DTC Brand Build

Overview

I started Dansu because I wanted to build a physical consumer product from scratch — specifically in fashion and e-commerce. I left my role at Laced, invested my own savings, and went all-in. No team, no agency, no outsourced functions. I owned every part of the business: product design and fabric testing, manufacturer negotiation, supply chain, Shopify build and custom front-end development, paid acquisition, organic growth, fulfilment, and customer support.

The result was a profitable DTC towel brand that generated ~£250k in revenue. I sold my stake to my business partner and exited cleanly.

The Problem

Building a physical consumer brand without a team forces you to confront every failure mode at once. Early on: inconsistent product quality from manufacturers, slow and error-prone fulfilment, manual ops that didn't scale, and acquisition concentrated in a single channel. The business had real demand but no system underneath it.

What I Did

I treated the business like a product to be engineered, not just a brand to be marketed. That meant:

• Designing towels, testing fabrics across GSM weights and weave patterns, building tech specs, running prototype cycles, and negotiating QC standards directly with manufacturers
• Building the Shopify store from the ground up, writing custom HTML/CSS/JS, and rebuilding the PDP and mobile experience to address low conversion
• Running Meta ads across TOF/MOF/BOF funnels with structured creative testing — dozens of hooks, angles, and formats tested systematically
• Building multi-account Instagram growth networks, remix loops, and creator funnels to compound organic reach
• Managing supply chain, packaging optimisation, shipping tiers, and cost modelling
• Shipping SKUs across festival, gym, and running verticals with distinct use-case framing and margin models

Systems I Built

The biggest unlock was automation. I audited every recurring operational task, then built a stack using n8n, Supabase, RocketAPI, and the Gmail API to handle:

• A CRM engine: scrape festival sites and Instagram accounts → enrich → score by relevance → personalised outreach, scaling from ~20 contacts/week to thousands
• A creator discovery engine using RocketAPI to collect engagement velocity signals, rank creators, and auto-trigger outreach for top candidates
• An Ops Brain covering fulfilment anomaly alerts, stock forecasting, supplier scorecards, and customer pipelines
• A Meta creative testing system for fast iteration across ad formats and funnel stages
• Reliability infrastructure: idempotency, dedupe keys, job state machines (queued → running → success/failed → retried), retry-with-backoff for flaky APIs, dead-letter queues, and audit logs

I treated automations like products — scoped requirements, built MVPs, validated reliability, and iterated against failure logs. Supabase was the single source of truth. Nothing ran without state tracking.

Impact

• Generated ~£250k in revenue across DTC and B2B channels
• Automated approximately 70–80% of recurring operational tasks
• Reduced operational time from ~40 hours/week to under 10
• Achieved repeatable ROAS on Meta through structured TOF/MOF/BOF creative testing
• Outreach capacity increased from ~20 contacts/week to thousands per week
• Built multi-account Instagram funnels driving consistent organic traffic at lower CAC than paid alone
• Made the business sellable — it could run without the founder's daily involvement
• Exited via a clean sale; returned to product and tech with a full picture of how product, ops, growth, and automation connect

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The deeper lesson from Dansu was operational: every decision you make in product, brand, and growth connects to everything else. Understanding those connections — not at a strategy level but at execution depth — is what this role actually taught me.