May 2026 · A personal letter from Benson, co-founder of Olivia
A letter to the DTC brand builders
The obsessed ones.
The builders still going.
For the passionate ones.
Dear founder, operator, brand builder —
First, something I need to say.
What you’re doing is genuinely hard. Not startup-pitch-deck hard. Actually hard.
The kind of hard that doesn’t make it into the highlight reel — the midnight shifts, the campaigns that didn’t land, the launches you overworked and still had to watch underperform, the quarter you gave everything and still came up short.
I see that. And we built Olivia for that person.
But this letter isn’t for everyone.
It’s for a specific kind of founder, team, and brand — ones building with the future, not against it. I’ll tell you exactly what that means before this is over.
Read it all the way through. There’s something at the end for the ones who do.
I know your nights.
THURSDAY · YOUR HOME OFFICE
11:47
PM
6 ISSUES NEED ATTENTION
ad account
klaviyo flows
shopify analytics
agency email
LP · draft 3w
launch creative
competitor drop
Thursday · 11:47pm · one window, seven tabs, no clean exit.
The laptop glow at 11:47pm. The tabs open — your ad account, your Klaviyo flows, your Shopify analytics, an agency email you haven’t answered, a landing page that’s been in draft for three weeks, a product launch whose creative still isn’t ready.
I know what it feels like to know exactly what your brand needs — across every touchpoint of the customer journey — and not be able to execute any of it fast enough, consistently enough, or cheaply enough to actually move the needle.
You have one window to grow this brand.
One window between when your product finds its market and when the category gets crowded, when consumer attention shifts, when the brands with more capital close the gap.
That window is finite.
THE WINDOW · WEEKS, NOT YEARS
OPEN
Your window
product finds its market
CLOSING
The same window
attention shifts · category crowds
The window opens once. It closes on its own schedule, not yours.
Every week you spend waiting on creative, guessing at what converts, or running campaigns you aren’t confident will drive real sales — that’s not just lost time. That’s lost runway. Capital you can’t recover. A window that won’t reopen.
90%
of DTC brands fail. Tens of thousands launch every single year — hundreds in your category alone. Most never break $1M. The ones that do aren’t better-funded or better-connected. They’re the ones that found their window and moved through it before it closed.
It is not your fault that you can’t keep up.
Keeping a brand fully produced across marketing, design, and creative — photography, ads, email, landing pages, social, Amazon, video — across nine channels simultaneously requires resources, revenue, and profit.
But building those requires creative execution. That’s the paradox. You need one to feed the other, and you need the other to build the first.
Most founders spend years caught inside that loop — not because they lack vision or work ethic, but because the math was never designed to balance.
That’s the gap.
The impossible math.
THE MATH · A LOOP WITH NO EXIT
More customers
More creative
More people
More profit
No entry point. No pause button. No ceiling on what it demands from you.
More customers need more creative. More creative needs more people. More people need more profit. Round it goes.
Meanwhile, the market hardened around you.
CAC is up across every channel — 30% or more year over year on Meta alone. Consumer trust takes longer to build than it did three years ago. A new brand launches in your category every other day.
Your consumer needs to see your brand across more than twenty touchpoints before they trust it enough to buy.
That’s not just a marketing problem. It’s a production problem wearing a marketing mask. And it compounds every day you don’t solve it.
Most brands I’ve worked with have two or three of those genuinely working. The rest are leaking.
And every leak is revenue that never happened, growth deferred another quarter, a customer who chose someone else because the right touchpoint wasn’t there.
Same ceiling, every stage.
The uncertainty looks different at every stage — but it’s the same underlying ceiling:
$1M
I have something real. How do I scale without gambling everything on guesswork creative?
$5M
Growing — but one wrong quarter sets us back a year. I don’t fully know what’s working.
$10M
Have a team now. But creative demand has outgrown all of us and we’re still under-shipping.
$25M
Multi-channel, real team — still leaking conversion between acquisition and retention.
$50M
Coordinating five vendors across nine channels and still producing less than the brand needs.
$100M+
Scale is real. But brand consistency, creative velocity, and production quality are still a daily fight.
Different revenue. Same underlying ceiling. Every dollar spent on creative that doesn’t convert is borrowed from your next stage of growth.
You don’t have the luxury of guesswork. You have a finite window, a finite bank balance, and every single asset needs to earn its place.
You’re sitting on data, ideas, and a roadmap in your head — but you can’t execute it all. And you can’t scale without people, and you can’t afford people until you scale. That loop has been the ceiling for every DTC brand I’ve ever worked with.
The brands winning right now aren’t just outspending you.
They’re out-converting you across the entire funnel — from the first ad impression to the email that brings a lapsed customer back.
They have optimized creative at every stage: photography that earns trust, ads that drive qualified traffic, landing pages that convert it, flows that retain and compound it.
Not one great ad. A fully optimized conversion engine running across every channel, every day. That’s the gap.
Where most brands actually are.
CUSTOMER JOURNEY AUDIT · WHERE MOST BRANDS ACTUALLY ARE
Awareness — Paid Ads
Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest
Interest — Landing Pages
Campaign & product landing pages
Trust — Product Photography
Hero, lifestyle, detail, UGC-style
4 of 9 SKUs awaiting shoots
Nurture — Email & SMS Flows
Welcome, abandon, post-purchase, win-back
2 flows live — 8 months untouched
Presence — Social Content
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest
Ad-hoc — no consistent production
Expansion — Amazon
Listings, A+ Content, Brand Store
Basic listing — no A+ built
Motion — Video & Animation
Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, ad motion
Not in budget
Retention — Win-back & Loyalty
Lapsed flows, referral, advocacy creative
Not built
Most brands I’ve worked with have two or three of those genuinely working. The rest are leaking.
And every leak is revenue that never happened, growth deferred another quarter, a customer who chose someone else because the right touchpoint wasn’t there.
Why we built Olivia.
I started and ran D2C Design — a creative agency for DTC brands across North America — before it was acquired. In that time I worked with hundreds of brands at every stage, every category, every revenue level.
The same ceiling appeared every single time. The product was real. The founder was relentless. The team was talented.
And still — creative production was quietly capping growth at every stage. Not strategy. Not product. Production.
So Jacob and I built her.
Not a faster agency. Not a smarter template tool. Not a generic AI you have to fight to make understand your brand — where every output depends on how well you prompt it, and you end up learning advanced prompting instead of running your business.
A generic model doesn’t know your category, your customer, or what a converting ad looks like in DTC. You have to teach it every single time. And even then, it guesses.
The world’s first AI creative agent purpose-built for DTC — built from the ground up on 15,000+ of the top-performing DTC brands in the world, across 24 categories. Trained on what works. Adapted to your brand, your products, your customer journey, your stage of growth.
She covers your entire conversion funnel.
Studio-quality product photography without a shoot. Ads across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Pinterest — 4 to 5 production-ready variants per brief, first generation. Email flows designed and built ready for Klaviyo. CRO-optimized landing pages built for Shopify.
Your full Amazon listing suite — A+ content, Brand Store, listing images. Social content calendars across every platform. Motion and video your brand has never been able to afford to produce consistently.
Every channel. Every stage. All of it working together as a single system.
FULL CONVERSION FUNNEL · WITH OLIVIA
Photography
Full catalog
Ads
4–5 variants
Landing pages
A/B ready
Email flows
All rebuilt
Social
Full calendar
Amazon
A+ built
Motion
Video ready
Next brief
Already running
She doesn’t wait for a brief.
She reads your brand data, researches your customers and competitors, surfaces what’s missing, and produces it.
The brief, the creative, the rationale — Olivia. You review, you deploy, you run the business.
Great people are still everything. That hasn’t changed.
PEOPLE × OLIVIA
TODAY
Your designer
buried in production
WITH OLIVIA
The same designer
leading creative direction
Great people don’t get replaced. They get amplified.
Let me be clear about something. Building a great brand still requires great people. The strategy, the culture, the customer obsession, the operator instincts — that comes from your team.
Olivia doesn’t change that. She amplifies it.
Hiring is hard. Q4 doesn’t wait.
Here’s what every founder knows and rarely says out loud: hiring is hard. Managing is hard. Growing people is hard.
You fight for months to find someone great, onboard them, integrate them into the brand — and then they leave. Or the role evolves faster than the person.
Suddenly there’s a hole in the organization and the growth demand doesn’t wait. The brief still needs to be written. The campaign still needs to go live. Q4 doesn’t ask if you’re short-staffed.
If you don’t have the role
Olivia fills it immediately. No hiring process, no onboarding window, no waiting. She’s briefed and produces — while you review and focus on the business.
If you already have the team
Olivia makes every person dramatically more effective. Your designer moves from production to creative direction. Your marketer stops managing assets and starts managing strategy.
Who this is — and isn’t — for.
In the years building brands and running D2C Design I’ve sat across from founders at $1M and founders at $150M. Regardless of size, the ones who weren’t ready shared one thing: they or their team weren’t willing to move with the era.
I want to be straight with you about what that looks like — because I’d rather be honest now than waste your time or ours.
The founder who’s open to AI — but whose team isn’t.
The obvious version is the founder who’s personally resistant to AI. But the harder one to see — and the more dangerous — is the founder who is open to AI, but whose most trusted operators, creative leads, or key team members aren’t — and doesn’t realize it yet.
I’ve watched this quietly kill brands from the inside. The founder is all in. The head of growth, the brand director, the creative lead — they feel threatened and they undermine every AI-native workflow.
The tool gets blamed. The results disappoint. The founder moves on. The real problem was never the tool.
If you’re the founder: ask yourself honestly whether the people you trust most to build this brand are genuinely ready to grow with this. Because Olivia doesn’t work as a bolt-on layer over a resistant team. She works when the whole organization wants to move forward together.
Not for your brand if —
You, your team, or your key operators aren’t open to AI touching your creative, your data, or your customer journey. If you don’t believe consumers will respond to AI-generated photography, ads, emails, or landing pages. If you want to run the traditional model and aren’t ready to change that. If you or the people you trust most feel threatened rather than amplified. Respect — we genuinely mean that. Come back when the team is ready.
Exactly for your brand if —
You and your team believe that Olivia + your people is a multiplier — every person more effective, every channel more consistent, every brief executed before the moment passes. You want to build AI-native authentically — not gimmicky, not shortcuts, but genuinely better creative, informed by more data, produced faster than your competition can respond. You’re the founder, the team, the brand that’s been waiting for something that actually solves the production problem. And you’re building with the future, not waiting for it.
Where Olivia sits
The first AI creative agent built for DTC — and only DTC.
Not a design tool with a DTC template pack. A creative agent trained on what the best brands in the category actually ship, across every channel a customer touches.
15,000+ DTC brands studied
24 categories
9 creative channels
Full customer journey
Built for brands like these.
The standard Olivia is trained against
Beauty
Footwear
Eyewear
Beverage
Functional beverage
Activewear
Ridge
Accessories
Supplements
Brooklinen
Home
Apparel
Health
Outdoor
Dr. Squatch
Personal care
Apparel
Travel
Caraway
Kitchen
Already building with Olivia.
Founders in early access
Brook Harvey-Taylor
Founder & President
Pacifica Beauty
Clean beauty
Vegan, cruelty-free beauty since 1996. On shelf at Target, Ulta, and Whole Foods.
AA
Alan Adler
Inventor & Founder
AeroPress
Coffee & kitchen
The coffee press with a global following, invented in 2005 and still made in the Bay Area.
Daniel Shemtob
Co-founder
Snibbs
Footwear
Non-slip work shoes for chefs, nurses, and anyone who never sits down. 150K+ customers.
Dr. Allen Lim
Founder
Skratch Labs
Sports nutrition
Real-food hydration born on the Pro Cycling Tour. Boulder, Colorado.
Angie Lee & Mike Lee
Co-founders
Soul
Wellness
Sibling-founded CBD wellness that actually tastes good. Online first, now in retail.
Kady Zinke
Founder
Kadyluxe
Activewear
Dance-born leggings built to be worn all day. Founded by a former professional ballerina.
Samantha & Dylan Dreiling
Co-founders
Ananda Elixirs
Functional beverage
Functional mushroom elixirs with the nostalgia of soda. Husband-and-wife founded.
ZN
Founder
To be confirmed
Zena Nutrition
Supplements
Organic supergreens at a price people can actually keep up with. Launched 2024.
Chris Williamson & James Smith
Co-founders
Neutonic
Functional beverage
The productivity drink. 7.5M+ cans sold and 10,000+ retail doors since 2023.
Manasi Gangan
Founder
Nested Bean
Baby & parenting
Gently weighted sleepwear that helps babies — and parents — sleep.
Portrait slots use monograms until photos and permissions are in hand. Real logo files replace the type-set wordmarks in Framer.
The mission.
Our mission is to empower one million brand builders through Olivia.
Every founder running a Shopify store at midnight. Every operator scaling from $1M trying not to make an expensive mistake. Every creative director holding nine channels together with a team of two. Every brand at $50M still leaking conversion between acquisition and retention.
Every builder — at every stage — who has the vision, the product, and the will, and has been waiting for the production system to finally match it.
For the first time in the history of DTC.
You don’t have to choose between moving fast and moving right. Between being consistent and being everywhere. Between confident creative decisions and expensive guesswork.
Olivia is trained on what works. She adapts it to your brand. She produces across your entire customer journey. And she gets sharper the longer she works with you.
The brands that build with Olivia will be the ones that stand out, last the longest, and define what DTC brand building looks like in the age of AI.
We built Olivia for the passionate ones.
The obsessed ones. The founders, operators, and brand builders who care too much to do this the slow way, the expensive way, or the guesswork way.
We’re just getting started. And we’re not going anywhere.
With a lot of respect, and a lot of late nights behind this —
Benson Sung
Co-founder & CEO · Olivia AI · tryolivia.ai
For the ones who read all the way to the end
Founder to founder
I’d love to talk to you.
Benson Sung
Co-founder & CEO · Olivia
No agenda. No deck. Just two people who care about building great brands.
Or — start here first
Get your DTC Journey Audit.
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