Sean Clarke

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Sean Clarke Built brands. Scaled stores. Now helping founders do the same. www.ecomiq.com and www.pacificiq.com

I’m running a workshop at League of Originals in LA on October 23, and I’d love to bring a few DTC founders along.It’s c...
10/06/2026

I’m running a workshop at League of Originals in LA on October 23, and I’d love to bring a few DTC founders along.

It’s called “Grow Revenue Without More Ad Spend.” We’ll look at how to increase revenue from the traffic you already have, and you’ll leave with a practical plan and clear priorities for your business.

The ticket includes a full day of panels and sessions, brand activations, lunch, coffee and happy hour drinks, plus time to meet other founders and ecommerce teams.

I have a few tickets to share. Message me and tell me about your brand if you’d like to come.

10/06/2026

Jennifer, our Head of Strategy, asked me what all the successful brands have in common. People expect a clever tactic. It's not that. It's organisation, right across the business.

They know their margins. They know which channels are working and which are just spending. They're properly staffed instead of stretched thin.

The big one is CAC, your cost to acquire a customer. The best brands know theirs, and they know it's sustainable. The ones in trouble are often spending to bring customers in without realising the maths doesn't work. Get organised, get the numbers right, and most of the hard problems ease.

10/05/2026

Personalization isn't a nice-to-have anymore, and I notice bad personalization everywhere now.

I buy a men's jacket and the follow-up email is full of women's clothing. I add a sauna to my cart and the upsell is a motorbike, when the obvious thing to show me is a cover or towels.

Every time it happens, it tells me the brand isn't paying attention. The ones that get it right, recommending what fits what I just bought, feel effortless by comparison. That's the gap I'd be watching closely right now, because customers feel it even when they can't name it.

Every time I'm in Napa I find an excuse to visit Far Niente.They're a client, which helps. But I'd go regardless. The ga...
10/04/2026

Every time I'm in Napa I find an excuse to visit Far Niente.

They're a client, which helps. But I'd go regardless. The gardens alone are worth the drive. Stone steps up through the lawn, flowers along every edge, the old stone w**ery sitting at the top like it's been there forever. It's the kind of place where you slow down without meaning to.

What I like most is that the care isn't just for show. It runs through the whole business.

The tasting room, the people, the w**e. When we work on their online store, that's the standard we're trying to match. Walking the grounds is a good reminder of what we're building toward.

10/03/2026

If the agency running your marketing has never used your product, that's a big problem.

And I don't mean trying it once. I mean becoming a real customer. Buying it, going through your checkout, receiving your packaging, opening your emails, then actually using the product.

Some of the best marketing insights come from experiencing that journey. You start noticing things. What's confusing, what's exciting, what the unboxing feels like, whether the product delivers on its promise.

A lot of agencies skip this. They jump straight into ads, email and strategy without ever seeing what your customer sees. That's exactly where the best opportunities get missed. If you're hiring someone to market your product, make sure they've been a customer first.

This is Mason. He was the first person I hired at Pacific IQ, and he's still here, which says more about him than it doe...
09/30/2026

This is Mason. He was the first person I hired at Pacific IQ, and he's still here, which says more about him than it does about me.

He's a partner now and runs our client relationships. For a while he was out in Virginia, which I've been calling the wilderness, mostly to annoy him. He's back on the West Coast, and this was us outside Ecommerce Fight for Charity in Las Vegas, first event together in far too long.

Plenty of people can hire. Keeping someone through every version of a business, the good years and the slow ones, is the rarer thing. Glad to have him closer to home.

09/29/2026

The strange product recommendation sitting next to a customer's cart is quietly costing you sales, and most brands never trace it back.

A shopper is one click from buying, and the thing you suggest alongside their order makes no sense to them. That small dissonance is enough to make them hesitate, and hesitation at the cart rarely ends in a purchase.

A few years ago this barely registered. Personalization made people slightly uncomfortable, and a brand that knew too much felt intrusive. That has reversed.

Customers now expect you to understand them, which means a bad recommendation is read very differently. It is no longer a harmless quirk. It tells the customer you had their information and used it carelessly, and that impression is expensive.

09/24/2026

Good people do not need looking after. They need to know what they are working on, what good looks like, and where they stand.

Most brands give them none of the three. Priorities that change without explanation. No agreed definition of what a good quarter is for their channel. Feedback that arrives only when something has gone wrong, and never when it has gone right.

Founders read the resignation as a pay problem. It usually is not. Somebody capable has spent a year unable to tell whether they were doing well. Eventually a recruiter called who could tell them.

The systems that prevent this are unremarkable. Priorities agreed each quarter and left alone. A written measure of success for each channel. A conversation every month that is not about a crisis. None of it costs anything, and it is the difference between a business people stay in and one they pass through.

09/22/2026

Here's a test that sounds risky but works. If you're not sure a channel is driving revenue, turn it off.

Attribution gets murky even with good systems. Sometimes switching a channel off is the only way to really know. Running TikTok, Meta and Google? Turn one off for a few weeks, no longer than a month, and you'll quickly see which channels contribute and which just cost you.

09/17/2026

I recently sat down with Lindsey Rosenberg, the founder of Dryft Sleep, and her take on curation was too good not to share.

Every sleep customer wants something different. Some want the data and buy an Oura ring. Some want a quick fix from the pharmacy. Then there's the group who want a holistic approach, and they reward real curation.

The brands that win that customer don't just stock products. They can tell you why each one made the cut, often because they know the founders and the science behind it.

That trust is hard to copy, and it's one of the most defensible things a brand can build.

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