Today I want to share with you my journey of how I went from a self taught Affiliate Marketer to becoming CMO of 9 figure DTC brand The Oodie, and now a Fractional CMO for eCommerce brands.
In 2008 I was a self taught Affiliate Marketer learning Google Ads and promoting Clickbank eBooks. Back in the day you didn’t even need a landing page and could send search traffic directly to the Affiliate landing page like everyone else on Page 1 of Google. Those were the days. I was in my early 20’s and pretty bad at maintaining a predictable income due to the nature of rotating different products and offers.
So in 2009 I was the 1st hire of an eCom startup called Gym and Fitness. From 2009 – 2013 the business grew to become, at the time, the largest online Gym and Fitness Equipment retailer in Australia. We developed our own products while also partnering with other fitness equipment brands and had thousands of SKUs.
We had success with the new Crossfit trend with fit-outs across Gyms around Australia and established 4 physical showrooms in Adelaide, Gold Coast, Melbourne, and Sydney. When I left I was General Manager and responsible for the team across all business functions. Gym and Fitness was later acquired.
In 2014 while backpacking across Europe I moved to Berlin and worked for a Venture Capital firm called Project A Ventures. Unlike traditional VC Firms with only 3 – 4 Partners, we had a 100 person in-house operational team including Performance Marketing, Business Intelligence, Product, Business Dev, Operations and Recruitment supporting our portfolio companies with a focus on eCom and B2C / B2B Marketplace.
We did 3 things:
- Incubate our own companies from idea to execution and support with fundraising and product market fit growth
- Invest in Seed to Series A rounds with other VCs and use our resources to scale new investments
- Partner with Private Equity who would either invest in or acquire business and use our resources to scale
I was part of the Performance Marketing team and worked across all 3 investment functions. One of my favourite success stories was a German business called Contorion. It was a Tools retailer eCom incubation project with hundreds of thousands of SKUs. I was part of the team responsible for the business case then launching in Germany. We scaled to Austria, France, Italy and The Netherlands, and after 4 years Contorion was acquired by Hoffmann Group for €120M.
Another one of my favourite stories is the Personalised Kids Book “Lost My Name” now Wonderbly, selling over 8 million books in 169 countries in 11 languages. Helping the team profitably scale spend to 6 figures a day across Google Ads and Facebook in Q4 2016 was something special.
I returned back to Australia at the end of 2016 and spent some time at a Fashion House of 6 brands as Head of Digital. I learnt all about the challenges of balancing wholesale, retail and online while not having a core range of predictable hero products.
The opportunity presented itself for me to join a growing Wireless Internet Startup called Uniti Wireless as Head of Digital. Uniti went public and listed on the ASX in early 2019 for $20M. After acquiring a portfolio of business functions, Uniti was acquired for $3.7 Billion by Private Equity.
Prior to the acquisition I moved back to DTC as the Head of Digital for The WOD Life, a Crossfit Functional Fitness specialty store. I recruited, trained and in-housed a team of 10 people including Performance Marketing, eCom and Creative while scaling the 8 figure brand across AU, NZ, US.
In 2021 I started as the Head of Digital for The Davie Group, the parent company of The Oodie. Although The Oodie is by far the largest brand within the group we had shared resources across all brands and The Oodie wasn’t getting the support it needed. I was promoted to CMO at The Oodie and restructured the team to focus on our largest brand.
I transitioned away from external agencies while recruiting and training an in-house team of 25+ people across Performance Marketing, Creative and eCommerce functions, profitably scaling to 9 figures across 8 markets.
Now I’m taking what I’ve learned from almost 15 years in eCommerce and helping 8 – 9 figure DTC brands profitably scale as a Fractional CMO.
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