DTC824: Four-Day Amazon Prime Day Tactics

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

🏆 Amazon Prime Day Tips
Survive a longer and more competitive sales period

🚀 Scale Profitably
IQBAR’s formula for achieving product-market fit.

📦 Daily Tariff Update
Today’s must-know news.

😟 The Downfall of Duolingo?
How the brand is dealing with the AI backlash.

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You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Fabric by Gerber Life, Hash Stash, and Alta Daily. 👋

👀 Your Team Can’t Monitor Everything — AI Agents Can

Sometimes, things get missed.

An ad tanking ROAS. An old discount code that’s still live. A checkout page that’s not converting shoppers. 😓

Not because you’re not looking — but because your team physically can’t monitor every metric, every creative, every SKU, all at once. 😵‍💫

🤖 AI agents can.

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In Triple Whale’s Ultimate AI Agents Playbook for Ecommerce Brands, you’ll learn how AI agents can:

• 🔍 Flag ad fatigue, budget waste, and revenue dips—instantly
• 📦 Forecast inventory demand to prevent stockouts
• 🧠 Inspire stronger email content while explaining why certain copy resonates
• 📈 Optimize high-traffic, low conversion rate landing pages with a testing action plan

Monitoring every facet of your brand 24/7 isn’t humanly possible. That’s really a job for AI.

👉 Discover how AI agents help you scale smarter, cut inefficiencies, and uncover revenue opportunities you might otherwise miss.

🏆 Why This Year’s Amazon Prime Day Is Different

Amazon announced that Prime Day will run for four full days this year.  Double the usual length.

At first glance, it feels like a win.

More time = more opportunity, right? 🤔

Yes, but the dynamics are different now.

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Why this changes how Amazon sellers compete:

The Pilothouse Amazon team shares that in past years, success on Prime Day came down to how fast you could react.

If your campaign's budget capped or underperformed early on, and you caught it fast, you had a huge advantage.

Your slower competitors didn’t have time to fix their campaigns, and you won those placements for the rest of the event.

But this year? With four full days, that edge is smaller.

The brands that used to miss out because they weren’t in the weeds on Day 1 now have time to return on Day 2, fix their bids and budgets, and compete again.

The Pilothouse Amazon team expects more competition deeper into the event, not just a surge on Day 1 and burnout on Day 2.

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A few key shifts to consider:

• Quick reaction time still matters, but it’s not the differentiator it once was — strong fundamentals matter more.
• Lightning Deals become less powerful. They’re no longer rare or urgent across a 4-day window.
• There’s more value in sustainable pacing, clean segmentation, and flexibility to scale into what’s working over time.

In a 4-day Prime Day, it’s less about reacting fast — and more about building a system that performs without panic.

The winners will be the brands with solid campaign architecture, clean segmentation, and room to scale — not just those who sprint out the gate.

📦 Your Daily Tariff Check-In

Whether it’s a minor tweak or a major shift, we’ll keep you posted on the latest tariff changes—so you’re always in the know.

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May 27, 2025 update:

• ASEAN Leaders Discuss Tariffs During Summit
  • Southeast Asian nations gather at the ASEAN summit on Tuesday to discuss the ongoing trade war.
  • On Tuesday, during the ASEAN meeting, leaders agreed that any deals negotiated with the U.S. should not harm members, ensuring the region as a whole is protected.
  • Southeast Asia is deeply impacted by Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs, and six countries will face levies between 32% to 49% in July if negotiations on tariff reductions fail.

👉 Underoutfit’s Secret to Scaling Without Hiring? AI Agents.

Underoutfit’s lean marketing team of three used to spend most of their day trying to untangle performance data across a sprawling web of paid and owned channels. 😵‍💫

Despite hours of analysis, they still couldn’t answer: What’s working? What’s not? And what should we do next? 🤔

Then they discovered Triple Whale’s Moby Agents — the only AI agents built to monitor every aspect of your brand, 24/7. 😎

👏 With Moby Agents, Underoutfit now saves 20+ hours a week on data analysis.

Even better? They eliminated the need to hire 5 full-time data analysts — because these AI agents instantly surface insights no human could spot. 👀

AI agents are the new competitive edge. 💥

It’s not a question of if you’ll adopt them, but when. And the brands that start now will gain the most.

🎧 IQBAR's Will Nitze CPG Playbook: From Rapid Product Market Fit Iteration to Omnichannel Scale

In this episode, IQBAR founder Will Nitze shares his journey from burnout in the corporate world to launching a bar brand rooted in cognitive nutrition.

He walks through the steps that IQBAR took, from kitchen counter tests to Amazon bestseller and retail mainstay.

What you’ll hear is less about hacks and more about the fundamentals: why starting online mattered, how feedback drove product-market fit, and what it really takes to scale profitably in CPG today.

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In this episode, you'll learn:

• DTC strategy: Why launching online allowed IQBAR to validate demand and iterate fast.
• Product development process: Why clean label and plant protein were non-negotiables.
• Adapting to market trends: Why IQBAR updated their packaging after the keto movement died out.
• Retail strategy: Why the brand didn’t enter retail until logistics and cost structures were optimized.

👉 Listen to the full episode with Will here.

🌐 IN THE SOCIAL SPHERE

Last month, Duolingo announced its plan to become an "AI-first" company, phasing out human contractors in favor of AI.

However, after intense backlash from users, Duolingo responded with…a social media campaign?

After going silent and deleting its social media posts, its unhinged owl mascot returned with a video called Exposed and another grilling its founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn, on why he made these AI changes.

However, Duolingo’s new social content strategy failed to resonate with audiences who are calling the quirky response “performative,” "dismissive," and "avoidant" for not engaging in a serious discussion about the dangers of AI.

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⚡ QUICK HITS

🤖 Are you taking full advantage of your AI agents? Triple Whale’s latest guide reveals how top DTC brands are using agentic AI to succeed—from first sale to scaling to seven figures and beyond. Grab your free copy. *

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🎉 CELEBRATE THIS!

🌈 June 1: Pride Month starts, National Olive Day, National Bubbly Day, National Nail Polish Day, New Year’s Resolution Recommitment Day

🐔 June 2: National Cancer Survivors’ Day, National Rotisserie Chicken Day

🥚 June 3: Repeat Day, National Egg Day, World Cider Day

🛒 June 4: International Corgi Day, Shopping Cart Day, National Cheese Day

🍔 June 5: National Veggie Burger Day, World Environment Day, National Gingerbread Day

🍩 June 6: National Donut Day, National Fish and Chip Day, National Eyewear Day, National Applesauce Cake Day

🦺 June 7: Chocolate Ice Cream Day, World Food Safety Day

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📅 EVENTS

Shopware Community Day 2025 - This one-day ecommerce conference aims to illuminate the future of digital commerce and shape its next 25 years through collaboration and shared knowledge.

🗓️ June 4, 📍 Cologne, Germany 💰 Register To Attend

AI and Big Data Expo -  A showcase of AI and big data advancements across enterprise, consumer, and innovation applications with keynotes, demos, and panels.

🗓️ June 4-5, 📍 Santa Clara, CA 💰 $699

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📰 NEWS

• ASEAN leaders agree tariff deals with the U.S. shouldn’t harm members.
• TikTok plans to lay off staff in response to Trump’s tariffs.
• Google releases a new doc that explains how ads in AI Overviews work.

📥 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.

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Have you heard our latest podcasts?

• 🚀 AKNF 510: Segmenting YouTube Campaigns for Scalable Growth
• 🍭 Ad-venturous 3: Chupa Chups + Salvador Dali = Your Brand???
• 🍳 TWBERP 34: Inside Cookware Brand Hestan’s Retention Strategy
• 🫖 How Art of Tea Scaled Through Story and Quality
• 🏆 AKNF 508: How to Scale an Agency with Kyle Hitchcox
• 🔥 Ad-venturous 2: FIIIIREE Memorial Day Sales Tips & Tricks

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Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

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