The acquisition loop was burning capital. Here is the reset that kept customers coming back | ft. Bernadette Olivier, The Volte + Seamlist | BBOM S3 E11

When almost every single customer is new, every sale costs you the full acquisition price. That was the reality at The Volte before the marketing strategy reset completely.

In Season 3 Episode 11 of The Black Box of Media, Aleisha McCall sits down with Bernadette Olivier, founder of The Volte and Seamlist, two companies at the front of Australia's circular fashion economy. Bernadette has been building since 2018: through COVID, through capital raises, through agency changes, and through a period where she was spending heavily on paid marketing with no real picture of what was working or why.

The conversation covers what drove the shift from almost every customer being new to over 50% of orders coming from existing ones, the marketing mistakes that came before it, why top-of-funnel investment is non-negotiable when the category you're building doesn't have search volume yet, and why Shopify's blended CAC data for Australian consumer brands should make every founder rethink what they're actually spending.

There's also the Cotton On "Resell to be Rewarded" campaign, the Hoodoo Gurus analogy that reframes how any brand should think about its existing product range, and the moment Bernadette said out loud that her marketing felt like a black box. She said it on a podcast called The Black Box of Media. She noticed.

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.