About
DTC strategy, marketing, analytics and AI, from the data up.
The questions people ask when they want to know what I do and how I help, answered the way I would across a table.
What do you do?
DTC strategy, marketing, analytics and AI. In practice, I find out what's true in a brand's data, and then build the lifecycle programs and systems that act on it. A golf and corporate apparel brand had walked away from constant 30-35% sitewide promotions, so the job there was rebuilding demand at full price, and that summer SMS revenue was up 34% on the year before. I've done this for fifteen-plus years, now through my studio, Yewgo. I ran every case on this site end to end, and the agency team or the brand's own people did the channel execution.
Who do you work with?
Direct-to-consumer brands, usually through the founder or the marketing lead. In fifteen-plus years the verticals have ranged from technology to food and drink, apparel, beauty, supplements, home and building products, a regional pharmacy, a hand-dyed yarn brand, and a large California retailer where I led the move of 9 million profiles to Klaviyo during peak Q4 with no revenue-impacting incidents. The category matters less than the situation: a brand that pays for Klaviyo and uses a third of it, or one that suspects its numbers or its flows are wrong. Those two I can help with on the first call. I'm less useful to anyone who wants more sends before checking the numbers behind them.
Where does an engagement start?
With the measurement, every time. I pull the data myself with Python, GA4 and the platform APIs, and build a revenue model from the store's own orders. I don't forecast anything or move budget until that model matches the commerce platform within one or two percent. At an architectural products retailer we fixed the tracking first, the model came in within 1.8%, and only then did budget move. At a regional pharmacy the model matched within 0.6%, and one split changed the story. The topline had recovered, but everyday orders were still about 13% below the year before, and bulk orders had carried the summer.
What do you find in other people's accounts?
Most of it is numbers that look fine and aren't. At that architectural products retailer, my first audit found GA4 seeing 54% of the revenue the store had booked. Another store's GA4 recorded 12% of its orders twice, while the totals looked about right. A vendor's identity tool claimed 19 conversions in one day. Of those people, 18 were already active that day and 11 never opened the email, so I recommended a holdout test instead of a renewal. One brand's birthday program was its best-engaging flow, at 73% opens, but across 740 redemptions in 13 months its average order ran 38% below the store's norm and it brought in almost no new customers. I wrote a plan to aim it at lapsed customers, with a basket threshold.
You're close to Klaviyo. What does that mean?
Of every major email platform I've used, Klaviyo is the one I know best, after about ten years in it. I've given their product team feedback and worked on their betas: the product feed, Reviews, Customer Hub, omnichannel and Composer, and flows, the push app and SMS. I was an early adopter of KDP, their data platform, and co-spoke with one of their product leaders at the Groove Summit in Baltimore. The features are Klaviyo's, and my part was using them early on client accounts and telling the people who built them what I saw. Before Klaviyo had RFM segments, I built a five-tier model, Explorer to Pioneer, to do the same job.
Where does AI fit, and what stays with you?
Every account I worked on had the same two problems: dashboards that were confidently wrong, and routine work that only happened when someone remembered to do it. So I run a set of AI agents for strategy, analytics, lifecycle, paid media and SEO. On a schedule they pull Klaviyo and GA4 data, draft the reports, run the analysis and flag what looks off, and every number passes a two-tier QA gate against the source of truth before a person sees it. I still own the segment logic and the offers, and every final call is mine.
How did you get here?
A working-class family with two interests in the house from the start: one of my parents ran the retail side of a chain of stores, and I had the computer. I learned the languages first, procedural and functional, then object-oriented, and then studied information systems, which in practice meant analysing real systems and making them better. The part that stuck was the people: how they use technology day to day, why they resist a change, and what a fix they will adopt looks like. Everything since has been retail, technology and how people behave, brought to one problem, DTC. My first job was email design and development, and I still write the HTML. Then six and a half years advising brands at SmartBug Media, strategy and operations at The Email Marketers, the senior CRM and lifecycle seat at Groove Commerce LLC, and my own agency, dellik, from 2020 until Yewgo took its place.
How do people start working with you?
There are four ways in. A working session is one call: bring the decision and your numbers, and you leave with a read on the data and a 30-day plan. A Klaviyo review checks every product, flow and segment against the store's own orders and ranks a roadmap by revenue at stake. A retention or measurement audit is fixed in scope and tells you what to fix first and what each fix is worth. Ongoing work through Yewgo fills the lifecycle and analytics seat month to month. If you'd rather start for free, the Yewgo newsletter comes out every Monday with one thing I learned doing the work.
Where I've worked.
2026 – now
Yewgo · Founder
Dec 2024 – Sep 2026
Groove Commerce LLC · Senior CRM & Lifecycle Manager
Jun 2020 – Mar 2026
dellik · Founder and CEO
Jun – Nov 2024
The Email Marketers · Director of Strategy & Operations
Jan 2018 – Jul 2024
SmartBug Media · Subject-Matter Expert · SDM
Education
B.S. in Information Systems Management