He Got Kicked Out of a Meeting. Then Built a Nine-Figure Brand.
Steven Borrelli started Cuts in 2017 because his boss kicked him out of a meeting for wearing the wrong shirt.
Eight years later, Cuts is a nine-figure business shipping to over 100 countries, bootstrapped almost entirely on personal credit cards and conviction.
We sat down with Steven on The Brand Study podcast and what came out of it wasn't the story you'd expect.
It wasn't about finding product-market fit or cracking Meta ads. It was about the decisions that most growing brands are getting exactly backwards.
Here is what we cover in this issue:
Constraints are a creative advantage, not a problem to solve.
Narrative ads outperform direct response.
Program your business like a media company.
Start with One Really Good Product
“The genius of the business was our constraints. We just did one SKU really well…. We did about $10 million in sales with that one product.”
Only four people were on the team when Cuts crossed $10 million in revenue. They hit $50 million with a single fabric, in a handful of cuts and colors.
This wasn’t a phase Cuts was trying to grow out of. It was the strategy. Staying focused on one product did three things most founders don't talk about:
Marketing Efficiency. Every marketing dollar went toward making one thing impossible to ignore.
Manufacturing Advantages. High volume on a single SKU gave Cuts real leverage with manufacturers when most startups couldn't get a factory to return their calls.
Clear Brand Story. The brand story stayed clean. Customers knew what Cuts stood for because Cuts only stood for one thing.
When you’re only doing one thing, your entire marketing effort goes into making that one thing impossible to ignore.
No splitting attention across ten SKUs. No briefing creative for six different product lines. Just getting very good, very fast at communicating one idea to one customer.
The pressure to expand usually comes before it should. A new SKU feels like momentum. But if your hero product hasn’t been fully maxed out across creative, distribution, and audience, adding more just spreads limited resources thinner.
Before you add a new product line or expand into a new category, ask whether your current hero product has been fully maxed out creatively and commercially.
Just ask AG1, Grüns, Liquid Death, Graza, Chomps, or Vacation Sunscreen. They all scaled well past eight figures with only one product.
Narrative Ads Outperform Direct Response
Most DTC brands are running the same playbook: feature-led hooks, urgency-driven offers, heavy discount creative. It is a crowded lane and it is getting more expensive every quarter.
What is working now is creative that makes the customer feel something about who they are, not just what they are buying.
Cuts calls this brand-first creative, and it is currently their highest performing format.
Here is how to shift from direct response to narrative without abandoning performance:
Lead with belief. Start with something your customer already holds to be true, then connect your product to it. The product is evidence of a worldview, not the point of the ad.
Concept first. Build the campaign idea before you cast talent into it. Cuts had "Cancel Suits" performing before any celebrity was attached. The narrative existed first, then the talent amplified it.
Stay loose. Over-scripted ads feel like ads. The more a piece of content feels like something a real person made, the more it holds attention.
Narrative creative performs differently at the top of the funnel, so give it the right framework before you kill it.
ROAS and CPA tell you whether an ad is paying for itself today. They do not tell you whether it is building something.
A narrative ad acquiring new customers at a slightly higher CPA is often worth more than a discount ad hitting your target with repeat buyers who would have purchased anyway.
Here are the key metrics to watch for narrative-based ads:
Hook rate. Anything above 30% means the opening is earning the watch.
Video through-rate. The percentage of viewers watching to 50% or 75% of the video. Narrative ads live or die on this number.
CPM. Your cost per 1,000 impressions is Meta's signal of how much it wants to show your ad. Good creative lowers your CPM because the algorithm rewards content that earns engagement and hold time.
Your Business is a Media Company
Most brands only communicate when they have something to sell. Cuts communicates on a schedule, and the sale follows the habit.
Here’s how to start. Pick one channel, one format, and show up before you do anything else:
Own a day. Pick one day a week where something happens. A new product. A restock. A piece of content. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it is consistent.
Record everything. The sourcing trip. The packaging decision. The collab conversation. The milestone. Most founders wait until something is ready to share it.
Build toward bigger moments. Once the weekly rhythm exists, layer in influencer collabs, and brand partnerships. These land because there is already an audience paying attention every Friday. The big moments amplify the habit.
The goal is rhythm, not volume. Cuts' content calendar looks aggressive from the outside. From the inside it is just one consistent commitment, repeated for eight years.
Quote of the Week
Steven's edge was disciplined ignorance. He didn't know how hard it was to build a fashion brand, so nothing stopped him from trying. He funded Cuts on personal credit cards, drove eight hours through rural China to find the right factory, wrote a letter to the President when tariffs threatened to kill the business, and bootstrapped the whole thing to nine figures without outside capital until this year.
The full conversation goes deeper on the financial decisions that nearly broke Cuts, how he thinks about scaling retail alongside DTC, and what he would've done differently from day one.
About the Writer
I run Sweep Creative, where we produce performance creative for DTC brands like Bespoke Post, Barry’s Bootcamp, Topo Designs, and more.
I host The Brand Study Podcast, where I talk directly with founders from brands like MìLà, Cuts Clothing, and Newton Baby.
Until next time
✌️, Conrad