Future Commerce

Content Creation and Open-Ended ConversationsFor the Love is a DTC newsletter covering mission-driven companies and aims to provide meaningful content for entrepreneurs and founders.The trio shares the joys and pains of producing weekly content and how that informs their own understanding of the market.Creating content is a means of learning and growing, and developing a cadence that requires you to get better over time.“I don't think of myself as the authority on all of these topics. I am trying to learn about them. And so I'm having these conversations and trying to convey that as best I can.” - AjaThere is a lot of good conversation and community building happening in the DTC media world, but there is still so much room to grow in providing spaces for diverse voices to provide their perspectives. For The Love seeks to have conversations with founders about the things that help to build a more charitable and equitable brand community.Aja aims to invite open-ended conversations from those she interviews to make deeper, more tactical information more readily available.“Something needs to be meaningfully different to be relevant” - AjaOn innovation in DTC companies: “Can we provide premium product to people without a premium price tag? And I think that was the original intention of direct to consumer.” - AjaAssociated Links:Subscribe to Aja’s newsletter, For the Love!Find Aja on Twitter here. Sign up to receive our newest report, Service is the New Storefront, dropping next week!

Nostalgia and MonocultureRob shares the story of how Rally acquired a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and their plan to make it accessible to the publicGen Z is growing up to be a completely different wealth creation cycle then the one that currently existsRob breaks down how Rally operates, the legal system that makes their IPOs possible, and how the system they created is both an online and in-person museum“We tried to create an ecosystem that is built around access but has a little bit for everybody involved, people that care about these assets individually.” - Rob “It's more important to have one of those sort of the Genesis moment of a franchise that I truly do believe has staying power and will live forever, then it is to have stock in a company where I'm beholden to, you know, a car manufacturer and something that's a little bit disconnected from the CEO of that company right now.” - Rob By keying in on nostalgia, Rally is unlocking the interest of a new type of investor. Nintendo’s mark on the culture has a strong nostalgia with a current generation experiencing new liquidity, looking to invest into new asset classes.“Anything that has that huge enthusiast group, the people who really care about it, has gotten out of reach because of access or price, that's a space that we want to be in.” - RobSpeculative future assets may be absurdist in nature. An example Rob gives is a Theranos centrifuge. It may not be worth much now, but acquiring it now for its potential future value is something that Rally thinks a lot about as they build for the future.You cannot buy spent Chernobyl fuel rods on Rally (yet).Associated Links:https://rallyrd.com/https://www.instagram.com/rally/?hl=en

The agency world doesn’t get enough respectAgencies are a necessary part of fractionalizing expertise. Legal and accounting are good examples of fractionalized professional services.The more mature you are as a business, the more it becomes imperative to bring those capabilities in house.Proof points of DTC brands who acquired professional services: Ro and GlossierAgencies are concentrators of expertise. Commerce platforms, like Magento, require domain expertise and platform specialization to implement — and many brands lack the ability to run this kind of operation in-house.“I don't think the agency world gets enough respect and agencies are concentrators of talent. Like they are concentrators of expertise. And the last time I looked, technologists make the decisions that create the experiences that your customers interact with.”Creating an anti-competitive ecosystem in eCommerce requires rethinking power structures. Brian recapped thoughts on this process of questioning those power structures, relating back to his Insiders piece: Rethinking Brand Power Structures“You are who you are because of the things that you've seen and the experiences you've had. That has a huge bearing on the way that we think of whatever the future is, because the future is determined by what's happened in the past”Associated Links:Check out Brian’s Insiders piece: Insiders #080: Rethinking Brand Power StructuresThe Future of Services Is Value Orchestration Let us know what you thought about the episode on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at Hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

The Big Pivot: From Physical Products to Headless CommerceThe core idea of the pivot from physical products to software was the basis of our piece in Insiders #070: Phenomenological Brands, which is how we booked Arfa (now Chord) to the Show.The Chord team’s background in deploying technology at Glossier informed the need for unique eCommerce experiences, and headless represents a shift from the template-driven sameness of eCommerce today, to a new limitless futureHenry breaks down a new announcement, the name change from Arfa to Chord, a stronger  focus on business software, as well as acquiring business intelligence company, Yaguara.Arfa was rated as #4 in our “Amazon Prime Challengers” category in our Spring 2020 Nine by Nine reportThe technological evolution of headless commerce allows for a fundamental revolution in direct to consumer “To make real value at some point, you’ve got to walk away from something that's worth something.” - Henry Proprietary competitive advantage is a meaningful way to make your entire business better, and what will impact everything else.“We need to move the conversation beyond build versus buy. It's really buy the right thing and then build around it. And if you can't build around it, then it's not the right thing.” - Bryan M.“Our very unique position on this is not just about headless, it's about the brain as well. Having the tools is half the battle. Knowing what to do with them is the other half. And that's our very strong position that we arrived at as operators.” - Henry Associated Links:Nine by Nine Reporthttps://chord.co/https://www.glossier.com/Let us know what you think on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at Hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

Society and Audience ConnectionThere’s a difference in connection with audiences—connection through logic (written) and connection through emotion (art).On emotional connection: “...when it connects with somebody, it deepens the experience of the things you’re trying to say through words.” - Phillip JacksonLumi is a software company connecting packaging manufacturers to brands and creating lasting relationships between those brands and manufacturers. Not only has COVID-19 affected manufacturing, but there’s a generational gap between manufacturers and brands. Lumi is bridging that gap.“I feel like we’re going to be in this golden age of business as performance art, where people are doing things that don’t make sense, but they’re doing it on a large scale when it comes to marketing.” - Stephan AngoTools with Soul“How do you create, give your company a soul, give your thing that you’re doing a soul? That’s very hard. It’s like trying to define why your thing should exist…” - Stephan Ango on what his podcast, Well Made, is trying to define.Slash Packaging is a hobby project of Stephan’s—and has helped brands tell the stories around their packaging. Slash Packaging isn’t trying to be the source of innovation for packaging, but they do want to build a framework for understanding what the more sustainable options are in your industry. “I want people to learn how to think about other ways that tools can be used so that they could find creative uses of these tools to expand all of our understanding and imagination and our horizons.” - Phillip Jackson“This idea of default, the idea of sampling, the idea of ubiquity in the tools that we use has created other problems that weren’t easy to anticipate and I think harder to solve for, which leaves room for challengers.” - Phillip JacksonLinksListen to Well Made.Check out Lumi’s status tracker for their factories.Check out Slash Packaging. Have any comments or questions about this episode? Reach out to us at hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels. We love hearing from our listeners!

A perfect rating isn’t perfect. Who knew? Validation on the web has been undermined by farms and bots, and trust is harder to build than ever before. Technology can solve for some of the challenges in building trust with your customers. In this episode we dive into the the complexity of building trust, and the paradox of how running an Amazon Prime operation can help you get better at delivering in DTC. Listen now!

🎶Let’s get personal, personal...🎶 But seriously, we have this bad habit in eCommerce to turn customers into segments and numbers and forget that they’re people. Ben Parr, President and Co-Founder of Octane AI and Jason Wong, of Doe Lashes & Wonghaus Ventures join the show to talk about making segments personal, organic, and engaging for the customer. Listen Now!

Consumers want instant gratification from their purchases and sometimes it can feel really intimidating to even try to attempt matching the expectation of 2-day shipping. But what if we told you that you can get your products to every customer in 2 days or Less? Babs King, CEO at Fleo and George Wojciechowski join the show to talk about building the process and technology to meet customer expectations. Listen Now!

Product returns can be a total pain. But what if brands used their returns to actually strengthen customer loyalty? In this episode of Step by Step, David Sobie, CEO and Co-Founder of Happy Returns and Zach Goldstein, CEO and Founder of Public Rec join the pod to chat about how returns can actually be painless for the brand and a good experience for the customer, driving their loyalty to your brand. Listen now!

94 percent of customers will blame the retailer if the delivery of their purchase goes poorly. In this episode, Adam Gardner, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Route reveals how Route gives customers peace of mind and your brand protection in case of a shipment gone awry. Listen Now!