Before Nick Sanetra optimizes anything, he goes looking for the hole in the bucket. He walks through the cohort analysis that revealed over 70% of Clove's customers were switching from Nike or Hoka, why he no longer trusts single-source analytics, and why root-cause diagnosis has to come before automation, not after.
Behind the Expert
Nick Sanetra is Director of Marketing at Clove, the footwear brand built for healthcare workers, and has spent nearly two decades moving through almost every seat in performance marketing. He started in 2007 at the ad network Tribal Fusion, back when programmatic buying barely existed and self-serve tools weren't a thing yet, then moved through a handful of ad networks before landing at a SaaS platform doing crowdsourced ad-copy optimization. From there he spent five years on the agency side, always in a client-facing role, before moving client-side into healthcare and healthcare-adjacent e-commerce marketing. That ad-network-SaaS-agency path, he argues, forged a marketer who diagnoses a funnel from first principles rather than reaching straight for a tool. At Clove — a brand named for the medical shorthand c̄, meaning "with," built around the idea that its shoes are literally made with love for people on their feet 12-plus hours a day — he now owns the acquisition and retention playbook for a category increasingly crowded by the running-shoe giants Clove wasn't originally built to compete with.
The Quick Hits
- Clove's origin isn't a market-gap thesis — it's personal. Founder Joe Ammon built the brand watching his nurse wife choose between ugly, protective clogs and comfortable, non-protective running shoes; the brand name itself, c̄ (medical shorthand for "with"), is literally "with love."
- Identifying the hole in the bucket is "almost the easy part," in Sanetra's words. The hard work is what comes after — a rigorous, monthly-cadence process for isolating whether a funnel drop-off is a CRO problem, an audience problem, or something else changing independently underneath it.
- Post-purchase surveys matter because their incentive structure differs from a platform's. Google is incentivized to attribute orders to Google's own channels; a post-purchase survey just asks and surfaces the answer — which is how Clove learned that over 70% of its buyers are switching off running shoes from major brands, and coined "our shoes are designed for ERs, not PRs."
- Sanetra calls his approach to funnel changes the "mountain-climber method": stay evolutionary, keep as many points of contact on the wall as possible, and reserve the occasional Hail Mary rather than betting everything on one big swing — the same discipline he applies to reading multiple, imperfect attribution sources instead of trusting one.
- GEO isn't a new discipline bolted onto SEO — it's the same fundamentals under new rules. A dedicated, crawlable reviews page, clean structural content, and authentic community presence on platforms like Reddit matter because, as Sanetra puts it, "you really can't be building your foundation on sand."
- AI tooling like Triple Whale's Moby hasn't replaced Sanetra's own analysis — it compresses time on tasks he could already do himself. Clove still runs a meaningful share of its business intelligence out of Google Sheets, a deliberately unglamorous admission that first-party data hygiene, not tooling sophistication, is what AI results actually depend on.
- Sanetra hires for intellectual curiosity above almost everything else, and Clove runs an internal practice of "strong beliefs, loosely held" — treating even long-standing assumptions as provisional and open to being overturned the moment the data disagrees.
A love story, not a business-school gap
Clove's founder, Joe Ammon, built the company watching his wife Tamara — a nurse — go through what Sanetra calls a footwear journey. Around 2018 and 2019, healthcare workers were choosing between clogs and tennis shoes, and neither checked every box: tennis shoes look decent and are relatively comfortable, but their mesh fabric uppers weren't built to be exposed to amniotic fluid, blood, and everything else that comes with a hospital shift, while clogs were protective but, in Sanetra's words, "ugly as sin." Sanetra is explicit that this wasn't a market-gap exercise — it was personal, in the same way he sees most of the D2C brands that have emerged over the last decade as personal.
Comfort is subjective — which makes it a marketing problem
Clove's original competition was clogs — what Sanetra calls "a relatively easy fight." Today the competition is large running-shoe brands, and the harder problem is telling a comfort story that's inherently subjective: someone upgrading from inexpensive sneakers to a premium running shoe will genuinely feel like their comfort improved, even if that shoe wasn't built for standing or walking 12 hours a day. Once people actually put Clove on their feet, though, retention takes care of itself — which is where the brand's post-purchase survey data becomes the clearest evidence of what's actually happening in the funnel.
"Identifying the hole in the bucket is almost the easy part"
Asked whether the pattern behind funnel leaks has stayed consistent across his stops in ad networks, SaaS, agencies, and now a brand, Sanetra reframed the question around process rather than pattern-matching. He leans on a James Clear line — you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems — to argue that the specific hole changes by product and lifecycle stage, but the discipline required to find and confirm it doesn't.
In practice, that process means tracking funnel drop-off on a monthly cadence — comparing month over month and year over year — so that local noise doesn't get mistaken for a structural shift, and so a genuinely different year-over-year number prompts the question of what's actually responsible for the change.
Why post-purchase surveys beat platform attribution on honesty
Sanetra treats post-purchase surveys as a second opinion against platform-reported attribution — not because the survey is more sophisticated, but because its incentive structure is cleaner. A platform like Google is structurally incentivized to attribute orders to its own channels; a well-designed survey question just asks the customer directly and reports what it hears.
The mountain-climber method: evolutionary, not revolutionary
Once a leak is confirmed, Sanetra is deliberate about how aggressively to respond to it. His preference is incremental, reversible change — reserving big, unproven swings for moments when the downside is contained — a philosophy he ties to distrusting any single source of attribution data in an increasingly anonymous-session world.
GEO is the old fundamentals under new rules
Sanetra is candid that Clove is "trying to catch up rather than keep up" on generative engine optimization, and that there's no consistent playbook yet — but he resists treating GEO as a wholesale departure from SEO discipline. Much of what's working is unglamorous: a dedicated, crawlable reviews page, cleaning up structural content, and building authentic presence in spaces like Reddit, which LLMs weight heavily precisely because those conversations are hard to fake at scale.
AI as a time-saver, not a replacement for judgment
Clove uses Triple Whale's AI widget, Moby, as part of its MTA stack, and Sanetra is clear about what it's actually earning its keep on: speed, not new analysis. He's equally candid that a meaningful share of Clove's business intelligence still runs through Google Sheets rather than a dedicated warehouse — not out of neglect, but because the cost and setup of a more sophisticated system never cleared the bar against a free tool that already did the job.
Strong beliefs, loosely held
Closing the conversation, Sanetra pointed to intellectual curiosity as the trait he hires for above nearly everything else, and described an internal habit at Clove of stress-testing its own assumptions rather than letting them calcify — treating even long-standing beliefs as provisional against new data.
Sound Bites
- “The brand — everything that we do — is solving a specific problem for people who have a hard job, and everything we do is with love for that group. It's in our name: the C with a bar over it is medical shorthand for "with." So the name is literally with love.”
- “We know from our post-purchase surveys that over 70% of the people buying our shoes are switching off running shoes, including some very big brands. We like to say our shoes are designed for ERs, not PRs.”
- “You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Depending on what you're selling, depending on what lifecycle stage you're at, that hole in the bucket is going to be different. But what you're building is a process. Knowing is half the battle.”
- “I call it the mountain-climber method. If you're free-solo climbing, you always want as many limbs on the wall as you can — that's the evolutionary, safe move. You're not doing the cliffhanger pull-up-and-jump move, where you take all your hands off the wall and bet everything on one move.”
- “LLMs like to crawl reviews. If you don't have a dedicated reviews page on your site, that's a big problem, so making sure we're buttoned up there. The landscape is changing so much that you can't be building your foundation on sand.”
- “It's proven useful on a day-to-day basis — there's not any analysis I've asked it to do that I couldn't do, but it's a big time savings. Google Sheets has done a lot of the heavy lifting. But it's flexible — you get out of it what you put into it.”
- “Intellectual curiosity is one of the most important traits we hire for. We talk a lot internally about strong beliefs, loosely held. As soon as the data disproves a belief we hold, we're willing to change our perspective.”
The Chord take
Sanetra's throughline across two decades — ad network, SaaS platform, agency, now brand — is a bias toward diagnosis before automation. It shows up in small ways throughout the conversation: he trusts post-purchase surveys precisely because their incentive structure is honest in a way platform-reported attribution can't be; he treats "the hole in the bucket" as the easy half of the problem, with the harder half being the disciplined, monthly-cadence process of confirming whether a given drop-off is a CRO issue, an audience issue, or something else moving independently underneath it. Even his enthusiasm for AI tooling stays tethered to that discipline — Moby, Triple Whale's AI widget, gets credit for saving time on analysis he could already do himself, not for replacing the judgment that decides what to analyze in the first place. That distinction matters more as more of the funnel goes dark. Anonymous sessions are rising across the board, GEO is displacing SEO as the discovery layer, and the reflex for a lot of marketing teams is to buy a smarter tool to paper over the visibility they've lost. Sanetra's approach is closer to the opposite: before layering on another attribution platform or automation stack, get honest, low-tech signal — a well-designed post-purchase survey question, a dedicated reviews page, a genuine Reddit presence — and use it to root-cause the actual leak. His candid admission that a meaningful share of Clove's business intelligence still runs through Google Sheets isn't a confession of immaturity; it's evidence that the diagnostic discipline, not the tooling budget, is what's actually been doing the work.
Put it to work
- 1Add (or re-examine) the "how did you hear about us" question in your post-purchase survey, and treat its answers as a check against platform-reported attribution rather than a replacement for it — the two have different incentive structures and will disagree in informative ways.
- 2Before adding another attribution or MTA tool, build the monthly-cadence habit Sanetra describes: track where in the funnel people are dropping off, compare month-over-month and year-over-year, and separate real structural change from local noise before deciding what to fix.
- 3Treat GEO as an extension of existing fundamentals, not a separate initiative — make sure you have a dedicated, crawlable reviews page, clean structural content, and an authentic presence in community spaces like Reddit, where LLMs weight organic conversation heavily.
- 4Resist the urge to bet the whole funnel on one big automated swing. Apply the "mountain-climber method": make incremental, evolutionary changes most of the time, and reserve Hail Mary tests for when you can afford to lose the bet.
- 5Before expecting more from AI tools, audit your first-party data hygiene. Generic AI output is usually a data problem, not a model problem — get your data centralized and trustworthy, even in something as unglamorous as Google Sheets or BigQuery, before expecting AI to give business-wide answers instead of generic ones.
- 6Hire and evaluate for intellectual curiosity, and build an internal habit of challenging your own team's "strong beliefs, loosely held" — set a regular cadence to test existing assumptions against fresh data rather than letting them calcify.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, we are live. Here we go. So welcome back to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce and unpack what it really takes to build iconic — or, as I like to say, soon-to-be-iconic — brands. Today I'm joined by Nick Sanetra, someone who knows this tension really well. He's the Director of Marketing at Clove, a brand that designs shoes for healthcare professionals who are on their feet all day. Nick has spent nearly 20 years across agencies, ad networks, and SaaS companies before moving in-house, and he's become an expert in finding what he likes to call the holes in the bucket — the exact points in the funnel where customers are falling out.
Nick Sanetra
Thank you so much for having me, Bryan. Really appreciate it. I'm glad to be here.
Bryan Mahoney
Before we dive into all things marketing and leaky buckets — first, where am I finding you today?
Nick Sanetra
I'm in San Diego, California.
Bryan Mahoney
Not that far north of you, then. Have you been based in San Diego for your entire career?
Nick Sanetra
No, I've been kind of all up and down California. I spent most of my life out here, but I've been in San Diego, then up to Orange County, up to the Bay Area, back down to San Diego again. So I've probably spent most of my time in California in San Diego, but I've been around a little bit.
Bryan Mahoney
Definitely a nice place to call home.
Nick Sanetra
Indeed.
Bryan Mahoney
So, Nick, I'm finding you today at a brand called Clove, which was new to me — but I really enjoyed getting to know it, and I'm sure a lot of people listening have too. I buy a lot of my footwear online. Can you take a couple of minutes and walk us through the origin story of Clove, and maybe what makes the products unique and different?
Nick Sanetra
Absolutely. The origin story is really interesting because it's ultimately a love story. Joe Ammon, our founder and CEO — his wife Tamara is a nurse. Back in 2018, 2019, he was watching her go through this footwear journey. At the time, a lot of healthcare workers were wearing clogs, or they were wearing tennis shoes, and there wasn't one shoe that checked all the boxes for form and function. Tennis shoes are decent-looking, relatively comfortable, but they've got a mesh fabric upper, which you do not want exposed to amniotic fluid, blood, everything else you're dealing with in a hospital environment. And then you've got the clogs, which are — I'm sorry to say — ugly as sin, and not very fluid-protective.
Bryan Mahoney
I'd better hide my clogs right now.
Nick Sanetra
So the landscape has changed. Back in 2019, the main competition was clogs — that was a relatively easy fight. Now tastes and expectations have changed, and who we're up against today are the large running shoe brands. One of the challenges we've faced is telling the story of why our shoes are different and how they're better. It ultimately boils down to this: every decision that goes into the design of a running shoe is about how to make it better for running. Sounds very elementary, but a modern running shoe has a rocker-bottom outsole designed for energy transfer, heel to toe — lighter, faster, stronger. The same things that make the shoe really effective for running make it not as good for standing or walking for very long periods of time, which is what healthcare workers are doing. Nurses are walking, on average, a marathon every week. They're on their feet 12 hours a day.
Bryan Mahoney
Wow.
Nick Sanetra
I have to admit, I was listening to your episode with Jason Bertrand from Purple, and he was saying, hey, you're on your back eight hours a day — and I was kind of smugly grinning to myself, like, healthcare workers are on their feet for 12 hours a day at least, so arguably an even higher bar to hit. But every decision we make when it comes to our shoes is how can we make it more comfortable and protective for people doing a really hard job, who are on their feet 12-plus hours a day — and how can we help them crush that 12-hour shift and come out the other end feeling amazing?
Bryan Mahoney
I love that. And I'd imagine that gives you a lot to work with in terms of storytelling and education — that's such an important part of marketing, and we'll get into this later when we talk about performance marketing, where it's more about someone who's already interested and getting them all the way through. But you're talking about creating an entire category. How do you show up in a conversation to find people with a product they didn't know they were looking for? I think maybe it starts with storytelling.
Nick Sanetra
I love this idea that it started with people trying to solve a problem that was very personal to them. If you look across the landscape of the incredible D2C brands that have emerged over the last 10 to 15 years, so many of them are rooted in that same thing — I was trying to get something I needed that didn't exist, so I had to create it. It wasn't a business-school problem, seeing a gap in the industry and deciding to go fix it and scale the thing. It was really personal.
Bryan Mahoney
So as a marketer, I'd love to spend a couple of minutes understanding how you balance the mix between acquisition and brand storytelling, when you're introducing people to an entirely new category and a product that's purpose-built for their needs.
Nick Sanetra
Brand storytelling and customer acquisition are very closely related. That story resonates with a lot of people, but some of the difficulty is that comfort is subjective. If you're upgrading from a pair of relatively inexpensive Skechers to a pair of Hokas, your subjective lived experience is going to be, okay, this is more comfortable — which isn't to say it's the best thing you could possibly wear for that specific application. Telling that story is part of the challenge. But once people get it, just getting the shoes on people's feet is the hard part. Then we have really strong customer retention, because once people experience it for themselves, there's a light bulb that clicks — this is it, this is amazing. We know from our post-purchase surveys that over 70% of the people buying our shoes are switching off running shoes, including some very big brands. We like to say our shoes are designed for ERs, not PRs.
Bryan Mahoney
Oh, I love that.
Nick Sanetra
That one's hot off the press — it's not in ads yet, but we'll get there.
Bryan Mahoney
I love it. Hopefully that works.
Nick Sanetra
The brand — everything that we do — is really, like you said, solving a specific problem for people who have a really hard job, and everything we do is with love for that group. It's actually in our name: the C with a bar over it is medical shorthand for "with." So the name is literally with love. That suffuses everything we do. This is a love letter to people who are working in healthcare, doing an incredibly hard job that's very demanding on the body, and we genuinely want to improve their lives. Inside every box: you support them, we support you. That's really the ethos we live by.
Bryan Mahoney
I think that's an incredible story, and I'm happy we started there. Tell me a little about your background — what did you do before landing at Clove?
Nick Sanetra
It's been kind of a wild journey. My first foray into marketing was working for an ad network called Tribal Fusion, back in 2007, 2008 — way back in the day, programmatic wasn't a thing, not a lot was self-serve, Facebook was just a twinkle in Zuckerberg's eye. From there I went to a couple of different ad networks, then ended up working for a SaaS platform for a couple of years — a really interesting ad-copy-optimization, crowdsourcing solution. Then eventually I landed on the agency side. The through-line for a lot of this was that I was client-facing. That was agencies for a total of five years before I switched to the brand side. Agencies are an incredible place to learn — you get exposed to a lot of stuff, a lot of really cool brands. It's a crucible that forges better marketers. It's also incredibly stressful — would you believe I had a full head of hair before I started? That's a lie. But yeah, it's been a fun journey.
Bryan Mahoney
If you had to choose — I did agency, then in-house, then SaaS, and you did agency, SaaS, then in-house at a brand. Do you have a favorite?
Nick Sanetra
This is kind of a cop-out answer, but I needed all of them at different stages of my development, and they each have different things to offer. A SaaS platform is really interesting but also a challenging environment, especially in a commoditized space. The agency game is tough — there are a million agencies out there, always a struggle, you're kind of damned if you don't: if you do a bad job, you're getting fired; if you do an amazing job, you might put yourself out of a job, because the ultimate goal for a lot of big brands is to get to the point where they can bring everything fully in-house. But again, an incredible place to learn — you get exposed to a lot of cool stuff, and you work with some really cool people.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think for me too, everything kind of happens for a reason. I loved my time in agency — it makes me a better partner to agencies now, whether we're working with them directly at Chord or on behalf of customers, just understanding what they're up against. It's also pretty cyclical — there was a time when everyone was working with agencies, then everyone needed to be in-house, then it became this hybrid thing. But you're right, it's a great place to learn and grow. The opportunity to apply your craft across a multitude of accounts at any one time was really interesting to me, and being able to share those learnings — I loved that. Then ultimately going in-house, being able to focus on one brand and really learn about that brand and its customers, was pretty awesome too. I still consider myself, at the end of the day, a brand person — every brand on the Chord platform, I've loved learning about, to the point I feel like I'm part of it.
Bryan Mahoney
So when I hear — and we'll talk about AI eventually today — but when I hear about agentic shopping, and commerce is going away, and we're going to have agents shopping for us, I'm like, well, hold on a second. I really love getting to know brands and discovering different things — call me old-fashioned, but I'm not in a hurry for that to go away, and hopefully that's good news for marketers. I still think there's a real job to do, to go find out who our best customers are and how we bring them into the brand story and get them all the way through. That's maybe a clumsy segue into this bucket — we want, as a brand, to fill that bucket with as many great customers as we can, and there are ways you've learned to do that over time. If you think about the patterns you've seen emerge — and maybe evolve — over the last two decades, has the hole in the bucket always been the same across your different stops, or have the patterns you look for to identify those holes changed? Let's dive into that leaky-bucket problem.
Nick Sanetra
I think the first thing I'd lead with is a James Clear quote I really like: you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I think the hole-in-the-bucket idea addresses that — depending on what you're selling, depending on what lifecycle stage you're at, that hole in the bucket is going to be different. But what you're really building is a process. Knowing is half the battle. When you have a rock-solid, rigorous, methodical process to identify and get laser-focused on where you need your time and resources invested to achieve the outcome you want, then all the other bells and whistles that go along with it aren't as distracting as they might otherwise be.
Bryan Mahoney
So process is what I'm hearing — is it fair to say you've developed a process over the years to help you identify opportunities to optimize the funnel?
Nick Sanetra
Yeah, and the reality is — I wish I could say this is a really complex, proprietary process, but it's a lot of just fundamentals. You need to understand who's buying. What's your split between first-time and returning customers? What are they buying, why are they buying, what product are they replacing? You're potentially solving different problems for different people. This is where post-purchase surveys come in — an incredibly valuable tool for understanding what people are looking for, and how people's needs are changing over time. But yeah, the process is essentially having a methodical way of looking at where people are dropping off in the purchase funnel, and how that's changing over time. Looking at this monthly, as a starting point — how is this changing month over month and year over year, so you're not just seeing local maximums, but also getting the bigger-picture view: wow, things are actually significantly different than they were a year ago. What's responsible for this change?
Bryan Mahoney
And it sounds like post-purchase surveys are one of the ways you're accumulating that data to understand a customer's journey through, say, one of your digital channels. How have the tools you use to measure that evolved over time, and what are some of the tools you're using today at Clove that would be hard to live without?
Nick Sanetra
For a long time, Google Analytics was the best solution for this, prior to the advent of MTA solutions that give you a second opinion on attribution. We put a lot of weight on Google Analytics, and that's changed — now we're using Triple Whale, and we've evaluated other MTA platforms. That's maybe the biggest change: everything used to live in that Google ecosystem. In the old days you had maybe ad servers where some of that data lived. Now you have a lot more tools at your disposal, especially tools powered by AI.
Bryan Mahoney
Too many tools, would you say?
Nick Sanetra
I know — I think there are a couple of big names that have really risen to the top. One of the perennial challenges is staying abreast of all the advancements in martech, and that's part of why I find marketing podcasts so valuable — staying on the cutting edge of what's rising to the top and cutting through the noise. There are a lot of players out there, but I think the ones doing a really good job tend to rise to the top.
Bryan Mahoney
I've been so curious about what the right amount of data to collect is, and how we get visibility into it. When multi-touch attribution was the holy grail everyone was going after, and now I think it's just an ingredient in the recipe you need to understand what a healthy funnel looks like — and how much do you want to be fully data-driven versus data-informed? I think that brings us back to how necessary the good instincts of being a marketer really are. So how do you get enough data to look at a customer journey, understand the friction, maybe work with product on a hypothesis about why you're losing people? Attribution is great — it tells you why you had a purchase, and helps inform what creative is working. But when it comes to the frictions that show up once you've done the hard work of getting eyeballs on your website and people browsing — is it the GAs of the world, the attribution platforms, that you look to for identifying opportunities to make the journey better?
Nick Sanetra
Identifying the hole in the bucket is almost the easy part. A lot of the hard work comes after — okay, now we know. Say we've got a significant drop-off between somebody viewing a product and somebody actually adding to cart — there are a lot of different ways to approach that. A lot of it has to do with CRO. It can also be the audience — who's actually coming to the site and engaging with it. All of those things are independently changing over time, so there's also a process and a discipline to how you actually move the needle. I like to think a lot about evolutionary versus revolutionary — building on things that work versus leaving room for the possible, always testing, giving yourself permission to throw a Hail Mary every now and again. It's important to keep a balanced perspective: we're going to go mostly incremental. I call it the mountain-climber method — if you're free-solo climbing, you always want as many limbs on the wall as you can. Those points of contact are the evolutionary, safe move. If you're free-solo climbing, you're probably not doing the cliffhanger pull-up-and-jump move, where you take all your hands off the wall and bet everything on one move. That's not a recipe for anything but disaster.
Bryan Mahoney
You've definitely plotted your course, but you have to remain nimble too. I wouldn't intend to get into the free-solo analogy myself, but you have to be prepared out there — if you don't have a rope, you have to be creative and think on your feet: the plan was to do this, but the weather is dictating I need to do that instead. That's where you have to rely on your instincts. This is a clumsy analogy, but I'll go with it anyway — I think about the "knowing less" problem, because we're seeing more and more anonymous sessions across all of our customers. You used to have a plan where you'd have pixel-perfect attribution for 90-plus percent of the sessions on your website — you knew exactly who the person was, where they came from, and ideally what they wanted to see next. Now you don't. It's like a free-soloist going up a route expecting to see a certain hand-hold, and suddenly it's not there — now you need to do something else. In this world of increasingly anonymous users, how has your playbook evolved? What have you learned, what's surprised you most, and what might you try next?
Nick Sanetra
Yeah, okay, there's a lot of things.
Bryan Mahoney
There's a lot to unpack there. It's a tricky route up the mountain.
Nick Sanetra
Starting with the anonymous sessions — this is one of many areas where post-purchase surveys have been helpful. Obviously it's only giving you data for the people who are transacting, but it's really useful — a question everyone should be asking is, how did you hear about us, or what brought you here today? That gives you a second opinion: GA or Triple Whale or whatever will give you some data on who's coming, but there are always going to be some unknown sessions. Post-purchase survey data at least gives you something directional if you extrapolate it out across your full traffic. What I'm seeing is that a lot of people are coming in via word of mouth, a lot via paid channels, people seeing us in retail stores and coming to transact online, and so on. So your original question was really big — I might need you to break it down for me.
Bryan Mahoney
No, that's okay. When I think about marketing — if we rewind the clock maybe 10 years, it was very much performance marketing. I knew what channels were delivering what revenue, and as a performance marketer, it was about balancing spend across those channels, testing into what was working, and allocating more spend there. I think we're in an era where there's still some performance marketing to do, but going back to how I kicked us off, with this idea of what it means to be an iconic brand — how do you build a brand that customers, or soon-to-be customers, want to be friends with? Being a marketer is about balancing how you acquire customers with traditional brand building — building a great product, a great brand experience — and then, on the digital side, your website or app has to do all the hard work of not just being an acquisition channel but also a brand-building channel. I think we're being forced back into a more balanced approach to marketing, because we know less about the customers actually on our site. We can infer certain things — time of day, maybe where they're coming from — but I don't know that it's Nick on his mobile device who's looked at these 25 things before.
Bryan Mahoney
So I'm curious how that's changed your thinking, and how you've had to approach that within your organization, where there's more ambiguity now than there used to be — including how you interpret the data. I love the post-purchase survey example, because if you think about the incentive structures: if you use Google for attribution, Google is incentivized to tell you your orders are coming from Google's channels. Whereas the incentive structure of a post-purchase survey is just, I want to get as many people as possible answering this question, and I'm going to surface up the result. So I think having that balanced approach, and being able to wrap it up with experience and say, okay, this is what the data is telling me and this is where I want to go — that's the setup for my question. I'd be curious how your approach has shifted as we enter more of this privacy-first world.
Nick Sanetra
We're unique in that our TAM hasn't really fundamentally changed over time. When we make a product designed for healthcare workers, we know from the post-purchase surveys that most of the people buying are healthcare workers, and most of the people who aren't are people who are on their feet for long periods of time. So when it comes to the job to be done — how do we live rent-free in people's heads — we understand the value prop we need to put out there to make ourselves appealing to that demographic. And it's unique too, because healthcare workers are very highly educated, well-compensated, and can smell BS a mile away. They're dealing with people on a daily basis who are unreliable witnesses, even about their own health issues — so they're probably fundamentally different from your average shopper. As far as the first-party data piece, I think we've been able to weather the storm. There are tech solutions out there — the likes of Blotout, Elevar, and Triple Whale's Sonar solution — that help bridge the gap as things like iOS have broken some of that tracking capability. But I'd hazard to say that, by and large, the increase in privacy considerations hasn't been as big an issue for us as other things, like the proliferation of smart campaigns and the performance implications that's had.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, let's go to smart campaigns. You mentioned in the warm-up that you listen to a lot of marketing podcasts — this is your first time as a guest on one, and you're doing great, by the way, it doesn't show. In listening to these podcasts over the last couple of months, have you noticed a shift in what marketers are talking about? Is it becoming overwhelmingly dominated by AI? How are you thinking about AI in the landscape of a smart campaign, and is that something you and the team are going to keep investing in?
Nick Sanetra
Yes, to your first question — AI is inescapable. We're leaning into it from a marketing standpoint, especially things like agentic AI for on-site shopping assistance. We're testing things around GEO — it's especially top of mind for us, since we want to show up when people are searching for us on the LLMs. But a lot of the marketing pods I listen to are pretty evergreen — yes, they touch on those things, but a lot of it is what I was talking about with the hole in the bucket and the fundamentals. The landscape is changing so much that you really can't be building your foundation on sand, with things constantly changing. So I appreciate that a lot of it is tactical, useful, actionable stuff that's more or less evergreen.
Bryan Mahoney
Go a little further there for me — in terms of evergreen, you said you all are dipping your toes in and trying different things. Let's start with GEO — SEO is becoming GEO, or we need to do both. For me, when I think about GEO, it's how do I make sure my content is relevant to the LLM, so that if someone's searching for shoes that are comfortable because they're on their feet all day, how do you guarantee your brand shows up front and center?
Bryan Mahoney
So have you tried — what are some initiatives or investments you and the team have made in AI that are either working in ways you want to double down on, or maybe the opposite, where you thought something was going to work and it let you down?
Nick Sanetra
First off, I'd caveat by saying we're sort of trying to catch up rather than keep up. We're actively making changes — there's a lot of, not necessarily conflicting information, but a lot of information out there.
Bryan Mahoney
Nobody.
Nick Sanetra
Nobody really has all the answers, as far as exactly what you need to do — there's not one consistent playbook that everyone's echoing. So we're trying to look at all of it — I get emails, I'm listening to podcasts on a daily basis, trying to synthesize everything into, okay, what's the through-line of what we need to be doing? Some of it is really just simple things — LLMs like to crawl reviews, so if you don't have a dedicated reviews page on your site, that's a big problem, so making sure we're buttoned up there. There are structural things I think we're still trying to wrap our heads around — things like hidden pages with a lot of text that are only meant to be understood by these LLMs.
Bryan Mahoney
The early days of SEO — all those pages people were setting up with shadow links.
Nick Sanetra
Right, but then there's also Reddit — that's a really interesting one, because it's being used by LLMs, which place a lot of value on these organic conversations happening there. By its nature, that's difficult — you can't really brute-force it. I'm sure there are companies out there seeding those conversations, but I guarantee you, just like with SEO and Google's constant vigilance against black-hat and gray-hat tactics, there are people at Reddit whose whole job is stamping that kind of thing out.
Bryan Mahoney
Remember when the algorithm would change — you'd figure out what Google's algorithm was for SEO, do a lot of work against it, have great placement, and then suddenly they'd release a new version and everyone would scramble to catch up. I think the challenge with these LLMs is they're not the same, and they're learning all the time, always changing — there's no version where we've figured it out. In some ways, brands are going to have to be more honest. How do you have great reviews — because you're right, that's part of it — but there's also a community aspect. Can you get some of your best customers showing up on Reddit, being the first to answer, wow, I discovered this shoe and my back pain is literally gone? That's going to matter a ton. I think we're getting back to a place where LLMs are going to force us to do the real work — building great products, having a great brand, and facilitating those conversations at scale. That builds community.
Nick Sanetra
Yeah, who knows what the future holds — but I'll say this area is probably where we feel the most off balance, trying to keep up with everything.
Bryan Mahoney
You and everyone else. It might feel like other people have it sorted out, but I haven't spoken to too many people who, when you get them sitting around the dinner table talking honestly, say, yep, I've cracked the code on that.
Nick Sanetra
At least in the short run, the moves we're making are bearing fruit, as far as where we're showing up in the rankings on these models. So we're going to keep forging ahead and hope that keeps bearing fruit.
Bryan Mahoney
That's awesome. And when you unpack some of the inputs you just offered — how you show up as relevant in these things — it's humans creating reviews, humans participating in Reddit conversations. So this idea that, a month or six months from now, it's just agents doing the shopping, doesn't really hold up to me — we're still going to need that experience at the brand, and we're still going to need people to contribute to the public domain what their experience with those products is. If you think about us as consumers — don't you like telling people when you make a great discovery, learn about a new brand, love a new product? Or if you had a bad experience with a brand or a product — we equally like to share those experiences.
Nick Sanetra
Absolutely. I remember the first time I heard this idea of basically just telling an AI agent, hey, go find me the best X thing for under Y price, and just do that whole transaction — for me it's like, where's the fun in that? I think you and I are similar — I really nerd out on trying to find the best bang for the buck, what's going to last me a long time, what's future-proof. I like doing that research. But I can also understand if there are people who are busy, balancing career, kids, all this stuff — I can understand if you're willing to set a budget and say, I don't really want to be involved in this process, just go find me the best thing. That's not me — couldn't be me — but I understand there are people out there like that.
Bryan Mahoney
I can imagine some LLMs will have access to my email and notice patterns — I noticed over the last six months you bought this thing 12 times, would you like me to buy this for you on a regular basis? That's clearly a commodity, and I'm okay delegating that responsibility — maybe that's the future of subscription, which I think is a part of the e-commerce tech stack that's long been waiting for some disruption. But the things I put on or in my body — I want to be involved in discovering those products, researching the brand, having those conversations. It's part of my identity, I guess. That's what it means to be a consumer to me, and I'm not in a hurry to shed that responsibility.
Nick Sanetra
And AI is not infallible, and probably never will be. You see instances almost daily of AI not having a consensus on what day of the week it is, let alone the right supplement you should take for a specific use case. So I personally wouldn't want to abdicate that kind of critical thinking and research — but I'm sure there are folks who are willing to just YOLO it and leave it up to ChatGPT.
Bryan Mahoney
To decide for the early adopters. So it's fair to say you're all thinking about how to optimize for AI as a thought partner for shoppers — how do you show up as one of the two or three brands they want to consider. That's smart. What about AI in terms of tooling — any discoveries you've made personally that have made your workflow easier, or things you've tried and abandoned, and what else are you all trying out?
Nick Sanetra
There are a couple I could point to specifically. Right now, Triple Whale, as I mentioned, is our MTA solution — they have an AI widget called Moby.
Bryan Mahoney
Sure, yeah, we have something similar. I've spent a bunch of time in Moby — I think they've done a nice job with it.
Nick Sanetra
Right, really powerful, easy to use — it saves a lot of time, and I think that's the big thing. It's proven really useful on a day-to-day basis — there's not really any analysis I've asked it to do that I couldn't do on my own, but it's definitely a big time savings. It's taking what's a very laborious, menial task and making it a lot quicker. It's also been helpful in understanding — one of our biggest complaints with a prior MTA platform we tried, I won't name them out of respect, was that what we really wanted was a mixed-media model. You've told us your POV on the efficiency of these different channels, we know there are diminishing returns, and there's a platonic-ideal, optimum configuration of spend across channels and strategies that gets us the outcome we're looking for — maximize top line, maximize EBITDA, whatever it is. The platform we were using at the time was very self-serve, and we were trying to connect those dots ourselves. I think one strength of Triple Whale and Moby is making it a lot easier to get at that — so what? What's the actionable insight here?
Bryan Mahoney
That's interesting. Before you started using Triple Whale or Moby, was there any kind of centralized or consolidated solution at Clove for business intelligence — a data warehouse, a tool like Tableau or Looker?
Nick Sanetra
Google Sheets.
Bryan Mahoney
Google Sheets, okay.
Nick Sanetra
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
So you're pulling data into Google Sheets and doing the analysis there?
Nick Sanetra
Yeah, we've used BigQuery and things like that, but in the past we never really had a Tableau instance. Google Sheets has honestly done a lot of the heavy lifting — we use it for a fair amount of stuff. I feel like I'm telling on myself a little bit. But it's honestly very flexible — you get out of it what you put into it.
Bryan Mahoney
No, there's a huge number of brands that, when they're honest, you'd be surprised — you can be quite big and still be relying on Google Sheets for a lot of your models. Some people are embarrassed to admit it, but I think that's really interesting.
Nick Sanetra
I spent a long time trying to stand up a proper system — did a lot of research on everything that would be involved, and at the time it was going to be an incredible amount of setup or an exorbitant cost, when we already had a system that did a fine job for free. It's a pretty high bar that has to be crossed to justify an expense like that.
Bryan Mahoney
No, I understand that. We spend a bunch of time in the CDP space, and being able to articulate its value proposition, having all your first-party data — as an industry we've been harping on this first-party-data bandwagon for a while, and I think it's going to be even more important in this era of AI. We're definitely in the early innings, but for me it's about: if I really want AI to unlock efficiency within my business, I need to give it access to all of my data. Not to say I'm taking all this private first-party data and uploading it to the LLMs — that's not what I'm saying. But I want all of my data at least somewhere — maybe Google Sheets, maybe something like BigQuery. A CDP can be a contributor to that; it's actually an efficient way to get good visibility and get that data in one place. Then I want to make that available to large language models in the form of context, so when I ask it a question, I want it to give me an answer based on the totality of my data — not just something marketing-specific, or ops-specific, or finance-specific, but visibility across the entire business.
Bryan Mahoney
We're starting to hear about some of those struggles — I tried AI, but I was somewhat disappointed because the results were generic. They were generic because, as an industry, we haven't done enough thinking about — you said it before — this foundation of sand. If I don't have a solid foundation, solid data hygiene, the LLMs are only going to be able to make a guess based on whatever information we make available to them. So the real challenge for AI to deliver results starts and stops with data. How good is our data? Do we trust that data? Well, now we can — instead of having to hire an entire suite of business analysts, I think we could reasonably use AI to help us get to the "what" a lot faster. And if we put that "what" in the hands of really smart marketers, I bet on us to keep creating great experiences for our customers that keep them coming back.
Nick Sanetra
I agree 100%. Marketers are a smart and scrappy bunch, and they will always find a way.
Bryan Mahoney
They will always find a way. The best marketers I've been fortunate to work with — more than I can count on two hands — the one common thing between all of them is that they're just super curious. They always want to be asking that question of the customer; they don't assume they always know the answer. One of the things I liked about what you shared earlier is that the landscape is always shifting, and if we show up with a preformed opinion of what our process is going to be, and deploy it no matter what the data is telling us, we're destined to fail. But if you show up with a point of view and a good place to start, along with a willingness to have a conversation and be curious, you'll always find a way.
Nick Sanetra
Absolutely. I'd say intellectual curiosity is one of the most important traits we hire for. It's invaluable to be able to do that self-examination and challenge your preconceived notions — almost run an internal RFP process on your own beliefs. We talk a lot internally about strong beliefs, loosely held. As soon as the data disproves a belief we hold, we're willing to change our perspective. We don't really hold anything that sacred, other than core things like putting the customer first — there are philosophical things, of course, that we believe.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that — that's probably a great place for us to wind up this conversation: this notion of always being curious, but built on top of a solid foundation, making sure we have those pillars in place. Nick, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing so much wisdom you've accumulated through your journey across a multitude of stops. I'm excited to follow along and see what you and the team roll out next. Again, thanks for joining me.
Nick Sanetra
Thank you so much for having me, Bryan. Appreciate it.