1800Hotline 024 // Pinterest built a shopping chatbot, Coconut Cult needs a bigger factory, and toothpaste got a wellness upgrade
Ask Pinterest is one to watch for any brand relying on discovery. Plus Kirsten from minisocial on the creator mistake most brands keep making, and Maxine's Heavenly buys its own facility.
Hey and Happy Thursday,
Good one this week.
Pinterest quietly launched something that could change how your products get found online. Coconut Cult is growing so fast they needed to build a new facility from scratch. And a brand new oral care company launched with a premise that is surprisingly hard to argue with: your toothpaste probably should not be the same formula at 7am and 10pm..
Let’s get into it.
Connect w/ the 1800DTC Community
This edition is presented by SATHI.
After a recent call with Yash Chavan, founder of SATHI, one story he shared really stood out.
His team just onboarded a brand onto the platform, and during setup, they ran an audit of the brand’s existing affiliate payouts. Their top affiliate that quarter, by sales, had 3,000 followers and was credited with $40K in revenue.
Well, it turns out none of it came from the affiliate promoting anything at all. Their code had leaked onto Reddit two months earlier, and anyone who found it could use it at checkout. The brand kept paying out commission on every one of those orders without knowing the difference.
SATHI’s fraud center is built exactly to catch situations like this, flagging these issues as they happen so the payout never goes out in the first place. It also catches self-referrals, paid ad hijacking, and click farms gaming refunds. We were definitely most impressed by the timing. It catches everything before the money is gone.
It also comes with cookieless multi-touch attribution, so credit goes to whichever affiliate earned it instead of whoever got the last click. Migration takes under a day if you’re ready to move off your current platform.
SATHI is built by the team behind SARAL, the influencer platform 200+ brands including Grüns, Obvi, and Spacegoods already run on. Yes, Yash was selling us on it. But…it wasn’t a hard sell at all, especially when he said we could share a little offer.
Book your SATHI demo and let their team know we sent you to claim your exclusive 20% off.
See What's Hiding in Your Payouts
Brand We’re Watching: DAYLY
Courtesy of DAYLY
Skincare has morning and evening routines. Supplements have AM and PM formulas. So why has toothpaste been the same tube, used the same way, twice a day, for generations?
That is the question DAYLY was built around. The brand launched this week with an AM/PM oral wellness system that does something genuinely new: four toothpaste formulas calibrated specifically to the body’s circadian rhythm. Two for adults, two for kids, each built with different functional ingredients depending on when you are using them.
The morning formulas, Rise for adults and Rocket Rise for kids, are built around energy and focus ingredients like Vitamin B12, Ginseng, and Zinc. The evening formulas, Unwind and Dream Drop, lean into calming and recovery ingredients like Magnesium, Chamomile, and L-Theanine. Each formula blends between nine and twelve vitamins, minerals, and botanicals and is manufactured in an FDA-registered facility in the U.S.
The positioning is smart because it does not ask you to adopt a new habit. It upgrades a habit you already have 730 times a year. For brands looking at how to enter a crowded category with a genuine differentiation story, DAYLY is a case study worth studying closely.
Available now - check the link below!
Unwrapped w/ Kirsten From minisocial
Most brands treat creator marketing like a one-time transaction. Post, perform, move on. Kirsten Baumberger spent years watching that approach underdeliver and built minisocial around a different model entirely.
The platform is fully managed, meaning brands submit a brief, approve creators, and review content as it comes in. The coordination, the follow-ups, the back and forth, minisocial handles all of that. Every project includes partnership ad whitelisting by default and there are no long-term commitments, brands pay per project and spin up campaigns when they need them.
What sets Kirsten’s thinking apart is how she frames the creator relationship. Not as a channel for reach. Not as a content production tool. But as a way to build genuine community around your brand over time. minisocial’s community program lets brands work with the same creators monthly over three to six month stretches, building trust with that creator’s audience in a way a single post never could.
The full conversation is on the 1800DTC site via the link below.
Main Stories
Pinterest just launched a standalone AI app called Ask Pinterest and it is worth understanding what it actually does for brand discovery.
The app uses natural language to handle the kind of shopping questions that do not fit neatly into a keyword search. Planning a dinner party on a budget. Furnishing a room over several months. Finding a gift that actually feels right. It pulls from Pinterest’s internal data on user taste and intent, retains context between sessions, and is designed to get smarter from what it learns.
Courtesy of Pinterest
The reason this matters for brands: Pinterest is not trying to compete with Google. It is trying to own the moment before someone knows exactly what they want. That is a different and in some ways more valuable kind of discovery. Brands with strong visual content, clean product data, and an active Pinterest presence are going to show up in those conversations. Brands that have been treating Pinterest as an afterthought are going to get filtered out. The platform just made its most serious AI bet yet and the brands that move now will have an advantage that compounds. → Full story
Coconut Cult just secured $12.5M in equipment financing and is building a 300,000 sqft manufacturing facility to keep up with where demand is going.
The Utah-based yogurt brand has been self-manufacturing since the beginning. That decision shaped the company’s quality control and gave them flexibility that brands relying on co-manufacturers often do not have. The problem is that the current facility is not big enough for what the business has become. After growing well over 100% in 2025 and projecting another big year in 2026, expanded into Target, H-E-B, Sprouts, and Whole Foods, the production side needed to catch up.
There is a bigger takeaway here for operators watching from the sidelines. Owning your manufacturing is a decision that feels expensive and operationally heavy early on. Coconut Cult is the case study for what that bet looks like when the brand grows into it.
Etsy launched a campaign during Prime Week called “Shop Other Jeffs” and it is one of the better brand marketing moves we have seen in a while.
The premise is simple. During the one week of the year when Amazon completely dominates the consumer conversation, Etsy pointed directly at everything Amazon is not. Independent sellers. One-of-a-kind products. The human side of commerce. The “Other Jeffs” framing does it without naming names and lands with just enough humor to travel.
Courtesy of Etsy
For operators watching how smaller brands and marketplaces compete against scale without matching it, this is a real example of using your positioning as an actual weapon. You do not need to out-spend the giant. You need to make the giant’s size look like a disadvantage.
Quick Hits
Courtesy of De Soi, Los Sundays, Pikasos, Maxine’s Heavenly, and StockX
De Soi just launched Social Spritz, a new extra-functional non-alc line across three flavors.
Lemon Elderflower, Peach Ginger, and Blackberry Hibiscus. Each can delivers 1000mg of adaptogens including L-Theanine, Ginseng, and B vitamins for a real energy lift without the crash afterward. De Soi has been building something genuinely interesting in the non-alc space and this launch pushes the functional angle harder than anything the brand has done before.Los Sundays Tequila brought in the founders of NÜTRL Vodka Soda as strategic investors ahead of its Canadian launch.
Paul and Melissa Meehan built NÜTRL into the top-selling vodka soda in Canada before AB InBev acquired the business. They know exactly how to build RTD distribution in that market and Los Sundays just secured the best possible guidance for its next phase. The tequila and agave category keeps pulling serious attention and Los Sundays is making the right moves to compete at scale.Pikasos, a creator-built sweet and spicy gummy brand, is moving into retail with placements at Zumiez, United Supermarkets, and the Marine Corps Exchange.
Co-developed with creator Santea, the brand has the community and the content already. Now it is translating that into a physical retail footprint starting in channels where its audience already shops. The Zumiez placement is the smartest pick of the three for exactly that reason.Maxine's Heavenly closed nearly $3M in Series A funding and is buying its own manufacturing facility.
The better-for-you creme sandwich cookie brand is in Whole Foods, Target, and Sprouts nationwide, growing fast, and staring down a supply problem. Rather than outsourcing to solve it, the team bought their own facility. Projecting $7.5M this year against $2.4M last year, and Target adding another 300 stores this summer, the bet is that demand is durable enough to justify the capital commitment. One to watch as the footprint expands.StockX just launched live shopping with real-time auctions.
The resale platform is adding a live commerce layer to its marketplace, letting sellers run real-time auctions for high-demand drops. For brands and operators watching the live shopping space, StockX is an interesting test case because the product is scarce, authenticated, and emotionally charged. That combination drives the kind of urgency that live commerce is built for. The results here will tell you a lot about where the format goes next.
Event Radar
Commerce After Dark — Monday, June 29 | New York, NY
Long day on the Fancy Food floor? We have you covered.
We are taking over the rooftop at the Flight Deck for a drop-in evening with CPG and DTC founders, operators, and friends of the ecosystem. DJ, signature drinks, good people, no agenda. Just the community doing what it does best when you put everyone in the same room.
8 PM to midnight. Come as you are. Stay as long as you want.
Ecomm Coffee Collective: Fancy Food Edition — Tuesday, June 30 | New York, NY
Not every great conversation happens at a panel. Some of them happen over coffee.
Pop in anytime between 9 AM and noon during Fancy Food week for a casual moment of connection, caffeine, and community with ecommerce operators and founders. Drop-in format, no schedule, no pressure. RSVP approval is required.
Earn Your Bite | Summer Fancy Food Week | Sunday, June 28 | New York, NY
Train like a fighter. Eat like a founder.
We are kicking off Summer Fancy Food Week at Gotham Gym in the West Village with a morning that earns the food that follows. A private boxing class led by Gotham trainer Charlie Himmelstein, then straight into post-workout bites and sampling from some of the most exciting brands in CPG right now.
Man Cereal, Smearcase, rawdog, Hormbles, and Alya are all bringing samples. Rotten, nine glow, POCA, NOON WORLD, and Spade are gifting. Recovery drips and peptide shots by Beyond Remedy.
7:30 AM check-in. 8:00 AM boxing. 9:00 AM bites, sampling, and founder networking. 10:00 AM wrap.
Athletic wear recommended. Come hungry.
That’s Field Notes for week 024.
Pinterest is building a shopping chatbot. Etsy turned Prime Week into a marketing advantage. Coconut Cult is building a factory. What is the story from this week that has your attention? Hit reply.
See you Tuesday.
— Zach and the 1800Hotline Team
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