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Good morning!
In today’s newsletter,
Expensive and exhausting product photoshoot?
Register your IP before someone steals it
Stop losing subscribers before they hit cancel
While You Were Building
Your AI media buyer, inside Slack
This issue takes 2 minutes to read.
Check out our DTC tool stack here
Let’s dive into it👇
Creatives
Expensive and exhausting product photoshoot?
Kittl does it in minutes, and for a fraction of the price.
A professional shoot day yields around 30 finished images. That's about $67 per image before retouching even starts.*
Kittl does it in minutes. Turn one plain product photo into a full set of studio-grade lifestyle shots - in a single workflow. Studio-quality imagery for your listings, social, and ads. Without booking a single shoot.
EXCLUSIVE: Use code DTCDAILY for 25% off any subscription.
Sources: Nightjar, Razor Creative Labs
Founder Resources
Building something? Here are a few ways we can help:
The Founder Community
We’re building an exclusive paid community for like-minded founders, operators, and builders to connect, help each other, bounce ideas, share learnings, and grow together. The first 50 people on the waitlist will get to join for free as founding members and help shape what the community becomes.
CTA: Join the Founder Waitlist
Agency Partner Match
Need help with design, development, marketing, content, paid ads, growth, branding, or something else? Our community of 41,201 founders, operators, and builders gives us access to a strong network of trusted service providers across all budgets. Tell us what you need, and we’ll try to connect you with the right agency or freelancer.
CTA: Get Matched With an Agency
Founder Tech Stack
Explore our curated list of useful tools, software, and offers to help founders save time, launch faster, and grow smarter.
CTA: Explore the Founder Tech Stack
Legal and protection
Register your IP before someone steals it
If a competitor copies your product photos or listing, you can report it to Amazon. They might pull the listing. But if you have a registered trademark or copyright, you can file a real legal claim and win actual damages.
But you can only sue for statutory damages if your copyright was registered before the infringement happened.
Three things worth doing now:
Register your brand on Amazon Brand Registry. This requires a pending or registered trademark and gives you tools to remove counterfeit listings faster.
Start your trademark through USPTO.gov. When you file, you pick a "class" — basically the category your product falls into (clothing, supplements, home goods, etc.). Most sellers file in one or two classes. The application costs $250–$350 per class and takes 8–12 months, but your protection starts at the filing date.
Register copyrights for your product photography at copyright.gov. You can register multiple images in one batch for $65. It takes a few weeks to process. Do it before you publish your listing, not after.
Action Summary:
File a trademark for your brand name in the relevant class
Register your product photos before publishing new listings
Apply for Amazon Brand Registry once your trademark application is filed
Retention
Stop losing subscribers before they hit cancel
When a subscription business isn't growing fast enough, the instinct is to fix the ads. Lower the CPM, test a new creative, find a cheaper audience.
Mike Salguero built ButcherBox to $600M without outside funding and says that's the wrong place to look first.
Lifetime value is easier to move than acquisition cost.
The question to ask: what happens at the moment a customer is about to quit?
Here are three things to put in place before that moment hits.
Throw in a freebie at the drop-off month. ButcherBox added free product — bacon, ground beef — at natural drop-off points in the subscription. Pushing one customer from month 10 to month 11 costs almost nothing and moves your LTV meaningfully.
Add a pause option before the cancel button. Brands that offer a "pause before cancel" option saw pause usage increase by 337%, with 3 out of 4 of those subscribers returning within months.
Add a loyalty milestone at month 3 or 6. Businesses that offer tenure-based perks at milestones report retention rates 25–40% higher for customers who stay beyond 12 months. A small reward at the right moment reminds the customer why they signed up.
To do any of this, you need to know when most customers cancel. Pull your churn data by month. If month 4 has a spike, that's your window.
Action Summary:
Pull your churn data and find the month most customers cancel
Set up a retention offer (freebie, pause option, or loyalty perk) one month before that point
Add a pause option to your cancellation flow if you don't have one
Track whether average customer lifespan increases over the next 90 days
While You Were Building
1.Asics spins off surging Onitsuka Tiger
Asics is carving out Onitsuka Tiger as a standalone brand while retro-sneaker demand and a tourism boom lift it. Spinning a hot sub-label into its own entity is the unbundling playbook again.
via Business of Fashion • Read more
2.Shopify Collective lands in Australia
Australian merchants can now sell other brands' products with no inventory or upfront cost, and suppliers reach new storefronts. Shopify's supplier-retailer network keeps expanding country by country.
via Shopify Changelog • Read more
3.Oner Active's creators will move $52M
The activewear brand expects its Move Ambassadors program to drive $52M in sales this year. The program draws about 30,000 applicants each cycle.
via Glossy • Read more
Your creative brief is due Friday. Viktor wrote it Tuesday.
Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.
Have questions or feedback? You can write to kaushal@dtcdailynews.com