About Ryan Shell

Two companies, built from nothing. Both still running.

The Home T started in 2012 with $1,200 and no outside money. It grew into a national DTC apparel brand that's been profitable for 14 years.

It got on ABC's Shark Tank, where I turned down three offers. It's funneled more than $1M to charity, and it's still mine to run today.

For years it ran on production I built and owned, screen printing in-house out of our own warehouse and shipping at real volume, before outsourcing became the smarter call.

Hey Frankie came in 2019, a growth and performance agency for DTC and consumer brands. A full team rolled up to me, with email, paid social, and creative each run by its own director. I own the client relationship and the P&L on every engagement.

Across its clients, $50M+ in paid media has run through my hands. I ran the growth engine for a multi-brand consumer group that scaled from $5M to roughly $200M over the engagement, with one brand inside it going from $5M to well past thirty in a year. Subscription programs built into seven figures a month. One client went from under a million in monthly revenue to several times that, profitably, in well under a year.

The categories run from apparel to jewelry to off-road vehicles. The growth machine is the same once you understand it.

Hey Frankie runs on an internal platform I designed and shipped in Next.js, Supabase, and the Claude API. It replaced three separate SaaS products with LLM-powered workflows that analyze ad accounts, generate campaign ideas, QA creative, and report.

There are a few AI products of my own beyond that, one already live with early clients. Plenty of people at this level talk about AI. This is building with it.

The job across both companies is the same: own the full growth and revenue engine, and the team and operations under it. Paid social and search, email and SMS, retention and subscriptions, creative, plus the people, systems, and supply chain that make it run.

The ad account and the P&L both, after more than a decade putting budget against real downstream economics, not vanity metrics.

Both companies run the same way. Assumptions get pressure-tested hard, and margin and brand come ahead of growth for its own sake.

The bar going in is a clear mandate and a real definition of success. That holds whether I'm running growth for a client or sitting inside a leadership team.