The DTC brand famous for its exercise bike has decided to double down on category expansion as it aims to be the chosen brand of gyms. With both a new bike and treadmill product. CEO Peter Stern states: “We are bridging the gap between the home and the gym by pairing our world-class digital experience and design with some of the most durable hardware on the market.”

Sephora’s Chief Digital Officer Anca Marola has strong words about the future of DTC. “You cannot stop progress. That’s the baseline… So you either embrace progress or you don’t. The risk is in not embracing progress.”

These words come as Sephora launches its first ChatGPT native app giving customers advice, curated recommendations and helping the customer discover products.

The capital arm of Shopify now has $1.7 billion in outstanding loans and advances. This is a rise of over 19,000% from $9 million in 2016. In 2025 the company earned $258 million from interest and fees alone.

In a move where ChatGPT is rolling back its internal checkout, Walmart have stepped in and launched their own checkout within the LLM. The experience takes users from discovery in ChatGPT to a Walmart environment supporting account linking, loyalty and payment.

You joined The Honest Company when it was still a small team and left after the business had reached a $1.8B valuation, and similarly with Parachute Home, joining a small startup and growing it to over $100M. What are the biggest operational shifts that happen when a consumer brand moves from startup mode to real scale?

Early on, a company can get really far on hustle, instinct, and talented, dedicated people working really hard. A lot is living in people’s heads. People are jumping in wherever needed. You’re moving really quickly to learn as fast as you can, and breaking things along the way. You can kind of brute-force your way through a lot.

Then at some-point that stops working. Or it works, but it starts getting expensive. You miss on inventory, teams start stepping on each other, decisions get slower because nobody is really sure who owns what. It just gets messier as the business gets bigger.

So I think the real shift is that you can’t rely on sheer effort in the same way anymore. You need much clearer ownership, and crystal clear priorities. You need people to be aligned on what matters. You need better communication. Not because process is fun—obviously—but because without that clarity the business just starts burning energy in a lot of directions at once.

You’ve shown passion for what’s happening with AI at the moment, even building personal apps to help in your own life. What do you feel the biggest use case for AI in DTC is right now? If you were in the $1-5 Million revenue scale where would you be focusing your AI efforts?

To me, the biggest use case right now is helping a small team get a lot more leverage, in a practical day to day way, especially with data.

If I were running a $1 to $5 million brand, I’d be focused on all the places where a lean team is spending too much time gathering information, synthesizing it, or trying to turn it into action. I’d start with daily and weekly reporting, making it as automated as possible, not only the data piece, but the insights and actions. Analyzing customer reviews and CX tickets and pulling useful signal out of post-purchase surveys. Tracking competitor activity like product launches, promotions, and new ads. Even just making information easier to find and use internally.

That’s where I think the value is right now. Not some flashy AI story for the sake of having one. Just—can this help a small team move faster and make better decisions?

Founders in startup e-commerce often prioritise marketing and growth hires before investing in operations. In your experience, where can better operations actually unlock revenue and margin?

Probably more places than people think. I think operations gets treated like it sits off to the side from growth, when really it’s often underneath growth, and providing real visibility into the health of the business.

If your products are not in stock, if launches are constantly late, if the site experience is messy, if merchandising is confusing, if customers are having a frustrating post-purchase experience, those are operational issues but they absolutely affect revenue, and you feel them everywhere.

Same on margin. Inventory discipline, returns, discounting, forecasting, tech costs, unused software or even seats. A lot of margin loss is not some giant dramatic problem. It’s more like death by a thousand papercuts that nobody has gone back and cleaned up.

It’s no secret that integrating Buy Now, Pay Later options into e-commerce checkouts drives increases in both conversion and average order value. Leading providers like Klarna and Affirm are used by millions of consumers worldwide.

This month Mordor Intelligence released a new analysis report on the growth and segmentation of BNPL, which shows the importance of the option—especially in the fashion and wellness sectors.

Mordor found:

Read the Mordor analysis HERE.

Each week we feature recent hires, showcasing top brands partnering with human brilliance to build their brand. This week’s hires include:

When Toyota wanted to improve manufacturing efficiency, what unusual rule did they introduce?

Answer:
Any worker could stop the entire production line if they spotted a problem.

Unlike traditional manufacturers where stopping the line is discouraged, Toyota emphasizes stopping the line to fix problems permanently immediately, rather than waiting to fix them later.

Lesson:
Empowering individuals at the lowest level can protect the entire system.