Brand Building Podcast

WE HELP SCALING BRANDS GENERATE RESULTS THROUGH CREATIVE, DEV, ADVERTISING, & RETENTION SERVICES.

Stop Training Your Customers to Wait for a Sale — The Offer Ladder Explained

f your customers can predict your next sale before you announce it, you’ve got a problem. Most brands default to percent off because it’s easy — but flat discounts do nothing to change buying behavior. They just make the thing customers already wanted cheaper. In this episode, I break down the offer ladder Bread Loaf uses with clients: why BOGOs and bundles outperform percent off, how to build hot campaigns so you’re never starting from a blank doc when revenue dips, what run rate is and how to use it, and how to properly...

4 min

2026 October 10

A Client Tried to Poach My Team Member. Here’s What Happened.

After a tough onboarding, we put everything into turning this client’s account around—and tripled their lead volume. When their contract ended, they decided to move on. Then they tried to hire the person leading their account directly. In this episode of the Brand Building Podcast, I share what happened, how my team member handled it, and why we’re still giving that client a professional handoff. We’re talking about loyalty, taking responsibility when your team falls short, and why better performance doesn’t always repair a damaged client relationship. Your rep...

9 min

2026 October 10

How Redo Makes Ecommerce Returns Free — and Turns Them Into Revenue | Taggart Kruger

Most brands lose the customer the moment they file a return. Redo is built to change that. In this episode, I sit down with Taggart Kruger from Redo to break down how they've built the only end-to-end returns solution in ecommerce — from checkout protection and AI-powered exchange agents to a 120,000 sq ft warehouse that physically processes, grades, and liquidates returned inventory. What's covered: → How Checkout Plus makes returns completely free for brands → How the AI exchange agent drives store credit and repeat purchases over refunds → What grading, refurbishment, and liquidation look like at scale...

26 min

2026 October 10

The Email Authentication Audit That Added 16 Deliverability Points for Our Client

Before you touch subject lines, creative, or your offer — check your email authentication. In this episode, Mark walks through the free 60-second deliverability check every Klaviyo brand should run: SPF, DKIM, DMARC via MX Toolbox, and your sending reputation in Google Postmaster. You'll hear two real client results: → Wavy: Klaviyo deliverability score up 11 points after fixing authentication → Tallman Shoes: up 16 points, Google Postmaster spam rate below 0.03% Plus the counterintuitive sending strategy that actually recovers deliverability — and why emailing more people when your reputation is down makes everything worse. Creativity is downs...

5 min

2026 October 10

Why More Flows, More Filters, and More Logic Is Actually Killing Your Klaviyo Revenue

The most sophisticated Klaviyo account we've audited recently was also one of the leakiest. Not because they weren't doing enough. Because they were doing too much. Flows everywhere. Filters everywhere. Exclusions everywhere. Years of logic stacked on top of more logic — and nobody willing to delete anything because nobody wants to be the person that breaks the account. We found 46 things that needed attention. Most of the fixes were subtraction, not addition. In this episode of the Brand Building Podcast, I'm breaking down the spag...

6 min

2026 October 10

The Suppressed List Blind Spot That's Costing Ecommerce Brands Real Revenue

We audited a Klaviyo account and found 16,000 people actively browsing, adding to cart, visiting the site — who couldn't receive a single marketing email. Not because they unsubscribed. Not because they complained. The brand had manually suppressed them by following what's considered a best practice: cleaning the list. In this episode of the Brand Building Podcast, I'm breaking down why suppression becomes a revenue leak most brands never find, what we discovered inside 153,000 suppressed profiles, how to check your own Klaviyo account right now, and the right process...

7 min

2026 October 10

How I Actually Got Started in Email Marketing — The Full Story

Most people think email marketing started with Klaviyo. Mine started at a winery in Paso Robles in 2011. In this episode of the Brand Building Podcast, I'm taking you back to where it all began — how I taught myself email marketing running a wine e-commerce startup, moonlighting it while working at top Southern California agencies, and eventually running $15M/year Toyota lead gen programs through event marketing at NASCAR, Bass Pro Shops, and Stagecoach. From there: Director of Ops at Stealth Venture Labs, founding Bread Loaf in 2016, and gener...

12 min

2026 October 10

The Revenue Hiding Inside Your Email List That Nobody Is Talking About

Most ecommerce brands doing $5M to $100M have the same blind spot. They're spending real money on paid acquisition. New customers are coming in. But once they're on the list — nobody really knows what's happening to them. Old automation. A list with hundreds of thousands of profiles nobody has looked inside in years. Monthly reports with open rates that never tell you if you're actually leaving money on the table. In this episode I'm breaking down the four things we find broken in almost eve...

3 min

2026 October 10

The Klaviyo Tool That's About to Change What You Pay an Agency For

I was in the room in Boston when Klaviyo announced Composer at K:BOS 2026. And I don't think most brands or agencies understand how big this is yet. Composer isn't another AI writing tool. It already knows your customers, your campaigns, your flows, your segments, and your performance data — and now it can start doing the work. In this episode I break down exactly what Composer is, what it can already do today, what's still rolling out, and what it means for D2C brands and...

13 min

2026 October 10

Klaviyo's New AI Tool Will Replace Half of What Agencies Do — K:BOS 2026 Recap

Just got back from K:BOS 2026 in Boston. Second year attending. First year sponsoring as a Silver Partner with a booth on the floor and a seat at the Partner Advisory Council with Klaviyo's executive team. In this episode I'm breaking down everything that happened — what Klaviyo announced, where the platform is going, and what it means for D2C brands and retention agencies right now. The biggest release: Composer. A natural language SQL interface that queries your entire Klaviyo database on demand. No data scienti...

18 min

2026 October 10