Most commerce leaders have either agency experience or operator experience. Corin Mills spent four years at Wolff Olins as the designated client voice inside a global branding agency, then led a rebrand consolidating 11 brands into one at Curries, the UK's Best Buy equivalent. Now he runs e-commerce at MOO, a $100M+ B2B print and merchandise company that built its business on bringing luxury print quality to a mass market.
Corin Mills tells Bryan why he's skeptical of rebrands as a default solution, even though he's led several. The real blockers to growth are usually product strategy or business architecture problems that brands try to paper over with visual refreshes. He breaks down the structural tension between brand and performance teams: performance marketers cling to last-click attribution because it feels robust, but everyone knows nobody just randomly searches a brand and converts. That false security makes brand investment hard to justify internally, even when awareness spend clearly improves performance results.
Topics discussed:
- Why rebrands often mask harder product strategy or architecture problems
- The false security of last-click attribution and why performance teams resist admitting it
- Never running a replatform and redesign simultaneously to preserve measurement clarity
- Using sampling as frictionless proof-of-quality in a commoditized B2B market
- Keeping humans in the loop while using AI to reduce internal research logistics
- Building brand systems flexible enough to extend beyond original product categories
- Maintaining conviction during rebrand rollouts when early signals are ambiguous
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