How Commerce, Creator, & Consumer Brands Are Built

Starday Foods may produce CPG products, but at heart, it’s an exciting new parent company platform that thrives off of a powerful data engine. After exposing gaps and interest in the F&B market, Starday is stepping up to fill those needs. Co-Founder Caroline McCarthy has lent her impressive background in tech to the endeavor, with acclaimed Michelin-starred chef Lena Kwak at her side as co-founder.

DTC cookware brand Made In was launched in 2017 as a resource for premium kitchen tools at a fraction of the price. In 2020, while most of the world shut down, their business grew by an astonishing 7x.

Brands are undervaluing one of the best organic channels out there: community. A community can act as the nucleus of your brand because it holds the instructions for your growth.

Co-Founder and Head of Product Matt Lanter joined us on DTC POD to explain how OpenStore works, and what inspired them to build it.

Olive oil is a saturated market, but Andrew Benin heard a siren song calling him to start his own CPG brand. An alum of DTC brands like Warby Parker and Magic Spoon, Andrew struck gold when he did two things: put the olive oil into a squeeze bottle, and decided to target middle America versus going boutique.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle was playing in the CRO space 6+ years ago, before it had even taken root in the headspace of most ecommerce brands. As the CEO of SplitBase, today Raphael is an advocate for a far more nuanced version of optimization.

When Michael Martocci dropped out of college, he had a new direction: entrepreneurship. Obsessed with learning and building things, Michael founded SwagUp in 2017, which has since grown to dominate the market for corporate and promotional swag.

It turns out that most traditional vitamins aren’t all that nourishing. Sara Cullen used her own health issues as a diving board to rethink the vitamin category entirely.

When makeup legend Bobbi Brown’s contract at her original company was up, she wasn’t ready to retire. Instead, she followed her clean beauty passion to bootstrap the DTC brand Jones Road Beauty.

Jarod Steffes co-founded Muddy Bites while he was a college student studying business management at Iowa State University. The irresistible snack is a treat that looks like the bottom of a sundae cone, and was a runaway success when they ran a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter in 2019.