Entrepreneur, Ecommerce Investor, Strategic Advisor, Speaker

Learn More

Co-Founder & CEO Agency Ventures Aggregator

Entrepreneur,
Ecommerce Investor,
Strategic Advisor,
Speaker

Learn More

Co-Founder & CEO
Agency Ventures Aggregator

Meet Tom

Tom Shipley

Tom Shipley is a serial entrepreneur, eCommerce and platform investor, strategic advisor, speaker, and over the past 20-years has become one of the leading experts in omnichannel brand building.

Tom’s brands have sold over $2B through Direct-to-Consumer Marketing and Retail. His brands are widely recognized household names that can be seen on TV, radio, online, Amazon, and found in major retailers like Costco, Ulta, CVS, Nordstroms, HSN, and more.

Tom Shipley is strategic advisor to Snow Oral Care (Teeth Whitening) as well as the co-founder of Foundry. Foundry is an Ecommerce and Amazon brand aggregator which raised $100m in 2021 to create a leading digital-first consumer brands company.

Most recently, Tom is the co-founder & CEO of AVA – Agency Ventures Aggregator – leading the charge to acquire and scale 30 advertising agencies per year, creating value through programmatic scaling and a people-first approach in order to compete head-to-head with traditional global advertising agency holding companies.

Read Tom’s Story

Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

The T. Shipley Catalog

One of Tom’s first startups, a marketing and operations consulting agency led in 1999 to launching and growing The T. Shipley Catalog, a $20M catalog and ecommerce brand in just 3 years.

Atlantic Coast Brands

Starting with no capital, Tom and his partner launched Atlantic Coast Brands (ACB) in 2005, and grew it into one of the largest direct to consumer multi-brand companies in America.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Tom leveraged low cost media in DRTV and DR Radio to grow ACB from $35M to $100M within 18 months.

ACB’s first brand, Hydroxatone, grew to over $1bn in sales through digital, DRTV, DR radio and retail distribution in ULTA, HSN and Costco.

In 2010, ACB launched Keranique, which is now the #1 hair regrowth brand for women in America with over $630 M in sales through Digital Channels, DRTV, Amazon, HSN, salons and retailers such as Ulta, CVS and Riteaid.

Tom Shipley and his partner Drew Surwilo, successfully exited Atlantic Coast Brands in 2021 through a sale to a private equity firm.

Foundry:

Tom raised $100m from LightBay Capital and Monogram Partners to launch Foundry, an Ecommerce and Amazon brand aggregator. Foundry acquires and scales ecommerce brands to create a leading digital-first consumer brands company.

AVA – Agency Ventures Aggregator

Tom launched AVA – – Agency Ventures Aggregator, an advertising agency aggregation company in 2022 to build a people-first, leading global agency through the acquisition 20+ agency per year and building value through programmatic scaling. AVA’s focus is on people, on culture, on scaling from the bottom up – on building an agency group with the people who represent the future of digital. This means giving founders a choice of career path, while using proven frameworks to enable and empower each agency’s next generation of talent.

Strategic Advisor

Strategic Advisor

Tom’s biggest passion in business is working with onfire entrepreneurs as an advisor to grow multi-channel Direct-to-Consumer businesses to iconic brands. He loves working with $3M-$30M businesses with the goal of hyper growth in profitability and increasing enterprise value for exit opportunities.

To grow brands to $100M+, Tom used the learnings from his success and failures to develop his business blueprint. As an investor and strategic partner, Tom leverages this framework for incorporating strategy, product, people, systems plus a network of contacts to help grow to 8 and 9 figure businesses.

Testimonials

What Others Are Saying About Tom

Don’t just take it from us, let these Entrepreneurs do the talking!

Ventures

Tom’s Former Ventures

Advisory

Strategic Advisory