Ep 628: How Unbound Merino Bootstrapped to Nine Figures Selling $90 T-Shirts

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Dan bootstrapped Unbound Merino from a Reddit-fueled obsession with merino wool into a brand approaching nine figures in lifetime revenue, with a warehouse sale, a growing women's line, and zero outside funding.

In his second appearance on the DTC Podcast, the Unbound co-founder gets specific about what actually moved the business over the last three years, why he almost lost 80% of his sales in a single day, and why he now cares more about the product and the friendships than any growth hack.

What you'll learn:

• Why the ads Dan loves flop and the cringe ones scale, and how he made peace with it
• The creative volume system that unlocked Meta scaling in 2023, and why Meta stopped working the same way
• How word of mouth (15% of new customers) and a 50/50 women's line changed the growth model
• The de minimis and tariff shock that nearly ended the company, and the scramble to open a Dallas warehouse before Liberation Day
• How Unbound uses a custom AI wired into Shopify, its ERP, Asana, Slack, and Drive to triangulate why products get returned
• Why 5% of sales now come from ChatGPT and Claude, and what that means for discovery

Who this is for: bootstrapped founders, DTC operators, and anyone selling a premium product who is tired of renting customers from Meta.

What to steal: the reorder-first mindset, the creative iteration loop, and the tariff survival playbook.

Timestamps:

00:00 Building a $90M travel apparel brand

02:12 Scaling Meta with creative volume

08:00 Why product quality beats acquisition tactics

16:00 How tariffs nearly killed the business

32:05 AI as a business advisor and data analyst

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