Cooki Haircare: Scaling a Solid Shampoo Brand Without Big Teams, Big Spend, or Chaos | #593

Can ecommerce still be simple? And can it still scale?

Cooki Haircare is a solid shampoo and conditioner brand Jaimee and her husband Lucas acquired as a “business in a box”, originally doing just four sales a day. Fast forward, and the brand is now generating over $3 million in annual revenue, powered by a lean team, a tight channel mix, and an unusually deep connection with its customers.

Today’s conversation is a masterclass in restraint, and why sometimes, doing less is what unlocks growth.

Today, we’re discussing:

• Scaling ecommerce profitably with a lean, lifestyle-first setup
• Why focus on one channel can outperform spreading across many
• Using customer reviews as a growth engine, not just social proof
• Building a niche brand through product obsession and clarity
• How deep customer understanding drives conversion, bundles and retention

Connect with Jaimee
Explore Cooki Haircare

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

And I started getting these emails from customers who'd gone through chemo and they were sending me not just a looks review, like a half-page email to my inbox. You know, I can tell if a piece of creative is gonna hit usually when I look at it, and nine times out of ten, it's right. And I have friends who've told me scale 30%, it'll be great. And for us, it was implosion. I'm Jamie Villellen, the co-founder of Cookie Hair Care and EuroWools, and today I'm gonna be talking about our journey of buying and scaling e-commerce businesses as a lifestyle as leanly as we can.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Hey, it's Nathan Bush or Bushy, joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. One of the big questions that I'm hearing in e-commerce right now is whether it's still possible to build and scale an e-commerce business without massive teams, without outside capital, and a whole lot of activity. Can we still keep it simple? Can e-commerce still be a lifestyle business? That's what we're going to discuss today with our guest on Add Descartes. Jamie Vallella is the managing director of Cookie Hair Care, the solid shampoo and conditioner brand that she and her husband Lucas bought as a tiny business in a box, doing four sales a day originally, which they've scaled to around$3 million a year profitably and with an incredibly lean setup. In this conversation, Jamie breaks down how they did it, focusing almost entirely on Meta and Clavio, obsessing over customer pain points, resisting channel addiction, and building systems that let a very small team operate at a very high level. We also talk about applying the same thinking to acquiring and growing a second business in a completely different category. If you're responsible for operating or scaling an e-commerce business, or you're thinking, hey, should I go out and buy an e-commerce business? There's a lot of things that you'll be able to take from this episode. Thank you to Shopify and Clavio for supporting Ad Descartes and helping us bring these conversations to the e-commerce community. Here's my conversation with Jamie Vallella, managing director of Cookie Hair Care. Jamie, welcome to Ad Descart.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Thank you, Nathan. It's such a pleasure to be here. I feel like I've climbed into my own Spotify, which is very weird.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Oh, that's lovely. It was so good to meet you and your husband Lucas at our Clavio windown event at the end of last year. And I was blown away by the business that you've built here, but also the way that you two have gone around it. So I'm so pumped to get into this conversation today.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

As am I.

Why Buy A Tiny E‑Com Brand

SPEAKER_01 2:33

All right, let's kick it off. Cookie. Solid shampoo. This is the business, and there are others to talk about, but this is the one we're going to focus on today. What got you into the solid shampoo game?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yes, yes. It is rather niche. So I was actually working as a head of marketing for another beauty business and had been in marketing for years. But Lucas, my husband, is sort of ops and finance minded and I'm marketing minded. And so he'd said to me, why don't we buy a tiny e-com? You don't have time to start a bus in your own time, but why don't we buy something and grow it together? And so I had actually been freelancing for InStyle Australia, May It Rest in Peace, Amazing Magazine. And they had flicked me an article on shampoo bars to edit. My background is in writing and editing. And I was like, shampoo bars? I just I had never heard of one. I'd never used one. I'd worked at DJ's and Beauty. I've been around the beauty traps for years, and I'd just never seen one. And they were talking about how Le Wave did soap on a rope and Glossier was doing face bars and it was bars are back. And so I thought, oh, how interesting. Put that to the back of my head. And then a few months later, no joke, I saw a shampoo bar company for sale. And it was just- Where did you see it?

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Where did it cross your path?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Like-minded bitches drinking wine. Shut up Lou for starting the most amazing community. I love when boys hear the name of that group, they just freak out because it's kind of like every woman in e-comm knows it.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

I love it. It's the best name for a group.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

It really is. And so the the founder had just popped it in there and she popped it on another online site that sells e-coms. And it ended up being the first one that we even investigated buying and we bought it. And it all happened quite quickly. So that's how it happened.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

And was the seller selling it for any reason? Were there any red flags that you saw immediately, or are you like all in straight away?

SPEAKER_00 4:11

She's amazing. So she's an e-comm consultant and is just phenomenal at going zero to one at that early scrappy stage and getting product market fit and early resonance. And so she had just had a baby and she'd had cookie for a couple of years, and I think had taken it as far as she wanted to, and knew that different skills were required to scale it from there. And I was in the opposite position where I love scaling and wanted something that was like business in a box, ready to go. But she'd run the business so beautifully. It had about 10,000 on the database when I got it. It was profitable, was doing about four sales a day. She has a lot of integrity and had just set up the business really well in the back end and was just a great person. I had the best experience buying from her. And we got lucky, but Lucas did a full due diligence on it. His background is an MA, so this poor founder was getting a professional MA business.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Just take it.

Product Fit And Solid Shampoo Benefits

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Just take it and run. So yeah, there were documents. But Lucas, you know, I think it's so important to have that skill set. He knew exactly what he needed to look for. He can see things in numbers that I never would. So yeah, we made a good team on that side of things. And we've obviously gone on to buy another biz as well. But uh yeah, that's how it happened. And I mean, why solid shampoo? I have stage four endometriosis. And so, as sort of as part of that, when you have any sort of chronic inflammatory condition, you're always looking to reduce inflammation. And there's a lot of chatter and beauty around sort of low tox or better for you cleaner ingredients products. And I think you've got to be careful with some of that. But certainly I was at a point where I was willing to throw anything at it. And so reducing chemicals. If it was an easy, good switch to something else that just didn't have those ingredients, I thought, why not? Hair care was so hard to find, something natural or better for you that foamed. Like they just don't foam up. They're like these waxy things, whether solid or liquid. And when I tried the bars, they foamed just like a glorious, foamy salon shampoo. And so I was really amazed by just the product quality of the biz we were buying. It wasn't a vehicle within which I then had to start from scratch. The products were amazing. So that's what really what got me hooked as well. And I thought, solid shampoo doesn't leak in your suitcase, better for your ingredients, light and easy to travel with in general. And now I'm a total bar convert. I've used them for years.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

There you go. Okay. So I think this is a good time to introduce your other business because we're going to talk a lot around your philosophy around buying and scaling businesses. So I think a lot of people might be thinking, okay, cool. Well, with your background in in style and your endometriosis and obviously your desire for a healthy, natural lifestyle, it would be a very health-focused business, your second one. It's not. What else are you into?

SPEAKER_00 6:39

It's wallpaper. So September 2024, we bought a wallpaper business. It's actually a very poetic tale. So when Lucas and I went on our first date in 2018, he was doing his MBA in Sydney. He's from Brazil. And he was like, I'm working part-time at a wallpaper company. And I was like, a wallpaper company. Okay. And I think I had it in my head, sort of commercial vinyl wall coverings or something like that. But he had an amazing time working for this company. The margins are dunning, as you can imagine, compared to CPG. And he just had a beer in his bonnet about it for years. He even got me to meet with the founders in 2022 about potentially buying it, but I had a beauty itch to scratch. I really wanted to do a beauty brand. And then actually in early 2024, he said, I can't stop thinking about Eurowalls. And I said, Fine, reach out.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Give it up already.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Correct, I give up. And so that actually happened really quickly. So we reached out to them in June. We bought it by September. And it's premium imported European wallpapers from Germany and Italy, but at amazing value. So it's sort of a value play. You know, the wallpaper market in Australia is 89 million and it's a really interesting market to be in. And I love beautiful things at home. So like whether it's pretty hair care or pretty walls, you know, beauty and interiors is my bread and butter. So the interiors angle was, you know, not necessarily hard by and I think it's been so good for me learning how to sell a high AOV product with an incredibly long sales cycle where the customer behavior is totally different. And that's been a really good challenge and quite fun for me too.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

And was the decision process very similar for both businesses, even though they were different categories? Did you come at it from the same way?

What We Look For When Acquiring

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Yeah, I think that that's a great question. So I think with EuroWools, Lucas knew the business inside and out because he'd worked inside it. And we knew the supplies were great, the product was stunning. You know, EuroWools was the first ever online wallpaper store in Australia. So it's been around since, you know, 2008. And it had just incredible relationships. You know, we still have the top architects and designers in the country in our inboxes proactively all the time. And so it had a really interesting journey where it had been sort of dormant for a few years and they used to have retail stores that they'd closed and gone full e-com. So they shut down the five retail stores during COVID and just didn't reopen. And so we when we were looking at the opportunity, it was high margin. You know, I think when we look at both businesses, the opportunity was Jamie's skills haven't been used on these yet, which is digital marketing, product market fit, repositioning, branding. So we can just reposition the ship and then go faster in that direction. And I think really that's what we look for, you know, existing brand love, product market fit, and room to move digitally. And so that was sort of the main decision factor. But yeah, the juicy margins is what got me over the line because it was a uh, I could see it could have been a distraction from cookie. The heartbreaking timing was that the month we took over the business, cookie had tripled in a week. And so we were in a true world of pain. It was, I was in New Zealand for a friend's wedding, and and Lucas had come up to me and said, Jamie, I need 80k in cash by Saturday to replace the all the bars. You just sold all our Black Friday bars and it's September. Kind regards. And then I was getting emails from customers about wallpaper and trying to Google adhesive. And so, yeah, that was I'll always champagne down at a wedding. Yeah, and I was at my best friend's wedding singing karaoke till 11. So that was fun. But yeah, I think to answer your question, we look for the same things in those businesses. What are the commonalities? How could we grow it? Are we inspired by growing this? And how would it fit into the portfolio of what we're already doing? Because there's a lot of sort of commonalities in marketing and e-com with what you do each week with email and social and ads. So yeah, it was it was very, very different, but also was exciting to us.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Knowing what you know now after buying those two businesses, what is the minimum gross margin you would go in on on a business at the moment, knowing what you need to do to be able to scale a business beyond that zero to one in a digital world? Where's the point where you go, anything below GM is this GM percentage is just too hard. It has to start here and go up.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Oh, call me a sucker for punishment, but I would still do CPG. Like I'd still don't do those disgusting beauty margins because I just think at the end of the day, I know beauty, I know how to sell it. And if you've got pain points like hair thinning or dandruff, they're a lot easier to sell on at volume than a slow decision-making process such as wallpaper. So I think I'm a glutton for punishment, but you know, beauty is famously low in margins. And so I don't have a minimum now. I I love my high margins in wallpaper, but I think I, you know, I'm we're literally in talks about another beauty brand as we speak. So I think ask me in a year.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

I think slow decision making around wallpaper, I can definitely relate to that. At the risk of mentioning a competitor we had Milton and King on. We had Chris.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

I love them. We're actually in chats with them about collabs and things. They're amazing. Yeah. They're a manufacturer, so they're friends of ours.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Yeah, great. And I'm a good friend of Chris. I used to work with him back in agency days. So I love going under the covers of the wallpaper business and hearing how wallpaper has changed so much from how it used to be when it used to stick on and you had to get it, like, scrape it off, and it was kind of stuck there forever. So I've been having all these ideas and then looking at your side as well. I'm like, what can I do to this room to set it up as a you know, with the studio and the wallpaper? And I have all these ideas, and my wife, I always send them through to Sarah. You're an idiot. Just settle down. You're not doing anything to the walls. So I blame my slow decision making on my wife.

Emotional Pain Points Drive Demand

SPEAKER_00 11:53

I understand. I understand. It's crazy because you'll get, you know, we'll sell sample, A4 samples of different patterns, and then someone will order samples in March and then install it in December. So, you know, with cookie, most people buy it the same day. It's not even a day that they wait. And so I've had to really get used to, you know, with with the wallpaper, you know, sa someone might buy with the wallpaper, you know, a customer might buy the sample, but then their installer or tradesperson might buy the role. And so you can't even map the customer journey from sample through to role. It's a it's a glorious LTB job, let me tell you. But yeah, I think, again, different challenge, different industry, but yeah, very slow decision making.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

Well, it's so different, isn't it, to cookie where you've got 6,000 five-star reviews. So you're getting all of this feedback. And I can imagine, as you said, it's it's almost real time. You you buy it, you use it, you give feedback. How have you driven all of that customer feedback to care? Like at the end of the day, and and not to be disrespectful, it's a bar for your hair. Like for customers to go that next step and really, I've been on your site, you've got some amazing UGC, amazing reviews. How do you get them to care so much so they want to give all that back to you after that purchase?

SPEAKER_00 12:58

I think that's a really interesting question. I think it comes back to the stickiness of the emotional element of buying hair care because hair is so much around our identity and how we feel about ourselves. And if you lose your hair, you know, whether that's balding for the guys or whether it's thinning, you know, after a baby or after chemo. So I think we are finding people often after they've done chemo and they're looking for hair growth. So that's been a huge way we've scaled. Grey hair. So suddenly, oh, suddenly my hair has gone gray and it used to be silky and brown and now it's wiry and coarse, and I don't know how to care for it. And we are coming to you with a solution that's affordable and beautiful to use and, you know, economical. And so people are, people feel so strongly about our products. It's true. There's this very unusual attachment to it. And I think it's because it's really exhausting navigating the beauty landscape, spending all this money, and you have so many fails in a row. And so when you find something that works for you, you're like, oh, thank goodness. And so I think with Cookie, they've just really rallied. But yeah, it has been this really kind of incredible community that has formed. And I'm very grateful for it in terms of, you know, how we get reviews. We send a luke's automated email, and then somehow 6,000 of them have come back in 18 months. So I don't know. I'm as shocked as you are, but it's been amazing to watch.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Has there been a piece of feedback that's stuck in your mind or changed the business?

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Yeah. I mean, I love that question. So, firstly, when I bought the business, it's important to add that I inherited an older demo because the original packaging was quite neutral, it wasn't design-led, and it had just attracted that group with its positioning and the copywriting and the visuals. And I wanted to keep them and grow them, but also expand out, which is what we've done. But we still have this very loud, very OG cohort of women in their 50s and 60s, and many of them, post-menopause, are going through breast cancer and chemo. And so a lot of customers find us in a during a post-chemo journey. And when I started getting these emails through, because we sort of dialed up the hair thinning piece when I took over the business, because I saw that there was an opportunity there. And we already had all these amazing reviews about what the natural ingredients were doing for promoting new growth. And we've never promised to be a silver bullet, but I think, you know, the products do work in that way. And I started getting these emails from customers who'd gone through chemo, and they were sending me not just a Luke's review, like a half-page email to my inbox. I have so many of them. I'd like to print them all and put them in a little binder for myself. And they were saying things like, I'd lost my confidence, I can't believe what a difference this has made. Thank you so much. I've told all my friends, I've got the whole house using it. You know, and I get those every day. I had another one yesterday. And so that made me think, oh wow, people really care about this and people feel connected to this brand. And I think they trust us. And so that was huge. And then I think when I started noticing these patterns that people were saying, oh, I bought this for travel, but now I'm not going to go back to my bottled stuff because this is such good stuff. I thought, oh, that's so interesting because you're actually creating demand for a new category. So you're growing the solid product category. And that is really interesting to me to observe because my competitors aren't necessarily even other bar brands. They're people that are using shampoo.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

So yeah, that's been really interesting to observe.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

I love the way that you talk about how the cookie bars are transformative for people. We had Tara from Proud Poppy on a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking around clothing and fashion as a piece of identity and the emotion attached to that. And I can see the similarities there of being able to tap into the emotions and the use cases there. From a marketing perspective, when you go out and you're thinking about introducing cookie to new audiences, are you doing the traditional demographics piece in terms of maybe having customer segments or profiles? Or are you looking at it more around use cases such as I'm going through chemotherapy, I'm losing my hair, I'm going gray, or all those pain points that you're solving for, or is it a mixture of both?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

I'd say primarily psychographics in terms of, you know, there's the segment that want to reduce plastic waste and they're really passionate about that. Or I don't lead with that though. I think that's an incidental and sort of table stakes for brands today to be more environmentally conscious. So I think people find us sometimes through that. But it's generally around, you know, better for your ingredients crowd, plastic free crowd, and then concern led. So we've also got this wild cohort of men who are obsessed with our peppermint shampoo for dandruff, psoriasis, and eczema. And I think dandruff seems to be this male issue. I'm just seeing I'm so many customers who are guys buying the dandruff bar, and I just find that really fascinating. And so I've called I've nicknamed that the husband bar because the husbands always steal it and then the wives laugh and you know what you've got it. It's always the wives as well. It's never the girlfriend. So I think definitely psychographics, but there's I think it's concern-led, and I think it's age range, and then I think there's travel. So the travel, you know, psychographic piece can be any age, and we have lots of people in their 30s and 40s using the bars as well. But yeah, I think we scaled swiftly with the older crowd and with gray hair, menopause, chemo, and concern led. And then sort of they've actually started influencing the younger people in their families, which is hilarious.

The Two‑Channel Play: Meta And Klaviyo

SPEAKER_01 17:59

And obviously, word of mouth is really uh strong for you in terms of probably household word of mouth and then expanding out from there. What other marketing channels are really moving the needle for you to allow you to tell those stories?

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Honestly, we've played it so simple. So, you know, when we bought the business, I had left my full-time job and jumped in full-time in Jan of 2024. And because there was only one of me, Lucas was still working full-time. We didn't have budget for, you know, teams or anything. This was purely a social experiment for us. We will put our own cash into buying this small business and see what we can do with it.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Social and a marriage test all in one.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

A hundred percent. I didn't actually know it was a working together test, but when we went to buy Euro, Lucas was like, this has gone really well. We are now ready for a bigger business. I was like, oh, I didn't know that this was a trend. Good to know. I guess correct, this has gone very well. Yeah, so I had really decided that we needed to scale on meta ads because I just seen Meta as if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And it's very much your positioning playground. I think a lot of brands have used organic for that really successfully, but you can also use paid. And, you know, I think when we bought the business, we were doing about$50 a day in spend. And I just slowly started scaling that up. And basically, I think this might be a dramatic opinion, but I really think you can hit, you know, five to ten million on meta alone. You don't have to do other things. It's a terrifying little game I like to pull scaling on one leg, and it's what we've been doing.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 19:24

Well, on the days where your meta ads fail, you've got no legs.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

And that's a really bad week. And that's probably been three weeks of the last two years. But you know, what it also does is it cleans up all the noise around attribution. There's no double dipping. You've got Cladio and Meta, and those are the two ways we've scaled. So when we bought the biz, we were doing, I think in 2023 the business did 179K in Rev. In 2024, we did 1.1 mil in Rev. And then last year we closed at just over 3 million in Rev. And that's just been Meta and Cladio. I think we started some token Google search late last year, and I'm not that invested in it. And I think that's because it can be really easy to go really broad and dilute yourself across a lot of channels and be sort of have that channel addiction. I needed to find product market fit. I needed to prove that what I'd bought could scale in a niche or in multiple niches. And so I put all of my energy and focus into learning to buy ads for the first time myself, making ads and scaling those ads. And so, really, I think you could go and do an amazing affiliate program and you could spend time on organic, which I literally haven't, but I think you've got to pick a couple of channels and do them really well. And I think once you do well on those, you earn the right to broaden out from there. And that's where we would be this year, which is exciting.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

There's nothing that's much more personal than undies and lingerie ride. But I mean, you wouldn't just shout at random customers about the types of undies that they want to wear, would you? That's why it was crucial for Nala, one of Australia's fastest growing underwear brands, to speak on a personal level with their customers. No shouting, no shaming. By using Clavio's B2C CRM and a masterful fit library that they've created, they have been able to take the targeted approach to product launches, give back-in-stock notifications, and reactivate dormant customers with the right offers. They now run 34 live flows, including one that saw a 125% jump in attributed revenue in just 90 days. They've pulled off 109% ROI on the platform and they haven't stopped growing since. You could say that they get pretty intimate with intimates. If you want to turn customer data into your biggest growth driver, visit clavio.com forward slash AU to see how brands like Nala are scaling fast. One of the things that I loved when we caught up was how lean your team is. And it makes sense when you position your marketing strategy like that. Standing on one leg, I love that analogy. So as you think about that though, and potentially broadening out the channels, does that change also your team structure as well?

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Not really, because we're insane. So I think you can scale to 10 million in revenue on Meta alone if you wanted to. And again, as long as you're growing the brand organically alongside that, whether it's organic socials, whether it's community building, like we've done really successfully, you know, even email database, retail is an amazing way to grow community around the brand, which is was a big part of our last year. We went into a hundred new stores in September and we're now in 175. So that was a whole story in itself. But we kind of got picked up by GoVita, who approached us after seeing the buzz around the brand in store. And so I think you can stay incredibly focused and narrow on your channels up to 10 mil if you wanted to. Obviously, you would not grow the brand as quickly as if you were doing a lot of top of funnel activity. And I think there's real wisdom in knowing those trade-offs. For Lucas and me, it's definitely our lifestyle business. So we have no desire to, you know, raise and burn and grow super fast and sell in five years for a huge profit. This is our lives, and we love these businesses and we plan to have them for a long time. And so for us, growing a small team really well and doing a few things well is more important to us. And so yeah, I think we could broaden out and I would love to, but I do think Meta is, you know, a really powerful channel. I'll give you a wild anecdote, which is that I was on a podcast last year in the UK and she asked me for my e-com top tip. And I said, Oh, well, I'm gonna be so boring and say chat GPT, but it's a specific way I've been using chat, which is that I went onto uh e-com guru Nick Sharmer's website, pasted it in, downloaded a bunch of his resources, and said to chat, you are Nick Sharma. Here is his website, here's all of his methodology, here's everything he's ever said or done, help me with these scaling challenges. And he became my friend. And so Robot Nick was my friend, real Nick Sharma, heard that episode. And I ended up getting a free consult with him for half an hour from New York at 5 a.m., which was so kind of him. And he'd heard this crazy story, and we got an intro from a mutual friend, which was really lovely. And I put this to him, I said, Look, I'm scaling so lean on Meta. What do you think? Like, should I diversify? And he was like, no, just stay there. And so you can keep scaling in that direction. And I think it is dangerous. Like you can have performance marketing addiction, you can risk not having a true deep brand. All these things we know. And I know best practice because I've had marketing teams of 10 and ginormous budgets in the past, which is, you know, I now laugh in the direction of thinking of how my day looks and how my to-do list looks. But I think when you are buying and growing a business, your first three, five, 10, whatever you're trying to do, your biggest risk is going to be channel addiction and going too broadly too quickly and not being able to attribute correctly because you're double dipping. And so I plan to stay lean for as long as I can get away with. And I think you soon start to surface problems such as, oh, you know, brand awareness is a problem or following is a problem or whatever these things might be. And that's when you think, okay, well, how do I grow those channels better? But in terms of revenue and profit, meta can be fantastic if you know what you're doing with creative.

When Meta Breaks And How To Recover

SPEAKER_01 24:57

And what is your Sharma bot and your lived experience telling you around? Is there a playbook that you're using to kind of get that scale when you talk one, three, five, ten? Where should people start? If you're talking about setting up meta, where would you say, actually, the low-lying fruit is here before we start to get more complicated?

SPEAKER_00 25:18

I think that's a great question. So I think, you know, what you're looking at is the brand and the pain points. Always start with the pain because that's what makes things sticky and what's it's what makes people click. So for hair care, you know, there was thinning, there was gray hair, there was menopause, and there was a real opportunity to create UGC that looked like the customer. And so I think I am so strict on profit with Meta. So if a campaign hits over$5 over my CPA target, it goes off. So we've just been ruthlessly strict on profit for two years, but it's how we've maintained the same CPA the entire time. And so you have your clavio, which obviously will double dip. And if you do a great email campaign, that will come down a little bit. But really, it's been about very slowly testing good creative that is created with that customer psychographic in mind. And for our demo, often longer ads work. So, you know, all the meta guys would say 15 seconds, and I'd be finding ads a minute and a half were working really well for me because it's a different demographic. You know, if you look at my product pages, you know, best practice is like half a para to a para. Mine are long. Our conversion rate last year was 8.4%.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Holy moly.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Yeah. So when we took over the business, it was 4.3%, which is already great. And then it just, yeah. So the year before was 7.00, last year was 8.4.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

And that's really unusual when you've got so much money or so much traffic coming from Facebook, right? Or Instagram from paid traffic, because usually it bounces when you're talking, when you're increasing those volumes, especially as you scale it, your conversion rate will go down over time. But to hold it at over 8% is incredible.

Resurrecting Ads And Site Conversion Wins

SPEAKER_00 26:51

Because we're so focused on our audience and we know exactly who they are, what they want, what they respond to, and what they hate. And so we've just been very defined with who we're acquiring. And so I think it would have been really easy to start all these other sort of ring fence tests. And there was other stuff that I spoke to Nick Sharmer about was around, you know, age range testing and all these things when you have an older demo. And he gave me some great advice there. But I think, you know, to answer your question, it's you have a hypothesis of who the customer is. Once you get early resonance with a couple of ads, you just triple down on it and you watch every element of the funnel like a hawk. So how are CPCs looking? Then how's ad-to-cart looking, then how's conversion? And I think it is a really analytical game. But I can also I have sort of like a gut feel relationship with the account and I can just sense it, which is insane when I say that to most buyers. But, you know, I can tell if a piece of creative is going to hit usually when I look at it. And nine times out of ten, it's right, because we just know this customer so well. And I think we're lucky that it's a really niche audience. And so that's been how we've done it. But I'd say, you know, on Meta, I'm surprised how many e-commerce owners I speak to who don't have a target CPA. They don't necessarily have a target of what good looks like each week in terms of making or losing. And I think when you're starting out, it can be quite nebulous. But Lucas, Captain Lucas over here was like, this is it. And so I had something really crystal clear to aim for and I love a goal. And so I just have kept everything to that level. And, you know, if Facebook has blowout one week, then you have to run a flash sale on email, but we try and avoid that as much as possible. And I think really it is that balance of great creative, not scaling too quickly. You know, I never scale more than 15% more every two days.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

And I have friends who've told me scale 30%, it'll be great. And for us, it was implosion. And so I'm very, very strict on scaling very slowly, very sustainably, and very profitably. But I think all the legwork was done before we started within Meta because the brand strategy was so clear in terms of we've done focus groups on the customer. We know what we're going after, we have a hypothesis about what creative they'll respond to, and then we iterated it from there. I think if you're going to try and go for everyone, that's when you fall into trouble.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

You mentioned before that there were only three weeks where Meta left you in the lurch from a driving traffic and revenue perspective. What happened there? Was it a case of costs just skyrocketed, out of control? Was it that campaigns just weren't working? Because when you talk about that$5 CPA, it's either on or it's off. I I love that approach and it makes decision making really simple.

SPEAKER_02 29:17

Very simple.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Is it a case of running out of ideas or the market just getting ultra competitive?

SPEAKER_00 29:22

I'll tell you what happened. The first one, my ads stopped serving.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

But we were still losing. Yeah. So it was a meta glitch, apparently, and we were still spending the money, but they were not reaching anyone. And so that was awful. That was in about March of 2024. And then the second one was in September of 2024 when my ads just all died for some reason. It was just this really scary week where they all just sort of flopped. I think it was creative fatigue, to be honest. And so I went from sheer panic at the beginning of the week to within a week later launching an ad that tripled our business. So we went from 40 to 120 sales overnight, which then never came back down. And so that was one great ad. And so I think creative fatigue, and that was a really early lesson of I need to become a more, you know, seasoned media buyer because this is all very new. The third time was the Andromeda update in September, September 27, 2025, if we all remember that day. And most brands tanked for about three weeks. And the fourth one was when I took some advice that had worked for another business and scaled by 25% instead of 15%, and it imploded our ads for three months.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Okay. That's all that's all explainable.

SPEAKER_00 30:32

It is. So I mean, look, I think generally speaking, if you keep on top of your creative funnel, you can sustain those campaigns and you can keep things moving. And I think it's a real mixture of the art and the science. So it's creative hitting and then it's being quite experimental around your buying and trying things. So I love following other buyers on LinkedIn and stealing all their ideas and trying things. So I think it's that mix.

Bundles, AOV, And Repeat Purchases

SPEAKER_01 30:55

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SPEAKER_00 32:21

I I mean, I think the one that tripled us shocked me because it was a two-minute long lo-fi in-bathroom UGC piece. And I thought I knew it was good. I knew it was a really compelling ad because it was so authentic. And I actually met someone at a black tie wedding at the opera house last year. And she said, Oh, what do you do? I said, Oh, I have a brand called Cookie Hecke. She was like, Cookie, I have the ginger one in the tin. And her husband was like, I'm not allowed to touch it. And she said, Oh, I saw this lady, and she was so authentic and genuine. It just didn't feel like an ad. And so that one, I knew it would be good, but I didn't know it would triple us overnight and change our business. And so that that was a shock. And that's been a great template to kind of follow, and it's given me confidence that you can go for longer ads and they can be incredibly explanatory, almost hitting every single pain point up front. And then similarly, just a really low-fi static I made in Canva of like a photo with a one headline on it, and that's been a bread and butter piece that I can I can keep going with for a year and a half. And I think I've learned that ads are like steak. If you rest them for 15 minutes, you know, they can re-emerge. So I rest my ads like steak. And so I'll find that I have an amazing campaign that then fatigues. You can actually turn that whole campaign on six months later. And sometimes it has a second wind and does amazing. So just little things like that, I think bringing ads back again is something I wish I'd known sooner. They can thrive, they can die, and then you can resurrect them, which really helps your funnel too.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

Great tip. Going back to that 8% conversion rate, because that blows my mind. One of the things that I noticed on your website is that you have your payment options directly under your add-to-cart button. So it's a really unusual layout in terms of you've got your add to cart button and then the logos of all your payment options, including your credit cards, which I haven't seen before. And I'm assuming there's some science behind this. Where's that coming from?

SPEAKER_00 34:08

So I inherited that with the site from the founder. And I also thought it was odd. I was like, what's that? And it originally had said 100% safe checkout guaranteed in Green Font as well. And I was like, well, I don't know if I really want to guarantee that. So I took that out. But when I took over the business, I would get. I've had so many Lucas and I have an in-joke where sometimes one of us will just say to each other out of the blue, what about conditioner? And we'll both crack up laughing. Because the number of times I've had what about conditioner under an ad, it's like 70 times at least. And the other one is, do you have PayPal? Do you have, you know, after pay? And we'll get emails about it and we'll get and when I saw the payment options there with the PayPal logo, I was like, can't hurt. And so you're the first person that's ever spoken to me about it. Maybe I should remove it. But I have it in the bottom of the EDMs as well. And I just thought, you know what? There's so much angst with this demo that I inherited around scams online, understandably. And so any assurance we can give them around PayPal, payment options, you know, it sort of goes hand in hand with the 60-day guarantee that we offer. I think it's just reassurance. But uh, I agree. It was a it was an unusual design choice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it makes sense now when you even talk about the demos that you've inherited. I'm like, oh yeah, that kind of makes sense. And sometimes I think in e-commerce, we take some of the most basic things for granted in that, yeah, customers are comfortable buying online. We're we're sweet. They know that's being taken care of.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Yeah, I have a few that still want to order on the phone, which I was personally doing for 2024. That was fun. I used them as an opportunity to sort of do, you know, customer interviews at the same time. But yeah, they saying, you know, I've been scammed and I want to I want to order it directly. So yeah, I get it.

Priorities: Retail, D2C, And US Expansion

SPEAKER_01 35:47

I'm really interested in from a product perspective, you have some of the most like I looked at your site and I'm like, some of these actually sound like cookies or desserts rather than shampoo bars. And I'm really keen to hear how you help people take that first step, especially new customers that land there for the first time, because I can imagine, as we were talking about before, it could have rode your conversion rate pretty quickly if they're just interested and they're having a poke around. But you've obviously done something to get them to convert straight away. I could imagine that having that many, not that many options, but like interesting options could cause a little bit of cognitive dissonance around, I just don't know which one to choose, I'll come back later and do it. How do you get people to make a decision there and then?

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Great question. I think the reality is that most of our ads are about a specific product. And so they're coming through with, you know, 6,000 five-star reviews, 60-day guarantee. And then they click through a piece of UGC that looks or feels relevant to them, and then they land on it, and then there's Tolstoy with other UGC that looks and feels like them, and then they start reading the reviews. And I think this audience is very decisive. You know, my nana, who's 90, we put new wallpaper in her bathroom. She wanted Laura Ashley wallpaper to match her Laura Ashley kettle and toaster. It's chaos, it's a lot of blue in there. And I gave her three samples and she was like, that one. She didn't want 10 more samples. I was like, oh, I have, you know, 20,000 products at EuroWorlds. Would you like to see some more? She's like, no, that's lovely. So I think I think they're also like they've parented teenagers and 20 somethings and they're grandparents and they don't have time and they're gonna just do it. And so I think social proof, you don't need much. I also, though, did spend the time creating a Canva asset, which hilariously became my best ad for all of 2024, so lo-fi, where it was just which shampoo is for you? And then it's a bar stack, and each one for thinning, for dandruff, for gray hair, for this. And then we have a CTA at the bottom of each product page, which is deciding between a few, email us here and we make it really easy. And so we do do very tailored advice back and forth, tons of customers each day. And I think you can see in my product pages, it's very long. It's like prefer low scent, go here. Prefer fragrant, go here. Like there's just it's like a clickable little map where you can kind of bounce around eternally. But I think they're more decisive than a millennial. I think usually we funneled them straight to a single product, not a category page. And I think within that page, there's enough social proof that they're willing to just give it a go. And we make it really easy to give tailored advice.

SPEAKER_01 38:12

Makes a lot of sense. Sounds easy.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

You'd think my temptation is I just want to add more sense. So I have to, I have to calm myself down also.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

And then obviously getting that first sale is great, but then you've got people who are so passionate about your products. How do you then take those people and increase their AOV and their customer lifetime value over their relationship with you? Obviously, you've got a product that needs to be repurchased constantly, which is a great start. But I also loved some of the bundling that you've done. Has that played a key role in taking that relationship to the next level?

SPEAKER_00 38:43

Absolutely. I think based on, you know, some data that we were pulling about our bundles, you know, there's a a handful of bundles that do over 50% of the rev. And that's because a lot of them are attached to some of our, you know, top sellers in terms of the bundle revenue. But I think a lot of them, I think they find it really fun to try the different ones. And so they'll come back and they'll try another one. And we do bundle a few together. So we'll have, you know, the ultimate hair loss bundle and that will have a few different ones. But I think bundling has been amazing for us because I've needed to do more bundle options than I would have preferred, because this demo, if not every single bar in both tin and box, is in a bundle, you'll get a Nina. So I decided it was more painless just to have all of the options there, and there's two pages of them. Whereas my preference would be to have 10 bundles. We also have build your own bundle, and I have found it so hard to get people over there to do it. And I think people just can't be bothered. They just want to, again, they're decisive, they're in, they're out. And so build your own bundle would be great, but people want those bundles. And so I find that again, if I have a bundle ad and it goes, that bundle gets purchased. But making it really easy for people to make sure that those starter bundles have all the accessories you need to have a good bar experience, which is why I don't just do one or two bars, I do a group of bars and accessories, has been really key as well.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Is it hard then to get your head over to wallpaper then? Like if you're managing both of these businesses where people are on cookie and they're like really decisive, it's like that one, let's transact, let's go. And then you're like, okay, what do I need to give people who are considering buying wallpaper for their home? If they're not like your nana, who can just go boom? Is that hard in taking those different customer journeys?

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Absolutely. There's just there's so much more sampling involved. And what's helpful is, you know, obviously with AI tools these days, you can do mock-ups or renders in someone's space. So they'll send us a photo of their space, we'll put it on the wall for them, and then they'll see. So that's been really helpful. A lot of our clients at EuroWools do work with interior designers. So the designer's job is to be that decisive one and they know our range really well. So, you know, we send free samples out to interior designers and we have, you know, a huge community of designers who work with us. So I think they make that easy, but we also we also say, you know, want to visualize it in your space, email us and we'll help. So again, I think something that flows across both brands is customer service is something we take incredibly seriously. We spend so much more time there than I would imagine most do. And we build a lot of kind of back and forth one-to-one relationships. But it's so worth it. And I think with wallpaper, you know, it's a harder journey, but it's a really rewarding journey because it's a high AOV, et cetera. But obviously, with Cookie, it's consumables, so they need to come back in a couple of months. With Eurowalls, they might not renovate a room for another 10 years. So aside from our designers, that LTV is going to look totally differently. So I think our LTV modeling in terms of CPAs for both brands are really different, understandably.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

Yeah. I'm in awe of of how you've built both of these businesses and you've done it sustainably, you've done it profitably, and you've kept your vision, you know, what you want these businesses to be, that they want to be lifestyle businesses, that they need to scale, they need to be set up to scale, but they are lifestyle businesses. You're doing this for a reason. When you then talk around things like, hey, if you don't know which cookie product to buy, just email us and we'll get back to you. Or we're dealing with interior designers. I can imagine that starts to get really manual and custom. Have you set up any systems to help make sure that you don't get pulled into that and like it takes up all of your time or makes you increase to a 10-person customer service team?

SPEAKER_00 42:03

Absolutely. Yeah. So I did all of customer service for cookie until mid-2024. And that was very good training for me. But the cool thing is then we had a bunch of templates. So, you know, we'll drop templates into ChatGPT, and that's the Jamie Tone of Voice for Cookie or the Jamie Tone of Voice for Urables. And then we have an amazing customer service part-timer, VA, who does both brands. And so she can like put the question into chat and it will reply in my tone of voice. Off it goes. And she's now learnt that tone so well that she replies as me. Sometimes she replies as me, and I think I don't know if that was me or her. So I think, yeah, customer service with Eurables, it was obviously a much smaller business than Cookie. Cookie scaled a lot, so customer service has scaled a lot, but we're still very lean. So we have myself and Lucas. Lucas jumped in full-time into the business last June. So yeah, we basically scaled to about 2 million in Rev with just me and a part-time VA and Lucas Moonlighting for about 10 hours a week. Then he jumped in full-time in June, which was incredible. And now we have, you know, a VA who does e-com, a VA who does customer service, and then I have a part-time person helping with social and content as well. So that's sort of it's still very lean and very much freelancers, but that's how we've done it. And I think customer service, we've just got a bunch of templates. And you'd be surprised, maybe, maybe not, how identical the queries are. It's like, what's the best for gray hair? Where are the blue wallpapers? You know, it's usually really simple. And I think in two years of cookie, I've now been asked every scientific formulation question you could be asked. And so I have an answer for that too.

SPEAKER_01 43:26

Yeah, fantastic. All right. You're the master of systems, master of creativity, master of knowing your customer. Is there anything you can't do?

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Sleep.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Sleep. That's fair. All right, next 12 months, you've talked about continuing to scale both businesses, and you've obviously got some key targets in mind. Talked about potentially acquiring another business at some point in there. What are your priorities for the next 12 months?

SPEAKER_00 43:48

I think for us, it's such an interesting one with Cookie because there's this real balance of retail and D2C when you are bootstrapped, self-funded with no loans. So where I think. I think hitting that three million revenue inflection point, most brands would take retail really seriously. You know, we had a really fantastic run last year. We said we wanted to be in 200 stores by the end of last year, and we got to 170. I thought Lucas was nuts when he gave me that goal, but it was a great year. And so basically we had we pitched into Go Vita at the local level, and then the bars started moving so quickly because we mobilized the community that then the national buyer reached out and then we went into Go Vida nationally in September. And then within two months, the national buyer called me. And you know, buyers don't usually throw flowers, they're very analytical people and very commercial. And he said, Jamie, I've been here for eight years, and in my eight years, I have never seen an indie brand fly off the shelf like that. I've never seen that revenue with a new brand. What are you doing? And I said, The people don't want to pay for shipping. The people want their cookie bars because they're going to Italy tomorrow and they want to come into the store. And so I send them in store. And so we really got behind that launch. And that gave us huge confidence for this year to go into retail more. So we're looking at, you know, we're going to Expo West in LA in March. Super exciting. It's seven stadiums of natural products.

SPEAKER_01 45:00

No way.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

All the buyers from every store in the world go. And so I think the US is a really interesting opportunity because we're very much health food. That's where we see ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 45:09

Can you put it out into the world? What would be the ideal US store to get into?

SPEAKER_00 45:13

Whole Foods and Credo Beauty. They're my two dreams. And so, yeah, we would see ourselves going into health food overseas before we'd see ourselves going into grocery here, for example. And so our challenge as self-funded, you know, businesses is how do you keep D2C growing at a certain level to fund the cash flow requirements of the payment terms of the retailers? So where most people would start raising at our stage, we're like, nope, we're going to keep with our meta strategy and we're going to have to just keep growing even faster because retail is ramping up and we can't let it catch up. So I'm going to be doing a delicate dance of growing retail, but not too much. Otherwise, we will have to raise, which would be interesting and total strategy change for us. And then I think for EuroWools, we've got some incredibly exciting partnerships coming up for Euro and growing that business. So, you know, Lucas did an incredible job and was was mainly running that one last year and it grew by 50%. And we want to grow Euro even more. We know there's a huge opportunity there. And so I think it's retail expansion, but not at the expense of G2C for cookie and sort of going overseas for the first time. And then for EuroWalls, it's getting more of my time onto it because last year with Triplink, I didn't have enough headspace for it. And I think having a bit more marketing time dedicated there would really do wonders for its growth. So that's the plan.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

How exciting. I'm exhausted for you already.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Thank you. Yeah. It's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

Jamie, thank you so much for joining us on our Descartes. I think your story is an incredible one of knowing where your strengths are, in knowing that you can take a business that's hit that zero to one and then scale it and knowing what you need to look for in a business to bring your strengths on top of it. Your insights around focusing on one channel for both attribution but also focus was a standout for me. And then your approach to knowing that you can scale businesses without having to go into huge debt, have massive teams, and doing it in a way that you want to do it was really refreshing as well. So thank you for sharing all that today.

SPEAKER_00 47:03

Oh, thank you. It's been such a pleasure to chat about such niche topics uh with someone who gets it. It's so fun.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

What we do. Thanks, Jamie.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

Thanks again, Nathan.

SPEAKER_01 47:15

What an absolute powerhouse Jamie and Lucas are. I love that they've designed their e-commerce business around their lifestyle, but haven't given up their dreams of scaling and growth at the same time. Here are three practical takeaways from this conversation that I think are worth taking a bit of time to think about. Firstly, focus beats Brett. Jamie showed that scaling primarily through Meta worked because the team went deep on one channel, one customer, and one set of pain points before earning the right to expand. Secondly, simplicity only works when it's enforced. Cookie's lean team, strict CPA discipline, and clear creative rules are what has made that simplicity sustainable at scale and more growth. And thirdly, knowing your customers better than anyone else isn't just puff, it makes commercial sense. It's what has allowed Jamie to run longer ads, high conversion product pages, and confident bundles that most brands might be too nervous to try. If you're working through similar trade-offs around channels, resourcing, or growth discipline, these are exactly the kinds of conversations that keep going inside the Add to Cart community, especially with operators comparing notes on what actually works in market. You can join us for free at addducart.com.au. Thank you for spending your time with me today. I look forward to seeing you again next week on AdDicart.