29. The E-Commerce Questions You Should Be Asking with Kat Dey, Co-Founder and President of ettitude

Buckle up for this interview with Kat Dey, co-founder of the sustainable lifestyle brand ettitude. Kat comes in with loads of wisdom for direct-to-customer (DTC) brands. Any brand selling online can benefit from this interview, but DTC brands with a mission will feel as though Kat speaks directly to them. The brand ettitude makes bedding and bath essentials with CleanBamboo, their innovative sustainable textile, and Kat demonstrates what a mission like that does for a brand.

Kat’s own trajectory was stated well before ettitude. She’s a serial entrepreneur and was named as one of “35 People to Watch” and “EY Entrepreneurial Winning Woman” in 2016. This interview doesn’t just focus on mission branding—Kat digs deep into vital data cues all brands online need to know, like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). Listen to the full episode for her tips!

What to listen for:

• Kat’s extraordinary background equipped her with many lessons learned and a “scrappy” attitude that she brought to ettitude. Making mistakes and learning from them, she remarks, is just how this works. A world like digital commerce is too new for any person to have all the answers right out of the gate.
• Early in the interview, Kat talks about the benefits of brands that rally behind a mission, like ettitude does. (Hint: their brand name stands for “eco-attitude.”) Listen to the full interview to learn about the first mission-driven DTC brand she grew and sold, too.
• E-commerce saw colossal growth during the pandemic, but rapid growth isn’t guaranteed brand-to-brand, Kat maintains. Raising enough capital to grow fast, as most brands know right out of the gate, is hard. Brands that want to pursue a riskier and faster growth strategy still can, however, as long as they have that capital or a revolutionary product that customers will rave about online.
• Kat then reflects on co-founding a brand and on what happens when that brand grows. As ettitude was able to hire more senior managers to drive different departments, Kat and ettitude’s other co-founder, Phoebe Yu, each moved into more specialty-focused roles. Today, Kat oversees marketing, finance, and HR.
• When asked about the metrics that really matter (in a world filled with data that brands can quickly become overwhelmed by), Kat says without hesitation that lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC) are the key numbers to watch.
• Kat wraps the interview discussing ettitude’s own decision to put “pause” on in-person retail, and why they still don’t sell on Amazon (for now). Kat says of Amazon: “you do lose margin so you have to decide if it’s worth it for you. There is a cash flow delay.” At the same time, she says, anyone doing traditional retail right now or who has the opportunity should consider taking it. Omnichannel, she assures us, is the “way of the future.”