Advertise to 40,692 E-Commerce Businesses
Promote your tool, service or upcoming event - Reach Founders
Good morning,
Most supplement brands ask customers to trust broad claims about quality and science.
Ritual does something riskier: it names where its ingredients are made, shows the experts behind its formulas and publishes finished-product clinical studies.
Today, we look at how a $250 million brand turned verifiable proof into part of the product.
Today:
We break down Ritual’s trust system, check whether Meta sees your ads as genuinely different, examine three new commerce-platform updates and stop one unnecessary inventory reorder.
Today’s issue is presented by Brevo, whose List Tax Calculator shows what your store pays for inactive email contacts and how much send-based pricing could save.
Today’s Deep Dive
Why This $250 Million Brand Names Its Suppliers
Would you tell customers who supplies your ingredients and where they are manufactured?
Most founders would worry that competitors could copy them.
Ritual made the opposite bet.
The supplement brand surpassed $250 million in gross revenue in 2024 while making transparency central to its positioning.
It started with the real objection
Customers cannot look at a supplement and judge its quality, safety or effectiveness.
Every brand claims to use better ingredients. Ritual needed to give customers a reason to believe it.
Its promise is simple:
Know what is in your product, where it comes from and why it works.
It shows where every ingredient comes from
Ritual lists the form and final manufacturing location of each active ingredient.
Folate comes from Pisticci, Italy. Vitamin D comes from Nottingham, UK. Iron comes from Ogden, Utah.
The claim is no longer “we use quality ingredients.” The customer can inspect the supply chain behind it.
Every ingredient lists its form and final place of manufacturing.
Your customers may not need a map of every supplier. But if sourcing affects whether they trust your product, hiding it leaves an important objection unanswered.
It makes the people behind the product visible
Ritual also introduces the scientists and medical experts who inform its formulations.
The page shows their names, qualifications and affiliations rather than asking customers to accept another vague “expert-backed” claim.
Ritual shows customers who helps formulate its products and why they are qualified.
If expertise is part of your pitch, show the people, credentials and work behind it.
Credentials still do not prove the product works
Knowing where an ingredient came from and who selected it is useful. Neither proves the finished formula is effective.
So Ritual adds another layer: human clinical studies on its finished products.
Its clinical-studies page shows which trials are complete and states a goal of completing clinical trials on all existing products by 2030.
Ritual tests finished products instead of relying only on research about individual ingredients.
This is the full trust system:
Show what is inside.
Show where it came from.
Show who stands behind it.
Test whether the finished product works.
What to copy
At this point, you may be thinking: Ritual is a $250 million company. Of course it can afford clinical studies, certifications and a team of scientists.
But this system was not built overnight. It started with a founder deciding that transparency would be part of how Ritual competed. The evidence accumulated over time.
You do not need to copy the entire system on day one.
Publishing supplier names or manufacturing locations costs almost nothing. If independent testing is expensive, begin with one hero product or the claim that matters most to the purchase.
Reveal one supplier or manufacturing partner.
Explain why one important material or ingredient was selected.
Commission one test and publish the result.
Then keep adding proof as the business grows.
The goal is not to look as established as Ritual today. It is to start building the evidence that could earn that level of trust over time.
Presented by Brevo
What a 25,000-contact store actually pays for email
Here's a side-by-side using published pricing.
Take a store with 25,000 contacts sending 40,000 emails a month - about four emails to each engaged subscriber.
On Klaviyo, which bills on active profiles stored, that store pays $400 a month.On Brevo, which bills on emails sent, the same list and the same sends cost $46 a month.
That's $354 a month, or $4,248 a year, for exactly the same sending.
Where does the gap come from?
At four emails each, 40,000 sends reach about 10,000 people.
The other 15,000 are ghost contacts - profiles you pay to store but rarely email.
On contact-based pricing, those ghosts cost this store roughly $3,000 a year on their own.
That's the List Tax: money spent on storage, not sales.
And it keeps growing.
Every popup signup and every one-time buyer adds to the bill, whether you email them again or not.
Enter your own contact count and monthly sends in the List Tax Calculator to see your version of this breakdown.
Spending $1,000+ a month on Klaviyo? Share an invoice and get 50% off Brevo for your first three months.
The How-To
How to Check if Meta Thinks Your Ads Are Actually Different
Ten ads do not necessarily give Meta ten different ideas to test. If they use similar visuals, messaging and formats, Meta may treat them as variations of the same creative.
Skydive is a new way to use AI agents. Each agent gets their own cloud computer with a browser, files, and terminal, so they can use your tools and actually do the work.
Step 1: Add the Creative Diversity column
Open Ads Manager and switch to the Ad Sets view.
Select Columns → Customize columns, search for Creative diversity, check the box and click Apply.
Step 2: Check your highest-spend ad sets
Meta rates their visual diversity as Low, Medium or High.
Start with the ad sets receiving the most spend. A Low rating suggests the images and video thumbnails may look too similar to give Meta meaningfully different options.
Step 3: Create different concepts, not minor variations
Do not simply change the headline, crop or background.
Product demonstration
Founder or expert story
Customer testimonial
Problem-and-solution ad
Comparison or objection-handling ad
Meta says its system groups ads that share visual and thematic attributes. The goal is not to make more ads. It is to give Meta more distinct ideas it can match with different customers.
Treat the rating as a diagnostic tool, not a performance verdict. Meta describes the metric as estimated and still in development.
While You Were Building
In the Headlines
Amazon’s new Selling Partner plugins give Claude and Amazon Quick access to a seller’s catalogue, real-time metrics and recommendations. This could move routine inventory, pricing and listing work outside Seller Central, but sellers should review exactly what account data and permissions they grant.
Demand Gen image ads can now send shoppers to a landing page with one tap. Brands using Shorts should upload full-bleed 9:16 assets and check that the destination page continues the same message.
Sellers can give up to five team members access to orders, listings and buyer messages without sharing the owner’s password or exposing financial information. It is a useful security upgrade for brands bringing in seasonal support.
On Socials
Worth testing, but not because “account credit” is a magic phrase. It makes the discount feel like value the customer already owns while preserving a more premium frame. Treat the 2.5× result as a hypothesis and test it against your own conversion rate and margin.
Ideas Worth Stealing
Caraway Includes the Storage, Not Just the Cookware
Caraway’s cookware set includes magnetic pan racks and a canvas lid holder, solving the storage problem that arrives with buying several new pans.
This makes the bundle feel more complete while removing a practical objection: “Where will I put all of this?”
The lesson is to look beyond the product itself. Include the accessory that helps customers store, use or maintain it, and you can make a higher-value bundle easier to justify.
📦 Today’s Growth Rep: Stop Reordering One Slow-Moving SKU
Find one product holding more inventory than its recent sales justify and pause the next purchase order.
Why this works:
Frees cash that would otherwise remain trapped in stock.
Reduces future discounting and storage costs.
Reveals whether purchasing decisions still match actual demand.
Your rep:
List your five SKUs with the most units in stock.
Compare each one with units sold during the last 30 days.
Calculate months of stock: units available ÷ monthly units sold.
Pause or reduce the next order for the SKU with the longest coverage.
Record how much cash this prevents you from committing.
Report: “Paused $___ in unnecessary inventory.”
Growth is easier when cash is available for products customers are actually buying.
Presented by Skydive
Skydive is a new way to use AI agents. Each agent gets their own cloud computer with a browser, files, and terminal, so they can use your tools and actually do the work.