Ep 180: Built on Restraint, Tested by AI - How Studio Nicholson Earns Brand Loyalty Without Discounts, with Andrew Cottington, Director of Digital & Ecommerce

Ep 183: What Happens to Football Brands When the World Cup Ends with Nico Willson, Co-Founder of Futsol

On this episode, I sit down with Nico Willson, co-founder of Futsol, to talk about what happens when you look at the world's most popular sport and decide the brands serving it are getting it completely wrong. Futsol started from a simple observation: every other sport - cycling, running, boxing - had developed a culture and community around it that people actually wanted to belong to. Football hadn't. Nico and his co-founders set out to build the brand that changed that. We get into how they avoided the trap of competing with Nike and Adidas on performance, why the vast majority of their customers wear Futsol to watch football rather than play it, and how jersey culture - once their hero product - has now been taken over by every brand from Gap to Palace, forcing them to think about what comes next. We also talk about the World Cup moment: how a small independent brand navigates a global tournament without getting drowned out, why they went evergreen instead of chasing the flash, and the Bloomsbury charity partnership and City Guides zine they built around it instead. On AI, Nico draws a clear line - operationally yes, creatively no. For a brand built on sun-faded fabrics, block printing, and tactile craft, the question of where AI belongs is anything but abstract. Enjoy the show.

Ep 182: Why Most CEOs Are Getting AI Adoption Wrong with Annica Rantala, CEO of Rapunzel of Sweden

On this episode, I sit down with Annica Rantala, CEO of Rapunzel of Sweden, to talk about what happens when you take a category dominated by professionals and salons and hand it directly to the consumer. Rapunzel is a Nordic pioneer in hair extensions - built on a direct-to-consumer model from day one, with 81% of revenue through their own e-commerce. We get into how that model works in practice: the education-first approach to new customers, why micro-creators with 2,000–10,000 followers consistently outperform big names on return, and how the brand thinks about its dual audience of end users and hairstylist key opinion leaders. We also talk about Annica's journey from board member to operating CEO - what you think you can see from a board seat, and what you can't - and the lessons from her time scaling Stronger through and beyond the pandemic. On AI, Annica makes a point I hadn't heard put quite this way before: you can take a people-first approach to AI adoption, a brand-first approach, or a technology-first approach and most companies are getting it wrong by defaulting to the last one and locking it down to the tech team. Enjoy the show.

Ep 181: Offcuts Live, Stockholm - You Can't Index Vibes: What AI Search Means for Brands Built on Culture with Erik Arnewing & Ola Ekerhov

On this episode, we did something different - Offcuts went live in Stockholm in front of a room of commerce operators. I'm joined by two people who've each spent the best part of two decades inside consumer brands: Erik Arnewing, CTO at Stellar Equipment and twenty years at Sneakersnstuff before that, and Ola Ekerhov, who ran ecommerce at Acne Studios for sixteen years and now advises mid-sized brands. We split the conversation in two. First, external AI - how customers now discover and buy through a layer you don't control. We get into why AI search reads structured data rather than brand vibe, the test you can run on your own phone in thirty seconds, and what happens to brands built on culture when the discovery surface stops caring about culture. Then, internal AI - the gap between the 76% of businesses using it and the 14% who say it works. Erik walks through querying his entire stack in plain English; Ola is sharp on where it makes teams faster and sloppier. We also get into agentic shopping, who should actually own AI inside a company, and why attribution is getting harder, not easier. Recorded live with our partners on this episode, Centra and DEMA. Enjoy the show.

Ep 180: Built on Restraint, Tested by AI - How Studio Nicholson Earns Brand Loyalty Without Discounts, with Andrew Cottington, Director of Digital & Ecommerce

On this episode, I ask whether a brand built entirely on restraint and considered growth can have a coherent relationship with AI. I sit down with Andrew Cottington, Director of Digital at Studio Nicholson, the London-based fashion brand known for its modular wardrobe, fabric-led design, and a customer base that tends to find it rather than be found. We dig into how a brand that deliberately avoids chasing scale thinks about customer acquisition and where performance marketing fits. We get into the loyalty programme they rebuilt after deciding fixed discounts were too transactional for their customer. We tackle the agentic storefront they launched in February with Swap, and something Andrew noticed that I thought was sharp: it was their most loyal customers, not new ones, who embraced it first. And we get into what considered growth actually looks like when the tools you're being asked to adopt are moving faster than anyone can predict. If you're running or marketing a brand that leads with taste and is trying to figure out where AI fits without compromising what makes the brand worth following, this one's for you. This episode is sponsored by Swap - if you want to see what the future of storefronts looks like, book a demo at swap-commerce.com/offcuts [http://swap-commerce.com/offcuts]

Ep 179: 3x Conversion, 20% Fewer Returns: Inside Swap's Agentic Storefront with Sam Atkinson, Co-Founder & CEO of Swap

On this episode, I sit down with Sam Atkinson, co-founder of Swap, to get into one of the more interesting infrastructure stories in commerce right now. How do you build the back office that nobody wants to think about, and use it as the foundation for something that changes how people shop entirely? Sam played semi-professional football for West Brom until 18, studied law, worked at McKinsey, ran his own DTC business, and joined a fintech before co-founding Swap in 2023. The through line is someone who kept getting close enough to the hard problems in e-commerce to eventually decide to go and solve them. We get into what Swap actually is, the back office suite covering cross-border, returns, tax, compliance and demand planning, and why building that first gave them something most agentic commerce players don't have: the data, the integrations, and the customer trust to move fast. We talk about the agentic storefront they are already running live, the stats on conversion and returns, how they think about high intent versus low intent shoppers, and why they want to be the agent powering experiences like Brunello Cucinelli rather than replace what great brand teams do. And then the fundraising journey, what it actually looks like to raise capital across multiple rounds, and the state of the fund raising market in 2025 and 2026. Enjoy the show. Book a free demo at: swap-commerce.com/offcuts [http://swap-commerce.com/offcuts]