Common Thread Collective is an ecommerce growth agency, helping DTC brands that are doing $10M-$100M in annual online revenue.
As your partner, we produce better financial outcomes for your business by constructing a system for achieving profitable scale. Whether you learn how to build that system from us - or hire us to build it for you - we have a solution to meet your business where it’s at.
Each of our services is part of a greater whole - that covers everything from strategy and data to acquisition and retention.
A review about "He/him" Holiday's leadership: "Cons CTC destroyed my belief in what a positive company culture could look like. A full 2 weeks of onboarding led me to believe that deep down, CTC actually cared about their employees. I genuinely believed their core values, flexible WFH policy, generous PTO, and emphasis on protecting the mental health of workers while fostering their growth as employees were REAL. I was so relieved for one single moment I had found a good place to work, that when reality hit me square in the face, I was in denial for months. They champion work life balance but nothing could have been further from the truth. I worked an average of 50 hours a week (the company's supposed policy is "to not work more than 30 hours a week including meetings") The understanding that communication is the best thing possible because "Clear is Kind" backfired on multiple employees who shared genuinely concerning feedback on their experiences. Retaliation was real and power dynamics were routinely abused. I was gaslit about adjusting the size of my workload so many times, I just stopped asking. The company downsized by almost half its size by the time I was laid off (as part of the fifth or sixth round of lay offs in 2022 alone). I didn't even get to work here for a year but I had the highest score possible on all my performance reviews. This company is failing more than it is succeeding, and it's because the CEO is a former major league baseball player who runs the business like it's his favorite hobby, oblivious to the lives and careers he destroys along the way. He apparently built the company to "help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams," but all he has done is crush mine and plenty of others' to smithereens. I wish I would have saved myself the heartache and never joined Common Thread Collective. Advice to Management Give up, you're terrible at this."
Review from Glassdoor for he/him Holiday: Founder is a good Twitter celebrity but not a good businessman or manager. The leadership team is mostly made up of his friends from playing sports, they don’t have actual experience in the field.
Well Taylor is really good at taking raw talent and making them into super stars. Also I have never played sports with Taylor, and now building Accelerator program together 🤷🏻♂🙂
Love this Glassdoor review about Mr. he/him Holiday: "Cons CEO having a lack of direction, Client Churn, Talent Churn. This organization is slowly turning into a small melting pot of the CEO's buddies. And whoever is willing to be yelled at in their small WeWork office in Newport Beach. I was sold on the remote first opportunity but that has recently started to change. I could see the favoritism for people who could actually come into the office very clearly. Heard they even have a forced dress code now because they want to be the "Harvard Business Review of E-comm", which is hilarious cause none of the talent has worked anywhere else. They are all trying to immolate Taylor Holiday who got lucky with his success. Either way the younger (green) employees don't know the opportunities that are out there for them and are stuck in a game of guilt and shaming from the CEO. Oh and they axed their entire HR department. Like completely got rid of them to have one of the CEO's buddies "coach" employees. I think we could all see the motive of that transition. And it is not in favor of the employee. I wish I would have known sooner... that I could have been making more $ elsewhere and have better work / life balance. Only regret is that I didn't leave sooner."
I don't stop to look at my phone after my middle night pee run! I do purchase fabrics from Missouri Star; just did today. Looking forward to one day visiting the town. Back in 2010, my teenage son wanted me to do youtube videos of my quilting. I looked at him like he would be taking my fun away. Your mom is the best! Love the videos!!!!
I've been thinking more and more about what role "brand" plays in this mix as we continue to push into META to drive sales... Not necessarily in terms of what the word brand means from a marketing perspective, but moreso how a customer perceives a brand via it's full catalog of products. If we're only ever trying to find the moment where we can sell deeper into a specific high margin SKU then how does a true assortment play a role if not to just serve the attempt at finding that single narrow and deep play? And isn't a "brand" made up of that full assortment? Path 1: Chase the singular best selling SKU and blow it out with META to make oodles of money (assortment exists only to serve the testing to find this sku) Path 2: Bloated catalog of products that destroy your cash position just to please leadership in wanting to look like a company that sells more than 1 thing I think I'm missing the middle ground?
Great insights as always. I will say the retention marketing thing isn’t something specific to CTC. We experience that as well with our larger clients. Being too focused on new customer acquisition and functioning under the assumption that we don’t want to spend large portions of budget to bring back existing customers was our downfall and it catches up with you over time. Email is great but like you guys addressed, all your customer don’t necessarily engage via email. Keep up the great content production!
When you are looking at returns per month how retrospective do you have to do this? For example do you fill in January's P +L at the end of February to have the returns that would have come in based on January sales? Otherwise you would be putting the returns for Jan that were most likely bought in December
But campaign budget optimization often spends on the ad sets and ads not getting the best ROAS or CPA (it can't know if your goal is ROAS or CPA anyway) and doesn't sufficiently test all your ads and ad sets. Every time I take an account OFF of CBO and turn it back to ad set budgets I find winning ads and ad sets that never got enough budget to sufficiently test when using CBO.
What about a co-branded approach that's a middle ground between a paid send vs. a totally owned product? Profit-share on the product but let the partner do the fullfillment? Potentially even more upside while also continuing to build the strength of the brand & goodwill
Thanks! Isnt part of the reason that you are profitable now is that you are generating revenue from prior unprofitable cohorts? Once that declines then your new profitable revenue might not be enough to cover fixed costs
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Wait...so what you're saying is that we can't just put up a garbage drop-shipped product without a brand story and expect to A/B test META ads to become millionaries?
