Direct-to-Consumer Growth
Taking a new consumer product to market.
One embedded partner in place of a full growth team.
How an AI-native partner took an organic supplement brand from a few hundred dollars a month in referral sales to a functioning, fully measured direct-to-consumer growth engine — in six weeks.
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01 — The Company
A founder-led brand with a product, and no path to market.
The client is an organic supplement producer in a major Southwest metro. The company develops and produces its own products and sells direct to consumer through Shopify alongside a single retail location. The business is founder-led and partner-operated, with owners who stay deeply involved in day-to-day decisions and expect real visibility into how their money is being spent.
The product at the center of this engagement was a deliberate pivot. The company's original offering was fresh and perishable, with a short shelf life that made shipping at scale impossible and capped the business at whatever the retail location and local referrals could absorb. A new shelf-stable supplement format solved that problem and opened a national direct-to-consumer market. When the brand connected with Avolis, the product was formulated and ready to produce. What did not exist was any way to reach a market with it.
— The Industry
The category the brand competes in is large and getting crowded. Direct-to-consumer brands, subscription models, and targeted social advertising are reshaping supplement buying, supported by consumers investing in personalized and premium wellness products. Demand is real and rising, but the category leaders are well-funded incumbents spending heavily on paid acquisition. A small brand cannot out-spend the incumbents. It has to out-measure them.
$225B
Global dietary supplement market, 2026
~9%
Annual category growth rate
11%+
Projected online supplement CAGR through 2033
02 — The Starting Point
Five figures a month in spend the owners couldn't see.
Before the engagement, the new product was effectively unlaunched. It generated a few hundred dollars in monthly revenue, all of it referral-driven through friends and family, moving roughly one unit per week. There was no repeatable sales process behind it.
The brand was not under-investing in marketing. It was spending roughly $20,000 per month with a marketing agency. The problem was what that spend produced:
01
No reporting of any kind was reaching the owners.
02
No attribution existed connecting posts or ads to actual sales.
03
Website conversion, SEO, and AI-search visibility were unknown quantities.
04
The social presence was impersonal, AI-generated content earning one or two likes per post.
05
Commerce infrastructure was split across two disconnected platforms, with no unified view of orders or customers.
For owners who wanted to be hands-on with their own company, the effect was corrosive. Every operational decision in e-commerce runs on reporting, and they had none. They could not evaluate the agency, refine the ads, improve the site, or tell which of their dollars were working.
03 — How the Engagement Took Shape
Not another vendor. An embedded partner.
The relationship began with an introductory web project scoped outside the engagement. Working alongside the team exposed the deeper gaps in marketing, reporting, commerce, and operations, and the conversation changed. Rather than another vendor delivering another asset, the brand needed a partner that was AI-native, could adapt quickly, and could cover the full go-to-market function within a budget comparable to what the underperforming agency was already consuming.
Avolis committed to concrete first-month deliverables: social channels live and producing, paid ads running, a full go-to-market strategy rulebook, and migration of the brand's fragmented commerce stack onto Shopify. The engagement was structured as a six-month retainer within a budget comparable to the previous agency spend, and it has since expanded twice as the scope of work grew.
Notably, the engagement was never sold on a unit-sales guarantee. The commitment was an operating one: scale the brand as fast as possible while keeping it as lean as possible, and prove the work with data every week.
— The Operating Cadence
Daily
A morning text update to all partners covering active work and current conversion performance.
Weekly Call
A standing go-to-market call on the same day each week, driven by a run-of-show with named owners and deadlines.
Weekly Report
An end-of-week report from the live dashboard: revenue, ad spend, funnel, subscription, affiliate, and fulfillment metrics.
The cadence coordinates not just Avolis and the brand but the brand's outside creative and paid-media partners, giving a multi-vendor program a single point of program management.
04 — What Avolis Built
A full growth department, delivered as one system.
— The Go-to-Market System
Avolis built the strategy layer the brand never had: a cross-channel plan spanning paid, organic, lifecycle, affiliates, subscriptions, events, and professional-channel growth, with weekly performance diagnosis that turns metrics into decisions. Supporting it, Avolis produced a full brand system across three progressively deeper editions of a Brand Bible: positioning, product language, visual identity, voice, audiences, and a copy swipe file. Claims and sourcing language are reviewed for accuracy and compliance, with clinical materials gated behind review by a licensed medical professional, protecting credibility in a category where overclaiming is endemic. The system extends into physical and partner channels: event collateral with tracked QR journeys for a major national sporting event, packaging and label work, a professional-channel sales one-pager, a retention rewards program, and the full intake package for a celebrity media partnership.
— Commerce & Subscriptions
Avolis migrated the brand onto Shopify with full pixel, Conversions API, and event tracking, then built the recurring-revenue infrastructure on top: subscription offers, an editable self-service subscription experience, migration support for existing subscribers, and hands-on customer exception handling that protects recurring revenue while the tooling matures. For creator-driven growth, Avolis launched a dedicated creator landing page with sitewide placement, a dedicated offer, and a tracked discount code, producing a measurable creator-to-subscription funnel whose first attributed orders arrived within a day of launch.
— The Affiliate Program
The affiliate program runs on two separate third-party systems: one for attribution and commissions, the other managing discount codes on a single master Shopify discount. Avolis white-labeled both behind one clean console. Onboarding a new affiliate is a four-step orchestration across both APIs that the system executes automatically, hardened against the edge cases discovered in live testing. The owners see one branded "Affiliates" section (program totals, per-affiliate revenue and commission, and code health) with no third-party branding anywhere.
— The Operations Dashboard
One branded tab that consolidates everything.
The centerpiece build is a custom, owner-facing operations dashboard that consolidates everything the source tools scatter. Shopify orders and Meta ad performance sync nightly into the brand's own Postgres rollup layer, so the dashboard loads instantly and reads one consistent data shape regardless of where numbers originate. Owners open a single branded tab and see revenue, orders, AOV, ROAS, spend, subscriptions and MRR, fulfillment queues prioritized by ship-speed SLA, top products, campaign performance, and the affiliate program, with period-over-period deltas across 7-, 30-, and 90-day windows.
Three capabilities set it apart from an off-the-shelf BI tool
Ask the Data
A Claude-powered assistant inside the dashboard answers natural-language questions about the business, grounded in the live numbers and a cached profile of the brand's real products and pricing. When a question needs outside context, it runs live web research and ties competitor pricing, market size, and trends back to the brand's actual performance, with citations.
The automated weekly recap
Every week, a branded, email-client-safe recap of the week's performance lands in the partners' inboxes automatically, with an in-dashboard preview, on-demand send, full send history, and a duplicate-send guard.
Honest data by design
Every credential lives server-side and never reaches the browser. Any panel without a trustworthy live source stays hidden rather than showing demo numbers, so the owners never mistake a placeholder for reality.
— Lifecycle Marketing
Avolis stood up the brand's owned-audience infrastructure: a newsletter program with weekly creative packages, plus automated follow-up, nurture, and abandoned-cart sequences across both email and SMS.
— Executive AI Enablement
Beyond the growth system, Avolis is making the leadership team itself AI-native: a secure Claude team environment for company information and executive work, a custom executive-operator skill that challenges assumptions and prepares decisions, voice-productivity tooling that cuts drafting time, and training that lets the leaders standardize their own recurring knowledge work. The roadmap extends to AI control of commerce, email, and finance systems through one conversational interface, and proactive overnight agents that surface opportunities before the workday starts.
The commitment was an operating one: scale the brand as fast as possible while keeping it as lean as possible, and prove the work with data every week.
05 — Results in the First Six Weeks
A functioning growth engine, proven with data.
~$7K
Revenue, trailing 30 days
~80
Orders in the window
~1.5x
Blended ROAS · near 2x most recent week
~30
Active subscribers · $2K+ MRR
Metric
Trailing 30 Days
Revenue
Approaching $7,000, on an average order value in the mid-$80s
Orders
Roughly 80
Blended ROAS
Approaching 1.5x, with the most recent week near 2x
Active subscribers
Nearly 30, generating over $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue
Subscription share
Roughly a third of all orders
New customers
Nearly three quarters of orders
Unit run rate
Approaching 100 units per month
— Paid & Organic Efficiency
Acquisition got efficient, measurably faster.
~50% ↓
Cost per click, within the first month
~40% ↓
Cost per purchase
~50% ↑
Weekly attributed purchases
On organic channels, a pivot toward founder-led storytelling lifted followers more than 20% month over month and reached roughly 90,000 monthly impressions. The affiliate program produced its first attributed orders within weeks of going live.
— Two Results Underneath the Numbers
A growth engine, not word of mouth
A product that had been moving roughly one unit per week through word of mouth now has a functioning growth engine behind it, and the partners have set their sights on a monthly unit target an order of magnitude higher.
Marketing made accountable
The owners went in with a five-figure monthly spend they could not evaluate. Today every dollar, order, subscription, and affiliate code is attributed, visible in one place, and reviewed weekly. Not just execution, but the measurement infrastructure that makes execution accountable.
06 — What the Engagement Replaces
The work of seven in-house seats.
Benchmarked against the brand's local labor market using current federal wage data and reputable salary sources, replicating the distinct functions Avolis performs would require seven in-house seats:
In-House Function
Est. Loaded Annual Cost
Growth Marketing Director
~$165,000
Performance / Paid Media Manager
~$125,000
E-commerce Manager
~$106,000
Web / Systems Developer
~$131,000
Lifecycle, Email & Affiliate Manager
~$102,000
Marketing Data / BI Analyst
~$93,000
Customer Success / E-commerce Support
~$61,000
Total estimated loaded cost
~$785,000
Replicating these functions in-house would require roughly $630,000 in base payroll, or about $785,000 annually after a conservative 25% employer burden. The brand covers all seven functions through a single engagement at a small fraction of that figure, and the AI enablement work is not even counted as a seat in the model.
The comparison is deliberately conservative: it reflects functional coverage rather than eliminated headcount, folds brand and content work into the marketing-leadership seat, folds affiliate operations into the lifecycle seat, excludes externally executed paid-media production, and uses a burden rate below what many small employers actually carry.
07 — Tech Stack
The system, under the hood.
Commerce
Shopify (Admin GraphQL API), pixel + Conversions API event tracking
Paid Media
Meta Marketing API
Dashboard
React + TypeScript SPA, Vite, Recharts
Backend
Vercel serverless functions + Cron, Supabase (Postgres) rollup layer
AI
Anthropic Claude (Opus) with server-side web search; Claude team environment + custom skills
Lifecycle
Klaviyo (email + SMS), Resend (automated weekly recap)
Affiliates
GOAFFPRO + Regios Automatic Discounts, white-labeled behind one console
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