Growing ecommerce businesses through CRO, UX research, and data analytics.

We're a conversion rate optimization agency for eCommerce brands looking to grow to the next level, but know they need to a better job converting traffic. 

We talk to your potential customers, find out why they're not buying, and fix those issues through a/b testing, personalization, and data-informed UX/UI design.

We help you grow by leveraging: 
-> Full-website conversion optimization
-> Landing page optimization
-> Personalization and segmentation
-> Conversion-focused web design
-> User experience research
-> Website analytics and reporting

We’ve worked with brands you know, like JensonUSA, Osprey, PENN Fishing, and The Shade Store. We’re also fired up about helping growing brands reach the next level. Some brands we've helped make this jump include Hydro Flask, Made In, Mizzen and Main, and Peak Design.

Brian Schmitt

Michael Fisher

Most better-for-you brands look “healthy”. Boring packaging. Sterile branding. Zero personality.

Not Rotten. We make low-sugar candy with premium, better-for-you ingredients but with all of the nostalgia and personality you expect from your candy.

From Dr. Rotten to Franky Freak, we’ve built a universe of characters that will end on your TV screen one day!

Since launching, we’ve:

     •   Developed products that compete with billion-dollar brands
     •   Captured a completely new customer base (70% of our customers are new to better-for-you candy!)
     •   Launched in major national retailers

We’re revolutionizing the non-chocolate candy category, one of the fastest-growing segments in candy.

I’m always up for connecting and chatting about building better-for-you products and brands that don’t force people to compromise.

And don’t forget to Feed Your Freak some Rotten!

Founder & CEO

Sickeningly delicious gummy worms with less sugar and zero-waste packaging! #FeedYourFreak

Sign up for our email newsletter and get exclusive updates and early access to launch at https://www.eatrotten.com/

I'm super excited about this national roll out to DICK'S Sporting Goods ! This was a big team effort to bring across the finish line for a speed to shelf - great job everyone.

And this is great validation that what we're doing is truly new, innovative, exciting, AND incremental when we're already flying off the shelves and being asked for more innovation 🤘

Founder & CEO at Rotten | Feed Your Freak at eatrotten.com

New Year, New National Distribution (the kind of start every new year deserves)! 

We're excited to share we'll be hitting the ground running in 2026 with national distribution on our top four SKUs across DICK'S Sporting Goods nationwide. This killer partnership lets us do what we do best - feed more freaks.

Next time you need that freakishly delicious sweet, sour, or crunchy gummy fix, just head to your local Dick's.

Why I trust a 90-minute meal more than 3 rounds of interviews:

I used to spend my time selling the role. Now, I spend my time giving applicants every reason to drop out.

I want people to have such clear expectations of the daily grind that it actually scares away the wrong candidates before they ever sign a contract.

Interviews are performances. Meals are reality.

That’s why our final round at Rotten is always in person. No Zoom, no office, no "interview" structure.

We just sit down and eat.

When you remove the meeting room, the mask slips. You see how someone handles a mistake, how they treat a server, and how they think when they aren't reading from a script.

It’s a simple filter, but it’s the most reliable one we have.

At Rotten, remote hiring just doesn’t work. We need to see the real you.

Most founders optimize for a spreadsheet. We optimized for a visceral reaction.

We spent months trying to hit the perfect nutritional profile.

Low sugar. Clean label. Every box checked.

The lab samples came back and they were technically perfect.

And they were also completely forgettable.

They tasted like a compromise.

That is the moment most startups fold. They prioritize the claim over the candy. 
They lean on the nutrition panel because the product cannot stand on its own.

We threw the R&D deck in the trash.

Our philosophy is simple. The guardrails exist to serve the product, not the other way around.

If a version of Rotten is technically healthy but fails to make someone smile, it does not ship.

We are not building another vitamin company. We are building a candy brand people actually care about.

You can buy a clean ingredient list anywhere. You cannot buy a core memory.

Clean ingredients get you the first trial. A craveable experience gets you the repeat.

One is a list. The other is a business.

Build for the reality of the craving, not the safety of the spreadsheet.

I only had 4 minutes to pitch Rotten and didn’t even finish.

The clock hit zero and the mic went dead while I was still in the middle of a sentence.

We walked away with the win anyway.

Winning the Nosh Pitch Slam felt like a glitch in the simulation for this brand.

For years the natural products world did not really know what to do with us.

That world has always seemed a bit serious and obsessed with purity.

Rotten is intentionally unhinged and loud.

I stopped trying to fit into that specific ecosystem years ago.

It is why we skip the clout war at Expo West to show up at Sweets and Snacks instead.

Winning on that stage proved that the industry has finally stopped asking us to explain our internal logic.

They stopped looking for a clean font and started looking at our performance.

Acceptance is a strange feeling when you have spent years being the brand that makes people flinch.

But the lesson for founders is simple.

Do not change your brand to fit the room.

Wait for the room to change for you.

Getting onto the shelf is a vanity metric. 

Most founders celebrate the "Yes" from a buyer, but they don't realize they've just signed an expensive rental agreement. 

The operational reality of CPG isn't what people think:

Post-Purchase Risk: You think a sale to a distributor is final. It’s not. If the product doesn’t move, you’re often carrying the liability for the dead inventory. 

Invisible Labor: Retailers don't always stock your product. You often have to fund the displays, the materials, and the people to physically put the bags on the hooks. 

The Promo Trap: Those "2 for $6.00" tags? The brand usually funds that discount and pays a fee to the retailer just for the privilege of running the deal. 

The grocery aisle isn't a gallery for your brand story; it’s a high-stakes rental market. 

Stop pitching your "clean ingredients" or your "category disruption." 

Buyers don’t want a story. They want proof of performance. 

Once I stopped selling Rotten and started selling impact – velocity, incrementality, and category growth – our close rate shifted. 

If you aren't prepared to be the merchandiser, the marketer, and the insurance policy for the store, you’ve already lost.

Adrenaline is a liability.

For the first two years Rotten lived on it.

I out-hustled the supply chain, out-talked the buyers, and sprinted through every operational fire.

Stubbornness got us into 1600 stores.

But stubbornness is not a system.

You cannot muscle your way into a 98 percent in-stock rate.

You cannot use founder energy to fix a late invoice or a misprinted production run.

The very thing that builds a brand eventually becomes the thing that breaks it.

I used to think being involved in every decision was leadership.

It was actually just a bottleneck.

This next chapter of Rotten is about firing myself from the chaos.

It is about trading the high of the sprint for the discipline of the scale.

We are moving from an era of ideas to an era of execution.

That means hiring people who are better than me at the things I used to muscle through.

Adrenaline is great for starting a fire.

It is useless for keeping the lights on.

We just spent a small fortune on a team offsite in Malibu.

Facilitator. Flights. House. Dinner.

Every part of my founder brain was screaming that this was a waste of cash. We are a lean brand. We have retail shelf space to win and supply chains to fix. Spending two days talking about 2035 felt like a luxury we could not afford.

The 10 year vision exercise was the part I dreaded most. Most of my team has been here for less than six months. I was terrified that having everyone weigh in would dilute the weirdness I built while I was solo.

I was wrong. It was the biggest reality check I have had all year.

When you carry the vision alone for too long it becomes a cage. You stop seeing the bigger world because you are too busy protecting the small one you already built.

My team didn’t just align. They expanded the map. They saw versions of Rotten that were bigger and more visceral than my original deck.

Once we agreed on where we want to be in a decade, the 2026 roadmap stopped being a debate. The plan became a filter. Either an idea gets us closer to the 10 year mark or it is noise.

It turned out the most expensive part of the trip was not the flights. It was the months I spent trying to be the only person with a crystal ball.

If you are the only one who knows where the ship is going you are not a leader. You are a bottleneck.

5 things you should know before investing in Rotten.

1) Candy is a massive category.
It’s not niche or cute. It’s one of the biggest food categories in the world.

2) The category is in rapid transition.
The shift is generational. Younger consumers are moving differently than the generations these legacy brands were built for.

3) Dollars are moving fast from chocolate to non-chocolate.
That matters more than most people realize. Portfolio mix is changing whether incumbents like it or not.

4) The big strategics are going to have a problem.
They need brands that actually speak to Gen Z and millennials, and most of what they own was built for older consumers. That gap doesn’t get fixed with internal brand creation. It gets fixed through acquisition.

5) Rotten is being built for where the market is going.
Not where it’s been. Not what worked twenty years ago. The brand, the category choice, and the positioning all assume that shift continues.

What this means:

If you’re an investor who understands category transitions, brand-led growth, and why the next generation can’t be marketed to with legacy playbooks, we’ll probably see the world the same way.

But if you’re looking for something corporate, traditional, or purely spreadsheet-driven, Rotten’s not for you.

Let's gooooo!! 4.5/5 stars on Rottens new Spicy Sour Gummy Cruncheez from Nosh.com. Grab them at your local Sprouts!

Thank you to the always incredible Monica Watrous and Shauna Golden for the review and feature!!

Open article: Reviews: Rotten Taps into ‘Swicy’ Trend, Bronco Bets On Frozen Breakfast by nosh.com

Reviews: Rotten Taps into ‘Swicy’ Trend, Bronco Bets On Frozen Breakfast

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