Susumu Creative
For DTC founders stuck between $2M and $15M

In 90 days your growth engine is rebuilt and running. Or you walk with the diagnostic.

Without the agency. Without the $180K VP hire. Without another quarter of starting over.

Fractional senior growth operator. Two clients at a time. You own everything I build. Month-to-month after a 6-month minimum.

Book your free 45-minute DTC Audit →

I'll map your top 3 revenue leaks in paid, email, and retention. Whether we work together or not.

$50M

Garage to $50M in five years

$20M+/yr

DTC portfolio led as growth lead

$10M+

Paid media managed across Meta, Google, TikTok, YouTube

20 yrs

Inside DTC growth operations

Why most DTC growth hires don't work

Here's what usually happens before a founder calls me.

You hit $3M. Then $5M. Then $10M. And growth got harder.

Your ad agency burned another quarter's budget on creative that stopped working six months ago. Your email flows haven't been rewritten in two years. Something's clearly broken, but you're too deep in product, ops, supply chain, and 40 other fires to rebuild the marketing engine yourself.

So you did what every advisor, peer group, and LinkedIn post tells you to do. You hired a VP of Marketing.

You landed someone with a resume from a real brand. A company ten times your size, with ten times your budget and a hundred times your team. They showed up on day one asking for headcount, a six-month strategic planning process, and a seat at the exec table.

Six months later: you've paid them $100K+ in salary and equity. They've produced slide decks. Nothing has actually shipped. You let them go.

And now you're starting over. Again.

The effort was there. The match wasn't.

They learned marketing in a business that doesn't look like yours. A $5M DTC brand doesn't need a strategist. It needs one operator who can diagnose what's broken in two weeks, rebuild the funnel in four, and run the result with the people and budget already in place.

That's the work I do.

If this sounds like your business, book the audit

The positioning

You need one person accountable for the whole growth function.

Not an agency that bills hours against a retainer and disappears into a Slack channel. Not a "strategic advisor" who shows up twice a month to ask how it's going.

One operator. Owns the P&L. Does the work.

Alongside whoever's already on your team, so nothing sits in a queue waiting for a handoff that never comes.

The work

What I actually own when I take the engagement.

1. Acquisition

You stop watching CPL climb month over month.

Paid media across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Google, run by someone who's put $10M+ behind DTC categories and knows which creative, targeting, and measurement actually hold up in 2026. Affiliate and influencer when they make sense. Not because an agency needed to justify a line item.

2. Retention and lifecycle

You start pulling margin out of the list you already have.

Klaviyo welcome flows, abandoned cart, post-purchase, reactivation, VIP segmentation, rewritten and running. Not templates. Not "best practices." Your voice, your offers, your data.

Most DTC brands between $2M and $15M are under-invested in retention by a factor of 3 to 5x. That's almost always the fastest margin unlock I find in the audit.

3. Conversion

You stop leaving money on the table at the point of decision.

Landing page design and build. Offer structure. Site speed and UX audit. Subscription architecture for brands selling recurring. CRO tests that actually ship instead of sitting in a backlog marked "Q2."

4. Operations

You find the money most CMOs don't even look for.

I read the full P&L: shipping, fulfillment, payment processing, customer service costs, 3PL contracts. The growth job doesn't end at Add to Cart.

Last ShipStation review I ran for a client surfaced $240K/year in savings nobody was tracking. That alone paid for 26 months of retainer.

The plan

How the engagement actually runs.

Step 1

Diagnose (Weeks 1 to 2)

I audit your full marketing operation: paid accounts, email platform, tracking and attribution, site, offer, retention, operations. You get a written prioritized list of what's broken and what's worth building.

If what I deliver isn't useful, you end the engagement there. No further obligation. Most clients stay. Some don't. That's fine.

Step 2

Rebuild (Weeks 3 to 12)

I run the work. Paid media in your accounts. Email rebuilds in your Klaviyo. Landing pages on your stack. Reporting in a shared dashboard.

Direct Slack access to me. When things go wrong, and at some point they always do, the conversation is with the person doing the work, not an account manager three layers away.

Step 3

Run (Months 4 to 18)

The system compounds. I operate it, tune it, scale it. By month 12, you've usually hired one or two in-house people I've helped you find and train. By month 18, I'm ready to hand off and exit.

My goal is to build the system well enough that you don't need me forever.

Proof

What this actually produced for other DTC founders.

Revenue tripled in 90 days. Held for two years.

Supplement brand, sports nutrition, post-acquisition turnaround

Brought in immediately after a private acquisition. The previous owner had let the ad account drift, email flows hadn't been touched in over a year, and the new ownership couldn't tell what was driving what revenue.

I rebuilt the acquisition funnel from positioning through paid through post-purchase, reinstalled proper attribution, and got the new team a clear read on unit economics.

Revenue tripled inside 90 days. The brand sustained that growth rate for another two years.

Garage to $50M in five years.

Supplement brand, joined 2006 as first growth hire

One of the first growth hires at a garage-scale supplement brand. Helped build it into a $50M company over the next five years.

Ran creative direction, CRO, and core acquisition channels through the hyper-growth phase. Led the conversion and attribution work that let the team invest aggressively in new channels without losing efficiency.

This is the engagement that taught me how DTC actually scales. Not in theory, but by living inside it for five years.

Portfolio revenue past $20M/year with a two-person growth team.

Multi-brand DTC portfolio: apparel, consumer goods, health

Three years as the growth lead for a portfolio spanning apparel, consumer goods, and health. Reported directly to the founder. Owned paid media and funnel strategy across every brand.

Oversaw $10M+ in ad spend across Meta, Google, and YouTube. Built the creative and copy systems that let each brand move fast without rebuilding from scratch every launch.

Portfolio scaled past $20M/year with a two-person growth team. That's the leverage one operator with systems can generate.

If this sounds like your business, book the audit

Investment

What this costs, and what it replaces.

Two tiers. Occasionally a custom third. All month-to-month after a 6-month minimum. These are what I charge right now. Book the audit and we'll confirm fit before anything gets quoted.

Two clients at a time, occasionally three. Five clients is an agency pretending to be a consultant. Two is focused attention. When slots are full, you wait. When they're open, you get the real thing.

Growth Engine

$6,500 / mo

Single-channel focus for brands building their first real system.

Best for DTC brands in the $1M to $3M range, or larger brands that want to start with a specific focus. Full diagnostic, then deep work on the single highest-leverage channel, usually paid media or email/SMS. Bi-weekly strategy calls. Direct Slack access. Live reporting dashboard. Measurable progress on the P&L line that matters most.

Apply for Growth Engine →
Most common

Fractional Growth Lead

$9,500 / mo

The whole growth function, owned.

Best for DTC brands in the $3M to $15M range that need senior growth leadership but can't justify a full-time VP yet. Paid media, email/SMS, CRO, retention, and the operational layer, end to end. Weekly strategy calls. Direct Slack access. Live reporting dashboard. Full accountability for the growth P&L. Equivalent to 2 to 3 days per week of senior operator time.

Apply for Fractional Growth Lead →

Custom

Let's talk

For $15M+ brands or engagements with specialized scope.

Post-acquisition turnarounds, channel-specific deep work (Amazon, international, subscription architecture), or multi-project engagements. We scope it together.

Let's talk →
Price anchor

What you're actually comparing this to.

OptionCost per yearWhat you get
VP of Marketing$180K to $240K salary + equity + benefitsStrategy. Maybe. Six months in.
Agency retainer$10K to $25K/mo + ad spend markupA shared account manager and creative made for three other brands
This engagement$78K to $114K/yearOne senior operator. Two clients total. Owns the P&L. Does the work.

All engagements month-to-month after a 6-month minimum. You own everything we build: accounts, creative, copy, documentation. When the engagement ends, you keep running the system.

FAQ

Questions I get every week.

How is this different from a fractional CMO?

Most fractional CMOs advise. I operate. They run calls; I run accounts. If what you need is strategy only, I'm the wrong hire.

Why not just hire a VP of Marketing?

If you're above $15M and can afford a real one, do it. Below that, the math almost never works. You'll pay $200K+ for someone who needs a team you don't have yet.

What if we've already got an agency running paid?

Fine. Two paths: I take over, or I manage them. Most engagements, the agency stays for 30 to 60 days and we transition. Sometimes they stay forever. Depends what they're actually good at.

What if we're below $2M?

You probably don't need me yet. At sub-$2M, the bottleneck is usually product-market fit and offer, not marketing infrastructure. Come back when you're stuck between $2M and $15M.

Do you work with Amazon-only brands?

No. I work with brands that own their channel, DTC first, with Amazon as a supporting channel. If 90%+ of your revenue is Amazon, I'm not the right operator for you.

Risk reversal

The risk is on me, not you.

Two commitments I make in writing:

  1. 1. The 2-week diagnostic is self-contained. If what I deliver in weeks 1 to 2 isn't worth paying for, you end the engagement there. No further obligation. No lock-in.
  2. 2. You own everything I build. Accounts, creative, copy, documentation, dashboards, SOPs. If you decide six months in you'd rather hire in-house, I'll help you find and train the person. The goal is infrastructure that outlasts me, not dependency.

If this sounds like your business, book the audit

Who this isn't for

Who I don't work with.

If any of that's you: no hard feelings. Come back later, or don't.

Book the audit. Forty-five minutes. Go.

You leave with your top 3 revenue leaks, in your accounts, with dollar figures attached. No pitch. No follow-up sequence. No "nurture track."

Book your free DTC Audit →

Roster cap: 5 active clients. 1 DTC slot open. Short waitlist after that.

P.S. Most founders wait too long. They pay another $100K to a VP hire that doesn't ship. They burn another quarter's budget on an agency that's on autopilot. Then they call, usually after another full cycle of starting over.

The brands that get out of the $2M to $15M slog are the ones who stop starting over. If that sounds like where you are: book the audit. You'll know by the end of the call whether this is the right next move.

Book the audit