Four months postpartum, Elysia Krstevski got hit by a competitor that copied everything: the website, the product, the copy, the ads, like for like. She started down the legal path, found it exhausting, and then did something completely different.

In this clip, the Mekė Baby founder tells the wild story of how she answered a copycat. She went to high school with Adrian Portelli, so she messaged him and asked to borrow his jet. Within a week she'd shot a mini film to launch her Black Range for Black Friday, custom black dress, a Lamborghini, the whole thing, ridiculous for a baby brand and exactly the point. Her theory: you can copy the website and try to copy the product, but you can't copy the brand and the creativity behind it. She dropped the legal case, and as far as she knows the competitor isn't even around anymore.

From Add To Cart with Elysia Krstevski, Founder and CEO of Mekė Baby.

Brands and tools mentioned: Mekė Baby

Connect with us on LinkedIn:
👤 Elysia Krstevski → https://au.linkedin.com/in/elysia-krstevski-b41485b7
👤 Nathan Bush → https://au.linkedin.com/in/nathbush

New episode out now on https://addtocart.com.au!🎙️

📩 Sign up for the free Add To Cart newsletter → https://newsletter.addtocart.com.au/subscribe
💬 Join the Add To Cart Community → https://community.addtocart.com.au/feed

0 0

"Decks upon decks of incredible ideas, always on the end of a no."
Rebecca Williams on walking into Seed & Sprout.
Not bad ideas. Bad timing. Wrong audience. A business in decline.
Same team. Same ideas. New moment. Magic.
Check what your team already pitched and lost.

0 0

Mark Broadhead's rule: if you piss off 80% of Australia, 20% love you. And 20% is a big number.

At The Lad Collective, testing is everything. They'll make dozens of ad styles and try what other brands won't.

Box yourself in creatively on Meta and you cap the reach you need to grow.

Going outside the norm isn't reckless. It's how you open up your targeting.

0 0

Four years ago Elysia Krstevski didn't know what ecommerce was. She'd spent 15 years in musical theatre, working her way from receptionist to co-CEO. Today she runs Mekė Baby, the brand behind Australia's first portable milk warmer, she's in the 2026 Top 50 People in eCommerce, and she's the face of Australia Post's national "Big Boss Energy" campaign.

It started with a bad moment. Stuck in a supermarket during Covid, dealing with mastitis and unable to warm expressed milk for her screaming baby, Elysia went looking for a product that didn't exist and decided to build it herself.

In this episode, Elysia sits down with Nathan Bush to break down how she created a feeding category from scratch. We get into why she built the brand before she had a product, why she handed prototypes to high-profile mums instead of waiting for perfection, and the wild story of answering a copycat competitor by borrowing Adrian Portelli's jet for a Black Friday film. Elysia is refreshingly direct about the numbers, why she stopped chasing top-line revenue on Meta and moved into Baby Bunting, why she runs her own ad account, and why she'll never hand customer service to AI. Plus building a brand while raising three kids, and launching the Go-Box while she was in labour.

Brands and tools mentioned: Mekė Baby, Baby Bunting, The Memo, Australia Post, Shopify, Meta, TikTok, Claude

This episode is brought to you with thanks to our partners:
🛍️ Shopify → https://www.shopify.com/au
📧 Klaviyo → https://www.klaviyo.com/au/

Connect with us on LinkedIn:
👤 Elysia Krstevski → https://au.linkedin.com/in/elysia-krstevski-b41485b7
👤 Nathan Bush → https://au.linkedin.com/in/nathbush
👤 Rosa Willis → https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-clara-willis-23761066/

🎙️ Want to be a guest or sponsor on Add To Cart? → https://www.addtocart.com.au/contact
📩 Sign up for the free Add To Cart newsletter → https://newsletter.addtocart.com.au/subscribe
💬 Join the Add To Cart Community → https://community.addtocart.com.au/feed

1 0