Turning Team Culture Into an Operating System That Can Handle Scale
Culture is one of those things ecommerce brands talk about constantly. Right up until it starts to wobble.
In the early days, culture just exists. The founder’s in the building. Decisions are fast. Everyone knows why the business exists and how things get done. It’s messy, but it works.
But then the brand grows. Headcount increases. Layers appear. Process sneaks in. Suddenly, the thing that once felt like an advantage starts to feel fragile. Not broken, just thinner. Harder to rely on.
Today’s Playbook pulls together lessons from operators who’ve been through that exact moment and come out the other side. Not by trying to “protect the vibe”, but by treating culture like infrastructure: something that has to be designed, maintained, and occasionally rebuilt.
Featuring insights from Emma Grasso at Culture Kings, Jane Cay at Birdsnest, Kira MacLeod-Finke at The Body Shop, and Ringo Chan at Ecosa, the message is consistent: culture doesn’t scale on its own. But when it’s built intentionally, it becomes one of the most underrated growth levers in ecommerce.
Culture Usually Breaks During Change, Not Growth
When Culture Kings transitioned out of its founder-led era and into the AKA Brands group, the biggest risk wasn’t strategy or performance. It was people.
Founder exits are destabilising, even when the future looks exciting on paper. The familiar voice disappears, decisions feel different and uncertainty creeps in quietly. Emma Grasso, Director of People and Culture, stepped into the business at exactly that moment. Instead of leading with frameworks or shiny initiatives, she focused on something far more practical: trust.
That started with showing up. Meeting people face-to-face. Acknowledging that the moment felt unsettling rather than pretending everything was fine. Making it clear that the chaos wasn’t being ignored, it was being managed.
One of the simplest but most effective tools was a weekly Slack update. Business updates sat alongside personal shout-outs, side hustles, music projects and small moments that reminded people they were still part of something human. For ecommerce operators, this is a critical lesson. Change is inevitable once a business scales. But if people don’t feel seen before new systems arrive, resistance is guaranteed. You can’t process your way into trust. You have to earn it first.
Stop Measuring Engagement and Start Thinking About Trust
At Birdsnest, Jane Cay doesn’t treat culture as an HR metric. She treats it as a trust balance.
Instead of obsessing over engagement scores or pulse surveys in isolation, Birdsnest uses a simple mental model: every interaction between leadership and the team either adds to trust or withdraws from it. When trust is high, teams absorb change. Mistakes are forgiven. Feedback lands. When trust is low, even small decisions feel loaded and morale erodes quickly.
This reframing changes how leaders behave day to day. It puts the focus on consistency, transparency and follow-through, rather than performative culture initiatives.
In ecommerce, where pressure cycles are constant (think missed forecasts, delayed stock, platform changes, algorithm updates) trust is the buffer that keeps teams functional. Without it, culture doesn’t collapse overnight. It just quietly becomes brittle.
Calm Isn’t a Personality Trait. It’s a Strategy
During a period of intense change at The Body Shop, including a major replatforming project, Kira MacLeod-Finke made a deliberate leadership decision: prioritise calm.
Not in a “let’s all breathe” BS way. In a structural way. Rather than letting uncertainty cascade through the business, she acted as a heat shield for her teams. Noise was absorbed at the top so teams could stay focused on customers and execution.
That calm showed up in how the business was designed. Digital and retail teams were brought together instead of competing for attention. A role was introduced to sit between HQ and the shop floor, turning raw customer feedback into structured learning rather than background noise.
The result wasn’t just better alignment. It was clarity. And in fast-moving ecommerce environments, where panic spreads quickly, calm doesn’t mean moving slowl: it means making sure decisions are grounded, even when the pressure’s on. When leaders stay steady, culture holds. When they don’t, it fractures fast.
Culture Is the Thing That Protects Quality
At Ecosa, founder Ringo Chan doesn’t separate culture from product quality. They’re inseparable.
Ringo famously scrapped a product after more than a year of development because it didn’t meet the standard. It was expensive, uncomfortable, and completely intentional. That decision sent a clear signal internally: momentum doesn’t trump quality. Standards matter, even when growth creates pressure to ship.
When teams believe the business genuinely cares about what it puts into the world, something interesting happens. They care more too: about the product, the customer, and the details that don’t show up in a dashboard.
In ecommerce, no amount of marketing can compensate for a team that doesn’t believe in what it’s building. Culture becomes the mechanism that enforces quality long after the founder can’t be in every decision.
Here’s what you should take home: culture doesn’t disappear because people stop caring. It erodes when growth outpaces intention.
Emma showed that trust has to come before systems. Jane reframed culture as a daily trust balance, not a quarterly score. Kira demonstrated that calm can be designed into how teams operate under pressure. And Ringo proved that culture is the final quality filter when scale tests standards.
Team culture isn’t the soft stuff, it’s the operating system that determines whether growth feels sustainable or exhausting. When culture is designed intentionally, scale feels manageable.
When it isn’t, scale exposes every weakness you’ve been ignoring.
In this Playbook:
- Why team culture usually breaks during change, not growth
- How to build trust before introducing process and structure
- The role of communication rituals in stabilising teams at scale
- Why measuring trust beats chasing engagement scores
- How calm leadership prevents culture from fracturing under pressure
- Using team culture as a quality control mechanism as you scale
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