1800Hotline 020 // Dad Gang hit $35M without a single paid ad, AI is now filtering your brand loyalty, and Huel is making ramen

Hey DTC Fam,

A hat brand built by three dads in a garage just crossed $35M in revenue with zero paid acquisition spend. New research shows more than half of consumers are now comfortable letting AI decide which brand communications they even see. And Huel, fresh off a $1.1B acquisition by Danone, just walked into the instant ramen aisle.

Also, if you are in New York on June 23, we are hosting Commerce Unfiltered at Shopify NY with some of the sharpest operators in the room. Real conversations about what is actually working right now in commerce. Link is in the Event Radar below.

Let’s get into it.

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This edition is presented by Consio.

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And, if it’s something you want to move on, take advantage of 1,000 free minutes when sharing 1800DTC sent you their way.

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Brand We’re Watching: Dad Gang

Three friends. A group chat about fatherhood. Less than $1,000 in startup capital and a garage too small to fit even one car. That is where Dad Gang started in May 2022.

Four years later the brand has sold over a million hats, crossed $35M in annual revenue, and just dropped a founders-edition collab with Shopify after the platform’s president reached out personally because he had been wearing the hats himself. With Father's Day right around the corner, the timing on this one could not be better.

The story behind that last part is worth understanding. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein was a Dad Gang customer before he was a collab partner. He noticed the brand’s growth on the platform, reached out directly, and the partnership was born from there. That is not how most brand collabs happen. That is what community-driven brand building actually produces at scale.

What Dad Gang built is not complicated on paper: hats priced accessibly for dads who have other priorities, no paid ads, growth through social and word of mouth, and a product that resonated with a specific audience that had been largely ignored by the apparel industry. With Father’s Day right around the corner, timing could not be better for the brand’s moment in the spotlight.

The capital efficiency story underneath all of this is remarkable. Near-zero customer acquisition cost over four years at 60%+ gross margins for a DTC apparel brand compounds very differently than a brand spending 15 to 30% of revenue on paid acquisition. The Shopify collab is the institutional stamp on a path most DTC brands are told is not scalable. Dad Gang proved otherwise.

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Main Stories

More than half of consumers are now comfortable letting AI filter every single communication they receive from a brand. That number should get every operator's attention.

New research from agency Gale surveyed 3,000 consumers across the U.S. and UK and found that 56% are now fully comfortable letting AI act as the intermediary between them and brands. Nearly one in three have already begun using ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar tools to set brand preferences and prioritize certain companies over others. Roughly a quarter plan to do so regularly within the next year. Gale projects the realistic addressable market for what they are calling AI-native loyalty will exceed 70% of consumers within three years.

What this means for brands building right now is significant. If AI is becoming the filter, then the question is no longer just how you reach your customer. It is whether your brand has built enough preference, enough reputation, and enough real signal that an AI surfaces you favorably when someone asks it to find the best option in your category. Brands that have been investing in community, reviews, and genuine product quality are better positioned here than brands that have relied primarily on paid reach. The ones that bought their way into customer feeds are going to find AI a harder room to buy into.

→ Full story

Huel just launched a ramen line in the UK, and the timing tells you something about where functional convenience food is headed.

Less than a year after Danone’s $1.1B acquisition, Huel is already moving into new formats. The new Huel Lite Hot and Savory Ramen comes in four flavors including Classic Chicken, Spicy Thai, and Katsu Curry, with 25g of protein and 26 vitamins and minerals per cup. A broader European rollout is planned for later this summer.

The ramen move is interesting for a few reasons. Instant noodles are one of the most recognizable comfort food formats in the world and the better-for-you version of the category has been underserved for years. Huel entering it signals that functional meal replacement is not just about shakes and powders anymore. It is about formats people already reach for, rebuilt with the ingredient profile the next generation of consumers actually wants. Whether this lands in the U.S. next is the question to watch.

Stars + Honey just raised $24M led by VMG Partners, and the brand’s trajectory in one of the most crowded categories in food is genuinely hard to ignore.

Founded in 2023 and already tracking toward $50M in revenue this year, the protein and collagen bar brand is moving faster than almost anything else in the format right now. VMG’s track record speaks for itself and when they write a check at this stage it is because they see a brand with the product quality and distribution momentum to compete at the next level. The protein bar space rewards differentiation more than most people give it credit for. Stars + Honey has found a lane and is running hard in it. → More

Quick Hits

• Rem3dy Health, a UK-based 3D printed personalized gummy supplement brand, just raised over $18M from Suntory, UPSA, and others. Founded in 2019 by Melissa Snover, the company produces 500,000 personalized gummies per day and crossed £10M in 2025 revenue, up 61% year over year. The brand is now valued north of $110M. The personalization angle in supplements has been talked about for years. Rem3dy is one of the few brands actually doing it at scale with the technology to back it up. Strategic investment from Suntory and UPSA suggests the big players in food and pharma are taking it seriously.

• Takeaways just launched a savory cheese bar and it is filling a gap the snack aisle has been ignoring for a while. The format is simple: a compact, portable bar built around real cheese with macros that actually make sense for a grab-and-go snack. Three flavors available at launch. The branding has personality, which in a category that tends to be pretty generic is half the battle. The better-for-you snack space keeps expanding into new formats and this one has the ingredient story and the form factor to earn a real shelf presence. Early stage but worth knowing about.

• Superb Bakehouse just crossed 1,000 retail doors with its gluten-free, dairy-free frozen waffles after landing in Giant Food Stores and Big Y. Columbus-based founder Stacie Skinner has been building this one deliberately, and the timing of the retail expansion lines up with the brand opening its own manufacturing facility this year. That last part is the detail worth paying attention to. Most brands at this stage are still relying on co-manufacturers. Owning your production gives you a different kind of control and a different kind of cost structure as you scale. The better-for-you breakfast category has been one of the more active areas in the natural foods space and Superb Bakehouse is putting down the infrastructure to compete in it seriously.

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Event Radar

Commerce Unfiltered | 1800DTC x Shopify — June 23 | New York City

We are hosting something at Shopify NY on June 23 and want this community there.

The first half of 2026 handed everyone a lot to work through. AI is reshaping how brands reach customers. Acquisition costs are climbing. The retail playbook keeps shifting. And most of the “what to do about it” advice out there is more noise than signal.

Commerce Unfiltered is a night built around the conversations that actually matter. What is driving real results right now, how operators are adapting their acquisition strategy, what it looks like to build through uncertainty, and how the brands that are still growing are doing it.

Joining us on stage: Ben Sharf from Platter, Arda Bulak from Create, and Taylor Prokes from The Big Ass Calendar.

June 23. 6 PM. Shopify NY. Come build with us.

RSVP Here

Operator’s Happy Hour | Intelligems x Zenyt.ai — Monday, June 22 | Brooklyn, NY

The night before CommerceNext, a curated group of ecommerce operators and growth leaders is coming together for an intimate happy hour with 22nd-floor waterfront rooftop views, drinks, light bites, and an Uber voucher to get you there.

No agenda. No panels. Just the people actually doing the work, with real space to talk through what is working, what is not, and what everyone is navigating right now. The best conversations in this industry happen in rooms like this one.

6 PM to 9 PM. Monday June 22. Brooklyn, NY.

Request to join here

That’s Field Notes for week 020.

Dad Gang built $35M in revenue without spending a dollar on paid ads. What does that tell you about the DTC paths that actually compound? Hit reply.

We read every reply.

— Zach and the 1800Hotline Team

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