Stay ConnectedWelcome to the #1 podcast for commerce teams, executives, and entrepreneurs.
Join host Stephanie Postles as she sits down with commerce leaders on the front lines of digital innovation. With guests from established enterprise companies to D2C start-ups barely out of infancy to everyone in between – you’ll get the inside scoop on what’s Up Next in Commerce.
New episodes come out every Tuesday and Thursday. Up Next in Commerce is created by Mission.org.
When it comes to decisions brand leaders have to make, choosing the typeface that will live across your website and on all of your products is a pretty big one. Customers are going to see and interact with your copy throughout the life of your brand — and making a change to your design style will cause a ripple effect with lasting impacts. Monotype is the largest company that is dedicated to typefaces. According to Jonathan Zsittnik, the Vice President of Commerce Channels at Monotype, the company has the world's largest library of typefaces, and thousands of type families, many of which are the backbone of key brands. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jonathan explains the intricacies that go into running and selling that massive inventory of fonts. Plus, he dives into the importance of choosing and properly licensing a font style and how it can impact a brand. Main Takeaways: Would You Like To Update? — A brand is a living, breathing thing, and needs to change with the times. But updating a brand’s typeface may require more careful thought and planning than some may anticipate. How do you pick or create a typeface that works for both mobile and desktop, speaks to your brand’s identity, works in multiple languages, and meets different users' needs? Tune in to find out! It All Adds Up — The Ecommerce experience does not begin and end with a customer putting an item in a cart and then completing a transaction. That experience needs to carry on after the purchase has occurred, because in order to turn a one-time purchase into a repeat customer, brands need to stay top of mind for their customers. Every part of your brand — including the typeface you choose — makes up the Ecommerce experience and should be taken into consideration. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show, we have Jonathan Zitnik the Vice President of commerce channels at Monotype. How's it going, Jonathan? Jonathan: Very good. Thanks so much for having me, Stephanie. Stephanie: Yeah, thanks for coming on. We were just mentioning that today's a special day. It's your 19th anniversary. And how lucky are we to have you on the show? Jonathan: Oh, man. It's crazy to have been here so long, but I've enjoyed the ride. And what better way to kind of celebrate that anniversary by talking about Monotype and all the things that I've done and see coming, than being here with you today. So thanks for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, it's going to be really fun. I think you're the first person we've had on the show that's been somewhere this long. So I think it'll be a really good conversation where you've actually been able to see a company evolve, and grow, and change. So I'm excited to dive into it. Jonathan: Awesome. Stephanie: I was hoping we can first start at Monotype. So I was reading a bit about it. But then I saw that you employ, I think it was somewhere around like 700 people and had really high revenue numbers. And I was wondering, what do you guys actually do? What is Monotype? And how do I think about the company? Jonathan: Sure. So I think probably your audience is largely not familiar with Monotype, but would recognize many of our flagship products. So if you've ever worked with the fonts Helvetica, Arial or Times New Roman, then you've worked with some of our key offerings. Monotype is the largest company that's dedicated to type. And we have the world's largest library of typefaces, where you'll find thousands of type families, many of which are the backbone of key brands. So the list of typefaces goes on quite a bit that that brands rely on every day. Stephanie: That's awesome. So are you guys purely a typeface design company or do you do other things as well? Jonathan: So type is really at the core of what we do, but we do have some other supporting businesses that all relate to helping brands express themselves and make sure that their digital expression is on point and translates across their various mediums that they communicate over. Stephanie: Very cool. So when I'm thinking about fonts, I guess maybe I'm a newbie when it's coming, or when I'm thinking about fonts, but oftentimes, I'll maybe go and look for free fonts or trying to see like what's out there. So how does Monotype make money and monetize these fonts? Jonathan: Sure. So the majority of our revenue comes from creative professionals that are working with type and those creative professionals could be internal, so working on behalf of the brands, at the brands, at those enterprises, or working at agencies, or even individual creative professionals that are in freeline design spaces. So we're really supporting the creative space and these are the people that know about type, care about type and know how to leverage it within their design projects. And understand that it can really be the backbone of a brand. So these are the people that are willing to spend the value in a typeface. Stephanie: Awesome. And I saw I think you guys developed some fonts I know like Times New Roman, huh, that's a favorite. Is that you guys who created that one? Jonathan: It is, that was a custom typeface at the turn of the century for the London Times. And so it's gone through many, many iterations over the years to catch up with digital times to make the progression that the type has gone from over the years from metal type through phototype and now it's a digital type. Stephanie: That's cool. So how do we think about types transforming over time? Like, what are the levers that make you guys want to change a font, or typeface, or edit it, or make a new one? Like, how are you staying on top of these trends and actually deciding like, "Ah, this would be a new way to maybe shift the fonts or create something new or even transition an old font into something more relevant." Jonathan: Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of our successful typeface releases come from either new opportunities based on the way that type needs to be used or updates to existing typefaces to make sure that they're catching up with the digital needs of today, right? So take Helvetica as an example. Last year we released Helvetica Now, and it was an update for Helvetica, which cleaned up some of the idiosyncrasies that had caught up with the typeface over the years and make sure that it has all the necessary characters that are used today, some adjustments so that the type looks great on screens versus some of the way the characters were drawn originally, and which didn't translate as well. Jonathan: So those types of updates are really common. And as I said, previously, when you're thinking about a new typeface, you want to think about the challenges that designers are having today and make sure that you're designing it for those needs. Stephanie: So what are some of those challenges, if a brand is thinking right now about I mean, what first comes to mind is maybe creating a logo or something like that? And I think for us, we're pretty, like easy standard. I think we just use like Futura or something like that. But for people who are looking to actually develop their own typeface, what are some challenges they might encounter down the road when it comes to maybe designers trying to use that? Jonathan: Yeah. So if you want to think about all the places where the brand needs to be represented, right? So if you are going to be using your type in an application, like a mobile application, you're going to make sure that the type performs its small sizes, that it looks great on screen and that the readability remains strong when it's presented that way. And you also want to think about your audience, right? Jonathan: So if you're selecting a typeface, and you know that you're going to be communicating with an audience that's global, you have to make sure that you have the necessary characters to ensure that you can communicate in all the languages your audience uses. So those are just a couple of the considerations, but those are big ones. Stephanie: No, that's some good things to keep in mind. So when I'm like... what are some of the maybe top typefaces right now that you see a lot of brands going with? Like, is there anything new that's happening or shifts happening in the world of fonts that maybe hasn't happened up until now? Jonathan: So I mentioned the remaking of typefaces and updating them and that's a big trend. A lot of the big name typeface families like Helvetica and you mentioned Futura are used by these major brands because they know them, they're familiar with them. They know they perform well. They're versatile typefaces, and they're just beautiful designs. And so these updates that are happening, it's a trend that you're seeing more and more of, and what the audience is getting is a broader range of typeface suites which can be exciting so you can extend the family to include more decorative designs so that you can extend the family designs to be more creative with your work. Jonathan: You're getting broader character ranges, which is excellent for taking your brand to different places and geographies. And also some visual adjustments to make sure the performance is there, regardless of what the typeface is. So that's a big one. Stephanie: All right, cool. So I wanted to get into your role a bit. Being at the company for 19 years. I want to hear how it's evolved and what your day to day looks like right now. Jonathan: Sure. So when I started back in the day, it was still really at the dawn of Ecommerce. It was kind of an exciting place to begin, certainly for Ecommerce marketing. Pay per click advertising was just emerging. So I don't think even Google had introduced AdSense at that point. So it was kind of an exciting time and we used all of those things really to establish our Ecommerce business, which when I started, had really just launched. Jonathan: And so at that point, we developed myfonts.com and through my time we've gone through numerous acquisitions. So we have a host of commerce properties, myfonts.com the largest of those today. And so it really went from an Ecommerce marketing roll up into managing operations for an Ecommerce business and took a brief turn in that to focus on a subscription offering and then helped build out a customer success and support organization to help the greater Monotype business grow and ensure that our customers including our enterprise, customers, really have the support that they needed. Jonathan: And more recently kind of turned my focus back over to the Ecommerce world. So now the role is managing the global digital commerce business, which includes our font sites, some of which I just mentioned, a little bit of our indirect business and a relatively new business that's fun and growing, which is called flip font. And it's an application that runs on a mobile phone unless you've changed the UI typeface to one that you purchase from a store. Stephanie: Oh, very cool. Jonathan: Yeah. Stephanie: So what does that look like overseeing the different Ecommerce channels? Like are there different maybe learnings that you're getting from having different websites to be able to like see trends on or see like which ones are doing things successfully, and which ones maybe need to have a little help. What kind of things are you seeing by having that oversight of multiple websites? Jonathan: Yeah, well, that's certainly one of the challenges right? Because it's a lot of businesses rolled up into one business. But there's advantages of that too, right? Because you can test out different techniques on one website. And then if it works out, you can roll it out to others. And one of the challenges is that they all have slightly different audiences, the customers coming from different places, like if you look at the different customer segments, they're not identical. They have different preferences and so you have to act and think in the interest of these different audience segments. Stephanie: Got it. So where are these customers coming from right now? Like, what kind of acquisition channels are you guys using to find new customers and then how are you treating them differently depending on the source of where they came? Jonathan: Yeah. So most of our customers, one of the advantages that we have is that a lot of our typefaces have been in use for many years. And so when a typeface gets, it's purchased and sees used within a project, and that project will spurn additional use, right? Especially if it's in the hands of an agency and an agency might use it with multiple clients. Jonathan: So a lot of people will come to the channels already knowing exactly what they need. And so a lot of the focus is on making sure that we can get that customer who already knows that they need to use this particular font, get them the font, get them in the cart, make sure that they know what license they need, so they can get back to designing as quickly as possible. So that's a lot of the emphasis there. Jonathan: And then the other point of emphasis is really on the discovery phase, and this is for the designer that knows that they need a particular type of typeface, they might have a classification in mind or a couple of different qualities in mind that will suit the needs of their project. So what are the tools that we can provide them, how can we help them filter down the inventory of a hundred thousand plus fonts so they can get down to the one that's really going to be the perfect design, perfect choice for their design. Stephanie: How do you go about personalizing that because I could see it being quite a bit of consulting and education depending on maybe the industry and I could see people also coming in with quite a few wild ideas where when I was looking at design recently it's like, "Okay, don't go too crazy. Don't go too designery or too out there because that stuff will probably got out of style soon." And like, how would someone go about recommending what kind of font a brand should use? Jonathan: Yeah, so I think there's a couple things you can focus on. One is just the making sure that you provide enough tools to help someone navigate the inventory. And so if you understand the attributes of your inventory, you can make it easy to filter down. And also you can go take a look at just the Sans Serif fonts. And then you can look at the Humanistic Sans, not to geek out too much on type here. No, but you can kind of narrow down your selections by the various characteristics of the typefaces for the person that has an idea of what they're looking for. Jonathan: But I think the more fun thing that we do is making sure that we give our customers a sense of how the typeface is going to perform before they purchase, right? So you need a lot of tools that allows the designer to experiment with the typeface before they purchase it. So before they lay their money down, make sure they understand what it's going to look like. And the visuals that we supply are critically important. So making sure that we have the…
Full show notes at the publisherThe COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, and there is a lot of talk about when things will go “back to normal,” or whether this is the “new normal.” Christoph Schell, the Chief Commercial Officer at HP, is spending a lot of time thinking about what this new world will look like. He’s responsible for setting the company’s path and making sure HP is ready to go-to-market in the best ways possible. How he does that is by looking at emerging consumer behaviors and combining that information with hard data, which leads him to design strategies and solutions that, recently, have needed to be deployed faster than anticipated. The pace of change is quicker than ever before, and the five-year roadmap that companies had previously planned for are now taking place in a matter of months. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Christoph explains how this acceleration has forced a change in HP’s roadmap and sales model, and discusses why the new plan is so focused on subscription-based services, supply chain resiliency, and data. Main Takeaways: The Rise of the Prosumer: A new customer segment has emerged in recent months — the prosumer, who is a professional who is now working from home but requires enterprise-level capabilities and technology. Companies like HP have had to pivot to meet the needs of this new group, who are being guided by CIOs investing heavily in workflows and increased security for new work environments. Everybody is an Inside Sales Rep: With much of the world forced to work from home, how business gets done needed to change. This was especially true for sales, which now had to be done fully remote through digital interactions. But working with many retail partners and revamping an entire sales model is no easy task. All About Supply Chains: Creating a resilient supply chain is one of the biggest challenges companies face today. For global companies, that challenge is made trickier by things like tariffs and other cultural and legal issues that may arise. To become antifragile in the supply chain means to have the ability to assess all your partners from every angle in order to see where roadblocks may occur and if they are surmountable. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show, we have Christoph Schell, the Chief Commercial Officer at HP Inc. Stephanie: Cristoph, welcome. Christoph: Thanks for having me. Stephanie: If it was any other time, I would have you in studio, I'd have you walk down the street to come here but here we are, on Zoom, even though we're basically neighbors. Christoph: That's true. Stephanie: So I want to hear a little bit about your journey. I saw that you have been at HP for more than 21 years which I was like, "Whoa." That's a long time. So I want to hear a little bit about how you came to HP and what that journey looked like to becoming a Chief Commercial Officer, which is where you are now. Christoph: Yeah. So look, you probably can hear this. I'm German. I started with HP in Germany, in '95, as an intern. I did a six month internship in the business school that I went to and I worked with HP as a business analyst and then back for another year to school. And yeah, then actually graduated and I wanted a job at HP but HP had a hiring freeze back then and so I went to P&G in Germany as well. And then one a half years into it, went back to HP. Moved with HP to the middle east. I was eight years in Dubai and then Australia, Singapore, San Diego, back to Singapore. Then I left HP again. I went to a company called [Phillips] and I stayed there for close to two years. And then in 2014, came back to HP. This time, in Palo Alto. And yeah, since then I've been with HP here in Palo Alto. Stephanie: That's amazing. So what does your current role look like now? Christoph: Look, it's a new role. I mean for all these years that I was in HP, there was a lot of change. But actually, one thing that never changed, we always had the globe organized into three regions. These regions were the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and Asia, Pacific, and Japan. And we decided last year that we will change that and we did away with the three regions and moved to ten markets. These ten markets are reporting now into a central structure that we call The Commercial Organization and I'm heading the team of The Commercial Organization. Christoph: And we're basically responsible for all go-to-market, and from category management, we do the product management. We're responsible for basically the revenue and the margin and positioning the products correctly to get with our marketing teams and global business units. So in a classic marketing term, you would say we manage the four P's, the four P's of marketing. And we do that globally. Stephanie: Got it. So tell me a little bit about behind the scenes of why you moved the org structure to the ten markets instead of the three regional one. Like what was the driving force behind that? Christoph: The driving force to me, and I was leading that project from the get-go when we designed this new structure, was a change that we saw in how our customers wanted to consume our technology and how they went shopping. And actually it's interesting to see that COVID-19 has accelerated a lot of this. Christoph: So a lot of our go-to-market has moved online. Either to marketplaces or to online businesses, these can be partners or even our own store. And customers go back and forth between these. They get some of their information during the journey, on the marketplace, on HP, with the partners. Some of them go obviously to publications, they listen to podcasts. And they form an opinion. And when you want to be there with them all the way, you need to be very consistent. Very consistent in how you show up, very consistent in how you manage additional assets. And very consistent in how you get your value proposition across, globally, internationally. And we thought that the structure that we had of three independent regions resulted in too much decentralized decision taking when it came to four P management but also basically, basic definitions of value proposition. Christoph: And so, we centralized this a lot more. We took a lot more control in how we manage it. And that was the big, driving force behind the structural change. There is, hand-in-hand with this, a move to go more and more into subscription-based engagement with customers. And we can talk about this a little bit later. And that's also a lot easier to do in a digital go-to-market, and digitally engage with customers. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned COVID earlier and I've heard from quite a few guests that their tech or product roadmaps that were maybe for three years to come, that sped up into three months. So what kind of changes has HP seen when it comes to COVID? Christoph: Yeah, look, I will echo that. I really believe that what we've seen now happening in five months is what our plan, our roadmap had to schedule to happen in five years. So there was a huge acceleration. Basically, the way I would summarize it is this move to digital has been accelerated, the move from transactional engagements to subscription-based engagements has accelerated. The request of customers to have more personalized experiences has increased. And that has a profound impact on how we design products. It has a major impact on our roadmap that has clearly changed if I compare from February to now. Christoph: But it also has a significant impact in how we think about talent, how we think about culture that we want to build within HP. It's actually very exciting. The core of our business is around personal systems and printing. And there are categories within personal systems and printing that have become essential during COVID-19. You know, the good-old PC is very hip right now. A lot of people need it to work from home or to learn from home and even home printing which a lot of people stopped even looking at as a desirable purchase, has been coming back in attractiveness. And it's essential, again, for people that work from home and that learn from home. Christoph: And so that helps us a lot to offset some of the headwinds that we see clearly in an office environment with people working from home. Obviously the office business is a little bit neutered right now. So those are the big changes. Stephanie: So how are you guys handling these big changes? Like what were some of the biggest pivots that you had to make over these past couple months and how are you aligning team members and everyone around a big cause like that that is probably shifting a lot of the plans, like you had mentioned, and condensing them into a very short time. Christoph: I'm going to answer this across a couple of headlines. So the first one is really, roadmap. So if you stay with these essential categories of working from home and learning from home, what is really interesting to see is that COVID-19, to me, has created a new customer segment. I call this the consumer segment. And what I mean by that is that you have employees that work from home and expect enterprise type of deliverables in their home. Their CIO's want to make sure that they can work securely and in a compliant way from home. And that required us to think about how can we bring assets that we have usually in an enterprise go-to-market, how can you bring that into individual employee's home? So that's the first change in roadmap that you see. A lot of investment into workflow. A lot of investment into security. Christoph: The second notion under this headline is, when you run an employee's home, you are also participating in how the family entertains itself. And that gives you a boost in how you think about your consumer value proposition and your consumer roadmap. And so, we saw these two things merging. We had to, in the past for example, a product called Instant Ink. It's a replenishment service where your printer sits in the cloud and you pay $2.99 or $4.99 or $9.99 a month and you get a certain page amount based on the subscription that you pay. When your ink levels in your cartridges are at a certain level, we will replenish those and send them automatically to your home. So you don't have to leave the home to go shopping for ink. Christoph: And that has, during COVID-19, really hit a nerve and we saw subscriptions going up. Now the cool thing about this is that you build a very loyal engagement with your customers. And the loyalty that we have on this product is really very impressive. We like the numbers and we have really thought about how can we take this and engage on it from an enterprise point of view and satisfying some of the CIO needs of having employees print from home? That's number one. It requires a bit of infrastructure investments that we're thinking about how can we take this program and scale it further globally from the countries that we're in today to get a more complete coverage. So I think that's one point. Christoph: The second point is, around the headline of supply chain. I think, my generation, we have learned how to optimize supply chain for cost. But we had to now learn that you need to also optimize supply chains for resiliency. And that is a very complex topic to do that when you manage a global business and when you produce some of the products that we have, some of the portfolio that we have, we own the manufacturing. Some others, we do that with equipment manufacturers. And so coordinating that, working on strategies and how to, on the one-hand side, still be cost-effective but on the other-hand side, be more resilient, is actually very interesting. And so that's an ongoing project but clearly something that COVID-19 has required us to do. Christoph: And then the third element is how we manage customers and how we allow customers to really enjoy our technology and consume our technology and I said this before, COVID-19 has been for families, but also for businesses, a concern. A concern to their bottom line, a concern to their cashflow. And so moving from Capex investments to apex investments around subscription engagements and contractual engagements is something that is super important right now and we're bringing those business models to the forefront of our offering. So those are the three headlines I would like to touch on. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, maybe let's start with the prosumer shift as you call it. I want to hear a bit about how ... So you were focused B2B and on enterprises and maybe not as much on consumer prior to this. How did you shift your mindset and really understand what the consumers are looking for and what they need? How did you change that sales model to be more consumer-focused and at home and working at home and learning at home? Christoph: We very quickly saw an increasing need of customers to become productive working from home. And it started really with a lot of global accounts, enterprise accounts. Think about the financial service industry. Think about call centers that all of a sudden had to move thousands of people that they had in call centers to working from home. And to do that in a compliant way to the enterprise, in a secure way, with cyber attacks going through the roof during COVID-19 because home networks are not as well protected as our usually office networks. That created an immediate request from our customers to come back with solutions, how can we do that? How can you enable us doing that? And can you please do this in a way that we don't have to transact with you but we in through a service [inaudible] engagement? That was the very first thing that happened. Christoph: The second thing that came right on the heel of that was, hey, we need the kids to go back to school and they need to do this online. How can we do that? What's the best ecosystem? It's not just a question of what device you buy but you have to actually think about with school districts, how is it best to move a curriculum online? What's the best way to partner from a technology point of view, what solutions do we have in the ecosystem? If I think about Microsoft, if I think about Google, if I think about other service providers we have? And then again, how do you package that? In the beginning there was a lot of demand for mobility products. And right now, I actually start seeing a shift to a more desktop products because I think kids and their parents are learning the hard way that if you sit six, seven, eight hours a day in front of a small screen, it's not very easy to stay focused and concentrate. So getting them the best possible setup to learn, to read from a large display, to maybe have the speaker set, to have a good microphone for voice. All of this becomes very important. Christoph: And how did they learn this to life from a business modeling point of view, again, was very interesting. In the US, a lot of the education business is still transaction for us but we have other countries where we are letting kids and school districts consume on a subscription model. And so this is something I think that COVID will further. Christoph: So I think those are the two clear item…
Full show notes at the publisherWhy wouldn’t someone like free swag? That’s not a rhetorical question. In fact, Jeremy Parker has been trying to answer that question since he co-founded Swag.com in 2016. Jeremy knew that swag and other promotional items were becoming key marketing tools, and he saw an opportunity to build a business that brought those items straight to the people who needed them. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jeremy takes us behind the scenes of what it was like building Swag.com, including how he went from 3,000 organic site visitors in a month to more than 40,000 organic visitors. The journey to that success was paved with many hiccups, including the difficulty that comes with building an ecommerce platform from scratch, and trying to land their first big-name customer by walking around that company’s campus until they found a buyer. But today, Swag.com can handle unlimited orders, and that first customer was a little company called Facebook. How did it happen? Learn that and more on this episode. Main Takeaways: The Snowball Effect — Attracting customers is always easier when you have a proven track record that you can point to. Therefore, it is critical to land key accounts in the early days that can be referenced in future sales conversations. Because when you can point to one successful company that works with you, other companies will follow suit. What To Know About SEO — Good SEO doesn’t happen by accident. Even though you might have great products and a thriving customer base, organic growth doesn’t happen unless you’re paying attention to your content strategy and making the necessary little tweaks that will bump you up in the search results. If You Build It, They Will Come — When deciding on your product offerings, you have to get inside your customers’ heads and build up an inventory of things that people actually want. Sometimes that means you have to get your hands dirty, do some testing and try things that don’t scale before finally settling on the right blend of offerings. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show we have Jeremy Parker, the co-founder and CEO at Swag.com. Jeremy, how's it going? Jeremy: Hey, thanks so much for having me. Stephanie: I'm excited to talk all things swag. You saw my shirt hoodie. I was ready for you this morning. I have everything branded mission. Jeremy: Every everyone needs a little schtickle of swag in their life. Stephanie: I agree. What is the first piece of swag that you remember? Jeremy: Oh, wow. For myself, I've been going to a ridiculous number of trade shows and events over the years. Honestly the earliest swagger member was stuff that I ended up throwing away and that's one that gave me one of the ideas for Swag.com and we wanted to make sure we only offer products that people actually want to keep. That was my main mission from the very beginning. Stephanie: Yeah, same here. I remember getting a bunch of stuff and throwing it away, but I remember being so excited it was back I think in 2010, it was like my first finance conference and I got like a Koozie. I was so excited because it was like the first thing that I'd ever gotten for free maybe and finances a little bit. Sticklers is about giving stuff away for free. And I look back and laugh now because I would go and collect all this stuff and it would ultimately end up being nothing that I really used. Jeremy: 100%. From the very beginning of our business, we were thinking of swag as an amazing marketing tool if it's used right, so obviously that's a big caveat. And when you think of just marketing in general and you have TV commercials and everyone's trained to now fast forward through commercials and you get a magazine, you flip through the ads, or you put your ad blocker on your computer. If you give somebody really high quality swag, they say, “Thank you.” It's really a powerful tool if it's done really right. And it has to be something that people are actually going to want to use. We don't really like to push the flashiest thing or the new hottest thing. It's all about what are people that actually use every day and get those impressions of. Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. Before we dive way too deep into Swag.com, I want to hear a little bit about your background because I see you've done a lot of things in your previous life. And I wanted to kind of hear what your journey was like before founding Swag.com. Jeremy: Sure. I was a documentary filmmaker actually in college, that's why I went to school for. I actually never wanted to be a filmmaker when I went to Boston University. And I looked at the curriculum and I really wanted it to be in high school my whole … Before college life I always wanted to be a marketing guy. I was always into branding and commercials and how to tell stories through marketing. When I went to school and I looked at the syllabus of film and marketing, they really were the exact same thing, except for film taught me how to make videos. And this is right at the onset of like YouTube. I thought that would become valuable. I became like probably the first filmmaker at BU history that never actually wanted to be a filmmaker. Jeremy: But as I was in school for those four years, I ended up making a feature length documentary that ended up winning the audience award at the Vail Film Festival. And I was [inaudible] and I walked down and the brunch the next day after the award ceremony and half the room are these major celebrities and half the room are these struggling filmmakers. And I did kind of an internal gut check of, am I good enough? Is this what I want to do with my life? And it wasn't, so right after I won this award, when people primarily feel like on a high, they're like, “Oh, I'm going to become the biggest filmmaker,” my thought was, “What else am I going to do? What's my plan? What's really my plan? What am I good at?” Jeremy: And when I graduated college, I didn't know what I was good at. I had no real experience in business or anything, but I thought maybe I should start something and just learn what I'm good at, what I enjoyed. I started a t-shirt company right out of college when I was 21, 22. And really I thought t-shirt sounds so simple, but really you're learning manufacturing, PR, marketing, building an Ecommerce experience, all the different aspects of business, fulfillment, all these different things. And I tried to figure out what I was really good at. Jeremy: And over the last 10 years, I've done a lot of different things. I started the company with my brother and Jesse Itzler. Jesse is the co-founder of Marquis Jet, private jet company. He sold ZICO Coconut Water to Coca-Cola. He's one of the owners of Atlanta Hawks. I started a company with him where we partnered up with different celebrity influencers and we owned their celebrity rights to Twitter and Facebook feeds before people knew how valuable it was. This was nine years ago or so. Jeremy: So [inaudible] a lot of celebrities, buying their rights. That company ultimately got bought by a publicly traded company. I then went on to start a social networking app that ultimately failed. Never start a social networking app, I'll tell you that. Extremely difficult. Stephanie: Semi-hard. Jeremy: Yeah, it's semi-hard to do. And we built an app called Vouch. That basically was about like Oprah's favorite things democratize for everybody. You could vouch for your favorite movie and book and charity and anything you'd want to vouch for and people who follow you really get to know what you like. Really kind of making the like button with its own platform. We ended up having 100,000 plus users. We had tons of influences. It just never materialized. And after doing that for three years, I realized that the next business I want to start, it needs to be something where we made money from day one, I could give a service and a product and I started Swag.com. Jeremy: So, it's been almost five years at this point with Swag. We were just named the 218 fastest growing company on the Inc. 5000. We have 5,000 companies from Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, TikTok, Spotify buying on our site and we spent a really big portion of that building is automated experience for purchasing swag. And now it's about, now how do you handle the distribution of swag? It's more than just making it easy to buy. How do you get into the hands of people? And especially now with this pandemic, that's really the most important thing. Stephanie: Yeah, I was just going to touch on that. I know everyone's probably wondering with everything going on, where conferences are being obviously canceled and not coming back for a while. How are you guys handling that? Because I'm that the swag industry right now is down overall. What are you guys doing right now to not be part of that downward spiral? Jeremy: Yeah, that's a 100% true. They just came up with numbers. ASI, which is like the big organization for promotional products, just came out to number that over 92% of companies in our industry are down approximately 50% in Q2 this year versus last year. So, it's really bad. And then obviously it makes sense on the surface where you have our core buyer was like the HR manager buying for onboarding of new hires. That was one of our big purchases and no one's hiring right now. That business goes away. And then you have the marketing teams buying for trade shows and there's no trade shows happening, so that business goes away. Jeremy: Then you have the office manager buying for internal office and company culture, and no one's in the office right now. You have all these different buyers that really are not buying swag for the normal, the typical reasons to buy swag. So like everyone in our industry, we were very nervous like what's going to happen. And what we've been able to do is take this platform, our swag distribution platform, which is what we're really pushing and what we're really excited about. We'd been building this really amazing platform over the last two years, specifically for marketing managers. That was the initial idea of it. Allowing marketing managers to easily be able to buy swag and then send swag to the remote customers or to best leads to close sales. Jeremy: That was their initial intention. But obviously with this pandemic and everyone's working remotely, it's transitioned to office managers and HR managers really buying swag in bulk and sending it to the remote employees addresses to keep the company culture thriving, even when no one's in the office, so much so that not only are we not one of the 92%, that's downloading over 50% our Q2 this year was more than our Q2 of last year and July was almost double our last year July. And it was our best month ever and August is even better than that. We're really growing frankly in a crazy time for everyone. Stephanie: That's amazing. Now, I'm thinking about it. I ordered swag for our team maybe two years ago and the process, it was crazy. It was so much back and forth of like, “Here's your quote. Oh, you want to more of this? Okay. Here's your new quote? Here's what the design might look like.” It was just a lot. And then of course the big box came to me and then I had to maybe ship things out individually or wait until I saw people in-person if I was being a little cheap. What does it look like now I'm thinking about reordering hoodies and shirts for our team members? But of course I would have to individually maybe shift them out again or are you guys different? What is your process look like that's so different than others? Jeremy: Really simple. On our site, we have very curated selection of products. You're not going to be overwhelmed with too many options. Say the top 25 mugs, you find a mug you could use our filtering tools, really easy to search by color or price point or your type of brands. You find the product you upload your logo. Our system will detect how many colors are in your logo, in the nearest Pantone match. We're making sure we're printing, Coca-Cola red and not Staples red. Once the logo is uploaded, you can maneuver the rounds, you can mark everything up. You select on your quantity price adjuster in real time and checkout. It literally takes less than three minutes to buy swag. There's no back and forth. You can also use our instant quote tool, if you wanted to quote things out before you want to go through the design process on our site, you can upload your different variables, the quantity that you're looking for, how many print locations, the number of colors in the print. It takes two seconds and you're coordinating things out. Jeremy: So, there's no back and forth emails, there's no phone calls, there's no presentation decks. It's none of it. It's really completely automated streamlined. And then when you're going through the checkout flow, obviously you can input your own address, so we'll ship everything to your office. Or if you want us to handle all the distribution for you, there's a pink button on that shipping page that says, one is to hold your swag and inventory easily distributed, [inaudible 00:09:29]. You click on the button, you follow the onboarding and then we hold all of your swag in this online Swag closet if you will, where you can manage all of your inventory in real time. If you're ever running low in stock, we'll send you smart notifications to restock. If you want to send 1,000 different locations, you upload a CSV file we'll calculate the shipping costs in real time, based on the product you selected, where they're going. Jeremy: Once you pay for that, we grab those products off the shelf and we're shipping it all over the world for you. We really streamlined the entire experience. We take it a step further if you wanted it, some companies want this, some companies don't, but we have a whole ability to create different inventory closets for location or for a department. You can have a marketing closet versus a sales closet, versus your London office or New York office. Different people should get access to it. There's different permission settings, approval flows, et cetera. You could really break it down by department, by location and we're doing this with a lot of global main companies all over the world. Also, a lot of small startups who just want to use our service as a way to distribute swag. Stephanie: I was looking through your site and I saw products there that I haven't seen in other swag companies. And I wanted to talk a little bit about how you guys go about picking your products because all of them seemed high quality where oftentimes, I'll go through it and I'll find 50 different shirts on a custom t-shirt company website. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, actually let me look through all the reviews. Let me see if they're good. Okay. 95% of them are all bad. They all have bad reviews, bad fits, whatever.” How do you go about making sure that you only have high quality stuff there that people will actually want? Jeremy: That's a…
Full show notes at the publisherAlthough many brands were forced to invest a bit more into their ecommerce operations in 2020 than they expected, many still have brick and mortar stores that need attention, too. Foot traffic is down at local malls and on Main Streets all over the world, but there is a way to bring people back to that in-store experience. Audrey Gauthier is the Vice-President of Marketing and Ecommerce for Little Burgundy, a multi-brand footwear retailer owned by Genesco. She believes that an omnichannel approach and some creative partnerships are the answer to this widespread problem. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Audrey, (who called in all the way from Montréal) explains that customers who are comfortable with both in-store and online shopping will ultimately be your highest-value customers. She dives into how Little Burgundy is driving conversions in both areas through partnerships with local creatives and businesses that bring more in-store traffic while also providing new and exciting online shopping experiences. Plus, Audrey reminds us why concentrating on the basics of logistics and shipping is what ultimately builds confidence with your customer base. Main Takeaways: Is the Partnership Worth It?: There are common problems facing stores, malls, and other retailers in every country. If you can find a strategic partnership that benefits all parties, you can not only revive your own business but help bring more prosperity to an entire community. (Pro Tip: Metrics matter. When measuring the success of these kinds of partnerships, pay attention to the average order value, traffic, and engagement numbers.) National Reach With Local Flavor: Whether you are a mom and pop shop or a worldwide brand, connections are a key driver for success. Bringing local artists and creators into the in-store or online experience can help build a stronger connection to the people in the communities you’re working in that can carry your company even farther. Would You Like To Leave A Comment?: When there are open and transparent lines of communication through all levels of an organization, improvements that have real impact can be made much easier. When an in-store sales associate can easily present feedback she received from a customer to the ecommerce or marketing team, that customer insight which may have gone unnoticed before can instead be turned into a new solution or campaign. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Stephanie: Today on the show, we have Audrey Gauthier The vice-president of marketing and ecommerce for the Little Burgundy division of Genesco. Audrey, welcome. Audrey: Hi. Thank you. Stephanie: Thanks for coming on the show. Audrey: Yeah, sure. My pleasure. Stephanie: It feels like you're so far away. Where are you calling in from today? Audrey: I'm in Montreal, actually. That's where my accent is coming from as well. Stephanie: I love it. Are you guys opening up your retail stores of Little Burgundy or are you still strictly working from home? Audrey: We opened up the office. In Montreal, actually, we're allowed to have 25% of the employees working from the office, so we manage our calendar for people that want to go back to working from the office, but also everyone can actually work from home if they prefer as well. Stephanie: Very cool. So before we dive into Little Burgundy, I wanted to go through your background a bit. I saw that you've worked in the world of ecommerce for about a decade, and I wanted to hear what drew you to ecommerce, and a little bit about your journey. Audrey: Yeah, sure. I mean, I first started my career after a master in administration. At the beginning after my studies, I really wanted to work for ad agency, but after interviews had gotten me really into retail world, so I started for La Vie En Rose, which is also a Canadian-based retailer out of Montreal. It's a lingerie retailer, could be similar at the smaller case to Victoria's Secret. And I quickly fell in love with all the opportunities at ecommerce and the endless possibilities and creativity that goes really beyond the activation that we're doing, but also in terms of troubleshooting. So, really it's what got me in ecommerce. Audrey: And then after I got an opportunity within the Aldo Group and then continue my career in footwear since about seven to eight years now. Stephanie: Very cool. So what have been some of your favorite campaigns that you've worked on over the years? Audrey: One of my favorite campaign was actually the first time we shot abroad. We went to Mexico City and worked with combination of talents that we brought with us from Montreal and some others that were local based. That was just an amazing experience to be able to shoot abroad for a campaign that was going to live both in store and also in the digital side, so really exciting. And I would add to that that's recently just navigating to COVID and our new reality, coming up with our fall-winter campaign and trying to really connect with the customer with this new reality and just reinvent ourself was really fun and different and challenging, but a good end for me. Stephanie: I'd love it if you could highlight what Little Burgundy is. Audrey: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Little Burgundy is a multi brand retailer. We started back in 2008. We were initially launched by the Aldo Group and acquired by the Genesco Group back in 2015, so about five years ago. And, I mean, we're really boutique sale retailer, so we only have 38 stores. We're pretty strong on ecommerce as well. But even though we're a nationwide retailer, we really tend to do things locally and try to connect with local communities. Our stores look a bit different from every region. We try to partner also with local influencers, local artists and ambassadors. So, I would describe us as, really, a multi brand retailer that carry brands like Dr. Marten's, Converse, Vans, brands that you can get in a lot of other retail stores, but we even though we're multi brand, we really have a strong artistic brand DNA. Stephanie: That's great. So, when it comes to forming partnerships with the local talent or the artists, how do you guys approach that? Because I think that is really important when you're walking into a really fun, nice shoe store, you've got good music going, you've got good art around, but how do you guys think about finding new artists or finding people that are a good fit? Audrey: There's a lot of searching, I would say, especially if they came into consideration that doing business in Canada and most specifically in the Quebec province, we always love to do everything in French and English. And that goes as well for even the music in our stores. There's certain laws in Quebec that you need certain amounts of songs that play in your playlist in the store that needs to be in French, so we need to manage our playlist in store so we enough French songs and local artists from Montreal. But that goes as well from people that are connecting with artists. Our musician, for example, from Toronto or Ottawa are really different than the people that are connecting with more local based Montreal and French artists. Audrey: So there's a lot of researching from my team, either through connections and contacts or Instagram, Facebook ... just always trying to be in the know of who's up and coming. And also, we're still a pretty small player, so budget wise, in terms of collaboration, we really love to just be highlighting new artists that are up and coming, and [inaudible] the ones that have been seen around by every other retailers or partners. Stephanie: That's really fun. That seems like such a great way to lift up the community and really help out a lot of people, like you said, the artists and people who are doing really cool work. Audrey: Yeah, absolutely. Stephanie: Cool. So tell me a little bit about how you're thinking about, so you have your retail stores opening back up soon, and you also have your ecommerce stores going. Tell me a little bit about how you're thinking about the omnichannel approach and how you want to sync them together so it all feels similar. Audrey: I see really that regardless of the channel, we really need to provide the very best experience we can to our customer. In the recent months, there've been a lot of customer that for the time they shopped with us online. They used to be in-store customer. And we saw from the data that the customer that do shop in both channels are the one that are bringing the most revenue to the company if they're active in store, but as well online. Audrey: So I think moving forward, we're not only going to try to drive our business either online or in store, but really convert them both. And some initiative in regards to that, for us in our end will be solution like we call [Book Us 00:09:28] for example. So you buy it online and then you can go within the next hour in your favorite shop and maybe spend a bit less time in store, but at least it's reserved, it's for you, you can try it, try your size, especially in footwear, because it could be quite tricky in terms of size. So you can go in store, have that experience, but it's more fast and easy because you've done your pre shopping online, you reserved your item, you know it's waiting in store for you. The store's assistant is there to maybe offer you an alternative product if that doesn't work for you. Audrey: So, I think all of that omnichannel experience and improving both the in-store, but as well, the online is going to be key, same thing with just the shipping and return as well. So, I mean, if you decide to go in-store, try the product, we don't have it. We currently order it for you and then it can be delivered either to the store or your home. But we need to do a better job of just shipping faster, same-day delivery without pain, returning it the way you want, either in-store or to a delivery location without any cost, without any trouble to go through, or you don't have to call customer service. Audrey: So, I think on the logistic end, that's where we're actually going to win in the upcoming years of ecommerce. Stephanie: I love that. And I saw on your website that it said you could return shoe within 365 days. Is that right? Audrey: Yeah, exactly. That's something we always been actually doing with Genesco. The only thing is we've never really been pushing it, so through COVID and the culture of our stores, that was the type of messaging that we were putting up front of the customer, just to reassure them in their process, especially for the new digital customer that were used to maybe buy in store and become more comfortable with returning in store the next week or within the next two weeks. Stephanie: Yeah. I think that's so important to get someone to feel like there is no risk with buying if you can't get it back in a year. It sounds such a good idea, to have people come back and store so they can get comfortable with the experience and get a part of the in-person experience that you guys have built up. So how are you thinking about other ways to drive them in the store that maybe isn't competing with the free shipping? Because it seems like it'd be hard to want to go in store if I know that I could buy something online and ship it back for free for a whole year. Audrey: Yeah. It's been an ongoing question, to be honest, since we've been reopening our stores. I mean, traffic has been, even prior to COVID, it was a little bit down in malls, and it was already hard to get customer to actually go in-store. So, our job is even tougher in terms of really just increasing that traffic and really making sure that the customer do show up as well in store. So we're looking at doing special launches, special partnership as well. I think a good way of winning, especially in tough situation like we are is doing partnership maybe with other retailers. We recently done a partnership as well with RBC Bank in Canada. So that was a way to get new customers. Audrey: I mean, downtown is pretty much still dead for us in Montreal, as well as Toronto. The traffic has significantly decreased overall, not just in shops, but in restaurants and bars and every places, but for the ones that are still going downtown to maybe give a special promotion that they can get on their lunch break or something like that. Audrey: So we're really just trying to work more closely with other retailers, other partners, the malls also itself, or if it's a street store to work with, like the neighborhood, that store to find partnership and ways that we can all together bring more traffic to our stores. Stephanie: Very cool. So, what kind of launches or partnerships are you seeing success with right now? What kind of things are you trying out that are working? Audrey: The RBC partnership that we've done, it was basically giving an exclusive offer to the RBC Bank members. It was successful in the way that it brought a lot of new customer to Little Burgundy and they were also high-value customers that were spending more than average. So in a time where businesses is tough, definitely that was a good win for us. Audrey: Another one is we have this student price card in Canada, it's called SPC. And it's giving discount to members of SPC when they are student and could be applicable in multiple retail location. So that's another way that other partnership that we're seeing, that it doesn't change the entire business, but it does add up at the end with multiple type of partnership like this. Audrey: And I think another good way of winning is working closer definitely with the malls, because at the end of the day, we're in the same boat. We're all seeing either decrease of traffic and difficult business. So I think we need tighter communication with the malls and the partnership, if they're doing an event to really involve the retailers as well. With one of the mall regroupments here in Canada, Cadillac Fairview, they're doing a incentive during the holiday, so if a customer buy Cadillac Fairview $100 gift card, then they can get special items in certain participant store. So that's another way of, again, in terms of traffic and partnership, try to get more customer into our doors. Stephanie: Yeah. That seems like definitely the way of the future is figuring out how to partner with people who are around you to create really good experiences. Yeah. It seems very smart. Stephanie: Are there any metrics that you pay attention to when you're forming these partnerships and these spatial launches? Audrey: Mm-hmm (affirmative) As I was saying, with RBC, the average order value, the revenue it's bringing, but also in terms of long term, are they staying customer? The acquisition that we're doing through that partnership, are they going to redo a purchase in the next six months and then next year, or that was really just a one-time to get the promotion, so it's a little bit less valuable for us? So, these are definitely metrics that we're paying attention. Stephanie: That's great. So how do you keep custo…
Full show notes at the publisherWhy don’t more companies offer affordable international shipping? The answer is because navigating the world of VAT, customs, international duties, and other intricacies make this too much of a headache for most eCommerce operators. Additionally, technical components, payment options, logistics and, yes, varying holiday calendars are all variables that a company needs to consider when it is expanding globally. It’s nearly impossible to do without some sort of help. So the question becomes how do you face this nightmare ready and prepared? That’s where Matthew Merrilees comes in. Matthew is the CEO, North America for Global-e, and they solve these problems. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Matthew shares the ins and outs of what it takes to equip your ecommerce brand for international expansion. Whether you need to address currency concerns or want to understand the data that drives your competitors to success in the market, Matthew shares those secrets and more on today’s episode. Main Takeaways: Is It a Holiday? — When brands expand internationally, it’s important to know and plan for holidays that affect customers in every single market. There are opportunities being missed by companies who are too focused on the big international holidays and not enough on local strategy. Pay With Ease — Customers want transactions to be simple. Anything that makes a transaction hard, or confusing, will almost certainly result in an abandoned purchase. Implementing an integrated, hyper-localized payment and taxation strategy is one of the first things companies need to consider when expanding internationally. Plan B — Companies and individuals are currently experiencing many unexpected disruptions in life and business. Being able to navigate through those disruptions is necessary in order to continue providing the best possible customer experience. Creating contingency plans and backup systems to deploy if there is a disruption in your logistics or backend operations will take you a long way. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org. And today on the show, we have Matthew Merrilees, the CEO of North America at Global-e. Matthew, Welcome. Matthew: Hey, pleasure to be here Stephanie. Thanks so much for having me. Stephanie: So, I want to dive in a bit into your background. It looks like you've worked at a lot of different logistics companies. Before we touch on Global-e, I was hoping we could go over your background a bit and how you got to where you are. Matthew: Yeah, for sure. It gets a bit about me, and my background, definitely started, I would say from call it my family history, just the family history of fathers and brothers. And call it family members who grew up in operations logistics, and obviously [inaudible] Ecommerce. So, I think as I followed the family tree and fell into place, I think all in all it definitely did kick off and start my career at DHL Express, where I spent quite a number of years in various different positions, leadership roles, and such. And then made the transition to FedEx where I definitely did a lot of the same. And obviously, now here at Global-e. I think when you look at the background, straight from university into the logistics arena, was quite exciting. Stephanie: Yep. Very cool. So tell me a little bit about Global-e. What is the company? And what kind of customers do you guys have? And how do you interact with them? Matthew: Yeah, for sure. What we are is a cross border enablement platform, right? We focus primarily in three different arenas that support our brands, which is in boosting international conversion rates, which is boosting overall sales and revenue of course. And then most importantly, boosting customer satisfaction for an international transaction. Right? So I think when you look at the vast portfolio of brands that we work with from a global perspective... I mean, we worked with over 350 enterprise global brands, right? Matthew: So when you look at some of the likes of, let's just call it Forever 21, Reformation and Anastasia Beverly Hills, Marc Jacobs, Hugo boss, Versace. But, I think when you look at the broad gamut of brands, I mean it is something that is, for me, always eye opening. Just how we're able to help take an international transaction and really, truly localize it to a way that consumer in that individual market would really expect to buy online. And I think there's a lot of barriers when you look at the international market and how we help these brands really position that data, that knowledge, that insight, and that expertise is really I'd say where we come in and help. Stephanie: Cool. And what stage does a company need to be at to partner with Global-e? Do they need to be as big as Forever 21, or could a new DTC company also utilize your great services? Matthew: Really it's any size, shape or brand. I would say just over I think seven years ago now we deployed the business, right? And I think we came out of the gate with a very strong enterprise focus. But, I think as we evolved we saw the demand in market for small medium enterprise type brands. Really it's any size, shape or brand who has let's just call it an Ecommerce platform running an online digital storefront. And it is someone that obviously has an Ecommerce strategy in place today. So it's not just the Bigs that I think you see in the market that we continue to focus on and then come into the portfolio. I think it's also those brands that are digitally native, that are really looking to capture revenue outside of their home market. So I think it's really any size, shape or size customer that could lead to that discussion. Stephanie: Cool. I was hoping we could kind of start the episode there around what are maybe some international fails you see happening with brands right now, or hiccups that maybe new companies would encounter if they don't use a solution that figures out all the different challenges when selling across borders. Matthew: Yeah, for sure. I think sales are important. Obviously, I think brands all have different approaches to sale, right? There are some heavy sale brands by design. There are some flash sale businesses out there that really drive high, heavy traffic to a limited amount of inventory. And then I think there's your typical sale holidays where everyone's on sale, which is typically your Black Friday type periods that we recognize here in the North American market. But, I think as brands start to think internationally and think what sales exists outside of just this US home market. For us, we start to really get into the education process, which is number one; what are the holidays that are happening outside of the USA? Is it Singles Day? Is it Boxing Day? Is it Click Frenzy in Australia, for example? Which I think is the beginning part for a lot of the brands that we tend to work with. Matthew: I'd say number one, what are the holidays? What and where do these holidays exist? And then number two, how do you get prepared in order to approach that consumer? Is it a similar approach that we have to a domestic customer here in the US? They're going to need to be spoken to and treated in a unique way that more relates to them in that market. So I think sales are critically important. But, I think with branding awareness of when they're happening, why they're happening, and how to really give that consumer, let's just say the customer satisfaction experience that they would expect, is important. Stephanie: Yep. Are there any holidays that come to mind that you've seen a bunch of brands missing? Because I've heard of a couple of them like Singles Day. I think especially more recently, we started hearing about these other sales that go on around the world. But, is there any big opportunities or a time when you say, "Hey, there's a sale happening." And a lot of brands are like, "Oh, I've never heard of that." Or, "That's never come across my radar before." But, it's like a big important one? Matthew: Honestly, the three I listed, and the reason for listing them is because they are the most important, that typically I would say a lot of brands are just not aware of. And believe it or not, don't have strategies planned around. They used to be sales, and I think that specifically the two in both Boxing Day, and I'd say most importantly, Click Frenzy, is probably the one that is most highly missed out of the portfolio of brands. Just saying, "Wow! Click Frenzy, I didn't realize how large it was." And it's something that we absolutely want to help tailor to our market, which is such a key focus market for a lot of US brands in Australia. Stephanie: Got it. So what kind of strategies are you maybe suggesting to them? Maybe we'll focus on those two. How would you walk a brand through these holidays and maybe how to approach it to get into that market? Matthew: I think it all begins with the communication. So number one, we talked about the education, the awareness, which is obviously going to be key. And then I think with the brand. Every brand, as I mentioned earlier, the approach sale differently. So I think when you look at whether it be a flash sale business, whether it be a traditionally just natively sale business, who's very highly discounted down to high luxury brands that like to go on sale at certain times per year, typically two times or so per year, I think it all begins with their engagement. And obviously a lot of the brands, they free up their time for these marketing efforts. And we help break down a lot of barriers to get them to focus their time on the strategy. But, I think it begins with a setting strategy for each one of these markets. Matthew: And it begins with communication. How are you going to touch that consumer? How are you going to touch that consumer in a way that relates locally to them? And then obviously making sure that you have all the tools in place to execute on that sale so that when that consumer hits for an Australian day like Frenzy, they're seeing their currency in Australian dollars. They're aware of GST and the 10% that has to be captured on every single order that is being built in your product price. These are things that you need to communicate, "Hey, we've got a great sale going on. But, hey, also we accept your local currency. You can come buy with confidence." So I think as long as the marketing strategies within the brands are executing them the way they typically do, I think the next step there is to make sure that they've got the tools and the site in place to then obviously relate to that customer. Stephanie: Got it. And are you helping them implement those technologies? Or are you more giving avenues of like, "You couldn't implement this tech stack or you could go with this one." Matthew: So we typically implement it. Right? So all of our brands, even all of the ones that I've spoken about in the entire portfolio, basically what Global-e is doing is helping, let's just say arm and equip their site to be able to speak to an international consumer. And I'd say a lot of brands, come to us and say, "Hey, we view you as our international outsource Ecommerce team." Because we need to understand not only that I need to equip my US site to be able to speak to a consumer in China versus Singapore, versus Thailand and Canada and Australia and so on but, I also need to know what's the right proposition. How do I take insights and data and duty and tax? And what do I do with all of these different elements that are barriers to that customer buying? And how do we break it down so it's local to that consumer and market? And these are when I say quick to site and be ready for that type of volume to be hitting your site so that you're able to convert that customer, that's where Global-e comes into play. Stephanie: Got it. It seems like, you mentioned data earlier, it seems like you would have access to a ton of data from working with all these brands and seeing what works and what doesn't work. Tell us a little bit about some of the insights that you guys are seeing and also teaching your brands when it comes to selling internationally. Matthew: Sure. So I think the first thing that in an engagement with a brand that we have, right? Because there's brands of all different verticals, as you can imagine whether it be fashion and retail, whether it be beauty, whether it be footwear, streetwear and so on and so forth. So I think the one biggest insight in a lot of brands I would say, come to us for is, we want to understand what the rest of our vertical's doing. How are they being successful? What are they doing to target consumers? And let's just say all these parts of the world. So we really, I think from a data perspective, we consolidate it. And we sit on mountains of data that we can then drive from an insight's perspective to the brand that, "Hey, based off of where you're selling today and based off of where you should be selling tomorrow, we're going to help you build a strategy on let's just say end to end perspective. Right? Matthew: So it all starts from when the consumer hits the site, right? Currency, how are you going to show it? How are you going to also locally round that currency to make sure that it's a number that that consumer can relate to in that market. Down to duty and tax strategies, shipping propositions, and all of the elements that we know are going to have an impact to a consumer buying. And as an example of that for a few key markets that we can at least relate to, Canada. Canada is a market that acts very much like the US. And I'd say far too many US brands that we tend to see will typically treat, let's just say a Canadian shopper as they would a shopper within Singapore. And basically just take that product that they're selling and sell it at the same experience worldwide and say, "Okay. But, did I think that a Canadian customer is used to paying tax when they hit a local shop to buy the shirt?" They never ever see the term duty in market experience. Matthew: So on your site, you should never ever display duty and taxes as part of an overall transaction. Otherwise, that consumer's going to be shocked to see extra costs and abandon. And there's other elements to, how do we factor in duty into the product price? Because that's typically going to be a conversion driver for that Canadian consumer. And that goes even into markets like Europe and the UK, where it's that inclusive. The typical buying experience for a European consumer. So the second that a US brand now puts at the point of checkout duty and tax and breaks it out, it's going to cut their conversion in half. So these are the insights on a market by market basis where every country is and has to be looked at independently. And as far as too many times when we come into these conversations, our brand's just taking a single strategy for the world. And I think that's kind of one of the biggest opportunities to help our brand succeed. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah. That…
Full show notes at the publisherAs 2020 continues to throw curveballs left and right, the only thing we know for sure is that we have no idea what is coming next. That’s a tough pill to swallow, especially if you are a business owner trying to plan for the next quarter, or even the next week. Consumer behavior continues to shift in varying directions, and every industry in the world seems to be in a constant state of flux. With so much volatility, what is an entrepreneur to do? Taylor Holiday has some ideas. Taylor is the Managing Partner of Common Thread Collective, an agency that helps eCommerce companies grow from zero to millions. Recently, the companies he works with have been forced to change the way they operate. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Taylor takes us through what it means to build an antifragile business, and how that mentality can lead to a thriving business despite what the market or current environment has in store. Because, as Taylor says, there’s no point in trying to predict what the future holds, and instead, founders should be creating many different models so you can prevail even during volatile times. So what does that mean for your Q4 strategy? How should you be preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? And what data should you really be looking at when developing a Facebook ad strategy? Find out all of that and more in this interview. Main Takeaways: Never-Ending Qs for Q4: 2020 has been the year of uncertainty, and Q4 will be no different. Traditional planning for end of year events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday have to be approached with a new mindset, one that can adapt and pivot quickly. Companies need to put systems and plans in place so that they are prepared to take on any and all scenarios that might arise. Building Something That Works in Spite of You: Modeling and forecasting are tools that every business uses to help guide strategy, but neither are ever 100% accurate. Because humans are wrong more often than they are right, it is critical to set up systems that can survive not only when you’re right, but also when you’re wrong. That is the fundamental practice of being antifragile. How The Past Predicts The Future: Drawing insights from historical ad campaigns is a double-edged sword. When it comes to analyzing data, you can’t look too far back or too far forward. Yesterday’s ad data can help inform your decision for what to do tomorrow, but it can’t help you make a month or year-long ad strategy. What can be beneficial, however, is poking through the creative assets of campaigns from companies decades ago, pre-internet. Those are timeless sources of inspiration that can help you stand out from the uniform ad campaigns of today. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, we have Taylor Holiday join the show, the Managing Partner of Common Thread Collective. Taylor, welcome. Taylor: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you here as well. I have followed your Twitter threads and I think we're going to have a lot to talk about today. Taylor: Okay. That's good. Now I feel accountable to everything I've ever said. So here we go. Let's see what I can dig up. Stephanie: Yep. I've looked at everything back to 2008, so we're going to cover all of it. Stephanie: I wanted to start with your background a little bit. I saw that you were in the world of sports. Taylor: Yeah, I did many [crosstalk 00:00:50]. Stephanie: And I wanted to hear how you evolved. Taylor: Another lifetime ago, I was a professional athlete. I played baseball in the Yankees organization for a couple of years, and that was my life for the first 25 years of my life, was committed to that pursuit. Then one day I got a call and they told me that they were no longer interested in my services and I had to figure out what on earth I was going to do from there. That sort of set me off onto the second phase of life. I'd like to think I'm breaking my life in this sort of 25 year chunks. I'm about halfway through the second quarter. Stephanie: That's awesome. What did you decide to do after that? Taylor: Well, I didn't really decide much. I was finishing up, so I got drafted when I was a junior in college, so I had some school to finish. I was sort of in the off season. I would go back to school and take them at a semester at a time. When I got released, I started trying to figure out, okay, well, what was I going to do? And I was a political science major with a minor in psychology, and I loved to argue, and so I figured, well, I'll try and be a lawyer. That was sort of what I was prepping to do. I was prepping to take the LSAT and head off to be a lawyer. Then I had a good friend that had been a childhood friend, and is still now my business partner named Josh, who was starting a company. In between class, he would let me come to their office, which was him and his brother in a garage, and print the orders off the website and take them to the post office, and that was my job part-time. Stephanie: Sweet. Taylor: One day, day one, there was one order, and then within a year and a half we had done 60 million in revenue and that became my business school, and how I got into entrepreneurship. Stephanie: Wow. That is crazy. That's really good growth, and I'm sure you learned a ton while working there. Taylor: It was wild. But it sort of met everything in me that being an athlete did. There was a team of people that I love, working towards a common goal, every day you showed up and had something to do intentionally to be better. I was single, I was young, I had nothing else to do. We just lived at the office, and it was everything. As the business was sort of growing, we got asked this question of like, "Well, this is a real company. What's your job going to be?" And they went, "Well, you're the young person. Why don't we figure out Ecommerce, social media, and you know some famous people, so how about influencer marketing?" And I was like, "Okay." Then I started Googling, how do you set up a Facebook page. And just had no idea what I was doing, but learned, got to play in a sandbox, where suddenly I developed a skill that mattered in the world. I got really lucky in that sense that they entrusted me with that responsibility. Stephanie: That's great. What kind of famous people do you know? Now I'm intrigued? Taylor: Oh, so many famous people. No, not really. I had played professional sports, so I had a lot of relationships with athletes and agents and people like that. Our product was built for that community, and so it was just literally Facebook messaging friends and being like, "Hey, can I send you this product? Would you wear it?" That snowballed really quickly. We ended up building an incredible athlete team with ... at one point, we had all four MVPs of the major sports. We were brokering deals with Kobe Bryant and China, Shaquille O'Neal was a business partner. It was wild. We got involved in so many things in that first business that we had no business doing as 26, 27 year old kids, and made every mistake you could possibly make, but just learned so much that has sort of been the foundation for what we get the chance to do today. Stephanie: That's great. Yeah, that's a really good story. So fast forward to today. Tell me a bit about Common Thread Collective. What is it and what is your role there? What's your day to day look like? Taylor: Yeah. Common Thread Collective is an Ecommerce growth agency. We help consumer product Ecom businesses grow from zero to $30 million. That's sort of the range that we focus on, and we do that through a combination of paid acquisition services, email, SMS retention and landing page development, and then creative for that whole customer journey. So, we really see our role as the guide for our clients along that growth trajectory that we've lived ourselves and are currently living alongside them with the brands that we own and operate. So, we sort of approach growth from an operator's mindset, which we think really sets us apart from a lot of marketing agencies. My job is to be the CEO of that organization. It is certainly a very different job than when I started where I was doing the work. I spend much more of my time now thinking about organizational structure and culture and hiring than I do about marketing. That has just sort of been my own personal evolution, which I'm learning to love. But yeah, that's what it does. Stephanie: That's cool. So how do you go about picking who you want to partner with, which companies you want to? Taylor: In terms of the clients? Stephanie: Yeah, clients. Taylor: Yeah, so our mission for Common Thread Collective and really for our whole ecosystem, and I think Andrew talked a little bit about this on your podcast, is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. That is our heartbeat. It's what drives us because we ourselves have experienced the transformation that comes from being a successful entrepreneur, what it offers you in life. So, we love to partner specifically with founders and entrepreneurs who are in that range of business. Usually, when clients come to us, they're somewhere between two to 10 million in revenue, and we're helping them sort of reach that next phase of growth along the way. That connection to the person who is passionately committed to the product or idea that they have is what motivates us. It's what keeps us engaged, because the reality is, when you work at an agency, you're not going to love every product that you're working on. Taylor: You're not going to care as deeply as the founder about hair care and sports wear and fitness equipment and beauty products and vitamins. There's just no way, but what we learn is that, what really works is when we care about the people. That's when our people internally are the most inspired, that's when they wake up in the middle of the night and think about ideas for the product, is that when they fall in love with the humans on the other side of it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. I want to jump right into something I've been following. You were discussing a little bit about how brands should be approaching holiday season, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and how they should be thinking about their marketing and advertising efforts. I think it was on Twitter, maybe as an email thread, but I was hoping we could dive right into that, because we hadn't actually talked about that on the podcast so far, and I think it's a perfect time to kind of discuss how you think brands should be prepping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and how it's different than in the past. Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. This is a crazy time, right? It's never been a more volatile moment in the history of Ecommerce, which is not necessarily the longest history in the world. I would put it right up there with every business season in our country's history, certainly in terms of the volatility of the moment. When you think about trying to forecast into an environment that is this volatile, there's huge error bars on any prediction that you're going to make as a business owner. If you think about some of the things that we're looking at, as we think about Q4, is retail going to be open? Are people going to be able to shop in stores? We have no idea? Is the USPS going to be able to handle the influx of demand on the infrastructure? We have no idea. Taylor: What is the social position of our country going to be after this election? We have no idea. As you think about that, what you have to sort of agree or accept is the idea that whatever you think is going to happen is likely going to be wrong. What that means is that, unlike years before, where we were in a more stable environment, you need to have plans that account for different possibilities. As you think about something like your Black Friday promotion, which in years past, maybe a very simple exercise of just going well, we're going to try and bundle some products and do a discount, you need to consider the possibility, well, what happens, what would our discount be if USPS doubled their rates? Would we still be able to offer and afford free shipping? Taylor: I would start to have multiple plans. The same is true for the tone of your messaging. If we come out of an incredibly hostile election on November 4th, and three weeks later we're in holiday season, and the country's significant unrest, what is the right message for your brand to have to sell products into that environment? Rather than trying to guess which one is going to be accurate, I would begin to have a multitude of plans for this moment in ways that we've never really had to consider that level of volatility before. That's one of the big things we're talking with our clients about, is this idea of how do you deal with the idea that you are most likely going to be wrong about whatever you think is going to happen in the future? Stephanie: Yeah, that's really good. I like the idea of making scenarios so you don't have to predict the future. How are you thinking about advertising? I think you were mentioning that you can actually prep in a way that you know it's going to be expensive to advertise during those times, and so how brands can actually start prepping early so maybe they're not being met with these really high costs. Taylor: Yeah. I would just contend that I don't actually know that it's going to be expensive. I think that's a theory that people have, is this idea that big retailers are going to be allocating a bunch of money into the platform and CPMs are going to be through the roof. But we have seen really dramatic things happen where like, last time when the pandemic got peaked in April, all of a sudden cell phone usage goes through the roof, the inventory allotment for ads goes really high, CPMs plummet. The idea that we know for sure, this is, again, sort of that idea of the contingency planning, I think is really hard. What that means, and I think what you're driving me towards is this idea that, how do I build revenue in a more predictable fashion when the ad environment could be incredibly volatile? Taylor: What I would say is that, when I think about forecasting, we described Ecommerce forecasting like a layer cake. The base layer, the foundation with the least variability is your existing customer set. You know that when you acquire a customer, they're going to produce future revenue for you as well as present revenue, and they do that really predictably. It's not subject to CPMs, it's not subject to the levels of volatility based on any sort of thing. So you can always start by my existing customer side is going to produce future revenue, and you can look at cohort specific LTV data and figure out exactly how much future revenue. That's the foundation of your forecast. Then the next layer is owned audiences. If I think about like organic SEO, my keyword rank of position two on keyword, CrossFit sports bra is going to produce for me a certain volume of traffic that will lead to…
Full show notes at the publisherWithout question, the last several months have accelerated ecommerce adoption and drastically changed consumer behavior. The entire sales lifecycle from finding a prospect to closing the deal has been turned upside down. Now two key obstacles lie in the path of ecommerce leaders… The first is the more obvious, more discussed problem: How do you operationally and technically need to change to meet your customers' evolving needs? The second key obstacle is not as often addressed, but is equally as important: How do you then communicate to your customers that even in these changing times, you are equipped and ready to meet their new needs? The binding and laminating business doesn’t sound like it would be ripe with insights into answers to both of these questions, but Jeff McRitchie, the VP of eCommerce at Spiral, is here to prove that assumption wrong. Jeff has nearly two decades of experience in the ecommerce and digital space. Just last year, his own company, MyBinding.com, was acquired by Spiral, where he now helps lead ecommerce operations. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jeff explains what it has been like merging his ecommerce business with a more traditional binding company. He shares some of the challenges he faced along the way, and what methods and strategies he’s leaned into to find success. Jeff also discusses tips for building out a winning SEO and content strategy, and how ecommerce is playing a larger role across the entire business, including in customer acquisition and content marketing. Main Takeaways: The Merge: When a primarily ecommerce company merges with a larger more traditional business, there are a lot of balls in the air to create a cohesive and efficient system. Most of the adjustments have to be made on the side of the acquiring company, which needs to learn how to compete in a digital marketplace. That means that education has to be a priority both internally and externally. Use Their Words: Every industry has jargon and industry-speak. It’s easy to fall into the trap of using that language throughout your platforms and channels. Instead, you have to meet customers where they are with their own language, and use the words and phrases they use. This will ensure that your customers feel like you are speaking directly to them and it also helps create more longtail SEO opportunities. Content For Now that Pays Off Later: Some of the most-viewed content you create might be consumed after a customer makes a purchase. On the surface, that might make it seem like content-creation is not a good customer acquisition strategy. On the contrary, it’s actually a critical long-term strategy in the sense that good, useful content is critical for brand awareness and building trust, which customers will remember when they need to buy in the future. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to another episode of Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles. Today on the show, we have Jeff McRitchie, the VP of Ecommerce at Spiral Binding, My Binding and Binding 101. Jeff welcome. Jeff: Thank you. Stephanie: Thanks for coming on the show. I was excited when I was looking through Spiral's background. It looked like you guys started in 1932. Is that right? Jeff: Yeah. I mean, we've been around for a long time. Stephanie: Yeah. I think that'll make for a really fun conversation because I'm sure that the company and you have seen a lot of transformation over the years, so that'll be fun to dive into later. Jeff: For sure. Stephanie: Tell me a bit about Spiral. What is it? How do I think about what you guys do? Jeff: So Spiral is really a company and we've built ourselves around helping people to bind presentations and proposals. We do a little bit of laminating. We do a little bit of other things, but really we focus a lot on binding. We sell the equipment and the supplies for people to be able to bind presentations, proposals, books and training materials. Those are probably the primary things that come out of it. Jeff: We're a niche player in the office products market is one way to think about it. We're an interesting a hybrid of a company because we sell a little bit in B2B, a lot in B2B, a lot in B2C or B2B to C sort of space. Then we also have some really interesting national account sort of business as well. Kind of a little bit of an evolving company, we're a manufacturer and a distributor at the same time. We have lots of different faces which presents some really cool challenges from the standpoint of being in a digital transformation or Ecommerce role. Stephanie: Okay cool. So how long have you been at the company for? Jeff: My story is interesting, actually I'm co founder of a company called My Binding about 17 years ago. Last year we sold to Spiral. I've been with Spiral for just over a year now in this sort of digital transformation role but with My Binding, which was more of a pure play Ecommerce space. We grew and we were the largest sort of binding Ecommerce player in the market. Then all of a sudden we joined forces essentially with Spiral, which was the largest sort of B2B player in the market. Now we're one force together going after the binding and laminating market. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. What was that process like where you had your own company, you guys were selling online and then joining a company that maybe wasn't doing as much of that. What was that process like when it came to incorporating your company into an existing older company? Jeff: There's definitely some upsides. Suddenly you have increased purchasing power, you have more access to talent and capital. Those were amazing things, but the integration side of things is tough. Jeff: I mean, you're trying to merge systems and figure out how everything works together and learn the language of a new company. Some of that stuff is not as easy as it should be, as well as trying to figure out where exactly are they on the landscape of digital transformation and how do you navigate that when... We were pretty much an Ecommerce or digital first organization. That wasn't really their background. Now we're figuring out how do we be both? That's a pretty big challenge actually. Stephanie: Yeah. That sounds really difficult. What does the customer journey look like for Spiral or what did it look like compared to My Binding? Jeff: I guess the best way to think about it would be that in a B2B, B2C sort of Ecommerce experience, we were really building our business around a large number of transactions with a large number of customers, essentially small transactions to a large number of customers. On the more traditional B2B model, the traditional side of the Spiral business would have been around a small number of transactions to really big customers. Which is pretty typical when you look at this idea of traditional B2B and more like an Ecommerce B2B sort of experience. At least a B2B, to C sort of experience. Jeff: That was the really interesting thing is that we were dealing with customers from all over the country that in almost every industry that you can imagine, but most of them were rather small and we are filling specific needs for those customers. That was fine. On the spiral side you were looking and saying, hey, they had deep relationships. Relationships that went back decades, in many cases, with organizations where they were the supplier of choice. They had complex contracts and all those kinds of things. That was never really part of the Ecommerce world. Trying to figure out how do you merge those two together to get the best of both. It's not easy, but it's really fun actually. Stephanie: Yeah. I can imagine it takes a lot of training for their existing customers who are used to those contracts and used to things being done a certain way. How are you maybe going about training the customers who are used to doing things the old way to be like, Hey, we actually can do this online usually. Jeff: Slowly. Stephanie: Any lessons there that someone can take away if they're going through the same thing right now within their org? Jeff: You don't have to do it all at once. Our approach is really to allow customers to interact with us the way they want to interact with us by giving them better options. Really the priorities for this past year have been to try to integrate systems and then upgrade our footprint so that we can allow the company to put its best foot forward. Really starting with the E-comm side and getting everybody on the same platform and then tied into the same systems. Jeff: Now we're actually probably just a couple of months away from launching our brand new B2B E-com experience for the traditional spiral customers. Essentially we have been allowing them to continue to exist and deal with the company in the way that they used to while improving the experience and then bringing the platform up for the entire organization. One of the things about especially B2B commerce is that it gets really complicated as you tie in lots and lots of systems and a lot of interesting rules. Jeff: Customers want to deal with you in the way that they want to deal with you. What we've found is that we have to build specific experiences for our different customer types. That's the approach that we've been taking. I think that's a good approach from the standpoint of, you're not trying to force everybody into the same sort of experience because not everybody wants to deal with it in the same way. As a large organization that sort of deals with these sort of different challenges, we have to answer questions, like, do you display pricing on the front end of your website or is it a login only experience? Jeff: What pricing do you show people or what price pricing do people get and how do you control that and how do you manage that and how do you make sure that that experience is personalized for individuals? Then there's the age old question, which is really challenging in an organization that has multi channels and that is, how do you deal with the channel conflict? Whose customer is that? I guess it depends on who you would ask because everybody thinks that the customer is theirs. Yet ultimately the customer needs to deal with the organization in a way that the customer feels the most comfortable, not in the way that the organization feels most comfortable. Stephanie: Yeah. That makes sense. What kind of legacy or what things did the legacy customers get hung up on the most when you guys are making this transition and trying to show them that a new platform's coming? Is there similar themes of things that they're like, oh, I don't feel comfortable with that, or, I don't want to move because of this? Jeff: I think when it comes to customers, most customers want technology. I mean, they become comfortable. I think that they don't want to lose functionality. That's been probably one of the hardest things is that even if that functionality wasn't the best, they become comfortable with it and they don't really want to lose that. Yes they do want a best in class experience. One of the hard things that we all have to deal with in Ecommerce right now is that the bar has been raised. Jeff: There are people who want more and more features in terms of their online shopping experience. What you find is that you need to be able to roll these things out, but you need to make sure that it doesn't make things harder on those customers, especially long time corporate customers. They are really dependent on these things working smoothly and easily. That's actually one of the hardest challenges in this process has been, okay, well, we've done a lot of cool things for customers over the years. One off, you build a feature on the website just for that one customer. Jeff: Well, trying to then redo that and not lose a substantial amount of functionality for specific customers, especially large customers that you have these really deep relationships with, that's pretty tough. Stephanie: I was actually going to ask that next, when you mentioned that you were personalizing the experience for certain customers to make them feel more comfortable or hearing what they want and trying to incorporate that into the platform, how do you go about picking out what things you should maybe personalize or give to the customer without going down a worm hole of having a personal experience for every customer? Jeff: Ultimately, we're taking an approach of first saying, what's the best in class experience that we could build. What are the things that are going to be the best for all of the customers and then looking and saying, "Hey, can we in our roadmap put in the flexibility to accommodate for these many things that customers have asked for?" Jeff: How could we build this in such a way that we can add that on or this on? I'm not sure that we always nail it just from the standpoint of... It's pretty tough to keep everybody happy. But we're taking the approach of, hey, we can make it substantially better for everybody. It may not be perfect, but it should be a dramatic enough improvement that they'll recognize that we have their best interest in mind. Stephanie: It seems like some of those requests might also fit other customers as well or it might be something where they're like, oh, I actually wanted that and never thought to ask. It could be helpful when it comes to product development on your side, like technology development. Jeff: Yeah, totally. We had a really good team that we used to build out stuff and we're able to iterate fairly quickly. That's the good news because sometimes we miss something and so... But as long as you can respond fairly quickly to a customer's need, it gives you an opportunity to serve them better and to communicate. But the other really important part of this is really getting the account managers and your sales people involved in this process so you get some really good feedback because one of the challenges that we face at least is that sometimes as the E-com department and on the technology side, you don't always get raw feedback. Jeff: Maybe the stuff you're hearing is from the people who are yelling the loudest, not necessarily from the people who are trying to help you. You're not necessarily hearing about the features that are going to make the biggest difference for most number of users. Stephanie: That makes sense. With this whole re-platforming and new tech stack that you're going to be launching what pieces of tech are you most excited about showing to the customer or bringing online that maybe wasn't there before? Jeff: For us it's really about an enhanced user experience. We kind of been a little bit on the old school side on the traditional B2B piece of it. This gives us the ability to provide a really much better experience end to end in terms of transacting with us. Some of the things that we're aiming for, that are harder than I was thinking they would be, would be real time freight quoting. When you're a B2B company and you've got a distribution network across the country, and you're trying to figure out how much that pallet is going to cost to go to this customer. You think, hey that should be super easy…
Full show notes at the publisherAmanda Hesser believes that food is at the center of a life well-lived, and it is that belief that led her to co-found Food52 in 2009. Food52 is a community-centered blog and eCommerce store that reaches more than 24 million people a month. But no platform builds itself, and in the case of Food52, this massive community of users was brought together through a set of unique engagement tactics that Amanda has iterated on and refined over the decade-plus that the company has been around. It’s a strategy that any company would envy, and one that she shares with us today. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Amanda explains how she and her team were able to use high- and low-touch ways to get users involved, and why that engagement created a sense of buy-in that made Food52 scalable. As Amanda explains, engaged users don’t just help with content generation, they also provide valuable insights into consumer trends and have helped inform Food52’s latest offering, an exclusive product line that is helping further boost its revenue into the tens of millions. From tips on building a community, to dropshipping products, and launching a new product line, tune in to find out all of that and more. Main Takeaways: Building A Community: The platforms that last are those that give users a sense of ownership in the community being created. Engagement is necessary to achieve that end, but not everyone wants to engage in the same way. That’s why it’s important to create high-touch and low-touch ways to get — and keep — people involved. Getting the Feedback You Need: Your customers are full of ideas on what’s working, what’s not, and what to try instead. But tapping into those ideas is easier said than done. To access that honest feedback, you need to meet your customers where they are. Generic product surveys often go ignored. Instead, hang out on social media, ask open-ended questions, and engage with your customers in an organic way. It’s Never Easy: Whether you are creating content or building a user base, there are no infallible methods to find success. You can’t be wedded to any one idea, platform, channel or content type. Try new things, explore new strategies, and don’t fall into the trap of becoming complacent just because one thing is working right now. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce, this is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Amanda Hesser, the co-founder and CEO of Food52. Stephanie: Amanda, welcome! Amanda: Thank you so much for having me, hello. Stephanie: So, I was just looking through the Food52 website, and it's absolutely beautiful. I love everything about it, the theme, the concept, I mean, the design, really, really beautiful. Tell me a little bit about how you came upon starting it. What made you want to found that? Amanda: Sure. Well, my co-founder Merill Stubbs and I co-founded it together, and we did so because we were both journalists and editors and trained cooks, so we were professionals in the field, but we were professionals because it was a passion of ours. We love food, we love home, we love cooking and traveling and eating, and we just felt that a couple things were happening. One was just that food was really shifting from being this niche topic in our culture to something that was just much more ingrained in Americans' identities and lifestyles, frankly. Amanda: And there was this real sea change happening in the industry and that was really exciting to us, as people who care about food. But we also felt like as a result, what we were being served with as consumers, meaning the content that we had available to us, the products, the conversation, interaction, the community was lacking and really wasn't keeping up with the evolution of its place in our culture, and we felt like there was an opportunity to serve people better to create a very different kind of company than had existed before, one that was much more a 360-degree and also selfishly, we wanted to create this world and this hub for ourselves. You know? We felt a lot of great companies are born out of an unsatisfying consumer experience, and I think that definitely was a piece of what drove us to create Food52. Stephanie: That's awesome. So, how long has it been around? Amanda: So, we launched Food52 in September of 2009, so we are 11 years old, which is both I think on one hand, is an incredible accomplishment and is also... It is not a surprise to us that it has taken us sort of this amount of time to get where we are, because we understood going in that when you're building a brand, when you're really trying to create an emotional connection with your readers and your followers, that it takes time. It's not something you can do overnight. On the other hand, being a startup and being 11 years old, I think once you pass the three-year mark, you start entering dinosaur-hood. Stephanie: Yeah, everyone else that you started with is gone. You're like, "Oh, it's just me left." Amanda: Yeah, there is a survival feeling, which is nice. But also that it's an industry and world that is always looking for the next. So, if you've made it beyond three years, you're no longer the news. But it's actually I think in many ways, in terms of running the company, it's been so great to... Actually, I think once we hit kind of eight years, where we're really not only just more of an established company, but able to really broaden what we were covering as a media company, really ambitiously pursue our commerce business. Amanda: The business just became much more interesting, and it's a complex business, so it's not something that you can... We started focused on content because we understand the power of content to build that relationship. And also to really build brand identity and that was to us, the most important thing that we could do in the beginning. And then we methodically kind of added, layered on all the things that we do now. And I think that even if you were starting today, that is the way to do it, because you couldn't... A, you couldn't get funding to do all the things that we do now. But also, we wouldn't want to, because it's sort of... You really need to build that relationship and you can't just kind of [inaudible] press the consumer with like, books and a site and recipes and content across cooking and home, and a presence on all the social channels. There's a lot of stuff that we do that I think had to sort of slowly evolve. Stephanie: So, yeah. I want to kind of dive into the evolution of your brand, because I think I recently read that you guys reach 24 million people month, is that right? Amanda: Yes, mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Stephanie: That's amazing. So, I want to kind of hear how did you all start out, and then where are you now? Amanda: Sure. So, as I mentioned earlier, we started by focusing on content, and we started very much in the kitchen. Because we felt that is the core of our premise, which is that we see food at the center of a well-lived life. And we serve people who believe in that. We felt like the kitchen and cooking was always going to be kind of our core strength, and so when we began, the vast majority of our content was focused on cooking. We did recipe contests, and we did that because it was a way to test a content model that we felt like was underused online. Which was there was lots of user-generated content, but it wasn't done in a way that really served other readers well and really celebrated the content creators. We wanted to become this platform for them, and what we provided was in some ways, you could look at it as production services, right? People could contribute their recipes, and then we would photograph, then we would test them, and then we would distribute them across a bigger platform, our platform. Amanda: And that was the way that we built community and we created lots of ways for people to get involved. So, it wasn't just for the people who were creating recipes, it was also for people who if you wanted to become a recipe tester, you could do that, or if you wanted to vote on the recipe contest. We created lots of different kind of high-touch and low-touch ways for people to have meaningful engagement and involvement in the curation of the content, and that was something that really hadn't been done well before, and we felt like it was a way to not only build community, but also create a scalable model and send the message that this is a community-driven company that cares a lot about high-quality content, and we can build this together. And we can start with recipes, and then we can build out from there. Amanda: And what we did do was through our recipe contests, we were able to identify really great home cooks who maybe they had a blog, maybe they didn't, but they didn't have a platform that was sizeable. And we were able to provide that for them, and we got them to then write articles for us, and some have done cookbooks for us and many of them have gone on to do their own cookbooks. And I think that building that sort of trust and that relationship in the early days with our community is what has allowed us to get to where we are now, which is a much bigger site, and we still have recipe contests, but fewer of them. But we have other ways for people to be really deeply involved in what we do. And so, for instance, I'll just give you kind of a smattering of examples. Amanda: We have a hotline and on our hotline, anyone can ask any cooking or home or food question, and it gets answered by the community and answers can get voted up or down in a kind of stack overflow fashion. And so that's a community resource. We do our own kind of set of social contests on Instagram. That's really how we built our Instagram community and following was through creating a hashtag called #F52Brands, where we named themes and then people would tag us with photographs relevant to that theme, and then we would repost our favorites. And so, people posted, tagged us, let their friends know, and that's how we built our following which is at 2.8 million. We have a product line called Five Two, and we have a drop ship shop where we sell hundreds of products, really thousands of SKUs at this point, and those are products that are produced by other vendors, that we drop ship through our site and our platform. Amanda: But we wanted to create our own line of products once we had gotten our sea legs in commerce. And so, when we went to do that, it made total sense for us to actually call on our community for their input on the products, and not just in a shallow way, but a really kind of deep and extensive way. We had the data on what people were shopping for, what was selling well on our site, what materials. But we really wanted to hear... and our first product, just to give you a specific example, our first product was a cutting board. Amanda: Now we already sold a lot of cutting boards, so we knew what materials sold, what price point sold, what sizes sold. But we really wanted to just go to our community and say, "What do you want?" In your ideal cutting board, what does it look like? What is it made of? What do you use it for? What features do you want? And we did a survey that was 11 questions, which goes against all rules of surveys, too long. And more than 10,000 people answered, and in great detail what they wanted. And so, we created a product that reflected their feedback, and that's how that has formed the DNA of that whole product line, is using the input of our community to create better cooking and home products than we could have otherwise come up with ourselves. Stephanie: That's amazing. Such a good evolution of the business. How are you encouraging your community to fill out those surveys or want to engage? I mean, I'm sure there's your power users who are like, "Anything Amanda does or puts out or the brand puts out, we're ready to help." But then for newer people, I'm sure there's a little bit more maybe convincing, so how do you strike that balance to get people to help decide on the product decisions or what's next? Amanda: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of different ways that we do it. One is as we saw that there was great interest in having a say in the products we created, we decided to create what we call the Five Two Design Team, and it's essentially a communication channel for that group who wants to have all the latest news on what products we're thinking about, what surveys are coming up, what products are launching. They get a sneak peek. They help us test those products, we'll send them prototypes. And so, people could sign up for that. So, that's one way that people could kind of engage at whatever level they're interested in, but of course, that also attracts people who tend to want to be more engaged. The cutting board survey I think is maybe a bit of an outlier in that it's probably one of the more extensive surveys we've done. Amanda: What we tend to do is kind of lighter touch things on social. So, we'll go on Instagram and we'll ask three to five questions on an Instagram story. And you can vote right there on the story, so we give you the choices and just press a button and let us know, and then we do like to make sure that we give open-ended, sort of open field questions so that people who are extra passionate or who have detailed information they want to share, they have that opportunity. But they can do it in a medium that's right in front of them. For instance, if they're on Instagram already, we want them to be able to do it right there, not have to flick over to our site and fill something out. Amanda: And I think this is not just with our product line, I think this is with everything we do, is meet people where they are and serve them well where they are. And so, that's really the way we think about it, and we also try to frankly, just make it fun. So, it's not just these surveys to feel like we're giving a homework assignment. We want them to be presented in a fun way, and it should be entertaining, but it also should be substantive. Stephanie: Yep, I love that. So, you're getting a bunch of data from these surveys and from the community. Are there any tools or tech or are you using AI or ML or anything to kind of sort through all this data to help make decisions, whether it's for new products, or a new direction that the community wants or anything? Amanda: I would love to say yes. The answer is no. I mean, we have just found honestly that the best way to... We've created for some of the survey answers, our team will create pivot tables so they can kind of group things together. But frankly, the best ideas have come from just reading through people's answers. I think we've gotten better at structuring the questions we're asking, so that many of them can be answered through multiple choice and therefore, you have very straight up data. But the best product features, they come from those open field questions, and we want to make sure that there's space for that and that we are reading through them. And we also have a group, it…
Full show notes at the publisherWe’ve all been there. It’s late at night, you’re flipping through the channels and you stop on CNBC. Chances are there is an old episode of Shark Tank playing, and sitting in one of those leather chairs you might have seen Kevin Harrington, one of the original sharks. Now think back many years ago, you’re still flipping through the channels, but this time you stop on an infomercial for a George Foreman Grill or a Tony Little Gazelle. Did you know you were actually seeing Kevin there, too? Maybe not physically, but Kevin’s fingerprints and dollars were very much present in those “as-seen-on-TV” specials. Kevin was the pioneer of the television infomercial, and, therefore, the direct-to-consumer industry. And when the internet emerged, Kevin was one of the first to move his sales online. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we grabbed Kevin for a quick interview to discuss his latest book, Mentor To Millions, and asked him to take us through his transition from TV powerhouse to digital investor. Kevin explains some of the key areas he looks at when determining if a company is worth investing in, and he details some of the ways that eCommerce companies should be thinking about marketing and product strategy. 3 Takeaways: If You Don’t Have Marketing Money, Get Marketing Money: It is impossible to have a successful business if no one knows you exist. No matter how small a company might be, marketing has to be a top priority and, when spent wisely, whatever you invest in marketing has the potential to lead to huge ROI. Follow the Customers: The move toward eCommerce began in the mid-1990s when TV infomercials started putting website addresses at the bottom of the screen. Suddenly, companies saw that customers were opting to bypass telephone operators and place the orders themselves, and from there, ecommerce as we know it emerged. By always testing new ways to capture customers, you create opportunities to discover and encourage new types of buying behavior. Exit This Way: What’s more valuable than a product? A brand. And with the marketing tools available today, the ability to create a brand that customers love and trust is easier than ever before. Big buyers everywhere are eager to tap into these niche, high-conversion networks, which in turn, creates exit opportunities for smaller companies that never would have existed in the past. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephaine: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, and today I'm really excited. We have Kevin Harrington on the show, the OG original shark from Shark Tank and the CEO of Harrington Enterprises. Kevin, welcome. Kevin: Stephanie, thanks for having me. Looking forward to having some fun today. Stephaine: Oh, me too. Your background is so interesting. I feel like I can't even do it justice, going through how you started out in the world of e-commerce. So, I was hoping you could actually touch on that, of where did you start in Ecommerce? Because I see you listed as the original everything. The infomercial guy, the guy who created this stuff. So, I want you to put it in your words how you started out in this industry. Kevin: Okay. Yeah. So, I started... I was a young entrepreneur back in Cincinnati, Ohio, one of six kids, and I had started a... Getting, ordered cable television. And so, I remember I got a 30 channel package. This was, now, early eighties. And so, I'm going through my 30 channels, 24 hours of sports on ESPN and 24 hours of movies on HBO. I get to Channel 30 and there's nothing there. So, I call the cable company and I said, "Hey, look. I love this cable, all these channels, 29 of them. But I'm paying for 30. Nothing on channel, Discovery Channel." Kevin: And so, they said, "Oh, Discovery is our latest channel. It's brand new. They don't have a budget for 24 hours a day. They do an 18 hour a day schedule. Six hours is nothing." And so, that's when the light bulb went off. I'm thinking, "Wait." I said... I literally said to the person, "If I have something to put on that six hours, would you be interested?" "Hey, yeah. Come on down. Talk to us. We're definitely... Whatever you're thinking." Kevin: So, anyway, make a long story short, I started putting products on Discovery Channel back in the early eighties. I then tied up that six-hour block on the nationwide level at the parent, Discovery, which was in now tens of millions of homes. And so... And again, this is back in the early eighties and we were doing the Food Saver, the Jack LaLanne Juicer, the Tony Little Fitness, George Foreman, Billy Mays. We even started getting into mainstream celebrities like Paris Hilton and her lip plumpers and the Kardashians and their skin care and things like this. So, we got involved, and this was early on, the early eighties. Nobody else was doing this, so people call me the inventor of the modern day infomercial. Kevin: So, that's when it all started and we've, over the years, gone public with a few companies. Build them, sell them, build them, sell them. I like entrepreneurship and bringing in the right kind of team of people to help, but... So, as we were then selling products on TV, that was the beginning of my entry into the marketplace and I think as we started getting more sophisticated, things started happening down the road, where we started putting websites. Of course, in the early eighties, websites didn't exist, right? It wasn't until, I believe, around '94 that things started. I mean, Amazon started in '94. I was in business for a dozen years before Amazon ever started. So, selling products direct to the consumer. Kevin: And in the nineties, we started putting websites into our infomercials and wow. All of a sudden, we found a certain percentage of the people, they didn't want to call the operator. They wanted to go straight to that website, get all of the details, and now we found a whole new area business between websites and Amazon and digital and now when you look at Facebook, etc. etc., it's a whole new world. Stephaine: That's awesome. So, what does your role look like today? I read that you have launched more than 20 businesses that have grown to over 100 million in sales each, so I wanted to hear kind of what are you doing today and what kind of principles are you using that you've learned from the many years that you've been doing this? Kevin: So, that first company that I mentioned, we ended up being a public company in a little bit of a complicated transaction. But here we were, public on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock was sitting at a dollar a share and I started bringing the right kind of people on board and you give options and things to people. But make a long story short, a few years later, that stock went to $20, and so I was one of the co-founders and had millions of shares, so this was my first chance to be like... And take some chips off the table, as they say, right? So... Because I was building my business all those years, putting all my own personal cash back into building the business until we had a public company, then I could use other people's money. We had lines of credit and all kinds of amazing things. So, that was the first public company that I got involved with and we had great success with it. So, I thought to myself, look, yes. I can make money selling products, but I can also make money driving share prices in public companies. Kevin: So, since then, fast forward, I like to participate in public companies. I like to be on the board if that's important for me from their standpoint. Also, there's hardcore board of directors of public companies. There's also advisory boards. So, as I invest in companies and take board seats and things, I'm involved now in about north of 10 public companies in some significant fashion, meaning I own equity, shares, board position, advisory seats, whatever. I mean, for example, one of my companies I got involved with five years ago was a little company called CELSIUS and it's an energy drink that... I don't know. Have you ever heard of CELSIUS [crosstalk 00:06:14]? Stephaine: Yes, I've... Yes, I have. Kevin: Okay. So, I got involved at a start-up, CELSIUS. The stock was 22 cents a share and again, I got a nice package when I got involved with these guys. But the stock yesterday hit $19, okay? So, I mean, it's... So, when you think about... When you get in in the beginning and get a big block and that block goes to a big number, that is wealth creation. So, I can talk about national media. I can talk about another one As Seen On TV, another one [inaudible] Travel Biz. I'm involved in various of these pub-cos. Some of them have product, some of them... Most of them have some kind of relation to what I can bring to the table. But I will say this. Almost every single one of them needs the expertise of Ecom and selling and doing digital marketing to create, whether it's customer acquisition or investor acquisition or friendly participant in whatever it might be, the acquisition of names and value to the company. Kevin: So, generally, when I join the board of a public company or the advisory board of a public company, I'll be helping bring some of the things that I've been dealing with and learning about over the last 30-some years in the world of Ecom and internet and digital. So, it... I think my focus now, since I've had great success with helping small pub-cos grow and create value for their shareholders, that's something that's near and dear to me and I love participating in those kind of opportunities. Stephaine: That's awesome. So, how are you able to build buzz or advise your companies to build buzz in the way that you were when you were using traditional media streams like TV? How can you have that same experience online or through word of mouth and conversions online? How are you advising your companies to get that same kind of buzz that you had generated in your past life? Kevin: [inaudible] If we went through... If we take a look at CELSIUS, for example. Let's look at that industry. CELSIUS was a start-up five years ago going against Red Bull and Monster, two of the biggest companies out there that had tremendous shelf space already. So, they started down the path of getting shelf space and they were successful at getting some space here and there, but what we also created was a direct to the consumer side of the business where we started bringing on influencers, big ones like Flo Rida, Khloe Kardashian, etc. And then micro-influencers, fitness influencers. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of fitness influencers, micro-influencers, out there on some arrangement that we've made with them to blast all of the information out about CELSIUS, why they love it, why they use it. And these are people... Many of them that approached us because they were users of our product. Kevin: So, now what's happened... So, for example, Flo Rida. He had 26 million followers. He created an amazing buzz to the point where one of his followers and friends was Khloe Kardashian. Well, she said, "Hey, Flo. I love this CELSIUS. Can you get me some cases of it?" So, we're shipping her cases, Flo cases, hundreds of fitness influencers, and now our Amazon business is just crushing it. So, I mean, this is... You can't just sit and wait for it to happen. You got to build the buzz. Kevin: And by the way, there's one thing that I did not say we did. The old days of as seen on TV... I used to spend, some years, as much as $100 million on television. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, Discovery, Lifetime, all the cable networks, hundreds and hundreds of broadcast stations around the country. But it's very, very expensive and the brand, a product like CELSIUS, in the world of as seen on TV would cost millions, if not tens of millions. So, we chose to go in the newer and much more direct way by utilizing micro-influencers and we've had a great run. The product is now in 165,000 stores, but it's also being supported by the social media influence marketplace. Stephaine: Yeah. I love that. Yeah, really great story. So, someone does not have connections or even maybe a budget big enough to give them even a micro-influencer. What would you suggest to a new DTC startup who's trying to get in front of people? What kind of digital channel are you advising your companies to try out or marketing methods or anything? How would you tell a new person starting out, this is the things that you should look into that are working right now? Kevin: Well, if they don't have the budget, I'd recommend that they go raise some money and get a budget, okay? So... Because if you are in business and you say, "Well, I don't have a budget for the Facebook or Instagram." I mean, this is where you have to test, these outlets, because... I mean, I had a product that somebody brought me two years ago. They had attempted to sell it in stores and on QVC and different places and they got shut down because nobody had ever heard about it. There was no branding. And so, we started running some very inexpensive $5 ads on Facebook and then Instagram and for $5,000 in ads, we brought in $25,000 in credit card orders. Amazing, right? Stephaine: Yeah. That's great. Kevin: Now, these folks that owned the company, we had a partnership now where we're starting to run this and so we were spending 100,000 a week, bringing in 400,000 a week in sales. Making money, paying for itself, unbelievable. So, don't tell me as an entrepreneur, "I don't have the budget." Because for five grand, you can test and you're going to find out. You may be... That... What happens... If you bring in 25,000 in sales off a $5,000 spend, that's self-liquidates, makes money and you're in a big profit position. So, you have to figure out a way to test the digital forces out there. Kevin: The other thing you can do... I know some groups that represent a lot of influencers and there are some people taking aggressive positions, where maybe you could talk them into taking a little equity position in your company in exchange for exposure from groups of influencers, so... Because these big master influencing organizations that have... I know companies, they have 800 influencers that they work with. Well, they pay them, but there's nothing that says they couldn't dribble down some stock or some equity to some of them also, and I think... I'm aware of some companies that are now starting to do equity-based influence marketing and so, I think you're going to see something like that taking storm in the near future. Stephaine: That's really interesting. So, when you're picking companies to either go on their board or help them, what kind of metrics are you looking at for these Ecommerce companies that lets you know whether they're going to be a winner or not? What kind of things are you looking for to pick who you're going to support? Kevin: Well, I like to see that they're spending money on media or influencers or some form of getting distribution. And so, if a company is... They say, "Okay. We've got $100,000 a month budget and $25,000 a week, and we'r…
Full show notes at the publisherOne of the most vexing questions brands are asking themselves today is how to get a solid ROI from influencer marketing. At Fancy.com, Greg Spillane thinks he has the answer. When Greg came on as the CEO of Fancy in 2019, he was tasked with re-inventing and rebuilding the brand. Known as the “turnaround guy,” he had experience coming into distressed companies and pivoting them into viable businesses. Fancy was right up his alley. The company was known for lavish parties, and even handing out $1,000 gift cards to celebrities, models, and influencers. After Fancy blew through $100M in investment money, and with no profit in sight, Greg knew there was work to be done. With a new focus on profitability, and building on the impressive technology that Fancy created, Greg figured out a model that created a win-win opportunity for brands and influencers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Greg discusses how he approached his role when he was brought in to turn around this struggling brand. He details the influencer, channel and email strategies he’s implementing to turn engagement into transactions. Plus, he talks about how to build a sustainable company, the things to consider when building out a board or taking on investment money, and his thoughts on when building an app is beneficial or just a distraction. Enjoy! Main Takeaways: Influencing the Influencer Market — Most companies have yet to figure out how to get a solid ROI from utilizing influencers. Tune in to hear how Fancy is creating a mutually beneficial relationship by providing a platform that allows both the influencer and the brand to grow and monetize their user bases. Do You Really Need An App? — When store owners start to have success, many begin to think about that next platform and are eager to jump into building their own app. But Spillane says this may not be the best move for many brands. Before diving into the world of apps, think about what will be different about the app versus the desktop. If the answer is nothing, then you will probably be just fine with a mobile responsive website instead. Building a Viable Business — When taking over as CEO at Fancy, Greg had to re-invent and re-build the business from the ground up and turn the focus toward profitability. Having open and honest communication with the team is crucial during these pivotal times. New CEO? Take it Slow — Oftentimes, new CEOs come into a company and try to do too much too soon. Instead, spend the first 90 days listening, getting buy-in, and letting the problems — and many times the solutions — reveal themselves. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Perfect. Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org. Today we're chatting with Greg Spillane, CEO of Fancy.com. Greg, welcome. Greg: Thank you, Stephanie. I'm so excited to be here and speaking with you. Stephanie: I know. I'm really excited to have you on. I was going through Fancy.com before this, and I think I've found at least three things that I want to order after the show that I actually have not seen anywhere else. One was an air plant that was on top of an amethyst crystal. I haven't seen that. And the other one was like a chilling beer mug. It looked Awesome. So that's where my mind's at right now. Air plants and beer mugs. Greg: Well, perfect. I'll tell you what, I'll hook you up with a solid discount code and even something you can send out to your audience. Stephanie: Oh, I like it. This interview is already going great. Greg: Yes. Stephanie: So, you have such an interesting story. Fancy is a really good story. I was hoping actually, we can just start and dive right in about what is your role and how did you come to Fancy? And what is Fancy.com? Greg: Sure. Yeah. My background is I guess, little atypical. I mean, I came out of school really as an athlete. I attended undergrad on a football scholarship. So I was a little bit of a meathead type of guy earlier in my life. And was introduced to the internet and really computers really early on. I was one of those guys that had a computer when I was 10 years old, connecting with my 2,400 baud modem to BBST, doing all those types of things. So that's schools, technology is where I studied, I got out. I started my career as an engineer. I quickly realized coding all day is just not for me. And that's kind of where my entrepreneurial journey started. I actually founded an agency. Greg: We were doing customer development for people. A lot of digital transformation stuff really early and sort of the internet booms like early 2000s and built a couple of different products sort of just for happenstance. And I took them to market in a subscription-based model. Well, before SaaS was really even a term. And had some success and had an opportunity to sell that company. So that was great. I decided to go back to business school at that point. And then really spent the better part of the next eight years or so in kind of the management consulting world specific around technology, sort of like big Fortune 100 type of systems implementations, et cetera. And great cushy, all that stuff, like good pay. But I just, I didn't want to be like sort of a cog in a giant wheel. Greg: So a business school colleague of mine had just taken over this company based out of San Diego, was founded by a guy who had already had a billion dollar exit. It's kind of more of an incubator of sorts. Was like four or five companies that had come together and he was asked to run it. And he was looking for a guy who had sort of a tech marketing business development background. And brought me in and I left sort of the cushy corporate world to get back into the crazy world of entrepreneurship. Led that company through a pivot. We ended up eventually rebranding as Events.com. We spun off one of our divisions and sold it to private equity. And it was a nice little ride. And that gentleman ended up moving back into the private equity world and opened up a firm in a venture front and would invest in a number of different companies. Greg: And somehow I became like this turnaround guy that he would bring me in to these companies that had all this potential that they invested in, but for one reason or another was somewhat distressed. And that's ultimately how I got introduced to Fancy. He came in, they sit on the board of directors here, they invested in the company in late 2018 and there were some things that needed to be changed. Obviously, Fancy has been a company, been around for a really long time. So I was brought in, made the CEO in March of 2019. But a little bit more about Fancy, the company itself was founded in 2010, tremendous amount of early success. I think we're talking about people like Jack Dorsey was on the board of directors early on. Even today our board of directors is sort of a who's who of people. Greg: But our company had over 12 million users since our inception. Really found it as more of a social network, Pinterest of sorts. A place to really kind of find and share just really cool and interesting and unique products. And then there was a natural evolution into commerce. And we've had a lot of highs. And the company never had an issue with users or experience, it was really around profitability and finding a way to make this into a viable business model. So we did end up having a situation where there's a couple of insolvency moments which ultimately led to the transition. But I've come in and there's still such a great userbase and foundation in here. And we've sort of been pivoting the company and turning things back around. It's been a fun little ride so far. We're really excited about the future. Stephanie: That's great. So when thinking about coming in and turning around companies, either at Fancy.com or just holistically from like a higher level of what you've done in your past, what is the first maybe 90 days look like when you are looking at a company and figuring out how you want to change it and what's going wrong? Greg: Yeah. Good question. So having done this a handful of times now, I can tell you that I made a lot of mistakes the first couple of times doing it. And I think that it really prepared me for the role I took on at Fancy. I'll tell you what not to do. First, what not to do is go in and start making changes too quickly. To go in and sort of like point out every mistake that the company's ever made. One of the easiest things in the world to do is be a critic. And you can go into a company that's somewhat distressed or has had some issues, and you could just start just tearing things apart. Whose decision was this? Why are we doing this? This doesn't make sense. And even though you can quickly come up with the right direction and the right solution for what you need to do, you can lose your people. Greg: And ultimately, your people are the most important assets you have in many cases. So what you do need to do when you go into a company and you want to turn around, and I think it's something that I was able to do at Fancy even though there were a lot of tough decisions and tough changes, is get the buy-in from your team. A lot of times you do that by just listening and just acknowledging all the great things that they've done in the past. And truthfully, most of the issues that you're going to eventually have to address, they already know they exist and they know what they are. So let them tell you, and you'll start to kind of pull out the solutions. Then when you have to make those really difficult changes that impact people's lives and careers and whatever it may be, the people that you need and people that you keep are on board because they see the rationale and they understand it. And a lot of ways, they're the ones that have kind of helped you, guide you. Greg: So I guess just to summarize that, the one thing that I've learned over time and that I don't think I did really early on in my career is to just take super account of the people and the human aspect of what they're going through and being a new person coming into an established company and having to make change, but doing it in a way that keeps them engaged and let them believe in you and want to continue to be part of the company. Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. So when it comes to Fancy.com, it seemed like before you, it was a pretty fancy environment. Like maybe really nice parties and things like that. Did you have any struggles maybe when it came to convincing the employees like we can't keep doing that? Because many employees are probably like, "I'm used to this and I'm very used to going here and interacting with these people and having this kind of swag." I don't know if that's the case for Fancy.com, but did you encounter any of that pushback when you were kind of evolving the environment to focus on profitability? Greg: Yeah. I did. Funny story, at least I think it's funny. We had the storage unit in Manhattan. And I went into it one day and just a bunch of old fancy stuff, swag and different products, people incentives for revaluation. There are just box. And I open up this box and it's got these thick, like metal credit cards. They're the size of credit cards, but they're kind of like solid steel. And it's like, "Thank you for visiting Fancy. We value you. Here's a $1,000 gift credit to use at Fancy, coupon code." And there are like- Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Greg: ... Hundreds of these things. I mean like a stack, like a box full of them, probably even had thousands of them. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Greg: I'm like, "What is this?" I go, "We were just giving away, like handing out $1,000 gift cards?" And so I went back to the team uptown. And the founders apparently would go to these parties in New York City and they would have models and celebrities and hip hop artists and athletes and et cetera. And they would just walk around the party just kind of talking and they would just give these $1,000 gift cards away to people. Stephanie: Wow. That's super fancy. Greg: That is super fancy. Right. Right. That's how you go through $120 million in capital in a period of time. Stephanie: Is that what you encountered when you came in? It was like $120 million of capital was kind of spent maybe in not the best ways and you had to kind of get out of the hole? Greg: Well, yes and no. So the positive, and this is what really is I think exciting about the opportunity and one of the reasons why I decided to pretty much route my life and spend the last, however many months in New York. I'd been a Southern California guy, is, yes, that a lot of money went to waste. And there was a lot of money spent on parties and those types of things. But along the way, they built an amazing technology platform. So Fancy is all proprietary and really the underlying technology that's built upon... The mobile app that we have is really rock solid. I'm in technology. And I've been in technology throughout my life and our mobile app, we have, I think today like give or take like 2.7 million active installs of the Fancy app, iOS, Android. Stephanie: Wow. Greg: Fancy.com domain name, the site itself is generating however many hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month just to sort of organic and SEO. Our dataset, we've had over 12 million Fancy accounts created. We've done several million transactions. We're working with however many merchants, some 800 merchants. We're a global company. Last year alone, we sold a product to 135 countries. So there was this asset pool that was built with that money that went out that as a startup you would just never be able to replicate. You just couldn't do those things if you were starting from scratch. Greg: But then because of some of the shortfalls of the company, and this is more from a business perspective, the current valuation and as we've raised last money, I mean, we're just closing out a small little bridge note right now and a $12 million valuation, which is insane. I mean, the intrinsic value of our assets far exceeds that number, but because of the situation that's where we're at. So I look at it as a huge opportunity and an amazing asset pool that we sit on. But short answer to your question is there was a lot of money spent on parties that like Tiësto was deejaying at. They had no business rationale really other than just getting the Fancy brand out. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. I mean, I kind of wish I was at that party, but I don't know if I want to be an investor in that company per se or the CEO at that time. So that sounds like a big turnaround project. Maybe to talk a little bit about Fancy, so there's a lot of products on there, a lot of really cool products, was there any business decisions around product selection or how to curate them or personalize things or around like sourcing new products that you're implementing right now to maybe make the user experience better and to not show thousands of products at once and more personalize it to the people when they're coming onto the website? Greg: Yeah. Really kind of all those things in some way or…
Full show notes at the publisher
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
