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Good morning,
Hereâs what youâll find in todayâs DTC:
Youâre reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Scenario IQ, Reign Bridal, and SILKE London. đ

âđĽ Stop Guessing. Discover The Next Right Move With Data-Backed Insights From Henri AI
Most AI tools promise smarter insights but deliver the same generic recommendations, with zero clarity on why performance tanks or what competitors are actually doing.
Theyâre trained on tiny datasets, canât explain day-to-day drops, and definitely canât show you which ads, angles, and creatives are stealing your revenue. đľâđŤ
Finally, an alternative to overpriced $500â$1,000/month AI growth agents.
đ Henri uses a proprietary $4B dataset and built-in competitor tracking to reveal exactly what moves the needle and whatâs silently hurting your growth.
đ Just clear, data-backed answers that actually help you scale, built by the team behind Lebesgue, trusted by 5,000+ brands.
And the best part? It starts at just $79/month.
*Â sponsored
âđ Page Speed Might Be The Difference Between A Sale or A Bounce for Black Friday
Black Friday means a major spike in traffic.
But if your site is too slow, chances are that even with that increased traffic, youâll lose out on conversions.
The harsh reality: When page load time jumps even a few seconds, shoppers bail. The longer it takes your site to load, the more visitors will bounce.
The Pilothouse team shares that as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, bounce rates rise to 32%.
1 to 5 seconds? 90%. đ¤Ż
Not only that, but CPCs also rise, and Googleâs algo starts treating your ads like low-quality inventory.
Why? Because Google factors in landing-page speed in Quality Score, meaning slow pages raise CPCs even before someone bounces.
Smart Bidding also downgrades slow pages, reducing impression share right when competition peaks.
This means a few extra seconds can erase a campaignâs profitability.
If you want your BFCM campaigns to stay profitable, page speed is the one lever you can still pull today.
How to Win Back Speed Today (Five Fast Fixes)
1ď¸âŁ Compress Every Asset: Convert images to WebP and keep hero images under 200â300 KB. Run all assets through TinyPNG or Squoosh.
2ď¸âŁ Defer Non-Essential Tools
3ď¸âŁ Reduce Page Weight
4ď¸âŁ Validate With Tools: Use PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to gauge site speed.
Aim for these metrics in your Core Web Vitals Assessment:
5ď¸âŁ Measure Marketing Impact
The takeaway?
A slow site during Black Friday doesnât just lose conversions. It makes every click more expensive.
Google rewards fast pages with cheaper clicks, stronger engagement, and better placement in the auction.
So make sure to optimize your site speed before Black Friday kicks off.
Every second you save puts money back into your pocket. đ

đââď¸ Your Creator Bottleneck Is Costing You Growth
Growth stalls when creative velocity stalls.
Not because your product is weak, but because you donât have the creator pipeline to keep up.
Too many channels. Too much content. Zero time to chase creators. đŤ
Sound familiar?
Then you plug into JoinBrands and the creator bottleneck disappears. đ
500,000+ creators who apply TO YOU are ready for UGC, Spark, TikTok Shop, Lives, Amazon, and IG.
đŻ Save time and money with JoinBrands. Create your free brand account and launch your first campaign today.
*Â sponsored

âđ§ How Pilothouse Builds Strategy That Scales
Most DTC brands arenât short on effort but lack strategy.
Theyâre stuck in the tactical spin cycle: chasing hacks, optimizing in circles, burning time and team on things that used to work.
In this episode, Dave Steele, CEO of Pilothouse, and Duncan Ferguson, Strategy Lead, unpack how Pilothouse breaks that vicious loop and why a proper strategy isnât optional once you pass the $5 million mark.
For DTC brands trying to scale past tactics and actually build leverage.
In this episode, we dive into:
âśď¸ Watch the full episode on YouTube here.
đ§ Or click here to listen on Spotify.
Zach Stuck shares that optimizing your ad strategy isnât just about creating different iterations of the same ad for different platforms, but generating new concepts as well.
He shares that his team put out fewer iterations in Q4 than Q3 and focused on generating net-new concepts instead.
âđď¸ The NRF Predicts Record-Breaking Holiday Sales
The National Retail Federation expects 187 million people to shop between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, 3 million more than last year.
Black Friday remains the biggest shopping day, followed closely by Cyber Monday.
And for the first time ever, NRF projects holiday sales will surpass $1 trillion.
âđŞ Tired of AI tools that donât explain anything? Henri AI breaks down your data, your competitors' data, and industry benchmarks so you know every spike and dip in your performance. Try it at $79/mo. *
*Â sponsored
âđĽ Got a B2B Biz?
Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.
DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.
Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.
