Nike walked out of boutique fitness, Tom Holland walked into Vuori And one SMS founder is rethinking how brands talk to customers
Hey DTC fam and Happy Thursday,
Something kept coming up as I was putting this issue together.
Almost every story this week is really about a brand figuring out where it belongs. AG1 spent 15 years saying no to retail and is finally saying yes. Nike tried boutique fitness, decided it was not their game, and got out. Levi’s is leaning into AI while being careful not to lose the thing that makes Levi’s, Levi’s. Vuori brought in Tom Holland not as a spokesperson but as an actual partner with equity.
None of these are small decisions. And I think how each of them plays out over the next few years is going to tell us a lot about who is really building versus who is just moving.
Okay. Let us get into it.
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Vuori just announced a multi-year partnership with Tom Holland and honestly the structure of the deal is what caught my attention.
This is not a traditional ambassador arrangement. Holland is coming in as a creative, strategic, and financial partner. He co-created the spring campaign “Play It as It Lies” with his brother Harry Holland directing, and he has actual equity in the brand. The campaign itself was shot in Portugal and uses golf as a way into talking about resilience and how you deal with things you cannot control. It is cinematic and personal and feels nothing like a typical brand activation.
What I keep coming back to is that Holland was already a Vuori customer before any deal was on the table. That matters. He also built Bero, his non-alcoholic beer brand, from a genuinely personal place after going public about sobriety. He knows what it means to build something tied to real conviction rather than just a commercial opportunity.
Vuori CEO Joe Kudla said they are measuring the partnership through brand affinity over time, not campaign metrics. That is a different way to think about it, and I think it is the right one.
Most SMS tools were built to send. Charlie Reverte built Intellica to listen.
The idea did not come from a pitch deck. It came from watching DTC brands inside Atomic VC’s own portfolio run SMS like a broadcast tower and then wonder why it was not working. Text blasts converting at 2%. Checkout recovery sitting somewhere between 1 and 4%. The most human moment in the buying journey, fully automated, and completely disconnected from the actual person on the other end.
Charlie’s read was that the problem was not the message. It was the model. So Intellica took a different direction entirely: instead of building a better blast, they built a team of US-based human concierges who step in over SMS and iMessage to have real conversations, answer objections, close purchases, and build the kind of 1:1 relationships that compound into LTV over time.
We asked Charlie a few questions about what he has learned building it.
Most brands think low conversions are a messaging problem. What is the real issue?
“They think low conversions are a messaging problem. It’s a relationship problem. The real problem is that SMS is treated like a broadcast channel instead of a relationship channel. Brands end up handing out discounts blindly because they don’t know why people are abandoning. The issue isn’t SMS. It’s that it isn’t treated like a conversation tool.”
What makes Intellica different from every other SMS tool out there?
“Most brands automate transactions. We build relationships. Intellica becomes your outsourced sales and concierge team: US-based humans trained to your voice, stepping in to answer questions, close purchases, and create connection. We only charge 10% when a customer clicks our link or uses our code within 24 hours. If they buy later on their own, the brand keeps 100%. No setup fees, no contract lock-in. We only make money when we make our brands money.”
What is the shift happening in your space that brands have not fully internalized yet?
“It’s not just a shift toward more automation. It’s a shift from campaigns to conversations. That’s the shift most brands haven’t fully internalized yet.”
What is the hardest lesson from building Intellica?
“Blasting is easy. Building trust is harder, but it compounds.”
AG1 launched in 2010 and kept everything inside one channel for a decade and a half. No retail partners. No wholesale. One product, one channel, full stop. That discipline helped them get to $600 million in annual revenue and real profitability before they ever seriously considered a shelf.
That changed in 2025. Amazon first. Costco in June. The Vitamin Shoppe in January. Target is the latest move and the biggest mass retail door they have opened yet.
What stands out about how they have done this is the groundwork. CEO Kat Cole has been clear about what needed to be true before retail made sense: a stronger supply chain, enough clinical research to back up a simple shelf message, and a team that actually knew retail. They did not try to skip any of that.
The packaging piece is worth calling out. On their own site AG1 can go deep on the science for as long as the customer wants to read. On a Target shelf they get a few seconds and a few words. Their answer was to lead with “daily foundational nutrition and gut support” and let the shelf do the rest. That is not dumbing it down. That is understanding a new customer.
When Cole got asked directly whether this retail expansion is setting up an exit, she did not dodge it. She said the brand is profitable, funds its own growth, and that a more diversified channel mix opens up options. That is a pretty honest answer from someone in her position. → Full story
Right after announcing a $575 million raise at a $10.1 billion valuation, Whoop filed a lawsuit against Bevel, a health analytics app run by about 20 people. The claims are trade dress infringement, copyright, and patents, all centered on how biometric data is organized and displayed inside the app.
Bevel does not make hardware. No device, no subscription band, no sensors. It is a software app that reads data from devices you already own, things like Apple Watch and Garmin, and presents it through a recovery and readiness framework that feels familiar to anyone who has used Whoop. That familiarity is exactly what Whoop is taking issue with.
Bevel’s CEO Grey Nguyen fired back publicly. His point: a $10 billion company just used freshly raised capital to go after a 20-person team that is trying to make health data more accessible. He also shared that Whoop had reached out about a potential partnership in mid-2024, more than a year before the lawsuit landed, which is a detail that does not look great in context.
The legal question here is genuinely unsettled. Whoop’s earlier case against hardware copycat Lexqi was cleaner because it was about a near-identical physical product. Whether a software interface that uses similar metric categories and similar visual structure crosses a legal line is a different, harder question with no clean precedent yet.
The reason this matters for anyone building in this space: as AI health tools and branded apps keep multiplying, the question of where one company’s right to an interface ends and another’s right to build something similar begins is going to come up more and more. This case will help define that line. → More context
After six months of building in stealth, on Tuesday Sawyer and his crew finally launched to show the world what they’ve been working on, and I couldn’t be more pumped for them. I’ve had a front-row seat to this journey and trust me, what they’re bringing is exciting.
In case you live under a rock, General Context is now live and publicly available for you to go and use as a marketer, and here’s the kicker… every 1800DTC subscriber who signs up today gets something very special sent their way.
Big love to Sawyer and the whole General Context team. This is just the beginning. 🚀
Levi’s CEO Michelle Gass talked this week about how the brand is approaching AI and the framing was refreshing. Rather than positioning it as a way to cut headcount, she described it as a way to create room, managing costs and freeing up people for the work that actually needs them. She also talked about what a 150-year-old brand owes to its history when it is bringing in new tools and chasing new audiences. For anyone navigating that same question at a much earlier stage, it is a good one to read. → Retail Dive
Nike closed all Nike Studios locations at the end of March, ending a two-year run in boutique fitness it ran alongside FitLab. The studios covered HIIT, running, and strength training in markets including West Hollywood and Austin. Most locations will reopen under FitLab’s own brands. Here is the thing about this: brand recognition gets people to try something once. What keeps them coming back is operational consistency, coaching quality, and actual community. Those require a completely different playbook than what Nike is great at. The experiment made sense to try. Getting out made just as much sense. → Fitt Insider
Lucille Health just closed a multimillion dollar investment round led by IRIS Ventures. Founded in 2025 by Jess Haghani after watching her grandmother navigate a nutrition market that had barely evolved in decades, Lucille makes high-protein, high-fiber shakes built around the specific needs of older adults. The 75-plus population in the U.S. is expected to grow 45% over the next decade. The 85-plus cohort is expected to double. And the category is still dominated by the same ultra-processed legacy products it has always been. Jess saw a gap that is hard to ignore and started building. One to watch.
Nur landed a strategic investment from Capital Q Ventures to support its category launch. Building in the wellness space with a focus on underserved consumer segments. Early days but a name worth tracking. →More
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That is Field Notes for Issue 004.
Thinking about the AG1 story and the broader question it raises: if you are a DTC brand that has stayed channel-pure by choice, what would it take for you to move into retail? Or if you have already made that move, what is the thing you wish you had known going in? Hit reply. We want to hear what is actually happening.
See you Tuesday.
— Zach and the 1800 Hotline Team
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