Marketing Operators Podcast | Episode 93

From Brand Moments to Revenue: How Halfdays Drives Growth
Guest: Liz Anthony, Chief of Staff at Halfdays
Date: January 6, 2026
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald

Episode Overview

This episode features Liz Anthony, Chief of Staff at women’s outdoor apparel brand Halfdays, in a deep dive on how the brand leverages founder-led storytelling, data-driven decision-making, and ambitious marketing activations to drive year-on-year growth well above industry norms. Liz offers a candid look at the "many hats" she wears, the collaborative and structured strategic processes at Halfdays, as well as key learnings about product/market fit, campaign orchestration, creative content effectiveness, and data infrastructure. For marketing operators and brand builders, this is an inside look at how a fast-growing, digitally native brand pivots from startup chaos to methodical growth through clarifying key metrics, bold collaborations, and a customer-obsessed culture.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Halfdays Origin Story & Explosive Growth

• Unique Beginnings & Rapid Product-Market Fit
  Liz recounts how Halfdays was founded by Ariana (CEO with business acumen) and Kylie (Olympic skier) in 2020 with a focus on flattering, women's-first ski apparel. With just 2-4 people initially, the brand quickly found a niche and strong year-over-year growth.

  “We just passed our fifth birthday this November and we’ve expanded beyond just an E-com business. We now are E-com, wholesale, and retail through our one store. And we're a year-round business as well.” – Liz Anthony [06:33]

• Seasonality as a Feature, Not a Flaw
  “Halfdays is very seasonal, right? Like November through obviously like November holiday season and then going into winter ... Black Friday / Cyber Monday makes like November, December a really crazy and fun time for us and it's gone really well.” – Liz Anthony [06:36]

• Growth Metrics & Carving a Niche
  “We're in sort of like the tens of millions category right now and we've been growing 80+ percent year over year for the last three years.” – Liz Anthony [10:58]

• Defining Their Niche
  Halfdays targets "functional gear for the stylish woman," distinguishing from larger, utilitarian brands by focusing obsessively on a female customer who wants both performance and style.

  “The funny thing is that we say 'niche', but I think that's the majority of women on the mountain, and there was just no one that was serving them before.” – Liz Anthony [11:52]

2. Customer-Centric Persona & Product Iteration

• Founder Identity as Customer Proxy
  Both founders actively embody the brand’s persona, lending authenticity, rapid feedback loops, and making decision-making easier:

  “Our core demo is also 100% encapsulated in our founders... It is just such a competitive advantage for us... because it allows us to always keep that at the forefront.” – Liz Anthony [13:27]

• Learning from Product Misses
  When internal product launches (e.g., hiking-focused collections) didn’t resonate, it taught the team to trust their intuition as "the customer":

  “...decisions that on paper seem right but don't totally resonate with our persona is always wrong.” – Liz Anthony [13:10]

• Fragmenting Personas as Brand Matures While the “monolithic” persona works now, Halfdays anticipates fragmenting customer segments over time, particularly as product lines diversify. [17:27]

3. Role of Chief of Staff at Halfdays: Making It All Fit Together

• Three Buckets of the Chief of Staff Role ([19:05])

  1. KPI Measurement & Reporting: Internal dashboards for individual accountability on metrics used for team performance, board updates, and investor reporting.
  2. Strategic Initiatives: Growth-phase prioritization—when to invest in retail, international, or line extensions, and how to operationalize those phases.
  3. CEO Counterpart: Freeing up Ariana to do what only she can do (external, fundraising, high-level) while ensuring alignment and execution internally.

  “I want to be the one who, like, knows [any] metric and owns it and can speak to it. And I think that also ties into why I am so heavily involved in marketing...” – Liz Anthony [19:18]

• No Direct Reports—Intentionally Broad and Analytics-Oriented
  “We’ve kept my role intentionally very broad and I love it... I do think that will come in the new year and I think it will probably be a lot of the functions of the business that are more analytics focused.” – Liz Anthony [21:43]

4. Founder-Led Brands, Consultancy DNA, and Operational Speed

• Why Former Consultants Excel in DTC
  <i>Efficiency, prioritization, and making things go fast with less:</i>

  “The goal is... how do you keep everything moving along at a much faster pace than it probably should be and with less resources than you probably should have? And that's kind of like what we're trained for.” – Liz Anthony [24:11]

• The “Fixer” Mindset
  Liz was known at McKinsey for jumping into chaotic projects and establishing order/scalable structure—an approach that translates well to startup life:

  “If a project was really broke, I would come in and fix it, which is, by the way, a terrible way to just burn out... but it was really fun.” – Liz Anthony [28:17]

• Ownership Culture
  Ariana’s management style is to hire equals, provide clear KPIs, and give autonomy:

  “She really hires people that she considers like an equal or that she thinks can drive an area that she either doesn't want to drive or... doesn't have the experience to drive.” – Liz Anthony [30:26]

5. Q4 & Black Friday/Cyber Monday Performance: What Worked?

• HOKA Collaboration as Rocket Fuel
  “We launched a collaboration with HOKA in early November... we grew our email list by 10% in two days just from that.” – Liz Anthony [00:03, 33:51]
  Notable: Foot traffic, line-ups at launch, “ice box” themed events, and a major lift in social followers and new customers right before BFCM.

• Integrated, Multi-Touch Brand Moment

  “It was incredible content that we shot in studio and on mountain. It was community events and... an incredible amount of other content... we could really just like attack it from all angles.” – Liz Anthony [32:25]

• Content Volume & Diversity
  Relaunching work with their agency in October unlocked greater creative testing, crucial for BFCM push:

  “Variety of content that they can put out and test... has been a complete game changer..." [37:10]

• Spring/Summer Product Success & Funnel Building Off-peak campaigns (e.g., Million Dollar Cowboy Bar) drive incremental, first-time buyers—key to year-round growth. While not all data is in, Liz highlights a surge in “lower price point” entryways for non-skiers who follow the brand. [39:22, 40:02]

6. Creative Strategy: Founder Content and Community

• Founder Content Drives Results

  “Of our top 10 performing posts from the past few years, in both cases, about 50% of them had our founders in it... we saw that the roas on the founder-led content in many cases was like double the roas on something for the same product by a content creator.” – Liz Anthony [45:04]

• Lo-fi, Authentic Outperforms High-Production

  “Those lo-fi, founder-led contents are the ones that people always come back to... Even if we continue like pumping spend into it, it just continues to perform.” – Liz Anthony [45:04, 46:52]

• Mixing UGC, Community, and Creator Content
  Gifting (especially for higher-ticket items) to smaller creators leads to authentic content and long-term loyalty. Community event content is leveraged, but most true UGC used for paid is still creator-generated. [47:58]

7. Marketing Planning: 360° Campaigns, Tiered Moments, and Structured Execution

• How 360 Campaigns Come Together
  Small, high-accountability team; each function has a clear owner and checklist.

  “Every single one of those people is in the room and every single person is thinking about what is the role that I play in this new... moment for the brand or product that we're launching ... Because we have basically one owner for each of those things, every person feels personally accountable...” – Liz Anthony [61:24]

• Campaign Templatization
  Each big launch includes a deliberate "workstream": influencer, PR, email, events, paid, etc. "Not rocket science," says Liz, but relentless in execution and review. [63:07]

• Tiering & Calendarization
  Year planned around “tier 1” moments (~1/month is the stretch goal), supported by “tier 2” or smaller events to keep acquisition flywheel going. Out-of-home (e.g., Denver airport) and CTV tested for the first time in 2025/2026.

  “We try to make sure that we have like one [tier 1] per month... and we honestly try to do that like 18 months in advance because it takes so long on the apparel front.” – Liz Anthony [65:42]

8. Data, Analytics & KPI Ownership

• Metrics That Matter
  For Halfdays, the current north star metrics are:

  • Net revenue (factoring for high returns in apparel)
  • CAC (aiming under $100 for AOV $350+)
  • ROAS (adjusted for seasonality and efficiency bands)

  “Everyone in your team, especially in your marketing team, should own like 1 to 4 KPIs that are indicative of that channel's performance and that they should be optimizing against.” – Host [71:10]

• Daily Operational Tracking in Google Sheets
  Despite growth, the team still largely uses Google Sheets (with some automation via Supermetrics) for daily reporting. Comparison and transition to data warehouses (BigQuery, Looker) are discussed as the next step for scaling, especially with international and channel expansion.

  “We do a lot of this, I would say like almost all of it in Google Sheets... But we didn’t really start building [a data warehouse] until last year... I think we waited way too long.” – Connor [73:13, 81:14]

• Nuanced Efficiency Decisions “Lower first order AOV, but bigger decrease in CAC” = positive efficiency shift, important for rapid scaling.

• Text-to-Data LLMs as Game Changers Both hosts and Liz are excited about democratizing data querying with LLMs ("text to data") to empower more non-technical team members to make data-driven decisions and relieve bottlenecks. Regular lunch-and-learns being considered to upskill the broader org. [88:08]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Rapid Growth & Niche:

“We're in sort of like the tens of millions category right now and we've been growing 80+ percent year over year for the last three years.”
— Liz Anthony [10:58]

On Audience & Founder Fit:

“Our core demo is also 100% encapsulated in our founders... having founders who basically are the persona is such a competitive advantage.”
— Liz Anthony [13:27]

On Brand Collaboration Impact:

“We grew our email list by 10% in two days just from [the HOKA collab].”
— Liz Anthony [33:51]

On Founder Content in Performance Marketing:

“...the ROAS on the founder-led content in many cases was like double the ROAS on something for the same product by a content creator... those lo-fi founder-led contents are the ones that people always come back to.”
— Liz Anthony [45:04]

On Structuring 360 Activations:

“It's not rocket science. But it is one of those things that's very easy to fall through the cracks as your team gets bigger... every single one of those people is in the room and every single person is thinking about what is the role that I play in this...”
— Liz Anthony [61:24]

On Ownership and Management:

“She [Ariana] really hires people that she considers like an equal or that she thinks can drive an area that she either doesn't want to drive or... doesn't have the experience to drive.”
— Liz Anthony [30:26]

On Data & Analytics Tools:

“So many organizations use Google Sheets, like way longer than you think that they are. You assume that every company has this incredible data warehouse and it's like probably not actually until they're like well into the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.”
— Liz Anthony [82:38]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [06:03] — Liz's recap of Halfdays’ founding & rapid growth
• [10:58] — Revenue scale, growth rates disclosed
• [13:27] — Founder-persona alignment as an advantage
• [17:27] — Persona fragmentation as the company scales
• [19:05] — Chief of Staff role broken down into three buckets
• [24:11] — McKinsey-to-DTC operator translation, the “move fast with less” mentality
• [32:25] — Q4 performance drivers, HOKA collaboration breakdown
• [39:22] — Year-round product strategy & acquisition funnel insights
• [45:04] — Data demonstrating founder content as top performer in organic & paid
• [61:24] — How 360 marketing campaigns are planned and owned
• [65:42] — Tiering campaign “moments” across the annual calendar
• [71:10] — The central role and structure of KPI tracking at Halfdays
• [81:14] — Transitioning from Google Sheets to a data warehouse
• [88:08] — The promise of text-to-data LLMs for democratizing analytics

Conclusion

This episode is a masterclass in high-growth brand operations: how structure, clarity of role, lean teams, and customer obsession can 10x the impact of every initiative and marketing dollar. The conversation is equal parts tactical (how to structure a data stack, when to move from Sheets to Looker, running 360 campaigns) and inspirational (the power of founder-as-customer, activating mega-collaborations, using authenticity as a media multiplier). Whether you’re a DTC operator, general manager, or data-obsessed performance marketer, Halfdays’ playbook distilled here offers a powerful case study in brand moments that lead directly to revenue.

Host’s closing:
“It was a jam-packed episode... very actionable, very tactical. Thank you, Liz, for coming on.”