The Numbers Come Before the Brief
One of the clearest threads running through Jess’s approach is the refusal to let gut instinct run ahead of evidence. That’s not a knock on intuition, she’s clear that instinct still has a seat at the table, but she’s equally clear about the order of operations: data first, then creative direction.
When she came into Betts, she spent two months doing nothing but pulling apart the business. Purchase rates, full-price trade performance, channel mix, creative consistency. What the data showed was a brand that had become reliant on a single channel, driven almost entirely by performance marketing, attracting a price-sensitive customer with low loyalty and a weak repeat purchase rate. The creative was inconsistent, all the eggs were in one basket, and the acquisition strategy hadn’t caught up to where the customer had shifted.
“I needed to take a step back and go, right, how do I acquire someone who has more propensity to purchase more than once, who’s going to purchase at full price, who’s going to talk to their friends about the product?”
The answer wasn’t found by looking only at Betts customers. Jess is deliberate about looking across categories, not just at competitive shoe brands. She reads annual reports, research papers, comment sections across unrelated brands, and reviews on sites. The insight that the brand needed to stop chasing a price-sensitive, low-loyalty customer and start building toward a fashion-forward, heritage-curious younger consumer came from that breadth of input. Then it was backed by numbers. Only then did the creative brief follow.
Ruthlessly Culling What Doesn’t Belong
The Betts rebrand required some genuinely hard calls. Removing school shoes from a brand that was essentially built on school shoes. Cutting men’s. Reducing the SKU count from around 700 products down to 250 to 300. None of that is easy to recommend to a family business that has been operating for 134 years. But it’s exactly the kind of clarity that Jess says separates brands that grow from brands that just keep treading water.
“You can’t do everything and brands that try to do everything just do an average job of all of those things.”
The strategic logic for Betts was about repositioning toward a customer with more long-term value for the business. The school shoe buyer wasn’t wrong, just not where the growth was going to come from. By tightening the product range, the brand could focus the creative, build a more coherent identity, and give the new customer a clearer reason to engage. The rebrand launched in October 2024, and within six months the brand was generating genuine organic traction on TikTok from a cohort that would have previously found the brand irrelevant. That doesn’t happen without the difficult decisions that came first.
The same principle applies to channel strategy. Jess didn’t try to activate TikTok straight away. Instagram came first because that’s where the primary audience was. TikTok followed six months later, once the Instagram presence had been properly established. Prioritisation is its own skill, and it’s one she talks about consistently, whether she’s working with a startup founder or a century-old retail brand.
Eventing as an Influencer Strategy
The conversation around influencer marketing in this episode is worth paying attention to because it goes in a different direction to most. Jess is not a fan of high-follower-count influencer deals, not because influence doesn’t work, but because the return rarely justifies the spend when it’s done as isolated one-off engagements.
Her preferred model is eventing: bringing together a curated group of influencers, tastemakers, and decision-makers in person, building real relationships, generating a stack of organic content, and doing it all for a fraction of what individual influencer fees would cost.
“Influencers are living, breathing billboards online. You need multiple engagements. People need to see something half a dozen times before they’re actually going to care, and it needs to come from half a dozen credible sources.”
At Frank, that looked like taking influencers to a smash room where they’d destroy crockery with baseball bats, which sounds chaotic but made total sense for a brand that was built on body confidence and breaking beauty norms. At Willow & Blake, events are the primary outward marketing vehicle: panel conversations with editors and brand leaders, usually built around a tight, insight-driven topic. The last one was called How Women Shop and featured the editor of Vogue Australia alongside the head of brand at Afterpay. The conversation was honest, practical, and the kind of thing people in the room could actually use.
For e-commerce brands watching their influencer spend with diminishing returns, the event model is worth a serious look. One well-run event with the right people in the room will often outperform ten individual posts, build longer-lasting relationships, and give every attendee content to share on their own terms..
Brand Strategy Is Not a Creative Exercise
The bigger picture argument Jess makes throughout this episode is that brand is not a visual exercise or a tone-of-voice document. It is commercial architecture, and it has to be built on a real understanding of who the customer is, what they actually value, and where the genuine white space sits in the market.
Most founders, she says, aren’t honest enough with themselves about whether their product is actually differentiated. The answer is often that it isn’t, at least not intrinsically, and the work is to build that differentiation through the brand itself. That requires removing ego from the conversation, which is easier said than done when it’s your business and your product.
“You have to be honest with yourself about the fact that there isn’t anything particularly ownable about the product. Therefore, how do we create something ownable with the brand? That requires a real level of self-awareness, a removal of ego.”
She also pushes back on the idea that AI can shortcut the strategic work. It’s useful for rollout, for administrative tasks, for scaling content production. It cannot replace human insight, and human insight is what makes a brand genuinely distinctive. That’s still the job.
For founders who can’t afford a full brand overhaul, the advice is to experiment in the channels where mistakes are reversible first: social, email, performance. Get a feel for what’s resonating before committing to anything permanent. But don’t mistake that for a brand strategy. The full work still needs to happen, and it still needs to be grounded in data.
Twenty years into a career she describes as being “in ideas”, Jess Hatzis is as sharp as ever on what actually builds a consumer brand for the long term. The short version: spend more time in the numbers than feels comfortable, kill the things that don’t belong, and stop trying to be everywhere at once.
Based on the Add To Cart podcast with Jess Hatzis, co-founder of Willow & Blake, founder of For Scale, and fractional CMO at Betts Shoes. Join the Add To Cart communityfor free.
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