Paid media for the primary brand ran through an outside agency. The reports looked normal — spend, impressions, the usual dashboard fare — but return on ad spend was 0.83. Less than a dollar came back for every dollar spent. Nobody had flagged it, because "paid media is expensive" is an easy assumption to hide behind.

Audited the campaign structure rather than the summary reporting — targeting, creative rotation, bid strategy — and found where spend and conversion had come apart. Moved the whole operation in-house and rebuilt it.

ROAS went from 0.83 to 5.55, on less spend than the agency had been using.

Email was treated the way most retailers treat it — promotions out, order confirmations out, the same message to everyone on the list. It produced revenue, so nobody questioned it. It was also the only channel where we owned the audience outright and weren't paying for reach.

Rebuilt it on segmentation and behavioral triggers, then tested continuously rather than in campaigns: subject lines, send timing, design, dynamic product blocks. Lifecycle automation — welcome, post-purchase, win-back — went from three flows nobody had touched to the system doing the steady work.

Open rates up 105%, clicks up 30%, conversion up 9%. Attributed revenue grew 91% year over year, $474K to $907K. Automated flow revenue went from $33K to $112K. Dynamic product blocks moved average cart from 1.4 items to 2.2 and AOV from $180 to $223.

Performance data lived in three systems — Meta, Google Analytics, Shopify — each with its own interface and its own definition of a sale. Answering "how did we do this week" meant three tabs and hand math, every week.

The obvious fix is a dashboard. I built one and it didn't land. Ownership wanted the numbers themselves, not a chart standing in for them.

One sheet, rebuilt weekly, pulling all three sources together with the formulas doing the calculation work so nobody downstream had to. Not automated end to end — the consolidation stayed manual by choice. Every number in it had to be one you could trust without going to check the source.

I helped open XHIBITION in 2014 and managed the store. Fairly quickly I got pulled behind the scenes into operations — less by plan than by being the person who kept solving whatever was broken. The scope never stopped widening. By the end there were three brands, XHIBITION, Rule of Next, and two:minds, each with its own identity and customer, none with a dedicated team, and I was the only person working across all three.

Shopify Plus backend, site speed, SEO, and blog content. Product and lifestyle photography workflow, with the fastest turnaround on the team. Visual merchandising and category hierarchy for promotional events. Homepage creative and campaign graphics. Visual identity and packaging held as a system across all three brands rather than rebuilt per project. Off-site shoot production from concept through execution, on budget — the resulting creative consistently outperformed everything else we ran. Our Klaviyo rep once told me she didn’t believe one person was doing all of it.