There Is No 'Best' Company Culture: What Hexclad, Ridge, and Simple Modern Prove About Building Teams

I'll admit something that took me a few years and a lot of bad hires to actually believe: there is no best company culture. None. The whole idea is a trap.

For ages I assumed there was a right answer. Some ideal blend of perks and values and ping-pong tables that "good" companies had and the rest were just too lazy to copy. So I'd read about whatever culture was winning that month and quietly feel like we were doing it wrong.

Then you look at the brands that have actually built nine-figure businesses, and the theory falls apart immediately. Because they run on completely opposite cultures, and they all win.

Three brands, three opposite cultures, all winning

The cleanest way to see this is to put three well-known DTC names side by side: Hexclad, Ridge, and Simple Modern. Listen to the people who run them talk about their teams and you'd swear they were describing three different planets.

Hexclad is grind. It's a New York toughness, carrot-and-stick, pursuit-of-excellence kind of place. The honest pitch is roughly: come in, work brutal hours, get after it, and the chips fall where they may. But once you're in the fold, you're in. They watch your back, your career goes where you want it to go, and the comp and the logo on your resume are worth the hours. If you're a top 5% operator willing to absolutely send it, you'll do extraordinarily well there. If you're not, you probably don't make it to year two.

Simple Modern is family. Encouraging, relationship-driven, very results-oriented, but built so that an A-player who wants to give 40 hours a week because their kids matter still has a real home there. They've gone as far as making the whole company an ESOP, so a customer-support hire can open a statement and find they're sitting on tens of thousands of dollars of company stock in year one. People stay there for a decade. That's the point. The culture is built around motivations that run 10 and 15 years deep, not three.

Ridge is autonomy. The founder will openly tell you he doesn't love managing and won't be checking in often. You'll be handed a problem, told exactly what the outcome needs to be, and left alone to go solve it. You can work from home, you're barely bugged, the place basically shuts down for a few weeks over the holidays. The quality of life is the perk. But you have to be the kind of person who can be your own boss with nobody watching, because if you can't, you'll sink.

Grind, family, autonomy. Three opposite answers. Three brands that have all built something most founders would kill for.

So which one is correct? That's the wrong question, and asking it is exactly where most of us go wrong.

The real variable is motivational alignment, not perks

Here's the thing none of these is about ping-pong tables or snacks or a "fun" office. The thing that actually makes each of them work is that the people inside genuinely want what the place is offering.

The Ridge person wants independence and would feel suffocated at Hexclad. The Hexclad person wants to compress a decade of money and skill into three or four years and would feel like Simple Modern had no clear on-ramps for that. The Simple Modern person wants depth and stability and a place their family fits, and would quietly hate being told the chips will fall where they may.

Same A-players. Drop them into the wrong culture and they underperform or leave. Not because they got worse, but because the motivation underneath them stopped matching the place.

There's a line I keep coming back to from the people who run these brands: great teams are monocultures of values. You can have wild diversity in age, background, what people look like, how they vote, all of it. But the motivational layer, the why-we're-here, has to line up. When that's aligned, you get a high-performing team. When it's not, you can hire brilliant people and still get a mess.

So the perks are downstream. They're not the culture. The culture is the answer to one question most founders never actually sit down and answer: what are we, and who is this genuinely for?

Why this matters more for a 6 or 7 figure founder than for them

Now, it's easy to read three nine-figure examples and file it under "nice for them". But I'd argue this matters more for you, earlier, than it does for any of those businesses.

At their scale, a wrong hire is a rounding error. At 6 or 7 figures, your first few marketing hires aren't filling seats on a big team. They basically are the team. Each one is a huge slice of how your brand actually shows up. Get one badly mismatched to how you really run, and you don't just lose a person, you lose months and a chunk of organisational knowledge walking back out the door.

So before you write a single job ad, I'd answer the boring question first. What are you actually building here, and what does the day-to-day genuinely feel like?

Are you a grind shop where the first marketer is going to be in the trenches with you at 9pm? Then say that out loud and hire someone who finds that exciting, not someone who'll resent it by month three. Are you a calmer, family-shaped business where you want someone for the long haul? Then stop trying to recruit the 70-hour killer who'll be bored and gone in 18 months. Are you mostly hands-off and need someone who can own a problem with no oversight? Then hire for that, and screen hard for it, because plenty of talented people quietly need structure and will drown without it.

The mistake I see again and again is founders hiring against a LinkedIn ideal of culture instead of their real one. They write the job ad for the company they think they're supposed to be, attract someone who wants that company, and then both sides are confused when it doesn't fit. You didn't hire badly. You hired for a culture you don't actually have.

To put a number on the stakes, in an invented but very ordinary way: say a homewares brand at around A$80k a month brings on its first dedicated marketing hire, gets the fit wrong, and unwinds it five months later. That's not just a salary. It's two quarters of momentum, a creative pipeline that never got built, and a founder back at square one. At that size, that's the difference between a good year and a flat one.

Your agency is a culture hire too

Here's the part I care most about, because it's our world. The exact same logic applies to who you bring in to run your ads.

Most founders vet an agency on case studies and a list of past results. Almost nobody vets for culture fit, and then they're surprised when the relationship grinds.

If you're a grind-it-out founder who wants to be in the account daily, debating angles at midnight, you'll hate a hands-off partner who sends a tidy monthly report. And if you're a calmer operator who wants to hand it over and trust it's handled, you'll be miserable with a team that pings you for a decision every afternoon. Neither agency is bad. One of them just doesn't match how you actually like to work.

This is genuinely how I think about who we partner with at Pigeon. The honest answer to "are we a fit" isn't only about whether we can move the numbers. It's whether the way we operate lines up with how a particular founder wants to run their brand. When that match is there, the work compounds. When it isn't, even good work feels like friction, and we'd rather know that early than fake it.

So I'd hold your agency to the same test as your first marketing hire. Not just "are they good", but "do they run the way I want my brand run".

Where to from here

If you take one thing from three brands running three opposite cultures and all winning, let it be this: stop hunting for the best culture. There isn't one. There's only the one that's true for you, and then the discipline to hire, and partner, in line with it.

So the real work happens before any of the recruiting. Write down, plainly, what your brand actually is and who genuinely thrives in it. Then look at your last few hires, and your current agency, against that honest description.

And if you'd value an outside read on whether the people running your growth are actually built for the way you run, that's a big part of what a Signal/Noise Audit surfaces. Where the fit is real, and where you're quietly paying for a mismatch you've gotten used to.

So, honestly: do the people in charge of your marketing match the culture you actually have, or the one you think you're supposed to have?