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Tom van der Kolk led Ekster's US expansion to roughly 80–85% of its revenue and is now taking The Longevity Store there. In this Venice All Hands he covers entity setup, the importance of hiring native US copywriters, and the avatar-and-CBO playbook for finding your American angle.
Tom van der Kolk, Co-Owner and Managing Director at Ekster; founder of The Longevity Store® · 16 September 2026 · Venice All Hands
Tom van der Kolk took Ekster from a 2016 Kickstarter to a business that makes roughly 80–85% of its revenue in the US, without a single employee living there. Now he is doing it again with The Longevity Store, which goes live in the US on 3 November. In this session he covered what he got right and wrong the first time: the entity structure, the lawsuits, the 3PLs, the hiring, and the media-buying playbook for finding a US angle. His core message is that the operational side is far easier than founders fear, and the marketing side is far harder.
Five takeaways:
Ekster launched in 2016 with a Kickstarter, bootstrapped, selling wallets with trackers and now bags and luggage. 70% of the Kickstarter backers were in the US, so instead of grinding through Europe country by country the team shipped its inventory to America and went for it. The first two years were slow while they learned digital marketing. Today the US is still roughly 80–85% of Ekster's revenue, and Tom says the market has no equal: once you crack it, even small percentage gains translate into far more revenue than anywhere else.
Asked how hard the reorientation was, Tom said it is a lot easier than founders assume. Ekster never had anyone living or working in the US beyond freelancers. The one role you cannot do without is a US copywriter or creative strategist who speaks to American consumers natively, because European marketing is understated and US consumers are bombarded with extreme advertising. The upside is a whole different level of claims you are allowed to make, though you have to be careful. In his words, the marketing side is the most difficult to crack; logistics and legal are fairly easy.
"I'm figuring out that the most important role in the company is a copywriter, and preferably a copywriter who kind of turns into a creative strategist."
— Tom van der Kolk, 00:16:27
The Longevity Store runs on Shopify Plus, but Tom says a standard Advanced plan at a couple of hundred dollars a month was fine until recently. For fulfilment he wants 3PLs with transparent pricing: an upfront per-country, per-order estimate rather than the multi-tab monthly spreadsheet some Dutch 3PLs send, so shipping cost drops cleanly into your attribution tool. Those are hard to find in the US, but they found one; he is still looking for one in the UK. For freight he has always used Flexport, which costs a premium but was the partner that pulled Ekster's stock through customs when it got stuck before Black Friday. Stock ships from a US 3PL; the first batch was made in the Netherlands and they are now sampling with a US manufacturer to cut lead times.
Patrick asked how you edge into the US without betting the company. Tom's MVP, which they have not run themselves, is a US-only landing page promising 2–4 day shipping, a few thousand dollars of ad spend to learn conversion rate and CPMs, and then refunding every order with an apology. The Longevity Store skipped it because its post-purchase survey showed around 60% of buyers had considered IM8 or AG1, and a bit of Blueprint, and chose them anyway. That was enough signal to go.
His advice is to incorporate a C-Corp rather than an LLC if you want to protect your European entity. Take the terms and conditions, terms of sale, and privacy policy from your two or three closest competitors, adapt them with your own brand details, and have a US lawyer check them, which should cost no more than $500–$1,000. Incorporation runs about $3,000. If the launch fails, ship the stock back to Europe and dissolve the entity. On tax, he has paid KPMG for a tax blueprint and transfer-pricing structure. The practical rule: pay advertising and operating costs from the Dutch entity, and let the US entity only collect sales and pay cost of goods and fulfilment, so as much cash as possible flows home beyond the fee the US entity has to keep.
The entity matters because Ekster was sued repeatedly. The first cases were ADA accessibility suits: without an accessibility reader and alt text on every image, visually impaired plaintiffs claimed the site discriminated against them, and Ekster settled the first for $40,000. The fix he eventually found was in the terms and conditions the customer accepts at checkout: exonerate the business for accessibility claims and, the same way, exclude class action lawsuits, which he calls rule number one. There were more suits after that. His warning is that there are cowboys who target scaling e-commerce brands, and once you are big in the US you will get one. He offered to intro members to his US lawyer via Slack.
Tom is a big Upwork fan. He estimates he has hired around 50 people there this year and let roughly 40 of them go. He posts vacancies even for roles he is not sure he needs; interviewing the top three to five candidates tells him whether to hire, automate with AI, or use an agency. He would not default to an agency, and if you do, he would pick a European one that also works in the US, because US agencies get expensive fast. A lot of the work can be done in-house with a good copywriter briefing your video editors and designers.
The Longevity Store launched a year ago and now has a team of around 15, and its angel investors wanted a Netherlands-first, then Belgium, then Germany rollout. Tom ran a single Europe-wide English campaign instead, and Eastern Europe is currently its best-performing region. The same logic drives the US launch: with limited resources, go where you can grow fastest. They will launch in the US and Canada from the US entity alongside a global campaign, then double down wherever it scales. He knows brands that started last year doing 20–30 million in their first US year versus maybe 5–10 million in Europe.
Cost was the most common pre-session question. Tom's data point comes from the UK, where CPMs are twice Europe's because US brands run UK campaigns too. But click-through rate is also twice as high, and CPA and ROAS come out 30% better, because people there are readier to buy. He does not believe in setting a budget and spending through it. The Longevity Store was behind target early this year, then caught up once new educational flows, landing pages and funnels were live and converting. If the first US month misses CPA targets, they will stop and iterate on the funnel rather than keep spending.
To scale once you are in, Tom is copying the best US brands' ads and landing pages. Until you are roughly a 30–50 million brand, he argues, branding does not matter; a small brand is no brand, and the job is to convert. For each main competitor they track the longest-running ads and the split of traffic across landing pages, which shows exactly which angles scale. From that they defined around 13 avatars built on benefits such as energy, NAD, muscle and immune support. Launch is roughly 50 concepts, each an ad set with three to five variations, all in one CBO so Meta reveals which avatar is most scalable. Then they drill one level at a time: gender, then age group, and only much later the very specific persona. He does not expect European personas to hold in the US. A media-buying consultant told him about a brand doing around 120 million whose 200 proven European concepts all failed when relaunched in America. He will still test his European winners, but expects he may have to rebuild.
Q: When you localize, do you rewrite product-page copy, and how does AI compare with a local copywriter? (Nicolas)
Van der Kolk's answer was blunt: AI writes bad copy. He tried to run everything on AI, hired consultants to teach the team copywriting, and is now taking courses himself. He would not use AI for translation or copy. The plan is one product page for the US and one for Europe, plus benefit-led landing pages per avatar. One great English copy with human translators per country is fine, with one caveat: market sophistication stages differ, so he would treat continental Europe, the UK and the US as three regions.
Q: How important are brand ambassadors, seeding and press when you enter a new market? (Tobi, Tap Out)
You need a hygiene level of trust: some press logos, reviews, an expert or ambassador, a few reels. You do not need big ambassadors to go live. The Longevity Store currently aims for around 5–10 partnership ads a week and wants around 20 a week for the US, as an extra creative layer rather than a strategy in itself. He cited a collagen brand that scaled past 100 million in a year in the most crowded category on direct-response marketing alone.
Q: How do you approach pricing and the offer when CPAs are higher? (Sandy)
Average order value went from €45 at launch to €150 a year later by stacking as much as possible upfront and focusing on three-month supplies. They will price-test heavily in the US using a Shopify price-testing tool, and start cheaper than their biggest competitors. Higher AOV raises CPA, but not at the same rate, so contribution profit grows and the cash arrives up front.
Q: I plan to launch in the US on Amazon only. Do I still need an entity? (Nicolas)
For toys, yes: the entity is about product liability, and he cannot imagine putting nothing between a claim and the Dutch company. Amazon itself is simple, and easier with a US entity. Amazon growth tracks your Meta spend and overall brand growth, so start on Amazon but drive outside traffic to it. One trick he hears a lot: use TikTok Shop, which needs a US entity, for seeding and free product, because the traction lifts Amazon sales, ranking and reviews.
Q: Six months from now, what does nailing it look like, and what does disaster look like? (Patrick Crowley)
Disaster is being sued within six months. Nailing it is hitting around 5 million a year in the US six months after the 3 November go-live.
Tom van der Kolk is Co-Owner and Managing Director at Ekster, the Dutch smart-wallet and bag brand he helped launch on Kickstarter in 2016 and grew into a business with the US as its largest market. He is now applying that playbook as founder of The Longevity Store®, which launched in Europe a year ago and goes live in the US on 3 November 2026. LinkedIn
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