1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Adele Maynard: I’ve been involved with ecommerce for a long time. A few wins but a lot of failures too. After a few years out of it, and just focusing on learning more about marketing I decided
to try and get back into it. I tried a bunch of different ideas, and finally landed on reselling custom laser cut fire pits. At first, I found a supplier who could cut , pack and ship them and eventually decided to design our own product and source manufacturing ourselves.

2. Who is your best customer today, and what specific problem are they hiring your product to solve? How has that understanding changed since you launched?

Adele Maynard: We sell both directly to the public and B2B. Both have their quirks, but in general dealing with corporate clients is vey rewarding for the business. We find the sales process, while longer is less complex.

For the corporate clients, they are often purchasing to help solve a marketing goal in their own business.. a sales promotion to drive new customers or a reward for long-term valuable clients.

3. Which 2–3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Adele Maynard: We focus a lot of our energy o building a long-term SEO strategy which we top-up with seasonal Meta advertising.

What’s interesting in that field, is that we only advertise on Meta for B2B customers.. but of course we are going to get people who own o run companies just looking for a fire pit for personal use.

We find this strategy gives us the best of both worlds.. We get some of the larger orders as well as building relationships with business owners for future sales.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2025 — Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Adele Maynard: Absolutely. So far, the SEO world is pretty consistent on the view that optimising for AI search is essentially the same as optimising for regular search. Give the user what they need, make your content easy to digest and valuable. Answer a user’s question as quickly as possible.

There are a whole bunch of new development being proposed, the big question mark for now is the adoption of the new llms.txt file that is being suggested as a standard. This file is a new form of sitemap, designed specifically for AI. It will be interesting to see if it is widely adopted. Time will tell.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Adele Maynard: Firstly, make your product great.

If it’s just ok, spent the time refining and listening to your customers on what it needs to be a great product. So much of our one-off sales and business sales come directly from referrals. Also, over communicate with your customers on their order status. I’ve never had someone complain they know too much about how their order is progressing.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months — and what would you stop doing entirely?

Adele Maynard: I would double down on customer service. With a real focus on brand authority we have seen, positive engagement from the public.. posts on social media, interviews , reviews etc are the new currency for SEO. What I would stop doing is trying to over automate everything and remove yourself from the sales process. It’s only when you stop talking to your customers that you stop learning what they want.