Shawn Singh was managing 40–50 people at a fintech by day and building a copper drinkware brand between 5pm and 7pm every night. Then Valentine's Day 2025 hit,

250 orders landed over a single weekend, and he and his wife packed every one of them on the living room floor, with 10 pallets of stock stacked in the garage

behind them.

In this episode, Shawn joins Ryan Martin (Host and Founder of Remarkable Digital) to unpack how Copper Culture went from

an off-the-shelf Shopify theme to a multi-market brand selling into Australia,

the US and 17 duty-free markets, and why he'd rather be the best copper drinkware brand outside India than the biggest.

It's an honest one: the money lost learning Meta, the 51% jump in the copper price over 12 months, and a live teardown of a supplier sample that scored "7.5 out of 10" and still got rejected.

WHAT WE COVER

• Why a lunch-and-learn from the Arms of Eve founders was the final push to quit

the day job

• Building to a few million in lifetime sales on a default Shopify theme

• Google first, Meta second: why it took 18–24 months to tame the beast, and

what it cost along the way

• The Valentine's gift set that changed everything, no discount, just better

packaging and a message flip from "you need a copper bottle" to "give your

loved ones a copper bottle"

• The UGC engine: triggering review requests 48 hours after delivery (not 14 or

21 days) and offering a coupon to upgrade a text review to video

• The real science of copper: antimicrobial to 99%+ within three hours, plus the copper toxicity warning Shawn puts on every box

• Copper up 51% in 12 months, 300g in a bottle and up to a kilo in a dispenser, how Copper Culture protected margin without passing on the full increase

• Manufacturing in India's copper cottage industry: why a supplier that tripled

output still can't keep up with a business that grew 6x

• Testing new markets and SKUs: 200-300 unit runs, six-week sell-through rules,

and why Moscow mule mugs fly in Australia but not the US

• Why a real-time profit dashboard is the first thing Shawn checks every morning

(and the mate who did $25k in revenue for $800 profit)

CHAPTERS

00:00 – Cold open

01:27 – Welcome: Shawn Singh, Copper Culture

01:57 – Rebuilding the site with Clever Conversions

02:11 – The first website his wife designed, and the millions it carried

04:42 – Fintech by day, ecommerce by night

05:36 – The Arms of Eve lunch-and-learn that changed everything

06:00 – Google traction first, then 18–24 months learning Meta

07:20 – Valentine's Day 2025: 250 orders packed in the living room

10:22 – The copper pitch — and the toxicity warning

11:47 – How to actually use a copper bottle day to day

12:50 – Hammered vs polished, and why hammering matters

13:37 – Indian grandparents, an Ayurvedic practitioner, and terrible Amazon bottles

15:32 – The Valentine's gift set and the AOV unlock

16:49 – Demand capture on Google vs demand generation on Meta

18:01 – In-house, offshore, then Swann Studio

19:46 – The UGC machine: the 48-hour post-delivery review trigger

23:19 – Copper up 51%: margins, pricing and a lower CAC

26:11 – Live sample teardown: what a 7.5/10 looks like

30:28 – How a copper jug is actually made, from Chilean copper up

31:46 – Supplier at 3x, business at 6x: pre-orders and air freight

33:46 – Australia, the US, and 17 duty-free markets (Dubai and Saudi next)

34:56 – Expanding the range: 200–300 unit tests and fast-moving SKUs

36:13 – Real-time profit, channel decisions and a creative backlog

LINKS

Copper Culture: https://copperculture.com.au

Clever Conversions (Ilan Hurwitz): [https://cleverconversions.com.au/]

Swann Studio: https://swan.studio/

BeProfit: https://beprofit.co

Enjoyed this one? Follow the eCommerce Aus Podcast and leave a review it helps more Aussie founders find the show.

A text message at an airport turned into Australia's biggest retail and eCommerce community in about twelve months:

4,000 members, up to 90 chat groups, and meetups from Ballarat to Dubai.

Dean Salakas (The Party People) and Jethro Marks (The Nile) join Ryan Martin (Remarkable Digital) to explain how Retail Community Group actually works, what it deliberately isn't, and how its members had workarounds in place days before Australia Post announced it was suspending shipping to the US.

Dean built a two-person family business into Australia's largest party supplies retailer, offering click-and-collect in 1999 and becoming Google's first advertiser in Australia in 2003 at one cent a click, before exiting eighteen months ago.

Jethro co-founded The Nile in 2003 and is now building the world's most trusted bookstore, with US and UK launches on the way. Neither of them set out to build a community.

They started a WhatsApp group so they could find each other for a drink at Retail Fest, and it had fifty people in it before Dean's plane landed.

Join the Whatsapp here

In this episode they unpack the mechanics behind the growth: why the group split into interest-based channels for AI, cross-border trade, HR and open-to-work; how the "pitch slap" keeps unsolicited selling out; and why a moderated, free, no-pay-to-play space has become the place Australian retailers go first when something breaks.

They also share what's coming next, including a public events directory, a vendor portal and peer advisory groups for retailers, plus their honest take on the hardest problem ahead: keeping the magic while scaling to a market Jethro estimates at 100,000 people.

If you run an online store, work in retail tech, or you're new to eCommerce and feel like you're doing it alone, this one is a practical guide to plugging into the most collaborative industry in the country.

Join The Retail Community Here

Topics covered: retail community building, Australian eCommerce, cross-border trade and tariffs, Australia Post US shipping suspension, 3PL and fulfilment, retail conferences and events, AI tools for retail, B2B community moderation, thought leadership for service providers.

Running an Australian eCommerce or Shopify store? Your customers have started shopping inside ChatGPT, and shoppers arriving from AI answer engines convert around 1.5x better than any other source.

Melbourne eCommerce Aus Event - Tickets Here.

Online shopping has become… boring? A recent Criteo study found 77% of Australians describe online shopping as unexciting, and that's just the starting point for one of our most forward-looking conversations yet.

Ryan sits down with Matt Hurle from Criteo to unpack the findings of their latest report and what they mean for anyone running an eCommerce business in Australia. Matt brings 20 years in advertising, 15 in digital and 10 in martech, from cold-calling rural businesses out of the Yellow Pages to sitting at the front edge of AI-powered retail media.

The big theme: the path to purchase is no longer linear. Consumers are bouncing between publishers, retailer sites, social platforms and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, and increasingly starting their entire shopping journey inside those answer engines, at the very first spark of an idea. Criteo was the first technology company integrated with OpenAI via API and has already run 2,000+ campaigns in that environment. Early signal? Shoppers arriving from ChatGPT convert about 1.5x more efficiently than any other source.

We also get into the eternal marketer's tension Ryan sums up perfectly: "The thing I love about digital marketing is you can track every dollar. The thing I hate about digital marketing is you can track every dollar." Attribution, brand vs. performance, the resurgence of SEO (or GEO/AIO, whatever we're calling it this week), influencer strategy, and why customer support and honest reviews now beat polished influencer content for building real trust.

Key Takeaways

• The funnel is dead — long live discovery. Consumers now begin shopping journeys inside AI answer engines, far earlier than the traditional mid-to-lower funnel signals marketers relied on. Brands need to show up higher up the discovery journey.
• Commerce data is the new gold standard. Moving away from demographics and guesswork toward real commerce signals — what people add to cart, actually buy, and browse before and after. Criteo observes 1T+ in annual eCommerce transactions across 730M+ daily active shoppers.
• Show up across surfaces, not just your own. Criteo's independence means it serves ads on whichever "surface" (open web, ChatGPT, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, X) is most likely to convert — not a walled-garden's owned inventory.
• ChatGPT shoppers convert ~1.5x better. They've researched and validated inside the answer engine, so trust is high by the time they land.
• SEO/GEO/AIO matters more than ever. As search shifts from keywords to full-sentence, conversational queries, rich product data and verifiable messaging determine whether you appear in AI answers — or get left out of the consideration set entirely.
• Trust beats polish. Verified reviews and genuine customer support now outweigh paid influencer content. 200 five-star reviews can be less trusted than a 4.7 average. Reply to bad reviews honestly. (Ryan's Nero merino example and Matt's Artisan chopping-board recall story both make the point.)
• Match the influencer to the job to be done. Celebrities drive reach and exposure; micro-influencers drive engaged, community-level trust and conversion. Different jobs, different tiers.
• AI answer engines stay out of sensitive categories. OpenAI keeps advertising away from health-related matters, directing people back to their GPs.

If you're building a Shopify store, a DTC label, or an omnichannel ecommerce brand in Australia, this episode is your blueprint.

From selling jewellery at Bondi markets to 13 stores and a booming ecommerce business, Arms of Eve co-founders Kerryn and Aaron Langer show how an Australian DTC brand scales retail without losing its ecommerce edge.

Kerryn and Aaron Langer turned a market stall and a pile of leftover merino wool offcuts into Arms of Eve, now a nine-store (soon to be 13) Australian jewellery and lifestyle brand that's scaled past $20 million in revenue on the back of a genuinely direct-to-consumer ecommerce model.

In this episode of eCommerce Australia, Ryan Martin sits down with the husband-and-wife founders to unpack how they walked away from the traditional wholesale/indent model, why The Iconic marketplace became their unlikely proving ground, and how COVID-era demand for jewellery (turns out that's the only accessory that shows up on a Zoom call) turned a side category into 80% of the business.

For Shopify merchants and ecommerce operators thinking about opening a physical store, this conversation is a masterclass in getting the sequencing right.

Aaron was convinced retail was dead, until their "little experiment" Bondi Beach store proved the opposite, creating a measurable halo effect that lifts online sales in a 10km radius around every new location. They talk candidly about the tech stack behind a fast-scaling DTC ecommerce brand (Starshipit for fulfilment, Okendo for reviews, Profit Peak for profitability data, and an in-house team now "vibe coding" their own dashboards), how they balance agency support with in-house performance marketing, and why their content strategy has swung from polished campaign shoots to raw, iPhone-shot, Tolstoy-powered video that converts better than the highly produced stuff ever did.

There's also a genuinely useful nugget for anyone running ecommerce SEO or content strategy: Kerryn and Aaron explain how customer questions from their retail staff (about materials, tarnish, sizing, warranty) are becoming the seed for on-site content designed to capture organic search traffic, a simple but underused move for any Shopify or ecommerce brand trying to turn support questions into search-optimised product and FAQ pages that rank.

Add in an unfiltered take on celebrity gifting (Margot Robbie, Hailey Bieber and Dua Lipa have all been photographed in Arms of Eve pieces, without a single paid placement), a calculated US relaunch planned for June 2027, and hard-won lessons on hiring, culture and staying "even" as leaders, and this is one of the most tactical founder conversations on ecommerce, retail expansion and DTC brand-building we've featured on the show

About Arms of Eve:Arms of Eve is an Australian jewellery, accessories and resortwear brand founded by Kerryn and Aaron Langer. Starting out selling at local markets, the brand has grown into a multi-channel ecommerce and retail business with nine stores nationwide (growing to 13 by the end of 2026), a wholesale presence in boutiques across Australia, and a fast-growing direct-to-consumer online store.

• Website: https://armsofeve.com/
• Instagram: @armsofeve

Resources & tools mentioned:

• Starshipit: ecommerce shipping and fulfilment platform
• Okendo: customer reviews platform
• Profit Peak: ecommerce profitability analytics
• Tolstoy: shoppable, native video for ecommerce sites
• The Iconic: Australian fashion marketplace

Follow eCommerce Australia for more conversations with Australia's leading ecommerce and Shopify founders on growth, retail strategy, and building direct-to-consumer brands. Subscribe on Spotify and leave a review to help more ecommerce and Shopify store owners find the show.

Will North has led marketing and commercial functions at brands including Meshki, PE Nation, AJE and Superdry UK.

For the last two and a half years he's been at Kulani Kinis, the Australian swimwear brand doing 75-80% of its revenue in the US.

He joined Ryan Martin from Remarkable Digital to talk conversion rate optimisation, attribution, TikTok Shop and the marketing shifts defining 2026.

The Kulani Kinis story. Founded 11.5 years ago by Sydney couple Danny and Alex as a side hustle, the brand found its footing in the US when Alex transferred to EY in LA. Today the US makes up 75-80% of revenue; Australia is just 7%.

CRO is a business metric, not a digital one. Will's Retail Fest keynote ("I Lost the Company $15 Million and Got a Promotion") explored why every untested change to your site is a potential loss. His starting point: survey customers who've purchased and subscribers who haven't, distil 3-4 themes, then run ideas through an effort-versus-upside matrix before testing.

Context kills best practice. Adding "some items in your cart may sell out" drove nearly $2M in annualised revenue at a streetwear brand. The same test lost revenue at a women's fashion brand, because scarcity signalling made shoppers worry about wearing the same thing as everyone else. Customer psychology differs by brand.

The thank you page question nobody asks. Immediately post-purchase, ask: "Was there anything that almost stopped you from buying?" Customers who've just converted will tell you exactly what's broken.

Attribution in 2026. No one does it perfectly. Will's approach is to define the role of each channel across the seasonal cycle and measure a marketing efficiency ratio (spend divided by sales) as a flow, not a fixed weekly target.

TikTok Shop. 72% of fashion revenue on the platform flows through affiliate and creator. The new customer rate is 95%. Will visited the US team last month and TikTok Shop is a major focus for Kulani Kinis in FY27.

What you say now matters as much as how you look. LLMs are changing discovery. If a brand has no content narrative, it won't show up when someone asks an AI for a recommendation. Will's take: GEO, AIO and SEO are all just SEO.

Not all impressions are equal. Kulani Kinis ran direct mail via Post Pilot at a $600 CPM and it outperformed. A postcard on a fridge is a very different impression to a feed scroll-past.

In-person events. A $40,000 Maldives brand trip generated the equivalent of $140,000 in media value from creator and customer content.

Collaborations. A LinkedIn conversation between brand experience leads led to a Lounge Underwear collab that spiked Kulani Kinis' German sales in July 2024. Go in with clear objectives or don't bother.

"Conversion is a business metric. It's not an e-com metric."

"There is no such thing as best practice with CRO. Every brand's customer psychology is different."

"You've got to sell it twice: on site and when they get it, otherwise it's coming back."

• Kulani Kinis: kulanikinis.com
• Post Pilot: postpilot.com
• Lounge Underwear: loungeunderwear.com
• Pura Vida Bracelets: puravidabracelets.com
• Retail Fest

About Will North:

Head of Commercial & Performance at Kulani Kinis. Previously held senior roles at Meshki, PE Nation, AJE and Superdry UK. Retail Fest speaker and Oria Award nominee (International Conqueror).

Building an Art-Led eCommerce Fashion Brand:

Kyall & Maku Fenaroli on Maku The Label

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Kyall and Maku Fenaroli, the husband-and-wife team behind Maku The Label, an art-centric fashion brand that's gone from Maku painting designs on blank t-shirts to landing David Jones as a stockist, all in under 18 months.

Maku spent over a decade in finance before turning her lifelong passion for art into a business. Kyall left a career as a plumber and general manager in construction to run the operations side full-time. Together they've built a brand defined by original artwork, rapid organic growth, and a willingness to make big, fast calls, including ripping up their entire fulfilment model mid-flight.

This one's a masterclass in scrappy growth, knowing when to change your model, and what it actually takes to go from side hustle to major retail partner.

From side hustle to Style Runner in four monthsMaku started printing her art on blank tees with zero branding, just a decision to stop buying t-shirts she didn't love. Four months later they landed Style Runner, their first major stockist, before either of them had heard of an SSCC barcode.

Why they walked away from print-on-demandPrint-on-demand gave Maku total creative flexibility (paint today, sell tomorrow), but it was killing customer experience with two-week delivery windows and mispicked orders. After a rough Black Friday period exposed the gap, they moved to a 3PL and in-stock model in a matter of months.

The real cost of switching to held stockKyall breaks down what changes when you go from print-on-demand to holding inventory: deposits on stock six months out, a five-to-nine month cash conversion cycle, and having to plan collections over a year in advance. Maku is already painting for August 2027.

Contribution margin over vanity revenueKyall's biggest lesson from the last 18 months: understanding gross margin, delivered margin, and contribution profit, not just top-line revenue. He talks candidly about how much of the "guru" advice in eCommerce ignores what it actually costs to get a sale to break-even.

Wholesale lessons from Style Runner and David JonesMaku credits Style Runner for patiently teaching them the basics of wholesale (barcodes, dispatch windows, systems) before they stepped up to David Jones, where the same requirements come with far less flexibility.

Personalised influencer gifting that actually gets sharedMaku's approach to influencer seeding isn't a mail-merge, it's DM'ing people directly, matching values and aesthetic, and adding a genuinely personal touch (a hand-painted portrait for Alana Hadid, a custom tee tied to Celeste Barber's own brand). The result: organic shares from influencers with audiences in the hundreds of thousands to over a million.

Pulling back from paid ads toward organic and IRLAfter ramping up Meta and Google ads over the past year, the pair are consciously shifting back toward the organic-first strategy that built the brand, including real-world events they say outperform equivalent ad spend.

New York Fashion Week, twiceMaku The Label is heading back to New York in September for NYFW, running a gifting suite with PR agency Kate & Co. and exploring a possible pop-up retail space alongside other Australian brands.

What's next: the Australian designer categoryMaku's goal is to move the brand firmly into ready-to-wear and the Australian designer space, with the US identified as the next major growth market for both DTC and wholesale.

Links & Mentions

• Maku The Label
• Style Runner
• David Jones
• Kate & Co. PR
• New York Fashion Week (September)
• Yotpo: Amazing Women in eCommerce retreat
• Humble Brag's retreat

What does it actually take to launch a product-based eCommerce business from scratch, scale it to over 400,000 customers, land in 170 Officeworks stores, crack Amazon US, and run a live Kickstarter campaign, all while raising a family from the other side of the world?

In this episode of eCommerce Australia, Ryan Martin from Remarkable Digital, sits down with Lou Rice, Co-Founder of Strapsicle, the silicone Kindle and e-reader strap brand that went from a 2am maternity leave idea to a globally recognised eCommerce brand in under four years.

Lou gets refreshingly honest about the messy middle of building a product business: the overstock nightmares, the borrowed money, the Amazon learning curve, and why she thinks most Australian eCommerce founders move too slowly on international expansion.

If you sell physical products online, whether on Shopify, Amazon, or both, this episode is packed with hard-won tactical and strategic insights.

• The Strapsicle origin story: how a dropped Kindle at 2am became a 400,000-customer brand
• Launching a Kickstarter campaign: why Lou chose crowdfunding and what it takes to run one successfully
• Amazon US in 4 months: Lou's approach to international expansion that most Aussie founders avoid
• Scaling into Officeworks: from 13 stores to 170, and what actually drove sell-through
• TikTok Shop lives vs. Instagram Live: which channel is converting and how Lou runs flash sales in real time
• Building a brand community: how a Facebook group with engaged customers becomes a product feedback engine
• Overcoming eCommerce growing pains: overstock, cash flow, production costs, and how to navigate them
• Financial clarity for product founders: why knowing your numbers (especially unit economics on a low-AOV product) matters more than you think
• Accessibility as a product category: how Strapsicle is opening up reading for people with physical limitations
• The one thing most eCommerce founders don't do early enough:

Lou Rice is the Co-Founder of Strapsicle, a silicone strap accessory for Kindles and e-readers that makes hands-free reading possible.

What started as a 2am maternity leave invention is now a global eCommerce brand with over 400,000 customers, stocked in 170 Officeworks stores across Australia, and sold across the US, UK, and beyond via Shopify and Amazon.

Lou is known in the Australian eCommerce community for her direct approach, her willingness to talk about the hard parts of building a product business, and her speed-first philosophy on international expansion.

• Strapsicle website: strapsicle.com
• Strapsicle Kickstarter campaign: Search "Strapsicle" on Kickstarter
• Officeworks: officeworks.com.au
• Amazon US: amazon.com: search "Strapsicle"
• eCommerce Australia Podcast: Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

Shopify eCommerce Australia, product-based business, eCommerce growth strategy, Amazon FBA Australia, Officeworks retail distribution, TikTok Shop Australia, live shopping eCommerce, Kickstarter product launch, Kindle accessories, scaling a physical product business, eCommerce founder story, international expansion strategy, eCommerce community building, Shopify store growth, low AOV product strategy, Australian eCommerce podcast