D2C Diaries

Loukas Hambi and Olly Hudson

Join Olly Hudson and Loukas Hambi in a laid-back yet insightful podcast, where we dive into the heart of D2C and e-commerce. With a combined experience of managing over £150 million in ad spend across Meta and TikTok and helping scale over 200 brands, we bring you a digestible blend of performance, operational, and creative wisdom.

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S1 · E73
April 24 · 58 min
The 4 Growth Levers Every DTC Brand Needs To Audit
This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard. Most founders building high-growth digital companies are stuck doing the same thing: toggling between apps, wrestling with spreadsheets, and manually reconciling expenses - all while trying to actually grow their business. There's a better way. Incard is the financial platform built for the way modern digital businesses actually operate. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards with real rewards, and a fully connected banking experience - all in one place. This dedicated offer gets you: 1 month free trial Incard Plus All Incard Plus plan features included 2% cashback on Ad Spend, Saas, Travel for year one This is a time-limited offer valid till the end of this month, April 2026. Take control of your finances with Incard today: https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod --- Most people think growing a DTC brand is complicated. It doesn't have to be. In this episode, Olly and Sam break down the Growth Compass™ — Soar Group's trademarked framework for diagnosing the #1 constraint holding any ecommerce brand back from profitable growth. 4 pillars. 20 sub-factors. One binding constraint. Fix that one first. Everything else is noise. As promised in the episode — the full Growth Compass™ cheat sheet covering every sub-factor across all four pillars https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ3_v0 If you want us to run the full Growth Compass™ audit for your brand - scored across all 20 sub-factors with a prioritised roadmap - book a call with the team 👉 Book a call https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ4SL0 Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
S1 · E72
April 14 · 1 hr 3 min
Q1 2026 D2C Debrief: AI Animation, Attribution Updates, and the Creative Gap Brands Are Missing
We're back. After a month off, a new office, two London events, and somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 ads launched... there's a lot to catch up on. In this episode, Olly and Loukas do a full Q1 2026 debrief across creative strategy, Meta attribution, offer positioning, and the frameworks they've been running across 250+ brands. --- This episode is sponsored by Foreplay. Start your free trial here: https://tinyurl.com/3caahj4w --- 🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tvkYy0 --- Resources mentioned in this episode: Brad Jacobs: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-Few-Billion-Dollars/dp/B0CHTQP25T Rick Rubin: The Creative Act: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/1838858636 Jason Cohen: A Smart Bear: https://longform.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen/ Oren Johnson (organic content & creator trends): https://www.youtube.com/@orenmeetsworld The GLP-1 $1.8B four-person business: https://x.com/jonoringer/status/2039759594461839599?s=20 Creative Testing Playbook: comment TESTING below and we'll send it to you --- Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
S1 · E71
March 16 · 50 min
The Persona Mastermind: How Top 1% DTC Brands Drive Incremental Reach on Meta
🚨🚀 Your creative strategy was built for an algorithm that doesn't exist. In 4 weeks, we'll identify exactly where your creative is leaking money and hand you a roadmap on how to fix it using a persona-driven strategy that reduces CAC, beats creative fatigue, and scales spend profitably. 4 week sprint. 3 hours of your time. No retainer commitment: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQ-p0 Most brands respond to reach problems by producing more creative. More hooks, more formats, more volume. But if you're speaking to the same emotional states in the same way, more output isn't going to move the needle. The real unlock is persona diversity — and not just at a demographic level. In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas breaks down the exact micro persona framework Hambi use across seven and eight figure DTC brands to drive incremental reach at scale on Meta. This is the internal process — from macro persona to micro persona mapping, through to how psychological diversity in your creative signals to Andromeda who to put your ads in front of. If you're managing serious Meta spend and incremental reach is a constraint, this is the framework to fix it. Download our persona breakdown board here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQTw0 Loukas published an article on micro personas, you can read that here: https://x.com/LoukasHambi/status/2028854922209374604 Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
S1 · E68
March 5 · 1 hr 9 min
M&A Secrets for selling your DTC brand in 2026
🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0slb_f0 Most DTC founders have a number in their head. A valuation. An exit. A moment where the work pays off. What nobody tells you is that the decisions killing that outcome are being made right now, long before you ever sit across from an acquirer. In this episode, Olly and Loukas sit down with Paul Hanley from the Fortia Group, one of the UK's leading e-commerce M&A advisors, to pull back the curtain on what the exit process actually looks like from the other side of the table. Paul and his team have seen hundreds of DTC businesses come through their doors — from £400K startups to £50M+ brands — and the same mistakes keep showing up. Paul breaks these down. Plus Paul launches Beauty Value Labs — a new network built specifically for beauty founders who want to understand where their valuation stands today and what it could be. About Beauty Value Lab: For beauty brands doing $10M+ in revenue, the most important exit decisions are already being made, without you realising it. Years before a banker gets hired, through operating choices and reporting discipline. Beauty Value Lab is a pre-exit value engineering platform built by career investment bankers at the Fortia Group, working with founders 12 to 36 months ahead of a transaction. Membership includes quarterly Buyer-Grade Valuation Memos, ongoing decision support grounded in buyer logic, and direct access to active beauty acquirers through closed-door sessions. This is not a founder community. It sits upstream of advisors and bankers, engineering the conditions under which future transactions succeed. If you're a beauty founder building toward an exit in the next 1 to 3 years, find out more at the link below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DfEGtuaRTYMsFYeVoK3CBQf8GH0GJ1dV/view https://thefortiagroup.com/ Follow Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hanley-4ab64592/ Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
S1 · E67
February 26 · 46 min
How to Make AI UGC Ads in 2026: Sora 2, Claude and the Full Workflow
🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0s7Jtp0 AI UGC has come on leaps and bounds. In this episode Loukas breaks down the exact workflow he's using right now to generate hyper-realistic UGC style ads, without booking a creator, running a shoot, or spending a fortune on production. We cover the full tech stack: Claude for prompt writing, Sora 2 for hook footage, ElevenLabs for voice cloning, ChatGPT for subject consistency, Nano Banana for B-roll generation and Kling for bringing static images to life. Then Olly and Loukas go deep on Claude skills, recursive self-improvement loops, and how they're using AI to grade scripts, review landing page congruency and build self-improving creative workflows across the agency. Comment PROMPT below and we'll send you the Claude template we use to generate Sora 2 prompts. Read Sarah's article here: https://x.com/SarahLevinger/status/2021281038895546761 Recursive self improvement loop: https://x.com/vibemarketer_/status/2019435524532904205?s=46 Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
S1 · E66
February 17 · 1 hr 5 min
Meta Insider Reveals How £100M+ Disruptor Brands Scale With Andromeda
🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rNf_N0 For this episode, we’re joined by a Meta Creative Strategist working directly with some of the most disruptive brands on the platform. This is someone inside the system, helping fast-scaling brands rethink how they approach creative, performance, and growth. We unpack how the algorithm actually works in 2026 and why so many brands are still optimising for an outdated version of Meta. From the shift away from interrupting attention toward earning it, to Andromeda acting like a “super intelligent librarian” that reads the entire book rather than judging the cover, this conversation reframes how creative is interpreted at scale. We dive into why small iterative tweaks stop unlocking growth, how creative diversity fuels learning, and what really separates the top 1% of brands from everyone else. We also explore the real role of partnership ads, why identity changes how the algorithm understands your message, and where brands are over-relying on AI instead of strengthening creative judgment. If you run Meta ads, lead a DTC brand, or oversee creative strategy, this episode will likely challenge a few assumptions you didn’t realise you were making. You can download our 2026 Partnership Ads Guide here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rNfZb0 Read our Meta campaign study here: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/creative-customers/1942172 This episode is sponsored by Foreplay. Start your free trial here: https://tinyurl.com/msm5ak8c Follow Maxime: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxime-menant/ Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
S1 · E65
February 5 · 59 min
Meta Algorithm Update: How to Adjust Your Organic and Paid Media Strategy
🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rw0Jc0 From the team behind Soar With Us and Hambi Media: http://www.soarwithus.co/ In this episode, we break down Meta’s latest algorithm updates — including UTIs and the next phase of Andromeda and what they actually mean for reach, creative strategy, and performance. We explore why Meta is moving away from engagement-led optimisation toward interest alignment, how organic content is increasingly training paid delivery, and why generic, broad hooks are losing effectiveness. The conversation digs into creative diversity, persona depth, and how brands should rethink both organic and paid as part of the same system. We also share how we’re experimenting with Claude Skills, Co-worker, and Claude Code inside our creative strategy team, moving from prompt engineering to codified inputs, context-driven workflows, and structured delegation. This is a practical, operator-level discussion on how platforms are changing, how strategy needs to evolve, and where AI genuinely creates leverage without the hype. Read Olly's Meta GEM article here: https://x.com/oliverwhudson/status/2016142894504047008 You can download Olly's Partnership ads guide here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rw5St0 Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/
January 29 · 55 min
The 2026 Meta Playbook: Creative Formats, Personas & Scaleable Structures
In this episode, we break down what’s actually driving Meta performance right now and why the brands scaling in 2026 aren’t chasing more creative, but building smarter systems around personas and AI. We go deep into how top-performing accounts are reusing existing assets, structuring creative by persona, and using AI to unlock speed, diversity, and incremental reach... without burning teams out or inflating creative costs. We also cover what’s next for high-production creative, why emotional authenticity still beats AI in key moments, and how founders and teams should be thinking about context, not prompts, as AI becomes embedded in everyday work. If you’re a founder, head of growth, or creative leader trying to scale Meta in a world where targeting is gone and AI is everywhere, this episode will reset how you think about creative strategy. Deep research AI guide here: https://kylepoyar.substack.com/p/deep-research-for-gtm?r=10j51v&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true From the team behind Soar With Us and Hambi Media: http://www.soarwithus.co/ 🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rls0q0 00:00 Intro 01:15 Creative formats we're using right now 11:20 Next evolution of AI generated content 15:30 Creative testing strategy (ABO vs. CBO vs. ASC) 17:40 Criteria for deeming a scalable ad 19:40 ASC by persona scaling campaigns 22:40 The "Bidcap Graveyard" hack 24:20 Exclusions in ad setup 25:50 Intentional persona mapping 30:50 Post-purchase surveys for purchase triggers 34:10 AI-powered customer interviews 35:20 Do not turn off winning ads 36:50 Importance of AI experimentation 39:00 Claude Skills and Co-worker 42:15 Context engineering over prompt engineering 44:20 Building a Claude Skill for script writing 51:45 The rise of vibe coding Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/ Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

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