Madison Fiore | DTC operator

VACATION GETS INVESTMENT FROM VMG PARTNERS Vacation, the nostalgia-branded sunscreen company co-founded by Lach Hall in 2021, has closed a minority investment from VMG Partners. While terms were not disclosed, spitballing that the check was between $30M and $60M for a 20% to 40% stake. The transaction follows the brand recently hiring investment bank Raymond James to explore a minority stake deal. Existing backers are True Beauty Ventures and Silas Capital (which led the original $6M Series A). VMG's beauty track record is strong: they backed Drunk Elephant (sold to Shiseido for $845M in 2019), K18 (sold to Unilever in 2023), and Kosas (still in portfolio, was reportedly exploring a sale as of early 2024). VMG closed a $1 billion Fund VI in May 2025, so they have fresh capital to deploy. Vacation generates approximately 5M weekly organic social media views, driven by its nostalgic takes on branding and marketing. According to WWD, they recorded $60M to $75M in 2025 net sales.

SMB is a fucking grind. Nice to hear one of the best operators of all time acknowledge that.

Are there any brands where you open EVERY email?

We were Clay's largest user at one point in time, hitting their platform 17.3 million times per week. Last month we replaced them entirely with a $200/mo Claude Code subscription. I can't write code. Neither can James, my VP of Growth who built the replacement. Here's the full story. Clay is a GREAT product and I TRULY think most people should use it. But we hit their ceiling. 50,000 row limit per table. 12.5 million row cap per workspace. Tables that take days to actually delete. Clicking "run all" thousands of times and waiting days for things to clear out. So When you're processing millions of leads, all the above become the bottleneck of your entire business. James had never touched Claude Code before. Three weeks after learning it, he built our entire core system. With Clay, processing 1 million leads took 27 hours. And it would error out often enough that we would always have to plan on hitting the “run all rows” button again on 20+ clay tables. IYKYK but Our new system waterfall enriches 1 million leads in 5 seconds. 272,000 leads PER SECOND. AND On top of the core engine, we vibe coded a Google Maps scraper that pulls leads zip code by zip code across all 32,000 US zip codes. AND An AI lead finder that hits 95% contact match rates where Apollo gives you about 30%. AND Ad library scrapers for Google and LinkedIn. AND An AI campaign analysis system. AND An auto-refill system so clients never run out of leads mid-campaign. One we started building with Claude, we just couldn’t stop Now we have the data ready for clients sending 5 million emails a month within 1 week of signing the contract. I put together the full system blueprint -- every tool, the tech stack, a Clay vs custom comparison, and a 6-step playbook for building your own. Plus a video walkthrough where I show you the live system and how each tool actually works. Retweet or Reply CODE below and I'll DM it to you.