Ep. 176 - Amazon & Northwestern Mutual's Aaron Hawkins on Consumer Channel Disruption

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Aaron Hawkins, former Head of Global Prime, now Whole Foods and Fresh Last Mile Delivery Strategy, at Amazon. And currently the VP of Digital Product at Northwestern Mutual. They discuss eCommerce retail at Kohl's and Amazon, drop shipping, customer experience, PR-FAQ, customer truisms, financial services at Northwestern Mutual, and Agile.

Interview Transcript  (Read the transcript at insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger:  Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we are recording live at the Fall Experiment conference here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.And with me today is Aaron Hawkins. He is the former head of Global Prime now Whole Foods and Fresh Last Mile Delivery Strategy at Amazon. And he's now currently the VP of Digital Product at Northwestern Mutual. Welcome to the show Aaron. 

Aaron Hawkins: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm super excited to have you on the show for a couple of different reasons.  One, you've been in this space of innovation, obviously working for Amazon in the retail space, and all the disruption that's going on. Love to talk a little bit more about your experiences there, and then obviously you're now to a new role, moving back to the Midwest, where you're from. Let's start the conversation with talking a little bit about your background and how did you get into innovation.

Aaron Hawkins: Yes, my background is that I really have been permanently in eCommerce retail my whole career. I started at Kohl's working for their website, and when I joined Kohl's, they were about a $15.5 billion retail business and that was primarily through their stores and their website was doing about $140 million at the time.  When I joined it, it was way under penetrated and they were looking to expand and I sort of just lucked out and got an opportunity to really start up in a scrappy kind of pilot mode, a drop ship program, which is a direct to consumer model where they leverage suppliers and manufacturers and distributors capabilities to ship in individual units to end consumers. And it was a great opportunity for Kohl's to expand because it was pretty low capital investment on their part. And so piloted a program there in 2007. And that really grew. 

I think by the time I left Kohl's to go to Amazon, their website had grown to about $1.7 billion. And so it was basically doubling itself every two years, which was incredible growth. And that really afforded me the opportunity to go to Amazon and work for their North America drop ship program, which was really how they got started. They started drop shipping books way back in 1995 and so it was a pretty mature program, but it had gotten a little stale. And so they brought me in to think about ways to refresh it a little bit and also to start leveraging some of their fulfillment capabilities that they had developed over time and you know, two day prime shipping had been a pretty well established thing at that point. I think they had 55 fulfillment centers by the time I joined. 

Read the transcript at insideoutside.io