Matt Nastos Runs Growth for 100+ Premium Brands.

Maison MRKT is a performance marketing agency built around a single mandate: e-commerce customer acquisition for premium brands. Matt Nastos started it with his younger brother in 2014, out of an apartment on the Upper West Side. Twelve years later they run paid, creator, affiliate, and lifecycle programs for roughly 100 brands, about half in apparel, the rest in beauty, fragrance, home, wellness, and accessories, with a healthy share based outside the U.S. and using Maison MRKT as their entry point into North America.

The most useful thing an agency that sees a hundred brands can tell you is whether a problem is yours or everyone's. The second most useful thing, and Matt would argue the more important one, is when you've caught lightning in a bottle and don't realize it.

Matt has watched brands pull a 15-to-20x return on ad spend, watched that number settle to 13x as he scaled their budget, and watched the founder get disappointed.

Underneath that is the through line of the whole conversation: paid doesn't create demand, it amplifies it. The brands that win are the ones with organic traction, and increasingly, the ones whose founders are willing to become the face.

What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

ALEX – You've got around 100 brands on the platform. What's the vantage point that gives you?

MATT – Two things, really, and they're the same coin. The first is that when a brand has a soft month, everybody wants to know the age-old question: is it just us, or is everyone seeing this? The clearest example I can give you is Q1 of 2025, when the tariffs were announced. In twelve years I'd never seen a grinding stop in shopping behavior that consistent across the board. It didn't last the whole year, it was really a Q1, Q2 phenomenon, but being able to tell our clients what we were seeing beyond the four walls of their own account was genuinely valuable.

The other side of that coin is more important. When a brand achieves true product-market fit and catches lightning in a bottle on acquisition, we have to be the ones reinforcing that they should push their advantage. Brands get anchored. I've had a contemporary womenswear brand running between 15 and 20x on ad spend, and as we throttle spend up they go from 15x to 13x, and there's this disappointment. Meanwhile you just want to have a very candid conversation: this is not normal. You are printing money. This doesn't last forever, and right now is the moment to go for it.

ALEX – Do brands often not realize they've lassoed lightning to that degree?

MATT – That's the norm, honestly. It's a strange anchoring effect. A brand turns on paid, sees double-digit ROAS, and within a month or two that becomes the baseline they measure disappointment against — when really they should be doing it for as long and as aggressively as they can.

ALEX – If 2012 to 2019 was a “first” era of DTC e-commerce, and 2020 to 2022 was a second era, it seems we’re in a new era, and I am wondering how has the playbook for scaling has changed over these three distinct moments?

MATT – The model that lives in my head is less 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and more BC and AD — before COVID, after COVID. COVID front-loaded an enormous amount of growth, but it also accelerated trends that have had lasting impact, and the biggest one for our clients was the decline of wholesale.

Most of the brands we work with aren't VC darlings. They grew up bootstrapped, or more commonly they grew through traditional wholesale — selling into Barneys, Bergdorf, Saks, Neiman Marcus. What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that wholesale was doing three things at once. It was underwriting their unit economics, because hitting factory minimums kept their cost of goods reasonable. It was providing critical cash flow, a check from Saks would hit the bank account and then largely get funneled straight to Meta, and we were the ones managing that spend. And third, it was generating an enormous amount of free brand awareness. Being on the shop floor put eyeballs on the product at no acquisition cost.

As wholesale eroded, that awareness didn't disappear, it just flipped polarity. You can still buy it on Meta, but now the cash is going out to pay for it instead of coming in from Saks. That's forced brands to get a lot more creative about how they fill the top of the funnel.

ALEX – Is there an effective lever you've seen to come in and replace wholesale for these businesses?

MATT – Working with a high volume of nano and micro creators, and getting much more aggressive with product seeding. We've started saying in our pitch decks that creators are the new wholesale, because they're the cost-effective top-of-funnel awareness that the shop floor used to provide. With platforms like ShopMy and LTK maturing, there's far more incrementality you can actually prove out from creators than there used to be.

The framing I picked up from a client is to bifurcate affiliates into two buckets: creators and converters. Creators make beautiful content. They're the ones you'd repost, the ones you'd put in your ads, highly aligned with the brand. Converters are messier — maybe it's someone posting their outfit of the day tagging twelve brands — but they drive real sales. Occasionally you get the overlap in the Venn diagram, and those are your all-star ambassadors. The mistake most brands make is they only think about the first bucket. "I love her content, I follow her." Meanwhile there's an enormous pool of converters with substantial commercial impact that they ignore.

ALEX – It's almost a dedicated creator funnel. If top of funnel is about what the brand looks like through someone else's lens, and further down it's about transacting on a specific product.

MATT– Exactly right. And taking a role in the seeding process has forced us to understand the merchandise itself at a much deeper level, which has been genuinely fun. There's also a founder dimension to this and it goes well beyond apparel. Brands are becoming inextricable from their founders. I looked at the top 20 companies in the world by market cap recently, and you could put a face to almost all of them: Jensen and the leather jacket, Dario and Anthropic. That compression is happening at the very top of the market, and it's happening for our clients too. Founder-as-creator content has become one of the most consistent silver bullets we have. Not every founder is comfortable with it. I'm a behind-the-scenes person myself, but as we all get more inundated with AI slop, real people and faces and relationships are exactly what's becoming scarce. I don't see that reversing.

ALEX – Where is the money actually going right now?

MATT – For total paid media, ballpark: 60 to 65% into Meta, 20 to 25% into Google including YouTube, and the remaining 15% into channels that are far more brand-specific: TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, connected TV. Meta and Google are still the two kings of the jungle.

On the creator side, Instagram is still the home for premium, higher-price-point categories. TikTok is a completely different animal, almost more like a marketplace. People talk about it the way they talk about Amazon, because the funnel is compressed inside the app; the algorithm is so good at keeping people in that they don't want to leave, so TikTok Shop becomes the monetization. But there's a sticky ceiling on AOV. It works for beauty in the sub-$150 range. It's not yet the home for luxury or even contemporary.

ALEX – Women's apparel: what's a healthy CAC, and how has it moved?

MATT– Apparel can be a brutal category, mostly because of returns, people buying three sizes and returning two if you're lucky. So almost all our apparel clients are focused on being first-order profitable, rather than doing the voodoo math where you're profitable on someone's fourth or fifth purchase. We'll often simplify CAC-to-LTV down to a CAC-to-AOV ratio for that reason. Most clients are sustainable around four-to-one — a contemporary brand with a $400 AOV spending $100 or less on a new customer is in a healthy spot, assuming the contribution margin is there.

The nice thing with apparel is the second purchase. For a lot of our womenswear clients — and RetentionX is one of our key sources for measuring this — the gap to the second order tends to land between 90 and 110 days. That's the turnover of the seasons giving you another bite at the apple.

ALEX – We've gone deep before on excluding chronic returners. In apparel that matters more than anywhere.

MATT– It's a real and severe pain point. Moving the needle even a point or two in the right direction can be hugely impactful.

ALEX – Beauty: who's winning and who's getting squeezed?

MATT– A lot of beauty brands come to us leaning too heavily on the idea that product efficacy will do the heavy lifting on the first purchase. The margins are great and repeat behavior is consistent once you've got someone, but acquiring that first customer is so hard that you almost need an unfair advantage. A founder with a community, something. "You get 115% more moisture throughout the day" just doesn't move people the way it used to.

ALEX – Last one before the lightning round — what category are you most bullish on?

MATT– This surprises people: independent fragrance. You'd think scent is impossible to sell online because it's sensory, and yet we've seen independent fragrance brands do exceptionally well. Part of it is that there's a robust creator community built around discovering new fragrances, and part of it is that you can be incredibly generous with samples and seeding in a way that's cost-prohibitive in other categories. You can just get the product into people's hands.

ALEX – Most overrated metric in e-commerce?

MATT– It's a lightning-rod answer, but return on ad spend. Not because we should get rid of it — brands love the simplicity of a North Star, and that simplicity has been impossible to kill. But it needs to be rounded out. The real game is incrementality. If a partner is spending your whole budget on retargeting, you'll get a glossy high-ROAS number that's mostly people who were going to buy anyway. That's where brands get spun around. The good news is operators are far more educated about this than they were.

ALEX – A brand comes to you and says paid isn't working. What's the first thing you look at?

MATT– Whether they have organic traction. What are the non-paid channels doing — does the brand actually have product-market fit and real demand? My favorite conversation is the brand that's spent a year or two building an organic following and now wants to turn up the volume with paid. That's one of the easiest playbooks to run. The harder conversation is when you take a peek under the hood and nothing is working. Paid is an outstanding accelerant — it can augment a trend — but if you don't have merchandise people want to buy at an efficient rate, there's nothing Meta is going to do to fundamentally change that. So I'll give those brands a target — a revenue number, a conversion rate — and tell them to come back once they're there. A lot of operators think "everyone's doing paid, so I have to be too," and they skip over some more fundamental realities.

The throughline in everything Matt said is that paid doesn't create demand: it it finds it, amplifies it, and occasionally runs out ahead of it. The brands that scale cleanly are the ones that build something worth accelerating, then read their own numbers honestly enough to know when to press and when to hold. The spend is the easy part. Knowing what it's actually buying you is the work.