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?

Nina Sadauskas: My name is Nina Sadauskas. I was a professional swimmer and represented my home country of Bulgaria in three Olympics. When I started Delfina Athletics I had no business background at all, just a willingness to work hard and a clear sense of what athletes and the people around them need. I started the company as a side hustle in 2016 while I was training for the Rio Olympics.

But the whole idea really came while I was captain of the women’s swim team at SMU. For years we’d wear off-the-shelf suits, the same ones every other team sponsored by that company had. They were okay, but not anything that made us feel special. Then we got the chance to design our own, and the difference was evident. Suddenly, across the board, each of us felt like we represented a bigger mission. The men’s squad decided to join in too, and even though we trained under different coaches and didn’t always travel to meets together, the suits pulled the whole program into one look. That stayed with me, and I understood that gear isn’t just gear. It was how a team saw itself.
Beyond the actual gear, I saw another big gap. I’d spent the bigger part of my life in pools and on pool decks, and I watched coaches and small clubs get treated like they didn’t matter to the big vendors. Minimums they couldn’t hit. Turnaround times that missed the first meet. Designs they had to pay for or fight over. These are people running programs of fifteen to eighty athletes, often as volunteers, and they were being treated like just another number. Preset patterns, no attention to detail, nothing to set you apart.

So I built a company that challenges that. Delfina Athletics is built around the small-but-mighty team, with no minimum order quantities, free design, and direct shipping to each athlete so the coach isn’t chasing parents for sizes and checks.
That same belief, that the right gear is how someone feels seen, doesn’t stop at the team. It’s just as true for the parent on the deck and the kid climbing out of the water. So on the family side, we make the gear a parent reaches for without thinking, goggles that fit a small face and don’t leak, hooded poncho towels and parkas a kid actually wants to wear on a cold deck. Then we brought all of it to the platforms people already use to shop: Amazon, TikTok Shop, the Shop app, and our own website.

What makes it different is that I’m not guessing at what these athletes and parents need. I lived it as a swimmer, and now I’m living it as a mom of two young kids.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Nina Sadauskas: The first was deciding to expand beyond custom team gear into individual products, and to meet people where they already shop, on Amazon. I’ll be honest about this one. Growth there has been hard, and profitability has been a real challenge. Margins are thin and the platform is crowded. But it put the brand in front of people who’d never have found us otherwise, in the sense that we’ve now impacted over 3,000 more customers than we would have otherwise. So the lesson was that the channel that’s toughest to make money on can still be the one that introduces you to the most people, and at this stage, that reach was worth more to us than the margin. You have to be clear-eyed about what a channel is actually for.

The second turning point was more personal. For a long time I let the brand speak for itself and stayed behind it. When I started actually showing up, putting myself in the content, taking people behind the scenes, showing them what we’re really about, that’s when things shifted. People don’t connect with a logo. They connect with a person and a reason. Being a three-time Olympian who’s now a mom figuring out how to run a company is the whole story, and the moment I let people see that instead of hiding it, the trust followed. People will remember how you made them feel, and you can’t make anyone feel anything without showing up yourself.

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?

Nina Sadauskas: Three stand out, and they have something in common.

SEO, and increasingly AEO as people start searching through AI tools, has brought us a steady stream of leads, especially on the custom team side. That came from a deliberate strategy: thoughtful content and real optimization of the site, not tricks. In a category this specific, you can’t out-spend the big vendors, but you can out-teach them. The coach searching for custom gear with no minimums finds us because we actually answer the question they’re asking.

In-person events are the second. We do pop-ups at swim meets and triathlons, and most of what comes out of them is word of mouth. There’s no substitute for a coach or a parent holding the gear, feeling the towel, seeing how the goggles fit a kid’s face. You earn a level of trust at a pool deck that no ad can buy, and that trust travels, one coach tells another.

Social media is the third, and it’s the one with the most room still ahead of us. The pattern we keep seeing is simple: the more openly we share what the brand is and what we stand for, the more people want to be part of it. They don’t just buy. They align. That’s slower than paid acquisition, but it builds something paid can’t.

The thing I’ve learned across all three is that none of them works on volume or spend. They work on connection. Our category rewards the brands people trust, and you can’t shortcut your way to that.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – 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?

Nina Sadauskas: The biggest change is that search is moving from a list of links to a single answer.

When someone asks an AI assistant where to find custom team gear with no minimums, it doesn’t hand them ten options, it gives them one. So the goal isn’t ranking on page one anymore. It’s being the source the assistant trusts enough to cite.

That’s reshaped what we make. We’ve leaned into educational content that answers a real question directly and in plain language, the exact things a coach or a parent actually types or asks, rather than content built to game a ranking. If someone wants to know how to outfit a fifteen-person club without hitting a minimum, we want to be the clearest answer to that question anywhere.

The founder side matters more than people expect here. AI assistants lean on credible, named, real sources, not anonymous brand copy. So building authority around me and the team, through blogs and interviews like this one, isn’t vanity. It’s part of being found. A three-time Olympian explaining the category is more useful to an assistant, and more trustworthy to a reader, than a faceless brand page.

The last thing is how we measure it. A lot of our customers buy on Amazon, so the revenue our website tracks understates what search is really worth to us. If we judged search by last click alone, we’d undercount it badly. So we don’t optimize for the immediate sale. We optimize for being found and trusted at the moment someone is deciding, and we trust that the sale follows wherever they prefer to buy.

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?

Nina Sadauskas: It splits by who’s buying, because a coach and a parent come back for different reasons.

On the team side, retention is mostly earned the plain way. We deliver gear that holds up season after season and service that doesn’t make a coach chase us. When the quality is there and the experience is easy, the coach comes back the next season, and often brings more of the program with them. There’s no trick to it. You do the work right and you get to keep doing it. That’s a relationship, season to season, built on trust rather than a contract.

On the family side, the connection gets built a different way. Every pair of our kids’ goggles comes with a free digital activity book for parents and kids to use on their next water adventure. For a toddler, it’s simple exercises to help them get more comfortable and confident in the water. For an older kid, it’s coloring, spot-the-difference, the kind of thing that keeps them happy on the side of a pool. It’s small, but it does something a product alone can’t. It puts us inside the moment that matters to the family, not the moment they checked out, but the afternoon they’re actually at the water with their kid. That’s how you go from a brand someone bought from once to a brand they feel part of.

The thread through both is the same. We’re not trying to be just another number on a receipt. We want the coach and the family to feel like there’s a real person and a real mission behind the gear, and people stay with what they feel connected to.

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?

Nina Sadauskas: Double down on knowing exactly why you’re doing this and how you’re different, then say it everywhere, on every channel you can reach, online and in person, until you’re sick of hearing yourself say it. Most founders are vague about both, and vague doesn’t travel. When you’re clear, people can repeat you to someone else, and that’s how a small brand actually grows. For me, getting clear on the why is what finally let me show up as myself instead of hiding behind the logo, and that’s when things started to move.What I’d stop entirely is trying to look bigger and more polished than you are.

People don’t connect with a perfect front anymore. They connect with the person doing the work and the mess that comes with it. The late nights, the things that didn’t work, the deck at 5 a.m., that’s what makes someone trust you, not a flawless brand page. The energy you’d spend looking like a big company is better spent letting people see you’re not one yet, and bringing them along while you build it.