How To Scale DTC, Amazon, and Retail Simultaneously With Chad Massura

Chad Massure is the Founder and CEO of Rosy Soil, a company creating peat-free, carbon-negative potting soils designed to nurture both plants and the planet. He grew up gardening with his grandmother, a background that sparked his passion for sustainable horticulture and inspired him to reimagine what soil could be. Before founding Rosy Soil in 2022, he worked in the impact and food space, helping build ventures focused on sustainable food access and social good. Since then, Chad has guided the brand from a small startup to a rapidly scaling company while maintaining a strong commitment to research, innovation, and environmental stewardship.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:15] Chad Massura highlights Rosy Soil’s mission to create sustainable, biochar-based super soils
• [3:45] Why Rosy Soil pursued DTC first, and how an unexpected email from Target changed the brand’s trajectory
• [05:17] How early retail adoption led the team to rethink go-to-market strategy and product readiness
• [10:46] The challenges of delaying Amazon and why launching earlier would have accelerated growth
• [13:30] How Target and Amazon now act as top-of-funnel drivers that boost DTC sales through cross-channel discovery

In this episode…

The rapid expansion of online and offline channels can create confusion around where to focus, especially when early retail opportunities reshape expectations and timelines. Brands often face challenges balancing product readiness, packaging clarity, and consistent pricing while simultaneously building demand across DTC, Amazon, and brick-and-mortar shelves. How do you maintain momentum while keeping every channel aligned?

For Chad Massura, an expert in omnichannel growth, success lies in prioritizing strong packaging fundamentals to ensure performance across retail, Amazon, and DTC. He highlights the importance of launching Amazon earlier to capture high-intent demand, maintaining pricing consistency across partners, and leveraging retail presence to amplify awareness in other channels. Chad also encourages brands to embrace cross-channel customer behavior rather than resist it, noting how shoppers move naturally between retail, Amazon, and DTC.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews Chad Massura, Founder and CEO of Rosy Soil, about building an omnichannel brand from day one. Chad discusses how early retail adoption shaped his team's go-to-market strategy, the value of packaging optimization, launching at the right time on Amazon, and navigating cross-channel customer behavior.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Chad Massura on LinkedIn
• Rosy Soil: Website | Instagram | Amazon | Target | Store Locator

Quotable Moments:

• "We did tons of R&D behind the scenes, but the plan was always to start DTC first."
• "We built our own soil lab; we did tons of R&D behind the scenes."
• "I was more concerned about channel conflict than I probably should have been."
• "It took off like a rocket ship, so I definitely wish that we had done it sooner."
• "You kind of have to let some fires burn and accept that you're going to do some things well and some things not so well."

Action Steps:

1. Launch Amazon earlier in your growth journey: Capturing demand where customers already shop accelerates acquisition and fuels cross-channel momentum.
2. Strengthen your DTC channel from day one: Building a solid direct foundation increases margins, conversion rates, and long-term customer lifetime value.
3. Treat packaging as a core growth lever: Clear messaging and strong front-of-pack design help customers quickly understand the product, encouraging first-time purchases and keeping the brand consistent across every sales channel.
4. Embrace an omnichannel customer path: Supporting shoppers across retail, Amazon, and DTC boosts loyalty, frequency, and overall revenue stability.
5. Maintain consistent pricing and positioning: Unified presentation across channels protects your brand, prevents conflict, and preserves customer trust.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  0:00  

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15 minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy. So you'll get to learn and grow your online sales today on episode number 70, get ready. I'm chatting with Chad Massura, founder at Rosy Soil, which is the first, the first Earth positive soil company, and we'll also be talking about how to scale omnichannel alongside DTC and Amazon. So super interesting and great conversation here. Make sure to tune in. I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Ecommerce. Now this episode is brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight- and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice and Amika grow through customer focused conversion optimization programs. We pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money most, and then, well, we help you fix it. The result you get increased conversions, higher converting landing pages, higher AOV and, of course, more money, which then allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade, and we can help you manage the full CRO process from A to Z, design, development, copywriting strategy. So if you need to increase the performance of your ecommerce Store, go to splitbase.com today and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right, Chad, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Chad Massura  1:44  

Yeah, same here. I'm super excited to chat with you today.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  1:47  

Yeah. Now, as you know, this podcast is all about going deep, right, and dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get the most value right away in the short amount of time that we've got together today. But maybe just to give some people context before we talk about omni channel and how to grow DTC alongside Amazon and omni channel, maybe a 15 second intro to the brand would be helpful to our listeners. Sure.

Chad Massura   2:16  

Yeah, I'll give. I'll give you a quick one. So yeah, my name is Chad Massura. I'm the founder and CEO of Rosy Soil. We create a biochar based super soil for house plants, cacti, orchids, veggie starts, you name it. We kind of have a product that works better than everything out there and is more sustainable. And yeah, super excited to chat about our growth journey here, where, you know, we launched the brand, and in 2022 we're going full chain into Target. We've now sold hundreds of 1000s of units of this stuff, and behind the scenes, the metric that I'm super proud of, we've also captured nearly 1000 metric tons of CO two in the process. So, yeah, excited to dive in.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  3:00  

Well, okay, so let's talk about that, right? I think a lot of brands, they grow and they mostly focus on D to C first. It's very sequential. There seems to be an order of things. It's D to C first. Sometimes Amazon first, or, you know, after DTC has reached a certain scale, and then much later in the life of the company, does retail make an appearance? Now you guys have kind of flipped that, and you got into retail super early, and everything kind of has happened in parallel and almost at the same time. So just to again, provide some context before we dive deep into how you guys have been doing that tell maybe our audience a bit more about like, What exactly have you guys been doing?

Chad Massura   3:45  

Yeah, certainly. And, you know, I think we went into it with the same level of thinking, you know, we, we launched, well, we spent about a year on the product. We built our own soil lab. We did tons of R&D behind the scenes, but the plan was always to start D to C first, to try to understand the consumer, try to hone the brand, try to nail the, you know, the reasons to believe and all the benefits. And then also, we've taken a super iterative approach to the formulation itself, because we wanted it to be the best soil in the world. And that takes, you know, serious research and iteration. So anyway, we launched the brand on a Shopify site on Earth Day 2022, and the plan was to kind of scale DtC. From there. We ended up getting super frankly lucky in that the the target lawn and garden buyer when she was preparing for her line reviews maybe two months after our D to C launch, was searching specifically for sustainable soil, and unfortunately, traditional soil has a massive environmental footprint, and it's built around non renewable resources and synthetic fertilizers and just a bunch of nasty stuff that's like bad for plants and the plants. On it. And so in her effectively, just Googling for sustainable soil, she stumbled upon our brand, or we're one of the only sustainable soils out there, and just fill out our website, like contact form, so, yeah, I mean, it was, it was, that's all you want to have, right off the bat. I know, yeah, I know. And I mean, thank goodness the email, like, didn't go to spam or something. I almost fell out of my chair when we got the email. And so anyway, she brought us in. We did a full kind of line review. We kind of shared our vision for the brand and where we thought it was going to go. And she took a total kind of chance on us and committed to a 200 store shelf test for, and this was the funny part, January 2024, so great. It gave us, I know, right? And I mean, that's just how these, these large organizations, move, you know, they're working on year to two year timelines. And so one that gave us a lot of time to, like, prepare the supply chain for handling that. But two it meant, you know, basically from the inception of the brand, we knew it had to be sort of target retail already, and we could kind of design some of the fundamentals around that plan and timeline. And so it just changed the way that we approached, kind of our go to market and scaling, and also, like, gave us this sort of 18 month, kind of hard deadline to get the products and the brand ready for target. And so, you know, I It wasn't in the plan, I don't think you could plan for something like that, but it was super lucky and fortunate. And I think it shifted the way that we approached building Rosy.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  6:44  

So in hindsight, I'm curious, right? Like your entry into Target was potentially a bit of luck, but also, I would say it goes beyond luck. I think in a way, you were at the crossroads of a market opportunity, and you guys were the right solution at the time. So you know that's how you got found, but I'm curious, obviously, that led to you guys planning differently from that point on. Now imagine that target never would have reached out right in hindsight, it would have waited to try to get more of that retail distribution, would you or would you have, you know, kind of gone for it, tried to find, you know, buyers very early on.

Chad Massura  7:31  

Yeah, it's a good question. Um, you know, I think, I think in hindsight, as I learned more about the category, it became pretty obvious that for soil, specifically, one it has lower ecommerce penetration than other categories do, like it is still very much a go into a store and buy it. And also, I would say the incumbent soil brands, partially because of that, partially because of the economics of shipping a heavy product, and partially because, you know, there a lot of these brands are just more old school. Have kind of missed the ecommerce training. And so I think, yeah, I think part of me would have probably seen ecommerce as the flank around some of the bigger brands. But then also, I think just, you know, I started as a total novice in this category. Now that I know more about the category, I think we would have built a retail go to market, probably just not as fast as we did, given the kind of target, wonderful surprise,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  8:34  

What would you say has been kind of the biggest challenge, and going through all these channels in parallel from the early days.

Chad Massura  8:44  

I mean, there's so many to try to pick one, um, you know, I think focus is challenging, right? Like you are trying to ride a couple bicycles at the same time, and it's, it's hard to do each of them super well, and you have to just, you kind of have to let some buyers burn and accept that you're going to do some things well, and some things well and some things not so well. I think a recent challenge has been maintaining what's called Map pricing, or MSRP. But basically, you know, because you're being sold across a number of channels, you want to show up at the same level of quality and the same, ideally, price point across those channels, and that's a little hard dealing with a bunch of different partners, doing their own thing and then. But so I would say those are two that come to mind. But actually the core, the thing that we're constantly playing with and iterating, and I think this is probably something that G to C brands in general, wait a little too long on is how important front of pack is and will always be. You know, kind of old school CPG sort of strategy is price packaging and placement, or price product and placement. But a lot of that, at least for trial, is packaging. You. And it's, I think it's really important, especially if you're going to, you know, start with a big, big launch, with a national retailer like you should be pretty confident that you have the right combination of those three things. And it takes, it takes serious trial and error. And I still don't think we have it, have it perfect, you know. So that will be a forever, I think challenge with certainly a retail brand, but I think even more so on Omni brand, because, like that, Trifecta has to work on Amazon, on DTC, at Target, you know, at all of our wonderful independent retailers. And kind of like a spider web, you pull on one thing and something's wrong somewhere else,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  10:38  

and Chad, maybe I missed it and you mentioned it, but Amazon, when in the life of the company, did

Chad Massura   10:45  

It launched? I was dumb, and I dragged my feet on Amazon for way too long. I was more concerned about channel conflict than I probably should have been, and also just resources, you know, like it's expensive to launch on Amazon. It's pretty pay to play at this point. But yeah, so to answer your question, like I said, we launched the brand April 2022 we didn't launch Amazon until December 2023

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  11:15  

and it took off like a rocket ship. So I definitely wish that we had done it sooner, but we did it when we did it, and now it's, you know, a massive, massive channel for us. Amazing. I'm curious. Like, if you had to do this all over again, you'd build different brands, like, timing wise, strategy wise, is there anything you would do differently when it comes to when you'd be trying to get into each of those different channels, or how you're approaching it?

Chad Massura   11:45  

Oh yeah. I mean, definitely would have done Amazon sooner. I think also because we knew the target was coming and it was sort of this impending deadline, we actually ended up putting less energy into our DTC for a while. I didn't end up hiring a full time d to c person until, until last year. And you know now that she's gotten under the hood, she's, like, doubled our conversion rate and, like, that channel is really growing. But it was, it was kind of like, I said, because of that focus thing, like, I think we neglected d to c a little more than we should have. And I think it's a wonderful complement to the rest of the channels. So yeah, I think launching Amazon sooner and giving DTC a little more love early, early, early days probably would have helped grow this thing a little faster, although it's been pretty fast. So I can't say I have too

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  12:37  

many regrets. I do think it's pretty fast, too. I was surprised when he said, Oh, it's just a year later at the end of the day. And you thought it was slow, but I think that's a testament to you guys executing fast and actually having the success that you have today. What I'm curious about is, when it comes specifically to D, to C, how much have you been able to kind of, you know, like you said, there's always challenges with making sure every channel is in sync. But how much has the retail presence helped DTC? You know, very often we see the opposite, right? Brands start with the D to C, and the DTC helps the retail presence. But in your case, it was flipped. So how is that playing out, strategy wise? And how does that change how you do marketing today?

Chad Massura   13:30  

Yeah, it totally flips the top of the funnel. It's really fascinating. You know, I think for all of 2024 our biggest awareness channel was target, was being on shelf at Target, and what we found is people would go into Target, they they discover our our brand, and they'd kind of verify, you know, like they'd look us up on Amazon, or they'd look us up on our website and check reviews to make sure we were legit, and tried to learn more about the brand and all of that stuff. So I think the Target ended up having kind of an overflow effect across channels. I would say this year, because Amazon's grown so quickly, it's actually, I would say Amazon is probably the biggest top of funnel channel for us, and it also has that overflow to D to C, you know, we find a lot of people discover on Amazon and maybe buy it the first time on Amazon, and then come to D to C to, you know, buy our bundles, or buy in bulk, or kind of, you know, I would say more of the super fans come to the D to C site because they want to support the brand. Or, you know, we have free shipping at a certain tier. So I think, you know, both of those actually complement each other really well. And then I would say the retail presence legitimizes all of it. So again, it's, it's hard to do the Omni thing well, but you can really feel it work once you start to get it working. The other nice thing is, you know, we'll have a down DTC month, and then an up, Amazon. Month, and everything is still looking, you know, up into the right and that, I think, brings a little bit of pressure off, you know, having those stressful weekly revenue reviews on any given channel, because, like, one's doing better, another one's kind of falling behind. And the net, net is, we're still, we're still doing super well.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  15:16  

That's super interesting. And I kind of want to go back to your Amazon launch, and you saying that you wish you would have been sooner, right? I talk with E commerce brands every day, and there are still a lot of very major brands that aren't on Amazon, and often, right? There's a fear of Amazon potentially cannibalizing their D to C business, and then you don't really own the customer. What would you say to that, and especially like a brand that's starting out that's trying to, you know, really make their name. They feel like having a bit more control on their products is kind of the way to go. But on the flip side today, you know, you're still saying you wish you would have done it sooner, and

Chad Massura   15:57  

for all those reasons, right? I mean, that's why I dragged my feet, because I was Amazon scary for a number of reasons, but I think now that we've really scaled up that channel it one, there's just a ton of demand for our category, for basically all categories that's happening on Amazon that isn't necessarily happening elsewhere. So I think there's a whole cohort of shoppers that just started their journey in Amazon, and if you're not there, you're just, you're just missing that demand. It's not like they're doing it in tandem Google search that you can hit. So I think you're, I think you're definitely missing out on customers by not being there. I think also Amazon, when done right, is tons of new to brand purchases for sort of that reason, but also because you can do, you know, really strategic. You can be really strategic about search terms. You can do kind of category campaigns. You can do some conquesting, like you can really introduce people to the brand, I think, at this point, pretty well on Amazon. And then I, like I said, I found that there's a total kind of overflow and carryover to the other channels. So you know it is Amazon. Will Amazon be lower margin than DTC? Yes, probably. And do you have less control over your customer base for sure, but I think at the same time, you're probably missing out on an opportunity to really do one scale of business, but also, truthfully, like scale DTC by not being there. I mean, that's my personal opinion. I think each brand is different, each category is different, but that's definitely

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  17:29  

proven true for us. I'm curious here, is there a strategy or, like, a conscious decision? I'm trying to find a word here to really bring people from Amazon, a deliberate strategy to bring people from Amazon to the DTC, or from retail to D to C, or do you kind of let those channels live in their own bubbles, and you know, if customers cross pollinate over, then great.

Chad Massura   17:57  

I think we could do better at this. But, you know, part of it is just brand. I think trying to build a really emotionally resonant and recognizable brand and packaging system, I think helps a ton so they start to recognize it on the other channels. The other small thing we've done is we put our phone number on every bag. We kind of stole that from the I mispronounced the brand, but Taika, Taika crew, and we say, like, you have any, you know, plant questions or soil questions, like text us. And so hopefully that's bringing more people into our ecosystem that we can then, you know, have a one to one relationship and upsell. But it's a great question. I think there's a lot more to be done there across, you know, Amazon, people get creative with inserts and rebate programs and that sort of stuff. So we haven't quite gone down that path, but I think there's, there's tons more to explore. But at the end of the day, I kind of learned this in my my last company, I was head of growth for omni channel food business, and we really, we really dug into the numbers, and we found that the customers that had transacted across two or more channels had a meaningfully larger LTV. And so that encouraged us to, just like, double down and not necessarily treat them as not necessarily treat them as silos, but understand that kind of, like the rising tide kind of raises all ships. And so I think, I think the instinct was to actually fight against people being on my channel, and try and, you know, keep them on DTC. But if that pattern holds true at Rosy, and I think it definitely does, like I think the customers that are buying, they need it tomorrow. They're going to go or they need it today. They're going to go to a store. They need it tomorrow. They're going to go to Amazon. They need it next week in bulk. They're going to go to our DTC like, I think actually those customers probably look like our best customers, and we should encourage that behavior. Amazing.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  19:50  

So we've been talking to Chad Massura, Founder at Rosy Soil. Now, Chad, if people want to learn more about you, about the brand, what? Should they go?

Chad Massura   20:01  

Yeah, check us out. So the website, Rosysoil.com, our Instagram is just @Rosysoil. We have a ton of fun there and check, you know, as we were talking today, you can grab us on Amazon. You can grab us at Target. You can grab us if we're in about 1000 independent garden centers across the country, which we don't even really talk about, but as a whole other piece of our growth strategy. So there's, you know, there's a store locator on our website. You can find a really cool local plant shop there as well. And yeah, if you need, need help with your house plants or your cacti, or you just got an orchid as a gift, like we got you, we make the best soil on the planet.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  20:36  

Amazing. Chad, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Chad Massura  20:39  

Cool. Thank you for your time.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  20:46  

All right, well, that's it for today's episode, and thank you so much for tuning in now, if you like what you've heard and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes Store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce Store that does over a million dollars in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news, because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that. Go to splitbase.com to learn more, or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions or comments, tweet me @Rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you and again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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