What a $25 Pair of Sunglasses Taught Us About Scaling a DTC Brand

In the early days of Goodr, the CEO Steven, was driving around Los Angeles with a trunk full of sunglasses. He wasn’t shipping them, let alone running any ads. Instead, he met his potential audience right where they were: run clubs, marathons, and five Ks. He literally handed them out himself.

On paper, it does sound nice (sun and sweat aside); his customers get to meet him, interact with him, ask him questions, and it’s already put in a context where they might need his product.

Now pitch the same strategy at a board meeting. Most brands would find it tough selling it in a pitch deck. It does not scale cleanly. You can’t t attribute it to a channel. It has no ROAS attached.

And yet eleven years later, when Goodr asks customers how they found the brand, the number one answer is still friends and family.

A $25 pair of sunglasses became one of the most recognizable DTC brands of the last decade. And it really wasn’t about feeding a monster budget or even a smarter channel mix. It really is about the foundation and the connection.

When Zak sat down with Ron Sinha and Jared Grorock from Goodr on Episode 1 of the DTC Revenue Rocket Podcast, he asked them, “What would you tell a growing ecommerce brand to focus on right now?”

Neither of them started with a specific channel, or even a specific strategy. They started with the foundation: find a product worth sharing, a real community that will need it, and a clear reason for them to care.

Yes, I hear you loud and clear. It might seem obvious, but it is more useful than it sounds.

If your brand has traction but growth is starting to feel harder than it should. If you’re finding yourself hitting that plateau, this is why…and what you should do to fix it.

The Hardest Stage for Ecommerce Brands to Navigate

Ask any founder or marketing director at a brand doing five to twenty million dollars in annual revenue what their biggest challenge is, and you will rarely hear “we don’t have enough channels.” You will hear something closer to “we have too many things pulling us in too many directions, and we’re not sure which one to fix first.”

There really is truth to the age-old concept of suffering from success. Brands at those sizes already have the traction, and clearly customers are buying. They might even have a great and varying amount of data to see it’s all working. And they may have the means to allocate a nice, healthy budget to whatever their next step is. But that success creates its own problem. Every direction starts to look like a reasonable next move.

Paid media wants more creative creative. Email wants more sends in their calendar. SMS wants more segmentation. The website team sets out to optimize what’s been optimized. Leadership wants to throw all the extra money into the intern’s new TikTok Live-to-TikTok Shop funnel.

It’s rare that when reflecting on their business, the brand looks farther back than last year’s numbers, or even worse, last quarter’s numbers. But the answers to most of the questions they’re wrestling with—why retention is soft, why paid is getting more expensive, why email engagement is declining— are usually not in the campaign data.

They are in the foundation. The clarity of the value proposition. The strength of the community. The quality of the product and the story around it. The reason a customer would choose this brand over every other option available to them.

Those are not soft brand questions. They are the inputs that determine how hard every channel has to work. And at five to twenty million, getting them right is the difference between scaling a compounding system and spending more to stay in the same place.

And yes, we understand that for brands in this stage, it might sound like doom and gloom, but it is fixable. And for some, that might mean rolling up the sleeves and getting back down into the weeds we haven’t touched in forever.

Is Your Brand’s Value Clear Enough to Scale?

Let’s start here. At this stage, a lot of ecommerce businesses understand their value prop. I mean, it is their business after all. It’s like the back of their hand, or their kid, right? But that’s the thing.

If you haven’t revisited the value prop you wrote on a whiteboard of your first office ten years ago, then how do you know it still makes sense in the context of where your business is today?

Goodr is a great example of a brand that knows itself very well: exactly what it stands for, and has never stopped checking whether that is still coming through.

Jared described how the team thinks about their brand personality in terms of absurdity, something they took seriously enough to build into their internal process. “We often talk about the absurdity level,” he said. “At one point we actually had an absurdity meter on our pitch decks.”

That absurdity was reflected in product names, the campaigns, all beginning down at the run clubs where Steven handed out sunglasses himself. And it compounded. Jared noted that even now, eleven years later, “our number one answer of how did you hear about Goodr is still friends and family.”

That kind of word of mouth does not happen because of a bigger budget. It happens because the brand’s reason to exist was clear enough that customers could explain it to someone else without reading the website.

Most brands at this stage have a version of a value proposition, of course. The problem is that it is either too broad, too spciefic/product-focused, or inconsistent enough that different channels are making different promises to the same customer. And that itself is confusing. And unfortunately, confusing isn’t memorable, and if it is…it’s for the wrong reason.

Regardless of channel, a sharp value prop is like a sharp pitch, which is like a sharp premise. No one enjoys a messy pitch, the way no one enjoys a confusing movie filled to the brim with every trope under the sun… so why would anyone want a spec-stack value prop?

A simple test: ask your team, without preparation, why a customer should choose your brand. Can they answer that? Are all the answers similar?

Then look at your homepage, your best-performing ad, and your last email. Do they also point to the same answers? If not, that’s where we have to start fixing. Figuring out the why should we care?

Why Community Outperforms Every Channel You’re Considering

Growing brands have this inclination to hop aboard the new channel that’s trending, or to hijack one that’s coming back into the marketing-stack rotation. Maybe this quarter it’s TikTok Shop, TikTok Live, AI shopping, direct mail, influencer, more SMS.

But none of those channels just create a community.

Ron and Jared were both clear on this when Zak asked where a growing brand should focus. Ron said it first: “build community, start from there.” Jared echoed it and went further: “Figure out what your community actually is. And then once you figure out what your community is, start building it because those are going to be your loyal fans, your brand evangelists.”

Now, not every brand can pop up at a run club with a trunk full of product. But every brand can find where their customers already are and show up there with intention. That looks different depending on the product and the audience.

Is it organic social content that invites conversation rather than just broadcasting? Is it a community manager who genuinely engages on customer reviews, Reddit threads, Facebook groups, and other people’s content? Is it showing up at the events, the trade shows, the local markets, the hobby spaces where the right people already gather? Is it a post-purchase survey that actually gets used to understand who your best customers are and what they care about? Is it a live activation in the subway or on a billboard?

TikTok Shop, direct mail, influencer, and SMS can all help foster a community once it exists. But they cannot manufacture one from scratch. The brands that try to use channels to build community before the community is real end up renting attention instead of earning it.

Stop Choosing Channels by Trend

TikTok Shop is hard, let alone any other hot and new platform where you can start selling things. The algorithm changes constantly, the shopping behavior on it is still evolving, and what works for one brand does not automatically transfer to another. The worst thing a brand can do is see a competitor winning on it and decide the answer is to keep brute-forcing it without stopping to ask why it is not working for you.

Jared was candid about this on the podcast. When TikTok Shop started gaining traction, Goodr jumped in. And by their own admission, they did not get it right the first time.

“We launched it, and we just didn’t get the full scope of what that could look like and should look like for us as a company,” Jared said.

So they stopped. They sat down as a team and asked one honest question: “Are we doing this the best we can?”

Everyone said no. So they went back, built a proper plan, and relaunched. Now TikTok Shop is growing for them year over year.

Asking “are we doing this the best we can” is really asking a few more specific things. Do we understand how this platform’s audience actually shops? Does our content fit the format and the culture of the channel, or are we just recycling and repurposing what we made for somewhere else? Do we have the right people, process, and bandwidth to run this properly? Are we measuring the right things? If the answer to any of those is no, that is where to start.

The two most important things for a brand to do right now if they see themselves failing are stopping to think and being painfully honest with yourself.

Jared mentioned that Goodr applies that same self-check across all of their channels regularly, including email and SMS. Staying honest about whether a channel is being used to its full potential is how they avoid the problem before it gets expensive.

That question costs nothing. And it is worth asking before the next channel gets a budget line.