DTC Growth Agency Built by Former Operators: Fluency Story

Before Fluency, I spent 14 years inside the businesses we now advise.

That changes how you build.

In 2021, I left a private equity holding company.
I started Fluency with ONE client and no team.
 
And I had no real plan beyond a belief that the way most agencies served consumer brands wasn't working.

I didn't know it would become an agency.
I set out to build a SaaS reporting tool for brands.

I went to three clients that started consulting for and asked if they'd pay $500 a month for a reporting and analytics product.

They all said "NO", but each one of them asked if I'd just come work with them directly instead.

What I did have in 2021 was 14 years of operating inside some of the largest consumer and media companies in the world:

✅ Sony.
✅ Hulu.
✅ NBCUniversal.
✅ A stretch inside M&A.

Then I worked at Anine Bing, where I ran the entire DTC side of a fashion brand and helped grow it from $30MM to hundreds of millions.

Then, I moved onto a PE-backed holding company, managing three brands through an acquisition.

I had run P&Ls, managed teams, overseen creative, and forecasted inventory.
I made growth decisions when the data was incomplete, and the stakes were real.

I had been inside the kind of businesses my future clients were trying to build.

That's what I brought into the room in 2021.
A point of view built from being inside those decisions for a long time.

It started with me consulting solo.
Then, it grew into a team, then a real agency.

Four years later, Fluency has 33 people, 40+ active clients, and more than 100 brands over our history.

We work with brands like Rhode, KUIU, and Psycho Bunny, and more than 15 celebrity-founded consumer brands.

We are still intentionally boutique.
We have fewer clients than we could take, and only accept senior operators.

It started with a sales internship at Fox Television in 2007.

Fourteen years of learning the industry before I built anything of my own.
Now I have scaled 100+ consumer brands, from early growth through to nine-figures.

And we are just getting started.

If I could go back... I wouldn't change anything.

How do you apply what you've learned from past jobs in your current business?

♻️ Repost if you believe the best founders spent time learning before they started building.
Follow me, Jacob Rokeach, if you're building a consumer brand and want to learn about the operator side of that journey.