Raising money is one of the hardest things you'll do as a founder. You get so used to hearing no that you stop flinching, even when the reason makes so little sense you wonder if they were listening to your pitch at all.

The catch is that there's no incentive for an investor to tell you the real reason. The truth takes time, invites an argument and closes a door they might want to walk back through later. A vague, kind no costs them nothing and keeps the relationship warm. After-all, their worst fear is missing out!

Anyway, I went back through every rejection I received and wrote my own translation guide. Don’t worry, funds and names are anonymous but I would like to say that everyone was, and is, so lovely.

"It's not a fit."

This is the most common rejection in venture and the least useful, so it's where I started digging.

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Mid way through 2024, eighteen months into CLUTCH, a producer from Channel 10 slid into my LinkedIn DMs and asked if I’d ever thought about going on Shark Tank. I replied no. He asked for my number so he could call and ask why and how he could ease any reservations I had.

If you haven’t seen it (or want to watch it again), here’s the pitch:

Shark Tank Australia | Can Clutch Glue Solve Wardrobe Malfunctions FOREVER?

Why I initially said no

I’m obsessed with Shark Tank. I’ve watched thousands of pitches, and what always struck me is how negative they are. Take Scrub Daddy, which the sharks famously hated, and which is now an incredible business. I couldn’t stop thinking about how awful it would be to walk onto national television with the thing I’d poured my life savings, my reputation and my ego into, only to have it torn apart in a matter of seconds.

I also did the realistic maths on who I was. A young woman pitching fashion glue, (or as most people ignorantly perceive it as ‘boob’ glue), to a panel of mostly male sharks, hoping they’d understand it well enough to back it. I thought the odds were really, really slim.

The producer listened to all of it and said something that stuck with me: a lot of the time, the negativity comes from people who just aren’t prepared.

As a very competitive person I thought, fuck it, let’s do this, I’m going to blow this show out of the water.

Six months of preparation

I called my sister Lucy, who is our CMO, and she was very clear. If I was doing this, I was going to be as prepared as humanly possible.

We had about five or six months, and we used every one of them. Every day we got on a call and worked through a brand new version of the script. We also auditioned wardrobe malfunctions, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write. It had to read on camera, so socks and bike shorts were out because the shot sits around chest height, and I had no interest in my boobs being out on national television either. The strap slipping off my shoulder ticked every box, which is how it became the one you saw.

Then we ran three mock Shark Tank nights. I invited 50 friends and people from the industry each time: old bosses, my boss at the time, other founders. The real format is a two-minute pitch where nobody is allowed to interrupt you, followed by roughly fifty minutes of questions. Our version ran for three hours, with two and a half hours of Q&A each night.

Pitching to your friends is almost more nerve-racking than pitching to strangers. However, by the end of the third night I had answered every question anyone could possibly ask, and that changed everything.

The ask was a strategy

I went in asking for $200,000 for 10%. That was deliberate. Nobody wants to watch forty-five minutes of a founder haggling over valuation, and it doesn’t make good TV. What makes good TV is talking about how good the product is, so I kept the commercials simple and gave myself room to talk about CLUTCH.

On the day, I was incredibly calm. I remember every detail of it, and I didn’t have a nervous bone in my body. That’s what preparation buys you. When you’ve got your pitch down pat and you believe in what you’re selling, the person on the other side can feel it.

All five sharks wanted in. I said yes to two of them, Davey Fogarty and Rob Herjavec, who were offering double what I’d asked for. In that moment I couldn’t exactly say no on the telly.

What you didn’t see

While I was running mock nights, something else was happening in the background. A friend called and asked if I’d heard of the Startmate accelerator. I hadn’t. They told me to just apply and see what happened, so I did, and somehow we got in.

Right before I signed, my lawyer told me it didn’t really make much commercial sense. We’d already found product-market fit, we were in market and we were making revenue. Instead, he suggested I pitch Blackbird, Startmate’s older and much, much bigger sibling.

I’d never heard of Blackbird in my life. I jumped on the call, talked about my business, and afterwards they told me they don’t do CPG investments but CLUTCH was too good to pass up. Not long after, I had a term sheet in my hand: $2 million for 20% of the business.

Walking away

Shark Tank deals aren’t done when the cameras stop. Afterwards, Davey and Rob’s lawyers started their due diligence, and I went back to them with a question. I had a $2 million term sheet from Blackbird. Would they re-evaluate so their offer was on par?

They said yes, on the condition that I gave them founder’s shares.

Absolutely not.

So I walked away, and Blackbird led our pre-seed instead. For the record, there’s no bad blood. I still email both of them asking for help and resources, and they’re always happy to share. Our pitch also ended up being the most viral piece of footage across all five sharks’ social channels and Channel 10’s, so I like to think I did them all a favour. Being associated with CLUTCH is a good thing and paints them as allies of women in business.

What I’d tell you if you’re thinking about it

Be more prepared than feels reasonable. I know that sounds obvious, but it’s the single biggest reason the pitch worked. Not a day goes by where I’m not pitching this business to someone, whether it’s my Uber driver, someone at customs, or an investor on the phone, and it all started with those three nights.

Try to have a term sheet before you walk in. Your on-air number becomes an anchor, and the only thing that moves it is a better offer sitting on the table. Keeping my ask small made for better TV and left me the leverage to renegotiate later.

Get your supply chain ready for what comes next. A successful episode sends a wave of demand your way, and a lot worked in our favour because we were ready to go. Telling Blackbird the pitch had gone well also meant we had the capital to ride the publicity rather than drown in it.

Not a founder?

The same rule applies to any room you’re nervous about walking into: the job interview, the pay rise conversation, the speech at your brother or sister’s wedding. Run it past people who’ll ask you the hard questions first. Nerves mostly come from the questions you haven’t answered yet.

I said no to Shark Tank because I was scared of being torn apart. I said yes because I realised preparation was the one part I could control.

Good luck in the tank!
Annabel

Earlier this week, , founder of 4AM Skincare, shared a screenshot from Jennifer Lawrence’s interview with The Cut about her new haircare brand, Mes.

Side note: if you don’t already follow Jade, fix that today. She’s building 4AM which I’m 100% certain is the next billion dollar skincare brand. I’ve spoken with a number of her investors who have all said the same thing too.

Sorry now back to it: When the interviewer moved on to the business side of Mes, Lawrence said this: “If you put a gun to my head and were like, ‘What are the numbers we would need to reach in order for Mes to be a success?’ I would have no clue. Numbers don’t stick in here. I’m dumb but cute!” Asked whether the company has investors, she whispered “I don’t know” and redirected the journalist to her co-founder. For the record, her co-founder’s original company, Arcaea, has raised $78 million and is funding Mes.

My reply under Jade’s post was this:

Yikes this hurts to read... Women founders already fight so hard to be taken seriously in business, and this feels like such a disappointing blow. It doesn’t just hurt her brand. It feeds the exact stereotype the rest of us are working to break.

A few days on, I’m still stewing over it, so like any professional self regulator, I’m putting pen to paper.

I get the joke. I just don’t think it’s funny.

To be fair to her, self-deprecation is the whole Jennifer Lawrence brand. It’s what made her the most relatable person in Hollywood, and I don’t doubt she was playing to that in the moment. She also has a co-founder who clearly does know the numbers, and nobody expects an Oscar winner to have the P&L memorised.

However, she wasn’t promoting a film. She was on the record as the founder of a company, being asked a founder’s questions. In that context “dumb but cute” isn’t a punchline, it’s a confirmation of the oldest assumption about women in business, delivered by one of the most famous women in the world to an audience of millions.

Women founders already walk into rooms where the default is that we probably don’t understand our own numbers. A line like that doesn’t stay in the pages of The Cut. It follows the rest of us into the next pitch meeting.

Fame is the business plan

Here’s the part that really gets under my skin. I’m raising CLUTCH’s seed round right now, and I guarantee that if we had a celebrity attached, investors would see the potential upside immediately. Yet when I, a passionate founder, explain how we’ve completely revolutionised a market category, we’re not believed.

Mes is, with respect, more fluff in an already oversaturated category. Meanwhile there are founders genuinely innovating, putting what feels like their entire lives on the line, and still not being believed.

That’s the double standard in one interview. You can not know whether your company has investors and still be backed by $78 million. We can know our numbers down to the cent and still have to fight for a second meeting.

What she could have said instead

Nobody needs Jennifer Lawrence to recite her customer acquisition cost. Something like “that’s not my side of the business, my co-founder lives in the numbers and I trust her completely” would have been just as charming and just as human. It also would have made both women look good.

Knowing what you don’t know is a strength. Calling yourself dumb because of it is a choice, and when you have her platform, it’s a choice that lands on everyone else.

One last observation. I can’t think of a single celebrity brand that people are still devoted to long after the launch hype dies down. I can’t see myself in ten years’ time saying “I still love Alix Earle’s skincare brand” or “I still love Jennifer Lawrence’s haircare brand!” I will sure as hell still be supporting the brands that were led with purpose and community in mind, though.

A huge, heavy launch gets you the headlines. Retention is what tells you whether anyone actually cared, and funnily enough, that’s a number worth knowing.

If you’re a founder, particularly a woman, I’d gently suggest retiring the “numbers aren’t my thing” bit, even as a joke. If you’re an investor, maybe ask why the celebrity deck feels like less of a risk than the founder who has bet everything on her product.

Maybe she didn’t mean anything by it and that’s exactly the problem.

Bye for now!

Annabel xx

Shoutout to our COO, Ollie Monks, and our General Manager, Livvi Hamblin. They are entirely the genius behind this operation, so when I say ‘we’, I really mean them!

Quickly before I start…

In August I wrote about why I’ll never let a chatbot answer our customers, so at a glance you might think I’m contradicting myself. But this couldn’t be more different, and it all comes down to where you point the thing. Almost every AI pitch I see is aimed at the human parts of a business: the customer service inbox, the HR, the content. Those are the parts people actually feel, which is exactly why I don’t want a machine doing them.

The parts nobody feels are the ones that eat a small team alive: chasing invoices, keying purchase orders into our inventory system, reconciling stock figures across warehouses, and preparing for meetings about the work instead of doing the work. That’s where we pointed it. But there is one golden rule in our approach: always have a human in the loop. Nothing that leaves the building happens without one of us pressing the big green button (apart from nagging our warehouses, but more on that later).

We built all three apps ourselves: one for operations, one for marketing, and one the whole team lives in. Between them they plug into about 40 outside platforms, from Xero, Cin7 and Shopify to every warehouse location and every ad account we spend money on.

PART 1: CLOPERATIONS (Operations Dashboard)

Before CLOPERATIONS, a question as basic as “how much stock do we have?” meant five logins and a vibes-based guess. Now Ollie has built a system that pulls stock from more than eight warehouse locations around the world before anyone is awake, with the date beside each figure so we can track historical stock figures too (important for bookkeeping).

On its own, that’s just a nicer spreadsheet. The interesting part is what happens when stock sits next to everything else. Line it up with our open purchase orders and the sales forecast, and the dashboard flags a stock-out anywhere in the world before it happens, then recommends a reorder in whole cartons with the factory minimum already applied. Ollie can test that order against an 18 to 24-month forecast and see how long it will take to pay itself back without committing a cent. His newest page goes a step further and suggests moving stock between locations as a contingency if buying more isn’t a priority.

That forecast is the bit I’m most in awe of, because our channels behave completely differently. Ecomm is fairly steady day to day, with seasonal bumps and sale spikes we can tie back to ad spend. Retail is lumpier, waiting on the lag from our brand and trade marketing campaigns. Distributors are harder again: you’re predicting how quickly they can land new retailers, how keen those retailers are to range us, and how well their own campaigns drive people in store, all at once and sometimes across an entire continent. Ollie’s model accounts for all of it, from store counts, door ramp-up and UPSPW (units per store per week) for retail, to ad spend, target MER and ROAS (what we get back for every marketing dollar) and growth scenarios from conservative to aggressive for ecomm. The result is real confidence in our stock, our purchase plan and our revenue for the next 18 to 24 months. Not bad for a glue company!

Put Shopify, Amazon and the weekly sell-through reports from retailers like Priceline, CVS and Boots in the same place, and we can see what is leaving shelves, not just what we shipped. It’s also how we spot trends, and how I got an answer to my burning question this week: is the new 5mL XS Travel Mini tube at Priceline bringing in new customers, or just cannibalising our 15mL OG tube sales? (Fortunately, it’s the former!)

Exhibit A: Sell-Through Trends.

Profit works the same way. With the real invoices from our warehouses sitting beside marketplace fees and ad spend, we can see which channel genuinely makes money once freight and fees have taken their cut, rather than which one simply sells the most. Before we run a sale, a simulator calibrated on a real past promotion shows what it will do to orders and margin, so it gets costed before it runs rather than mourned after it.

Exhibit B: the Promo Simulator. Move the sliders, see what a sale does to orders and margin before you run it.

Because the month-end accounting pack is built from those same numbers, the books now close from one source with evidence behind every figure. The pack our bookkeeper works from went from 13,886 pages to four. That isn’t a typo. CLOPERATIONS also grades every month against the forecast we saved before it began, which is deeply humbling.

PART 2: CLACTIVATIONS (Marketing Dashboard)

Marketing has too many places to look: email, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, ten different review pages, Reddit, a dozen competitors and every ad platform we pay. The risk was never doing them badly. It was missing them entirely.

CLACTIVATIONS pulls all of it into one app for Lucy and her marketing team. Each morning it has already read the overnight reviews, comments and DMs, sorted them, and left a draft waiting on anything that needs a human.

Where it really earns its keep is in connecting everything. Email, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok messages land in one inbox, and a request to cancel an order jumps to the top with the live Shopify order status beside it, so it’s caught while the parcel can still be stopped. Ad spend from each platform sits next to the revenue Shopify actually recorded, so we can see which paid channel is earning its budget, instead of taking each platform’s word for it. The marketing budget is checked against the real bills in Xero, not a plan in a spreadsheet.

Exhibit C: four channels, one inbox.

Ratings across ten storefronts, from Amazon and Boots to Priceline and The Iconic, are checked daily, so a drop anywhere is noticed the next morning. Even the content calendar listens in: a campaign mentioned in an email or a meeting note turns up as a suggestion, so nothing discussed gets forgotten.

PART 3: THE CLAPP (the CLUTCH App where this all lives)

All three apps share one sign-in and the same figures, so marketing and operations work from the same numbers. Promotion results in CLACTIVATIONS use the same data and definitions as Ollie’s dashboard. The marketing budget reads its bills from Xero through the CLAPP, and the CLAPP watches every overnight refresh in CLOPERATIONS and raises the alarm if one fails, before anyone opens a report built on stale figures.

My Day is where everyone starts. It sorts each person’s inbox by what matters most, and pulls the team’s to-dos out of emails, Slack and meeting notes so nothing discussed is lost. A task arrives with its owner, source and deadline, and closes itself when the reply goes out.

Orders live on one board. The big retailers send theirs by EDI, straight into Cin7. Everyone else (distributors, smaller retailers and boutiques) emails a purchase order. The CLAPP reads it, pulls out the lines, prices and ship-to, matches the account and puts up a card. Someone says yes, and only then is the order created in Cin7. No re-keying (bliss). From there, the CLAPP moves each order forward as Cin7, the warehouse and the carrier report in. It flags late deliveries, drafts the invoice the day the goods land, and queues a chase to the warehouse when nothing has shipped. For a boutique, the whole chain runs: a shop emails an order, a reply is drafted, someone says yes, the order hits Cin7 within 20 minutes, the Xero invoice goes out with a pay link, the warehouse ships and the parcel is tracked to the door. When an invoice falls overdue, the chase is drafted and waits for a click. Every email the system writes waits in an approvals queue until a person has read it, apart from the ones nagging our warehouses about late parcels, and I’m very comfortable with a robot doing that. Every automation has an off switch anyone can flip.

The company’s memory is the Playbooks: how each account is actually run, a running list of every contact, and a tracker of every contract, registration and renewal coming up, with how long each takes, who to contact and what to do. They refresh themselves from the team’s own email and meetings and propose edits rather than make them. Clappy, our Slack assistant, answers the team from the same pages.

The retail database holds every retailer’s profile: doors stocked, terms, last week’s sell-through, what they owe us, and where they sit in the pipeline. Every account is scored on the same rules: revenue, growth, delivery, money owed and the effort it takes from us. So the retailer review that used to take a week of spreadsheets (a week I will never get back) is built from live data in minutes and says, account by account, grow, fix or stop. The channel strategy pack does the same for the whole business: every channel’s contribution after freight, fees and ads, cash and stock, and the new streams on the table, all on one page. The meeting opens with the decision, not the data. The OKRs sit beside live revenue and margin and update as the figures land, so the gap is visible every week and ready for discussion. Our weekly leadership meeting draws its context from every data point, with nothing spent on agenda preparation.

Exhibit D: the Sales Orders board. An emailed purchase order becomes a card, someone says yes, and it walks through Cin7, the warehouse and the carrier.

Exhibit E: My Day.

You want it? So how do you get it?

None of this is particularly groundbreaking, and that’s rather the point. Pulling numbers out of forty systems and lining them up is admin, and it’s exactly the admin that used to stop a team our size from making good decisions quickly. The robots gather, reconcile and draft. The humans decide, and still have time left for the parts that actually build a brand.

If you run a small business and you’re drowning in day-to-day tasks with no time or mental bandwidth to work on the business, I wouldn’t start with whatever your customers see. I’d start with whatever you groan at on a Monday morning.

AI didn’t make CLUTCH less human. It just took away our excuses for not being.

Email me at info@clutchglue.com and let’s build you your own brain so you can get on with the big stuff!

Annabel x

There’s one phrase I hear more than almost any other, mostly from other women and it’s usually delivered with a small apologetic laugh: “I’ve got such bad imposter syndrome.” It has quietly become the standard explanation for why someone hasn’t sent the email, made the ask or backed themselves when it counted.

My approach to it is simple, if a little unorthodox. I don’t let myself think it exists.

The first time an invasive, imposing thought ever crossed my mind, I put it to bed instantly by telling myself, “well, men don’t get it, so why should I?” It’s not the most scientifically rigorous position I’ve ever taken, but it worked remarkably well. If that particular brainwashing tactic also works for you, congratulations, you probably don’t need to keep reading.

For everyone else, that’s not me claiming to be immune to nerves. I’m not, and neither is anyone who has ever had something on the line. I’ve just decided not to give the feeling a name, because the moment you name it, you start treating it like it’s true and accepting that it will get in the way.

It turns up everywhere

What’s interesting about imposter syndrome is how little it cares about context. It isn’t reserved for founders pitching to investors or delivering a keynote at the conference, although it certainly turns up there. It’s the first client meeting you’ve ever chaired, where you’re convinced everyone at the table can tell. It’s the email to the CEO of Atlassian that you’ve rewritten more times than you’d like to admit, because you’re not sure you’re allowed to be in their inbox. It’s the birthday party where everyone seems to have a bigger title, a bigger following or a bigger bank balance than you, and you spend the night rehearsing how to explain what you do.

Different setting, same script. Somewhere in your head a voice pipes up with “who do you think you are?”, and the phrase arrives to give it credibility.

Why I refuse the phrase

Calling it a syndrome turns an ordinary reaction into a condition, and conditions need treating before you’re allowed to get on with things. Yet most of the time, that unease isn’t a malfunction at all, rather it’s an accurate read of the situation. You’re doing something new, without much proof you can pull it off, in front of people you’d quite like to impress. Of course your body has opinions about that.

You’re not an imposter, you’re just new.

There’s also a flawed assumption baked into the term, which is that everyone else was issued a qualification you somehow skipped. They weren’t. The client across the table, the CEO on the other end of that email and the guests with more clout at the party were all new to their thing once, and plenty of them still are. You’re comparing your messy interior to somebody else’s edited exterior, then concluding you’re the one faking it.

Everyone is winging it, some have just had more practice and some are just simply put at ease by being uncomfortable.

Naming it is the easy option

Here’s where it starts costing you. Diagnosing yourself feels productive. You’ve identified the problem, you can talk about it, and there’s an entire cottage industry of podcasts and carousel posts ready to nod along (I say this with love).

None of that sends the email. The pitch is still sitting in drafts, your rates are still too low, and the person you wanted to meet at the party still doesn’t know your name. Talking about imposter syndrome and actually doing the thing are two separate activities, only one of them is comfortable, and I’ll let you guess which gets done more often.

It’s procrastination with better branding. It stops you from asking for what you want, and if my parents taught me anything, it’s that you’ll never get what you want if you don’t ask.

The part that worries me most is where it sends your attention. The moment you accept the label, your focus turns inwards: do I deserve to be here, am I qualified, do they think I’m a fraud? Meanwhile the client needs an answer, the CEO needs a reason to reply, and the person next to you at the party would simply like a normal conversation. Nobody in that room is assessing whether you belong. They’re far too busy worrying about themselves.

What to do instead

When the nerves arrive, and they will, skip the label and get specific. What exactly are you worried about? That they’ll say no? That you’ll get a number wrong, or be asked a question you can’t answer? Those are real problems with real solutions, and nine times out of ten the solution is preparation. A fear with a clear object isn’t a syndrome, it’s a to-do list, which is far easier to work through.

Over-prepare for every meeting you walk into, because it’s the closest thing to a superpower most of us will ever have. Know the numbers, know the likely questions, and know what a yes looks like before you sit down.

The same logic works for the less formal settings. If the birthday party is what’s making you sweat, the fix isn’t a confidence mantra. It’s having a couple of good questions up your sleeve and being curious about the people you’re talking to. Most people with clout are more than happy to talk about themselves, which takes a surprising amount of pressure off you.

The self-fulfilling version

If you let imposter syndrome get to you, you’re unlikely to walk away with the best case scenario you were hoping for. More often, you get the worst one. The pitch falls flat because you hedged every sentence, the client senses you’re unsure and takes over the meeting, or the reply never comes because your email apologised for its own existence. At which point the outcome seems to prove the fear right, and the voice that said you didn’t belong gets to say “see?”. That’s exactly the loop you want to avoid.

The thing is, if you’re in that moment, you already have the attention of the room, the person or the inbox. Take it and run with it. It’s amazing what happens when you take the energy you’d normally spend doubting yourself and procrastinating, and turn it into a force for good and getting shit done.

I have never once regretted being confident in the room. If anything, those are the times I’ve been most successful, most memorable and most myself.

While imposter syndrome might tell you that you don’t deserve to be there, I think there’s something far worse: being there anyway and wasting it. Showing up, holding back, and leaving someone with an impression of you that isn’t accurate to who you really are, inside and out.

A note for everyone else

For anyone who doesn’t think this applies to them, I’d gently point out that the phrase is contagious. Every time we laugh it off in a meeting or caption a win with “imposter syndrome is real”, we’re telling the people around us that feeling out of place is a condition, rather than a completely normal part of doing anything worth doing.

You’ll still get nervous before the big ones. I certainly do. The difference is what you decide that feeling means. Maybe it isn’t evidence that you don’t belong. Maybe it’s evidence that you’ve finally put yourself somewhere worth being.

Go get ‘em!

Annabel

Dupe culture has made copying something to be proud of and made paying full price seem naive. It has also quietly changed what it means to be original and invent something, because if the reward for making something new is watching everyone else sell it for less, I’m not sure how many people will keep bothering.

It has changed how we treat not being able to afford something, too. We’ve gone from accepting it to refusing to go without the thing we want.

Candidly, some days I wonder whether being an inventor was the hardest path I could’ve taken. I spent four years exploring and testing countless formulas and packaging prototypes, chasing a standard that only existed in my imagination, for a product nobody knew they wanted yet. After that, I had to convince customers to try it, teach them how to use it and, brick by brick, build trust and a market where there wasn’t one before. Then, a few years later, faceless cash-grabbing copycats decided to bottle up a concoction of crap and got to skip all the hard bits. Going first also means watching everyone else realise there was money to be made.

When did buying a dupe become normal?

Not that long ago, buying a knockoff was something we kept to ourselves. Now every woman and her cat is on TikTok finding the cheaper version of whatever’s popular this week, and we cheer for whoever finds it like they’ve cracked the Enigma code.

I understand why it’s so popular, and nobody should feel guilty for wanting nice things, so this isn’t a dig at anyone trying to make their money go further. What bothers me is what the culture ends up rewarding, because the copier never has to create any demand. They just inherit it. The dupe gets all the upside of the idea and none of the risk of having it.

It’s worse when the copy is bad. All CLUTCH dupes are genuine rubbish that simply does not work, and when someone buys one and it fails, it drags down the credibility of the whole category. So the original is left protecting that reputation, while the imitation happily cashes in on demand it did nothing to earn.

Whatever happened to simply not being able to afford something?

To be clear, I’m not saying anyone should buy things they can’t afford. I’m asking whether we now expect that pretty much anything for sale should be available to us at whatever price we’ve decided we’re willing to pay. It used to be completely ordinary to see something, love it, realise it was out of reach, and get on with our lives. Social media has somehow turned wanting something into expecting it.

Historically, when money is tight, we trade down. What’s interesting about dupe culture is that none of us feel like we’re trading down anymore. We still want the designer silhouette, the viral product, the dress everyone’s wearing. We just want it for $90 instead of $290, and the marketing promises it’s the EXACT same product when it truly isn’t.

The fashion industry is notorious for this grubby behaviour. Take Après Studio’s bubble dress, for example. We saw the world fall in love with that distinct silhouette and fabric and within five minutes versions of it were everywhere. The modern-day shopper doesn’t think “I can’t afford that, so I’ll sit this trend out”. The thought is closer to “who’s making something similar for less?” A seemingly small but almighty capitalist mindset shift.

Will copying win?

Innovation is expensive, slow and fraught with risk. If the market’s reaction to anything desirable is to immediately undercut it, that’s a pretty strange incentive structure we’ve built for ourselves.

I see it with investors too. They’ll back the millionth supplement brand hoping it’s the next Nutrafol and overlook the trailblazers operating in categories with no competitors at all. It pushes founders and investors alike towards a perceived quick win, and eventually we end up with an oversubscribed market full of absolute shit.

That said, I don’t think original thinkers are going anywhere. Founders who innovate will keep innovating and rise above the noise, while the copycats will always be in dirty wind. If anything, that makes originality more valuable than ever.

I’m not going to tell anyone to stop buying dupes. But every purchase is a small vote for the kind of market we want, and I’d like to live in one where the original always gets its flowers.

That’s all for now,

Annabel x

The retailer looks generous, the customer saves money, and the brand acquires more customers! Everyone wins, right?

WRONG!

The following has been my experience of the standard retail contract between a large retailer and a small (but growing!) brand like CLUTCH.

Generally, when a retailer puts a product on sale, its dollar margin doesn’t move. It can still make exactly what it would have made had that product sold at full price. The discount you’re enjoying is often funded by the brand, an arrangement the industry calls a ‘scan-back’ or ‘margin support’.

Confused? Fair enough, here’s an example:

In a simplified case, say a 15mL tube of CLUTCH Glue has an RRP of $29 AUD. The retailer runs a 30% off promotion, so the customer sees $20.30 at checkout ($29 × 0.70). What the customer doesn’t see is that the retailer still protects its agreed dollar margin on the original $29 price. The $8.70 discount ($29 × 0.30) is absorbed by CLUTCH: at the end of the promotional period, the retailer sends us an invoice for $8.70 for every tube sold. If 1,000 tubes are sold during the promotion, CLUTCH gets an $8,700 invoice from the retailer ($8.70 × 1,000).

It gets even more lopsided when you look at it from our side. Assume a notional 40% retailer margin: we’d normally receive $17.40 per tube ($29 × 0.60). On a 30% off promotion, after the scan-back we receive $8.70 ($17.40 − $8.70), so a 30% discount to the customer halves our revenue. The retailer, meanwhile, still takes home $11.60 in either case.

But wait, there’s more.

The relationship between Big Retail and Little Brand has other asymmetries as well. Retailers typically expect brands to commit to trade spend, which includes money allocated to marketing that drives customers into their stores and towards the promotion. That marketing package is bought from the retailer, and the scope can vary enormously: a spot in a flimsy paper catalogue that arrives in your letterbox (despite the “no junk mail” sticker…), a single Instagram grid post, or even a TV ad. The price can range just as widely - anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000 per marketing package.

Let’s put that on top of the example above. A brand like CLUTCH might commit to a few one-week promotions across the year at anywhere from 15% to 50% off, plus a five or six figure marketing package to support each one.

Then there are stand-alone display units, or additional shelf-side signage (called a ‘shelf talker’). These are often paid for by the brand as well. What about the shipping of the goods and the promotional material, and the labour of a third-party merchandiser to install them? Brand-funded. Access to sell-through data, so the sale’s success can be measured by more than the size of the invoice? What about warehousing, chargebacks, range fees or ticketing? You guessed it, usually paid for by the brand.

Now imagine all these costs repeated across several large retailers, in several countries, on a promotional calendar negotiated 12 months in advance. Not to mention the fact that all of this is often due before the retailer’s 60-day-plus payment terms get proceeds into your pocket.

Is it always like this?

No, not necessarily. Bigger suppliers like the Arnott’s and Unilevers of this world are much more likely to tilt the scales back in their own favour. The details of their trading terms may differ from the boilerplate contract, and their promotional costs are spread across tens if not hundreds of products. Their leverage as a major supplier can mean that a threat to walk away from the deal is credible both ways, and negotiating power is more balanced.

Clearance sales, loss-leader items, retailer price-investment and private-label products can all work differently, as can fresh produce, where there’s often no RRP and promotions are usually funded through a lower supply price. Big department stores, low-cost retailers like Aldi and Costco, and online disruptors like Amazon all have different contract and promotional structures too.

But in our experience, the unfortunate reality has been that temporary promotions on branded products are usually brand-funded.

What does it mean for you and your brand?

If you’re a consumer product founder with your sights set on retail, the above should give you pause and prompt a good look at the trade-offs. On one hand is the massive reach to a massive number of new customers, the credibility that comes with being stocked by a household name, a ‘halo effect’ lifting your direct-to-consumer sales, and the economies of scale bringing down unit costs. All very tangible and impactful reasons to chase a big stockist.

But on the other hand, it’s worth honestly evaluating whether you can afford to be there before you sign anything. I’ve watched incredible small businesses come unstuck in retail. Profitability is nuanced, cash flow can be genuinely hard, and it’s always worth understanding the full cost stack before you go signing a contract.

Lastly, to all of us consumers who love a good bargain, I’m sorry that you won’t look at those little yellow tags the same way again.

Annabel x

Our biggest challenge at CLUTCH has never been traction, advertising, or getting onto the shelves. It’s been education.

Nobody arrives on our doorstep knowing how to glue themselves into their clothes because, until CLUTCH launched, their closest reference point with adhesives was superglue. While I believe fusing your fingers together with that small but mighty tube is something of a canon event, CLUTCH is thankfully very different. I don’t think we would have lasted particularly long as a business if the only way to detach your clothes from your skin was a trip to the emergency room or a bucket of acetone.

What I didn’t anticipate was how people would wrongly assume the product worked.

Despite the instructions being printed on the box and tube, along with the thousands of tutorial videos we’ve posted online, there seems to be a very loud minority that have reverted to the superglue technique. Subsequently, when they apply the tiniest possible dab, wait absolutely no time at all, and see it inevitably detach five minutes later, they conclude that we are frauds. “I knew it was too good to be true”, I imagine them thinking. But CLUTCH is a product you do have to get a feel for, which has been especially tough to navigate given we are a brand that acquires most of our customers online.

It is this very small but very loud minority that skips the obvious “ask for help” step (easily accessed via email or DM’s I might add) and goes straight to leaving the most explosive one-star review followed by a tirade of hate comments on TikTok as if I’ve personally murdered their entire family.

This is quite the adverse response, given I want nothing more than to be of help. Especially since I know that the product works so well, when used correctly, that it’s basically sorcery.

We will always tend to the matter privately, replying with a detailed breakdown of where they’ve gone wrong and how to refine their technique. Almost always the customer leaves our conversation fully converted and a devout CLUTCH stan.

However their negative reviews and comments still remain, shaping what the next person thinks of us and having a tangible impact on sales in the long run.

I’ve mostly stopped letting this consume me, but what I can’t stop turning over is ‘why is this the way people behave?’. Why does the fury get published but the delight is expressed in private? Well, there’s a name for it!

Loss aversion

This concept is very simple: humans don’t feel gains and losses in equal ways.

Loss aversion is the psychological quirk that makes the pain of losing something feel far greater than the pleasure of gaining that same thing. It is a concept that would be familiar to anyone who has taken a first year finance course, and I think it applies here too.

When I relate it to my experience with CLUTCH, it explains a lot. When a customer has a positive experience, we’re far less likely to hear about it because, well, it did exactly what it said on the packet. They get on with their day.

But when CLUTCH doesn’t work the way they expect, the emotional response is disproportionately large. Suddenly, frustration becomes anger, and anger that needs to be publicised. What’s interesting is how quickly that negativity can escalate and how irrational the response can become compared to the actual problem.

Someone’s human error becomes gospel, yet hundreds of good experiences never make it into the record at all.

How this has broken the review economy

I can’t think of a single industry today that isn’t, to some degree, governed by reviews.

We’re all guilty of scrolling straight to the one-star reviews, looking for reasons to de-influence ourselves and protect against disappointment. We’re not necessarily looking for the average experience, we’re looking for the worst-case scenario.

But the flaw underneath the entire review economy is that we treat reviewers as a representative sample of buyers when they aren’t.

Someone who has a perfectly fine experience with a product or service has very little incentive to tell the world about it. They got what they paid for. Nothing to report. But someone who feels disappointed, ripped off or hard done by? They have an emotional errand to run.

A review section, therefore, isn’t a reflection of what all customers think. It’s a reflection of the relatively small percentage of customers who felt strongly enough (mostly negatively) to sit down and type something.

None of what I’m saying is particularly groundbreaking, which is why so many brands are willing to spend serious money trying to influence what appears in their review section and across the internet. They offer discounts in exchange for reviews, pay expensive SEO agencies to manipulate how they appear in search, or, at the grubbiest end of the spectrum, buy fake reviews.

What I find particularly troubling is what happens when you add AI into the mix. More and more, we’re using AI to help us make purchasing decisions. But if AI is drawing its conclusions from the same ecosystem of reviews, search rankings and SEO (search engine optimization) that brands can spend money influencing, we’ve created a new kind of pay-to-play system.

I don’t have a fix, though I do have a suggestion.

There was a Subway Takes episode (linked here) where someone argued you shouldn’t be allowed to read reviews until you’ve experienced the thing yourself. I love it, mostly. It falls over in the obvious spots - if the hotel room has bed bugs, you’d quite like to know before you check in. It removes the very good reason we publish reviews in the first place, so I don’t think it’s the solution.

My suggestion is specifically for e-commerce: if you want to leave a negative review of less than three stars, you should have make a genuine attempt to contact customer service first. A verified customer should still absolutely be able to leave a bad review, but before they do, the brand should have the opportunity to make it right. Bad things happen to good products. Things break, orders go missing, people misunderstand how something works. What tells me far more about a company isn’t necessarily that something went wrong, but how they respond when it does. Right now, our review systems don’t really have a place for that nuance. A star rating and ten-word review flatten an entire customer experience into a number, and its long term impact is disproportionate.

In the meantime, though, my suggestion to all of us is much simpler: get better at leaving good reviews.

Back in 2024, I made it my New Year’s resolution to leave a five-star review for anything that genuinely met or exceeded my (high) expectations. I know this could be seen as somewhat bastardising the 5-star scale, but I know how negatively biased the system is against business owners and I’ve taken it upon myself to play my part in correcting it. I’ve become so committed that I’m now a top contributor on Google. How cute.

But seriously, if a product or service worked for you, go and say so, especially if it’s a small business. A positive review might take you 30 seconds, but to the person on the other side, it can be one of the most valuable things you give them.

Ultimately, I think this is the problem: we’ve built an entire trust infrastructure on information that was never designed to carry the weight we’ve put on it. We use reviews to make decisions, we use AI to interpret those reviews, and underneath both systems are very human biases: loss aversion, negativity bias, and our tendency to give disproportionate weight to the people who felt strongly enough to speak up.

Maybe the answer isn’t to stop trusting reviews altogether. Maybe it’s to get better at understanding what a review actually represents and just as importantly, what it doesn’t.

Chat to ya soon

Annabel x

Before I launched CLUTCH, everyone seemed to have an opinion about what should come first: the cute packaging, a launch party, an influencer gifting list, expensive photoshoots. Now that we’re a little more established, I am often asked “is there any advice you would give to budding founders?” Besides my kneejerk answer (get a good lawyer!), there is one critical priority which costs nearly nothing - building a community around your brand.

My sister Lucy is the CMO of CLUTCH, and after years of copywriting at the world’s biggest agencies, she was the one who first challenged me with the hard questions: What does your brand stand for? What problem are you REALLY solving? Naively, I just thought “it’s a game-changing world first product, why wouldn’t someone buy it? This surely sells itself!”

Eventually I clocked what she was driving at. Besides the patents in 47 countries, community is the best moat we have. Marketing reach is how somebody first finds your brand, whereas community decides whether they stay, whether they tell their mates, and whether they buy your product again. Attention can be bought, but loyalty is a human act you have to earn.

Working out what you stand for

The best place to start is by assessing the brands currently operating in your category and finding where they fall short. And then you do the total opposite!

For example, Lucy looked at fashion tape and found that the category was built entirely on shame - “How mortifying that you’d let a wardrobe malfunction happen to you!”. In reality, clothes misbehaving is as human an experience as it gets! So, she flipped CLUTCH’s narrative to make sure it came from a place of empowerment: wear whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want. The CLUTCH brand embodies girlhood. It’s about solving your own problems and helping a stranger out with theirs, whether that be in the nightclub bathrooms, at the start line of a marathon, or in the mosh pit at a festival. This is how we developed a dedicated fanbase who understood our mission and formed the core of our early follower list.

Building your portfolio of content

Once you have your company ethos sorted, it’s now about how you communicate with your audience. This is arguably even harder to execute, and I have seen several failure modes in early-stage start-ups.

The first obvious temptation is buying views and followers with ad spend or bots. This can provide instant gratification with the social media numbers going up, but it is expensive, unsustainable, and the community isn’t real. Real customers aren’t stupid, and they can quickly sense when a company’s success is fabricated.

Secondly, a common low-percentage play approach is striving for virality with every post, trying increasingly provocative or ‘shock-jock’ tactics that stray further and further from the messaging we spoke about earlier. This might produce a viral moment or two, but it wont’’t hit the community you were trying to build in the first place. It’s an all-or-nothing play, you’re like a fast bowler trying to take a wicket with every ball. The perceived higher likelihood of going gangbusters is traded off with lower median view counts, and alienates the people who backed you from the start.

Both of the above methods had content aimed at strangers. We found that a better way to achieve success was with consistent messaging that resonated with the existing follower-base, however small it may be. Then, the strategy is to iteratively try ideas that probe at the boundaries while steadfastly maintaining your core ethos. This could initially result in posts that get viewer numbers more commensurate with your followership (which can be demotivating early on), but that is a poor metric as to how well it has resonated with them, whether it be four people or four million.

Posting known content aimed at your established audience is the percentage play: it will likely perform closer to your mean, but still with a balanced probability of going viral. It steadily builds your portfolio of consistent content, consolidates your messaging, and makes people feel like they are a part of something that they understand. This is what happened with CLUTCH, and our first viral post was one that straddled both outcomes.

Once you’ve got a few hundred reps under your belt you will see the magic unveil itself, and soon you’ll have thousands of people a part of your community - and the virality is just a bonus.

The best brands and personalities manage to do both, but the only way you can maintain that equilibrium is by always returning to your home base of what you stand for.

Some examples:

One of my favourite artists, Role Model (real name Tucker Pillsbury) does this better than any other celebrity in my opinion. Open any of his comment sections and you will see them filled with in-jokes he shares with his audience. If you’re a newer fan, this encourages you to go back and read up on the lore behind him. It’s addictive and makes you feel like you have deserved a rightful place within his community because you put in the time to understand his humour. In an interview he was asked why he engages with his audience in such niche ways to which he responded “the people simply yearn for community.”

Frank and Jacques Greef prioritised this with their app Kinso from the outset before they could even talk about the product they were building. A very novel concept for a tech company to hire a bunch of marketers as an early priority. They have built such a strong community that it’s done the unthinkable: made AI feel human. This drives strong retention and interest in their brand and a willingness to learn more.

White Fox have been so successful because they understand their audience, and play straight into their hands with an affiliate programme for every day young women. With this approach, everyone can feel like an influencer receiving PR!

Shameless have been able to foster community through the ‘You Beauty’ Facebook Group which gets thousands of posts a day, all centered around seeking advice and unsponsored opinions.

All these different examples are free to participate in as an audience member and are all centered around humanity: how it makes you feel.

CLUTCH has gone about this in a few different ways. We have fostered community by going to festivals, concerts, marathons and anywhere else a wardrobe malfunction will spoil a big day. Simply helping in a moment of need is a sure way to gain trust and a positive association people will tell all their friends about.

We also show up for our community in video series on socials where I reply to real hate comments men have left on our CLUTCH posts. Nothing pulls the crowd together faster than watching you meaningfully confront a scenario which is all too common for everyday women.

These weren’t strictly commercial plays, they were deliberate engagements with the community that just happened to educate people about our product. And that community has paid us back in spades! Within it, CLUTCH has become a verb. CLUTCH’d in, CLUTCH’ing in or CLUTCH have all become the way to describe gluing yourself into your clothes. The biggest brand moat there is, and money alone can NEVER buy that association.

It pays you back slowly, then all at once

Going viral is addictive and feels like proof of reaching a community, but as we said - this is just the initial reach. Your audience has not been consolidated. Your strategy can’t be to beat your best ever post, every time, and it is this mentality that walks brands off a cliff.

As much as community building might feel slow, it’s our absolute priority at CLUTCH. Have patience, a point of view, and a willingness to get amongst your audience. Prioritise the fifty in front of you and they’ll hand you the masses eventually.

If you’re not launching anything, this doubles as a test of the brands you spend your hard earned money on: do they talk to the room, or shout straight past it?

Cheers

Annabel x

“Building in public” is a phrase I have heard a lot recently, referring to a social media phenomenon where aspiring entrepreneurs publicly document the journey of building a business from the ground up, often before there’s even a product or service to buy. It is widely accepted as the done thing, but now the part that was traditionally private, hard and relentless has become the show! You build a community around the journey. You create awareness before you launch. And, perhaps most importantly, you give yourself a very public reason not to give up.

For what it’s worth, I think this can be a huge force for good. The community and awareness that can be built by letting people into your journey is incredibly valuable, particularly when it comes to turning that attention into customers once you launch. But it’s not black and white.

I’ve always liked to keep two ideas distinct in my mind: I think of CLUTCH as a founder-led business but it wasn’t necessarily built in public.

Founder-led, to me, means the founder is a visible part of the brand – their personality, perspective and story are fully integrated. Building in public, by contrast, focusses on turning the process of building the business into content. You can absolutely be founder-led without building in public. I’d argue the inverse isn’t true.

I only started posting myself with CLUTCH once the product had launched, and that was a very deliberate decision for a few reasons. One was that the product idea was genuinely novel, and at the time my idea wasn’t protected by a patent. Another being that I had a full-time job which was taking up the majority of my time, so frankly I didn’t have the bandwidth. And another being that I was living in Hong Kong where TikTok is banned, so was off the table. But as I’ve thought about it, there’s a bigger reason why I didn’t jump to social media too early.

I didn’t want to spend more time talking about the business than I did actually building it.

Online, you come across a handful of people where you’ve got to wonder whether they’re doing it for the right reasons. Is it a case of wanting to be on social media, but you don’t want to be perceived as an influencer? Did you start building in public for a product “in stealth” that never hit the market, but now it’s been years and you’re selling a course on how to start a business? At this point I’m not even sure what you’ve built in the first place!

You only have progress to share if you’re actually making progress.

The more serious version of this is that it is easy to become distracted by documenting the process and interacting with your community rather than doing the actual work that needs to be done. The lines blur between vanity and impact.

If you feel like you might be sliding into enemy territory here, it’s worth asking yourself: what does success actually look like here? Is it (future) revenue and community? Or is it perception, views and followers?

When building in public is done well, it is incredibly inspiring. These founders become mentors to people they’ve never met. They demystify entrepreneurship. They make starting a business feel possible. Shoutout Anaita Sarkar (@sellanythingonline). You’re an icon.

But I think there’s a deeper reality. Even when it is done well, and entirely for the right reasons, building in public is HARD! And because of this, I think this generation of founders are far braver than the those that came before us. Back in the day, you got to be bad in private.

Premature and overt publicity is the total opposite of how most successful businesses were traditionally built, but we’ve somehow arrived at a point where it feels like part of the job description. It is something you’re expected to do as a matter of course, but I just don’t think it’s normal.

For most of commercial history, founders could start small, scale slowly and fall flat on their face over and over again, and entirely in private. I envy founders who built companies before social media for this reason. They had space and time to be totally shit and to know absolutely nothing.

There was also far less comparison. No launch had to be a moment. There was no pressure to be viral, to find instant product-market fit, to hit million-dollar sales days, to achieve high gross margins, to understand a million pieces of business jargon or three letter acronyms…

Now, social media demands the polish of a conglomerate that spent billions of dollars and decades perfecting its supply chain, branding, packaging, distribution and customer experience.

We’ve inverted the natural order of building a business.

Traditionally, the playbook was to graft away behind the scenes and then show up outwardly once it’s good. But now we’ve flipped it, and consumers feel surprised, let down, or even try to cancel a brand when the first attempt isn’t perfect.

Every expectation your customer has of you was set by a company with a hundred-year head start. And when you go viral and reach new customers who haven’t come across you before, they assume you’re a huge multinational when that couldn’t be further from the truth. You’re just one person, probably still doing a full-time job, bootstrapping it, and working out whether the mistake you’ve just made is genuinely survivable.

You get scrutiny worthy of a corporation while on the resources of a hobby. This is where I think building in public creates its biggest contradiction: the very place where you built the trust is often the place you lose it fastest.

So, to all the founders out there building in public, losing your privacy in pursuit of following your dreams, remind yourself: you’re the first generation to be doing this shit in public.

And maybe that’s why I think we’re braver than the founders who came before us. Not because we’re necessarily better, but because they got a chance to be shit in private.

Bye for now!

Annabel

I completely understand why that email might sound appealing though. Who wouldn’t want to get a few hours back in your week, plus the ability to offload a shitty job which is fraught with negativity?

But I think this is the wrong way to think about it. Everyone expects customer service to be generic, careless and impersonal, which is exactly why you should do the unexpected and be human. This is a business decision as much as it is a values and community building exercise.

Now I’m not saying I enjoy the unfiltered, mildly threatening, Sent from my iPhone emails that end up in our inbox. It’s a humbling experience running a business where it feels like you’re putting your whole life on the line, meanwhile Becky’s kicking off because the ETA on her package said 3pm and it’s now 3:11pm.

I need you to reframe your thinking from “this is a shitty job” to “look at all this sweet sweet feedback”.

Every email or DM is a chance to fix a problem within my business that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise.

A few quick examples:

Someone contacts us believing that CLUTCH simply doesn’t work? Instead of taking this personally, I’ve found it more productive to use this as an educational opportunity: I know for a fact they just aren’t using it quite right, and I can explain where they might’ve gone wrong in their application and what to do next time. The gentle parenting version of customer service.

Visual cues always help, so I can do this with a bunch of unique example videos and hand-drawn illustrations if I have to. And this is reusable! Beyond that one email, we can use the feedback to redesign packaging, review instructions and upload more tutorials so that nobody else hits the same wall.

Someone’s CLUTCH tube arrived damaged? That’s a manufacturing issue that needs resolving immediately. It goes into our tracker, it gets discussed that day, stock gets audited, and a new tube goes out to this customer quickly and at no extra cost.

Obviously this is a human workflow that is very relevant to our business as it stands today. In larger organisations with mature, enterprise quality control and in-house manufacturing, and hundreds of thousands of complaints, I can see where this falls down. And I hope we get to that point one day! But for us, these interactions are invaluable.

A customer ordered CLUTCH three weeks ago and it still hasn’t arrived? An express post replacement goes out immediately, while behind the scenes we’re pulling apart whether it’s due to our systems not syncing, the address was entered incorrectly, or if it’s sitting in customs somewhere.

The lesson: I am only aware of these issues because somebody was annoyed enough to tell me.

While it’s never ideal for the customer to have problems, it’s sometimes inevitable and what you do to fix it matters most. But if you just have a bot, the people who could have responded in a relationship-saving manner aren’t there on the front line.

And there’s an asymmetry to the way people respond to good vs. bad service.

One bad support experience and that customer could be gone, and now they’re telling all their friends how much they hate you over a glass of wine. A bot might be right 99% of the time, but the 1% could be catastrophic.

On the flip side, when customer service is done well (human-to-human), the reply we get back is suddenly apologetic and self reflective. It’s as if the human attention is a relief, and its received like a warm comforting hug.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

That’s the bar. Businesses have had their priorities wrong for so long that customers now turn up jaded, expecting the worst of you before they’ve even hit send. Which is pretty sad, but it also means clearing that bar costs me exactly one honest response.

And it’s not just goodwill - people actually spend more! We’ve had customers place an order while we were mid-conversation fixing something for them, and others come back for the second, third and fourth time because a human actually helped them. Cheapest marketing I’ve ever done, and retention is the most important metric.

AI has raised the floor on access, but it’s also lowered the ceiling on what counts as genuinely good work. If you’re original, if you take care in the moments that matter most, everything will follow.

If you have read this article and are still skeptical, feel free to email me at info@clutchglue.com or DM us at @clutch_glue on Instagram or TikTok. Yes, it’s really me.

Big Love!

Annabel x

Let me take you back to the end of 2024. My now-famous Shark Tank pitch had just aired and CLUTCH was reaching levels of virality even the Kardashians would be impressed by. This coincided with a six-week trial in one of Australia’s largest retailers over Black Friday and Christmas. I felt the universe was really on my side! Hazzah!

I was given just two weeks to manufacture and deliver tens of thousands of units in custom shelf-ready trays (SRT’s as we call them in this industry) to make our little CLUTCH tubes stand out in the sea of products vying for your attention. I thanked previous me for purchasing some contingency tubes and boxes for a hypothetical ‘urgent ranging’ scenario. I begged a manufacturer in Australia to urgently make the product, fill and seal the tubes.

Then I did what anyone would do in this situation. I took my Mum and Dad, my sister Lucy (CLUTCH CMO and absolute legend), her partner Matt, my partner Harry… and I locked them in a warehouse. A warehouse used for storing mining machinery. For an entire weekend. From there we individually squeezed every single tube to make sure it was defect-free, boxed each one, packed them into the SRTs, packed those SRTs into even bigger boxes, and stacked the whole lot onto pallets by hand. It was a true team effort powered by cups of tea and Arnott’s Assorted Creams, and we somehow pulled it off – right down to delivering the order inside the ten-minute slot the distribution centre had allocated us.

CLICK HERE for a video of the magic.

But they rejected the delivery because they had put the wrong purchase order number on their warehouse receiving document. Their mistake but of course a redelivery cost that was ours to bear.

Then we waited a few weeks for launch day, and I remember feeling like a little kid waking up on Christmas morning. I levitated into my local store only to find we weren’t on the shelf. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, because I know from previous retail launches that they can be slow. So I went back the next day, and the next, and the next for a week. But still nothing! So I emailed the buyer, who told me “My list was wrong, you’re actually not going into that store,” and sent me a whole new store list.

It gets worse

I desperately wanted to smash this trial. Our customers were incessant that CLUTCH be on this retailer’s shelves, and we had a six week window to prove it deserved a permanent home. So in week two we started running Meta ads to push people into stores to buy. Then the DMs started rolling in: “It’s not on the shelf.” “Couldn’t find it.” “I went to four stores and it’s not there!” “You’re lying!”

So I sent another email to the buyer, who told me it was ‘still rolling out, and we’ll chase the stores up.’ I was sus, so I got in the car and spent all day driving to 25 stores across Sydney and found exactly two stores had it stocked, out of the n stores we had been promised in the contract.

My excitement for this trial grew into anger, and I hired a third-party merchandising company, the kind that does mystery shopping and actual merchandising (yes, that’s right: companies pay people to physically stock the shelves, because you can’t rely on the store to get your product out there). I asked them to do one thing, which was to audit how many stores across Australia actually had stock on the shelf. The verdict: three weeks into a six-week trial only 30% of stores had the product on display, and most of them only put it out in week two. The other 70% had the stock sitting in the storeroom out the back, and they just hadn’t bothered to walk it onto the shelf.

And the stores that did have it out? All but one of them had displayed it wrong, literally tearing our custom display unit apart instead of assembling it.

The good news was that the stores that had ranged it had almost sold out! Twelve units per store, and they were shifting nearly all of them in a week. That’s an insane sell-through metric.

The range review

Four weeks in, we sat down face to face with the buyer for our range review: a meeting to discuss a potential permanent place on the planogram. And of course I came prepared, slide deck and report in hand to present our independent audit and our side of the story. Not in an accusatory way, more of a “here’s what happened, here’s what we did about it, and look how well it’s performing despite all of that” way. Unfortunately, they proceeded to tell me it was somehow still our fault and, in the very same meeting, asked us to give them national exclusivity if we wanted CLUTCH to be ranged permanently.

I remember thinking to myself, “Um, no? You couldn’t even put CLUTCH on the shelf, what makes you think I’d go for that?”

After the trial ended, only 60% of stores had it out, and half of those had only put it out in the final week.

In this circumstance, our agreement had been that we would buy back the unsold stock - we were desperate for it. CLUTCH was flying off the shelves at Priceline and we were scrambling to keep up with their purchase orders, meanwhile this other retailer was running what felt like a sabotage campaign.

Then suddenly, without telling us, the retailer slapped a 75% clearance discount on the excess stock. And funnily enough, that’s exactly when the rest of the stock out the back magically appeared on shelves. Coincidence? I think not.

And for those who don’t know how this works, the supplier (us) funds the sale. So for every tube sold at 75% off (down to $7.25, by the way) we owed this retailer $21.75 per tube, which they cheerfully invoiced back to us.

But wait, it gets worse…

At the same time, we were in a range review with a third retailer. When they saw we were on clearance elsewhere, they took it as a sign we weren’t performing and declined to stock us going forward.

The whole exercise cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, which almost sank us. Lucy and I were both still working full-time day jobs through all of this, so the goal of going all-in just kept getting further and further away.

Why am I telling you this?

Mostly because it’s a good story and I’ve got over it (lol). But also, this is a tale for everyone who is desperate to get ranged in retail, who didn’t get ranged, or is still getting knocked back. Rejection is redirection, and the silence or ‘no’ might have saved you a whole lot of money, heartbreak, or your entire business.

And for everybody else reading this who isn’t a founder and doesn’t intend on launching a product: you probably perceive every brand sitting on the shelves of a big retailer as successful, but its a lot more likely than you think that it’s a total clusterfuck behind the scenes.

Despite this we have had many very successful retail partnerships, so I can also speak more to what made those great soon… Annabel