I'm Taylor Sicard. I co-founded WIN Brands Group, a consumer-brand operator we scaled to nine figures across DTC, marketplace, wholesale, and retail, was an early Shopify employee who helped build and scale the Partner Program, and built and sold a software company to Tiny. Now I work as a fractional ecommerce growth consultant to brands scaling from $5M toward $100M and beyond, platform-agnostic, operator judgment on the decisions that move the P&L, not an agency selling you execution.
Most ecommerce brands hit a point where the single channel that built them, usually paid social into a DTC store, stops carrying the business. The next leg of growth lives in the mix: marketplace, wholesale, retail, subscription, and owned audience, each with its own margin and operational reality. I help brands read that mix and decide where the next dollar and the next hire actually go. This is platform-agnostic work: Shopify, headless, or across Amazon and retail, the constraints on the P&L are the same.
Founder-led ecommerce brands past $5M where CAC on the core channel keeps climbing and the obvious next move is not obvious. Channel mix, contribution margin, and retention before you pour more into a channel that is already saturating.
Brands taking ecommerce into retail, wholesale, and marketplace without wrecking margin or brand, plus the operating systems and finance that scale needs. The work larger and enterprise consumer teams bring me in for.
When a channel stalls, the reflex is to open another one, to hand it to an agency, or to hire a VP to go find it. All three are expensive answers to a question that is usually about judgment, not capacity. A full-time leader runs close to $25,000 a month fully loaded, before a three-to-six-month ramp and the real chance you hire twice. A fifth channel looks cheaper than a hire and rarely is. It takes budget, inventory, and attention away from the four already running.
| Your situation | The right tool | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You don't know what to do next | Fractional advisor | Senior judgment on the few calls that move the business |
| You know what to do, need hands | Agency or junior hire | Execution capacity once the strategy is set |
| A whole function, all day, ongoing | Full-time hire | True forty-hour ownership the business can't run without |
The full breakdown, with the cost math and failure modes, is in fractional advisor vs agency vs a full-time hire. Plenty of the time the right answer is an agency, or nothing at all. You'll hear that on the first call.
Four places the work lands, and every one of them comes back to the mix. You can run my first-pass math yourself before we ever talk. It's the DTC margin calculator and the max allowable CAC tool.
Contribution margin per channel, not blended, because the blend hides whichever channel is losing money. The work behind the brand profitability teardown and the inflection points.
Fixing the mix and getting CAC and payback under control across paid, owned audience, retail media, marketplace, and the shift off rented reach.
The move into retail, wholesale, and marketplaces without losing margin or brand, including the own store versus marketplace call and international.
Whether the next move is scale, profit, or a sale, and what has to be cleaned up first. Buyers price a multi-channel brand on different math than a single-channel one. I've been on the buy side of a nine-figure acquirer and the sell side of my own company.
Which channel stopped carrying the business, and what the rest of the mix looks like now. Free.
Every channel laid out side by side on margin and payback, then a call on where the next dollar and the next hire go.
Monthly retainer, weekly cadence, twelve months to start and month to month after. Most of the work is sequencing the mix.
It ends when the team reads the mix without me. That's the goal, not a longer retainer.
Most ecommerce consultants know one channel well and talk about the rest. I joined Shopify early to help build and scale the Partner Program, then co-founded WIN Brands Group, the acquirer behind Homesick, Qalo, and a portfolio of scaled consumer brands, where the growth came from DTC, marketplace, wholesale, and retail running at once. I also built Uptime and sold it to Tiny, a publicly traded acquirer, and I've advised Fortune 500 consumer-goods teams including Nike, Coca-Cola, Hallmark, and P&G.
I've carried a P&L across DTC, marketplace, wholesale, and retail, and watched what each one does to margin as volume grows. I don't advise on a channel I haven't run. If your business is specifically direct-to-consumer, see DTC growth consulting; if you build in the Shopify ecosystem, see Shopify growth consulting. More in the full background, or browse all advisory tracks.
Name the channel that stopped working and we'll spend a free 30 minutes on it. What the mix looks like now, what it costs you per order, and where the next dollar goes. I'll tell you honestly when the answer isn't me. If you want the margin math first, the free wholesale versus DTC margin calculator runs it.
Start a conversation