About this episode
Most ecommerce operations don't fail loudly. They leak quietly. A shipment goes out late. An order never leaves the warehouse. A customer reaches out days later, and by then, the damage is already done.
In this episode, Chad Brinton, founder of Roger AI and former Head of Ecommerce Operations at Made In Cookware and True Classic, breaks down what he learned scaling DTC fulfillment from the ground up—from joining Made In as employee #5 to managing the operational complexity of one of the fastest-moving brands in apparel. He also shares why he built Roger AI to help ecommerce brands find lost revenue and close the gap between fulfillment and customer service before customers ever have to reach out.
Key takeaways
- Ecommerce operations leaders must think beyond the warehouse, understanding the P&L is non-negotiable at every stage of growth
- A 99% on-time fulfillment rate is only impressive until you count the individual customers on the wrong side of that 1%
- The best ecommerce operators don't default to policy; they find a way to say yes
- Operating leverage in ecommerce means building on the right partner and software ecosystem, not solving every problem yourself
- The gap between fulfillment and customer service is where ecommerce revenue goes to disappear
About the Guest
Chad Brinton is the founder of Roger AI, a Shopify-native tool that helps ecommerce brands identify lost revenue and detect operational issues before customers do. Prior to founding Roger AI, Chad led ecommerce operations at Made In Cookware and True Classic, scaling fulfillment, customer service, and supply chain across two of the fastest-growing DTC brands in the country. Earlier in his career, he held ecommerce operations roles at Walmart and Deloitte Consulting. Chad brings a finance-forward, customer-obsessed approach to ecommerce operations, and a track record of building lean, high-performing teams that scale.
Ben Eachus (00:02.182)
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ben Hiss and I am the co-founder and CEO of Flowspace, a fulfillment platform that helps fast growing brands scale their operations. Joining me on the well-delivered podcast, have Chad Britton, who's the former head of operations at True Classic, Made In, and prior that, worked at Walmart E-commerce and also Deloitte Consulting. He is now the founder of Roger AI.
a tool that helps brands find lost revenue and detect operational issues. So welcome, Chad. Thank you for joining us.
Chad Brinton (00:36.012)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben. Appreciate it. Good to see you again. Happy to have this conversation today.
Ben Eachus (00:39.94)
You too. So Chad, I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, you started your career in consulting. How did you get into the dark world of operations and fulfillment?
Chad Brinton (00:51.842)
Yeah, you know, it's funny. I, I, you may think that I'm joking when I say this, but I kind of think that I had a grand plan the whole time. you know, one day I woke up, from my kind of time is at Deloitte in operations consulting. And I said to myself, I'd really like to get into, you know, customer sort of online e-commerce logistics, final mile supply chain. And like a week later, I had a,
inbound LinkedIn message from a Walmart recruiter. And my plan in taking that job was I was going to build the resume and cut my teeth and hope to take over operations that a direct consumer startup one day and you know, wouldn't you know it that a friend from grad school reached out to me, you a few months later and asked me if I wanted to take the role it made in. So I jumped at the opportunity. So I sort of had like, you know, an idea of where I wanted to take things and the world just kind of showed me the opportunities and I took it.
Ben Eachus (01:45.98)
So you go from working at one of the biggest e-commerce companies around to joining a startup super early on. Maybe tell us a little about what was made in like when you joined. How many people were there? What kind of processes were you starting with? of that.
Chad Brinton (02:00.163)
Yeah.
Chad Brinton (02:03.756)
Yeah. Yeah. So I went from an organization that at the time was 2.3 million people globally in Walmart, and joined as the fifth employee at MadeIn. And, you know, honestly, surprisingly enough from like kind of the core of it, the sort of, you know, problems that we were solving from a logistics perspective, it was really similar. You know, was how can we fulfill this customer's order in a single box in a single shipment, know, is effectively
both from a cost and speed perspective and make the customer happy. And I think Walmart is famously a very customer centric organization and Sam Walton, maybe not the pioneer, but at least a pioneer of kind of this customer centric thinking and decision making. I think that was a really great stepping stone to come into a direct to consumer brand. The thing that was really different though is like, for anybody who's listening to this, they're probably a startup operator too, so they probably get this, but.
It's really hard to describe that level of accountability when there's only five people sitting around the table and each of them is wearing probably 10 different hats. And, you know, if you're not the one who gets that thing done, it's not going to get done. Right. That was the thing that, you know, was the, the wake up call and the lesson hard learned and going from a big organization to a startup.
Ben Eachus (03:19.238)
the well said, think one of my favorite expressions is there's no one coming, right? Like this is your problem. Yeah, help is not coming. So one of the things that you mentioned and this has struck me with working with Made In for a few years now is how incredibly customer focused they are. And one of the questions I had for you is how do you start to quantify?
Chad Brinton (03:26.164)
Yeah, yeah, the help is not coming. Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Brinton (03:38.638)
huh.
Ben Eachus (03:47.312)
Because that's another thing I've noticed from working with you, Chad, is incredibly data driven and trying to put numbers on some of these things. So what are you looking at to ensure that you're actually meeting the customer expectations?
Chad Brinton (04:01.622)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, from a metrics perspective, you know, we tracked all of the things that I think you would expect from a direct to consumer brand, right? Like on time, fulfillment percentages, click to ship days and time and time and transit and things of that nature. And then, you know, from like a customer behavior perspective, you know, we kind of wanted to track what the customer was telling us, which was, you know, time to second purchase or.
know, lifetime value, things of that nature to kind of say, Hey, are we doing right by the customer such that they want to come back and, you know, place another order with us? Um, but I think the, the framing really matters, right? And that's where I always kind of like tried to flip the flip the conversation where it's like, you know, if, somebody comes to you and tells you we've got a 99 % on time fulfillment percentage, like that sounds really good, right? But when you're fulfilling,
10,000 orders a day, that 1 % of late orders is actually a lot of individual customers who have a single experience with your brand where they didn't have a good experience. And, you know, it could have been a couple of weeks before their order shipped because something was out of stock or something happened, right? And so to me, I think like it's not just the data, but it's how you frame it and how you talk about it to really kind of put yourself in the customer's shoes and kind of play that role.
to really understand what does a 99 % on time rate even mean,
Ben Eachus (05:26.48)
Right. I think that's so well said is that often you can kind of fall into the trap of looking at these dashboards and you know, 99 % sounds great, but that could be a hundred people. so I think one of the, the, goals, I guess, if any e-commerce brand, but is, is to have this like higher level of service or the hospitality level of service. I guess what, what does that mean to you, Chad? Like kind of translating that into an operation, operational focus.
Chad Brinton (05:36.557)
Yeah.
Chad Brinton (05:55.99)
Yeah. The hospitality level focus was something that one of the co-founders at Made In kind of coined. His family was in the commercial cookware business for he was the third generation of it. And, you know, they spent their entire career and in some cases lives, you know, sort of adjacent to this hospitality industry. And, you know, it was required reading at one point for Made In the book by Danny Meyer, setting the table.
you know, where he kind of famously talks about things like unreasonable hospitality and things of that nature. and I think it's really just like a no one size fits all approach, right? Like every customer who's coming to you has a unique need and maybe a unique problem and how you go about solving that isn't necessarily like codified in an SOP that you train every customer service agent or everyone who interacts with a, with a customer on it's really taking the time to understand, you know, what's their scenario and what happened here.
you know, can remember instances while of course this isn't the most scalable model, but you know, there were times we were, we would, you know, we, we ran a promotion and maybe we were selling like, you know, pizza flour, dough flour to go along with something. and we ran out of stock and you know, we didn't make that thing. So we didn't have more of it once we were out of stock, but like, you know, we'd go on Amazon and we'd buy it for the customer and we'd ship it to their house, you know, just, you know, to try to make, make right and, know, try to make, make hole in our promise.
And I think it's, you know, getting creative and doing things like that to solve a problem. you know, we always used to talk about finding a way to say yes, rather than, you know, saying like, well, our policy is X or, you know, we can do Y. It's like, what would yes look like in this scenario?
Ben Eachus (07:39.686)
It's such a great point and we try to do that on our side as well because we, you know, I think it's often easy to lose in the shuffle that every one of those boxes, every one of those orders, that could be the first time that someone's ever experienced your product, right? You might be doing, and it's easy to lose sight of that when it's a line on a spreadsheet or something like that. So it's fun and I think ultimately any fulfillment operator, their goal is to make
Chad Brinton (07:43.096)
Yeah.
Ben Eachus (08:07.984)
the merchant look good in front of their consumers. Shifting gears a little bit. So you obviously had a tremendous run at Made In, helping to scale that brand into what it is today, from five people all the way here. And then left and joined a really fast growing fashion brand for men, True Classic. And many listeners probably have the t-shirts that they're famous for.
It's very different products, obviously. But were there similar problems or were they totally different? Just curious what that experience was like.
Chad Brinton (08:47.106)
Yeah, I mean, and wearing one of the shirts right now, know, a heavy percentage of my wardrobe is still true classic for sure. You know, again, you know, kind of like the transition from Walmart to MadeIn where a lot of the core problems were just the reality of doing business online and making customers happy and making sure you were making the right decisions to kind of do right by the customer and do right by the P &L. It was really similar. But, you know, I think
Ben Eachus (08:53.21)
Yeah.
Chad Brinton (09:14.422)
Every startup operator is very aware, at least for call it the last six to seven years, that there have been some very unique, exogenous variables that have presented unique problems at different points in the journey. And, you know, my time at True Classic was very much categorized by sort of the volatility of tariffs that, you know, were a reality of that time. you know, thankfully it was a bit of a different product where
Just the reality is, the manufacturing base for apparel is much more fungible than it is this craftsman, cookware, family-owned, generational business sort of sourcing model that Made In has versus clothing. I was pretty thankful that we had an opportunity to be really competitive in our sourcing and how we thought about globally sourcing products when the reality of tariffs came crashing down on everyone.
So that was a bit of a silver lining, frankly, but a difficult time, I think, for everybody who was manufacturing products and importing them.
Ben Eachus (10:19.228)
And I guess just the ability to move so quickly really becomes core competency.
Chad Brinton (10:22.722)
Yeah. I mean, that's what True Classic really excels at, man. That business moves super, super fast. It is not for the faint of heart. And it is definitely one where, you you move at hyper speed to capitalize on every opportunity and knock down any barrier in front of you.
Ben Eachus (10:39.772)
That's awesome. Well, I have another question. Given that you've spent time at a pretty diverse group of companies, it's Deloitte or Walmart, true classic, made in, how much do you believe in an operational playbook versus kind of as the operations leader getting there and figuring out what makes each business unique? How much is plug and play versus, you really need to spend some time learning how each system is different?
Chad Brinton (11:10.476)
Yeah, I'm a big believer in a playbook actually. But I think my definition of the playbook might be a little bit different. You know, I think the one thing that stands out is probably the loudest lesson learned that I had from my time at Made In was just spending the time with the finance team and, you know, thinking like an owner about the P &L and the mechanics of the P &L and what was going to move the needle.
You know, just like any startup, right? We went from a period of time where the focus was revenue growth to then, all right, EBITDA profitability. And then, okay, great. Now we've achieved that milestone. Now it's cashflow, right? And just those distinct phases of the business really taught me, you know, one, what it means to optimize for that part of your business at that point in your cycle. And then two, what are the levers that are at your fingertips that you can utilize to optimize any one of those?
And I would say to me, that's the playbook, right? It's understanding that it's understanding the strategy, like where is the business in their growth cycle along that kind of like trend. And then from there, it is playing in the margins and it's sort of customizing it for what it looks like for cookware versus t-shirts versus, you know, big TVs at Black Friday for Walmart, right? Yeah, I guess that's how I think about it.
Ben Eachus (12:29.574)
That's awesome. I think one of the things that has struck me is just kind of the evolution of the operations role. You know, when, when I was in a similar role, very little interaction with sales and merchandising or the finance team, right? Kind of understood what my little area was, but I think what you're describing is kind of this, the new operations leader really needs to understand working capital. They need to understand merchandising.
what the overall goal of the business is, customer service and customer satisfaction. You maybe just shed some light on that because it seems like a big part of your job is just understanding what else is going on in the organization other than purely operational things.
Chad Brinton (13:11.766)
Yeah, you hearing you talk about that, you know, it reminds me of a book that I love and one that I reread recently was Delivering Happiness, the story of the Zappos founding and just kind of their evolution as a company. And, the thing that I maybe didn't realize in reading that book and, you know, that story was not that long ago, right. But they were sort of one of the pioneers of this kind of e-commerce shift and
You know, you hear about some of the challenges they ran into and, they're having problems with their fulfillment and their alternative was like, you know, I don't know how many fulfillment providers were there for e-commerce brands at that time, like three, five, I don't know. Right. And now there, there are a lot. It's a really competitive space. I mean, you know that better than anybody. and so anyway, like, I think about this example because, you know, there's so much of an ecosystem around what e-commerce operators are trying to do nowadays. And there's so much help.
There's software help, there are all these channel partners, there are fulfillment partners, whatever, right? And so, you know, I think that to me has really changed the role of the operator in a lot of ways where you don't have to go solve all these problems for yourself. You just have to have the playbook for identifying great partners, bringing them on board, you know, looking at the right data, asking the right questions, empowering the team. And so, you know, I think probably something
I wasn't always good at and sort of learned the hard way as every, I think, operator does, just how to be a leader and how to sort of execute and delegate and do all those sorts of things. And that's how I sort of categorize that role as the successful operator, again, to maybe some varying level of degree of success.
Ben Eachus (14:56.826)
It's such a good point about understanding the ecosystem and where you can get leverage, not negotiating leverage, but just what we're seeing is many of our customers have such small teams, but really high revenue expectations, right? And like understanding what software is out there, understanding what vendors can help you, maybe putting more of the onus on a vendor to help you with planning and things like that.
Chad Brinton (15:03.662)
Yeah.
Chad Brinton (15:23.214)
Yeah. Yeah. Operating leverage. We talk about that all the time.
Ben Eachus (15:25.692)
Exactly. And, know, I think a prime example, um, 10 years ago when I was at the honest company, we had a 100 person engineering team, right? And today in the era of Shopify, like that would never happen today. Right. That's maybe there's a few engineers, small operational team, but you're totally right. Back when you and I started, it was, it was, you had to build a lot of this stuff from scratch. Um, which is super expensive. Um,
Chad Brinton (15:35.512)
Yeah.
Ben Eachus (15:54.884)
So I want to segue a little bit into, talked about systems and the metrics and stuff that you're looking at, but can you maybe talk about building teams and, you know, especially at a smaller stage company or I should say earlier stage company, what are you looking for when you recruit someone? Are you looking for that specialist who really knows one area of the supply chain or are you looking more for
Chad Brinton (16:06.947)
Yeah.
Ben Eachus (16:22.576)
know, a generalist, someone who can quickly learn and be thrown into the fire and figure it out.
Chad Brinton (16:29.514)
say yes and. I think the reality of what you were just describing in getting operating leverage and I think again something that learned the hard way through a couple cycles that this is, the reality is you're only going to get a couple of really big swings at some high powered intellectual horsepower people who are going to be your right hand people at getting things done.
Ben Eachus (16:30.704)
Yeah.
Chad Brinton (16:57.742)
Kara, who you just had on your podcast is a great example of somebody who I had worked with previously and was really excited that I was able to bring onto the team it made in. I mean, she's done great things and that's who she is as a person. But she was one of my big bets that the generalist who I knew was super sharp and was gonna work hard and was gonna get it done. And again, I only got to make a couple of those types of hires. then from there,
you know, it was finding those executional players who were going to also work hard and going to own an area of the business that you knew they were just going to cover it and you wouldn't have to worry about it. You wouldn't have to, you know, wake up in the middle of the night panicked like, shoot, did that thing happen? And, you know, I think it requires both and it requires, you know, both skill sets. And what I hope most is, you know, those folks that were brought on to those more executional roles.
Ben Eachus (17:40.838)
Yep.
Chad Brinton (17:54.306)
you know, got to go on to be the care at their next one because they had seen it and done it and learned a few things. and I think that is what this kind of ecosystem of operators and e-commerce industry has done a great job of is just, you know, spinning out people like yourself who, know, you, what you were back at Granger back in the day and then honest company and then, go on to. Yeah.
Ben Eachus (18:15.547)
McMaster car, yeah, but it's a lot of our, I still keep in touch with lot of people. Like, you know, we have people from McMaster and other startups, though. It's just, to your point about the ecosystem and people who are curious and want to learn. And I think one of the things that I've seen some of the best operators have is just a certain humility that you might not know everything. And hiring people that are smarter than you at a certain stage, it can be so tremendous. And I just think back on one example,
Chad Brinton (18:21.891)
Yeah.
Chad Brinton (18:41.091)
Yeah.
Ben Eachus (18:44.59)
our example is like, when I thought I knew a lot about warehousing and fulfillment when I started the company and then was only after we hired certain people on the team that I was like, my gosh, I have so much to learn from the folks that are on the team. So he's one of the most gratifying part of the job. and one of the things Chad, that, that struck me, I think when we were having conversation before is you said you've, you would never ask someone to do something that
Chad Brinton (18:59.437)
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
Ben Eachus (19:13.978)
you wouldn't do yourself. What do you mean by that exactly? I know it's a cliche, but practically in your role, what does it mean?
Chad Brinton (19:24.8)
You've done some New York Times level of investigative journalism here, man. I'm impressed.
Ben Eachus (19:28.26)
You know, this podcast is serious stuff, Chad.
Chad Brinton (19:32.866)
I can tell, I can tell. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that's just like who I've prided myself on being as a leader. You know, I think, you know, there's, I don't know that there's one size fits all on a leadership mentality. I think, you know, I've seen leaders embody a few different archetypes and the one that I think fits me best is one of, you know, kind of to use a word you just used of humility. And I mean, I really do see myself in that way, you know, like I...
you know, have seen a few things, but that doesn't mean I'm smarter or, you know, any better equipped than anyone else to solve a certain problem. you know, I think, I saw my role as a leader in being, you know, multifaceted as any role is, but one of those was, you know, building a team of folks who were really excited about what they got to do every day and, you know, liked the people that they were working with. And I think ultimately, if you foster that kind of environment,
you get much better results out of people. And so, you know, that's just how I took it and how, you know, one of the ways I sought to embody that, you know, I think, and, you know, if I could, from a third party perspective, kind of say that's one of the things I've really appreciated about Flowspace over the years is, you know, you guys have great people, like, I will never forget folks like Han and Norms, you know, who were some of my first touch points at Flowspace before we ever, you know, signed an agreement to work with you guys and.
I could just tell from working with those folks that you guys had a great culture and you probably had a pretty good leadership mentality to just foster an environment where those folks flourish and made companies more successful and folks like me happy,
Ben Eachus (21:12.924)
Well, I appreciate that. And that's one of the things we are really proud of at the company. With it, I think this is a good segue, actually, Chad. So you've worked at some of the most successful brands in e-commerce and direct to consumer. You recently decided to take the plunge into entrepreneurship and launch your own product and not a physical product, but a software product. So can you tell us a little about Roger AI?
Why were you so compelled to do this? And what problem are you trying to solve?
Chad Brinton (21:45.836)
Yeah, for sure. You know, like in my role at Made In, I owned all of the functions, customer support, fulfillment, IT, that when something went wrong and a customer didn't get their order and they reached out to us 10 days later and said, you know, hey guys, place this order, where is it? Like all of those roads led back to me. Like there was no human who was like more individually responsible for that mishap than myself, right? So
You know, I really spent a lot of time thinking about this and kind of thinking about it from the various perspectives of the organization and how we respond to it. you know, I observed things about just, you time and bandwidth consumption of the customer service team, trying to figure out what happened and asking the fulfillment team, what went on with this order and the fulfillment team spending time getting information back to them. And then I went to true classic and I saw the same thing going on. Right. And so I think eventually, you know, just like any good innovator, you know,
I said, there's got to be a better way and I want to go take a shot at building it. And so really at the end of the day, the product is built for Shopify application. It plugs in to help you understand where you might be losing revenue from the sales that you captured online to what you can actually record in the accountant's world at the end of the day. And of course, things being lost to refunds and orders that never shipped out and...
helping brands identify those things before the customer does and before anyone ever needs to call you and providing some nice little automations on top of it to keep folks internal to the company informed to what's going on and to keep the customer informed that's what's going on. And I think in a lot of ways that linkage between fulfillment and customer service has kind of been missing and we're trying to close that gap.
Ben Eachus (23:36.772)
I love it. And you know, when I first saw that you launched, I was like, okay, this makes total sense based on our previous conversations and problems and issues that we worked through. So congratulations on the launch of the product and it's very exciting time. think it's a very cool product. And I just wanted to thank you, Chad, for joining us here. I've learned so much from this conversation and look forward to doing again soon.
Chad Brinton (23:49.987)
Thank you.
Chad Brinton (24:04.066)
Yeah, man, I appreciate it. You know, if I could just end with one final note, I mean, if there's, you know, a lesson that that again, I've learned in this time is, how important it is to find good partners and, know, a good partner could mean a lot of different things that a lot of different stages of your your company. But, you know, just knowing that you've got somebody sitting across the aisle from you who you can pick up the phone and call when the business changes or there's a problem. And I feel like you guys were that.
to made in and to me at various points in this journey. And just want to thank you for being a good partner. It's really more rare than, you I think anybody would like it to be, but you guys definitely proved to be that and I appreciate that.
Ben Eachus (24:45.744)
Thank you Chad. I appreciate the words there and have a great weekend and I'll talk to you soon. All right. See ya.
Chad Brinton (24:51.287)
Yeah, you too,
