Kate Assaraf tried every plastic-free shampoo bar on the market. They sat in her shower like, and I'm quoting here, "tombstones." Failed products. Dead ends. So she decided to make her own. Without Instagram ads. Without Amazon. Without any of the things you're supposed to need to build a business. Today on our program, we follow Kate's journey from beauty industry veteran to the woman who said no to everything, and built a million-dollar company anyway.

In this episode, we explore how Kate sold 250,000 shampoo bars in 4 years while refusing Meta ads, Amazon listings, and influencer partnerships. When her contract manufacturer went under, she didn't find a new one—she built her own factory and hired the displaced workers. Now with 400+ retail partners and 7-figure revenue, Kate proves that sometimes the best growth strategy is saying no to growth hacks.

GUEST BIO

Kate Assaraf is the founder of DIP Haircare, a plastic-free beauty brand that's redefined sustainable haircare without compromising performance. With 20 years in the beauty industry, Kate launched DIP from her kitchen table in October 2021 after discovering that existing eco-friendly alternatives failed to deliver. Her shampoo and conditioner bars compete directly with luxury salon brands while lasting up to a year. By refusing traditional DTC tactics and focusing on local retail partnerships, she's built a 7-figure business that champions American manufacturing and community-first commerce.

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LINKS

• DIP Haircare: https://dipalready.com/
• Find DIP in stores: https://dipalready.com/pages/stockists
• Kate on Instagram: @kateassaraf

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

There's this thing that happens when you run an e-commerce store. You know you need to discount, but you're terrified. Terrified of training customers to wait for sales. Terrified of looking cheap. So you do nothing, or worse, you slap WELCOME10 on your popup and call it a day. Meanwhile, the big brands? They're discounting constantly. Just invisibly.

Cara Marin from Seguno looked at 162,000 discount code sets. Real data from real stores. And what she found flips everything we thought we knew. The most successful stores discount more, not less. They just do it smarter. With unique codes. With segmentation. With strategies that preserve brand value while driving conversions.

The revelation that changes everything: it's not about the discount. It's about the delivery. 20% off might be the magic number, but 10% is secretly almost as effective. Gift with purchase is used 6X more by Plus stores. And those customer service recovery codes? They're turning angry customers into superfans. This isn't theory. This is what actually works.

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LINKS

• Seguno 2025 Unique Discount Benchmarking Report
• Seguno Bulk Discount Code Bot
• Promo Party Pro
• PostPilot
• Shopify Discount Docs

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

So there's this guy, Bora Celik. Software engineer, thirty years in the game. Last year he tells his investors something crazy: SaaS is dead. Not dying. Dead. And here's the thing - he might be right. See, while everyone's playing with ChatGPT, asking it questions, Bora's building these things called AI agents. They don't just answer questions. They do the work. Like, actually reach out to influencers, negotiate deals, send products, follow up. No humans involved. One of his clients, Harney & Sons Tea, they've got agents running their entire influencer program. The agents find people, check their engagement rates, send emails, track who posts. Everything. And the wildest part? The CEOs of these $100 million companies are building their own agents now. Using tools anyone can access. Today, Bora shows us exactly how.

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LINKS

• N8N Agent Builder: https://n8n.io/ai-agents/
• Agentic Brand Newsletter: https://agenticbrand.ai/
• Agentic: https://a.gentic.co/

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

So there's this moment in 2022 where Celia Hatch wakes up from a dream about chicken supplements called "Chicken Spice." She thinks it's ridiculous. Fast forward to today, and she's running a seven-figure business serving America's 13% of households with backyard chickens.

The twist is it started as her teenage son's eighth-grade homework assignment. He made $500 selling herbs in craft bags, then quit. Ms. Hatch, a serial entrepreneur with 16 businesses behind her, picked it up and scaled Buff Clucks to seven figures in 18 months using Meta advertising, landing pages, and subscription bundling.

This is a story about accidental entrepreneurship, the growing market of premium pet owners willing to double their feed costs, and why sometimes the best business ideas come to you in your sleep. Along the way, Celia reveals why their Shopify store is the "neglected child" of their operation, how a "sneeze warning" became genius marketing, and why she wishes she'd built a proper Shopify store from day one.

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LINKS

• Buff Clucks: https://www.buffclucks.com/
• Buff Clucks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buff_clucks/
• Funnelish (tool they use): https://funnelish.com/
• SEMrush: https://www.semrush.com/
• Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Shopify just went from 100 variants per product to 2,048. Shopify Partners Kurt Elster and Paul Reda tested it and found out there's a secret limit at 250 where everything changes. Your theme might work perfectly, it might half-work, or it might completely break depending on when it was built.

They also dig into the new VS Code-based theme editor (developers love it, merchants hate it), the "unlisted" product status that's perfect for hiding free gifts and private sales, and Kurt reveals the one homepage element that gets clicked more than anything else—you're probably not using it right.

This is pure Shopify platform talk that's more entertaining than it should be.

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LINKS

• Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/unofficialshopify

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Kurt and Filip break down buy-two-get-two offers that crush percentage discounts, why five emails on Black Friday is actually conservative, and the three-week framework 8-figure brands use to win Q4. If you're planning to send a couple emails on Cyber Monday and call it done, this episode will make you rethink everything.

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LINKS

• Filip Pejic on X: https://x.com/BallinFil
• Bedford Marketing: https://www.bedfordmarketing.co/
• The Paper Boy Newsletter: https://thepaperboy.beehiiv.com/

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

"These tools rely on automation that only catches 30% of issues. And for blind users with screen readers? The overlays often conflict with their assistive tech—making the site harder to use."

Bet Hannon runs AccessiCart, an agency that fixes accessibility problems for e-commerce stores—usually right after they've been sued. We talked about why "quick fix" overlay plugins are making the problem worse, the four accessibility issues you can fix right now, and what the European Accessibility Act's €100K fines mean for US-based stores.

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LINKS

• AccessiCart: https://accessicart.com
• Bet on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/bethannon
• WAVE Accessibility Tool: https://wave.webaim.org
• Overlay Fact Sheet: https://overlayfactsheet.com

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

I spent three days at Smart Marketer Live in Denver, capturing raw conversations with agency owners, brand founders, and Meta reps about what's actually working in 2025.

This isn't your typical conference recap. We're talking about Meta's Andromeda update that killed everyone's ad performance over the summer, why TikTok Shop might be a trap, and how a chicken supplement business owner plans to poach employees like she's manifesting herbs.

Featuring Beav Brodie (Tactical Baby Gear), Brett Curry (OMG Commerce), Attila from Smart Marketer, and Celia Hatch (Buff Clucks).

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LINKS

• Tactical Baby Gear: https://tacticalbabygear.com
• Fight Soap: https://fightsoap.us
• Buff Clucks: https://buffclucks.com
• OMG Commerce: https://omgcommerce.com
• Smart Marketer: https://smartmarketer.com

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

So there's this baseball media company. They make shirts about guys with nicknames like "The Big Dumper." And they needed three different store experiences, but only wanted to use one store. What our co-host Paul Reda figured out next is either brilliant or insane. Maybe both.

Today on the show, we're asking: when does a hack become a feature? When does one store become three? And why would anyone voluntarily remove every frontend app from their Shopify store? Plus, ChatGPT can now sell your products directly. No, really. We'll explain how that works and why Kurt thinks automated fraud prevention might actually matter this time.

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LINKS

• Jomboy Media Shop: https://shop.jomboymedia.com/
• ChatGPT Shopping Signup: https://shopify.com/chatgpt
• Customer Category Segmentation: https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/segment-customers-based-on-the-product-categories-they-ve-browsed-or-bought
• Automated Fraud Prevention: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/fraud-prevention/index
• Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders (Facebook Group): https://www.facebook.com/groups/UnofficialShopifyPodcast/

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

"ChatGPT is not that sophisticated yet. So for marketers, what that means is there are real ways right now for arbitrage in this short period of time before ChatGPT gets good enough to say, no, we're only showing the proper result."

Mac King from Domaine breaks down why merchants are seeing ChatGPT and Perplexity show up as referral sources in their analytics—and what to do about it. We talked about the terminology wars (GEO vs AEO vs AI search optimization), why AI engines favor content from Google's 10th page, and the Reddit strategies that actually work without getting banned.

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Swym - Wishlists, Back in Stock alerts, & more
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LINKS

• Domaine AI Commerce Suite: https://www.meetdomaine.com/insights/domaine-news/domaine-launches-ai-commerce-suite
• Mac King on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mackenziepking/
• Mac King on Twitter: https://x.com/MacKing/
• Profound (tracking tool): https://www.tryprofound.com/
• Shopify Knowledge Base app: https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-knowledge-base
• SEOFOMO newsletter: https://seofomo.co/
• Commerce GPT newsletter: https://www.yotpo.com/commerce-gpt/

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Jamil Bhuya has scaled businesses across three wildly different industries: restaurants, beauty, and now Shopify agencies. That multi-industry perspective gives him a unique superpower—he can spot the conversion killers that store owners become blind to. We talked about why fresh eyes matter more than fancy tools, the psychology behind purchase objections, and how being too close to your business destroys your ability to see what customers actually need.

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LINKS

• Other Half Studio: https://otherhalf.studio
• Jamil on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jamil-bhuya

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.