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

If you think Temu is just cheap socks and weird gadgets, you’re missing the real story.

This is the case study in how fast commerce is mutating, faster than we can civilize it.On this week’s Ostrich Report, Hendrik and I dove deep into Temu’s European explosion, and the numbers are pure madness:

📈 24.7 million EU customers between April and August 2024. 🚀 By June 2025, that figure will hit 150 million active users. 💶 $1.2 billion in revenue from Europe alone. 💰 $120 million in profit, yes, profit, not “adjusted EBITDA.” And they did it all by flipping the script: cross-border → credibility → local integration.

They’ve gone from “that Chinese discount app” to the default shopping channel in countries like Italy and Portugal, where 92% of consumers say buying direct from manufacturers saves them money without sacrificing quality.

Let’s be honest: Europe didn’t invite Temu in, Amazon’s complacency and eBay’s nostalgia did.

While old giants debated logistics and ad margins, Temu quietly built trust through delivery, gamification, and pricing transparency. You can now buy garden furniture in Ireland and get it in four days. eBay still can’t do that.

And that’s the part that should make every retailer nervous. Because 63% of shoppers already prefer marketplaces over brand sites, and 56% of those are impulse purchases. If you’re not there when the urge strikes, someone else is.

Meanwhile, brands selling on 3+ marketplaces grow 4.5x faster than those that don’t. That’s not cannibalization, that’s new money.

But here’s the uncomfortable question:

What happens when the most efficient marketplace on earth is also the least politically palatable?

Geopolitics will decide as much as strategy here. In the Nordics, 3 in 4 consumers say Temu increases price transparency. In the US, regulators call it a data Trojan horse. Both can be true.

So what do we do, block it, beat it, or learn from it?

Because whether you love or loathe Temu, you can’t deny one thing: It’s teaching the West a painful lesson, speed, simplicity, and scale still win.

And if Europe is the battleground for trust and convenience, Temu just showed up with the biggest army we’ve ever seen.

🎙 Full episode now live: “Orange Is the New Commerce”, Hendrik and I unpack how Temu pulled off the fastest retail land grab since Amazon Prime.

💬 Question for you: If Temu can win consumer trust this quickly, what excuse do Western marketplaces have left?

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when an Irish eCommerce consultant, a South African data whisperer, and an Australian marketplace guru walk into a podcast — the answer is a surprisingly civil 45 minutes of insight, laughter, and just a tiny bit of existential dread about the state of retail.

This week, Vinny and Hendrik sat down with Luke Hilton, Global VP of Solution Engineering at Marketplacer, to talk about everything — from standing desks and ergonomic enlightenment to how retailers can stop overcomplicating the idea of becoming a marketplace.

And spoiler alert: Luke brought gold.

• Marketplaces aren’t a religion — they’re a strategy. Not every retailer needs to “become a marketplace.” Sometimes, the smarter play is range extension — expanding your offer with complementary products, without building Rome (or Amazon) overnight.

• Incubate, don’t detonate. The old “big bang” approach to marketplace transformation is out. Hilton calls for smarter, staged approaches — start with dropship, test what sells, learn fast, and evolve from there.

• Mid-market is the sleeping giant. Enterprise gets the headlines, but mid-sized retailers are the real white space. They’re nimble, loyal to nothing but results, and hungry for scalable ways to extend reach without burning cash.

• Complexity is not a bug — it’s the feature. True marketplace success lives in the messy middle: OMS, PIM, ERP, integrations, fulfillment. It’s a symphony of systems, and Luke is the guy with the baton.

• Loyalty is a myth (and that’s okay). As Luke put it — we’re not loyal; we’re lazy. Amazon didn’t win our hearts, it won our delivery windows.

• Convenience trumps cheapness. It’s not a race to the bottom, it’s a race to the door. Consumers buy where it’s easiest, not necessarily where it’s cheapest.

Luke dropped a belter of a case study — Rackhams, a luxury retailer running 250,000 products and 600 sellers with a team of fewer than ten people. Yes, ten.
Turns out, if you marry smart systems, modern thinking, and a no-code integration layer, you can scale faster than a Wallaby with a caffeine problem.

What makes Luke special isn’t just his technical chops — it’s his clarity. He sees marketplaces not as monoliths, but as modular evolutions of how retailers survive. His mantra: start small, learn fast, scale smart.

And if he ever gets bored, he moonlights helping startups move away from “founder-led sales” (translation: the CEO stopped cold-calling).

A huge shout-out to our friends at Evolve Commerce Community, who continue to keep the conversation alive between episodes — connecting the thinkers, builders, and slightly sleep-deprived retail nerds shaping the next decade of global commerce.

In our next episode, we dive into Temu’s explosive European growth — the platform every EU regulator loves to hate. Expect strong opinions, questionable metaphors, and maybe a group therapy session for legacy retailers.

We’re still looking for them.
If you’re a brave brand that wants your logo sitting next to this chaos, reach out. It’s cheaper than Google Ads and way more fun.

💡 Golden Nuggets from Luke Hilton🏆 Case in Point: Rackhams🧠 Final Thoughts🫱 A Tip of the Wing to Our Community Partners🔮 Next Up💸 Oh, and Sponsors…

15 Minutes or Bust: What Hospitality Taught Rafael Barini About Commerce The Ostrich Report has landed. What I loved most about my conversation with Rafael Barini is his reminder that eCommerce is not just retail.

It’s a discipline.A way of thinking.A toolkit for solving problems across any industry.

Once you’ve learned to build and manage marketplaces, you start to see systems everywhere.The restaurant kitchen is just a fulfillment center with higher stakes. A hotel lobby is a loyalty program waiting to be optimized. Even real estate starts to look like product listings, search filters, and conversion funnels.

That’s Rafael’s gift: taking the mindset forged in Brazil’s early eCommerce boom and applying it everywhere from Switzerland’s hospitality industry to AI-driven transformation projects today.

Some moments that hit hardest:

👉 “If you can build a marketplace, you can probably build any eCommerce business.” 👉 Marketplaces aren’t one-dimensional. You’re serving multiple “customers”: buyers, sellers, developers, and ecosystems. Balance or bust. 👉 AI isn’t just a buzzword, right now it’s about productivity. Next wave? Personalization. Think of it as the industrial revolution for intellectual work. 👉 Hospitality taught him that speed changes everything. Deliver food in 15 minutes or fail. That kind of timing discipline should terrify every retail exec. 👉 Coming from Latin America gave him adaptability muscles most of Europe doesn’t even know it needs.

This is why I love conversations like this, they remind us that commerce is not a department, it’s a lens. Whether you’re selling sneakers, steaks, or square meters, the same underlying logic applies: systems, people, and the flow of value.

And that’s exactly what The Ostrich Report is here to explore. Honest, global stories that cut through the noise and show how commerce is really evolving.

🎧 Episode 1 is live now: Rafael Barini on marketplaces, AI, and the cultural power of adaptability. [Insert Spotify/Apple link here]

A big thanks to our community partner Evolve Commerce Club (where Rafael is also a proud member) for being part of this journey with us. And yes, we are still looking for a headline sponsor to grow this show. If you believe in honest conversations about the future of global commerce, my inbox is open.

Big thanks again to Rafael for setting the tone for our very first guest episode, and Hendrik, you’d better bring the heat when you’re back on!

#ecommerce #marketplaces #AI #TheOstrichReport

No one ever buys something the first time they see it… said Rhys. Wethersoons taught him alot from the kitchen to the table.

Learn How How a former Wetherspoons kitchen worker built a freeze-dried sweet brand that sold 40,000 products on Temu in just two months — without spending a penny on ads.

This week on The Ostrich Report we sat down with Rhys Sandford of Exploded Sweets and, honestly, it was a masterclass in modern marketplace selling.

Rhys told us:

“No one ever buys something the first time they see it. You’ve got to constantly have these implants into people’s brains… where we currently use at Exploded Sweets, this cross-platform approach of being in people’s faces. People’s attention spans at the minute – they’ll scroll through 100 TikTok videos within ten minutes… having that cross-platform advertisement helps build those imprints into people quite early on.”

💥 Key numbers that stopped us in our tracks:
– 40,000 units sold on Temu within the first 2 months.
– 500 units sold in the first 3 days of launch.
– One customer placed 48 separate orders in 6 months.
– New product ideas turned around in days, not months.
– Feedback loops as fast as 3–5 days from purchase to implementation.

💡 What we learned from Rhys:
– Marketplaces aren’t just sales channels; they’re real-time R&D labs.
– Cross-platform discoverability isn’t copy/paste — you need unique twists for each platform.
– A culture of listening + iteration beats a big ad budget.
– Early adoption is a test lab, not a gamble. Rhys used Temu to refine products and discover new demographics (older generations as well as parents/kids).
– Speed is the new moat: feedback Monday, change Thursday, higher-quality product by Friday.

🍭 Why this matters:
Most CPG brands are still fighting algorithms, paying to get seen, and waiting weeks for insights. Rhys built a feedback loop so tight it turns sweets into data points and customers into collaborators.

Hendrik called it “utopia” during the recording. I called it a “unicorn” moment. If you sell on marketplaces (or want to), this is your wake-up call.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Ostrich Report here: [insert link]
Tagging my co-hosts [@HendrikLaubscher] and [@VinnyOBrien] and giving a nod to our community partners at Evolve Commerce Club for helping us surface stories like this.

For prospective sellers, visit Temu's seller portal at https://seller.temu.com/