From Lead-Gen Burnout to Nine-Figure CRO: Hovhannes Mkhitaryan on Why the Story Beats the Price

About this episode

Hovhannes Mkhitaryan didn't set out to work in e-commerce. He set out to leave a lead-generation job, a year and a half of what he calls sweatshop A/B testing sending leads to companies like ADT and solar installers, and the next opportunity that opened up happened to run its own Shopify brand. That company was 310 Nutrition, where Hov, as he's known, spent six or seven years going from developer to head of e-commerce, before 2023 handed him a baby, a wife running her own acquisition consultancy, and a coffee brand born out of his own poetry, all in the same year.

In this episode of Brewed, Hov breaks down why he believes most early-stage CRO problems are actually storytelling problems, the exact audit sequence he runs on eight and nine figure fashion brands with a plateaued conversion rate, why body-scanning apps have never once moved his return-rate numbers despite years of testing them, and why he thinks most brands treat their app as an afterthought at the exact moment it could be doing the cheapest storytelling distribution they have.

This conversation is for fashion and apparel operators trying to figure out what's actually broken when growth stalls, CRO practitioners looking for a sharper audit framework, and any founder who has ever quietly wondered whether the problem was really the price, or the story they never finished telling.

What you'll learn

• The Hov story: from lead-gen A/B testing to head of e-commerce at 310 Nutrition
• 2023, three identities at once: fatherhood, a consultancy, and Sevak Coffee
• Why the earliest CRO lever isn't a lever at all, it's the story
• Simplify or die: catalogs, comparison, and making a site feel like an app
• The audit framework for eight and nine figure brands with a plateaued conversion rate
• Buckets over body scanners: fixing the sizing problem that drives returns
• Discounting without training your customer to wait for it
• The app's real job: order tracking, storytelling, and the acquisition ceiling Apple built in
• Building leverage in the AI era, and why agentic shopping still has to earn trust
• The broader lesson: work with founders who are opinionated, because they know what's not for them

The complete breakdown

1. The Hov story: from lead-gen A/B testing to head of e-commerce at 310 Nutrition — 1:13

Before Shopify, Hov spent a year and a half at a lead-generation company in El Segundo, running one or two A/B tests a day for big-name clients like ADT and solar installers. It was, in his words, sweatshop A/B testing, high traffic volume, simple conversion actions, fast answers.

"It was a year and a half of sweatshop A/B testing. Because it was a lead generation company, the conversion actions were simpler than e-commerce. You get way more leads and answers for your A/B tests a lot quicker."

He wasn't chasing e-commerce specifically. He was just job hunting when he found a company called 310 Nutrition, structured like an agency but running its own owned brands. He'd never touched Shopify or its Liquid templating language before, but he knew JavaScript, PHP, and HTML from side projects, including a self-built workout app he'd made while working as a certified personal trainer. That was enough to get hired as a developer.

"It wasn't a conscious decision to go into e-commerce. I needed a new job, and I was done with lead generation. That door opened up for me."

Over six or seven years at 310 Nutrition, Hov moved from developer to head of development to, eventually, head of e-commerce, running email, paid media, and the entire front end. The real shift wasn't technical, it was in how he related to the customer. Lead generation meant handing off a name and phone number and never seeing what happened next. E-commerce meant living with the consequences.

"You can't pull every CRO lever in the world, because these are humans you have to take care of. You have to carry on the entire experience and deliver on what you promised."

2. 2023, three identities at once: fatherhood, a consultancy, and Sevak Coffee — 7:33

2023 rearranged Hov's life in one motion. He became a father. His wife, previously VP of acquisition at Skims, was building her own consultancy. And somewhere in the middle of both, he quit 310 Nutrition with no real follow-up plan.

"I was faced with hard choices, like take a meeting or go on a walk with my son. It's like, what am I doing with my life?"

He didn't leave with a business plan. He started posting on LinkedIn instead, a series called Let's Optimize with the Hov, where he'd screenshot a well-known e-commerce brand's mobile experience, spend 45 minutes redesigning it, and record a video walking through why he made each decision. No strategy behind it beyond knowing his years of A/B testing experience were worth putting into the world.

The content brought in work almost by accident. One call came from a large fashion brand he won't name, unconnected to anything he'd posted. Their head of e-commerce had just quit and they needed a few months of coverage.

"A three-month contract became three years. I've been working with them, and it's been awesome."

In parallel, he built Sevak Coffee, not his first creative outlet, an earlier project called New Charms sold 3D-printed and laser-cut jewelry for charity, but the one that stuck. Sevak started as his pen name for poetry he'd been writing and wanted to get out into the world. It carried over into the coffee brand's name and, in a roundabout way, into his own identity, his mother had wanted to name him Sevak at birth, and lost the choice to his father in a backgammon game.

"For me, the variety of doing multiple things keeps me alive. If I were to do only one thing, I don't think I'd thrive in that situation."

3. Why the earliest CRO lever isn't a lever at all, it's the story — 11:39

Ask Hov what a founder doing under $100,000 a month should prioritize before hiring a CRO specialist, and his answer isn't a testing roadmap. It's the story.

"The story is something the founder or the brand marketer has to drive. It's not necessarily somebody in a CRO position would do. I would still work with them to craft it if they haven't, but hopefully by $100,000 a month or so, they already have that story."

He points to his own coffee brand as proof this never fully resolves. Every order gets packaged and signed by him personally, a choice he's trying to preserve as long as possible even as the brand grows, because it forces him to keep articulating why the product exists every time he makes content about it.

"I still haven't told my Sevak Coffee story fully. Once you're in the creative world, telling that story is such a lifetime thing that I haven't even scratched the surface."

The stakes of getting this wrong showed up in a story Abhijeet shared back to him mid-conversation, a founder convinced his revenue problem was pricing, who spent half an hour debating SKU velocity and price points before concluding, out loud, that the real problem was never the price. The same product sells at $200 and at $20 depending entirely on whether the story around it lands.

Hov's read on why this happens so often is structural. Founders who spend their days staring at dashboards lose sight of the customer underneath the numbers, and that disconnect doesn't announce itself, it accumulates quietly until a founder wakes up one day running a brand they no longer recognize.

"If the founder is not happy with where the company is going, even if it's making more money, that's a real risk. Success isn't just the money. It has to align with what you're doing and the purpose behind it."

His own method for staying aligned splits into two modes, running in parallel rather than resolved into one system. One is pure operator, doing the obvious work, not letting fear of the outcome stall the next step. The other is a slower, largely subconscious check on whether the direction still matches the vision.

"Building a signal within yourself, that you're not skipping a step because you're afraid of it or the outcome. That's one thing. The other is understanding whether the outcome is something you'll actually be happy with."

4. Simplify or die: catalogs, comparison, and making a site feel like an app — 15:40

The most common failure mode Hov sees in apparel brands is almost mechanical. Brands launch a hero product, expand into variations and new SKUs, and at some point a visitor lands on the site and can no longer tell why all those variations exist.

"One motif that's been true across every apparel brand I've worked with is simplifying that for the audience. Is the navigation easy? Is comparing different products very simple?"

His fix leans on a comparison to what Appbrew itself builds toward: making the website feel like an app. Not visually, but structurally, minimizing the number of times a shopper has to leave a product page, land back on a collection page, and start over to compare a different fabric or style of the same garment.

The same instinct scales up to the discovery problem larger catalogs create. Hov frames search and browse as two different mechanisms entirely, search assumes the shopper already knows what they want, browsing means presenting options and letting them choose, and for the overwhelming majority of apparel brands, browsing dominates.

"Search is a crutch. Unless you're a department brand like Macy's, most brands overcomplicate their collection pages and end up relying on search instead of fixing the browsing experience."

He's tested Shopify's headless stack, hydrogen and oxygen, specifically to chase this same app-like feel, and watched the platform quietly deprioritize it. The tool he thinks actually delivers on that promise already ships natively.

"Shopify's section rendering lets you render things that feel like an app on the site now, without going from page to page. Most people haven't taken advantage of it."

The goal, in his words, is fluidity, how quickly a shopper can drill down into a specific SKU and climb back up to browse something else, without the site itself becoming the friction.

5. The audit framework for eight and nine figure brands with a plateaued conversion rate — 24:08

For brands with real scale and real traffic whose conversion rate has flattened despite a working acquisition engine, Hov runs a two-level audit before touching anything creative.

The first level is diagnostic hygiene. Session count and conversion rate are inversely correlated almost by definition, so a dip in conversion rate paired with a jump in sessions isn't necessarily a problem, it might just mean lower-intent traffic is arriving in bigger volume. He checks that relationship, and confirms nothing on the site itself is broken, before drawing any conclusions.

"That's the first thing to give peace of mind to everybody that things are working as expected."

Only once that's ruled out does he move to the level that actually tends to move revenue: whether the offer itself is right. Are the value propositions clear? Do bundles, gifts, and thresholds make sense against how the brand positions itself? Is the deal easy to claim, and does claiming it feel good?

"The biggest levers I've seen are just offer testing. It's a value exchange, I'm going to give you this much money, I'm going to get this much out of your brand. And is there trust in the brand for a second or third purchase?"

For brands already past the site-health stage, in his experience, it's almost always the offer layer where the real gains are still sitting unclaimed.

6. Buckets over body scanners: fixing the sizing problem that drives returns — 32:34

Hov has tested the body-scanning and virtual fitting apps that promise to solve fashion's return-rate problem, the ones that ask a shopper to take a photo and calculate their measurements, across multiple large brands. None of them, in his experience, have moved either conversion or returns.

"Any app that tries to give you a minute of taking a picture to figure out your size, I haven't seen it move the needle at all. I've tested the big apps, done A/B testing, and neither conversion nor returns have budged."

His actual fix is far blunter: bucket customers by weight and height, tell them plainly which bucket they fall into, and flag the borderline cases explicitly, size up or size down, rather than leaving the shopper to guess. Women return roughly double the rate of men in his data, partly because women's fashion adds a dimension, chest size, that men's sizing mostly avoids, and partly, he suspects, for psychological reasons, men are more likely to just keep an imperfect fit rather than deal with a return.

"At a glance, within a few seconds, somebody needs to know what bucket they fit into. And if they're on the border, tell them to size up or down. Those are the basics to cover."

Pants complicate the picture further than tops, simply because there are more dimensions in play, but the underlying principle holds across categories: simple, explicit guidance beats sophisticated measurement tools that customers don't have time to use anyway.

7. Discounting without training your customer to wait for it — 37:11

Hov pushes back on two extremes at once when it comes to discounting. He's not arguing for a race to the bottom, but he's equally skeptical of brands that refuse to discount at all on principle.

The psychology behind a discount is straightforward and worth taking seriously on its own terms. A $100 item priced down from $125 converts differently than the same item priced at $100 from the start, even though the final price is identical.

"That's just a psychological thing."

The harder question is where a brand sets its baseline, and how much it flexes that baseline with seasonality. Most apparel brands have a real season, and Hov treats the off-season as the moment to hold discounts tighter, saving room to move during the demand spike when customers are already showing up in volume.

He's particularly unconvinced by the common founder line that discounting trains customers to expect it and therefore erodes long-term value.

"They miss the fact that most of their traffic is new customers, and LTV usually matures after four or five months. That's always been the argument for not discounting, let's not be an Apple. If you've actually gotten to Apple's level, sure. But most brands aren't. Let's be real, and discount when it makes sense."

Inventory position factors in too. A brand sitting on stock that will take years to sell through has an obvious answer, in his framing, regardless of any philosophical stance on discounting.

8. The app's real job: order tracking, storytelling, and the acquisition ceiling Apple built in — 42:19

For brands doing one to five million dollars a year, Hov sees the app less as a growth engine and more as a coordination problem solved at a slower pace. Traffic at that scale isn't high enough to run fast website tests, so decisions move more deliberately, and the app can actually keep up with the site instead of permanently lagging behind it, the way it does at brands that ship site changes daily.

The clearest use case at that stage is unglamorous but effective: order tracking. Getting a customer to download the app to track a shipment is, in his words, the bait, the reason someone installs it in the first place.

"Once you get a foot in the door with an app, that customer journey is practically free with an app notification, versus not free with email, SMS, or worse, Meta and postcards."

At scale, the picture shifts. Larger brands treat returning customer sales as the app's primary KPI, but Hov has consistently seen the channel treated as an afterthought relative to the site, even when it performs well. Part of the reason is mechanical: when a brand doubles marketing spend to chase acquisition, the app's order share doesn't double along with it, since the app skews toward existing customers, so the ratio between app and web orders drops exactly when the team is most excited about growth, and attention follows the excitement to the site.

He sees an underused opportunity sitting in that gap: using the app as a low-pressure storytelling channel, something closer to a blog post or video tied to a new product launch, rather than routing every notification straight to a bare product page.

"It's distribution at scale, immediate distribution at scale. I don't know why more people aren't doing this."

Abhijeet added a structural reason large brands stay retention-focused on the app rather than acquisition-focused: Apple's deep-link restrictions mean even attribution tools like AppsFlyer or Branch only land a new user on the exact right in-app page around 60 percent of the time, well short of full reliability, which pushes bigger brands to keep their acquisition pipeline on the website and treat the app as a second-purchase channel instead. Different brands land at very different points on that spectrum, some fast fashion brands deliberately go app-first for launches and exclusives and drive 60 to 80 percent of sales through the app, while others cap it closer to 15 to 25 percent as a pure retention play.

9. Building leverage in the AI era, and why agentic shopping still has to earn trust — 51:27

Asked how operators should think about AI given stories of two-person teams building billion-dollar ARR brands, Hov's advice is less about strategy and more about a personal habit: build unrelated, low-stakes projects with AI tools just to develop the muscle, because those skills transfer back into serious work faster than expected.

"Whatever provider, OpenAI, Claude, whatever your favorite LLM is, just start building stuff that's fun for you. This is a golden age to start practicing your creativity."

He expects leaner, more leveraged teams generally, especially in software, though he draws a clear line around e-commerce's physical side. Someone still has to pack the box, at least until robotics genuinely catches up.

On agentic shopping specifically, prompted by predictions that AI platforms could generate massive advertising revenue from shopping recommendations, Hov stays deliberately uncommitted. He notes that OpenAI's own Shopify integration had already pulled back toward search-style functionality rather than a fully agentic experience, and he's skeptical that an advertising-driven model earns the same trust as an organic one.

"Do you want to be advertised to by your LLM? How are people thinking about their favorite model, as a friend, or as something that suggests things to you? I'm more bullish on an organic pathway than an advertising one. I hope the advertising pathway doesn't happen, that wouldn't really be an evolution from what we already have with Google search."

10. The broader lesson: work with founders who are opinionated, because they know what's not for them — 57:21

Asked to name two DTC founders or CMOs he admires, Hov picks two people who, on the surface, run very different businesses, but share the same underlying trait.

Ryan Bartlett of True Classic tops the list, not for any single tactic, but for how closely the brand's personality has tracked his own personality over years of real growth.

"It's one of the more ideal things I've seen, where the brand personality is the founder's personality, and it's stayed true over the years."

The second is Lila Shams, a swimsuit fashion founder who came up as a product sourcer and designer before building her company, someone Hov singles out for how tightly her decisions still trace back to the product and the customer experience, rather than to a dashboard.

What connects both examples, for Hov, is less about taste and more about speed of decision-making. A founder with a genuinely clear, opinionated vision doesn't just make better calls, they make them faster, because they already know what doesn't belong.

"I'd rather work with somebody who's really opinionated than somebody who says, I don't know what to do, and just follows the money or a KPI that isn't good. They know what's not for them, and that makes day-to-day decision-making so much easier."

The complete episode transcript

Abhijeet: Today's guest on Brewed has spent close to 15 years inside the Shopify ecosystem, as an operator, a builder, a consultant, and a brand founder. He's the person fashion brands call when their traffic is up but their conversion is stuck, a CRO expert, a startup advisor, and someone who practices everything he preaches, including running his own DTC brand on Shopify. Welcome to Brewed, Hov.

Hov: Thank you, man. Very good intro, it felt like I was in a boxing match. Glad to be here.

Abhijeet: How did you first discover Shopify, as a merchant or a marketer? You came at it from a computer engineering background, a technical background. At what point did you look at e-commerce and think, this is the world I want to live in?

Hov: I was at a lead generation company in 2014 and 2015. I studied computer engineering in college, a mix of electrical engineering and computer science, but my first job out of college, and during college too, was design. I was doing web design, building sites in WordPress for small mom-and-pop shops. Then I got a call to join a lead generation company as a web designer, and that's where I really got my A/B testing practice, doing one or two tests a day for big brands like ADT, home security, and solar companies. They'd bring in search traffic and leads, and I'd design the A/B tests on top of it. It was a year and a half of what I'd call sweatshop A/B testing, a lot of traffic, and because it was lead generation, the conversion actions were simpler than e-commerce, you get emails and phone numbers, and answers to your tests a lot faster. I learned everything I could from that company, it was very well structured and well run, but eventually I wanted to leave. I wasn't specifically looking for e-commerce, I was just job hunting, and I found a company called 310 Nutrition. It looked like an agency with multiple owned brands. I'd never touched Shopify or Liquid before, but I knew JavaScript, PHP, and HTML well from my own projects, including a workout web app I'd built with WordPress APIs when I was working as a certified personal trainer. I showed them that, got hired as a developer, and that's how I got into Shopify. It wasn't a conscious decision to go into e-commerce, I just needed a new job and was done with lead generation, and that door opened up.

Abhijeet: So 310 Nutrition is where you really started with e-commerce. What were the unlearnings, moving from testing in lead gen to testing in e-commerce? What shaped your perspective?

Hov: Luckily, the skill transfer was there, testing and structure and understanding how long something takes to mature carry over, even though the numbers are smaller for actual purchases versus getting a lead. I brought that lens into 310, they didn't have much of a testing program at the time, and the founder appreciated it. Over six or seven years there, I went from developer, to head of development managing the A/B testing, to eventually director or head of e-commerce, running email, paid media, and the entire front end, while someone else ran fulfillment and backend operations, which is still probably my weaker area. The transfer from lead gen was more fun, because these are physical products and there's an actual feedback loop with a real customer. In lead gen, the company I worked for was mostly a middleman, we'd send leads to a brand, they'd pay us, and that was the end of the relationship, we never really owned the customer. In e-commerce, you can't just pull every CRO lever in the world, because these are humans you have to take care of, you have to carry the entire experience and deliver on what you promised.

Abhijeet: A lot goes into the pre-purchase and post-purchase journey, even the long tail until someone actually uses the product and comes back. In 2023, a lot changed for you, you had a baby, joined your wife's consultancy full time, and started a coffee brand, multiple identities at once, father, first-time entrepreneur, brand founder. Sevak Coffee has also been our sponsor for the Brewed podcast, thank you for that, we've gotten a lot of good feedback from the community about the brand. We'd love to understand those changes within a year, and what was going through your mind while juggling all of it?

Hov: Going from a full-time job that was basically my entire mindset, it wasn't a nine-to-five for me, it was all-day, and I loved every minute of it, to having my son, that was a real shift in priorities. It's not a unique story, you have a kid, your priorities change, you want to be there more. But I still love work, I still work around the clock. In 2023, when he was born, I was still at 310 Nutrition, but I started facing real choices, take a meeting or go on a walk with my son, and it made me ask what I was doing with my life. Around that time my wife had already started her own consultancy, she'd been VP of acquisition at Skims, and started working with marketing clients on the side. I didn't really have a plan, I quit 310 without a follow-up, and just started posting content on LinkedIn. I knew my years of A/B testing experience were worth something, so I started a series called Let's Optimize with the Hov, no real plan behind it, I'd take screenshots of big e-commerce brands' mobile apps, spend about 45 minutes redesigning them, and record videos explaining my decisions. That brought in clients. One, a big fashion brand I won't name, called me completely unprompted, unconnected to anything I'd posted. Their head of e-commerce had just quit and they needed someone for a few months. That three-month contract became three years, and I'm still working with them. And then there's my own brand. Before Sevak Coffee, I had another brand called New Charms, a charitable brand where I made 3D-printed and laser-cut bracelets, earrings, and necklaces. I've always had this urge to create, if I'm not creating every day I don't feel alive. Sevak Coffee grew out of that same urge, it's based on conversations and on my poetry. I started writing poetry and wanted to get it out into the world, and Sevak became my pen name for it. It's actually the name my mom wanted to give me at birth, my parents played backgammon over it, my dad normally doesn't win, but he won that game and named me Hovhannes instead. Sevak became my artist name, and then my coffee brand name too. So to answer your question, the variety of doing multiple things is what keeps me alive. If I only did one thing, I don't think I'd thrive.

Abhijeet: Our general approach with this podcast is to speak to people building or scaling a brand at every stage, and you've seen it all, from smaller brands to the biggest ones. If someone is starting a brand, or early in launching a fashion brand, say they're doing some ROAS, operationally profitable, thinking about scaling, less than $100,000 a month, early stage, how should they think about CRO? What framework would you recommend?

Hov: The overall framework is true at any scale, but especially early on. With the clients I work with now, gigantic volume brands, it's easy to think growth is automatic, like money just grows on trees, but there's real work happening in the background. When I started my own coffee brand, I wanted that one-on-one relationship, I package and sign every order myself, and I want to hold onto that as long as I can even as it scales. That forced me to think hard about the customer and the value I'm actually providing, and I started doing all my own organic social content. Organic social these days isn't really an acquisition channel for most brands, it's not going to drive much traffic on its own since most exposure is pay-to-play now, aside from a few brands that do very well organically. But from my experience, the more time I put into creating a story for my brand, the better the brand got, for two reasons, exposure, obviously, but also I got better at articulating why the product exists in the first place. Differentiation comes from your story. I like working with founders who have real personal stake in it, whose brand is a reflection of themselves, because the brand ends up becoming the founder's personality, and I love that. Crafting that story generally isn't a CRO's job, it's the founder's or the brand marketer's job to drive, though I'll still help craft it if they haven't. By $100,000 a month, hopefully they already have it. But getting your story right early, and differentiating yourself, comes from practice, nothing but practicing telling your story gets you there. I still haven't fully told my own Sevak Coffee story, once you're in the creative world, telling that story becomes a lifetime thing, I haven't even scratched the surface of it.

Abhijeet: To put a finer point on it, most fashion brands are founder-led, built on a certain philosophy, and they go out on Meta, TikTok, and start promoting. If they're doing something right, and their Meta ROAS is working, at around $100,000 a month, what should they think about first when it comes to CRO?

Hov: The main thing I've seen practically happen with fashion brands especially is that they start launching new SKUs and variations of a hero product, that's usually how apparel brands grow, and then they hit a point where there are too many things, and a visitor landing on the site doesn't understand why all those variations exist. One consistent motif across every apparel brand I've worked with is simplifying that for the audience, is the navigation easy, is it simple to compare different products. Jumping from page to page is a hard thing for people today, and very relevant to what you're doing with the app, the site needs to feel like an app in terms of instant response and easy comparison. If a brand has five variations of the same polo in different fabrics, is it simple for someone to understand the differences and navigate without bouncing between a collection page and multiple product pages? Shortening that journey, almost mimicking an app in the browsing experience, has been the one key differentiator, compacting the site and making it easy to compare offerings.

Abhijeet: I want to go back to the story point for a second, we digressed, but you touched on something important. One of the reasons I started this podcast is that we believe every brand founder and marketer is a storyteller, and we work with storytellers, we wanted to learn from them and build a better perspective to serve our own community. You mentioned that the story is never really complete, a founder keeps learning to refine it. A month or so ago I was talking with a founder who'd had a bad month of ROAS, and we ended up digressing into pricing, into which SKU was selling fastest, and after half an hour he said, we're working on the wrong metric, it doesn't matter, the price doesn't matter, it's the story. The same product sells for $200 and would sell for $20 depending on the story, and he started blaming himself for not getting the story right.

Hov: Yeah, when you're deep in operating a business, the brand can get away from you quickly. You can get lost in the volume of things. I've seen founders who cared deeply in the beginning, but once the brand gets large enough that all they're doing all day is looking at numbers and the bottom line, and there's value in that, but if you look at it all day, you lose sight of the customer and the why. I think that's one of the biggest stresses for any founder, whether e-commerce, SaaS, or otherwise, once something succeeds, every next step still has to align with the purpose behind why you started, or you'll end up stressed eventually. If you follow the wrong lead for the wrong reasons, you end up with a brand that doesn't mesh with who you are, and most people underestimate how much that affects day to day life. If a founder isn't happy with where the company is heading, even if it's making more money, and often it isn't even about the money, success has to align with the purpose behind it too. It's a big rabbit hole, we could talk about it for a while, but we can move on.

Abhijeet: What's the framework you personally practice to refine your own story, something any other founder could try and put into practice?

Hov: There are two modes I go between, maybe there's a balance to be found, but right now they're separate. One is pure operator mode, just do the obvious thing and put in the effort, you can't replace the work itself, and part of that is noticing when you're avoiding a step because you're afraid of it or its outcome. The other mode is understanding whether the outcome is actually one you'll be happy with, and that shapes how you work day to day too. When I work with founders, I try to understand their vision for where the company is going. Practically, day to day, CRO work isn't about vision and story every day, that wouldn't be a sellable service on its own, it's about making the website work better and hit concrete goals. But there are pivotal moments where something clicks for a founder after maybe a year of thinking about it, and they realize the direction needs to change. My job in those moments is to make sure the pivot isn't too drastic, and that it still makes financial sense, because we still have a business to run. A lot of CRO, in practice, is just having a hunch, testing it, and backtesting the result afterward rather than deciding everything up front. The vision side is more subconscious, and takes longer to surface, which is why founders sometimes wake up one day and realize the brand became something they never envisioned. The best founders I've seen are the ones who stay in tune with their business every day, because the more layers you add between the founder and the customer, hiring executives, then middle managers under them, the more disconnected, and the more dangerous that disconnect becomes.

Abhijeet: That's some deep talk. You've already given the basic framework, making the experience closer to an app, faster browsing, better comparison, and that translates into better CRO. Now, when we look at brands with real scale, eight and nine figure brands you work with, solid revenue, good traffic, ads running, but conversion has plateaued, they've tried a few things and nothing's moved the needle. What's your audit framework for that kind of problem?

Hov: There are multiple reasons it can happen. The most basic one everyone should check first is that sessions and conversion rate are inversely correlated, that's fairly obvious, but you have to actually look at traffic quality to see if it's changed, because you can be making more money with a lower conversion rate simply because you're bringing in far more people. So the first step is checking the health of the site and the relationship between marketing, traffic, and conversion rate, just to confirm there's no obvious broken experience, that gives everyone peace of mind that things are working as expected. After that, the second level is asking whether the offer itself is correct, is the price right, are the value propositions clear, are the choices presented to a user fighting with each other instead of being simplified. That second level, offer testing, is where the bigger gains usually sit, what free gifts are you offering, what pricing or bundle savings, does it match your advertising and brand positioning. For apparel brands specifically, whatever deal you offer needs to be easy to claim and make the customer feel good about claiming it, whether that's a welcome offer, a bulk bundle, a cart gift threshold, or something else. And there's a trust dimension too, for a second or third purchase, that's usually more settled at established brands. But the sequence is always the same, confirm the site itself isn't the issue, then move to how offers are presented.

Abhijeet: Every fashion founder complains about this one, as catalogs grow, more categories, weekly and monthly drops, discovery becomes a problem, collection pages, navigation. Some call it sorted filters, some call it merchandising. How should a brand approach helping customers search faster and increase the probability of purchase, especially when even brands using the best search and merchandising tools still struggle?

Hov: I think of search and browsing as a push-and-pull mechanism, search means someone already knows what they're looking for, browsing means you present the options and they choose. From what I've seen, unless you're a department-store-scale brand like Macy's with a catalog that genuinely requires search, most apparel brands overcomplicate their collection pages and end up leaning on search as a crutch instead of fixing the browsing experience itself. Search usage is typically a much smaller share than natural browsing from a menu or homepage category tile. Search itself is a less complicated problem to solve, mostly indexing, and semantic search has gotten a lot better, I've been working with Shopify's catalog API a lot, which is going to power agentic search too, though that hasn't fully arrived in the Shopify ecosystem yet, Shopify's working with OpenAI and Bing on it, the frameworks and catalog are there, it just hasn't cascaded through yet. But the real core of CRO is the browsing experience. There's a fatigue every user subconsciously feels once they start tapping around a site, if you have to keep backing out of a collection page, back to the menu, into another collection page, after a few of those a user decides it's too much effort to find something new. For apparel brands, the fix is making it feel like you can see everything on offer, drill down into a specific SKU, then climb back up just as easily, that fluidity between drilling down and going back up is what actually matters, and right now it usually gets solved with too many collection pages and sorting and filtering, which takes way too much effort. I've tested headless commerce, including Shopify's hydrogen and oxygen stack, specifically chasing that app-like feel, and it hasn't really gotten anywhere, Shopify has actually pulled back on supporting it. But when Shopify's section rendering came out, most people didn't really take advantage of it, and that's exactly what lets you render an app-like browsing experience without bouncing between pages. Taking a shopper's journey from many pages down to essentially one page where they can browse, find the right thing, and jump to something else, that's been the main lever for improving a large catalog's conversion.

Abhijeet: That's a masterclass. The other pain point, returns, is a real problem for any fashion brand as it scales. Two weeks ago I recorded a podcast with a fashion founder whose app became the number one shopping app in the App Store in India, ahead of Amazon, and around the same period, 17,000 of her orders shipped in the wrong size, and it turned into real firefighting. That problem usually starts on the PDP, where customers choose size, some brands put size in a filter, but that's not really a navigation fix. What can fashion brands do at the PDP level that meaningfully reduces returns?

Hov: Two things. First, I've seen a lot of apps come and go trying to scan a customer and figure out their body shape, and I think it's overengineered in most cases. Understanding that your product fits a given weight and height range is usually enough, and generally, women return at a noticeably higher rate than men, almost double in what I've seen. To reduce that, keep it simple, here's a product, here are the shapes and sizes it fits, and where the limits are before someone needs to move to a different size. Usually you know your size from brand to brand, that fit will hold in most cases, it gets harder with women's fashion because chest size adds another dimension, men's sizing is mostly just weight, and you can bracket that fairly easily. Some of the higher return rate is probably also psychological, women seem more willing to return an imperfect item, men are more likely to just keep it and eat the cost. What actually works on-site is making those brackets easy to read, speaking plainly, if you're in this weight range, this size will work, and for anyone near a border, nudging them to size up or down, whether a piece runs fitted or loose is something the brand or product owner will know best. Generally, within a few seconds someone should know exactly which bucket they fall into, and if they're on the border, be told clearly whether to size up or down. I haven't seen a body-scanning app move the needle on conversion or returns in any of the tests I've run on major brands, the simpler approach wins because people don't have time for anything more elaborate. Pants are harder than tops, just because there are more dimensions to account for, but the principle holds either way, figure out the bucket, and give a clear nudge at the border.

Abhijeet: You mentioned offers and bundle discounts as a scaling lever, that value exchange lever. I've spoken with founders who say discounting was a bad move for them, but we also know discounts and coupons clearly move conversion. I've seen brands run 60 to 70 percent off on the app, tracked app versus web, and by playing with the discount and bundle levers, increase average order value by 30 percent and conversion rate by roughly 3.2x. When a founder or CMO is scaling, how should they think about this lever?

Hov: You definitely want to avoid a race to the bottom, since price and conversion are closely tied. But when it comes to fearing discounting altogether, to me it comes down to, do you want the conversion or not, because it's largely psychological. If something is $100 but was originally $125 and it's 30 percent off, you're more likely to buy it than if it had just been $100 from the start. That's the psychological piece. Beyond that, it's about finding your baseline, being comfortable pulling the discount lever, and being able to return to that baseline afterward. Seasonality matters here too, most apparel brands have a real season, if you've got a strongly differentiated line it evens out a bit, but usually you're in one or two lanes, summer or winter. During slower periods when you're not spending much on marketing, you can hold discounts down near baseline, and when demand picks up and people are already coming through the door, that's when you can play more aggressively with the offer, all bounded by what your business can actually afford. People tend to overthink this as, I need to be lower than my competitor or as low as possible to get the highest conversion, but the real question is what you're trying to do with the business, are you stockpiling cash, are you fine running closer to the edge, and how your inventory position looks, a fast fashion brand with inventory that needs to move quickly has a very different answer than a brand sitting on stock that will take years to sell through, obviously discount that. Brands that do this best generally aren't married to a fixed price, they treat it as a base price and flex the discount up or down as conditions change. And the common line about not training customers to expect discounts misses something, most of a brand's traffic is new customers, and LTV typically matures four or five months out, so you're not actually training anyone in the short run. Founders sometimes reach for that argument because they want to be an Apple, but unless you're actually at Apple's scale, it's not realistic. Discount when it makes sense.

Abhijeet: Now for my favorite part. You've already touched on this, that brands need a navigation experience closer to an app for better conversion. For a brand starting out, say they've done their first few million dollars, somewhere between one and five million in DTC revenue, how should operators think about the app as a channel?

Hov: At that scale, one of the recurring problems I see is that the website moves quickly, changing every day, and the app always lags behind it, that's a conversation for another time, but you've probably seen it firsthand at bigger brands making daily changes. If you're in the one to five million a year range, you probably don't have enough traffic to run fast website tests and get answers within days, so your decisions are bigger and less frequent, which means you can actually coordinate the app with the site a lot more easily, there's less pressure from a constantly shifting acquisition flywheel forcing the app to keep pace. For brands at that stage, the app is specially positioned to handle the second-purchase moment, and one clear use case is order tracking, letting a customer see where their order is. I've seen other players lean on this, Shop does it too, it's basically the bait, the reason someone downloads the app in the first place, right after placing an order. Once you get that foot in the door, talking to that customer afterward through an app notification is practically free, compared to email, SMS, or worse, Meta retargeting or postcards. Being able to message someone the way you'd text them, personally I have to work on this more with my own coffee brand, I want to text these customers directly but I don't always have their number, but if they had the app and were on subscription, I could talk to them a lot more, including distributing content like a poem, which wouldn't make sense to blast out over paid SMS credits to fifty thousand people, but works fine on an app. That attention is essentially free. The time between someone placing their first order and receiving it is precious, and getting attention through email is a grind, and SMS is expensive, so distributing your story through the app is probably the best way to think about that window.

Abhijeet: You work with a lot of large brands, and a few of them have apps. How do large brands view the app as a channel, and what's the primary KPI they're trying to drive?

Hov: Returning customer sales, mainly, though I've seen apps surprisingly drive some first purchases too, low, but present. In most cases, for one reason or another, the app ends up being an afterthought, I don't fully know why, I've just observed that it tends to run on autopilot and perform fine, while all the excitement and effort goes into the site. One likely reason, and I've seen data that backs this up, is that when acquisition spend and seasonality ramp up, the app, which skews toward returning customers, doesn't scale at the same rate, if you double your marketing spend, the app doesn't double its orders, so the ratio between app and web orders actually drops just as acquisition spend increases, and teams get more excited about new acquisition and marketing during those periods, so attention naturally goes to the site. That's probably why the app ends up lagging on features, it's an afterthought, and it's not a major driver of new acquisition, so it gets deprioritized. But honestly, this conversation is making me rethink it, the app is really a no-pressure place to start telling your story. When you launch something new, you have all the room to write something closer to a blog post, using content or video you might otherwise reserve for an acquisition channel, and put it on a page inside the app for people to actually engage with, whether that's a TikTok Live clip or however you're showcasing the product. You can't really do that on a standard PDP tied to a template. If I launch something new, I can't think of a better way to announce it than through the app, not just linking straight to a PDP, but a content piece first. I don't know why more brands aren't doing this, it's immediate distribution at scale.

Abhijeet: I've learned that there are two clear patterns here. We work with a few fast fashion brands doing 60 percent of sales through the app, and that was a deliberate marketing team decision to go app-first, because they saw higher conversion and higher AOV, which made them profitable faster through the app. They made the app the primary channel for new launches and exclusive discounts, powering the whole omnichannel strategy, and their growth compounded, even their ROAS improved. But the bigger, more established brands we work with have almost never used the app for acquisition, they've perfected their web acquisition pipeline instead, largely because of how Apple handles deep links, if a new user sees a product in an ad and lands in the app, they need to land on that exact page, but Apple restricts that. Even with attribution tools like AppsFlyer or Branch, the probability of landing correctly from a catalog link into the app is around 60 percent, which is part of why app tends to work better as an acquisition channel in categories like gaming than in a lot of e-commerce. So we see different flavors, some brands doing 60 to 65 percent through the app, some doing 80 percent, and others treating the app purely as a retention channel from the second purchase onward, doing 15 to 25 percent.

Hov: Yeah, the acquisition side would be hard, you'd basically have to play within the app stores themselves and market yourself the way a general app would, rather than through a traditional marketing pipeline. Hearing this, I'm going to go back to the teams I work with and push for more storytelling inside the app instead of treating it as an afterthought, because a lot of the notifications I've seen for new product drops just route straight to a PDP, with zero storytelling behind why the product exists in the first place.

Abhijeet: We spoke with an LA-based brand last month, I won't name them, who had 40,000 concurrent users during a drop, and they treat the app as a channel doing about 35 percent of sales, so there's a real range of strategies brands are building around exclusives, with some built almost entirely on top of the app. Next question, an interesting one. We're in the AI age, arguably a technological golden age, where the gap between imagination and reality is a few minutes, a few prompts, a few iterations. E-commerce operators are reading stories about two-person teams building billion-dollar ARR brands. What's your recommendation for operators trying to become leaner and more impactful with AI, and how do you think the broader Shopify and e-commerce ecosystem grows from here?

Hov: Building personal leverage is something I think needs to happen at an individual level. The way I've trained myself is by starting fun, low-stakes projects and just watching how much faster I can now do things that would have taken weeks or months in the past. For operators inside brands, thinking about how to improve your own company or the brand you work with can come with a mental block, because in some ways you're also automating your own job, and that's genuinely top of mind right now, hiring freezes are happening, and the future points toward smaller, more leveraged teams building bigger products. That's happening fast in SaaS. E-commerce is a bit different because of its physical elasticity, you'll still need people to actually pack products until robotics fully catches up, which is still a couple of years out, but the software side of e-commerce is flattening just like SaaS. My advice for operators is to go build something fun that has nothing to do with your actual job, using whatever LLM you prefer, OpenAI, Claude, whichever, just to build the underlying skill, because it transfers to your serious work very naturally. In terms of where this goes, it's clearly agentic, though there's a whole separate conversation about how that plays out organizationally. For me personally, it's mostly given me permission to finally start building things that have been sitting in my head for a long time. If you're someone with a lot of ideas and a lot of dreams, this is genuinely the golden age to start practicing your creativity, and I think that's going to be one of the best outcomes of all of this.

Abhijeet: That's from the B2B side. What's your view on agentic shopping specifically? OpenAI has projected they'll eventually generate something like a hundred billion dollars in advertising revenue, and a lot of people are trying to figure out agentic shopping right now. Where do you see this heading? My own bias is that agentic shopping fits CPG and similar categories more naturally, but fashion is much more discovery-led, so I'm skeptical there, though I'd love your take.

Hov: It's definitely still emerging, so I can't say anything definitive yet. Even OpenAI's own Shopify partnership has shifted a bit sideways, stepping back toward more search-like functionality rather than a fully agentic experience. Advertising is clearly going to be part of this, but the real question is whether people actually want to be advertised to through their LLM, and how people think about their favorite model in the first place, is it a friend, or is it something that just suggests things and lets you choose. That relationship has to settle before advertising fits naturally into it. OpenAI has been one of the first to experiment with ads inside search-like results, but I think it'll follow the same trajectory as Google search, once people realize the top results are ads, trust erodes, and I don't think agentic search is immune to that. My guess is the more durable version looks like an agentic shopper genuinely aligned with the consumer, searching catalogs broadly and presenting real options, letting the user choose organically. I'm more bullish on that pathway than an advertising-driven one, and honestly I hope the advertising pathway doesn't win out, because that wouldn't really be much of an evolution from what we already have with Google search.

Abhijeet: I think we've covered most of it. Last question, the closing one we ask every guest, two DTC founders, or founders and CMOs, that you admire, and why.

Hov: Ryan Bartlett from True Classic is one. I haven't followed him since day one, but from reading his story and seeing where True Classic is now, he's stayed close to the brand the entire way, and it's one of the more ideal examples I've seen of a brand's personality genuinely being the founder's personality, kept true even through a lot of growth. The other is Lila Shams, a swimsuit fashion founder who came at it from a product angle, she designed the products herself as a fashion designer and product sourcer before building the company to real scale, and she talks about the end consumer experience constantly, because she comes from that product background. In both cases, I admire founders who use and are genuinely passionate about the products they create, because they end up with the clearest vision of what to do next, and just as importantly, what's not for them. Speaking practically, in CRO and in deciding next steps, it's so much easier working with a founder who's strongly opinionated than with someone who says, I don't know what to do, and just follows the money or a KPI that isn't actually meaningful. Both of them care about the consumer and the product, and their clarity makes day-to-day decisions so much easier, because they already know what isn't for them.

Abhijeet: I think that's it. Thank you, Hov, this was genuinely a masterclass on CRO, storytelling, and the app as a channel.

Hov: Thank you, man.