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Braxton Manley

Founder and operator in Austin. Over ten years I started four consumer brands and built each from nothing: product, packaging, ad account, and the part of the spreadsheet that decides whether any of it was worth doing. Today I'm a partner in all four. They run with their own teams and their own rhythm, and I'm looking for the next P&L to run day to day.

Open to an operating role at a founder-led brand Austin, Texas
Braxton Manley
Studio, Austin. Photo: Amie Santavicca
Braxley Bands Peace Love Hormones Mystic Gum Shop Radio NYT Wirecutter Forbes New York Post Austin Business Journal Texas Tech
4
Companies founded; today a partner in each
300k+
Customers served across the brands
8 figures
Lifetime revenue across the portfolio
10 yrs
Operating consumer P&Ls end to end

Everything I've built

2017 — 2025Founder, now partner

Braxley Bands

Apple Watch and Garmin bands — led it for eight years

A stretchy watch band I made in a Texas Tech dorm room, which turned into a top one percent Shopify store and the anchor of everything that followed. I built the brand, the packaging, the store, and the acquisition engine, then kept it profitable through the years when rising ad costs quietly killed a lot of brands our size. These days it runs steady on its repeat base.

  • Brand
  • Shopify
  • Paid social
  • Packaging
  • Retention
Braxley Coastal band Braxley Merlot band Braxley Garden band
braxleybands.com
2022 — nowCo-founder and partner

Peace Love Hormones

Women's hormone health, with Maddie Miles

A herbal apothecary built on my wife's clinical practice. I built the entire growth side: brand system, storefront, Meta and Google, lifecycle email, the creator program, and a wholesale push into Europe. Day to day this is Maddie's company now; I stay close as her partner and sounding board. The hard part was never traffic. It was sounding clinically credible and human at once, in a category where every claim is regulated.

  • Brand identity
  • Lifecycle
  • Creators
  • Compliance
  • Wholesale
Peace Love Hormones Triple Synergy Set Crampy tincture Gutsy tincture
peacelovehormones.com
2024 — nowFounder and partner

Mystic Gum

Pure mastic resin, harvested on Chios

A single ingredient chewing gum sold into a category held by generic sellers with no brand at all. Zero to a six figure monthly run rate in the first year, almost entirely through TikTok Shop and a creator program we rebuilt week over week. It also served as my proving ground: what worked here at low spend graduated to the bigger brands the following week. The playbook is written; the machine mostly runs it.

  • TikTok Shop
  • Creators
  • Category entry
  • Sourcing
Mystic Gum reusable tin Mystic Gum retail pack Raw mastic resin
mysticgum.com
2026Founder

Shop Radio

Branded audio for Shopify storefronts

My first software product and a deliberate step off the physical goods treadmill. Shop Radio generates custom branded audio for Shopify stores, so a storefront sounds like the brand instead of like nothing. I own product, brand, the marketing site, pricing, and the merchant experience. Owning a full stack I'd never owned before was the whole point. It's built to run light: software margins, no inventory, no headcount to feed.

  • B2B SaaS
  • Product
  • Go to market
  • Merchant UX
Shop Radio
Tap to hear a storefront sample
Lo-fi · Synthwave · Jazz · Rock
shoprad.io
NextOpen

Your brand here

The fifth spot on this shelf is open

If you've built a brand and want an operator to run it day to day, this is where your logo goes. Send the situation and the numbers you stare at. Within 48 hours you'll have a one page plan back, whether or not we ever talk again.

  • Operating lead
  • GM
  • Head of Growth
5
braxtonmanley@gmail.com
Case study

Keeping Braxley profitable through the ad-cost squeeze

In 2021 the ground moved under every DTC brand. iOS 14.5 broke targeting, CPMs climbed, and acquisition math that had worked for years quietly stopped working. Plenty of brands Braxley's size never made it out.

Braxley did, without outspending anyone. It's a better story with the numbers in front of us, so ask me about it.

  • Contribution margin per order, not ROAS.Platform numbers flattered themselves. Bank statements didn't.
  • Repeat purchase and owned channels first.Budget moved from cold acquisition toward email and the existing base.
  • Creative cadence kept running.When it would have been cheaper to stop testing, we didn't.

The contact sheet

Twenty two real products across the brands. Every one of these shipped to a paying customer.

Peace Love Hormones — brand campaign
Peace Love Hormones — brand campaign
PLH — Triple Synergy Set
PLH — Triple Synergy Set
PLH — Gutsy
PLH — Gutsy
PLH — Mama
PLH — Mama
PLH — Crampy
PLH — Crampy
Mystic Gum — reusable tin
Mystic Gum — reusable tin
Mystic Gum — retail pack
Mystic Gum — retail pack
Mystic Gum — raw mastic resin
Mystic Gum — raw mastic resin
Braxley — Merlot
Braxley — Merlot
Braxley — Tulip
Braxley — Tulip
Braxley — Onyx
Braxley — Onyx
Braxley — Blackout
Braxley — Blackout
Braxley — Garden
Braxley — Garden
Braxley — Coastal
Braxley — Coastal
Braxley — Slim Slate
Braxley — Slim Slate
Braxley — Revolver
Braxley — Revolver
Braxley — Chocolate
Braxley — Chocolate
Braxley — Western
Braxley — Western
Braxley — Espresso
Braxley — Espresso
Braxley — Retro
Braxley — Retro
Braxley — Strength
Braxley — Strength
Braxley — Ash
Braxley — Ash

What I'm good at

Every one of these I learned with my own money at risk, which is a different teacher than a client budget.

Owning the number instead of the activity

I've run businesses where a bad month of acquisition cost showed up in my own bank account. So I read performance against contribution margin and cash, not against a platform's version of ROAS. If something isn't working I'd rather bring you the diagnosis and the plan than the report.

Paid media on Meta and Google

Account structure, bidding, audience saturation, creative fatigue, incrementality testing. I know the specific places platform reporting flatters itself, and how to check it against what actually landed.

Creative that gets tested like a system

Hooks, angles, formats, and a cadence that produces winners deliberately instead of occasionally. I write the briefs, I often shoot the thing, and I can usually tell you why the winner won.

Creator and affiliate programs

Recruiting, briefing, whitelisting, and paying people against attribution that actually holds up. Including the unglamorous half: cutting the creators who don't convert and re-briefing the ones who nearly do.

Retention and lifecycle

Klaviyo flows, subscription economics, post purchase paths. I've built subscription programs and fixed broken ones, and I price the second and third order into every acquisition decision, because that's where the business actually lives.

Inventory and the physical side

Forecasting buys, sizing curves, 3PL transitions, landed cost. Eight years of physical goods teaches you the P&L lives in the warehouse as much as in the ad account, and that stock-outs kill brands faster than bad ads do.

Building with AI every day

Sites, creative, analysis, internal automation. It's the reason one person in my seat covers what usually needs a small team, and it's the most portable thing I'd bring into a new company.

Working with founders

Why the operating seat next to a creative founder is the one I want.

The best consumer brands have a founder who is the creative soul of the thing. The common mistake is asking that same person to also run inventory planning, subscription billing, and the weekly ad budget. Those are different jobs, done well by different people.

I've sat in the founder seat, so I know exactly what not to take away. The work I want next is the other chair: take over the operating side of a brand someone else started, keep the machine honest, and give the founder their creative time back.

Bio

Braxton and Maddie Manley
With Maddie, his wife and co-founder at Peace Love Hormones.

Braxton Manley is a founder and operator in Austin, Texas. He started Braxley Bands out of a Texas Tech dorm room and went on to found four consumer companies. He remains a partner in each; day to day, they run with their own teams.

He studied marketing and management at Texas Tech's Rawls College of Business and was selected as a University Innovation Fellow through Stanford's d.school, where he trained in design thinking and campus entrepreneurship programs.

Running three brands at once teaches you which of your wins actually transfer and which ones were luck.

He lives in Austin with his wife Maddie, a clinical herbalist and his co-founder at Peace Love Hormones, and their first child.

Background

2018

Texas Tech University, Rawls College of Business

B.B.A. in Marketing and Management, with Strategic Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

2016 — 2018

University Innovation Fellow, Stanford d.school program

Selected into the d.school fellowship that trains students to build design and entrepreneurship programs on their own campuses.

2016 — 2018

3 Day Startup, team lead

Ran founding teams through weekend company building sprints. Member of Tech CEOs.

2019

Pitched Mark Cuban

Braxley Bands got in front of him in Austin. The Austin Business Journal wrote it up.

Press

NYT Wirecutter
Apple Watch bands we like
Featured product
Forbes
Understanding the AI and e-commerce connection in socially distanced retail
2021
New York Post
The gum that's good for your gut health
2025
Authority Magazine
Meet the inventors: idea to store shelf
2023
Austin Business Journal
Quick-thinking entrepreneurs pitch Apple Watch bands to Mark Cuban
2019
Texas Tech
Rawls graduate and CEO of Braxley Bands
2018

Tell me what's
not working.

If you're a founder who wants someone to run the machine, or you're hiring for growth or brand, send the situation and the constraint behind it. Within 48 hours you'll have a one page plan back: where I think the leaks are, what I'd do first, and how I'd measure it. You keep the plan either way.

braxtonmanley@gmail.com LinkedIn