CurateA weekly dispatch for Shopify operators, brand designers, and growth marketers who'd rather study a referral loop than run another Meta campaign.
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I started saving links in a Notion doc in March 2023 because I was tired of every marketing newsletter being a listicle dressed as insight. I was running growth for a home goods brand at the time — we were doing about $4M in revenue, trying to figure out whether to go wholesale or double down on DTC — and I couldn't find anything useful in my inbox. Everything was either too broad ("here are 10 marketing trends for 2023") or too tactical without the thinking behind it.
The Notion doc got shared with a few people at a Shopify meetup in Brooklyn. Someone asked if they could subscribe. I didn't know what that meant yet. Forty-seven issues later, I still spend about six hours each week reading everything I can find about how brands are actually built — the structural decisions, the channel experiments, the packaging choices that compound into identity — and I distill it into twelve links with my annotations.
I'm not trying to build an audience. I'm trying to make a resource I would have wanted. The subscriber count is around 4,200 — mostly operators, a few investors, some brand designers. The open rate is 61%. I mention that not to brag but because it's the only metric I track, and it tells me whether the thing is still worth doing.
Not a tactic. Tactics expire. I'm looking for the underlying logic — why a brand made a decision, what it reveals about how DTC actually works at scale, what you could apply in a different context.
Pieces that name real numbers, real companies, real decisions. Generalities are easy to write and useless to read. If a piece says "brands should focus on retention," it doesn't pass. If it shows exactly how Caraway restructured their email flows and what happened to LTV, it does.
Most issues have one long read (15+ minutes), three medium pieces (5–8 minutes each), and several short dispatches under three minutes. The mix is intentional. Not every Thursday morning is a long-read morning.
What gets rejected: press releases dressed as journalism, anything that starts with "In today's fast-paced digital landscape," influencer hot takes without data, and anything I personally wouldn't read past the second paragraph.
The full issue had twelve, plus a 400-word curator's note. This is half of it, unedited.
The brand that built its identity on DTC exclusivity now sells at Sephora. Most hot takes missed what actually changed: the acquisition funnel reversed. Wholesale is now top-of-funnel, the .com is the conversion layer. Worth studying if you're thinking about channel expansion.
A packaging designer at Brightland walked through how they treat the tissue paper layer as a second first impression — the moment after the outer box opens, before the product is seen. Their repeat purchase rate among customers who photograph unboxings is 2.3× the average. Correlation, not causation, but the design thinking here is worth borrowing.
The mechanic isn't the referral code. It's the identity signal — the green bottle on a desk in a Zoom call. They engineered a product that functions as ambient advertising. This piece reverse-engineers how they made the container part of the value proposition.
Written by the founder of Jolie (the filtered showerhead brand) after their second 3PL switch. Specific enough to be actionable — they share the actual SLA metrics that triggered the decision. The bit about error rate compounding during peak season is something I haven't seen documented this clearly anywhere else.
An interview that reads more like a manifesto. The central argument: most brand voice documents kill the voice they're trying to protect by codifying what made it alive. Their alternative is a set of questions, not rules. I read this twice.
Not the LTV formula itself — you know that. What's interesting is how they weighted recency vs. frequency differently for consumables vs. durables, and how that changed the cohort story they told investors. The spreadsheet template linked at the bottom is genuinely useful.
Every Thursday morning. No ads, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements. The 4,200 people already on this list include operators at brands you've heard of, and a few you'll hear about soon.
Not ready to commit your inbox? Read Issue No. 038 in full — no email required. It's the one about why Olipop's packaging refresh cost them $600k and was worth every cent.
Curated by hand, every week, since March 2023. Issue No. 048 publishes Thursday, 6 March 2026, at 6:00 AM EST.
4,200 readers · 61% open rate · 47 issues published