The financial strains of COVID-19 have many direct to consumer brands looking for low- or no-cost ways to increase revenue. That usually means either driving more traffic to your website or converting more of the traffic you already have into paying customers.

Most tactics focus on one at the expense of the other. But an approach you can take now — with little or no upfront investment — can have significant impact on conversion rates while also helping organic SEO: crafting more consumer-centric product stories on your PDP through Agile Product Storytelling.

Agile Product Storytelling in a Nutshell

Agile Product Storytelling is simply doing on the…

Crises have a way of exposing patterns usually hidden beneath the hustle of everyday life. An example: My newsfeed tells me people are no longer spending money on non-essentials. That rings true in my life. Like everyone else, my wife and I are very careful about how we spend money in these uncertain days.

Then again, we just bought a Moscow Mule drink kit complete with two copper mugs. I don’t even like Moscow Mules. My wife does, but she has about three a year, tops. Logic tells me we should’ve saved that money. Or spent it on rice, beans…

TLDR: Brands that can build campfires, should.

I love autopay. I love it as only someone who used to sit at their kitchen table for an hour every week signing checks, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps could.

In the days before the internet, every week was filled with hours of mindless to-dos like scribbling down directions, copying documents and developing photos — tasks that are all now (blissfully) in our collective rearview mirror. …

Product descriptions describe what you’re selling. Product stories let people know why it matters.

Andy Warhol was the godfather of Pop Art. At one point his work accounted for one-sixth of all revenue generated by contemporary-art sales. In 1967 he helped produce The Velvet Underground & Nico, a work Rolling Stone described as the “most prophetic rock album ever made.” He was also a successful illustrator, publicist, photographer and filmmaker. It’s as if he lived six amazing lives in the time it takes the rest of us mere mortals to live just one.

In 1988, a year after his death…

DNVBs point the way to sunny, direct-to-consumer future and it all starts at the PDP

Friends and co-founders Chris White and Jens Nicolaysen launched the outrageously UNPC partywear brand Shinesty from a UC Boulder college apartment in 2014. Today, this world-leading purveyor of denim-look jeankinis and pink pineapple formalwear has taken four rounds of venture investment and is still growing at breakneck speed.

At the end of his book “How We Decide,” the once pop-science boy wonder Jonah Lehrer tells a story about the conundrum of buying Cheerios. He couldn’t decide between Honey Nut and Apple Cinnamon, and it was this weekly grocery struggle that inspired him to research the neuroscience of decision-making. Lehrer would eventually shoot his career in the foot, but before any shots were fired he did make some important points about how we make up our mind.

Since Descartes, the Western world has run with the idea that there are two very different types of decisions: decisions that come…

or how I got trapped in my cheese’s story

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the ’80s which also means I grew up on two kinds of cheese: the yellow, single-slice kind I could chew with my lips, and the white kind that fell in dry tufts from shimmery, green cardboard cans onto my spaghetti. I was happy.

After I graduated college and was buying cheese all on my own, I had a conversation with a well-meaning friend at a dinner party. …