D2C Diaries

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D2C Diaries

Loukas Hambi and Olly Hudson

57 episodes

6 days ago

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your free audit here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0pzLCJ0 Creative costs are climbing fast. Meta’s changed how ads learn. And AI is completely redefining what “creative strategy” means in 2026. In this episode, Olly and Loukas dive into how brands can adapt to Meta’s creative similarity update, scale creative diversity without burning resources, and build systems that use AI as part of the production line — not a side tool. ...

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All content for D2C Diaries is the property of Loukas Hambi and Olly Hudson and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your free audit here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0pzLCJ0 Creative costs are climbing fast. Meta’s changed how ads learn. And AI is completely redefining what “creative strategy” means in 2026. In this episode, Olly and Loukas dive into how brands can adapt to Meta’s creative similarity update, scale creative diversity without burning resources, and build systems that use AI as part of the production line — not a side tool. ...

Show more...

Episodes (20/57)

D2C Diaries

The Future of Creative Strategy: How AI Is Transforming Performance Marketing in 2026

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your free audit here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0pzLCJ0 Creative costs are climbing fast. Meta’s changed how ads learn. And AI is completely redefining what “creative strategy” means in 2026. In this episode, Olly and Loukas dive into how brands can adapt to Meta’s creative similarity update, scale creative diversity without burning resources, and build systems that use AI as part of the production line — not a side tool. ...

6 days ago

54 minutes

D2C Diaries

Meta’s Creative Diversity Mastermind: The 2026 Playbook for Ad Performance

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your free audit here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0ppm8t0 Meta’s Creative Similarity Penalty just changed the rules - here’s how to protect your performance in 2026 In one of the biggest creative updates since Andromeda, Meta has changed the way your ads are evaluated and most brands are getting silently penalised. This episode of D2C Diaries is a deep dive into Meta’s new Creative Similarity Algorithm, powered by Entity ID ...

1 week ago

41 minutes

D2C Diaries

The D2C Reset: Creative Strategy, Incremental Reach, and What’s Working Now

The D2C landscape has been completely rewritten in the last six months. Meta’s changing what it rewards. AI is reshaping how we research, test, and create. And the creative tactics that worked just half a year ago are already burning out. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Olly and Loukas break down what’s actually driving performance right now and how smart brands are adapting to find incremental reach in a tougher, more competitive landscape. They dig into what Meta is really rewarding in 2...

2 weeks ago

53 minutes

D2C Diaries

How Jack Rubin Scaled Purdy & Figg to 1 in 20 Homes with One Product

Purdy & Figg has quietly become one of the most impressive DTC brands in the UK. 1 in 20 households now use the product. But what’s more impressive is how they've done it: One product. One market. One channel. For six years. In this episode, Jack breaks down how he's stayed this focused and why most brands burn growth by diversifying too early. We get into how Purdy & Figg became the blueprint for creative volume, running 180 shoots a year and scaling a performance team in-house be...

3 weeks ago

59 minutes

D2C Diaries

The New Meta Ad Playbook: Avoiding Creative Similarity on Meta

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: https://tinyurl.com/4jfc8yej Creative similarity is quietly killing Meta ad performance and most brands have no idea it’s hap...

1 month ago

1 hour 3 minutes

D2C Diaries

How To Run Partnership Ads on Meta Like The Top 1%

How to Scale DTC Brands with Third-Party Ads Struggling to scale Meta ads without killing your CPA? In this episode of D2C Diaries, Olly breaks down the exact whitelisting and partnership ad strategies we’re using across 8 figure ad accounts to unlock First-Time Impression Ratio (FTI) and drive incremental reach. This internal training reveals why Meta’s Andromeda algorithm update makes creative and third-party identity the new targeting, how to build high-performing whitelisting ad funnels...

1 month ago

39 minutes

D2C Diaries

The Product-Led Strategy That Rebuilt Hera: Holly Beadle

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: https://tinyurl.com/4jfc8yej Most founders obsess over CAC, ad spend and creative testing, but almost no one talks about the...

1 month ago

1 hour 8 minutes

D2C Diaries

Scaling to £35M+ with Minimal Meta Spend: Pure Pet Food's Story

Before pet food was “DTC sexy,” Pure Pet Food was scaling with zero ad spend. In this episode, Matt and Joe unpack how they built early traction through scrappy tactics like event pitching, awards, and PR - not Meta. With just a £300 council grant and no industry experience, they grew the brand to £1M+ in revenue without touching paid media. They share how that foundation led to VC backing and how they leveraged Meta spend, a custom subscription stack, and retention-first thinking to push p...

1 month ago

1 hour 9 minutes

D2C Diaries

How Martyn Cook Scaled a Brand That Fortified 250M Meals

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: https://tinyurl.com/4jfc8yej This mission-first ecom brand has fortified 250 million meals without compromising scale. In t...

2 months ago

1 hour 2 minutes

D2C Diaries

A Proven Meta Blueprint for Reaching New Customers at Scale

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: https://tinyurl.com/4jfc8yej CPMs climbing. Frequency spiking. CAC creeping up... If you’ve felt your Meta ads are “hitting...

2 months ago

52 minutes

D2C Diaries

We Blew £30K on AI Workflows Trying to Scale Creative Ops

D2C Diaries is proudly sponsored by Wayflyer Running an ecom brand and struggling with cash flow? Whether you're scaling ad spend or restocking bestsellers ahead of peak season, Wayflyer provides fast, non-dilutive funding tailored to e-commerce businesses. No equity. No months of waiting. Just the capital and insights you need to grow, on your terms. Check them out: partners.wayflyer.com/soar In this episode, Olly sits down with Soar COO Sam to unpack the hard lessons from their early ex...

2 months ago

1 hour 9 minutes

D2C Diaries

Black Friday 2025: The Exact Strategy Behind £45M in Revenue

Black Friday isn’t just another sales weekend, for some DTC brands, it makes up 90% of yearly revenue. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Olly and Loukas break down the exact playbook that drove £45M in sales from £11.5M in Meta ad spend during Black Friday 2024 and reveal how they’ve evolved the strategy for 2025. You’ll learn: - The proven goal-setting framework to anchor your BFCM strategy - Offer strategies that actually convert without overcomplicating - Why creative iteration beats...

2 months ago

1 hour 3 minutes

D2C Diaries

£10M+ E-commerce CRO Tactics with Dylan Ander

CRO is the growth lever 99% of DTC brands are ignoring. In this episode, Olly is joined by Dylan Ander, ex-agency owner, 2x eCom founder, and now the creator of Heatmap.com, the CRO tool quietly powering some of the highest-performing brands online. They break down the post-click strategies the top 1% are using to scale profitably and why your landing page might matter more than your creative. You’ll learn: - Why CRO is the real 80/20 of DTC growth - What metrics actually matter (hint: not ...

3 months ago

55 minutes

D2C Diaries

Scriptwriting Mastermind: How We Use Storytelling to Outperform 80% of Meta Ads

Most brands creatives live at the bottom of the funnel, battling over the same small pool of ready-to-buy customers. But 80% of our best-performing ads? They start much higher up. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas shares the exact internal training we run with our creative strategists on the hardest skill in paid social: storytelling. You’ll see how we script for unaware and problem aware audiences (the stages most brands ignore) and why they’re the biggest unlock for scaling cold tra...

3 months ago

1 hour 3 minutes

D2C Diaries

Reinventing Creative Strategy with AI: Alex Cooper

Creative strategy is evolving, fast. And Alex Cooper is one of the sharpest minds pushing the industry forward. In this episode, we dig into the intersection of AI and creativity: how brands can scale content that actually converts, why performance-first storytelling matters now more than ever, and what the strategist’s role really looks like in 2025. Alex shares: - How AI is changing the business model of creative agencies - How AI is already reshaping the creative strategists role - What ...

3 months ago

1 hour 22 minutes

D2C Diaries

Scaling DTC Ad Creative with JSON Prompts and Veo 3

What happens when you give Loukas two weeks, a cleared calendar, and unrestricted access to Google’s new Veo 3? You get a repeatable system for generating scroll-stopping ad hooks, without touching a camera. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas breaks down the exact prompt structure we now use within the agency group to turn ChatGPT JSON prompts into Veo 3-generated ads. Whether you’re scaling a best-performing hook or building a fresh creative system from scratch, this workflow will save...

3 months ago

50 minutes

D2C Diaries

Matt Kelly Returns to Break Down the Path from £10M to £50M

Matt Kelly is back on the podcast, 9 months after his first episode, and a lot has changed. In this brutally honest conversation, Matt opens up about what it really feels like to scale a wellness brand beyond 8 figures. We talk: – Space Goods has gone from £3.5M to a projected £18M. – Growing from 1 to 15 employees in 9 months – Losing his sense of purpose as the business outgrows him – Why the rebrand feels terrifying (even after 5 months of work) – The reality of copycats launching before...

3 months ago

1 hour 3 minutes

D2C Diaries

The Creative Angles Powering 9-Figure Brands

Back by popular demand, this solo episode is loaded with behind-the-scenes insights on what’s working right now in the DTC performance space. Olly and Loukas get brutally honest about what it actually takes to scale creative, fix performance plateaus, and build a winning system inside a high-growth agency. From a UGC format that’s driving £1M+ in spend, to the playbooks reshaping TikTok Shop and Meta, this one’s a deep dive into what’s moving the needle. They also unpack what’s really going...

4 months ago

1 hour 1 minute

D2C Diaries

Obvi’s $50M Meta Ad Blueprint: What Still Works in 2025

In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas is joined by Ash Melwani, CMO and co-founder of Obvi, one of the most transparent and battle-tested operators in DTC. Ash breaks down the exact Meta strategy that took Obvi to $1M/month in revenue, and the moment it all fell apart. You’ll learn: - The Meta playbook Obvi used to scale with static ads - Why Meta performance collapsed overnight (and what they missed) - How Andromeda and health category crackdowns hit hard - Their pivot to creative volume...

4 months ago

57 minutes

D2C Diaries

How Batch LDN Turned a Shop Break-In into a Viral Billboard Campaign

In this episode, we sit down with Sam Matanle, co-founder of Batch LDN, the made-to-order menswear brand disrupting fashion’s broken model. Sam breaks down how Batch scaled 2.2x YoY, with 75% of revenue from one physical store and zero reliance on paid media or held stock. We cover: 1. Why fast fashion is financially broken and what works instead 2. The decision to bet big on retail instead of performance marketing 3. What happened when their Covent Garden store got robbed at 5am 4. Why 70%...

4 months ago

1 hour 2 minutes