Richie Mashiko is the CEO of She’s Birdie and a financial and business strategy for ecommerce businesses. Follow and DM him on X at https://x.com/richiemashiko. FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: https://x.com/andrewjfaris Email: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work With AJF Growth: https://ajfgrowth.com INTELLIGEMS Intelligems brings A/B testing to business decisions beyond copy and design. Test your pricing, shipping charges,…
Presented by Edgeverve Supply chains are where legacy integration models reach their limits. As partner networks expand and operational volatility increases, traditional middleware is buckling under costs and complexity. That’s why supply chain has emerged as a proving ground for automation‑led integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), a next-generation model designed to absorb constant change…
Scott Dancy is the founder and CEO of Azuna, a fast-growing challenger brand in at-home odor elimination. Since launching in 2019, Scott has scaled Azuna into a serious category disruptor. Prior to launching Azuna, Scott built, scaled, and sold several companies across cybersecurity, staffing, and energy – with curiosity as his fuel. During the dot-com…
April 27, 2026LeeUncategorizedComments Off on RAG precision tuning can quietly cut retrieval accuracy by 40%, putting agentic pipelines at risk
Enterprise teams that fine-tune their RAG embedding models for better precision may be unintentionally degrading the retrieval quality those pipelines depend on, according to new research from Redis. The paper, “Training for Compositional Sensitivity Reduces Dense Retrieval Generalization,” tested what happens when teams train embedding models for compositional sensitivity. That is the ability to catch…
Subscribe to DTC Newsletter – https://dtcnews.link/signup http://coyuchi.com Coyuchi is a premium bedding brand with a long purchase cycle and high AOV. That changes how you approach growth, attribution, and retention. Vicki Williams-Grahan (Brand President) explains how they tested Meta’s impact by turning it off, how they think about LTV in a low-frequency category, and why…
Can you take a clean beauty brand built on accessibility — and evolve it into a global “everyday luxury” powerhouse without losing what made it special?
On today’s episode, we welcome Michael Marquis, CEO of Raw Sugar Living — the personal care brand known for bringing clean, high-quality products to the masses at an accessible price point. With more than 30 years of experience across global consumer giants like Johnson & Johnson — where he led iconic brands including Listerine, Clean & Clear, and OGX — Michael brings a unique combination of operational discipline and brand-building expertise to Raw Sugar’s next chapter.
Since joining the company in 2022, Michael has led Raw Sugar through a period of rapid growth and transformation, expanding distribution across major retailers like Target, Walmart, and CVS while strengthening the brand’s foundation in clean, vegan-friendly formulations and its signature design. Now, he’s guiding the company through a major evolution — reimagining the brand with updated packaging, improved formulas, and a sharper positioning around “accessible everyday luxury.”
In this episode, Michael shares what it takes to execute a thoughtful rebrand without alienating loyal customers, how to build and sustain strong retail partnerships, and why operational excellence is critical when scaling in a competitive category. We also discuss the evolution of the clean beauty market, shifting consumer expectations around transparency and ingredients, and how leadership — including his perspective as a father — shapes both company culture and long-term strategy.
If you’re interested in scaling consumer brands, navigating rebrands, or building products that balance quality, accessibility, and growth — this episode is for you. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.
Are you interested in sponsoring and advertising on The Kara Goldin Show, which is now in the Top 1% of Entrepreneur podcasts in the world? Let me know by contacting me at karagoldin@gmail.com. You can also find me @KaraGoldin on all networks.
To learn more about Michael Marquis and Raw Sugar:
https://www.rawsugarliving.com
https://www.instagram.com/rawsugarliving/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmarquis/
Sponsored By:
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Check out our website to view this episode’s show notes: https://karagoldin.com/podcast/831
Most people know Pandora for its iconic charms, but far fewer realize the company is the largest jewelry brand in the world by volume — producing more than 100 million pieces a year. In this episode of Retail Remix, host Nicole Silberstein speaks with David Walmsley, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Pandora, about how…
Faye Whitley is the co-founder and managing director of Beevive creators of The Original Bee Revival Kit, and recent Dragon’s Den stars. Founded in 2018 they’ve sold over £2million of product via their Shopify store and over 350 wholesale customers selling their products in the UK. In this episode, Faye shares how a simple idea turned into a…
April 26, 2026LeeUncategorizedComments Off on Context decay, orchestration drift, and the rise of silent failures in AI systems
The most expensive AI failure I have seen in enterprise deployments did not produce an error. No alert fired. No dashboard turned red. The system was fully operational, it was just consistently, confidently wrong. That is the reliability gap. And it is the problem most enterprise AI programs are not built to catch. We have…
April 26, 2026LeeUncategorizedComments Off on AI synthetic audiences are already here and poised to upend the consulting industry
There is a war brewing between AI and consulting. Akin to an armies slow march towards the castle, a new technology is coming to dethrone the expert guessers of Mckinsey, Nielsen, Gartner, Publicis and the rest. Any consulting that involves analyzing people (think all of marketing, research, polling, etc.) will have to reckon with the…
