Episode 8
Guest: Kendal McMullen, VP of Marketing, Global Healing
Co-Host: Sam Moorhead, Director of Customer Growth, Klaviyo

00:08 — Introductions
Zak: Welcome to the D2C Revenue Rocket Podcast. We have a super exciting episode today. This episode is being co-hosted with Sam Moorhead, Director of Customer Growth from Klaviyo. And we are joined by Kendal McMullen from Global Healing. I met Kendal a couple of months ago at Shop Talk, and Kendal's one of those people that every time I have a conversation with her, I feel like I get a little bit smarter. Kendal, I'm really excited to have you join the episode and share what you guys are doing over at Global Healing — welcome.

Kendal: Absolutely, this is going to be a fun one for sure.

Sam: And Zak, I don't know what co-host really means on this, but I'm fired up to be back. Very quick background on me — I run our Customer Growth organization at Klaviyo. I've been in the SaaS space for 17 years. I am definitely one of the AI nerds, and I think that's probably originally how Kendal and I became friends, meeting at Shop Talk earlier this year. I'm really just so impressed with you, Kendal. I think you're in the top 0.001% of e-commerce marketers in the space today. Some of the things I heard about the way you've been able to build Global Healing and the revenue — the app that your founder said wasn't going to work, that you made work to drive more than 14% of revenue — I'm not going to share too much detail, but I've just been wowed by everything you've done, in combination with Zak's team. You've got an incredible team and I'm excited to dig into the tactics today of what works, and your lens coming at it from a P&L as well as a marketing perspective, which makes you a really unique operator.

Kendal: Yeah, definitely. It's a little bit of grassroots mixed with corporate — and that's the magic sauce.

02:15 — Kendal's Background
Sam: Give us some background — as if we had not already met you. Where have you come from, how did you get to this place?

Kendal: Sure. I don't have a typical operating marketer background. I didn't go from high school to college straight to an internship. My path was a lot bumpier, and that required me to grow faster and develop actual hands-on skills. A great example is operating my family's small business. We needed more business and nobody knew how to get it. So I started building a website from scratch — drag and drop templates — and then we weren't showing up on Google. So I had to learn SEO. I tried every trick in the book, including putting keywords in green text so they'd index. Then I figured out that paid ads were showing up at the top, so I had to learn AdWords and beg my parents for a $50-a-day budget just to start learning the paid space.

Then I hated the website when I saw what competitors were doing, so I taught myself HTML and CSS. I had to learn everything bite by bite on a very thin budget with very little room for error. If I blew $50, that was the marketing budget for the day. I'd get a call from my dad saying he had nothing to show for it. I learned through YouTube and Reddit. It wasn't until I was already in management that I finished my undergraduate degree. So I'm a huge proponent of getting into the space by understanding it firsthand — they don't teach you Google Ads or how these systems work in college. I'm really proud that I was able to start from ground level and get to where I am now. I think it makes me better because of it.

Zak: I think it makes you a lot better because of it. And you're kind of underplaying it — learning one of those things is not easy. Learning all of them is a testament to your hard work.

Kendal: A little bit nerdy.

05:20 — Fiscal Responsibility & Attribution
Sam: The definition of an autodidact is you, Kendal. And I love the constraint aspect of fifty bucks a day — that really helps you sharpen the saw. There are far too many marketers out there with large budgets wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars without the right level of fiscal responsibility. What did that teach you, and how do you apply it to a much larger budget now?

Kendal: I run it like it's mine. I'm very entrepreneurial in that way — it's my money coming out, my neck on the line. And one major thing that came out of working with tiny budgets was getting really good at tracking. I had to figure out how to separate the truth from the BS when it comes to reporting. You can't just trust in-platform data. When you only have $50 and the platform says you generated $300, but you call your dad and he says he didn't get a single phone call — you realize something's off. Taking that mindset to where I am now is how I keep the margin clean. And with a clean margin you can invest in the top line, and then rinse and repeat.

07:42 — SMS Migration to Klaviyo
Zak: You recently migrated your SMS from Attentive to Klaviyo. Was getting a clear picture on attribution part of the reason why you wanted to consolidate everything in Klaviyo?

Kendal: Attribution is one piece, but for us it's really about being smarter and more efficient. The real difference is owning our consumer data across channels — not just email, but now SMS as well, and they talk to each other. What works on email, we can now test different SMS strategies with the same subscribers to see what hits where. We also layered in the app with push notifications inside of Klaviyo, so our customers get a much more personalized experience based on their preferences and activity. Before, it was all siloed. Consolidating the data so we can know our customers better — that was the main driver.

Zak: Are you using Klaviyo's channel affinity to automatically send to where the customer wants to receive messages, or is it more manual?

Kendal: We have a lot of different layers inside our retention ecosystem, and a lot of it is Klaviyo tools. I'll be honest — I'm not the one pulling the levers at this point. That's my operator Connor. And one thing I always nag my team on is: if we're paying for the software, use every square inch of it. Connor is really pulling as many levers as possible inside Klaviyo with the automated flows. We've seen a lot of great benefits since we migrated — and we only moved over a couple of years ago.

09:52 — Connor, Attribution & the Psychology of Retention
Sam: What are some specific tactics that Connor was able to figure out inside the platform that someone less curious might have missed?

Kendal: Attribution is a big one. On our prior SMS platform, attribution was showing numbers I couldn't reconcile against the overall P&L. The math wasn't mathing. In Klaviyo, we were able to get really granular — sit down together, align on settings and best practices for our business. That was a game changer. Connor can now clearly see his actual effect on the overall DTC channel versus just his email KPIs. And then just the data consolidation — knowing our customers better so that metrics like open rate naturally improve when you're communicating the right thing at the right time to the right person.

Zak: My team has always said they're impressed with Connor — how much he can do and how deep his knowledge is.

Kendal: Connor's fantastic. He actually comes from a therapy background — he's licensed to work with people and their feelings and emotions. To have someone like that writing content for a supplement and wellness brand is a gold mine. We actually pulled him from a sister brand after watching him work.

Zak: Optimizing for e-commerce is all about psychology too — whether it's your storefront, app, or emails. That background must really help.

Kendal: Customers are human beings, just like we are. A lot of operators get stuck in the algorithmic weeds and forget they're dealing with people who are driven by emotion. People buy from companies they like and trust. Having someone who understands psychology — who can communicate as a human to a human and personify the brand — has been a game changer. The content we're sending out now versus what we were sending before is a completely different tonality, and it performs a lot better.

12:46 — About Global Healing
Zak: Let's take a step back. Give the two-minute explainer — who is Global Healing?

Kendal: Global Healing is the Rolls-Royce of vitamin supplements and detox — premium, cream of the crop. We make all of our supplements in-house. We have a facility in Houston for liquids and a facility in Phoenix for encapsulations. We're very vertically integrated — we source our ingredients, manufacture them, and ship from our own facilities all over the world. You'll find everyday evergreen supplements like Vitamin D and Vitamin C, but our superhero product is OxyPowder for colon cleanses. Our real claim to fame is cleansing and detoxing as the pivotal starting point for taking your health back into your own hands.

14:07 — AI Adoption & Getting Internal Buy-In
Sam: A lot of C-level leaders are leaning into AI in ways that are probably frustrating their marketing teams. You're on the opposite spectrum — you had to convince your leadership to adopt more advanced strategies. How do you internally change the mindset of leadership when they might be resistant, especially for a luxury brand where consumers might be perceived as allergic to AI?

Kendal: The biggest misconception is that AI only means a chatbot, or images with four fingers — something obviously fake. AI is so much more than ChatGPT. Right now, people are just scratching the surface of what it can do.

Internally, I'd start by highlighting processes that are taking up a lot of time and are expensive — whether in labor or lost revenue — that can be handled with AI. Customer service is a great example. If your team is answering 'Where's my order?' twenty times a day, that's something AI can handle. But if you walk up to a customer service rep who loves their customers and say 'I'm replacing you with AI,' the barrier goes sky-high. Instead, say: 'I can free up your time so you can focus on real, complex customer problems.' That framing changes everything.

Start small with something quick, easy, and repeatable — not worth a skilled operator's time. Once leadership sees the downstream effects — more revenue, fewer tickets, lower SaaS costs — they'll be ready to move to the next thing. The key is identifying the actual problem before you present the solution. If my developer came to me and said 'I'm going to inject AI code into our website operating code and it'll do X, Y, Z,' I'd pump the brakes. But if she said 'here's a bug that's slowing the site down, here's the fix' — I'd say do it without hesitation. Position the problem, then the solution.

18:26 — AI Workflows Across the Team
Zak: Any specific AI workflows that you and your team have created recently that you're in love with?

Sam: I feel like I'm hitting AI epiphanies every day. Things like building territory maps for better onsite coverage, or automated reporting that reads through my dashboards each morning and tells me when something is red, green, or yellow so I can immediately surface the right information to the right person. It allows me to be more human — when you remove the prep time for getting the TLDR before every customer conversation, you can have more conversations with more customers. Same with using AI-transcribed call notes before a coaching session — you arrive at the conversation with full context and can deliver more value. Right now we're very much in the time-saving workflow phase. A few months from now we're going to start to see it doing a lot more.

Kendal: I polled my team — my actual operators who get stuff done — and I have three completely different perspectives to share.

Kendal — Social (Kimberly): Our social media manager Kimberly calls AI her 'creative assistant.' She uses it for hook generation, content ideas, trending research, and streamlined caption writing. It helps her move faster and stay more strategic. In organic social, it's easy to fall into two hours of scrolling. She uses AI tools to stay focused and execute on all the great ideas she's generating, while keeping the content authentic to our brand voice. She uses AI behind the scenes to be more efficient — so she can spend more time actually creating the content, human to human.

Kendal — Dev/UX (Catherine): On the complete opposite end is our dev and UX person. She uses AI heavily to build automation scripts for repetitive tasks — when you run a large website like Global Healing across multiple countries, there's a lot that can go wrong. She also uses it to review and debug code — it's like a coworker. She can say 'this is broken, my brain is fried, give me three different solutions.' And she uses it to build internal tools that make the entire marketing engine smarter. Right now she's in the middle of rebuilding our product pages, and she built a tool that indexes 28 years of our customer reviews to inform how we write product copy. We're literally letting our customers write the product pages — using their actual words, tone, FAQs, and patterns. If a review surfaces a problem the product solves that's not in our internal wiki, it goes on the product page. That's what customers say it does, so that's what it does.

Sam: I want to pause on that. Using every single review — the actual voice of the customer — to train your AI and your messaging. I haven't heard of other marketers doing that, and it's incredibly powerful.

Kendal: The scientific ingredient info stays as-is. But the way we describe the product and its benefits — that's told through the words of our customers. It's peer to peer. We're not injecting our opinion. They're talking to each other through the product page.

Zak: Is that content being shared across email and SMS as well?

Kendal: Absolutely. My team all sits in a circle and we repurpose as much as possible. The content doesn't just go to the DTC team — it goes to the brand team and the copywriter who writes for all departments, including marketplaces and retail. It's going to be integrated through the entire brand voice across everything we do.

Kendal — Retention (Connor): And then there's Connor. Outside of his Klaviyo work, he uses AI and webhooks with Claude to stay on top of breaking news and new studies in the supplement industry. Our number one KPI as a brand is how many people we reached with information — whether that's email, SMS, a blog, whatever the medium. So if a new study comes out from the Mayo Clinic — say, on lithium orotate and its potential effects on Alzheimer's prevention — Connor wants us to be the first to surface that, share the article, and educate people. He's not making medical claims; he's saying 'here's what these researchers are saying, here's how our ingredient compares to the study, make your own decision.' AI keeps him on the forefront of that.

29:25 — UGC, Content Authenticity & Delivery
Sam: There's a big concern that consumers are allergic to AI-generated content. Your social director is using AI heavily for planning and research — but how are you thinking about user-generated content and keeping things authentic?

Kendal: This is the one area where I have my head in the sand, because we are in supplements. My moral line is that every person who appears in our content is a real person who has actually tried the product. Full stop. We send it to real human beings, they have a real experience, and they share it. Where AI becomes essential for us is in the distribution of that content. You can have the most human, authentic piece of content in the world — but it doesn't matter if nobody sees it. AI helps us figure out how to deliver it: what's the right mechanism, the right channel, the right timing. So UGC on camera will always be a human. The delivery and the research behind it are largely driven by AI.

31:54 — Team Structure, Alignment & Leadership
Sam: It sounds like one of the reasons you've been so successful at Global Healing is that you have an amazing team and everyone sits around in a circle, sharing insights. Can you expand on the value of having those team members working cross-functionally?

Kendal: I literally just taught a masterclass on this at HQ yesterday. We talked about the difference between alignment and agreement. Alignment means you're bought into the mission and you understand the why. Agreement is just 'yes, sure, yes, sure' — surface level. We want our team in alignment: this is our mission, this is our cause, this is our solution. Does everyone understand that on a personal level?

The other distinction is collaboration versus communication. Collaboration is building something together — components for a whole. Communication is just back-and-forth task assignment. There's no magic in communication alone. The magic is in the collaboration. My team feels empowered to raise their hand and say 'I don't like that idea.' I give them massive ownership over their channel. I hired them because they can do their job better than I can do their job. When they tell me something is broken, I trust them — what's your fix? That autonomy and ownership means they perform at a far higher level than if I was telling them what to do. It's bottom-up versus top-down.

We also have an e-commerce scorecard — a simple spreadsheet in Google Sheets where each tab is a person's name, and they each have two to three KPIs. Every single one of those KPIs feeds into a main sheet showing the top five revenue-generating channels. Everyone has a piece of the pie. They can input their own numbers and see the whole channel benefit because of it — or not. They have skin in the game, and I think that matters. It's about hiring adults to do their job, and then letting them be adults.

Zak: Hiring adults is the first step, but then letting them be adults is just as important. Giving people the autonomy to make a decision — even a small mistake — is what builds real capability. If you never give someone the power to decide, they'll always come back to you asking for permission.

Kendal: Yeah, and I call myself the 'shit shield' for my team. My whole job is to make sure they can operate in peace. All the noise from above — they either never hear it, or it's a much smaller deal by the time it reaches them. And they're able to fail forward because I'll take the heat. If leadership doesn't like how a campaign went, that's on me. I go back to the team member and say 'let's pivot the messaging' — not 'the CEO hated where you put that comma.' Because that will spiral them and make them nervous to try again. My job as a manager is to be their personal assistant and their shit shield. If I can do that effectively, they're killing it in their roles — which makes me look great.

Sam: I love it. I call it a 'shit umbrella' but same concept. If you are not doing that as a leader, you're just lighting money on fire.

39:48 — Feedback, Coaching & Emotional Intelligence
Sam: When you're early in your career and getting negative feedback from several levels up, it can be crippling. I'll share my most embarrassing moment as a salesperson — this was 2015 at HubSpot. I was following the qualification process exactly and I told a customer they were not a good fit for HubSpot. He completely lost it, called me the worst salesperson he'd ever spoken to, and went straight to the CEO for a 45-minute session. The following Saturday I'm parking at the Boston Common Loews Theater and I share an elevator with Brian Halligan. He looks at me and goes, 'Yeah, that guy really ripped you a new one.' It crippled me for two weeks.

Kendal: I'm never reading off a script ever again!

Zak: Sam, when you're coaching your sales reps and managers now, do you incorporate that lesson — about not needing to deliver things verbatim?

Sam: I do, and I still remind myself constantly. Thoughtful feedback takes more time, but the slowdown to speed up is far more valuable than flippant feedback. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the person who made the mistake already knows they messed up. If you just ask 'can you talk me through how that went?', they'll give themselves the feedback. And it's way more powerful when they give it to themselves. The one out of a hundred times they don't see it — that's when you really need to coach.

Zak: Spot on. And it comes back to what we said earlier about Connor — it's all emotional intelligence. Knowing how to motivate, how to guide, how to shift. I've been building some AI coaching dashboards using Lovable and Claude, tied into our sales call recordings. The interesting thing was that Claude's coaching was sometimes more direct than I'd ever be. But the sales reps actually responded well to it — I think because they're receiving feedback from an inanimate object rather than a human, and that changes the dynamic.

Kendal: I'm lucky in that way — because I'm a woman, something said bluntly by me naturally comes across a little softer. I have the ability to be direct without it landing as aggressive. But that same dynamic works against me when I'm talking up to leadership — I have to be sharper to be taken seriously in certain conversations. It's all about understanding your delivery and how it will be received. Before I say something to my team, I remind myself I am their manager. Coming to their desk will feel like they're in trouble whether or not they did anything. I try to be aware of that so I can immediately break down that barrier, or use it strategically as part of the conversation.

48:38 — K Social, Meta Algorithm & UGC at Scale
Sam: There's one more topic I want to get to before I have to drop — the Meta algorithm and what it's doing to smaller businesses that don't have a strong content engine. For anyone using Klaviyo today, K Social has built-in functionality specifically designed to help small businesses scale authentic UGC. Run a contest, campaign, or comment-based quiz to convert your Instagram followers into Klaviyo email and SMS subscribers. You'll be able to see how many followers they have, and identify champion loyal customers who are real product users — potentially mini influencers. Send them a gift, ask for UGC, and build a longer-term engagement with someone who authentically uses the product and has seen real results. That's a far more powerful story than hired creators.

Kendal: For small and medium businesses that don't have multi six-figures a month to spend on content generation, activating your existing audience this way is even more powerful.

Zak: We've been using K Social with clients for a few years — we used it when it was Gatsby before Klaviyo acquired it. We've had great success growing email and SMS lists and driving revenue from existing followers who just hadn't been in their Klaviyo accounts yet. I'm glad it's now generally available.

Sam: The use case I described is already free in the current product. The roadmap for where K Social is going is much richer — a full UGC portal that surfaces your best performing content and makes it easy to drop into email and SMS the same way you'd drop in a cross-sell recommendation. It'll also automate DM requests for content rights in a compliant way. The roadmap is thick for the rest of the year. And Zak, we might need to get Brett Bernstein on here to go deep on the social trends he's seeing.

Kendal: If Connor is talking about one thing, Kimberly is going to start creating a social post for it. Catherine is going to say 'that would make a great website banner.' And just from that one conversation, it's everywhere within a week.

52:57 — Closing Thoughts
Zak: Sam, thanks for joining us. Kendal, any last things you want to make sure we cover before we sign off?

Kendal: When you're considering adopting AI into your workflow, understand that it is there to make you more human. That sounds counterintuitive, but what it's doing is taking away the redundancy and the mindless tasks so you can put your creativity into building things that don't already exist. AI can only use inputs that already exist. Humans are the things that innovate things that didn't exist before. So keep that frame of mind. It's not taking over your job — it's enriching it and enhancing it so you can be better at your role and more innovative. When people are listening to podcasts in this space, I want them to understand it's not a takeover. It's an adaptation into a workflow.

Zak: People need to adopt. Historically, 80% of what brands paid agencies for was execution — and that's not lasting much longer. Agencies and marketers need to reinvent themselves. What you just described is the future: a lifecycle AI orchestration layer that sits between brands and their software, where execution is largely automated but you still need high-level strategy and someone who knows how all the pieces fit together.

Kendal: Exactly — putting the puzzle together. I love the human element of controlling and directing the AI. Who doesn't want to be smarter, wiser, and more innovative? Using AI, I can pull out of the redundant tasks, eliminate the bonehead errors — like forgetting to hit submit in GTM and having your tracking code never go live — and let the systems I've built in my head actually work. That campaign that could have been your best ever? It's useless if the tracking code never fired. AI eliminates that. It's not about being taken over. It's about harnessing it so you can make better decisions and stay on the side of innovation rather than catch-up.

Zak: I love it. And that's a great note to end on. Kendal, thank you so much for joining us.

Kendal: Thank you, Zak. That was great.