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🪩 Volume 147 | August 12, 2026

 

When it comes to actually getting things DONE around my house (or executing on some brilliant craft idea I had when scrolling Pinterest at like 9PM), I suck. Let me explain.

 

I'm a catalyst. I have great ideas (lol I know how that sounds, but hey, Funnel Cake exists for a reason???). And 8 times out of 10, those ideas either (a) never see daylight, or (b) they do, and the final result is… not quite what it looked like in my head.

 

The other 2 times out of 10? I found execution support. Around the house that's meant recruiting my kids (fails roughly 90% of the time lol) and, most recently, hiring a very part-time house manager. Turns out the idea was never the hard part. The doing was.

 

Which is, annoyingly, the exact thing I watch happen to brands. In our corner of the world (working with B2C brands), I have YET to meet a solo founder crushing it entirely alone, no support, nobody to delegate to. And even with a team, being too strapped to actually execute is a very real problem at every stage and size. Great ideas, no0ooo runway to build them (sound familiar?).

 

 

Step 1: figure out what actually needs to happen.

 

Step 2: recruit the support to make it happen. You cannot grow, or break out of a growth plateau, without a plan AND the hands to run it.

 

So this week I pulled three brands mid-growth-move: one launching a new line, one repositioning, one launching a campaign, all to show you what "the plan" actually looks like when it's working (and when it very much is not).

 

 

 

 

Every founder I know can generate an idea.

 

"We should launch a new product."

 

"We should reposition."

 

"We need a campaign."

 

COOL except, the idea is the cheap part. What separates the brands that actually grow from the ones that stall is everything that happens AFTER the idea: the plan, the people, the boring operational scaffolding that rarely gets posted about (here’s me petitioning for this to get talked about more, though!!).

 

 

Setting the stage: Drugstore "dupe" darling → TikTok obsession → Super Bowl ads → $1B acquisition of Hailey Bieber's rhode → full-blown multi-category, multi-country beauty empire.

 

In May 2025, e.l.f. bought rhode, Hailey Bieber's three-year-old, DTC-only skincare brand, in a deal worth up to $1 billion ($800M at close, up to $200M more tied to future growth). rhode had done roughly $212M in net sales in a single year with about ten products, online only. WOAH.

 

e.l.f. didn't just buy an idea ("go premium, go skincare"), they bought the machine to execute it. Bieber stays on as chief creative officer and head of innovation: they kept the founder who made the thing work. And the rollout reads like a logistics plan: rhode into Sephora across North America and the UK, then into 19 more European countries, a push into Brazil.

 

For your business: When you add a new product or service line, the launch isn't the plan, it's the last 10% of the plan. The other 90% is the “boring” stuff: who makes it, who sells it, where it lives, who keeps it running once the launch-day dopamine wears off? If you can't answer that, you don't have a new line, you have a damn good idea that skids to a halt when it tries to exit the thought bubble. (Ask me how I know.)

 

 

Setting the stage: 55-year-old roadside comfort-food institution → decides it's time to feel Modern™ → nearly torches five decades of goodwill in a single week.

In August 2025, Cracker Barrel rolled out its "All the More" rebrand: a stripped-down, minimalist logo that ditched "Uncle Herschel" (the old-timer leaning on a barrel) and the "Old Country Store" line, alongside a ~$700M plan to remodel its 660 stores. The backlash was instant and brutal. (Before and after below for reference).

 

The stock dropped double digits in a day, wiping out well over $100M in market value, and within a WEEK they reversed the logo entirely. By September, they'd suspended the remodels too.

 

The idea (don't look dated, bring in new customers) wasn't crazy. But the plan skipped the single most important input: their actual customer. They repositioned away from the people who already loved them, before they'd earned a single new one. Siiiiiggggh.

 

For your business: Repositioning is a promise to a specific person that you can actually keep. Before you change what you look like or who you talk to, get brutally clear on who you already serve and what they'd riot over losing.

 

 

Setting the stage: 153-year-old tub of petroleum jelly → shuts up and listens to the internet → becomes one of the most-awarded campaigns at Cannes.

 

For years, people had been posting DIY "Vaseline hacks" on TikTok and Instagram. Y’all, 3.5 million organic posts the brand never asked for. Instead of ignoring them (or worse, lawyering them), Vaseline built a campaign ON them: they took the viral hacks into an actual lab, had R&D scientists test which ones held up, and slapped a #VaselineVerified seal on the winners, then fed personalized video responses, badges, and even TikTok Shop commerce back to the creators who started it all.

 

The results: 136M+ social views in the first three months, double-digit brand growth, and a Cannes haul including a Titanium Lion and two Grands Prix. To you, it looks like ONE clean idea. Behind the curtain? A coordinated operation: social listening, a lab, scientists, a whole roster of agencies (Ogilvy, Edelman, Mindshare, VaynerMedia) all pointed at the same concept.

 

For your business: The campaigns that look effortless are almost always the most operationally involved. The "idea" (test the hacks!) is one sentence. The plan is scientists, testing, creators, and a content engine that runs itself. And (this is my soapbox, you knew it was coming) your audience is already telling you what your next campaign should be. Are you listening to them, or brainstorming in a vacuum?

 

 

Notice the pattern. e.l.f. is crushing it because the plan is bigger than the idea. Cracker Barrel got hurt because the idea outran the plan. Vaseline looks simple because the plan is doing all the heavy lifting in the places you can't see. Anyone can have the idea. The system you build to execute it is what makes it a smash hit success.

 

Which loops right back to me and my very-part-time house manager: the catalyst part is easy. Finding (or building) the hands to actually run it is what makes shit happen.

 

 

1. There's a man living in a billboard???? → Between August 6 and 8, Netflix stuck an actual human inside a fake house 30 feet above Sunset Blvd; front door, chimney, A/C, a whiteboard to talk to traffic all to promote The Last House, a thriller about a family trapped in their own home. Creepy? Deeply. Effective? Also deeply; the billboard pulled more buzz than the actual movie did (I only heard about this from our team member, Hope, who is chronically OFFLINE, so yeah big deal). It reminded me instantly of Apple TV+ boxing the Severance cast into a glass cube at Grand Central last year: same trick. Take a thing that lives on a screen and drag it into physical space you can't scroll past. In a feed built to be skipped (half of it AI slop by now). So here's what I'm chewing on and actually think about MORE THAN I’D LIKE TO ADMIT: as screens get noisier and cheaper to fake, does the smartest media buy become the one thing you can't skip?