Wayne — DTC Growth × AI Workflows × Cognitive Psychology
Hi, I'm Wayne.
I currently lead the DTC site for a leading XR smart glasses brand, owning growth, conversion, and international operations of the brand's owned channel. Before that, I spent close to four years at BLUETTI (Shenzhen PowerOak Newener), a unicorn in portable energy storage. I was promoted from market analyst all the way up to senior manager, ending up in charge of a ~30-person org spanning the Commercial Intelligence Department and the European DTC division. I took over the European site during a leadership crisis and brought it back to 60%+ YoY growth.
Before DTC, my starting point was export sales and supply chain. Earlier in my career, at a publicly listed mold-manufacturing group in Shenzhen — running international-station sales and key-account development — I led and closed an eight-figure-USD OEM order with a major Korean smartphone brand. That period gave me a real, hands-on read of the Shenzhen / South China manufacturing belt: factory vetting, sampling cadence, QC, certifications, export compliance, cross-border logistics — all of it learned by doing. It's a slightly unusual layer underneath my DTC work today — front-end I read users and conversion, back-end I can actually navigate the supply chain.
Outside of my main role, I also help out on a small cross-border consumer-electronics project — more as a partner working alongside friends than anything formal. I'm involved in branding, the storefront, and growth strategy. It's a way to put the playbook I built at scale through the friction of a real, small business.
My approach, in one line: cognitive-psychology insight × rigorous experimentation × AI-native workflows.
- Diagnosed via user surveys that ~20% of users were dropping off due to choice overload. Led the design and launch of Help Me Choose, an interactive product finder, pushing average page dwell time to 130 seconds and directly converting eight figures in revenue.
- Built a full-lifecycle email engine — monthly new subscribers from 3k to 18k (+500%), owned-channel revenue share from 5% to 20%.
- Took Saudi Arabia from 0 to 1 after the org had internally written it off as too hard — pushed Saber certification and the cross-border compliance chain through.
- Rebuilt the department as an AI-native team: RPA + custom AI Agents handling competitor pricing, VOC, SEO content, and reporting — replacing 2,000+ labor hours per month, roughly 12–15 FTEs.
My undergrad is psychology, at Stony Brook (SUNY) — A/B testing, hypothesis testing, consumer behavior. I was working on those before I ever worked in ecommerce, not after. That's still where my instinct for reading users and funnels comes from.
This blog is my own working notebook: the things I tried that broke, the experiments that worked, and how AI tooling actually gets embedded into day-to-day ecommerce ops — written one post at a time. If you're building a DTC brand, an independent site, or going cross-border, I hope something here is useful.
If you want to go deeper — getting an independent site live from 0 to 1, unsticking a stalled conversion funnel, scaling owned-channel revenue from 5% to 20%, embedding AI workflows into a real team, navigating cross-border compliance, or sourcing the right China-based supply chain / factory partners for an overseas product line — feel free to email me. I take 1:1 consulting, and I'm equally happy to just trade notes.