The Struggle Bus with Dave Morrissey: Culture, Creativity & the Irish Peak Moment

In this episode of The Struggle Bus, Vinny sits down with the endlessly curious, relentlessly cultural, and occasionally feral-in-the-best-way Dave Morrissey — growth & culture consultant, ex-Meta, ex-TikTok, author of Grow Like Tech, and a man who can track the rise of Irish influence by reading festival lineups the way historians read ancient scripts.

Together, they dive into:

🇮🇪 Ireland’s Cultural Peak
From Fontaines D.C. to Guinness dominating the UK to spice bags taking over London, Dave breaks down why Irishness is having a global moment — and why it matters.

🎭 Creativity, Community & Commerce
Dave explains how culture fuels creativity, why brands need to solve and serve rather than sell, and how real-world connection — run clubs, IRL events, human-first community building — might be the antidote to a hyper-digital age.

🛒 Experience vs. Entertainment in Ecommerce
Is ecommerce meant to be experiential or entertaining? And has the industry been fooling itself for a decade? The lads untangle where the future really is.

📚 Dave’s New Book
A first look at his upcoming work exploring Irish identity and influence across arts, tech, leadership, and global culture.

🎵 And yes… if Dave’s career were a song?
It’s Radiohead. Obviously.

This is a warm, meandering, joy-filled conversation about culture, hardship, creativity, the power of being Irish, and why solving beats selling every single time.

Pull up a seat on the Struggle Bus — this one’s a gem.

“If the first thing you do every morning is open Seller Central with a coffee… this one’s for you.” ☕📊

New episode of The Ostrich Report just dropped, and this time Hendrik and I brought in someone who actually runs the thing everyone has an opinion about but very few truly understand: marketplaces.

🎙 Guest: Jamie Roller
🧼 Brand: Dr. Squatch (yes, the Star Wars soap people with the ridiculous scents and surprisingly serious P&L discipline)

Jamie runs the marketplace business at Dr. Squatch, with a heavy focus on Amazon plus retail.com 1P. She’s not a “thought leader,” she’s the person who has to make the numbers work every 90 days.

A few threads we pulled on:

🧮 Marketplace = a P&L inside a P&L
Jamie’s team owns the whole thing end to end:

• What to sell

• How to get it into Amazon

• How to price, bundle & merchandise it

• How to put media behind it without destroying the margin

Her line that stuck: if you’re promising +25% YoY on Amazon, you better understand what that actually entails operationally — not just in a deck.

📦 1P vs 3P and why unit economics are a knife fight
We unpacked:

• Why running 3P means owning the inventory, the fees and the fulfillment pain

• How bundles become your secret weapon when a single bar of soap can’t carry $2.50+ in FBA fees

• The real trade-off: pristine margins vs access to Amazon’s absurd demand firehose

♻️ Cannibalization is out, incrementality is in
Two years ago, everyone was panicking:

“Is Amazon cannibalizing my DTC?”

Today Jamie’s more focused on:

“How do I prove incrementality of media and new product launches across channels?”

We talk about:

• Customer journeys that definitely aren’t linear

• Launching new SKUs that cannibalize your own range vs your own channels

• Why the goal is channel-agnostic loyalty, not channel purity

📊 Dashboards, data & the uncomfortable truth
Jamie spends 20–30% of her time inside the numbers. First tab open: yesterday’s sales in Seller Central. Then deeper analytics Squatch has built in-house.

The bit most brands won’t say out loud:

• Every channel has horrible blind spots

• Amazon just happens to give you enough data to keep you hooked and “just informed enough” to keep spending

• You win on Amazon by owning intent on specific keywords, not by “being present”

🤖 AI, agents & who actually wins
We debate whether AI agents will:

• Supercharge big CPGs with deep pockets

• Or reward the brands who are faster at updating content, testing, and staying “recent” in LLMs

Jamie’s view: we’re still early, there’s a lot of buzzword bingo, and the real work is still growth & media strategy, not AI theatre.

👥 Culture > strategy (especially in marketplaces)
We also get into how she:

• Runs a distributed, multi-time-zone team

• Keeps marketplace from being a weird silo off to the side

• Shares data & reporting so the rest of the business actually uses marketplace insights instead of treating Amazon like a dark art

Oh, and yes, we did manage to talk about Star Wars soap, Chewbacca as a scent choice, and why marketplaces should still be fun even when they’re stressful.

If you’re:

• Running Amazon / marketplace P&Ls

• Still arguing internally about “cannibalization”

• Or secretly afraid of your own dashboards

…this episode will either make you feel seen or mildly attacked. Maybe both.

What we got into with Jamie

$238BN Revenue a nostalgic, number-soaked sprint through Singles Day 2025 and a preview of our biggest episode yet. There are shopping events.

There are cultural moments. And then once a year China lights the ecommerce beacons, JD.com flexes its fulfilment biceps, and the rest of us sit there whispering:

“How… in the actual…?”

Welcome to our latest episode of The Ostrich Report, where Hendrik Laubscher and I dove beak-first into Singles Day 2025 the shopping festival that casually moved $238.3 billion in the time it takes most Western brands to agree on “final-final-final creative.”

And this year?

It wasn’t just big.

It was absurd.

The Headline Numbers (aka: “Your CFO Just Fainted”),.695 trillion yuan in GMV roughly the GDP of Greece, Portugal, AND the HSE’s full budget for the next 7.8 years… combined.

Growth? +14.2% YoY. Slower, yes but scale so large the Richter scale needs a side extension.

Instant retail (1-hour delivery) up 138.4%, because apparently patience is dead.

JD.com:

+40% shoppers

+60% orders & a cross-border expansion so broad it should probably get its own airline.

80 brands smashed 100M yuan in the first hour. Apple did it in, checks notes, minutes. And because we love perspective around here…

One Singles Day = 57% of Apple’s annual global revenue

One Singles Day = 37% of Amazon’s annual earnings

One Singles Day = all of NASA… for nine years

One Singles Day = New York City… for two years

One Singles Day = Ireland’s entire health system… nine times over

(Yes. Nine.)

If your eyes are watering, that’s normal. Mine did too.

Trends That Would Have Looked Unrealistic in a 2011 PowerPoint.

AI everything: tablets up 200%, smart glasses tripled, and consumers apparently fine with having their homes talk back to them.

Beauty brands went nuclear: 79 brands crossed 100M yuan BEFORE some of us finished our morning coffee.

The Chinese consumer is now the world’s most disciplined bargain-hunter with a black belt in “value.”

The campaign lasted 33 days we’re basically at “Singles Quarter” now.

Western Brands: The Overachievers’ Club

Apple cleared last year’s full-day total in two hours.

Nike likely crossed $1B in Singles Day sales again.

L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Lancôme all hit 100M yuan in under 10 minutes.

Xiaomi casually reported $4.1B on its own.

Somewhere, a performance-marketing team whispered, “Are you not entertained?”

🎙️ So Why Are We Talking About This on The Ostrich Report?

Because Singles Day is, well, It’s big.

It’s fun.

It’s unhinged in places.

And it’s a reminder that the world’s largest ecommerce event still makes Black Friday look like a quiet Tuesday at Woodie’s.

🧵 Full Episode Drops Now

If you like marketplaces, cross-border chaos, nerdy context, or two grown men laughing at trillion-yuan events, this one’s for you.

🎧 Listen to this episode here:

All other episodeshere:

🎙️💵Amazon: https://bit.ly/3LAKds4

🎙️🍏Apple: https://apple.co/47zGjIu

🎙️🎚️Spotify: https://bit.ly/47TmAlV

🎙️📺Youtube: https://bit.ly/4nWYSLz