Ep 570: Inside the Dragon's Den with Santevia and How they 2Xed Amazon Revenue by Taking Back Control

0:00Brand is the most important thing. You really have to build brand. So how do you spend profitably on meta? It's creative diversity. It's less about creating an insane campaign structure. It's more about aggregation into a single campaign or ad set with a ton of creative in there. We really have a well-defined creative strategy now that is turned on in a big way. So it's not just diverse, but there's scale there too. If you have a meta rep, ask for your creative diversity report. It shows you what Meta's algorithm thinks is different and what it thinks is the same. And that was really eye-opening.

0:46Matthew Gohl:Before we dive in, let's take a minute to talk about what happened this BFCM, because the numbers were massive and they reveal a lot about the state of e-commerce performance right now. Across the Triple Whale platform, brands processed more than 26 million orders and over$2.9 billion in revenue in just one weekend. Brands also spent more than$600 million across the major ad platforms, and Triple Whale brands alone represented nearly 20 % of all Shopify sales during BFCM, which is pretty incredible when you consider the scale. But here's the part that actually matters. The brands that performed best weren't reacting blindly.

1:21Matthew Gohl:They had a clear understanding of what was driving results, which channels were truly profitable, how ROAS was trending throughout the weekend, how AOV shifted as promotions rolled out, and where they had the strongest opportunities to keep momentum high. That level of clarity only comes from having all your data in one place, updating in real time. Triple Whale is the agent-powered intelligence platform trusted by more than 50 ,000 brands like True Classic, Way, and Olipop. It unifies data across every channel and tool, giving you a single source of truth and actionable AI insights so you can make confident decisions faster.

1:56Matthew Gohl:If you want that level of visibility heading into 2026, you can create a free account and see the platform for yourself. Visit triplewhale.com slash DTC. That's T-R-I-P-L-E-W-H-A-L-E dot com slash DTC. Matthew, welcome back to the DTC podcast. one of my personal favorite brands, Santa Villa. We did a podcast. We did a hot seat live on our Las Vegas stage. I have your glass system of water dispenser on my counter, and I absolutely love it. Happy to have you back to catch up on the Santa Villa journey. How are you doing? Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, yeah. It's been great. Wild Black Friday, Cyber Monday, just kind of coming out of that.

2:41We're still packing all the orders. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and glad you're getting to drink the Santevia water, Eric, because you're looking hydrated. You're looking handsome. Thank you. Thank you.

2:54Matthew Gohl:Wow. Don't often start with great compliments like that. But I wanted to start with something that I don't, a story that I don't hear of a lot. Santevia is more or less a family business with you. Maybe it was earlier this year or maybe late 2024, you actually bought the business from your parents. Can you talk a little bit about that process? Yeah. So my parents actually started the business in 2008 and I grew up around it. Me and my two sisters did. And, you know, we saw them build kind of something from nothing. They made the very first product, something called the Gravity Water System. Got it into over 500 retail stores Canada wide.

3:30And then I got into the business in 2018. I obviously knew a bunch about it because, you know, I'd been working summers at Santa Via forever. ever. And yeah, like I could see that the growth in retail was sort of flattening out, you know, we weren't hitting huge numbers year on year. And I got a little bit more involved and saw that there was a massive opportunity online, specifically on Amazon on DTC. So me and my business partner, Michael, another friend of mine who had joined the business around the same time, we thought, hey, you know what, like, I think we can we can buy this provide an exit path for my parents who are now happily retired.

4:09You know, they just got back from New Zealand, went on like a 20-day bike trip with some helicopter rides. They were sending me some like some crazy videos of them crossing rivers in a helicopter. Insane. And yeah, we bought the business and have really been scaling through D2C on Amazon. And most recently we're on Dragon's Den too.

4:31Matthew Gohl:Yeah. I'm excited to dive into that. What were some of the first changes, I guess, that you made after kind of being fully in charge? Because I know you were running the marketing for a long time, even when they were still in the picture. But are there any big changes that you've made kind of since taking it over? Yeah, the biggest thing that I wanted to do was really pull back on how many resources we were putting into retail, just because I saw it. Like, you know, there's obviously an opportunity to grow in retail. But I thought that the best use of our cash, like the highest incremental value of every dollar was through D2C.

5:04So specifically turning on meta advertising in a big way, really owning Amazon was huge. We used to be a vendor central business, which is kind of like for everyone that knows there's seller central on Amazon and there's vendor central. Vendor central, it's almost like it's a relationship that you would have with a store. Amazon is buying the inventory. They own it. They set prices. It's very much hands-off. And for certain types of businesses that are not very econ forward and don't really want to mess too much with Amazon, that's a great option. However, for us, we wanted to control pricing.

5:38We wanted to run our own advertising. We really wanted to change those PDPs and optimize them. So that was the first change we made is the transition from vendor central to seller central to really take back Amazon. And a part of that was even looking at who was selling Santa Fe on Amazon. We had some retailers who kind of opportunistically were selling on Amazon for probably very, very little margin. And we had been selling through a distributor to a sales rep to a retailer who's then selling to Amazon, who's then selling to the end customer. And there's so many levels in there. And maybe they weren't even really caring about the brand so much.

6:22so uh we took that back and we started to unwind that spaghetti's uh spaghetti mess and that took a long time that took a couple a couple years actually like from when we first had the idea to when every other seller was was off and we had fully transitioned from vendor central to seller central it was like almost like a 16 17 month process of which for a lot of it we had reduced sales because of that because as you're transitioning from vendor they have a lot of inventory and they have to sell through that inventory. And then we're transitioning to seller central where we're essentially consigning an inventory to Amazon.

6:59So that was a tough process because revenue dipped during that. And so you're like, I was really second guessing my decision to move from vendor to seller. Cause you know, I'm taking a more leadership role. And one of the first things that I'm doing is like actually making revenue go down. So I kept really thinking to myself like, Oh my gosh, like, am I, do I know what I'm doing? I had imposter syndrome. Like, is this a good idea? But I kept going back to the original plan that we had drawn up and kept reminding myself, no, this makes sense. I have to trust the process. We scaled Amazon literally 2x through working with Pilate.

7:34I'm so stoked about that relationship. And we're like really off to the races on Amazon. So that was a big piece. DTC was a whole other picture, you know, like meta advertising, getting the creative going on all that fun stuff too.

7:47Matthew Gohl:Your experiences with Amazon sounds a little like a detox. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, we had to stop drinking the Vendor Central Kool-Aid. That's right. So really from before Seller Central to after 2X. And you know what? It's way more scalable because we can actually decide how much advertising dollars we want to spend. And it's conducive to building a brand, which for anybody in the DTC space, you know, brand is the most important thing. You really have to build brand. And so guarding your pricing, your map pricing, and ensuring that Amazon's not competing with your direct-to-consumer store, your direct-to-consumer store's not competing with your retailers, you have to really be careful about that.

8:29And a big part of that, of course, is pricing. And if any partner doesn't respect your pricing, then probably they're not a very good partner to scale with over time.

8:37Matthew Gohl:Okay, you were leading into the big meta shakeup. And I love this story because I hear it echoed a lot of my podcast guests coming in talking about this. We're just on the heels of a huge Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So tell me a little bit about your meta creative overhaul and how that set you up for this year's big holiday season. yeah so three years ago we didn't really do meta in a big way which is crazy to think about um so like when we were like everybody here's you have to make creative you have to make content um and so when we were thinking three years ago like oh let's create a piece of content we're like okay well let's make uh maybe like a long form video and publish it in the next two weeks you know um and now it's like hey no we're gonna make like 60 pieces of creative and they're gonna get published by Friday, you know, and they're going to be creatively diverse and we're going to use agency support and we're going to make some of them in-house and we're going to use content creators and really focusing on personas and, you know, all over the place.

9:38So we really have a well-defined creative strategy now that is turned on and in a big way. So it's not just diverse, but there's scale there too. Why is that important nowadays? Well, it's because meta is content hungry and the king is spend. Spend in ROAS really, right? Like how much can you get spend on Facebook that is profitable? That takes a long time because you really have to look at a few different things. The first thing that we looked at was our margins. Some brands aren't like this. I know like, you know, every SaaS story ever is like, oh, you know, they're scaling to the moon unprofitably and they're venture backed, whatever.

10:16We're not venture backed. Uh, we're bootstrapped. Uh, we don't have external money. So every single product that we sell, it has to be profitable. That's the first thing. So looking at the margin of our product and knowing specifically how much we can spend on Facebook on meta to ensure that we don't overspend and essentially ship a product to a customer at a loss. So that was the first thing defining the math, the marginal unit economics of each sale. And that's COGS, the cost of goods sold. That is also how much does it cost to ship to someone? That is, you know, the packaging cost, like how much is it, the payment processor fees, everything all in.

10:56And then knowing, okay, well, all right, maybe for this product, we can spend like$80 to acquire a customer. So how do we do that? Well, you need to ensure that you have a great campaign set up. You need to make sure that you have enough creative. And maybe you do have, you know, a great ROAS last week, but you were only able to spend like$5 ,000. Well, that's not scalable. You know, like I need to put in, you know, I want to spend$100 ,000 a week, you know,$150 ,000 a week. And the way to do that is a lot of creative and really setting out those guardrails, both with your digital team and your finance team to ensure that everything's working together.

11:38Like one of the like operational hurdles that we run into and recently, you know, luckily avoided, but we're watching really closely after huge mistakes in the past is you'll be, it'll be like Thursday before Black Friday. And then your credit card is maxed. It's like, oh no. Right. So really thinking about all of the operational pieces that go alongside, uh, just, just launching ads on, on meta.

12:05Matthew Gohl:I want to dive into the creative strategy piece. I just had a friend reach out to me to ask if I knew any creative strategists. Everyone's talking about hiring creative strategists and building that into the plan, not just spamming content, but doing it really strategically, but just to dig it. Was there anything you learned on the cog side of things? I'm sure you learned a ton, But like when it came to actually the products you lead with the products that you have the most, you know, focus on in your ads, what, what, what were some of the main learnings when you really dug into the contribution margin of your, of your products?

12:36Sure, yeah. On the acquisition side, we have a product that's really hot. It's the Santevia bath filter. It's a$25 product. And we would spend super hard on that until we realized that actually, you know what? It's hard for us to really raise a ton of brand awareness and acquire a customer profitably on a$25 purchase. In fact, it's almost impossible. So when you're thinking about building brand awareness and, you know, running meta campaigns at scale or any campaign at scale, ensuring that your flagship or hero product is something that provides you a lot of advertising room. That's what we learned.

13:17So that's why we launched the Glasswater system. The Glasswater system is a$320 product. It's the one that you have. It's a fantastic product. And we did a lot of product research on that and R &D to make a product that isn't only fantastic and people want, but is a little bit of a higher AOV so that we could spend on meta. So looking at COGS is super important because, you know, you can have phenomenal unit margins, but the gross profit on the sale is really small. And so it's hard to compete on meta because, you know, like you're never going to get CPMs that are like 10 cents. It just doesn't happen.

13:57Like a CPM is going to be$10, you know? So no matter if your product is$20 or$200, the CPMs are still going to be somewhere around that. Like, you know, if you're lucky, you're sub$10, but it could be as high as$20 depending on what field or, uh, you know, niche you're in. So I think that's really important is making sure that it's not all margin. It's also gross profit.

14:18Matthew Gohl:It's such a striking looking product, the glass system too. Whereas like, I'm sure the shower thing, the shower piece is going to be really popular. But you've got that AOV, you've got this really striking looking glass product, and then you upsell or you sell through retention on the other products. Because a lot of people don't even, a lot of people know they should be drinking better water, but it's like this whole other thing that people are just learning that they should be showering in better water probably. So it's such a good task to maybe allow your retention to do that after you acquire the customer on this higher AOV product.

14:47Totally, yeah. No, I mean like, so this was the bath filter. Okay, the bath filter was the 24-hour product. We actually just launched yesterday our shower filter, which I'm stoked about. The shower filter, 150, it's refillable. The first and only refillable shower filter that's on the market. And you're right, actually. You know what? You'll actually inhale just as much chlorine from a shower every day as you will from drinking eight glasses of water. I don't think most people know that. So like if you're trying to reduce how much chlorine exposure you have, the shower is a huge vector for chlorine exposure.

15:18So that's a huge one. Dry, dry hair. I know ladies who might be dying their hair, chlorine really fades that color out a lot. So that's a big sales. Don't have that problem. Yeah.

15:32Matthew Gohl:But I want to dig in on your avatars a little bit, because I think this was kind of an extension of the conversation we had at the hot seat in Las Vegas, where I think we were looking at your website back then, and we were sort of like, you know, talking to you a lot about selling, you know, what the product actually does versus all the technology that kind of goes into the product. it because people want a two inch drill hole. They don't want a two inch drill bit kind of idea. And you really have built that into your whole creative strategy with, with who you're advertising to and why talk about that process.

16:01Matthew Gohl:Did it start with knowing you had to do it? And then you actually hired a creative strategist. Is that right? We did. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. You know, your brand, you have your product. It has a good margin, high gross profit. Okay. So you know that you can spend profitably on it. So how do you spend profitably on Meta? Well, it's creative diversity. Andromeda is the new engine that Meta is powered by. And Andromeda is very much, it's less about creating an insane campaign structure. It's more about aggregation into a single campaign or ad set with a ton of creative in there. So what type of creative you put in there is the real question.

16:41And what are the KPIs or metrics that you want to give your team. So for us, the KPIs that we give our team is we want spend. We want these campaigns to spend. That's the first and foremost thing. They have to spend within KPI. So one of those KPIs is to ensure that we have a ROAS, a return on ad spend, or an AMER. So you can't spend unprofitably, essentially. We set those guardrails up. Because these guardrails are set up, you need to be able to entice people to purchase your product? And how do you do that? Well, they're real customer journeys. And that's what I always want to pull this back to.

17:18It's not buttons on meta. It's not just like funky colors. It's the communication of the value of your brand. So how do you communicate the value of your brand? Well, you need to define your customer journey and you need to be able to explain that through a set of creative. So for us, for Santavia, we need creative that's very high funnel that says hey you know what you might have a health issue are you thinking about the most foundational piece of your health which is what you drink so we'll have a bunch of creative that's like that and to make that creative diverse we're going to have an old person saying that message a young person saying that message a doctor saying that message you know an athlete saying that message and then once they know that hey you know what i am interested in my health and water is a vector uh then maybe we're going to talk about product features.

18:05So we're going to say, Hey, Eric, the glass water system, it's made of glass. It has a bamboo lid and stand. It's super premium. It's going to look nice on your countertop. Now I'm going to say that through a couple of different ways as well, through the doctor's going to say that, you know, the, uh, young influencer is going to say that the athlete's going to say that. And I see an ad of Eric saying that one day, because I submitted an actual UGC. So yeah, fun fact for the audience, Eric sent us a sick piece of UGC. I wasn't expecting that. I I thought you were just going to send us a photo, but the video was awesome and it's in queue to be launched.

18:38Didn't even need any extra support. It's just like an awesome piece of creative. And then bottom of funnel, right? Like, okay, well, now what do people want to hear? Hey, it's free shipping. It's got a lifetime warranty. Again, creative diversity, right? So we're really thinking about that stack and it's the marketing funnel, brand awareness, consideration, and of course, conversion. And then creative diversity, all different types of people. So that's great for a single funnel. however there's all these different ways into the brand this was just our general health funnel but we have different personas so we'll have about like you know five to ten different active personas depending on the campaign that we're running so an example of that is like we'll have one persona that is acid reflux adam acid reflux adam he is really interested in solving his acid reflux or uh gerd gastroesophageal reflux disease right he's he's in pain and he wants some relief from that pain.

19:30So again, we'll go from brand awareness. Hey, you know, acid reflux, Adam, guess what? Drinking alkaline water is really good for reducing the symptoms of acid reflux, then go down into consideration, then go down into that conversion, right? So it's interesting. We were just speaking with our meta rep and she produced this report and the report's called, if you have a meta rep, I do recommend you go and speak to them and ask for your creative diversity report. And what that report does is it shows you what Meta's algorithm thinks is different and what it thinks is the same. And that was really eye-opening because for you to get spend, for Meta to show your ad to people, it wants to know that it can try different things, different ways in.

20:17So if you make three videos that are all using the same influencer, manager, Meta will actually say that those are not creatively diverse, likely, right? And it will only show one of those ads. And if that one ad doesn't work, it won't even show the other two ads. If that ad does work, then it'll probably show the other two, right? So that's really interesting because what we've found is that it's much broader than that. We had different CGC creators speaking the same message with the same framing. So they're like standing in front of our glass water system saying, hey, Santa Fe adds minerals, it filters contaminants, and it tastes great.

20:56And Meta said, hey, these are all the same piece of creative. Well, that sucks for us because if Meta doesn't feel like there's enough opportunity to spend on those creatives, we personally have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars with these CGC creators sending the product, writing up contracts, our people's time to produce these pieces of creative. And Meta will never spend on them because it's not creatively diverse. So you really have to think about persona based advertising and ensuring that those personas are wildly different. Yeah.

21:28Matthew Gohl:Or the setting of them, like if it's the same influencer and they go to a different setting, like if they're talking about a different thing in a different setting, do you think meta will, will see them as separate or is it really like influencer specific? Uh, yes. I think if, if you are in a different setting and you deliver the message differently, yeah it's going to deliver it so like you know if you have the same influencer on a hike saying the message and then that same influencer in a kitchen and she's saying the message that's that's probably creatively diverse i don't think anybody really understands the algorithm so you definitely have to try test um but uh i mean i would run that for sure i'd run that i think just because i've had so many like i just this text this morning uh nick sharma was on the other day and he was just talking about the creative strategist is like the most important position in the ad stack in 2025 and beyond.

22:16Matthew Gohl:So with this whole process that you've developed, did you hire someone to come in and build this with you where you worked with them? Talk about the process of finding a good creative strategist, hiring them and their actual role in overseeing this process. So when we were going to hire a creative strategist, we really wanted to find someone with experience. That was a big thing who understood the marketing funnel. This process was developed before they were onboarded actually. So I think if you need help developing this, I would go to an agency. Like I would go to Pilot House and say, hey, like let's develop this, co-develop this, tell them kind of directional, show them this podcast, say, I want that.

22:57Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll get them there, right? So that would be the first right step. The creative strategist role for us is really about briefing and ensuring that we're adhering to this plan and the plan of attack, because the briefing is the most important step. Like if we're briefing in the same ad over and over and the person, whoever, like maybe it's not a trained creative strategist, it's just some, you know, a marketing coordinator who is just kind of learning and they're briefing in the same ad and they don't realize it. Or maybe they're briefing in what they would want to see, which is something I find a lot of junior marketers do is they, you know, they were advertising to themselves and not realizing that, Hey, you know what?