Offcuts

On this episode I sit down with Alister Hewitt, Technology and Operations Director at Rat & Boa and co-founder of Prebuy.

Alister has been with the brand since the very beginning. He built the first website for a friend launching a clothing label, and within a couple of months the orders were flying in.
He describes what Rat & Boa actually is: born on Instagram in 2014, back when the platform had no product tags and no stories and brands used it as a mood board, built around the founders' aesthetic, worn organically by the likes of Bella Hadid and Alexa Chung, and still run by a far smaller team than people assume.

Most of the conversation is about the problem that comes with being a viral brand. Collections sell out in a couple of days, the rebuy window runs six to eight weeks and sometimes ten, and back-in-stock alerts were only converting at five to ten per cent. Alister's view is that preorders look like a product page feature and are really a supply chain one. Change the CTA and you just push the problem into the warehouse, the merch team and the customer service inbox. That is where Prebuy came from.

The second half is about how far AI has gone inside the business. A dev team that is almost AI native, with Cursor as the harness. A CRO audit skill the digital team built themselves. Gorgias and Shopify MCPs in customer service. A server in the building running local models, because the token bill is climbing. And why Alister thinks agentic shopping is sitting exactly where mobile commerce sat a decade ago.

Enjoy the show.

On this episode I sit down with Eleanor Warnock, a writer, journalist and communications expert based in London who has worked for The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times's Sifted, and the Reid Hoffman-backed AI company Every. She's currently an advisor to Bek Ventures, ranked the top-performing VC firm globally since 2010 by HEC-Dow Jones, and holds an MBA from INSEAD.

Eleanor is about to launch her own venture, and this conversation ranges across the state of journalism's business model, the myth of the one-person billion-dollar AI company, and where AI and taste collide.

We get into why she thinks journalism is heading toward a handful of consolidated giants and a long tail of one-person outlets, why Every's hybrid of media and consulting works, and why even she needed a lawyer to check the incorporation documents Claude wrote for her. We also dig into taste: why she thinks it's really about cultural status, why the tech world wants it and can't build it, and where in her own daily workflow she lets Claude in and where she keeps it firmly out.

Enjoy the show.

On this episode I sit down with Olivier Legris, co-founder of Alter, a native macOS AI assistant that refuses to bet on any single model, and founder of Clauders, the global Claude Ambassador community.

Olivier's thesis is simple: the model doesn't matter to most people, the task does. Alter started as a frustration with Siri and has become a Mac-native, model-agnostic assistant with its own router, Best, that picks the right model for the job. When Alter shipped that router, Olivier expected a fight over which model was best. Instead, barely 10% of users ever touch the model picker. They just want the task done.

We get into why Mac is quietly the best platform for building AI products, the challenge of building on a market that moves faster than any roadmap can keep up with, and Olivier's read on the "Linux of AI" moment happening with agent frameworks right now, powerful, but still too complicated for anyone outside the bleeding edge.

We also talk about the Clauders community, how it grew from 50 ambassadors to a genuine cross-border network, and the 90/9/1 rule that keeps it alive. And we close on the big picture: open source versus proprietary models, on-device AI, and whether Anthropic and OpenAI will actually IPO this year.

Enjoy the show.

On this episode, I sit down with Nico Willson, co-founder of Futsol, to talk about what happens when you look at the world's most popular sport and decide the brands serving it are getting it completely wrong.

Futsol started from a simple observation: every other sport - cycling, running, boxing - had developed a culture and community around it that people actually wanted to belong to. Football hadn't. Nico and his co-founders set out to build the brand that changed that. We get into how they avoided the trap of competing with Nike and Adidas on performance, why the vast majority of their customers wear Futsol to watch football rather than play it, and how jersey culture - once their hero product - has now been taken over by every brand from Gap to Palace, forcing them to think about what comes next.

We also talk about the World Cup moment: how a small independent brand navigates a global tournament without getting drowned out, why they went evergreen instead of chasing the flash, and the Bloomsbury charity partnership and City Guides zine they built around it instead.

On AI, Nico draws a clear line - operationally yes, creatively no. For a brand built on sun-faded fabrics, block printing, and tactile craft, the question of where AI belongs is anything but abstract.

Enjoy the show.

On this episode, I sit down with Annica Rantala, CEO of Rapunzel of Sweden, to talk about what happens when you take a category dominated by professionals and salons and hand it directly to the consumer.
Rapunzel is a Nordic pioneer in hair extensions - built on a direct-to-consumer model from day one, with 81% of revenue through their own e-commerce. We get into how that model works in practice: the education-first approach to new customers, why micro-creators with 2,000–10,000 followers consistently outperform big names on return, and how the brand thinks about its dual audience of end users and hairstylist key opinion leaders.
We also talk about Annica's journey from board member to operating CEO - what you think you can see from a board seat, and what you can't - and the lessons from her time scaling Stronger through and beyond the pandemic.
On AI, Annica makes a point I hadn't heard put quite this way before: you can take a people-first approach to AI adoption, a brand-first approach, or a technology-first approach and most companies are getting it wrong by defaulting to the last one and locking it down to the tech team.
Enjoy the show.