making the existing one bigger and better at the same time. That's a replatform. You're not pausing trade while you move across, you're still hitting the numbers and running the sales while shifting the entire business onto a brand new site.Here's the thing almost everyone gets wrong: the platform is the easy
The $30 Million Turnaround That Started With 48 Hours of One on Ones | #650
Beck Williams took the CEO chair at Seed & Sprout in 2022. A business in decline. A warehouse full of bread boxes nobody wanted. And a plan to fix it that started with people, not spreadsheets.If you've followed Australian sustainable retail over the past few years, you've watched Seed & Sprout climb. Beck came up through corporate, with an apprenticeship at GM Holden, a transfor
How to Win Back Customers Without a Discount | #649
Most of us have a segment sitting in our email platform we've quietly given up on. The customers who haven't opened anything in months. And every time the Klaviyo bill lands, someone suggests deleting them to clean up the list.Deleting that segment is one of the more expensive things you can do. Because someone you've stopped emailing isn't the same as someone who's stoppe
From Three Olympic Golds to Taking on a $600 Billion Industry | #648
Bronte Campbell won three Olympic gold medals in the pool. Now she's taking on a $600 billion industry with a rule she swam by: raise the bar, then raise it again.After four Olympics and a stint in corporate strategy at EY, Bronte co-founded Earthletica, a B Corp making high-performance activewear from recycled and organic fibres with none of the forever chemicals the industry runs on. She la
How to Make Your Email Flows Do the Selling | #647
Most email teams pour their week into campaigns. The Tuesday send, the launch, the sale out the door by Thursday. Meanwhile their flows quietly out-earn all of it in the background, and almost nobody goes back to optimise them.That's the beauty and the drawback of flows. Once they're built they run on their own, making money while you sleep, which is exactly why they get left alone. A ti
How Bared Turns Trusted Data Into Decisions and Action | Triple Whale | #646
Fourteen years ago, Angus Growney realised he could game his own attribution model. He's spent every year since chasing numbers he can actually trust.That hunt is what brought Angus Growney to Bared, the podiatrist-founded Melbourne footwear brand where he leads performance marketing across a business that now does roughly 70% of its trade online and is expanding into the US and New Zealand.
Why Converse Lets Creators Break Its Own Brand Rules with Dave Dullens | #645
Dave Dullens has spent 20 years keeping brands like that relevant. He's Head of Brand and Consumer at Conquest Sports, the 45-year Converse licensee for Australia and New Zealand, and his whole career has run through iconic footwear: Converse, Vans, Timberland, Dr. Martens. This isn't a creative-tactics episode, it's a masterclass in keeping an iconic brand relevant across generatio
How to Get More From the Tools You Already Pay For | #644
Ecommerce has never had more tools, and it's never been less clear which one is doing what. Every new AI tool that lands overlaps with three you already run, and half of them get absorbed into something else within months.So when something in the business isn't working, the instinct is to go and buy the next thing that'll fix it. But the problem usually isn't the tools. Most op
The Shopify App Store Is Not Dead. Martin Cox on What Has Changed | #643
Martin Cox walked away from agency life two months ago. No business plan. Four Shopify apps with animal mascots. A clear view of where the ecosystem is heading.If you've been in the Australian Shopify scene for any length of time, you've heard Martin's name. He's the guy people mean when they say "we should just ask Martin." After more than a decade agency-side, he&ap
How to Get More From Influencers by Spending Less | #642
Influencer marketing is still a young line item, the pricing is all over the shop, and you can spend real money on a creator without ever being sure what you got back. So plenty of teams treat it with one eyebrow raised.But the problem was never influencers. Most brands treat influence as one big post, from one big name, a single moment they hope lands. The brands getting real value treat it as a
Doesn't Cost You Anything to Do Good: Rohan McCloskey on Building GoGenerosity | #641
Rohan McCloskey refunded $350,000 in donations, gave up his salary for a year, and nearly lost everything. He's still building GoGenerosity. And he'd do it again.That kind of conviction usually comes from one of two places: delusion or proof. In Rohan's case it's the latter. One in six customers at his best-performing store donate every single time they shop. Ninety-eight perce
How to Ask for Help Before You Need It | #640
Ecommerce is still a young industry, and it's moving faster than anyone in ecommerce can keep up with. Nobody has all the answers, and the pressure to act as if you do can leave you in a precarious position.The ecommerce leaders who go furthest aren't the ones who faked it. They're the ones who asked for help early, while they were still learning, and kept doing it the whole way alo
The Unicorn Rule: Why The Lad Collective Publishes 15,000 Ads to Find 10 That Work | #639
The Lad Collective has shipped roughly 15,000 ads in four years. Around 10 of those have been unicorns. Mark Broadhead, Head of Creative and Growth, runs the Meta engine behind one of Australia's fastest-growing bedding brands, now 200,000 customers deep and expanding into North America.Mark joined as the founders' first employee, moving from his own vintage clothing business into the wa
How to Choose the Right Marketing Channels Using Data | #638
Most ecommerce teams are still arguing about channel split the same way they were five years ago. Meta versus Google, who gets the budget, who gets the credit. The argument usually gets won by whoever's most confident, not whoever's most right.The deeper issue is the data underneath it. Every ad platform is built to over-claim, because the more credit it takes, the more budget you hand i
How Kathmandu Pulled Off a Four-Month Shopify Migration Mid Flash Sale | #637
Craig Mildenhall did not start in ecommerce.He started in loyalty. Years at Loyalty New Zealand. A stint at adidas in Europe, running global loyalty and consumer engagement. And somewhere in all of that, he figured out something most digital leaders are still catching up to: the data tells you what happened. The customer tells you why.As GM of Digital at Kathmandu, Craig has spent two years rebuil
How to Find the Profit That's Already in Your Inventory | #636
Most businesses struggling with profitability aren't spending too much on ads. They're holding too much stock. The wrong stock. Stock bought on gut feel six months ago, sitting in a warehouse, tying up cash that could be doing something useful.Talea Bader is the co-founder of SKUTOPIA, an Australian fulfilment operation that's been building its own AI and robotics platform for eight
Inside I.AM.GIA's Global Playbook: Dom Moretti on Running Two Fashion Brands With One Team | #635
Dominique Moretti rebuilt the I.AM.GIA website from scratch in 12 weeks. Open rates sit above 50%. The re-engagement flow beats the welcome flow. And 90% of I.AM.GIA's revenue comes from the US. This is how she runs two global fashion brands with one lean team.Dom is Head of Ecommerce and Digital at A&S Labels, the Melbourne company behind Tiger Mist and I.AM.GIA. She started there as a g
How to Plan for a Product Recall Before You Need One | #634
Most product businesses don't have a recall plan. Not because they've decided against it. Just because the moment hasn't arrived yet.Melanie Nolan built Naternal Vitamins to eight million dollars in four years without running a paid ad for the first two. She built it on trust. Then in April last year, a manufacturing error created iodine variability across fifteen thousand units of
How Amart Holds Itself Accountable for Broken Promises: Inside Shippit's State of Shipping Report | #633
The gap between when you say the parcel will arrive and when it actually does is still the biggest unsolved loyalty problem in Australian retail. This is the episode that puts numbers on it.This episode discusses Shippit’s State of Shipping Report 2026. Download your copy here.Rob Hango-Zada co-founded Shippit in 2014 and has published the State of Shipping Report three years running. This year&ap
Inside the Emails of July, Step One and APG & Co: Three Klaviyo Champions on Why Segmentation Is Dying | The Klaviyo #632
Most brands know what their campaigns are doing. Fewer know whether their flows are actually doing the heavy lifting.This is the second of three special episodes recorded live at Klaviyo's Sydney event, K:SYD. Nathan put forward a panel instead of a single interview, and the room delivered. Three Klaviyo Champions, three very different businesses, one hour on email, CRM, data and where retent
How to Run a Live Shopping Show That Actually Sells | #631
Live shopping has been "the next big thing" in Australian ecommerce for five years. Grayson White has been doing it for fifteen.Grayson White started running "breaks" (the trading card version of live shopping) at Cherry Collectables back in 2008. Cherry is now Australia's biggest trading card retailer, and what Grayson has built since isn't a sales channel. It's
Klaviyo Is 1% Done: What Their Co-Founder Says the Other 99% Looks Like | #630
Klaviyo is sitting at $1.2 billion in revenue and 196,000 brands. Ed Hallen says it's 1% done.Ed Hallen co-founded Klaviyo in 2012 with Andrew Bialecki, off the back of a dinner in Boston where an Australian entrepreneur selling suits online told them he spent three hours a week manually emailing his customer list. They offered to automate it. Thirteen years, a 2023 IPO, and a shift from emai
How to Build a Creative Machine That Finds Winners | #629
For most of a decade, the performance marketing edge came from audience strategy. Which targeting, which lookalikes, which exclusions. Media buying was the skill, and creative was just the fuel you fed it. That advantage has quietly disappeared as Meta, Google and TikTok have absorbed the targeting levers into the platform.Most brands are still organised around the old model: budget and attention
Kill the School Shoes: How Jess Hatzis Rebuilt a 134-Year-Old Brand in Six Months | #628
Most people know Jess Hatzis from frank body.The coffee scrub brand built on a $10,000 investment, a genderless persona called Frank, and an Instagram strategy so early they were setting alarms through the night to post manually. Eleven years later, a $100 million valuation and one of the most recognised Australian beauty brands in the world.What fewer people talk about is what it actually took to
How to Calculate Your Breakeven Number | #627
Revenue is still the number most ecommerce founders lead with. It's the easiest to celebrate, the easiest to screenshot, and the one that gets the most airtime in strategy conversations. But it's also the number that tells you the least about whether the business is actually working.Most operators are chasing a revenue target that has no maths behind it. Nobody has calculated the one num
Business Prison: Grant Arnott on the PE Deal That Cost Him More Than Click Frenzy | #626
Grant Arnott built Click Frenzy from his bedroom into Australia's most iconic online sale event. Then one private equity decision cost him nearly everything, including, for a while, his reason to stay.He chose this conversation over every other request. When Click Frenzy and Power Retail went into receivership in March 2026, interview requests came in from multiple outlets. Grant turned them
How to Create a Hero Product as an Entry Point | #625
Most ecommerce brands can tell you their best-converting product. Fewer can tell you whether that product is bringing in the right customer.There's a difference. A product can have excellent front-end economics and still be filling your database with people who buy once and never come back. The ROAS looks good. The CAC looks manageable. But six months later, the repeat purchase rate is tellin
It's Not Digital, It's Just Retail with Freedom's Paula Mitchell | #624
The whole ecommerce industry is racing to ship faster. Paula Mitchell thinks that's the wrong race.Paula came to that view the hard way. After building ecommerce at Rebel Sport, Dan Murphy's and General Pants across 25 years, she joined Freedom as Digital GM and spent the first few months driving home wondering what she'd walked into. Furniture is not fashion. Made-to-order lead tim
How to Go From eCommerce to Physical Retail #623
Customer acquisition costs on paid social have been rising for years. The channels that drove efficient growth half a decade ago are harder to justify today. Physical retail is starting to look genuinely interesting to founders who would never have considered it before.But there's a gap between finding physical retail interesting and actually making it work. Most e-commerce operators approach
Why Most Ecommerce Brands Get Fulfilment Wrong with SKUTOPIA's Talea Bader | #622
Talea Bader is the founder of SKUTOPIA, a tech-led fulfillment platform rethinking how e-commerce brands scale their operations. What started from running co-working spaces for e-commerce businesses quickly turned into a much bigger opportunity solving one of the most consistent pain points founders face: fulfillment that can’t keep up with growth.In this episode:SKUTOPIA is building an “intellige
How to Turn Resale Into a Customer Acquisition Channel | #621
The conversation in most ecommerce businesses right now is about which channels to double down on. Meta is getting more expensive. CAC is going up. Every dollar of paid spend aimed at reaching a customer who hasn't found you yet.But some of those customers have already found you. Through a different door.Right now someone is buying your jacket secondhand on eBay. Someone is renting your dress
How Naternal Vitamins Grew to $8M Without Paid Ads for 2 Years | #620
Most ecommerce founders start with a product and work backwards to find the customer. Melanie Nolan did the opposite.As a practising naturopath, she watched the same problems show up again and again in her clinic: iron deficiency, prenatal gaps, supplements that caused side effects bad enough that patients would just stop taking them. The market had answers. None of them were good enough.So she bu
How to Fix Invisible Conversion Problems | #619
Most ecommerce conversion work targets the same moment: the customer who is already close to buying. But the most expensive conversion problems happen before anyone adds anything to cart.That customer doesn't show up in your abandoned cart report. They just don't show up.In today's Playbook: Your real conversion barrier is probably invisible to youThe best experience investments sol
The 80% Problem: How Incu Captures the Customers Who Don’t Buy | #618
Shane Lenton, founder of The Wishlist, and Douglas Low, CEO of Incu, are tackling one of retail’s most overlooked problems: what happens after a customer walks into a store, and leaves without buying.Between them, they’ve seen both sides of the equation. Shane built his career inside omnichannel retail before launching a platform designed to unify online and offline intent. Doug has spent over two
Lessons in Scarcity and Live Commerce from Australia's Biggest Trading Card Store | #617
Grayson White, founder of Cherry Collectibles, has built Australia’s leading trading card business by doing something most ecommerce brands overlook: he turned shopping into entertainment and community into a growth engine.What started as a side hustle to make an extra $100 a week quickly evolved into a category-defining business, spanning ecommerce, live shopping, and physical retail. But the jou
How to Sell in the Age of Agentic Shopping #616
There’s a lot of noise right now around AI in ecommerce. Agentic commerce. AI checkouts. Bots buying on behalf of customers. It all sounds big. It all sounds important. And it all sounds like something you’ll deal with… later.But here’s the problem with that thinking: The biggest shift in Agentic Shopping isn’t happening at checkout. It’s happening the moment your customer opens ChatGPT and asks,
Inside Chief Nutrition’s $1M/Month Ecommerce Engine Without Cutting Corners | #615
Justin Babet, co-founder of Chief Nutrition, didn’t set out to build a $1M/month ecommerce brand. What started as a side hustle selling beef bars in a gym has evolved into one of Australia’s fastest-growing health food brands, now stocked in Woolworths, Coles, and scaling globally.With a background in tech startups (including selling JobAdvisor), Justin brought a “build, measure, learn” mindset in
How to Use Emotion Over Features to Sell #614
Most ecommerce teams are incredibly good at the rational stuff. Product pages. Checkout flows. Abandoned cart sequences. Free shipping thresholds. Everything is designed to squeeze a little more conversion out of customers who are already close to buying.But here’s the uncomfortable truth: that’s not where the decision is made. Buying decisions are emotional first, and rational second. The feature
Why the US Isn't Always Your Best First Market with Stephanie Rogers | TransPerfect | #613
Stephanie Rogers, Retail Director at TransPerfect, has built her career helping global brands navigate one of ecommerce’s hardest challenges: expanding internationally without wasting time, money, or momentum.In today’s episode, we’re breaking down the difference between translation and true localisation, why “land and expand” beats going all-in too early, and how Australian brands can punch above
Beyond Revenue: The Financial Framework Every Ecommerce Business Needs | #612
Matt Byrne, founder of Day One Advisory, works with ecommerce brands every day as their outsourced finance function, helping Shopify businesses understand their numbers, improve profitability, and make better decisions.In today’s episode, Matt breaks down what actually matters behind the numbers. Not vanity metrics. Not revenue screenshots. But the core financial levers that determine whether a br
How to Grow Faster by Focusing on Fewer Channels #611
There’s a quiet pressure in ecommerce that’s hard to ignore. Every week there’s a new channel worth testing. A new platform gaining traction. A competitor showing up somewhere you’re not. And before long, “we should be there too” starts to feel less like a question and more like a requirement.But what if that instinct is actually slowing you down?That’s exactly what Jaimee Vilela, Managing Directo
How Sam Moore Bought Back PYRA from Culture Kings and Built It His Way | #610
Sam Moore, founder of PYRA, has built one of Australia’s most exciting challenger brands by blending technical outdoor apparel with streetwear DNA. After early roles at General Pants and Culture Kings, and a first brand that didn’t quite go to plan, Sam launched PYRA with a clear vision: bridge the gap between performance gear and fashion. What followed was rapid growth inside Culture Kings, a com
How to Build a Brand That Doesn’t Need Discounts #609
Danielle Pearce, founder of Merry People, has avoided discounting for over a decade. In more than 12 years of building her premium gumboot brand, she hasn’t run a single sale. Not once.By making pricing part of the brand, she removed hesitation. By attracting the right customers, she built loyalty instead of chasing volume. And by backing it all with a product that holds its own, she made full pri
Why Elite Supps Chose Behavioural Science Before Bargains with Behamics | #608
Brooke Eichhorn from Behamics joins Johan Nyberg, Chief Digital Officer at Elite Supps, to unpack how one of Australia’s fastest-growing supplement retailers is increasing conversion without leaning on discounts. With over 140 stores and rapid global expansion, Elite Supps isn’t short on traffic: the real challenge is helping customers make better decisions once they land on site.In today’s exclus
Scratch's Mike Halligan on Why He Was Wrong About Meta: How He Built a Smarter Growth Engine | #607
Five years ago, Mike Halligan joined Add To Cart from a hotel room during COVID lockdown, sharing how Scratch was disrupting the dog food category with a simple but powerful idea: healthier food, delivered on subscription, built on trust rather than tactics.Fast forward to today, and Scratch is still grounded in that same philosophy. But behind the scenes, the business has evolved significantly.To
How to Design a Pre-Purchase Experience People Can’t Stop Talking About #606
Most ecommerce brands think sales happen at the end of the journey: checkout, payments, abandoned carts. But by the time a customer gets there, the decision is already made.The brands generating real word of mouth aren’t the ones with the slickest checkout. They’re the ones that made the journey to checkout feel like something. Something personal. Something memorable. Something worth telling a fri
How to Be Named Australia's #1 Person in Ecommerce. Twice. | Guy Nappa | #605
Guy Nappa, co-founder and COO of Oz Hair & Beauty, joins Bushy fresh off being named the #1 person in the Top 50 People in Ecommerce Australia for the second consecutive year, one of the highest recognitions in the Australian ecommerce industry.In today's episode, Guy shares what it actually takes to scale a modern retail business: from warehouse upgrades and faster dispatch operations to
How to Turn Customers Into Community #604
Everyone says they’re building a community. But very few brands actually are.In this Add To Cart Playbook, we break down what it really takes to turn customers into a community that drives loyalty, repeat purchases and word of mouth.Featuring insights from Tara McKeon (Proud Poppy), Briony Kennedy (Adorn Cosmetics), Anastasia Lloyd-Wallis (Retail Doctor Group) and Laura Thompson & Sarah Sherid
You Can't Sell What You Can't Afford to Stock | Scaling Zea from Market Stalls to Woolworths | #603
Building an ecommerce brand often starts with a great product and a loyal customer base. But scaling that brand introduces a whole new set of challenges, especially when growth starts to outpace cashflow.In this episode of Add To Cart, Bushy sits down with Hayden Brass, founder of Zea, alongside David Carbines, co-founder of Cogsflow, to unpack the financial realities behind scaling a product bran
Why Resale and Rental Might Be Retail’s Next Growth Channel, with The Volte #602
Bernadette Olivier has spent the last six years building one of the most interesting fashion marketplaces in Australia. As the co-founder of The Volte, a peer-to-peer fashion rental platform, she’s helped create a thriving ecosystem where thousands of women are renting out designer wardrobes and building businesses around them. Alongside that, she’s now building Seamlist, infrastructure that allow
How To Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome in Ecommerce #601
Download StudioHawk's Exclusive eCommerce AI Visibility Toolkit.Every week there’s a new platform, a new tool, a new marketing tactic promising to unlock the next stage of scale. AI features, new social channels, advanced website widgets, automation tools. They all look compelling, and they all come with the same promise: growth. But chasing them all usually leads to the same outcome. You end
Bold Boobs & Bottom Lines: How Nala Turns Inclusivity Into Growth | #600
Chloe de Winter is the co-founder of Nala, the Australian underwear brand rewriting the rules of lingerie. A trained physiotherapist and Pilates instructor, Chloe didn’t come from fashion. She came from frustration. During COVID, stuck between countries and wardrobes, she went searching for bras and underwear that were cool, inclusive, well-fitting and affordable. They didn’t exist.What she saw wa
How to Prevent “Where is my Order?” Complaints Before Customers Ask #599
There are few phrases in ecommerce more expensive than, “Hi, just wondering where my order is?”. It sounds harmless. Polite, even. But behind that sentence is friction. Doubt. A small crack in trust. And if you’re getting a lot of them, you don’t have a response-time problem. You have a design problem.In today's Playbook, Jevon Le Roux from Keeyu joins a group of smart operators tackling the
You Can’t Out-Amazon Amazon Anymore: Inside Pattern’s 2026 Marketplace Report | #598
In today's exclusive episode, Merline McGregor, Pattern's Managing Director AZN, joins Add To Cart to unpack what that shift really means for brands navigating Amazon, TikTok Shop and AI-driven discovery. From Amazon’s continued dominance to the uncomfortable truth that your brand might already be selling on marketplaces without your control, this conversation challenges the idea that ev
Agentic Commerce Is Here: What Shopify’s UCP Means for Ecommerce | #597
Download Shippit's Commerce Delivery Report 2026 for free.At NRF in New York, Shopify and Google announced something that could quietly reshape the foundations of ecommerce: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).In this episode, James Johnson, Enterprise Leader at Shopify Australia, joins Bushy to unpack what UCP actually is, why agentic commerce is accelerating faster than most retailers rea
How To Scale Ecommerce Without Constantly Adding Headcount #596
Dave Thompson, founder of Run Remote and Hometime, has built and operated businesses across ecommerce, marketplaces and venture studios, and what stood out wasn’t a tactic, it was a mindset. He kept coming back to one word: leverage. Designing businesses so they scale through systems, distributed teams and smart tooling, not just headcount. In this Playbook, we revisit Dave’s philosophy and connec
Do Enough People Hate Your Brand? Why Playing It Safe Costs You | #595
As the Founder of IGU Global, Nick Gray has spent decades inside some of the world’s most influential brands including Nike, Adidas and Westfield. Today, he works with ecommerce and retail leaders who feel stuck between optimisation, automation and a creeping sense that something isn’t quite landing with customers anymore.On today’s episode of Add To Cart, Nick joins Nathan Bush and Rosa-Clare Wil
How to Identify the Customers Worth Keeping #594
James Hurman, founder of Previously Unavailable and one of the sharpest marketing strategists in the region, analysed data across dozens of retail brands and billions of dollars in transactions. What he found flips the default ecommerce logic on its head. Growth didn’t come from retaining more customers. It came from retaining the customers who increased their spend over time.That insight became t
Cooki Haircare: Scaling a Solid Shampoo Brand Without Big Teams, Big Spend, or Chaos | #593
Can ecommerce still be simple? And can it still scale?Cooki Haircare is a solid shampoo and conditioner brand Jaimee and her husband Lucas acquired as a “business in a box”, originally doing just four sales a day. Fast forward, and the brand is now generating over $3 million in annual revenue, powered by a lean team, a tight channel mix, and an unusually deep connection with its customers.Today’s
How to Systemise Team Culture Without Losing Trust #592
In the early days, culture just exists. The founder’s in the building. Decisions are fast. Everyone knows why the business exists and how things get done. It’s messy, but it works. But then the brand grows. Headcount increases. Layers appear. Process sneaks in. Suddenly, the thing that once felt like an advantage starts to feel fragile. Not broken, just thinner. Harder to rely on.Today's Play
Growth Without Discounts: How Merry People Played the Long Game | #591
Five years ago, Danielle joined us as the founder with a bold idea, a bootstrapped balance sheet, and a firm belief that Merry People would never discount. Fast forward to today and the business looks very different. International revenue now makes up half of sales. The team has grown to more than 30 people. There’s a physical retail store. And Danielle has navigated global expansion, copycats, ta
How to Remove Size Anxiety and Unlock Ecommerce Growth #590
In this Add To Cart Playbook, Bushy revisits three recent episodes that all land on the same insight from different angles: fit isn’t a logistics problem, it’s a confidence problem. When customers don’t trust the outcome, they hesitate, bounce, or buy three sizes and hope for the best. And the most expensive part of that behaviour is the bit brands never see: the sale that never happened.In today&
Meet Dr. Grillz: The Dentist Selling $5K Custom Pieces for Your Teeth | #589
In this episode of Add To Cart, Bushy chats with Maheer Shah, founder of Dr Grillz, a.k.a a dentist who turned a cultural obsession into a global, made-to-order ecommerce business. What began as a passion project quickly became something much bigger: a brand sitting at the intersection of self-expression, trust, and technology, built without a typical target market or ecommerce playbook.Today, we&
How to Turn Customer Experience from a Support Function into a Growth Lever #588
Customer experience has been living in the wrong part of the business. It has been treated as reactive. Operational. Something you scale after growth, not something you design for growth. But a decent number of high-performing brands are quietly flipping that thinking. They are treating customer experience not as a clean-up crew, but as infrastructure. Something that compounds over time. Something
Proud Poppy’s Growth Breaking Point: The Decisions That Saved the Business | #587
In today's episode, Nathan sits down with Tara McKeon, Founder of Proud Poppy, to unpack what really happens when a fashion ecommerce brand scales to $20M. From near-miss moments that threatened the business, to the decisions that helped pull it back from the edge, Tara shares a refreshingly honest take on growth, leadership, and why community ended up being Proud Poppy’s most powerful advant
How to Build a Product-First Growth Engine #586
While most conversations are wrapped up in AI, content hacks, clever creatives or customer service workflows, the brands that keep showing up year after year tend to share one unglamorous trait. They make consistently good products. And they’re willing to make uncomfortable decisions to protect that standard.Today's Playbook dives into product-led ecommerce through the lens of founders who tr
Write Down Goals to Make Them Happen: Adam Jelic on Building MiGOALS | #585
Adam Jelic didn’t set out to build a cult stationery brand. He was just trying to get his own head straight. Anxiety, big ideas, too many thoughts, not enough direction. So he did what a lot of founders eventually do. He built the tool he wished already existed. Fifteen years later, MiGOALS is stocked everywhere from Officeworks to Barnes & Noble, used by Canva, Lululemon and Apple teams, and
By the Numbers: Add To Cart’s 5 Most Listened Episodes of 2025 | #584
To kick off 2026, we're looking back at the five most downloaded episodes of 2025 and the ideas that resonated most with ecommerce leaders this year.From practical frameworks for adopting AI without losing the human edge, to rethinking customer experience, localisation at scale, agentic AI, and the real-world mechanics behind a 48% conversion lift, this countdown captures the conversations sh
The Conversations That Shaped Ecommerce in 2025 | #583
Between tariffs landing faster than expected, Amazon tightening its grip on customer expectations, B2B finally stepping into the spotlight, and APAC proving it’s anything but a “secondary” market, this was a year that forced operators to rethink fundamentals.In this special wrap-up episode of Add To Cart, Bushy revisited the eight conversations that personally shaped how he thinks about ecommerce,
The Loyalty Trap: James Hurman on What Really Drives Ecommerce Growth | #582
James Hurman has spent years shaping how the world understands brand building. An award-winning strategist, author and co-founder of Tracksuit, he’s become a global voice for effectiveness at a time when marketing teams are under more pressure than ever. In today’s episode, James dives into the real drivers behind brand growth, and why the industry must move on from its obsession with doing “more
How To Grow When Your Products Last Too Long #581
Most ecommerce founders dream of having customers who buy again and again. But what if your product’s so good, they never have to? That’s the challenge facing durable product brands like she wear, Ecosa, and Snotty Noses Australia. When your boots, mattresses, or devices are built to last for years, how do you keep growing without compromising quality or purpose?In this playbook: Why durable, long
The Hiring Playbook Delivering Ecommerce the Top 1% of Global Talent | #580
Zimbabwe-born entrepreneur Dave Thompson, co-founder of Hometime and founder of RunRemote, didn’t grow up around traditional career paths. He grew up around entrepreneurs, everywhere, all the time. That foundation shaped a career built on freedom, leverage and the belief that business should serve your life, not swallow it.In today's episode, Dave shares how he took a Bondi Airbnb experiment
How to Design Customer-Led B2B E-commerce #579
For years, B2B sites were the forgotten sibling of ecommerce: functional, clunky, and built for systems, not humans. But AS Colour’s Joe Sharplin is flipping that script. A designer turned digital lead, he’s bringing craft and customer-first thinking to wholesale. And those subtle differences are making a world of impact.In today's Playbook:Why the customer (not the tech stack) should drive e
Stop Customer Problems Before They Start: Inside Keeyu’s AI Ops | #578
In this episode of Add To Cart, Jevon Le Roux joins Nathan Bush to share how Keeyu is turning customer service on its head. Instead of managing complaints, Keeyu’s AI agents proactively detect and fix order issues (like stuck parcels, refund delays, and failed payments) before the customer ever asks, “Where’s my order?”Today, we're discussing:Why most CX tools are stuck in reactive mode, and
How to integrate AI agents into your e-commerce team #577
AI agents aren’t just a futuristic idea anymore. They’re showing up in every tool ecommerce teams use, from Shopify Sidekick and Klaviyo to Google Ads and Gorgias. But as David Brudenell, CEO of Decidr, pointed out on Add To Cart, most teams still treat AI like a virtual assistant for repetitive tasks. The real power comes when you teach agents to chase outcomes, not instructions.In this playbook:
