Born Primitive grew from a garage startup into a fitness brand that's generated $11 million in veteran medical debt relief through its marketing, not despite it. Claire Strohl breaks down the brand's internal agency model, why she calls her approach "data-informed rather than data-driven," and how the team uses AI for routine optimization while keeping storytelling firmly human.
Behind the Expert
Claire Strohl is SVP of Marketing & Brand Strategy at Born Primitive, the fitness apparel brand founded in a garage in 2014 by former Navy SEAL Bear Hanlon and co-founder Mallory Riley. She came to marketing through an unconventional path — a criminal justice major who detoured through business law, took a sales job out of school, and then spent about five years running a small direct-to-consumer brand that existed almost entirely on Amazon when she took it over, scaling it from a single SKU into a full catalog with its own website. From there she moved into agency work, where she found her footing at the intersection of brand storytelling and performance marketing, before joining Born Primitive two years ago — initially running athlete management and sponsorships, then growing into her current brand and marketing leadership role.
The Quick Hits
- Strohl treats "digital marketing" as an outdated category label. In her framing, there's no longer a digital bucket and a non-digital bucket — there's just marketing that happens to live inside a digital reality, and the real question is where in the funnel a given tactic reaches a customer.
- She rejects the idea that direct-to-consumer is dead, arguing every brand still needs a direct relationship with its customer to capture first-party data — even if a marketplace or wholesale remains part of the distribution mix — because the value of DTC is the data and relationship, not any one specific channel.
- Brand consistency across every touchpoint is the actual trust mechanism, in her view: if a brand looks like one thing on social and another thing in-store, customers notice, and that inconsistency directly costs trust — especially for a challenger brand competing against familiar, established names.
- Born Primitive built an internal "agency" inside the brand to solve a structural problem Strohl saw from the agency side: an outside agency rarely gets enough exposure to a brand to develop its authentic voice, so BP invested in giving its in-house creative team both storytelling instinct and direct access to performance data.
- Even with a strong internal team, Born Primitive still deliberately uses outside agencies for specific verticals — treated as domain experts worth leaning on, not a stopgap — while reserving in-house capacity for the fast-moving work that needs same-day responsiveness.
- Her Veterans Day campaign with ForgiveCo — pledging Veterans Day weekend profits toward paying off veteran medical debt — blew past its own $5 million goal, ultimately paying off $11 million in debt across roughly 6,000 families. When her team tracked the new customers acquired during that campaign and a related D-Day campaign, their 60-day LTV came in on par with, and in one cohort's case above, the brand's average customer LTV.
- Asked point-blank, "data-driven or data-informed," Strohl chose data-informed deliberately: the same data set can support multiple stories, so judgment and gut instinct built from experience still have to interpret what the numbers mean — especially for a brand, as opposed to a marketplace like Amazon, whose whole value proposition is a human relationship with its customer.
From criminal justice major to running an Amazon-only brand solo
Strohl's path into marketing wasn't linear. She started college as a criminal justice major on a pre-law track, detoured into business school after falling for a business-law class, and by her final semester had decided law school wasn't for her either. Like many new grads, she took a sales job — then landed a rare opportunity: running a small direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand that existed almost entirely on Amazon, with a single product, when she took it over in her early twenties.
She moved into agency work next, looking for more structure, and found her niche merging storytelling and brand craft with the hands-on digital marketing skills she'd taught herself running that first business — before eventually joining Born Primitive two years ago.
Born Primitive's origin: gear built by the people who needed it
Born Primitive started in a garage in 2014, founded by Bear Hanlon, a former Navy SEAL, and Mallory Riley, out of a straightforward frustration: their CrossFit gear wasn't built for what their bodies actually needed.
A decade later, the brand has expanded well beyond CrossFit into new category lines — including Savage One, plus outdoor and tactical gear — while staying rooted in the same problem-first approach that produced its first product.
Letting community lead into new categories, without losing the brand's point of view
Strohl credits Born Primitive's customer base directly for pointing the brand toward new categories — busy parents fitting a workout around errands, military operators and law enforcement customers who need gear that serves their job, not just their gym session.
She's careful to frame this as a balance rather than simply following instructions: Born Primitive listens closely to what its community asks for, but earns the sale by being the one on the front lines actually solving the problem, not just executing a customer's product brief.
"We live in a digital world" — retiring the term "digital marketing"
Asked how much longer marketers will keep the word "digital" as its own category, Strohl argued the distinction has already stopped being useful.
Every brand has to be direct-to-consumer — even if that's not the only channel
Strohl pushed back on the idea that direct-to-consumer is dead, and tied the DTC relationship directly to brand consistency across every channel a customer might encounter.
Building an internal agency that actually knows the brand
Coming from the agency side, Strohl identified a specific structural gap she wanted to close at Born Primitive: agencies rarely get enough exposure to a brand to develop its authentic voice, which can leave "great content" that's still somehow missing the brand itself.
That in-house capability doesn't replace outside agencies entirely — Born Primitive still leans on agency partners for specific verticals where an outside team's deep, cross-account expertise is worth more than building it internally, while keeping the fastest-moving, most responsive work in-house.
An $11 million Veterans Day campaign — and customers who stuck around
Strohl's standout campaign example wasn't a performance-marketing win in the traditional sense — it was Born Primitive's partnership with ForgiveCo to pay off veteran medical debt, timed to Veterans Day.
What made the campaign more than a feel-good moment, in Strohl's account, was what happened when her team ran the numbers afterward. She pulled the cohort of new customers acquired on two of the campaign's highest-traffic days — including a spike driven by founder Bear Hanlon's Fox & Friends appearance — and checked their 60-day LTV against the brand's average.
Data-informed, not data-driven
Asked directly whether she considers herself data-driven or data-informed, Strohl chose the latter deliberately — and drew a clear line between what a brand like Born Primitive should expect from data versus a marketplace like Amazon.
Where AI fits: absorbing the busywork, not the storytelling
Looking ahead, Strohl framed her team's biggest challenge as one of volume and bandwidth — keeping pace with a fast product cadence without sacrificing the strategic and creative thinking that actually differentiates the brand.
Sound Bites
- “The first product was a pair of snatch shorts. Bear was snatching, and if you've done a snatch before, you know when you pull the bar up off your hip, depending on where you hit, it can lead to bruising. So he had a seamstress make him a pair of padded snatch shorts. Mallory had a similar idea — the bras she was wearing were digging hard into her lats and traps, and she thought, we ladies are in the gym building all this muscle, we need gear that fits our bodies.”
- “It truly is the umbrella of marketing now. There are tactics that hit a customer at one stage on-site, but a customer might find you on another digital channel where they're not at that stage yet, so you have to meet them where they're at. It's not marketing and digital marketing. We live in a digital world.”
- “The experience of your brand needs to be seamless, regardless of where your customer is finding you. If you show up as brand A on this channel, but then a customer sees you in store and you look like brand Z, they're going to think, does this brand know me, do they get me, why should I shop them over a brand I've known forever?”
- “I want an internal agency that can bang out great content that gets the brand on a really intimate level — because you are the brand — but do so super efficiently. What we've built is talent that can ideate and think innovatively about content and storytelling, along with access to the metrics we need to make strategic, insightful content.”
- “We built a robust campaign donating 100% of our profits from Veterans Day weekend to pay off $5 million of veteran medical bill debt. Our customers blew us away — we more than doubled our initial pledge and ended up paying off $11 million in veteran medical bills, almost 6,000 families impacted. We had one person in particular where we removed $183,000 of medical debt.”
- “My expectation was, this is a promotional moment — people came in to shop the cause, bought a T-shirt, and likely aren't going to come back. But it was consistent with our general customer LTV for the year — right on par. And for the full window of our D-Day campaign, it was actually a little higher, by about a $60-day LTV, than our average for the year.”
- “Data is so important, and we have to analyze it and draw insights from it — but you can tell a lot of different stories with one data set. You also have to be willing to occasionally trust your gut, because you've got to judge the data that's being spit out with the intuition you have from your overall experience.”
The Chord take
Strohl's DTC-is-not-dead argument, her internal-agency model, and the Veterans Day LTV analysis are three versions of the same conviction: a challenger brand's real advantage over an established competitor isn't a bigger ad budget, it's a more consistent, more human relationship with its customer — one good enough to prove itself in the data, not just claimed in brand copy. She didn't stop at "our cause campaign felt good" — she pulled the cohort and checked whether those customers behaved like real, retained customers or like one-time promotional shoppers. They held up, which is exactly the kind of evidence that turns a values-driven campaign into a repeatable acquisition strategy rather than a one-off feel-good moment. That same discipline shows up in her answer to "data-driven or data-informed." She isn't rejecting data — she's rejecting the idea that data alone decides anything for a brand whose whole value proposition is a relationship, not a transaction. The internal agency she built exists for the same reason: an outside agency can execute a brief, but only a team that's actually inside the brand, with both storytelling instinct and metrics access, can tell whether a piece of content is missing the brand even when it looks great on paper. Her plan for AI follows the identical logic — automate the repeatable, business-as-usual work so more human time is left for the part of the job that a data set, on its own, can never fully explain.
Put it to work
- 1Retire the internal distinction between "digital marketing" and "marketing." Map your team's efforts to where in the customer journey they land, not to which channel or medium delivers them.
- 2Audit your brand's consistency across every touchpoint a customer might encounter — social, on-site, in-store, or through a retail partner — and treat any mismatch as a real trust cost, especially if you're a challenger brand.
- 3If your team runs cause-marketing or community campaigns, track the resulting customer cohort's LTV the same way you would a discount promotion. Don't assume a "feel-good" acquisition channel converts differently without checking.
- 4Before deciding whether to build an internal creative team or lean on an agency, identify the specific gap you're solving: agencies bring cross-account pattern recognition, but only an internal team gets deep, continuous exposure to the brand itself.
- 5Ask your own team the same question Strohl answers for Born Primitive: is this specific decision data-driven or data-informed? Different categories of decisions may deserve different answers.
- 6Point your AI investment first at recurring, repeatable workflows so that strategic thinking and creative time — the work that actually differentiates the brand — stays protected, not automated away.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with the brightest minds in commerce and unpack the secrets behind the industry's most iconic, or soon-to-be-iconic, brands. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Claire Strohl, Senior VP of Brand and Marketing at Born Primitive. Claire, welcome to the pod.
Claire Strohl
Thank you so much, Bryan. Great to be here today.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, thanks so much. Where am I catching you today?
Claire Strohl
I'm in Virginia Beach, and we are full-fledged starting the budding in spring and everything, so the allergies are hitting me kind of hard — if you hear that in my voice, disregard it, it's just the allergies.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, we got you coming through loud and clear. I miss the East Coast — we talked about this a bit in the warm-up. I'm on the West Coast now, but East Coaster by origin, so I miss the seasons. I love to ask this question just to get going — in three minutes or less, tell me your origin story.
Claire Strohl
Yeah, absolutely. I have a bit of a non-traditional background coming to marketing — I was actually a criminal justice major in school, with the intent of going into law. I'd started in the business school, and after taking some finance classes thought, actually, I really like this business law thing, this is pretty cool. So I switched paths, and after spending a couple years pursuing that degree, in my final semester I thought, you know what, I don't think law school is for me, I don't think practicing in the criminal system is for me.
Claire Strohl
So, like a lot of new grads, I took a sales job out of school and got into the cog of big business, and learned pretty quickly that I wanted to get my hands dirtier and understand more about actually being in the different fields within a business. I was presented with a really unique opportunity to run a very small, direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand that existed only on Amazon when I came on to run it. Over the next five years I scaled that to have its own website, multiple different SKUs, where it had been a single-product business — and that's where I learned everything about digital marketing. From there I went into an agency to get a bit more structure.
Claire Strohl
Running your own business in your early 20s is pretty daunting — I learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes. When I got into agency, I really found my niche within storytelling, creative, and brand, merging that with the digital marketing tactics I'd learned running an e-commerce business pretty much by myself. From there, my husband and I got married and were moving around, and I saw a really unique opportunity to join Born Primitive doing athlete management and sponsorships. I've been at Born Primitive for the last two years, and I've continued to grow within marketing.
Bryan Mahoney
That's super cool — there are so many similarities with our backgrounds. I did agency too, for a really long time out of school, had a non-traditional path, thought I was going to go down the business path, going to be an investment banker, and suddenly I'm in the agency world, then brand, then commerce. I want to circle back to that, but I do want to ask a couple questions about Born Primitive first — a fun fact, I bought my first pair of Born Primitive shoes about six months ago.
Claire Strohl
Okay.
Bryan Mahoney
I was looking for a pair to replace a worn-out pair from another brand, wanted something new and different — that's actually how I'd found that brand originally too. I was living in New York, wanted something that wasn't Nike or Reebok, and there was this challenger brand that was up and coming — they served me a bunch of ads, I eventually bought their shoe, wore it out, and now they sort of feel like the incumbent. So I thought, who's the next up-and-coming challenger? This is a really cool story — did a little research, reviews were great, bought the shoes, loved them, but I don't know that much yet about the brand.
Bryan Mahoney
So, three minutes or less — tell us a bit about Born Primitive, and why you love being there.
Claire Strohl
Yeah, absolutely, Born Primitive has a really unique story. It was started by a former Navy SEAL and his partner — Bear and Mallory are the founders of the business, and they actually—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Claire Strohl
Let me start that over — can you ask the question again?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, absolutely. So the story I told was, I just discovered the brand, bought a pair of shoes, have loved them, but I'd love to know more about Born Primitive. I think what you're building, specifically leveraging community, is really fascinating — can you tell listeners more about the story, and why you're excited to be there?
Claire Strohl
Yeah, absolutely. Born Primitive started out of a garage in 2014, with co-founders Bear Hanlon and Mallory Riley. They had a real passion for CrossFit and noticed their gear wasn't servicing them the way they needed. The first product was actually a pair of snatch shorts — Bear was snatching, and if you've done a snatch before, you know that when you pull the bar up off your hip, depending on where you hit, it can lead to bruising. So he had a seamstress make him, basically from a pair of football compression pants, a pair of padded snatch shorts, took them to the gym, and people were really interested — that started this project of, hey, the CrossFit community needs gear that fits a more muscular build.
Claire Strohl
Mallory had a similar product idea — the bras she was wearing were digging in hard to her lats and traps, and she thought, we ladies are in the gym building all this muscle, we need gear that fits our bodies. It timed very perfectly with the rise of CrossFit — 2014 to 2017 was such a big boom in that space, and the customer response, within what started as just their gym environment, was overwhelming. Over the next ten years, bringing us to year eleven this year, it's continued to hit home within that CrossFit market and then expand outside of it.
Claire Strohl
So, born out of CrossFit, expanding well beyond CrossFit at this point — new category entries like the Savage One, our outdoor and tactical brands, have really started to shape the landscape of what the future of Born Primitive looks like. It started in a garage as a CrossFit apparel brand, but we're quickly realizing Born Primitive has the potential to be so much more.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it's funny — I've been thinking about brands as products you want to be friends with. I'm really excited I discovered this thing, and I'm excited to tell my friend I discovered it, and it feels like Born Primitive has some of that. So it's interesting to hear you're expanding beyond CrossFit as you think about brand building and storytelling. How much of that is your community taking you there — that they're not just interested in wearing you in the gym in their CrossFit community, but hiking on the weekends, or wanting something comfortable when they're traveling across the country?
Bryan Mahoney
How much of it is this balance between you leading them into new categories, and you listening and meeting them where they are, with a community?
Claire Strohl
Oh, absolutely — I want to give a huge shout-out to our customers at Born Primitive, because they're so vocal with their feedback, and we take that so seriously. They'll say, hey, this is a product I really need — I'm a mom, I'm busy, I'm going to the gym, hitting my one-hour WOD at the box, and then I've got to run errands and pick up kids. Or they're a military operator or in law enforcement, and they say, hey, part of my job is being fit, I need something to service me so I can do my job better. Their feedback has been instrumental in shaping our product path.
Claire Strohl
A piece of the backstory I left out that's also unique — Bear is a former Navy SEAL, and we have a ton of veterans, former first responders, and veteran spouses on our staff. It's a huge foundational pillar of who we are as Born Primitive, and the makeup of our staff, who are really our customers as much as the customers we serve out in the community, has also shaped our product assortment. Someone will say, in the teams, I had product that wasn't meeting my needs as an operator — so we can take what we've learned from the fitness space and make operational gear so much more effective in the field, and we're really seeing that category take off.
Claire Strohl
So, yeah, the customers giving us that feedback of what they need has been instrumental.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think that's super cool — there's a balance you need to strike between taking instruction from the community and just building what they're asking for, versus also being thought leaders. The snatch-short example is great — you're feeling this firsthand, building a product for yourself, inspired by feedback from the community, so they feel like they're part of it, but ultimately they're buying the product from you because you're the innovators, you're on the front lines, you have a point of view. I think that's super powerful. Maybe we'll circle back to community.
Bryan Mahoney
You used the term 'digital marketing,' and it struck me that we've been talking, these first couple minutes, about what I'd put in the category of traditional marketing — brand building, being out there in the community. How much longer do you think 'digital marketing' stays its own term, before we just drop the digital and it becomes part of the bucket of things someone in your role needs to think about?
Claire Strohl
Yeah, we could go on about this for hours — I have such a passion for the digital space, and our reality now is that so much of it is digital. It truly is the umbrella of marketing now. What we used to look at as digital marketing — SEO, content, blogs — has evolved so much, and brands are all going to have a digital presence moving forward, even if they started outside the digital space. So I think they really go hand in hand, and it's more like, where in the funnel are those marketing efforts reaching the customer on their journey?
Claire Strohl
There are certain tactics that hit a customer at a stage on the site, but the customer might find you on another digital channel where they're not there yet — so you have to meet them where they're at, and some of that's more brand, storytelling, and creative, depending on which platform they're finding you on. It's really the nature of our reality now — it's not marketing and digital marketing, it's that we live in a digital world.
Bryan Mahoney
We live in a digital world. I find it fascinating how quickly the landscape's changed — you mentioned direct-to-consumer, and working at a small brand where their presence was effectively Amazon. I might challenge that and say Amazon isn't direct-to-consumer — to me, DTC is having a direct conversation with my customer, getting some of that first-party data, and using it to make their next experience with one of my digital channels better, or their experience with my physical product better. I hear all the time that direct-to-consumer is dead, which I think is absolutely hilarious.
Bryan Mahoney
I think we're just getting started, and I believe every brand in the world has to be a direct-to-consumer brand — that's where you get first-party data, even if it's not going to be your exclusive distribution channel. So, with your brand and marketing hat on, how do you think about balancing the investments you're making in direct-to-consumer on your own properties versus showing up where your customers are and meeting them there?
Claire Strohl
Yeah, that's a great question. For me, the experience of your brand needs to be seamless regardless of where your customer is finding you — that's where the power of brand is so important. If you show up as brand A on this channel, but then a customer sees you in-store and you look like brand Z, they'll think, wait, I'm confused, does this brand know me, do they get me, why should I shop them over this brand I've known forever? Especially coming into this space as a newer brand trying to take share of the market, I think it's paramount that you understand who you are.
Claire Strohl
In such a saturated marketplace, with so many different brands, you could sit there and say, well, brand B is doing this really well, brand C is doing that, maybe we can take that and make it ours — but it's, who are you? You need to know who you are, no matter where you show up.
Bryan Mahoney
Oh my gosh, Claire, that is gold. As I think about the landscape, we went through this era of performance marketing that felt like, I can acquire a customer if I spend enough money or get them the right offer — it was much more about optimizing there, and I think we sort of lost the script on storytelling, traditional brand building, being authentic, meeting your customer where they are. It's difficult sometimes to attribute an ROI to what your ROAS is on a campaign where you're really just trying to cement your value, so that when you do show up with an offer, the customer thinks, yeah, absolutely, I love this brand because they've really done that.
Bryan Mahoney
We sort of feel like e-commerce, or commerce, is a solved problem — this is what you do, that's what you do. But I'm sure you can tell listeners that playbook is evolving as quickly as it was written a couple years ago. One thing I've noticed looking at the ads I've since been served, now that I'm a customer, is that they seem to strike the right balance between something transactional and something that's storytelling. So from your time at agency to now being in-house, how have you rewritten your own playbook around performance marketing, digital marketing, and brand building — let's build on that thread you left us with a couple minutes ago.
Claire Strohl
Yeah, absolutely. One thing I took away from agency that I was really excited about going back in-house was being able to go deeper into all the different levels of communication throughout the marketing cadence of a year. At an agency you're very much moment-to-moment — yes, you might do some evergreen things, but you're pigeonholed into this moment and the next moment, and you're missing the whole story. So I was excited to get my hands dirty in the evergreen cadence of a brand. What I found coming into BP, and what I think we really needed to develop, was almost our own internal agency voice — because we know the brand.
Claire Strohl
That's sometimes the challenge with agency and client — you're only experiencing the client in these really controlled environments, you don't get the full taste of the brand. That's where there can be that dynamic where the content's great, but you're missing the brand. So I was really passionate about coming into BP and saying, I want an internal agency that can produce great content that gets the brand on a really intimate level — because you are the brand — but do so super efficiently.
Claire Strohl
What we've been able to create within our marketing and creative team is talent that can ideate and think innovatively about content and how to storytell, along with all the access to the metrics we need to make strategic, insightful content, and do so efficiently, so we have a lot of diversity — transactional content, storytelling content, and that's by design. We build our content funnel to hit the customer journey — this customer's motivated by price, this one by education, this one wants to be entertained — we're building that funnel month over month, based on promotional moments, new collection drops, whatever it is.
Claire Strohl
But it's really honing in on how we convey both who we are as a brand, the products we have, and meet each customer where they're at in their stage of meeting our brand — and I think we do that by creating that cohesive team system within Born Primitive.
Bryan Mahoney
That's really fascinating — this mindset of creating an internal agency within BP that understands the brand values at a really deep level. Do you work with agencies today? Do you augment your team with them?
Claire Strohl
Absolutely — and that's where having the right agency partner is so important. We've worked with a lot of agencies before my time at BP, and during my time here too. I think we've really streamlined our agency partnerships over the last couple of years — this partner really gets this segment of our business, and they're taking something that would require one or two positions internally, and they're the experts, so let them be the experts, adding value to us in a way we need, efficiently. There are areas where, internally, given the pace at which we move — we're a very fast-growing brand, evolving quickly with new category development—
Claire Strohl
—we need people in-house who can really respond in real time to everything happening in the moment. So, yeah, absolutely, still using agency partners for various verticals and categories of advertising, but a lot of it is happening in-house now.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. Do you think coming from agency makes it harder or easier for agencies to work with you — are you tough on them?
Claire Strohl
I'd say I have high standards for sure, but I also think I get their challenges a lot better than if I hadn't worked within an agency — that communication, how to brief correctly, how to be clear with your expectations. Every person who's worked within an agency has been on the client side, thinking, okay, I want to be wowed.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Claire Strohl
And you think, okay, well, what will wow me — something new. Okay, here's five ideas, do you like them? Yeah, these all sound great. Then you go through development, storyboard, present, and the client's like, well, none of this is what I wanted. So I think I'm able to deliver really clear direction, but I definitely have high standards — for agency and internal team both.
Bryan Mahoney
What used to drive me nuts was when we'd present three or four independent directions, and they'd say, cool, we're just going to take one element from this, one from that, one from that — well, that's not what they were designed to do, but okay, I think being open-minded about it — I've always found agencies, I did agency for 20 years, so I loved your answer. I think, on one hand, I'll have super high standards when we work with an agency, and on the other, I know how hard it is to be an agency and do great work and be a really good partner. We use agencies at Chord too.
Bryan Mahoney
It's a great tool to call on people with expertise who get to see challenges across multiple customers. As much as I love being in-house, and exactly what you said — spending more time on something, going deeper, really understanding the brand — is an incredible opportunity, having that perspective of working across the same challenge across a multitude of industries or companies is really unique. So I'm always trying to find agencies doing that, but that show up without a playbook that tells me my business, that just say, doesn't matter what the brief is, we're going to do our thing.
Bryan Mahoney
I think the best agencies in the world have an opinion, have a way of working, but are deeply curious and want to get to know you and the brand, and say, these things we've done before, we're going to leverage them to deliver great results, but we're going to be open-minded to change our approach so it's unique to you. Almost everyone should work at an agency before going in-house, or vice versa. I used to think my story was unique, but I keep running into folks like you, and it's like, actually, this is what makes the marketing world work.
Claire Strohl
It is — and I think a lot of the time, if you spent a lot of time in agency — I didn't spend a ton, but it was really meaningful time, such a growing tenure for me. One of the challenges when you go back to client side is, you were able to be so focused on one objective, or multiple objectives, but in this really creative space, depending on which vertical you're in at an agency. When you go back to client side, you're juggling so many different priorities, and some of them, in your brain, are so dull, right?
Claire Strohl
Because it's business-as-usual type stuff, and you're thinking, no, I want to create, I want the next disrupting campaign on the internet, I want to go viral. Those moments — you still have time to think through, ideate, brainstorm on the client side, but they're sandwiched between all this productivity and bottom-line-driving activity, and it can be really hard to transition back into that environment.
Bryan Mahoney
Now—
Claire Strohl
I've loved it — I've loved being back on the client side, it presents a whole new realm of challenges. But yeah, I've definitely seen people struggle with that agency-to-client transition.
Bryan Mahoney
That's a really interesting thread to pull on — I think in marketing, or commerce generally, there's necessarily some blocking and tackling you need to do, executing thoroughly and thoughtfully, and of course everyone wants to be creative, just give me the creative thing to do — but you have to earn the right to get there. As you think about the teams you've been part of or built and managed, whether inspiring folks on the agency side or your own internal team—
Bryan Mahoney
—how do you think about creating high-performance teams, making sure they're dotting their i's and crossing their t's and doing the work that isn't necessarily exciting, but inspiring creativity at the same time?
Claire Strohl
It's my favorite topic — I love people, I love people development. Honestly, that's why I love marketing, because marketing is people — you understand people, you can market pretty much anything. My number one priority when I start developing a team is truly to assess where people's eyes light up, where their talent flies, what they're most efficient at — then you can start to plug and play. Okay, this is what I need to build a robust team, these are the positions I need, this person fills this — but right now they're actually poorly positioned here, I'm going to give them a project to develop into this, and then present, no, this person has so much more potential.
Claire Strohl
We need to move them, promote them, or shift them laterally to a different vertical. And I always challenge the status quo — if you've been doing the same process for even a few months, and you're not evaluating the efficacy of that process, you're becoming stagnant. You should be constantly reassessing — but when you have a group of people where you know the talent's there and the drive is there, you've got to place them right.
Claire Strohl
And then you've got to find the inefficiencies in the current process, remove them, so they can dive deeper into their talent zone and really build the brand forward.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's amazing — it strikes me that's a pretty similar process to managing a campaign, thinking about not doing the status quo, looking for opportunities, constantly re-evaluating. No surprise you're a great people manager and a marketer. Maybe, curious about marketing generally — you've done a lot on the agency side, now back in-house at BP — is there one campaign that stands out, either because it surprised you in how poorly it did, or excited you in the results it delivered? I'd love to hear those stories, good or bad.
Claire Strohl
Okay, well, we could get into a lot of failed campaigns, but I want to talk about the most recent one that truly blew us away at Born Primitive — and I'm focusing on it because it also delivered a huge impact to the community. Our Veterans Day initiative is a huge one for us every year — we're veteran-owned, giving back to our service members is a foundational pillar, and every Veterans Day we do some kind of promotion for a charity or service-oriented organization. This last year we had a unique opportunity to partner with an organization called ForgiveCo, focused on paying off veteran medical bill debt — a cause a little unique for us, since typically we're supporting charities rather than individuals directly.
Claire Strohl
We built a very robust campaign, donating 100% of our profits from Veterans Day weekend, aiming to achieve $5 million of veteran medical bill debt paid off. Our customers blew us away — the reach of the campaign was enormous, very omnichannel, focused heavily on story and education about how little people understand what the veteran community can struggle with after their service time is over. We more than doubled our initial pledge and ended up paying off $11 million in veteran medical bills.
Claire Strohl
That was almost 6,000 families impacted right before the holiday season — getting letters in the mail that this medical bill they'd been brutally worried about for however long was no longer there. We had one person in particular where we removed $183,000 of medical bill debt. When you talk about building a campaign and knowing your objective — ours was to educate people about what's happening in the veteran community, show them an opportunity to support the cause and give back to people who've given so much, and the response was incredible. It blew us away.
Bryan Mahoney
That's a heartwarming story, truly amazing. To me, that's the power of commerce — it's not always about, I increased our conversion rate by 5%, I'm super focused on ROAS. Don't get me wrong, those things are important — but it sounds like here, commercially super successful from a brand-building point of view, it hit all the marks, and there's a feel-good story on top of it, an opportunity to give back to the community. Community seems like a really important part of what you're doing at BP. What a story.
Claire Strohl
Yeah, it's been incredible, and I'm not going to drop any spoilers, but we're already working on 2025 Veterans Day now — we have plans, based on the response we got last year, to take this even further, do even more good, and continue helping this community. What was so unique for us was getting to speak with some of the veterans who benefited from the debt relief effort — their stories were so moving.
Claire Strohl
As people in business, we can get so narrowly focused on the bottom line, the top line, our LTV, whether people are coming to shop this new product category — that's all important, but what it enables us to do at BP is just really special.
Bryan Mahoney
I think that's what builds a really durable brand — it's not just about blowing it out in a single quarter, it's making these investments and solidifying the community that's going to back you, not just today, but five years from now. I love using the term iconic brands, and I think it's these moments where it's not just an arbitrage of acquiring a customer — it's bringing the customer in the right way, bringing them along with you, letting them have a voice in where the brand's ultimately going. What strikes me about this campaign is it feels like BP is creating its own moment — Veterans Day becomes your Black Friday, let's say.
Bryan Mahoney
And I have plenty of thoughts about Black Friday and what's gone on there in the last ten years.
Claire Strohl
Oh, yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
It's nice to have something uniquely yours, born out of something that feels really authentic to the brand. I want to congratulate you on the execution of that, and I'm excited to see what happens this year for Veterans Day.
Claire Strohl
November's a crazy month for us, between Black Friday and Veterans Day.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, well, good news, Black Friday's no longer in November — it starts in October, it's a two-month-long adventure, at least in my experience these days.
Claire Strohl
Yes, I have a lot of opinions on that.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, come back on the pod again and we'll talk all about Black Friday. Can I ask one more question about that campaign, shifting gears to data? I remember my time at Glossier, when we did a couple things in the community space that we didn't intend to become acquisition channels, but almost organically noticed that they became a new acquisition channel — and we'd look at that cohort of customers differently from customers we'd acquire through traditional means. I'm curious — it sounds like the campaign was a huge success, and I'd imagine a lot of returning customers, but new customers too. Are you tracking that cohort of people who discovered the brand through that campaign differently, and how are they performing over time?
Claire Strohl
Absolutely, I'm actually really happy you asked this — we were just talking about this a couple months ago, kind of a postmortem of Q4 in general, but more specifically this campaign. We had a couple brand campaigns last year along this line — a Savage One special edition for D-Day, similarly benefiting veterans, and then this Veterans Day initiative. We pulled the launch day from the D-Day campaign, as well as our biggest new-customer day for the Veterans Day initiative — Bear, our founder and CEO, went on Fox & Friends on the Sunday morning segment, which he'd done the prior year too, and the amount of traffic we had on the site during that segment was absolutely insane.
Claire Strohl
So we took specifically that window of customers and asked, okay, this is mass exposure, being on a major news network talking about this campaign — what's the value of these people on a 60-day LTV basis? What we found, interestingly, is that both on the D-Day campaign launch day and the people who came in on the Fox & Friends day, they were consistent with our average customer LTV throughout the year. My expectation was that this is more of a promotional moment — an on-brand promotional moment, but a moment in time — so I imagined these people, if they came in to shop the cause and bought a T-shirt, likely weren't going to come back.
Claire Strohl
But it was consistent with our general customer LTV for the year, right on par — and for the full window of the D-Day campaign, actually a little higher, by about a $60-day LTV, than our average for the year.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool — it warms my heart that you're looking at data and thinking about things like that. Curious, I like to ask this question too: data-driven or data-informed?
Claire Strohl
Ooh — honestly, I'm going to say data-informed, more than anything. I say that with the caveat that data is so important, and we have to analyze it and draw insights from it, but you can tell a lot of different stories with one data set. So you have to understand what you're looking at, and be very informed about the implication of that — but you also have to be willing to occasionally trust your gut and your other feelers, because if you've been in this space, you get the space, right — you've got to be able to judge the data that's being spit out with the intuition you have from your overall experience.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I didn't mean for it to be a trick question, and I'm not sure there was a right answer, but that was an absolutely fantastic one. We see it the exact same way — it's one thing if you're Amazon. I think Amazon's a great brand, but it's different — I'm expecting that brand to be data-driven, to make it easier for me, with the millions of products and SKUs they have, to find the thing I'm looking for. That feels data-driven, and it feels kind of clinical — but that's okay, that's what I expect from that brand. But you are a brand, and you have this connection with your customer, so I think it's great that you're in command of your numbers, looking at them, being informed.
Bryan Mahoney
But trusting your gut — that's what brand building is all about. We might do something the numbers would tell us not to do, but our intuition tells us that's what our community wants, and that's going to strengthen our position in the market. I love that answer, and I think we, as brand builders and marketers, really have to continue striking that balance now more than ever — as we think about the arrival of agentic workflows and AI, I'm very worried we might lose the script, that it becomes more clinical. I think the best brands in the world will figure out how to continue using data to be data-informed, or to leverage AI to give their team superpowers.
Bryan Mahoney
But ultimately, that human connection you have as the marketer with the stories you're telling, and the connection that creates with your customer — I think that's been around since the dawn of commerce, and I don't think AI's arrival is suddenly going to change that. So, in the couple minutes we have left — what are you excited about for 2025 and beyond? There were hints about a new campaign for Veterans Day, which sounds really exciting, but maybe let's talk about what you're excited about — I'd love to learn more about how you're encouraging your team to lean into being data-informed, and whether AI is on your roadmap. What can we leave the audience with?
Claire Strohl
Oh, yeah — I think the challenge my team and I are struggling with right now is just volume. The pace of innovation is so fast, and the volume required to keep up is enormous. Specifically talking about content at BP, we have a pretty robust marketing cadence and launch a lot of products every year — so it's, how do we keep up and make sure new product is hitting our audience at the right time, in the right way, without sacrificing other key products and categories that also need to grow.
Claire Strohl
Where this relates to AI, for us, is finding areas within our business where we can create massive economies of scale by becoming more efficient with those business-as-usual processes — allowing for a kind of passive optimization of our customer experience, while being able to devote really strategic thinking time and creative time into which content matters the most, and how to get it out within the right amount of time. I think that's what a lot of brands are going to struggle with over the next few years — that equation of bandwidth plus time to think strategically equals output and volume.
Claire Strohl
And how can we cut down on those little processes that can be made really efficient, so we can spend more time doing the human work of understanding people, how to connect with them, and create content that shocks, odds, amazes, and converts.
Bryan Mahoney
That is an absolutely perfect way to end this — I adore that answer. Thank you very much, Claire, this was amazing, thank you so much for joining me today. I'd love to do this again — I feel like the notes on my desk here have so many additional questions I could ask, but we're out of time for today. Thanks again for joining me — I'll be looking out for the Veterans Day promotion this year, and continuing to cheer you and the entire team on from behind the scenes.
Claire Strohl
Thank you — such a pleasure to talk to you today. Thanks.