1800Hotline 016 // 47,000 signups and no product, Google wants to own your cart, and a pub owner fixed soft drinks
The Everlane founder's second act is already moving. Plus Khloud raises $15M, Orebella closes a Series A, and the thinking behind Something & Nothing is worth your time.
Hey DTC Fam,
Some weeks write themselves.
A founder with no product, no funding, and one paragraph just collected 47,000 emails. Google quietly made a move that every brand with an online presence needs to understand. And a guy who ran a pub in East London got sober and ended up building one of the more interesting soft drink brands we have come across.
Let’s get into it.
Connect w/ the 1800DTC Community
This edition is presented by TrackBee.
Wednesday June 3 at 1:00 PM ET (19:00 CET). Block your calendar!
TrackBee is running a live webinar: how to scale your Shopify ads with Claude or ChatGPT instead of using five different dashboards.
If you run paid media on Shopify, every Monday probably feels the same thing. Meta says one thing about last week. Google says another. GA4 says a third. You added an attribution dashboard to make sense of it. Everything ends up being more complex, not less.
What you’ll see:
How to spot the Meta/Google attribution overlap that’s eating your ROAS
How to find creative fatigue before performance breaks
How to decide what to scale next without piecing five reports together
It’s free to join. Live and practical. And, if you can’t make it, their team will send a recording your way if you register. Be sure to check it out!
Brand We’re Watching + Unwrapped: Olly Dixon, Founder of Something & Nothing
Most soft drink brands feel engineered for mass appeal. Something & Nothing was built for people who actually wanted something worth craving.
Co-founded by Olly Dixon, whose background spans Dazed and Confused, music, creative agencies, and running a pub in East London called The Gun in Hackney, the brand makes sparkling water and tea-based drinks designed to feel like a considered choice, not a compromise. The design is intentional, the ingredients are clean, and the whole thing is built to sit comfortably in a bar or dinner setting without feeling like you settled. It looks and feels nothing like a soft drink, which was entirely the point from day one.
When Olly stepped back from the pub and cut out alcohol, he went looking for a non-alc drink he actually wanted to order. Nothing existed. So he built it. The team spent months on just the name and the visual language, deliberately trying not to look or feel like anything already on the market. The goal was to create something that required a moment, something that made people think twice and created a real connection.
What makes this brand worth paying close attention to is how they have grown. Over 80% growth with minimal marketing spend. The philosophy behind that number is straightforward: sales are a lagging indicator of brand. Build something real, take a long-term view, focus obsessively on the right consumer, and do not chase vanity metrics. The growth follows, just not immediately. Patience is the strategy.
It is one of the better brand-building conversations we have had, and the thinking behind the product is as interesting as the product itself.
Main Stories
The Everlane founder just launched his next brand, and the way he is doing it is the whole story.
Michael Preysman co-founded Everlane in 2011 and spent over a decade building it around radical transparency before stepping back in 2020 when L Catterton took a majority stake. He found out about the Shein sale roughly the same time everyone else did.
His response was to put up a placeholder site called stillradical.com with a short note: he is rebuilding around the same values that defined Everlane, but this time entirely outside the venture capital and private equity model that he believes contributed to how the brand ended up. Within days, over 47,000 people had signed up to hear more.
That number says a lot. The audience Everlane built still exists and still cares about what the brand originally stood for. And founder credibility, when it is real, does not disappear when a brand gets sold out from under you. Preysman is not starting from zero. He is starting with a hard-earned point of view about what went wrong and a very public commitment to doing it differently. No product yet. Just a premise and a growing waitlist. One of the more compelling second acts we have seen from a DTC founder.
Google just launched Universal Cart and it is one of the more significant commerce moves in years.
Unveiled at Google I/O and now rolling out across the U.S., Universal Cart brings together products from Google Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into one persistent shopping cart. The Gemini-powered cart works in the background tracking price changes, alerting shoppers when items are back in stock, and surfacing deal history across merchants. From there, shoppers can either check out through Google Pay or hand off to individual retailer sites to finish the purchase.
For brands, the stakes here are real. Google touches over a billion shopping interactions daily and Universal Cart is the company’s most direct push yet to sit between the consumer and the point of purchase across every surface they already use. If your brand is not showing up cleanly in Google’s product ecosystem, you are simply not in the cart. There is also a legitimate longer-term question about what happens to first-party customer data when a platform this powerful starts mediating the transaction. Whoever owns the discovery layer owns the consumer relationship. Worth understanding deeply before this becomes fully mainstream.
Quick Hits
Khloud Foods, Khloé Kardashian's protein snack brand, just raised $15M in fresh capital. The brand launched just over a year ago with protein popcorn, expanded into protein chips, landed in Target, and recently got its White Cheddar flavor into Starbucks. The new raise adds to an earlier $12M round backed by Serena Ventures, WME, and Shrug Capital. Celebrity-backed CPG brands live and die on whether the founder actually cares about the product and whether the distribution follows the audience. Khloud has been moving fast on both fronts.
Orebella, Bella Hadid’s clean fragrance brand, just closed a Series A led by Silas Capital. Silas also backs Makeup by Mario and Fishwife, so they know how to spot culturally resonant brands with real product underneath the celebrity layer. Orebella built its positioning around alcohol-free, oil-based parfums at a time when the fragrance category was starting to move in exactly that direction. The brand is a top-five fragrance at Ulta Mexico and has been expanding internationally. The Series A positions them to keep pushing globally and build out the product line. Terms were not disclosed.
Fields Good Co. just launched a better-for-you cookie brand, and the origin story is worth knowing. Co-founded by Ashley Fields, daughter of the Mrs. Fields founder, and Kim Anderson, the brand is built around functional-minded cookies sold DTC with clean ingredients. Using a recognizable last name without hiding behind it or leaning on it entirely is a genuinely tricky balance to strike in CPG. The early positioning suggests they are trying to do something new rather than trade on nostalgia. One to watch as the DTC baked goods category continues to fragment and better-for-you takes up more shelf space across every snack format.
Event Radar
Pre-Match Dinner | DOSS x 1800DTC x Manifest.eco — Friday, June 12 | Austin, TX
We are putting together a small group curated dinner for CPG founders and senior operators on the evening of June 12 in Austin, and we want this community in the room.
Doors open at 5:00 PM and we wrap at 7:30 PM before heading into the watch party. This one is intentionally small. The goal is real conversation with the right people in the right setting. Seats are limited and approval is required.
Apply for the Pre-Match Dinner
FIFA Watch Party | DOSS x 1800DTC x Manifest.eco — Friday, June 12 | Austin, TX
Right after dinner we are moving into a full FIFA watch party for USA vs. Paraguay, kickoff at 8:00 PM CT.
Open bar all night, big screen, and a room full of CPG founders, operators, and teams. The broader crew is welcome for this one but spots are still limited and approval is required to attend. Kicks off at 7:30 PM, match starts at 8:00 PM.
Apply for the FIFA Watch Party
That’s Field Notes for week 016.
The Everlane founder just collected 47,000 emails with no product, no funding, and a single paragraph. What does that tell you about what people actually want from DTC brands right now? Hit reply.
We read every reply.
— Zach and the 1800Hotline Team
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