June 3, 2025 • 25 mins
EPISODE 11
From hand-carving a single silicone spatula in her kitchen to running a portfolio of revived consumer brands, Sam Rose walks Kevin and Jason through the through-line of her career: obsess over the customer, build a brand (not just a product), and make logistics as lovable as design. She explains how a “collision with the customer” on Kickstarter forced her into customer-service mode before she even had inventory, why color stories beat strict SKU rationalization, what the GIR sale to Pattern taught her about single-channel risk, and how vertical integration led to Manifest’s 3PL and the launch of Endless Commerce. Sam also breaks down AI’s role in just-in-time inventory, predicts an LLM-powered shopping future that both excites and unnerves her, and offers two free months of her commerce OS to fellow founders.
CHAPTERS
00:00 – Collision with the Customer & Kickstarter Lessons
02:44 – Scaling GIR: Color Stories vs. SKU Discipline
07:32 – Acquisition Insights: Building a Balanced Brand Portfolio
09:54 – Manifest & the Cost of Learning Curves
13:03 – Endless Commerce and AI-Driven Supply Chains
OFFER
Get two months free on any tier and free onboarding to Endless Commerce when you mention the Founder Mode podcast or that Jason & Kevin sent you!
LINKS
Connect with Samantha Rose
endlesscommerce.com • LinkedIn • X/Twitter
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
No plan survives the collision with the customer.
Launching our Kickstarter was a pre market collision with the
customer because I used to, I mean see pre selling spatulas,
but I had effectively customers that I owed time and attention
and ultimately products to. And we're back with another
(00:23):
episode of Founder Mode. Hey, Jason.
Hey Kevin, we're going to peek under the hood of today's
commerce revolution where ingenious design meets
bulletproof logistics. So Kevin, when a founder
sketches the next must have product, what stalls momentum
more perfecting the form factor or taming the supply chain?
Yeah, they're kind of like twins.
I mean, beautiful design withoutthe ability to sort of deliver
(00:43):
and ship. But I mean, I know I've seen a
ton of things online where I've kind of saw a pre release or
ordered something and then it just, you know, after that it
just stumbled, right. No updates, never got there.
And so logistics really is a kind of a key part of it.
And you know, the danger is like, you chase these viral
aesthetics before you've really stress tested that sort of
fulfillment. Yeah, margins will disappear,
customers will vent on X and allthe social networks, and the
(01:06):
TikTok hype train derails at thewarehouse door.
Today, I mean, we're diving kindof into the future of commerce,
like what are these trends in product design and logistics?
And really how do you craft products that people obsess over
and then ship them in this sort of like there's nothing better
than ordering something and seeing like, you know, it's
shipped and then out for delivery the next day.
And you're like, wow, that's just the the beautiful sense I
(01:27):
love. The Amazon Prime, it'll be here
today in a couple hours. Like, why would I ever go to a
store again? That's maybe a bad thing.
So we're talking to someone who's lived every node of that
journey from Kickstarter to acquisition, and now building
the tools that power modern brands.
Yeah, we're talking to Samantha Rose, multi exit founder,
investor, operator in the consumer space.
(01:48):
She's currently leads Endless Commerce, a commerce enablement
platform for high growth brands,and Hologram Capital, where she
directs investment strategy for turnarounds in Special
Situations. Yeah, she's she's a rock star.
She's buying and reviving these overlooked consumer brands.
She's taking hand carved prototypes and architecting AI
driven fulfillment. Samantha really proves that
(02:10):
design love and logistics rigor can and must coexist.
So let's hear how Samantha designs for Delight, Engineers
for Scale, and why the next Commerce Edge is invisibly fast
logistics. Welcome to founder mode, Sam.
Thank you. Thanks for having me guys.
Yeah, we're we're so happy to have you.
(02:31):
You have famously hand carved the prototype to GI Rs one piece
silicone spatula in 2012. Looking back, what single
decision in those early days most shaped your design to scale
philosophy? And I think the Spatula's on
that desk right there isn't. It yeah, single decision.
Well, I think the decision was that we were going to be a brand
(02:54):
and a business and not just a product.
And that framed my mindset for basically every decision around
the product, but also around therest of what our website look
like, what our content marketinglook like, what my relationships
with factories look like and basically what my learning curve
look like. And looking back, I, I have no
(03:15):
regrets, but, but definitely that was the moment where I was
like, OK, I'm not making a product, I'm making a business.
And then the rest will follow. So Kickstarter kind of, you
know, kind of accelerated you from this like 10 unit kind of
test run to like 10,000 units and, and crazy like, you know,
almost overnight. Like how did that sort of demand
shock like kind of rewrite the way your playbook for that?
I went from planning, but also just like you said, how how did
(03:36):
those relationship with factories and stuff change that
quickly? So, OK, so the way I like to
remember this is and I have thisphrase that I I didn't coin, but
that I come back to all the time, which is the collision
with the customer. And like no plan survives the
collision with the customer. Launching our Kickstarter was a
pre market collision with the customer because obviously I
(03:57):
mean pre selling spatulas, but Ihad effectively customers that I
owed time and attention and ultimately products to.
And so I think that crowdfundingis such a fascinating tool for
that reason. Like you get to learn from your
customers, but you also have to support them much earlier on
that you might have. And I could go on for an hour
about the weird implications of that, but one thing that it for
(04:21):
sure did that you know, anecdotally is worth reflecting
on is basically put me into the head of customer service seat
from day one. And so yes, my job was product
and yes, my job was building ourwebsite and like, and also, yes,
my job was talking to factories,but my job was talking to
customers and making them happy,you know, before they had
(04:41):
anything. But they had, you know, they
hadn't even given me dollars actually.
They just pledged to give me their dollars.
I'm like, I have nothing, but I owe you a lot.
And I stayed in the kind of customer service saddle almost
indefinitely actually. I mean, I eventually built
A-Team around myself, but I participated really heavily in
(05:02):
like customer service as part ofthe product that we were
delivering the whole time. It is ultimate founder mode
right there. Woof.
GIR grew to 55 products and 500 skews before its 2021 sale to
Pattern Brands. If you were starting GIR today,
which skew rationalization rule would be non negotiable from day
(05:23):
one. I think I kind of nailed it, no?
What did you do? Then give a real answer.
I can give a real answer to this, which is OK.
So I started with this like heroproduct and the way that I made
it more than literally one thingwas to make a lot of colors.
And that was a question that waslike really, really questioned
basically. And the reason I felt that it
(05:46):
was so important was that I was trying to tell a brand story and
not just a product story. And it wasn't so utilitarian.
Everyone bought red and black. Those I knew that those would be
the colors I knew from day one. Those are the colors that were
in my kitchen. But I thought that's not enough
of a story. So I fought against skew
rationalization on colors, but eventually had to give up the
ghost on a few. So like when we later launched
(06:08):
certain kind of derivative collection, So we had sort of
like our main kitchen utensil line and and that was almost
always in 12 colors and then sometimes 7.
We have like a core 7 colors that were like the highest
selling, most popular. But when we went into another
area like like storage where we were doing like stretch lids
(06:29):
and, and these like little airtight lids that just sat on
bowls, we had to be really tightabout the strategy.
And sometimes it as few as threecolors because the Moqs were
just so high. And I just couldn't afford to
have all of that money sitting on the shelf.
So I think that the product launch strategy had to be what
(06:50):
it was because we were building collections and I've been, I was
bootstrapping. So I started with 1 and I, I
built 220 utensils and another 20 storage SKU's and so on and
so forth. I don't think I could have made
a different choice over time with that, although we did still
make some mistakes. It's just just like, but we had
to kind of make those mistakes to figure out there were
mistakes. And I don't think the strategy
(07:11):
was wrong. I just think that like the
outcome was unexpected sometimes.
But colors were a discipline anda fight.
So pattern was like a family of brands built on this kind of
shared infrastructure. Like what did that kind of
acquisition and sort of integration teach you about, you
know, just holding companies in DTC and like you know, you
mentioned kind of or highlightedlike they fall short, like what,
what have you learned and, and what would you do differently?
(07:33):
Well, I'll be careful in answering this because I, we now
run and own a family of brands and I'm like live trying not to
repeat. Yeah, mistakes of aggregators
and also patterns. Such an incredible team and such
an incredible promise. I mean, all the aggregators at
the time that were sort of becoming my point of view was
(07:54):
that the, the, the danger zone that many fell into was over
indexing on a single channel as a strategy.
And there was a time when that really worked like Meta as a
strategy worked. That could be your only channel
and you'd build a business there.
Amazon as a strategy can work. You can just be an FBA brand and
like build a really, really big business there.
(08:15):
Given their reach. I always felt that that was
super risky. And as it turns out, there were
a lot of aggregators that suffered from that.
And, and the risk is real because you've got so much
counterparty risk and like you're not in charge, you don't
own the audience, you don't makethe rules, you can't control
acquisition costs. So my kind of portfolio brands
acquisition strategy is very much pays mine to making sure
(08:38):
that we have a constantly balanced channel blend and that
at any given time if we acquire a business that's like over
indexed in one, we'll try to like balance it out, but we'll
also make acquisitions very intentionally into a
specialization like this business has like a really solid
Amazon team. Let's acquire them and acquire
the team, then we'll acquire that Channel expertise and we
(09:01):
can cross pollinate. And you know, the things that
make a single channel work are they're, they're so different
from each other. Like what makes a relationship
with Target and Costco work is not the thing that what it that
makes Shopify work and not what makes Amazon work and so on and
so forth. And it's a pretty, it's a pretty
big surface area to have like subject matter expertise in.
So like the name of the game is to continue to build expertise
(09:25):
through personnel and expose across all of those things as
consistently as possible. I love the acquisition across a
hold Co of not just brands and products, but expertise, peace
and knowledge. Like that's This is why you're
here, Sam, because this is very smart.
After the exit you, you launchedManifest, which is a design
studio and three PL. What pain point did you keep
(09:48):
seeing in other brands that convinced you vertical
integration of design factory fulfillment was the right
answer? The biggest 1 is just not
understanding what makes the work work right.
Like if your business is making things and you don't understand
how things are made, then you can't pull on the right levers
of inefficiency for that thing. And this is true of like, so
(10:10):
this is the reason I vertically integrated was if I wanted my
unit economics on an X works basis to be better, I needed to
know the right questions to ask.You can't just say make it
cheaper or or at least you can, but that's not totally a fair
question to ask a trading partner.
It's not very collaborative. But if instead you can say, hey,
(10:31):
for this material, is there an alternative that we can swap
that will sufficiently fulfill the product promise but will be
less expensive for us, but not create problems for you?
Then you get a trading partner that's like, oh, totally, yeah,
that's easy to swap out. It doesn't hit our bottom line.
It will help your bottom line. Let's collaborate.
(10:52):
That's true of fulfillment operations too.
I can't tell you how many times as a three PL. we'd have a
customer ask a question that like is well meaning but
uneducated. And our team would come to us
and say, you guys, how are we going to do this?
I'll give you a perfect example,an urgent wholesale order that
surprise needs to ship yesterday, but needs these
(11:13):
special labels, which we don't have for you yet because our
Time Team hasn't had time to do it.
But I'm going to e-mail them to you at the end of the day.
And, and it's 12 pallets and what's great about this order
for, you know, for the brand hypothetically, is that it is
clearing out a bunch of back stock that they haven't had to
touch in months. So it's awesome, like
(11:35):
translating inventory into dollars.
I mean, manifest site literally says learning curves are
expensive. Don't start at score one.
Like what's the most expensive tuition check that you've ever
paid? Like kind of on this list
Justics journey and like you know, how do you help others
avoid these? The most expensive?
There's two. I'm going to give you 2.
The first most expensive was having an inventory management
(11:57):
system that was disconnected from our shipping system.
And the shipping system, when wesent the orders through it hit
an API call limit. I've told this story before, but
I'll tell it really specifically.
It's rad. So we hit an API limit going
pushing orders from from it was Magento.
I'm so old. So then we were out of stock
(12:18):
when a huge wholesale order camein and we were like, Oh yeah, no
problem. So we accept the order and we go
to fill it and they're like the shelf.
There's nothing on the shelf. I'm like, what are you talking
about? There's nothing on the shelf.
500 units of that color. They're like, no, you don't.
So then we had to go back to thetraining partner and man, that
was a really, really expensive mistake.
(12:39):
Well, this is Magento fault. I think that's what we learned
from all of this. There's got to be somebody to
blame my. Favorite my favorite thing you
just said was about warehouses. close your eyes and go as fast
as you can, which could be an alternate title to this podcast,
this founder mode, just, you know, just go as fast as you
can. Just go just power through it.
So let's switch gears to endlesscommerce, which bills itself as
commerce OS that replaces the chaotic tech stack.
(13:03):
What convinced you that the market needed a another ERP?
A brand new ERP rather than incremental middleware?
Well, I convinced myself by building it and like in the most
cobbled together but highly functional way.
And by the time sold business, that sold business #1 and built
business #2 and it was brewing on this idea for business number
(13:25):
three or five or whatever we're at right now.
I was like, there is a better way because I just, I just did
it, but it's not shareable, which is a huge problem.
And it's not that scalable, which is it was scaled to the
scale of my business. So okay, it's, you know, scale
to 8 figures, but it wasn't scale to 9 or 10 figures, which
is where we wanted to go. So when I was building this
(13:46):
proto software thing, I didn't even know what Erps were.
I just knew what my problems were and what my friends
problems were. And then I was like inheriting
other people's problems by beingan agency and trying to
understand how to solve through those.
And so I didn't start endless commerce because I saw a big
dollar sign above the door that was like, walk through this and
(14:08):
you'll, you'll make enterprise SAS that will like be venture
scale. I just saw like a problem to
solve. That was not just my problem,
although mine alone was like salient enough that I would have
built it anyway. But I'd seen so many other
people's similar problems. And, and I think the thing that
is making it really interesting to build right now is that the
(14:29):
way that we build software is transforming at, I mean,
thousands of miles a minute. The tools that I and my team are
using are transforming every week.
And when we go through the kind of 2010 to 2020 minute of
software development, there's a lot of predictableness to it.
And there there is a predictability to how you build
a team, to what tools you use. Of course there's like higher
(14:52):
scaled ways to do it and there'scheap tools and expensive tools,
but in general the kind of like the rhythm of software was
pretty stable in that vintage. And the rhythm of software
development is so unstable rightnow.
It's so volatile and it's so funas a result, because we can use
these new tools to build in a new way and to build much
(15:16):
faster. And and we're sort of like
trying to be who I think we are on the cutting edge of
understanding how business owners and operators are going
to need to transition themselves.
Right? Like there's, and I'll just say
it out loud, it's AI. People can all of a sudden build
their own tools to help themselves operate their
businesses. Like building a basic order
(15:36):
management system, logging system is an afternoon for
someone who is like, you know, into vibe coding enough to get
the job done. That doesn't connect to
anything. So it can deliver value to the
operator and to their business. But the real value is to build
something quickly and then connect it to everything else.
(15:57):
Because the world of commerce and retail moves so much more
slowly. It must, right?
And it's physical. It's like, it's dusty and
sweaty. So the excitement for me is to
build using like these blazinglyfuturistic new tools in a way
that is still like grounded in in like the real world
(16:17):
operations of it all. And then to create this through
line connection of like those things talking to each other.
And that has been really hard, really fun.
No, it's cool. I mean, we've talked about some
other folks with the kind of AI and just how it, you know, in
our own businesses, like how it's just transitioning, like
how we build everything. And I one thing I'm curious,
like, you know, so obviously this solves a lot of operational
(16:39):
hurdles. And I'm wondering like when you
come at it and you sort of say, hey, we have AI to sort of build
solutions a lot quicker and we have this sort of dusty, slow
moving logistics problem. Like how much more custom are
the solutions now for your customers than they were maybe
like you said, in the old vintage of SAS where it's like,
hey, we try to build a product and then we sell our customers
customer product. We're in today's SAS.
(17:00):
It's like you can almost build asolution and then that thing can
almost be more highly customized.
Are you seeing that in sort of your clients where you're able
to be more bespoke or specific because the cost of being
bespoke now you can kind of vibecode your way if you were to
like giving them a custom solution that then connects into
the smarts of all the stuff thatyou guys have figured out and
already kind of pre built? So our job is to deliver kind of
(17:23):
predictable interfaces that allow people to interact with
them in in like reliable ways, but that are unique to the
operator. And that I think is the
wonderfulness of building in this time is that we can do that
scalably without like being bogged down.
Endless is using AI to flag inventory and routing errors
(17:45):
before they're costly mistakes like the example you gave us.
Where do you see the biggest near term AI win inside the
supply chain? Is it forecasting freight
optimization, returns triage or this kind of ERP personalization
you just described? Like where is the where is the
big opportunity right now? The biggest opportunity I see is
most easily distilled into the this idea of just in time
(18:07):
inventory. In other words, having the
product available to your customer in the right moment,
the buying moment for them, is ahuge cost efficiency.
For businesses, there are two alternatives.
The order comes and you don't have inventory to fill it.
That's like money left on the table or you have inventory
sitting on the shelf gathering dust.
And that's really expensive because you can't deploy that
(18:29):
capital on something else like acquiring another customer.
So the net, net, and I'm boilingit down into 1, making it sound
so easy, just in time inventory,there's actually a lot that has
to go right and be connected in order to achieve that vision.
But that's what I'm trying to achieve on behalf of businesses
for whom, large or small, that is effectively the objective of
(18:51):
a consumer organization is to create the availability of a
product presented to the customer at the time of need.
That's the ball game. So in a nutshell, that's what
I'm trying to do. And I think that AI and these
new tools can influence that by allowing us to, well, a lot of
things. One, optimize the workflow of
(19:12):
getting the inventory there to help us better predict how much
is needed, how much will be too much.
And there's some really fun and easy examples of that.
Like I know that the the time that supply chain management
takes balloons like it accordions according to the time
of year. So let's just use the example of
a an overseas based supply chainthat has about 30 days of
(19:35):
production lead time for and then another 30 days of transit.
Now put a holiday in the middle of it, whether that's AUS based
sales holiday or the overseas based labor holiday or whatever
it is. And then close the Suez Canal.
Now my life like pretty predictable 60 to 70 day lead
time. I mean it can accordion to.
(19:56):
Like a. 100 days. And if I can help customers be
more predictable, predictive about it, then they'll place
their purchase orders at a time when there's less port
congestion and Oh my gosh, prices are cheaper because
demand went down, supply went up.
And so there's all of these efficiencies that you can
extract out of. Being more predictive in what's
(20:18):
going to happen in the business and and that really excites me
because it'll help more businesses grow faster.
Yeah, you mentioned kind of the the freight, the Suez Canal.
And I think as you see like this, you know, freight
volatility has been this kind ofcraziness since post pandemic.
Like how do you decide like whento diversify like ports and
shipping versus negotiating withlike an existing carrier?
Like how much of that you know, as you kind of look at this full
(20:38):
stack thing end to end. And then maybe with tariffs as
well, like, you know, changes where these things come in, if
you land, you know, north of a border or South of a border
these days, like that could radically change the cost of
something. You know, if we as a global
community want infinitely flexible supply chains, we can
Orient around that. I think there's some coolness in
it, you know, and, and, and a lot of diversification and
(21:00):
probably global commerce that would come out of it.
But it's a decades long job to be done.
And I think it's a global, it's a global choice ultimately, even
though there's a lot of national, international friction
around it all. Right.
Let's talk about the one commerce trend that you think is
overhyped and the one that is underappreciated heading into
this next year. What what would those be?
(21:22):
And and kind of why? Commerce trend that's overhyped,
probably. I'm going to give this, I'm
going to do the annoying thing. I'm going to make the weakness
of strength and give the same answer for both.
It's buying. It's buying through an LLM
interface. It's commerce and ChatGPT.
So I it's such a double edged sword.
I think that people like to be in the the aura of a brand,
(21:44):
interacting with the brand. Buying from a brand is so much
more than just I want this T-shirt at this time, I need a
plain white tee and serve it up to me now.
Brands are organisms that we identify with and extracting or
sort of like backing off of the brand ethos.
Being a part of commerce I thinkis really difficult for people.
(22:07):
And so I'm really excited for what it means for a bot that
knows me so, so well and knows all my taste and my purchase
history to be like, Sam, you need this.
Really. Yes, I do.
And you know, and they're, thesemodels are so they're so
understanding and so good at rhetoric and convincing that I,
(22:28):
I bet there's an entire, I don'tknow how the industry is going
to going to like build itself around this.
But like, there is something to be said for being convinced by a
chatbot like you need this. I'm really excited and also
terrified. Persuasion.
But I think that the overhyped element of it is that people
still create or extract part of their own identity from
(22:51):
interacting with brands. You know, there's a reason,
there's a reason that our closets are sort of like filled
with, you know, jeans from the same place and jackets from the
same place and shoes from our favorite brand.
And I don't know how, I don't know how these bots are going to
deal with that. So it's not maybe, maybe it's
not that it's over height in my opinion, but but that there
there will be a loss of something in that.
(23:13):
And I don't know how we'll replace it, except you need
that. This was great, Sam, where can
folks find you online and any special offers or things that
you can share with folks listening or watching?
Yeah, absolutely. So Endless commerce.com and
that's like my my main site. I'm also on LinkedIn.
You can find me at Samantha Roseand super lapsed on Twitter, but
(23:35):
I'm there as sorry robots. And for anyone who wants to give
Endless Commerce a try, I'm offering two free months and
free onboarding, which I think is sort of like.
Awesome. Basically the, you know, the
Kevin and Jason special love. It love it.
Earlier, earlier you were referring to the to warehousing
is sweaty and dusty and I said that could be what people call
(23:56):
us too, probably so, so thanks. Thank you so much, Sam for being
with us on founder mode. It was so great to hear your
take on commerce and design in 2025.
Here at Gold Sam's mantra, you know no product can survive a
collision with the customer. Yeah, she dropped so much
knowledge like she dropped shipsproducts.
Kevin, what were your big takeaways?
Yeah, a bunch, I mean think brand, not just product, right?
(24:18):
I mean the business mindset for for from Dave one drives that
scale, right. How are you influencing that
sort of broad sort of approach? And then, I mean, Kickstarter
sort of forced that customer obsession, right?
So from early, I mean, you haven't even really sold them
something, right? But you've sold them a promise.
And that promise, you know, sortof leads to that customer
satisfaction and just obsession over how do you take care of the
customer all the way until they get your product colors, build
(24:40):
stories, right? It's really skews build risk.
But strategically, if you can balance that variety with just
sort of inventory discipline of like, hey, what are the ones
that are actually going to sell?But how do you have the story
sort of that, you know, sort of rainbow approach and then never
bet on one channel. I think it was great.
I mean, she's acquiring companies and bringing things in
with strength to use that strength to build out, you know,
potential areas for opportunity and other businesses.
(25:01):
And I think that's really smart.And then really just know how
things get made. I mean, if you're going to go
back and push on a vendor or trading partner, you know,
having that vertical integrationand then the AI to unlock, you
know, what are those supply chains efficiencies and how do
you sort of micro manage that across the whole picture all?
Right, so if your product is stuck on a slow boat or it's
still in a designer's head, share this episode with your
crew. Smash, subscribe, drop a quick
(25:22):
review and help more builders find the show.
Links to Samantha's website, endlesscommerce.com and her
socials will be in the description and show notes.
And next time we're going to leave the warehouse and the
supply chain and go from Hollywood to the high rise
designing robots with another Rockstar founder.
Remember, when margins are razorthin, the boldest move is to
make the box as smart as the product inside.
No plan survives the collision with the customer.
Launching our Kickstarter was a pre market collision with the
customer because I used to, I mean see pre selling spatulas,
but I had effectively customers that I owed time and attention
and ultimately products to. And we're back with another
(00:23):
episode of Founder Mode. Hey, Jason.
Hey Kevin, we're going to peek under the hood of today's
commerce revolution where ingenious design meets
bulletproof logistics. So Kevin, when a founder
sketches the next must have product, what stalls momentum
more perfecting the form factor or taming the supply chain?
Yeah, they're kind of like twins.
I mean, beautiful design withoutthe ability to sort of deliver
(00:43):
and ship. But I mean, I know I've seen a
ton of things online where I've kind of saw a pre release or
ordered something and then it just, you know, after that it
just stumbled, right. No updates, never got there.
And so logistics really is a kind of a key part of it.
And you know, the danger is like, you chase these viral
aesthetics before you've really stress tested that sort of
fulfillment. Yeah, margins will disappear,
customers will vent on X and allthe social networks, and the
(01:06):
TikTok hype train derails at thewarehouse door.
Today, I mean, we're diving kindof into the future of commerce,
like what are these trends in product design and logistics?
And really how do you craft products that people obsess over
and then ship them in this sort of like there's nothing better
than ordering something and seeing like, you know, it's
shipped and then out for delivery the next day.
And you're like, wow, that's just the the beautiful sense I
(01:27):
love. The Amazon Prime, it'll be here
today in a couple hours. Like, why would I ever go to a
store again? That's maybe a bad thing.
So we're talking to someone who's lived every node of that
journey from Kickstarter to acquisition, and now building
the tools that power modern brands.
Yeah, we're talking to Samantha Rose, multi exit founder,
investor, operator in the consumer space.
(01:48):
She's currently leads Endless Commerce, a commerce enablement
platform for high growth brands,and Hologram Capital, where she
directs investment strategy for turnarounds in Special
Situations. Yeah, she's she's a rock star.
She's buying and reviving these overlooked consumer brands.
She's taking hand carved prototypes and architecting AI
driven fulfillment. Samantha really proves that
(02:10):
design love and logistics rigor can and must coexist.
So let's hear how Samantha designs for Delight, Engineers
for Scale, and why the next Commerce Edge is invisibly fast
logistics. Welcome to founder mode, Sam.
Thank you. Thanks for having me guys.
Yeah, we're we're so happy to have you.
(02:31):
You have famously hand carved the prototype to GI Rs one piece
silicone spatula in 2012. Looking back, what single
decision in those early days most shaped your design to scale
philosophy? And I think the Spatula's on
that desk right there isn't. It yeah, single decision.
Well, I think the decision was that we were going to be a brand
(02:54):
and a business and not just a product.
And that framed my mindset for basically every decision around
the product, but also around therest of what our website look
like, what our content marketinglook like, what my relationships
with factories look like and basically what my learning curve
look like. And looking back, I, I have no
(03:15):
regrets, but, but definitely that was the moment where I was
like, OK, I'm not making a product, I'm making a business.
And then the rest will follow. So Kickstarter kind of, you
know, kind of accelerated you from this like 10 unit kind of
test run to like 10,000 units and, and crazy like, you know,
almost overnight. Like how did that sort of demand
shock like kind of rewrite the way your playbook for that?
I went from planning, but also just like you said, how how did
(03:36):
those relationship with factories and stuff change that
quickly? So, OK, so the way I like to
remember this is and I have thisphrase that I I didn't coin, but
that I come back to all the time, which is the collision
with the customer. And like no plan survives the
collision with the customer. Launching our Kickstarter was a
pre market collision with the customer because obviously I
(03:57):
mean pre selling spatulas, but Ihad effectively customers that I
owed time and attention and ultimately products to.
And so I think that crowdfundingis such a fascinating tool for
that reason. Like you get to learn from your
customers, but you also have to support them much earlier on
that you might have. And I could go on for an hour
about the weird implications of that, but one thing that it for
(04:21):
sure did that you know, anecdotally is worth reflecting
on is basically put me into the head of customer service seat
from day one. And so yes, my job was product
and yes, my job was building ourwebsite and like, and also, yes,
my job was talking to factories,but my job was talking to
customers and making them happy,you know, before they had
(04:41):
anything. But they had, you know, they
hadn't even given me dollars actually.
They just pledged to give me their dollars.
I'm like, I have nothing, but I owe you a lot.
And I stayed in the kind of customer service saddle almost
indefinitely actually. I mean, I eventually built
A-Team around myself, but I participated really heavily in
(05:02):
like customer service as part ofthe product that we were
delivering the whole time. It is ultimate founder mode
right there. Woof.
GIR grew to 55 products and 500 skews before its 2021 sale to
Pattern Brands. If you were starting GIR today,
which skew rationalization rule would be non negotiable from day
(05:23):
one. I think I kind of nailed it, no?
What did you do? Then give a real answer.
I can give a real answer to this, which is OK.
So I started with this like heroproduct and the way that I made
it more than literally one thingwas to make a lot of colors.
And that was a question that waslike really, really questioned
basically. And the reason I felt that it
(05:46):
was so important was that I was trying to tell a brand story and
not just a product story. And it wasn't so utilitarian.
Everyone bought red and black. Those I knew that those would be
the colors I knew from day one. Those are the colors that were
in my kitchen. But I thought that's not enough
of a story. So I fought against skew
rationalization on colors, but eventually had to give up the
ghost on a few. So like when we later launched
(06:08):
certain kind of derivative collection, So we had sort of
like our main kitchen utensil line and and that was almost
always in 12 colors and then sometimes 7.
We have like a core 7 colors that were like the highest
selling, most popular. But when we went into another
area like like storage where we were doing like stretch lids
(06:29):
and, and these like little airtight lids that just sat on
bowls, we had to be really tightabout the strategy.
And sometimes it as few as threecolors because the Moqs were
just so high. And I just couldn't afford to
have all of that money sitting on the shelf.
So I think that the product launch strategy had to be what
(06:50):
it was because we were building collections and I've been, I was
bootstrapping. So I started with 1 and I, I
built 220 utensils and another 20 storage SKU's and so on and
so forth. I don't think I could have made
a different choice over time with that, although we did still
make some mistakes. It's just just like, but we had
to kind of make those mistakes to figure out there were
mistakes. And I don't think the strategy
(07:11):
was wrong. I just think that like the
outcome was unexpected sometimes.
But colors were a discipline anda fight.
So pattern was like a family of brands built on this kind of
shared infrastructure. Like what did that kind of
acquisition and sort of integration teach you about, you
know, just holding companies in DTC and like you know, you
mentioned kind of or highlightedlike they fall short, like what,
what have you learned and, and what would you do differently?
(07:33):
Well, I'll be careful in answering this because I, we now
run and own a family of brands and I'm like live trying not to
repeat. Yeah, mistakes of aggregators
and also patterns. Such an incredible team and such
an incredible promise. I mean, all the aggregators at
the time that were sort of becoming my point of view was
(07:54):
that the, the, the danger zone that many fell into was over
indexing on a single channel as a strategy.
And there was a time when that really worked like Meta as a
strategy worked. That could be your only channel
and you'd build a business there.
Amazon as a strategy can work. You can just be an FBA brand and
like build a really, really big business there.
(08:15):
Given their reach. I always felt that that was
super risky. And as it turns out, there were
a lot of aggregators that suffered from that.
And, and the risk is real because you've got so much
counterparty risk and like you're not in charge, you don't
own the audience, you don't makethe rules, you can't control
acquisition costs. So my kind of portfolio brands
acquisition strategy is very much pays mine to making sure
(08:38):
that we have a constantly balanced channel blend and that
at any given time if we acquire a business that's like over
indexed in one, we'll try to like balance it out, but we'll
also make acquisitions very intentionally into a
specialization like this business has like a really solid
Amazon team. Let's acquire them and acquire
the team, then we'll acquire that Channel expertise and we
(09:01):
can cross pollinate. And you know, the things that
make a single channel work are they're, they're so different
from each other. Like what makes a relationship
with Target and Costco work is not the thing that what it that
makes Shopify work and not what makes Amazon work and so on and
so forth. And it's a pretty, it's a pretty
big surface area to have like subject matter expertise in.
So like the name of the game is to continue to build expertise
(09:25):
through personnel and expose across all of those things as
consistently as possible. I love the acquisition across a
hold Co of not just brands and products, but expertise, peace
and knowledge. Like that's This is why you're
here, Sam, because this is very smart.
After the exit you, you launchedManifest, which is a design
studio and three PL. What pain point did you keep
(09:48):
seeing in other brands that convinced you vertical
integration of design factory fulfillment was the right
answer? The biggest 1 is just not
understanding what makes the work work right.
Like if your business is making things and you don't understand
how things are made, then you can't pull on the right levers
of inefficiency for that thing. And this is true of like, so
(10:10):
this is the reason I vertically integrated was if I wanted my
unit economics on an X works basis to be better, I needed to
know the right questions to ask.You can't just say make it
cheaper or or at least you can, but that's not totally a fair
question to ask a trading partner.
It's not very collaborative. But if instead you can say, hey,
(10:31):
for this material, is there an alternative that we can swap
that will sufficiently fulfill the product promise but will be
less expensive for us, but not create problems for you?
Then you get a trading partner that's like, oh, totally, yeah,
that's easy to swap out. It doesn't hit our bottom line.
It will help your bottom line. Let's collaborate.
(10:52):
That's true of fulfillment operations too.
I can't tell you how many times as a three PL. we'd have a
customer ask a question that like is well meaning but
uneducated. And our team would come to us
and say, you guys, how are we going to do this?
I'll give you a perfect example,an urgent wholesale order that
surprise needs to ship yesterday, but needs these
(11:13):
special labels, which we don't have for you yet because our
Time Team hasn't had time to do it.
But I'm going to e-mail them to you at the end of the day.
And, and it's 12 pallets and what's great about this order
for, you know, for the brand hypothetically, is that it is
clearing out a bunch of back stock that they haven't had to
touch in months. So it's awesome, like
(11:35):
translating inventory into dollars.
I mean, manifest site literally says learning curves are
expensive. Don't start at score one.
Like what's the most expensive tuition check that you've ever
paid? Like kind of on this list
Justics journey and like you know, how do you help others
avoid these? The most expensive?
There's two. I'm going to give you 2.
The first most expensive was having an inventory management
(11:57):
system that was disconnected from our shipping system.
And the shipping system, when wesent the orders through it hit
an API call limit. I've told this story before, but
I'll tell it really specifically.
It's rad. So we hit an API limit going
pushing orders from from it was Magento.
I'm so old. So then we were out of stock
(12:18):
when a huge wholesale order camein and we were like, Oh yeah, no
problem. So we accept the order and we go
to fill it and they're like the shelf.
There's nothing on the shelf. I'm like, what are you talking
about? There's nothing on the shelf.
500 units of that color. They're like, no, you don't.
So then we had to go back to thetraining partner and man, that
was a really, really expensive mistake.
(12:39):
Well, this is Magento fault. I think that's what we learned
from all of this. There's got to be somebody to
blame my. Favorite my favorite thing you
just said was about warehouses. close your eyes and go as fast
as you can, which could be an alternate title to this podcast,
this founder mode, just, you know, just go as fast as you
can. Just go just power through it.
So let's switch gears to endlesscommerce, which bills itself as
commerce OS that replaces the chaotic tech stack.
(13:03):
What convinced you that the market needed a another ERP?
A brand new ERP rather than incremental middleware?
Well, I convinced myself by building it and like in the most
cobbled together but highly functional way.
And by the time sold business, that sold business #1 and built
business #2 and it was brewing on this idea for business number
(13:25):
three or five or whatever we're at right now.
I was like, there is a better way because I just, I just did
it, but it's not shareable, which is a huge problem.
And it's not that scalable, which is it was scaled to the
scale of my business. So okay, it's, you know, scale
to 8 figures, but it wasn't scale to 9 or 10 figures, which
is where we wanted to go. So when I was building this
(13:46):
proto software thing, I didn't even know what Erps were.
I just knew what my problems were and what my friends
problems were. And then I was like inheriting
other people's problems by beingan agency and trying to
understand how to solve through those.
And so I didn't start endless commerce because I saw a big
dollar sign above the door that was like, walk through this and
(14:08):
you'll, you'll make enterprise SAS that will like be venture
scale. I just saw like a problem to
solve. That was not just my problem,
although mine alone was like salient enough that I would have
built it anyway. But I'd seen so many other
people's similar problems. And, and I think the thing that
is making it really interesting to build right now is that the
(14:29):
way that we build software is transforming at, I mean,
thousands of miles a minute. The tools that I and my team are
using are transforming every week.
And when we go through the kind of 2010 to 2020 minute of
software development, there's a lot of predictableness to it.
And there there is a predictability to how you build
a team, to what tools you use. Of course there's like higher
(14:52):
scaled ways to do it and there'scheap tools and expensive tools,
but in general the kind of like the rhythm of software was
pretty stable in that vintage. And the rhythm of software
development is so unstable rightnow.
It's so volatile and it's so funas a result, because we can use
these new tools to build in a new way and to build much
(15:16):
faster. And and we're sort of like
trying to be who I think we are on the cutting edge of
understanding how business owners and operators are going
to need to transition themselves.
Right? Like there's, and I'll just say
it out loud, it's AI. People can all of a sudden build
their own tools to help themselves operate their
businesses. Like building a basic order
(15:36):
management system, logging system is an afternoon for
someone who is like, you know, into vibe coding enough to get
the job done. That doesn't connect to
anything. So it can deliver value to the
operator and to their business. But the real value is to build
something quickly and then connect it to everything else.
(15:57):
Because the world of commerce and retail moves so much more
slowly. It must, right?
And it's physical. It's like, it's dusty and
sweaty. So the excitement for me is to
build using like these blazinglyfuturistic new tools in a way
that is still like grounded in in like the real world
(16:17):
operations of it all. And then to create this through
line connection of like those things talking to each other.
And that has been really hard, really fun.
No, it's cool. I mean, we've talked about some
other folks with the kind of AI and just how it, you know, in
our own businesses, like how it's just transitioning, like
how we build everything. And I one thing I'm curious,
like, you know, so obviously this solves a lot of operational
(16:39):
hurdles. And I'm wondering like when you
come at it and you sort of say, hey, we have AI to sort of build
solutions a lot quicker and we have this sort of dusty, slow
moving logistics problem. Like how much more custom are
the solutions now for your customers than they were maybe
like you said, in the old vintage of SAS where it's like,
hey, we try to build a product and then we sell our customers
customer product. We're in today's SAS.
(17:00):
It's like you can almost build asolution and then that thing can
almost be more highly customized.
Are you seeing that in sort of your clients where you're able
to be more bespoke or specific because the cost of being
bespoke now you can kind of vibecode your way if you were to
like giving them a custom solution that then connects into
the smarts of all the stuff thatyou guys have figured out and
already kind of pre built? So our job is to deliver kind of
(17:23):
predictable interfaces that allow people to interact with
them in in like reliable ways, but that are unique to the
operator. And that I think is the
wonderfulness of building in this time is that we can do that
scalably without like being bogged down.
Endless is using AI to flag inventory and routing errors
(17:45):
before they're costly mistakes like the example you gave us.
Where do you see the biggest near term AI win inside the
supply chain? Is it forecasting freight
optimization, returns triage or this kind of ERP personalization
you just described? Like where is the where is the
big opportunity right now? The biggest opportunity I see is
most easily distilled into the this idea of just in time
(18:07):
inventory. In other words, having the
product available to your customer in the right moment,
the buying moment for them, is ahuge cost efficiency.
For businesses, there are two alternatives.
The order comes and you don't have inventory to fill it.
That's like money left on the table or you have inventory
sitting on the shelf gathering dust.
And that's really expensive because you can't deploy that
(18:29):
capital on something else like acquiring another customer.
So the net, net, and I'm boilingit down into 1, making it sound
so easy, just in time inventory,there's actually a lot that has
to go right and be connected in order to achieve that vision.
But that's what I'm trying to achieve on behalf of businesses
for whom, large or small, that is effectively the objective of
(18:51):
a consumer organization is to create the availability of a
product presented to the customer at the time of need.
That's the ball game. So in a nutshell, that's what
I'm trying to do. And I think that AI and these
new tools can influence that by allowing us to, well, a lot of
things. One, optimize the workflow of
(19:12):
getting the inventory there to help us better predict how much
is needed, how much will be too much.
And there's some really fun and easy examples of that.
Like I know that the the time that supply chain management
takes balloons like it accordions according to the time
of year. So let's just use the example of
a an overseas based supply chainthat has about 30 days of
(19:35):
production lead time for and then another 30 days of transit.
Now put a holiday in the middle of it, whether that's AUS based
sales holiday or the overseas based labor holiday or whatever
it is. And then close the Suez Canal.
Now my life like pretty predictable 60 to 70 day lead
time. I mean it can accordion to.
(19:56):
Like a. 100 days. And if I can help customers be
more predictable, predictive about it, then they'll place
their purchase orders at a time when there's less port
congestion and Oh my gosh, prices are cheaper because
demand went down, supply went up.
And so there's all of these efficiencies that you can
extract out of. Being more predictive in what's
(20:18):
going to happen in the business and and that really excites me
because it'll help more businesses grow faster.
Yeah, you mentioned kind of the the freight, the Suez Canal.
And I think as you see like this, you know, freight
volatility has been this kind ofcraziness since post pandemic.
Like how do you decide like whento diversify like ports and
shipping versus negotiating withlike an existing carrier?
Like how much of that you know, as you kind of look at this full
(20:38):
stack thing end to end. And then maybe with tariffs as
well, like, you know, changes where these things come in, if
you land, you know, north of a border or South of a border
these days, like that could radically change the cost of
something. You know, if we as a global
community want infinitely flexible supply chains, we can
Orient around that. I think there's some coolness in
it, you know, and, and, and a lot of diversification and
(21:00):
probably global commerce that would come out of it.
But it's a decades long job to be done.
And I think it's a global, it's a global choice ultimately, even
though there's a lot of national, international friction
around it all. Right.
Let's talk about the one commerce trend that you think is
overhyped and the one that is underappreciated heading into
this next year. What what would those be?
(21:22):
And and kind of why? Commerce trend that's overhyped,
probably. I'm going to give this, I'm
going to do the annoying thing. I'm going to make the weakness
of strength and give the same answer for both.
It's buying. It's buying through an LLM
interface. It's commerce and ChatGPT.
So I it's such a double edged sword.
I think that people like to be in the the aura of a brand,
(21:44):
interacting with the brand. Buying from a brand is so much
more than just I want this T-shirt at this time, I need a
plain white tee and serve it up to me now.
Brands are organisms that we identify with and extracting or
sort of like backing off of the brand ethos.
Being a part of commerce I thinkis really difficult for people.
(22:07):
And so I'm really excited for what it means for a bot that
knows me so, so well and knows all my taste and my purchase
history to be like, Sam, you need this.
Really. Yes, I do.
And you know, and they're, thesemodels are so they're so
understanding and so good at rhetoric and convincing that I,
(22:28):
I bet there's an entire, I don'tknow how the industry is going
to going to like build itself around this.
But like, there is something to be said for being convinced by a
chatbot like you need this. I'm really excited and also
terrified. Persuasion.
But I think that the overhyped element of it is that people
still create or extract part of their own identity from
(22:51):
interacting with brands. You know, there's a reason,
there's a reason that our closets are sort of like filled
with, you know, jeans from the same place and jackets from the
same place and shoes from our favorite brand.
And I don't know how, I don't know how these bots are going to
deal with that. So it's not maybe, maybe it's
not that it's over height in my opinion, but but that there
there will be a loss of something in that.
(23:13):
And I don't know how we'll replace it, except you need
that. This was great, Sam, where can
folks find you online and any special offers or things that
you can share with folks listening or watching?
Yeah, absolutely. So Endless commerce.com and
that's like my my main site. I'm also on LinkedIn.
You can find me at Samantha Roseand super lapsed on Twitter, but
(23:35):
I'm there as sorry robots. And for anyone who wants to give
Endless Commerce a try, I'm offering two free months and
free onboarding, which I think is sort of like.
Awesome. Basically the, you know, the
Kevin and Jason special love. It love it.
Earlier, earlier you were referring to the to warehousing
is sweaty and dusty and I said that could be what people call
(23:56):
us too, probably so, so thanks. Thank you so much, Sam for being
with us on founder mode. It was so great to hear your
take on commerce and design in 2025.
Here at Gold Sam's mantra, you know no product can survive a
collision with the customer. Yeah, she dropped so much
knowledge like she dropped shipsproducts.
Kevin, what were your big takeaways?
Yeah, a bunch, I mean think brand, not just product, right?
(24:18):
I mean the business mindset for for from Dave one drives that
scale, right. How are you influencing that
sort of broad sort of approach? And then, I mean, Kickstarter
sort of forced that customer obsession, right?
So from early, I mean, you haven't even really sold them
something, right? But you've sold them a promise.
And that promise, you know, sortof leads to that customer
satisfaction and just obsession over how do you take care of the
customer all the way until they get your product colors, build
(24:40):
stories, right? It's really skews build risk.
But strategically, if you can balance that variety with just
sort of inventory discipline of like, hey, what are the ones
that are actually going to sell?But how do you have the story
sort of that, you know, sort of rainbow approach and then never
bet on one channel. I think it was great.
I mean, she's acquiring companies and bringing things in
with strength to use that strength to build out, you know,
potential areas for opportunity and other businesses.
(25:01):
And I think that's really smart.And then really just know how
things get made. I mean, if you're going to go
back and push on a vendor or trading partner, you know,
having that vertical integrationand then the AI to unlock, you
know, what are those supply chains efficiencies and how do
you sort of micro manage that across the whole picture all?
Right, so if your product is stuck on a slow boat or it's
still in a designer's head, share this episode with your
crew. Smash, subscribe, drop a quick
(25:22):
review and help more builders find the show.
Links to Samantha's website, endlesscommerce.com and her
socials will be in the description and show notes.
And next time we're going to leave the warehouse and the
supply chain and go from Hollywood to the high rise
designing robots with another Rockstar founder.
Remember, when margins are razorthin, the boldest move is to
make the box as smart as the product inside.
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