Sebastian Fuentes

The target is 30-50 or more new creatives and iterations of winners per brand per month.

• Below that, they say, media buyers are guessing with limited surface area and the account eventually caps out.
• The fix is not more ideas but a creative operations system: performance data to show what is working and why; category research into patterns, hooks and formats; and a human-led strategy and design sprint that turns those inputs into angles, concepts and layouts, with media buyers kept in direct communication throughout.
• Fuentes sums it up this way: tools give speed, strategy gives signals, and the system gives consistency.

Fuentes says the system lets the team ship 50-plus creatives a month per brand without quality falling off a cliff. They describe the process as continuous, not a one-off sprint.

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The system is offered as a white-label package with a performance intelligence layer, AI-assisted research, briefs and ideation, centralized performance monitoring tied to outputs, and a full creative department without the overhead. The performance figures come from Fuentes’s own case study account, with no brand named; ask for the brand and supporting results before relying on them.

Fuentes reports a DTC brand scaling ad spend by 40 percent and growing revenue by 90 percent year over year. They say teams using the system cut production time by 80 percent and scale creative capacity without adding headcount.

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They recommend collecting zero-party data, aligning email strategy with paid ads, social media and customer service so the channels reinforce each other, and continuously testing content, ideas and designs. Fuentes calls email one of the most powerful growth engines and says the best email marketers treat it that way.

Fuentes contrasts this with the marketer who is “just about hitting send or flaunting revenue attribution numbers.” Their point: a single attributed-revenue figure can hide deliverability, churn and lifetime-value problems.

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They started with no attendees and continued going live, sharing insights and answering questions.

• Fuentes reports that the sessions now draw 10-plus business owners per week, described as active brand owners rather than passive viewers, and cites 99 new members in 30 days and 451 members, with 14 percent actively engaged.
• The community has also hosted an email strategy training on engagement, efficiency at work and standing out in crowded inboxes.
• A published post announces the paid tier, The Secret DTC Vault, as about to launch; ask whether it has since launched and what it includes.

Fuentes says the first sessions had no attendees, but they kept going. Their argument is that consistent effort compounds over time; they present the 10-plus weekly attendees and 99 new members as the result.

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Fuentes closes by asking readers what one unique thing they are doing for holiday prep, turning the checklist into a discussion prompt rather than a case study.

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On sustainability, they point to consumer demand and willingness to pay a premium, eco-friendly materials and reduced waste, circular economy concepts, cost savings from efficient resource use, and supply chain accountability, including fair labor, sustainable sourcing and lower carbon footprints.

• On data, they cite personalization, predictive analysis of trends and stock needs, consumer insight for product, marketing and pricing decisions, and data used to find friction points in the customer journey.
• They present the combination as a strategy for modern DTC brands.

Fuentes’s example of data at work is the customer journey: data can highlight friction points, from website navigation to checkout complications, that brands can fix to increase conversions and satisfaction.

This post stays conceptual — no named client, campaign or measured outcome — which contrasts with the specific tools, volume targets and account levers Fuentes gives in the creative-operations posts. Read together, the material suggests sustainability sits as a positioning argument rather than a demonstrated practice in the posts here.

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Start here for Fuentes's core diagnosis: low creative volume and weak hit rate cap an account. They also outline the operating system built around that diagnosis.

Fuentes argues that most agencies are not losing because of their media buyer; they are losing because creative hit rate is poor and creative volume is too low.

• If an agency is not pushing 30-50+ new creatives or iterations of winners per brand per month, they say, media buyers are guessing with limited surface area and the account caps out.
• The answer is not more ideas but a creative operations system.
• They describe using Motion to see what is working and why, communicating directly with media buyers, using Foreplay to research category patterns, hooks, and formats, and running a human-led strategy and design sprint that turns insights into angles, concepts, and layouts.
• The post sums it up: tools give speed, strategy gives signals, the system gives consistency.
• They say this lets the team ship 50+ creatives a month per brand without quality falling off a cliff.

For brands planning a campaign

For a DTC growth agency brief, this is the strongest evidence of Fuentes's creative ops method.

• Ask how they would set a creative volume target, divide research, strategy, and design roles, use Motion and Foreplay, and keep media buyers in the loop.
• For onboarding, ask which brands to start with, what the first sprint produces, and how hit rate is measured beyond shipped volume.

The specific levers Fuentes says changed results are account structure, creative testing, statics, broad targeting, and offer strategy.

Fuentes describes a creative ops system powered by AI and human strategy, combining AI, performance data, and human craft to ship high-quality creatives faster and increase iteration velocity with less chaos.

• In a case study, they say a DTC brand scaled ad spend by 40% and grew revenue by 90% year over year, using structure and creative testing rather than guesswork.
• The changes listed are Advantage+ Shopping as the spine with clean account structure; a creative testing engine where warehouse-style statics beat video; broad targeting that let the algorithm find high-value shoppers; and an offer strategy built around real purchase behavior.
• The system includes white-labeling the full system, a performance intelligence layer, AI-assisted research, briefs and ideation, a full creative department without overhead, and centralized performance monitoring tied to outputs.
• They say teams running the system cut production time by 80% and scale creative capacity without increasing team size.

For brands planning a campaign

Offers a starting architecture for a portfolio brand test: clean account structure, a creative testing engine, broad targeting, and offer strategy tied to purchase behavior.

• Ask for the case study and whether warehouse-style statics have worked outside that brand.
• Treat the 40% spend and 90% revenue results as self-reported until supporting results are published.

Fuentes says a great email marketer does more than hit send or flaunt revenue attribution numbers.

• They understand metrics beyond revenue: engagement rates, deliverability, churn, and lifetime value.
• They gather actionable data by collecting zero-party data, improving email performance, and driving growth across marketing channels.
• They work as part of the team, aligning email strategy with paid ads, social media, and customer service.
• They keep testing content, ideas, and designs.
• Fuentes calls email one of the most powerful engines for growth and says the best email marketers treat it that way.

For brands planning a campaign

Use this as an interview or training rubric for a campaign's email retention needs.

• Require zero-party data collection, deliverability checks, churn and lifetime-value reporting, cross-channel alignment, and a test cadence.
• It can help assess whether Fuentes can staff or train a retention function.
• Ask for examples of email programs they have improved.

It shows how they reach DTC owners and what kind of operator audience is gathering.

Fuentes started weekly live trainings inside the Skool community The DTC Vault 30 days before the post.

• At first, no one showed up, but they kept going live, shared insights, answered questions, and made the content valuable whether people were there or not.
• By the time of the post, 10+ high-quality business owners were joining the live sessions, described as actual brand owners looking to grow rather than passive viewers.
• The community had 99 new members in the last 30 days and 451 members, with 14% actively engaged.
• Fuentes was about to launch The Secret DTC Vault, a private paid community for top operators, and encouraged members who had been lurking to engage.

For brands planning a campaign

If the agency wants community access or live training for portfolio brands, this shows Fuentes already runs a DTC owner community and is building a paid tier.

• Ask about member composition, active rate, and whether those owners match the agency's portfolio-brand needs.
• The 451 members and 14% engagement indicate community scale, not a qualified buyer audience for a specific brand.

Fuentes hosted a live training in The DTC Vault on improving email strategy with simple tips and tricks.

• The training targets people struggling with low engagement or looking to improve their process.
• They offer a sneak peek at simple strategies to boost email engagement and revenue, process hacks to make email marketing more efficient, and ways to stand out in overcrowded inboxes.
• The post links to the full training and to the community, and says more trainings like it are planned.

For brands planning a campaign

Ask for the full training to review Fuentes's email process hacks and engagement methods. The workshop format could be adapted for an agency client session; ask for access to the training to assess the teaching details.

A compact planning checklist for a seasonal DTC campaign.

Fuentes says the starting gun for Q4 has fired and lays out a holiday game plan.

• Inventory management covers an in-depth stock check, forecasting from last year's sales data, and keeping suppliers informed.
• Holiday marketing strategy covers personalization by audience segment, calendarizing key dates such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and allocating budget to platforms where the audience spends time.
• Community engagement covers loyalty programs with holiday offers and interactive content such as polls, Q&A sessions, or holiday-themed contests.
• Digital touchpoints cover website load time, mobile optimization, and clear calls to action.
• Customer support covers training the team on promotions and common issues, plus extended hours at peak times.
• Fuentes asks what unique holiday prep readers are doing.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for onboarding a Q4 campaign: it gives a cross-functional checklist for creative, email, community, site, and support.

• Ask how Fuentes has adapted the plan for brands with different margins, inventory risk, or paid media budgets.
• Treat it as planning guidance, not proof of holiday performance.

It answers how sustainability and data can be combined in a brand strategy.

Fuentes says brands are merging planet-friendly practices with data-driven insights, aiming not just to sell but to create meaningful impact and improve the customer journey with data.

• They point to consumer demand and willingness to pay a premium for sustainable products; eco-friendly materials, reduced waste and circular economy concepts; cost savings from efficient resource use; and supply chain accountability, including fair labor, sustainable sourcing and lower carbon footprints.
• For data-driven DTC strategy, they cite personalization, predictive analysis for trends and stock needs, consumer insights to guide product, marketing and pricing decisions, and data that highlights friction points in the customer journey.
• They say the combination creates a formidable strategy for modern DTC brands.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant if the agency has a sustainability positioning goal.

• Use it to test whether Fuentes can connect mission to creative, offer, and data decisions.
• Ask for brand examples to assess their experience with sustainability campaigns.

The target is 30–50 or more new creatives and iterations of winners per brand per month; otherwise, media buyers are guessing with too little surface area until the account caps out. Fuentes describes a creative operations system, not just more ideas: performance data from Motion, category pattern, hook and format research from Foreplay, and a human-led strategy and design sprint that turns those inputs into angles, concepts and layouts.

Performance data from Motion, category research from Foreplay, and a human-led strategy and design sprint, run continuously rather than as a one-off.

For brands planning a campaign

For an agency campaign focused on creative testing velocity, the core proposition is a production cadence and toolchain designed to ship roughly 50 creatives per brand per month without a quality drop. Use it to set volume expectations and define the workflow in an onboarding plan.

Examples: Source 1

They attribute the results to Advantage+ Shopping as the structural spine, a creative testing engine in which warehouse-style statics outperformed video, broad targeting, and an offer strategy built around actual purchase behaviour. The system is offered as a white-label package with a performance intelligence layer, AI-assisted research, briefs and ideation, centralized performance monitoring, and a full creative department without the overhead.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant to a brand or agency deciding whether to build or buy creative capacity: the offer covers white-labelled delivery, AI-assisted ideation and shared performance reporting. Treat the 40 percent and 90 percent figures as a self-reported case study without a named brand or independent verification; ask for the underlying account data before relying on them in a client pitch.

Examples: Source 1

They also describe collecting zero-party data, aligning email strategy with paid ads, social media and customer service, and continuously testing content, ideas and designs.

For brands planning a campaign

Supports the retention half of a creative ops and email brief: expect email work measured against deliverability, churn and lifetime value, and planned jointly with paid and service channels rather than as a standalone send calendar. Zero-party data collection is a concrete first deliverable.

Examples: Source 1

They report starting with zero attendance, then reaching more than 10 business owners per session, 99 new members in 30 days, and 451 members with 14 percent actively engaged. They also describe launching The Secret DTC Vault, a private paid community for operators wanting to go deeper, and using the community to host a training on email strategy covering engagement, workflow efficiency and inbox differentiation.

For brands planning a campaign

Agency onboarding can include community-based training alongside hands-on account work. A paid tier is being introduced; check current membership terms, pricing and what access a brand portfolio receives before committing budget or promising clients a specific training cadence.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

For brands planning a campaign

Shows operational range beyond ad accounts, which matters for portfolio brands with a pronounced fourth-quarter peak. Use it as a seasonal planning framework.

Examples: Source 1

Ask for named client or campaign examples before treating these sustainability claims as demonstrated practice.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant for brands with a sustainability positioning that want marketing tied to operational claims. The argument is broad rather than grounded in specific brand examples; treat it as context for messaging, not as a demonstrated sustainability practice.

Examples: Source 1

Topics range from broad DTC strategy and holiday planning to email marketing specifics and, most recently, creative operations and AI-assisted production. Case studies appear as before-and-after performance summaries rather than long narratives.

For brands planning a campaign

Expect a collaborative content partner comfortable with list-driven LinkedIn posts, comment prompts and community cross-promotion. Plan how those formats could translate into co-marketing or lead-generation assets for an agency.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5 · Source 6 · Source 7

They promote joining the community and a forthcoming paid tier, The Secret DTC Vault. Ask whether they own the community, work for it, or earn affiliate income from it.

Original disclosure

I started doing weekly live trainings inside our Skool community, The DTC Vault.

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Ask whether they have a sponsorship, affiliate, client, or ownership relationship with Motion.

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Ask whether they have a sponsorship, affiliate, client, or ownership relationship with Foreplay.

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Silva’s posts cover building Shopify collections that guide shoppers to the right product, using segment and customer data, improving discoverability and lifting average order value. Fuentes works the same seam of product merchandising, data and conversion within a DTC growth system.

Silva stays inside the storefront, focusing on collections, tags, filters, navigation and Shopify data alignment.

• Fuentes works upstream, on the creative-testing volume, tooling and email retention that feed paid acquisition.
• They frame the output as a producible system with monthly volume targets, not a merchandising setup.

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Sadlak argues that brands treating email only as a sales channel burn out their list, and covers preparing automations and flows for the holiday rush. Fuentes argues email should be judged on engagement, deliverability, churn and lifetime value, and runs community training on those measures.

Sadlak’s material focuses on email platforms and lifecycle flows: discount-code reviews before peak season, universal content blocks, price-drop and back-in-stock flows, and post-holiday retention promos.

• It is tied to their agency’s podcast.
• Fuentes positions email as one part of a broader DTC growth system that also covers creative production and media buying, making the advice more conceptual and less tied to named platform features.

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Arif learned performance creative by running his own stores and losing money, then built an agency delivering statics and emails for brands spending heavily on paid social. Fuentes argues that the bottleneck is creative hit rate and volume, and describes a system for shipping creatives at scale.

Arif approaches the work as a designer, using customers’ own words—reviews, comments, objections and buying triggers—as a source of ideas, with an emphasis on the individual creative.

• Fuentes takes an operational approach: tooling for pattern research and performance data, a repeatable sprint, and monthly volume targets per brand.
• The individual creative is the output of a system.

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In his account of learning performance creative firsthand, he describes researching customer reviews, comments, competitors, objections and buying triggers before developing concepts.

• That gives a brand a practical way to find creative angles in customer language.
• He also describes Wasl Creative’s work delivering statics and emails for DTC brands in a post about his career and agency.

These posts explain Burhan’s creative approach and describe agency output, but offer less detail about a repeatable testing and performance-feedback operation than Sebastian Fuentes’s account of creative research, production and feedback.

• They also do not show a retention-email program or results from those services.
• For a portfolio-wide system spanning creative velocity and retention, they’re the closer match; ask Burhan for relevant examples and results before deciding.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Her Black Friday and Cyber Monday automation checklist calls out discount-code flows, campaign consistency, reusable Klaviyo content blocks, and price-drop and back-in-stock messages. In her post on email as a relationship channel, she argues for balancing promotional and educational content, adapting to customer lifecycle stages, and building trust before asking for another purchase.

The examples make Vira’s email focus more concrete, but don’t demonstrate a paid-ad creative testing or production system.

• Fuentes’s work is a closer fit if the need also includes increasing creative output and connecting it to performance feedback.
• Ask Vira for the underlying podcast and brand examples, along with performance results.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

In his guide to Shopify product collections, he recommends using customer and analytics insights to organize products, improving collection imagery and navigation, and using filters and relevant collection terms to help shoppers find items. Those changes may complement a campaign system when on-site discovery is limiting the value of paid traffic.

This is a narrower alternative, not a like-for-like substitute for Fuentes’s proposed combination of creative operations and email strategy. The available examples focus on Shopify data and merchandising; ask for relevant examples of ad testing, creative production or retention email before deciding.

Examples: Source 1