Logan Bird is the President and CEO of Mephisto, a France-based premium footwear brand known for handcrafted comfort shoes. Previously, he served as Mephisto's Vice President of Omnichannel Sales, where he helped advance the brand's digital, retail, wholesale, and DTC strategies. With experience in e-commerce, strategic partnerships, and omnichannel growth, Logan held senior roles at Lands' End and Zappos.

Scaling a brand can feel like a paradox: the faster you grow, the easier it becomes to lose the craftsmanship, culture, and customer trust that made the business work in the first place. In a market obsessed with speed, automation, and shortcuts, how can leaders grow without becoming generic?

Logan Bird's answer is to build around product-market fit, craftsmanship, and people who can execute with focus. As an e-commerce and omnichannel growth leader, he maintains that durable growth starts with knowing your customer, protecting product quality, and creating consistent brand experiences across channels. Leaders should replace manual processes before they break, trust teams enough to let them learn through execution, listen for patterns in customer feedback rather than reacting to the loudest complaint, and hire through trusted networks to find people aligned with the company's vision. The result is a business that scales with stronger systems, clearer priorities, and a deeper connection to its customers.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Logan Bird, President and CEO of Mephisto, about scaling premium brands without losing craftsmanship. Logan discusses product-market fit, omnichannel growth across retail and DTC, and leadership lessons from Japan and Zappos.

Brandi Dugal is the Founder and CEO of The Fidget Game, a company that creates curriculum-aligned learning games to make reading and literacy practice effective and fun. The company's resources are used in more than 50,000 schools. A former teacher with classroom experience in multiple countries, Brandi developed The Fidget Game after working with students who were struggling to read. Through the Fidget Forward program, she makes educational tools more accessible to classrooms and families in need.

Scaling an e-commerce brand often requires a counterintuitive move: letting go of the metrics you once used to measure growth. Yet when growth stalls, how do you know whether to pull back or push harder?

Brandi Dugal's answer is to zoom out, measure the whole business, and keep testing until the system reveals what works. As an educator-turned-e-commerce founder, she recommends looking beyond platform-level ROAS and using marketing efficiency ratios (MERs) to assess overall marketing efficiency. Brandi also suggests separating campaigns by product, tagging ad angles carefully, testing high volumes of creative, and staying close to customers through real conversations, feedback loops, and founder-led storytelling. Sustainable growth comes from pairing disciplined measurement with authentic, customer-informed creative.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Brandi Dugal, Founder and CEO of The Fidget Game, about scaling through creative testing and whole-business measurement. Brandi shares how MER changed her Meta strategy, why authentic founder-led ads outperform polished UGC, and how gamified classroom insights shaped her product development.

Rita Ainsworth is a Human Potential Coach at Rita Ainsworth Coaching, where she helps high-performing professionals and teams reduce stress and improve resilience through neuroscience-based, body-centered coaching. As a trauma-informed coach, she specializes in guiding clients out of chronic stress and into greater clarity, energy, and balanced performance. After spending a decade in marketing and media-buying, Rita spent years studying human performance, neuroscience, and somatic practices to understand sustainable success.

You can have all the experience, data, and strategy in the world and still make the wrong call in a critical moment. Under pressure, even top performers freeze, overreact, or spiral into unproductive action. So what's really driving those decisions when everything is on the line?

According to Rita Ainsworth, a human potential coach specializing in nervous system regulation and performance, it's not your intelligence or skillset — it's your physiological state. When stress takes over, the brain defaults to survival mode, limiting creativity and decision-making. Rita recommends starting with body-based resets like slowing your breath, scanning your environment for safety, or taking short movement breaks to discharge stress. By building awareness of your patterns and practicing regulation techniques consistently, you can shift from reactive to intentional thinking — even in high-stakes situations.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris sits down with Rita Ainsworth, Human Potential Coach at Rita Ainsworth Coaching, to discuss how stress impacts decision-making and performance. Rita explains how nervous system states affect outcomes, why high performers fall into burnout cycles, and practical ways to regulate stress and think clearly under pressure.