Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re ready to lock in. Today’s a long rant, but it comes from a place of wanting EVERYONE to have an efficient design process they can rely on, trust, and use to drive growth. I’ve set up a lot of design processes, and now I know how/why you need to do it. When I start working with a new brand and see they have a broken process, it makes me want to do everything in my power to fix it because of how important it is. That’s what today’s newsletter is about — fixing the design process to build better landing pages.

But before we get into that…

Vendor of the Week

Roku Ads Manager — performance TV that’s built for DTC brands.

Black Friday weekend is Roku’s Super Bowl — over 300 million hours streamed last year. That’s an unmatched window to reach shoppers who are already in buying mode. Roku makes it dead simple for brands to launch CTV campaigns in minutes: pick an audience, upload creative, set a budget, and go live.

This season, Roku’s new AppsFlyer integration lets you tie TV performance directly to conversions across channels. You get granular targeting, real-time reporting, and the agility to pivot fast during peak season.

With 125M+ streaming households and 76% of Roku users shopping sales and promos online, it’s the perfect time to turn connected TV into your top-performing channel.


Start your campaign today and own the biggest streaming weekend of the year!

Limited Supply

Everyone loved Hudson Leogrande’s episode, sharing the secret sauce behind Comfrt’s growth. I thought, let me also share the conversation with Danny Winer, founder and CEO of HexClad. HexClad is one of the most impressive brands ever, and Danny is one of the greatest to ever do it.


Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. Just search “Limited Supply” and click the blue cover art!

Why You Need an Efficient Design Process

With today’s newsletter, I hope that you see the NEED for sufficient design resources. Whether you hire Sharma Brands (now Lunar Solar Group), build a hybrid with internal/external resources, or hire all these roles internally… growing a DTC brand without a web/UX/UI design process is like having a Formula 1 car with no one to change the tires or fill your gas tank during the race.

The Digital Shelf Is Won by Speed and Iteration

In traditional retail, brands fight for limited physical shelf space. But online, the “shelf” is infinite, and fiercely competitive. Your product isn’t sitting pretty in a store; it’s one of dozens of tabs on a customer’s browser. The brands that win are the ones that can test and iterate creative rapidly. Why? Because digital shelf space goes to the fastest learners. If you can throw up a new landing page or ad creative, get data by the end of week, and pivot by next week, you’re outpacing the competition that’s stuck in a monthly creative cycle. Think about it: in the time a typical brand goes from idea to live page (often 2-3 weeks for a landing page under old processes), an agile DTC team could launch multiple tests.

Each test = new learnings, and faster learnings = an edge in a market where consumer attention is gold. There’s no store aisle here – your website is your storefront, and you can redesign that “storefront” as often as you want. The faster you experiment, the faster you discover what resonates with customers (and what flops). The fastest way to validate a marketing hypothesis is to test it, but when creation takes weeks, testing becomes a luxury. We can’t afford that luxury mindset in DTC. Speed is the strategy.

This isn’t about rushing sloppy work out the door. It’s about building a process that shrinks the cycle time from idea to execution. In a fast-moving digital landscape, being responsive in real-time can make or break your monthly CPA or pacing. If the idea pops up on Tuesday to create a GLP-1 bundle with your product assortment, I want a live landing page by Friday, not next month. If an A/B test on a product page shows variant B with a specific comparison chart module converts 20% better, I want to roll that out across the site ASAP. Agility wins on the digital shelf and comes from a process that enables rapid testing and iteration.

Designers vs “Conversion Designers”

One huge bottleneck I see: most brands hire “designers”, but not “conversion designers.” What’s the difference? A designer might make things look beautiful. A conversion-focused designer makes them sell. This isn’t a knock on designers at all, it’s a call to empower them (through data) with a conversion mindset.

Outside the growth world, people think a designer is a designer. Conversion designers blend visual design, UX, and CRO (conversion rate optimization) skills. They’re trained to ask: Does this layout direct the user’s eye to the right message and call-to-action? Does the page address the user’s psychological triggers and concerns? These folks live at the intersection of art and science, making pages aesthetic and persuasive.

Many DTC brands inadvertently create a bottleneck by expecting a single graphic designer also to be a master of UX, analytics, and persuasive copy. It’s like expecting your general practitioner to also be a cardiologist and a neurosurgeon. You need that conversion specialization. If you don’t have it in-house, consider training your team or bringing on a consultant who thinks in terms of hypotheses, user research, and A/B testing. Once a page is live, it’s an ongoing optimization process: learning from user feedback, coming up with new hypotheses, and testing. 

The brands that treat design as part of growth (not a siloed “creative” project) are leaping ahead. And if you lead a design team, here’s a pro-tip I’ve learned from experience: good design isn’t a solo act. Pair your designers with your marketers, analysts, and copywriters. Form little conversion squads. When a designer can riff with a marketer on “What if we move the form higher because our scroll map shows 80% of users never see our CTA?” – that’s the magic combo of aesthetics + analytics in action.

Great Design Starts with a Great Brief

Here’s an all-too-common scenario: a brand engages a freelance designer or agency, throws them a one-liner like “We need a cool landing page for our new product,” and then feels underwhelmed with the result. The truth is… garbage in, garbage out. A strong design process begins long before anyone opens Figma. It starts with the internal brief.

A good brief is not just a list of specs; it’s a transfer of inspiration and insight. Your team’s “secret sauce” lives inside your heads – the nuances of your brand voice, your customer psychology, what angle made that last campaign spike, the founder’s story that always gets folks excited. All that context needs to be distilled into the brief. If your designer is spending half their day just chasing down context or clarifying vague briefs, the problem is your process. You need better inputs. The brief should clearly state the goal, identify the target audience, describe the offer/product, outline the key messages to convey, and specify the desired action. If your brief could be swapped with any other brand’s and still make sense, it’s not specific enough. I like to include internal insights like:

  • Positioning
  • Customer insights
  • Proven hooks
  • Tone of voice/messaging parameters

A brief doesn’t need to be a novel, it needs to be clear. There’s a great example I love: If you tell a team “Make it cool,” that’s so vague it’s basically a Rorschach test – everyone will interpret “cool” differently. But if you say “We want to help busy parents feel more confident about their morning routine”, suddenly every creative decision falls into place. The designer knows the vibe. The copywriter knows to reassure and solve pain points. A good brief narrows the problem and sparks the right solutions. If you’re working with external agencies or freelancers, this is even more important. They can’t read your mind. They don’t sit in your all-hands meetings and absorb your vision every day. You have to hand them the insight on a silver platter. What’s your brand’s reason to exist? What’s the competitive angle you keep nudging on internally? Tell them! A little extra effort upfront to write a thorough brief can save weeks of back-and-forth later. Remember, “if your best designer is spending time clarifying vague briefs, that’s an operational failure,” not a talent issue.

Share the Secret Sauce: Empower Creators with Data

I once worked with a DTC brand that was struggling with its landing page results. They had great designers and even copywriters involved. The pages looked beautiful and on-brand, but performance was meh. When we dug in, we found the creative team was flying blind. The marketers were running Facebook ads to these pages and hoarding all the data on the backend, while the designers got just superficial feedback like “It’s not working, can we try a different hero image?”

This is way more common than you’d think. Creators, the designers, copywriters, video editors, and maybe even developers, should have direct access to performance insights to build intuition. If you have the time, I recommend walking them through it, too.

If your designers, writers, and developers can’t rattle off your last landing page’s conversion rate, or haven’t seen a heatmap of how users scroll that page – that’s a missed opportunity. How can we expect them to iterate intelligently if we don’t close the feedback loop? At Sharma Brands, we make it a point that our creative folks swim in the same data as our growth folks. We’ll literally show designers the heatmap recordings or user-session recordings from a page they designed, so they can see “oh wow, nobody is scrolling past the first section, maybe our intro isn’t compelling enough” or “people are rage-clicking this non-clickable element; it looks like a button”.

When creators see real user behavior, it’s like a lightbulb moment every time. They start designing with those learnings in mind, which means each version gets better. It shortens the feedback loop dramatically. Your internal data is part of your secret sauce. Share it (and ideally with your own insights layered on top). That means giving creators access to:

  • Analytics/dashboards (how is that page converting, where’s the drop-off in the funnel?)
  • A/B test results (what variations have you tried & what were the outcomes?)
  • Customer feedback (customer support tickets or survey responses)
  • Session recordings & heatmaps (where do they scroll, where do they pause, where do they bounce?)

One of the biggest wins we had was when a copywriter on our team started sitting in on bi-weekly performance review calls. She’d hear things like “Version X of the landing page beat Version Y with a +22% lift” and, more importantly, why we thought that happened. Her copy drafts started pre-empting the issues we usually caught later, because she had developed a nose for what works by absorbing the data. This is what I mean by building intuition. When creators internalize the metrics, they start making micro-decisions that move the needle, without always being explicitly told.

Data informs creativity; it doesn’t replace it. Your team’s gut feelings and bold ideas still lead the way, but now you’re validating and refining them with evidence.

Test, Learn, Repeat… or leave performance on the table

If you’re not testing new landing pages or page variations on a monthly or quarterly basis, you’re almost certainly leaving money (or at least performance upside) on the table. I’ll put it bluntly – set it and forget it is not a strategy on the digital shelf. Yet I see so many brands launch one fancy homepage or a single landing page and then just drive all traffic there for months.

One practical tip: duplicate and modify. If you have a landing page that’s performing decently, use it as a base to test a new angle rather than starting blank. My recommendation is to duplicate landing pages and test new angles constantly.

Testing isn’t only about big, dramatic redesigns. Some of our best lifts have come from seemingly minor changes like adding a line about “Free 2-day shipping + hassle-free returns” right below the CTA (addressing the “how fast do I get it?” and trust concerns in one go). Which reminds me: whatever you test, ensure you’re still answering the fundamentals… which brings us to the next section.

The 5-Question Landing Page Framework

One framework I swear by is making sure any landing page answers five key questions that every customer subconsciously asks. If you’ve been around my content, you’ve probably heard me harp on these. Different people phrase them differently, but here’s my take:

  1. What is the product? – Don’t assume the visitor magically knows. Tell them in clear, simple terms what you’re selling. A confused visitor never converts.
  2. Why does it exist? – What gap in the market or customer pain point are you addressing? Answer, “Why does this brand deserve to exist?” at every touchpoint.
  3. How will it benefit me? – Arguably the most important. This is all about benefits, not just features. Don’t assume the value is obvious. Spell it out: “helps you sleep through the night,” “saves you 10 hours a week,” “boosts your confidence on camera.” The visitor is subconsciously asking, “What’s in it for me?” at every second. If your page doesn’t quickly answer how your product will make their life better, they’re gone.
  4. How fast do I get it? – This is the logistics/immediacy question, and it matters more than brands realize. In a world trained by Amazon Prime, customers do wonder: “If I hit buy, when will this arrive? How much effort is it?” Address it upfront: if you have fast shipping, say so (“Ships within 24 hours” or “Delivered by Tuesday, Oct 28 if you order today”).
  5. Why should I trust this brand? – Last but definitely not least, build trust. New visitors are naturally skeptical. So your page must answer, “How do I know you’re legit and that this product will live up to its promises?” This is where social proof and credibility markers come in. Include things like:

• Customer reviews or testimonials

• Press logos or endorsements.

• Trust badges (if applicable: money-back guarantee, free returns, secure checkout icon, etc.).

• Awards or certifications

• Transparent details

Trust elements should be woven through the page: a review snippet near the top, a dedicated section with testimonials or logos, etc.

Final Thoughts: Design Process as a Competitive Moat

I’ll close with this: in DTC, your ability to test and iterate quickly on design and creative is one of the few sustainable advantages you have. When you foster a culture that’s always learning from the customer, always pushing out new experiments, and rapidly doubling down on what works, you create a virtuous cycle.

Each week you’re a little smarter and a little better than last week. Do that for 52 weeks and you’re playing a different ballgame than a competitor who refreshes their site once a quarter.

In an environment with no physical shelves and essentially infinite competition, the brand that learns fastest wins. The machine that turns ideas into learnings is your design and creative process. So invest in it. Audit it. Fix the leaks in it. Hire not just great designers, but enable them to be great conversion designers. Hand them great briefs infused with the insights only you have. Feed them the data to sharpen their intuition. And give them a workflow that lets them go from idea to live test in days, not weeks. Do this, and you’ll not only see better metrics, you’ll feel a change in your team.

There’s an excitement when the creative folks and growth folks are in lockstep, pumping out winners. It’s that feeling of momentum!

That's all for this week

Today’s newsletter was created slightly differently. If you’re curious about the BTS, I took something that I realized was a common problem, built a set of questions around it, answered them with a voice recording and then used speech-to-text to write more, faster. How did you enjoy it? My only concern is if I use too much speech-to-text, will I lose my ability to continue improving my writing? So many unanswered questions with AI!

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you’re planning to get 9 hours of sleep going into the new week. If you’re still in the midst of BFCM prep, good luck to you! Have an amazing upcoming week, and I’ll see you next Sunday for another deep dive!