Up Next In Commerce

There is no shortage of ecommerce companies popping up everywhere you look, especially in the U.S, where the culture of having a side hustle is making more and more people into entrepreneurs. Most of those companies sell products, and a lot of them also create or sell merch. That’s where Printful comes into the picture. Printful offers on-demand printing and dropshipping so that companies of all shapes and sizes can design and deliver customized products all over the world. But, according to Raitis Purins, the Head of Marketing of Printful, that’s not the main aspect of the company that has allowed it to grow to a $1 billion valuation.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Raitis explains that when it comes to serving burgeoning ecommerce brands, you have to do more than deliver products to them, you have to help educate them. Printful is only successful if the companies it serves survive and thrive, and so when 9 out of 10 new ecommerce businesses fail, that could spell trouble. Raitis explained that a lot of what Printful does is create content that not only helps the company rank on Google and bring in new customers, but also helps those customers figure out their footing in this crazy world of business. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Side Hustles As Printful’s Main Hustle: Thanks to the culture of side hustles in the United States, there are more creators and entrepreneurs than ever before who all need merchandise. This audience is a fruitful place for companies like Printful and other personalization brands to lean into and deliver new products for.Encouraging Success: It is extremely difficult to create an ecommerce shop that stands the test of time. Success is hard to come by, and so if you serve those young brands, it benefits you to try to help them succeed. When they thrive, so do you, so if you have tips, best practices, or other lessons that you can share with those who come work with you, sharing what you know will create a mutually beneficial, and therefore loyal, relationship.Content, Content, Content: No one knows exactly what it takes to rank on Google, but there is consensus that content is king, and developing content around key themes, key words, and key phrases is one method that has worked before. In order to stay relevant and ranking, constantly be pushing out content around the keywords you identify as important, and build out that content in as many ways and languages as possible.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

I want to make money. Yep, I said it, and you should too, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner. It seems obvious, but, as my guest today will explain, that idea and saying those words out loud is what holds so many people back.Leslie Kuster is the founder and CEO of Back from Bali, an ecommerce fashion brand that she scaled from 50k to multiple millions in just a few years. She achieved most of that growth on Amazon, a platform that is always challenging but can work wonders for your business if you know the ins and outs. She does and she shared them with us, including how Amazon has been changing its terms of service around images, what kind of SEO strategies will work well, and what it takes to connect with customers even when facing certain restrictions. Plus, Leslie has a ton of advice for all kinds of entrepreneurs, and women in particular, about what it takes to turn something that was more of a hobby into a business worth millions. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:But Why?: Success in business comes down to having a vision and a “why” behind what you are doing as an entrepreneur. There are so many ups and downs, that if you don’t have a vision that will fuel you and motivate you through all of the hardships, then you will not make it through them.Expanding In A Limited Way: When you think about expanding your business, you typically think about how to create a more broad product portfolio. Rather than bringing multiple new products to market, look at the product or products you have that are working already and expand those in creative ways.The Toughest Question of All: Trying to figure out where to invest your dollars is the biggest challenge for an entrepreneur. And when you are selling successfully on Amazon or on your website, you have to ask yourself is it worth it to try to drive traffic elsewhere? It’s expensive to be competitive in different markets, particularly fashion, where there is already overcrowding. So rather than throw money at a channel or website that is competing against a sea of other challengers, shift your focus to an area where you can create a niche or where you are already having success.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here. 

If you’ve heard of Casper, the mattress-in-a-box brand, you unknowingly have heard of Terri Rockovich. Terri was one of the early employees at Casper and helped the company launch into the stratosphere. Today, she’s trying to do the same thing with her new company, Jinx, a DTC dog food brand committed to helping our furry friends live their best lives. So maybe it should actually be DTD? Direct to dog?Anyway, as Terri told me, it’s hard to make magic happen twice, especially when you’re launching a brand in the middle of one of the biggest market shakeups in history. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Terri told me all about how Jinx had to pivot when its retail strategy fell to pieces when stores shut their doors in 2020, and she described how directing all of the company’s focus to digital fulfillment and creative partnerships with brands like Petco, Rover and Target landed Jinx in front of a national audience faster than they imagined. Plus, Terri and I got into how disruptive brands can build a moat against their major CPG competitors. And be sure to take note of when and where you might be seeing (and maybe smelling) some doggie billboards coming soon! Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:A Moat With Many Alligators: Young disruptive brands often come to market to take on larger, established CPG companies. As a brand trying to grab market share, you might think you’d want to push out others just like you. Instead, it might be more effective for similar disruptive brands to all go after the one or two market players in order to open up even more opportunities. The disruptive brands, by definition, will be doing something different than the CPG companies, and that insulates them from being overtaken so easily, especially if they band together.Ditching Customization: Creating a custom experience seems to be all the rage, but by creating a product that meets the needs of many, scaling becomes much easier. With a widely accessible product, you can much more easily sell, produce and ship product with speed.Pick Your Path: If you want to compete online or in retail, you need to be sure that you show up in a way that allows you to stand out. Whether that’s through price, uniqueness of product, the consumers you’re targeting or in your marketing and packaging, there has to be something that makes people stop, look and give your brand a chance.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here. 

When you’re building a business, the stakes are always high. Now think about building a company based on a product that absolutely has to work 100% of the time and the other competitors in your category have been around for a century and own about 70% of the market. That might seem like a lot of pressure, and you maybe would assume that having to succeed under those circumstances would mean working in a pretty intense environment. But that’s not necessarily the case for P.S. Condoms. The young DTC brand launched its first product in early 2020 and has been steadily building a base of loyal customers ever since. And the co-founders. Rob Seo and Raja Agnani, have made sure to bring some fun and humor to the company along the way.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I talked to Rob and Raja about what it’s been like to build P.S. Condoms and why creating a welcoming, open, and fun brand has been critical to the company’s success. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Bringing Sexy Back: For too long, the idea of what is “sexy” has been co-opted by a few major brands. By creating a company that messages to everyone and encourages them to embrace their individuality, P.S. Condoms has opened up the opportunity to reach more potential customers.Let’s Meet IRL: Most things are better in person or when tried first-hand. When bringing customers into the funnel — especially as a new brand — online channels will only get you so far. Meeting with potential customers at in-person events and giving them samples to use in their everyday lives is the most effective way to get people further into the sales funnel.Keep It Clean But Still Creative: To advertise on the traditional channels, you have to follow certain rules. But those restrictions shouldn’t limit your creativity, they should enhance it. Use the rules placed on you as a creative challenge to find new and more interesting ways to connect with people.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here. 

Catalogs and carpeting are two things that most people think went out of style in the 1990s. But those people are wrong, and FLOR is here to prove it. James Pope is the General Manager at FLOR, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he took me through all the ways that the company is making carpet cool again through their unique, easy-to-install, and beautiful carpet tiles. But, the first question? How to find new customers when your parent company has focused on B2B customers in the past such as office spaces or hotels. Well, as they say, what’s old is new again, and FLOR’s top-performing marketing programs and main entry point for customers is… a catalog. That catalog represents 70% of their consumer demand. Wild. James really dug into the details around how they think about designing their catalogs from front to back, to tracking offline to online attributions, why holdout testing is key, and why the 80/20 rule holds true for almost everything. Plus, stay tuned to hear about FLOR’s second-most successful marketing campaign which might just surprise you... Enjoy!Main Takeaways:Don’t Overcomplicate: Even if you have a unique product or methodology, more often than not, consumers tend to make decisions based on what they know and already like. Try not to get too cute or complicated with how you present your product and instead, just make it easy for consumers to see the value in your product regardless of the way they buy or use it.An Old-School Starting Line: Despite the fact that many companies are digital-first, oftentimes a customer’s starting point with a brand comes from a paper catalog they get in the mail. Brands are missing an opportunity when they ignore the more traditional means of marketing, especially now with over-saturated email inboxes and more consumers working directly from home. Digital marketing is easy to ignore, but everyone checks their mail every day, so you have a much better chance of having an impact there.What’s In A Name?: Turns out a lot. In the search field, customers at FLOR tend to search for the branded product name rather than using generic terms. This means that not only should the website be optimized to accommodate those searches, but that it’s important to pay attention to the names you give products.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here. 

Efficiency, transparency, trust. These are all things that both businesses and consumers crave, but don’t always achieve. Especially not all with one solution. But thanks to digital identities, and the technology that’s coming out of Avery Dennison, that’s about to change. Avery Dennison, a Fortune 500 global materials science company, is taking digital identities past the point of simple QR codes and RFID tags, and into a place where brands and consumers will be able to do more with individual products than ever before. We’re talking about a world where you can track the tiniest details of a product in shipment, like its exact origins to its temperature. And brands will have the ability to create more sustainable, reusable products that can learn from consumers each time they use and scan the digital identifiers, making it possible to adapt to changing consumer behavior in real time. To learn more about this new circular economy, I invited Max Winograd to the show, who serves as the VP of Connected Products at Avery Dennison and one of the founders of atma.io. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Max and I talked about all the ways that digital identities are already being used today, and what the future holds in terms of the connected experience that digital identities provide for brands and consumers. There are so many possibilities and upsides to the technology that Max and his team are creating at Avery Dennison, so keep your ears perked up for this awesome conversation! Main Takeaways:Individual Focus: Investments in innovative technology is helping make possible a future that will see consumers more in control of and informed about individual product journeys. Rather than simply tracking an item from the manufacturer to its final destination, consumers can get all the microdetails of a product. So whether you are expecting a shipment of produce or medical supplies and vaccines, Bluetooth, RFID, and other digital identity technology will make it possible to keep an eye on all of the minuscule details, like the temperature of the truck the product is being shipped in.So Long, Single-Use: How we package products is likely to undergo a fundamental change over the next few years. Rather than single-use anything, consumers will be encouraged and ultimately rewarded by having reusable individual containers that have unique digital IDs. So, rather than going to the store to buy a gallon of milk, so can have your own container, scan its QR code or other identifier at your local market, and the backend system will know who you are, what kind of milk you like (skim, oat, almond, etc.) and the exact amount, and will dispense that into your container.A Circle Is Round, It Has No End: Consumers are much more interested in taking part in a circular economy. There is more activity in re-commerce than ever before as customers turn to the resale marketplace. The need for product-level identification becomes crucial here because you can not only trace a product's origins, you can also pass along all of its information in the resale market, including selling it to be recycled and then have the recycled materials continue to be traced all along their journey.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here. 

Imagine this… it’s 1999, and you and your sibling decide to start an ecommerce company with just a phone line, a 14k modem, a ping pong table, and a credit card. You build a website, find a product that has unnecessary margins, and decide to just.. do it better yourself. Feeling bullish on this ending? Well we are. Because that’s exactly what Roger Hardy did when building his first company called Coastal Contacts, which grew to be the world’s largest omni channel eyewear retailer. The success couldn’t be ignored, and soon after, Coastal was acquired. But one part of that sibling duo, Roger Hardy, couldn’t stay away from the eyewear game forever. He re-entered the space in 2019 with his new company, Kits.com, and by the end of 2021 the business will have already eclipsed $100 million in revenue.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Roger and I got to chat about some of his secrets to success in the D2C world of eyewear. We dove into the importance of vertical integration, what the link is between a company’s NPS and its valuation, and how to think about hiring if you want to go from 1 to 25 to 100 to 300 and beyond. Enjoy this episode!   Main Takeaways:Who’s In Control?: Vertical integration has been a hallmark of many successful DTC eCommerce companies. When you control all the levers of production, you not only can cut costs and offer customers prices they will love, you also no longer have to worry about delays or logistics problems that otherwise would be out of your control and set you back for untold periods of time.Blend It Together: While you might have an idea of what you want to sell, if you focus only on offering your own premium products, you leave out an entire customer base that might be looking for something a bit different. By offering all kinds of products, you open the door to other customers who might not have found you otherwise. Then, once they are in the funnel, you can blow them away with a quality experience so they keep coming back for more, which is when you can present them with your product options.Beyond Basic: As you begin to scale, there comes a point when you have to think bigger than just hiring to fill roles. Even if the person is smart and a cultural fit, the aim needs to shift to attracting and hiring people who are the best in the world in every department.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.  

Crowdfunding has been around for centuries — all the way back to the 1700s when Alexander Pope was looking for resources to publish his book. So what did he do? He turned to the people! In return for their funding, his supporters were promised a shout out in the manuscript and would receive a printed copy.  Thanks to the internet, crowdfunding has been taken to another level. With easy access to billions of people — and their wallets — young companies, inventors, and entrepreneurs have used sites like GoFundMe, Kickstarter, and others to get some wind in their sails. Dan Shapiro was one of them. Dan is now the Founder and CEO of Glowforge, but before that, he had a massively successful crowdfunding campaign for a board game he had invented for his kids. Through that experience, Dan realized that there were certain elements of crowdfunding that he described as “magic” and that he thought could translate to the world of ecommerce. For his next venture, he wanted to take the high-intent visitors to a crowdfunding site on his website and get them to start converting reliably on the brand’s landing page. He wanted to build a community, and to build excitement that would turn into a flywheel of referrals and inbound leads. Oh, and he wanted to build an inclusive, mission-driven internal culture at the same time.Well guess what. He did just that with his next crowdfunding campaign. With $100K campaign goal that ended up being blown out of the water, hitting $27M in pre-orders, he launched his next endeavor. And we dove through all the details on this episode of Up Next in Commerce! Main Takeaways:Beyond Crowdfunding: The conversion rate of a visitor to Kickstarter is exponentially higher than that of a traditional ecommerce site visitor. So how can you take the elements of a crowdfunding site and bring it over to a traditional online marketplace? There are certain strategies and tactics that transcend crowdfunding and harnessing that energy, excitement, and engagement can be a differentiator for a brand.Bring A Friend: Referral programs are nothing new, but when done right, they can be a game changer for a new brand. Look at your customer base and the products they are buying from your company. If you are selling to naturally extroverted people — any kind of creator — and your product is helping them create something that they’ll want to share, tap into that natural tendency and give them incentives to share what they’re doing and how your company helped. This could lead to a flywheel of inbound customers without having to spend big on marketing.Come Back When You Want: Repeat customers are the lifeblood of many companies. And while getting customers to return is important, how and why they do so is even more critical. You want people to come back to your company because they were delighted by the product or the experience, not because they need to replace a part that wore out or broke. Those experiences leave a bad taste in the consumers’ mouth, and you should be striving for the opposite, especially if you are trying to build a community of advocates.  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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here. 

What if I told you that a technology that has been around since the 1910s is the secret sauce to a company that was founded in 2020 and has completely exploded in the year since? And when I say exploded, I mean scaling from $0 to over $25 million in…. Less than a year. Well, that’s the story of R-Zero Systems, and it’s a great example of how, in today’s world, spotting an opportunity, moving fast, and being able to solve problems in real-time is what separates the winners from the losers in the business world. Whether you’re in CPG, retail, healthcare, or some combination of multiple verticals, the biggest problem a company has is the ability to sustainably scale. But R-Zero Systems is showing just how to do it well, and that’s not the only solution the company is bringing to the table. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I sat down with Grant Morgan, the co-founder and CEO of R-Zero Systems, and he told me all about the wild ride the company has been on since its founding in spring of 2020. See, R-Zero is a biosafety technology company that, thanks to its innovative products, helps customers create safer spaces for its patients, employees, students, and anyone else entering an indoor space. It was created for the same reason as any other company — to solve a problem. The difference, though, was that Grant and his team were able to first, ramp up production at a time when few others could, and second, bring something critical to the very specific needs of the market that was already proven to be effective but wasn’t very accessible. Turns out, that’s the key to growing quickly is effectiveness and accessibility all at once, oh, and maybe a few other things too. Want to know what they are? Find out on this episode! Plus, listen closely to hear my epic UV product ideas that I know Grant is eager to add to his product roadmap, and some of the funniest product requests he has received to date. Main Takeaways:Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: One of the factors that affects productivity is sick days. By finding a way to reduce sick days, a company can operate more economically and efficiently. But more than just impacting the bottom line, by investing in creating a healthy environment, you are providing workers a better overall experience.Proof Positive: Even when you are working with a proven technique, application, or resource, when you introduce it in a new way, you have to go through the due diligence to re-prove its efficacy. Especially when what you are trying to prove is invisible to the human eye.The Right DNA: In order to scale, hiring is key. But this task shouldn’t be treated lightly. One wrong hire can impact the culture in more ways than one could imagaine. So how do you create and keep a culture worth building around, and find the right people for the company? Tune in to hear how Grant things about hiring within a fast growing company.!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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Okay, so sitting around trying to predict the future can be a pretty fun challenge. But for Phillip Jackson, the Chief Commerce Officer at Rightpoint and the Co-founder of Future Commerce, there’s no better way to spend a day — or an hour on a podcast. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Phillip and I went deep down the rabbit hole of all the crazy trends we’re currently seeing in the ecommerce world, and where we expect the industry to head next. From spotting innovation in the gaming community, building the ecommerce metaverse, or working with disruptor brands on high-risk, high-reward ideas to grow a digital community, we touched on it all. Plus, if you think big retail is dead, tune in to hear Phillip’s interesting take on how that is anything but true, and how the D2C brands currently praised on Twitter are nothing in comparison to the private revolution happening in places like Target and Walmart. Just check out the GMV if you don’t believe him! This was such a fun interview, and I loved getting the chance to pick the brain of another smart, forward-thinking podcast host and ecommerce enthusiast! Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!Main Takeaways:Retail Takeover: The private label revolution is all around us, you just have to know where to look! Hint: Check the quarterly earnings..Coming Together: Brands love to say they built a community. And while that might be true, the problem is that all brand communities are currently siloed. The future of commerce will be more unified as brands continue to experiment with ways to create an ecommerce metaverse by blending different digital properties, platforms collectibles, and other elements together and making them available more broadly outside of specific channels.Game On: To get a look at where the future of commerce and technology is headed, the best place to look is often in the gaming community, where innovation happens constantly and those innovations often find their way into the real world.Failure is Always An Option: Ecommerce shouldn’t be boring, it should be filled with experimentation, risk-taking, and big swings. Historically, bigger brands have played it safe and stayed on the prescribed path, which has meant they have been left behind by the disruptor brands that are more willing to try, fail, learn, and try again.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---For a full transcript of this interview, click here.