Up Next In Commerce

Ecommerce has come a long way from its early days as a separate part of the company that you set up and just hope to see returns on. Now, ecommerce is pivotal for just about every organization — but there is one faction of businesses that still lags behind. There are $17 trillion dollars worth of B2B payments made every year. Yes, trillion with a T. And half of those payments are still being made manually. Clearly, there is a massive shift that still needs to happen in the B2B space, and Deloitte Digital is helping make those digital transformations a reality.Paul do Forno is the Managing Director at Deloitte Digital, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he helped us understand the struggles B2B brands are facing and how moving them into the digital space could spell a massive change in the ecommerce industry. Paul also dives into some of the major trends he’s keeping an eye on in the ecommerce world, including how ecommerce continues to scale around the globe, most notably in Latin America. Plus, he shares some tips for businesses who are overwhelmed by the amount of channels and platforms they suddenly have to play in. Spoiler: he says do less. Tune in to hear more!Main Takeaways:Massive Call And Response: Bigger brands are struggling to stay connected to their consumers in a way that scales. Today, customers are looking to have a more authentic relationship and connection with the brands they engage with and support. For enterprises, connecting one-to-one is nearly impossible, so they are investing in tools like A.I. and conversational platforms to keep up with this newer generation of customers who crave connection.Dinosaurs Still Exist: So much B2B activity is still done manually, which means that there are trillions of dollars of transactions that could be moving online if/when B2B companies finally shift their activities to the digital space. The problem is that many B2B companies are miles behind their B2C peers in terms of optimizing the digital space for their many personas. It will take a lot of tools and transformation to bring those traditional B2B companies into 2021, but it will be necessary because the next generation is not interested in manually doing business and would much rather work with companies that have effective digital tools.Do Less: Brands can get caught up in the hype and the attempts to keep up with the Joneses. Instead, they should focus on being great at one platform or marketing activity. Plus, it’s critical to never forget the basics — like making sure your email list is generating the leads and engagement it should be to power your business.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--- 

Word of mouth is still the best marketing tool, even in today’s digital world. And in this time of the ecommerce boom, brands are constantly working to build buzz for their products. Whether that’s through ratings, reviews, social posts, or unique ad campaigns. But there’s one highly coveted strategy that’s been bubbling to the top of the stack, and every ecommerce leader knows it is the way of the future. User generated content. And a company called Yotpo is here to help with that. Yotpo is one of the top platforms that companies such as IKEA, 1-800-FLOWERS, Chubbies and more lean on to help them build communities, generate UGC, and create loyalty programs that yield the kind of engagement most brands only dream of. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I asked the co-founder and CEO of Yotpo, Tomer Tagrin to give us an inside look at how Yotpo is generating 5X more engagement and content creation than is typical. Plus, we also dove into the future of loyalty programs and personalization. My one-sentence takeaway: definitely start leaning heavily into loyalty and maybe let off the gas a bit on personalization. Why? Tune in to find out! Main Takeaways:Do What You Know: Success in ecommerce is becoming more about the community you can build to support you. So the question founders are asking themselves — and Yotpo — is how do you build that community? The answer is pretty simple actually, you just have to follow your own interests. A founder starts a company for a reason, and they typically personify the exact target customer their company is going after. So dig into that link and create content and strategies that would resonate with you, the founder.Long Live Loyalty Programs: Every brand should have a loyalty program, otherwise there are opportunities and dollars being left on the table. The only way to access those opportunities and cash, though, is through a very brand-specific program. There are no one-size-fits-all loyalty programs. Brands need to understand what they want to incentivize for in their loyalty programs, who they want to target, and how they will reward the behavior they are trying to generate through the loyalty program.Partial Personalization: By deploying personalization tools, you can sometimes open Pandora’s box of never-ending adjustments and adaptations in order to create individualized experiences. At a certain point, the return on that investment starts to diminish. Customers are all different, but they don’t all need to be treated as unicorns. Create segments of customer types, and personalize the experience to those subsets.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---

The world of ecommerce is constantly changing — this last year being a prime example. How people shop in 2021 is radically different from how they shopped in early 2020, so forget about thinking about comparing today’s world to a decade ago. Although that is fun to see how much has changed. Now, it’s all about keeping up with your customers, which is why for our first official roundtable episode of Up Next in Commerce we wanted to bring on two people who have been on the cutting edge of the industry for years. Ashima Sehgal is a Software Development Manager at Amazon Music and Jon Feldman, a Senior Marketing Leader for Salesforce Commerce Cloud. These two go way back to their days working together on ecommerce implementation at Restoration Hardware, which was a journey in and of itself, and while they remain close friends, they sit on the opposite side of the fence when it comes to certain aspects of the future of ecommerce. We get into all of it in this episode, including discussing whether shopping at the edge is the future of the industry or just a passing fad, and how to get buy-in when selling a new implementation. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!Main Takeaways:Make It Easy: When pitching or selling an implementation, the key is to tell the right story and make it hard for the business to say no. Highlight the pain points that their business is facing, and play up how you will solve those problems from beginning to end and be a great partner throughout the process. But one thing to remember, don’t try to tackle everything from the start and be upfront about what is prioritized and what is put on the backburner.Edgy Opinions: There is a lot of debate on the future of shopping at the edge and whether or not it is a fad. Regardless of whether it sticks, businesses should be harnessing the power of meeting customers where they are and selling to them in those places, but the base ecommerce platform should not have to suffer as a result of those efforts.It’s All A Simulation: In the last year especially, there has been a lot of talk about the death of retail and the rise of an ecommerce-only economy. That is a myth. While 2020 and early 2021 undeniably changed the way people shopped, it was more of a blip in the timeline and not a true indicator of the future, which will more likely be a blend of in-person and online experiences.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--- 

Interacting with customers requires a level of finesse and talent that is beautiful when done well, and a tough sight when done poorly. There is give and take, and you have to flow through various movements and ups and downs to reach a satisfying end result. It’s like a dance. A tango if you will. At least, that’s how the folks over at LivePerson see it. Alex Spinelli is the CTO and EVP of product, technology, and operations at LivePerson, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he broke down what that dance should look like, and how A.I. is taking the lead.  As Alex explains, LivePerson is a set of tools, technologies and platforms that enable businesses to have conversations with customers through messaging channels, and to detect where customers may be getting stuck or frustrated. Then, with a small immediate intervention, LivePerson’s A.I. routes that customer to a human who can make the buying process easier. It is a way to get to a better end result more often, and it works. Businesses using LivePerson have seen double-digit-percentage-point improvement in conversions and higher NPS scores than ever. But the power of A.I. doesn’t end there, and Alex dives deep into where we are headed with A.I. as a tool in retail, including the blended in-person and virtual experiences that seem to be overlapping more than ever before. And Alex gets into the nitty-gritty of the ethics behind A.I. and how everyone will have to be more involved going forward when it comes to defining their limits, wants, and needs. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Joining Forces: The future of A.I. in the ecommerce space is in the way brands can join together an A.I. experience with a human-based one. The way brands should be looking at A.I. is as a conversation-starter and a tool that can solve transactional problems, but when a deeper conversation is needed, it should be able to usher customers through a seamless transition to a real person who can build a relationship, form trust, solve problems, and ensure that the customer experience is a good one the has a positive end result.Let’s Get Ethical!: With any new technology, there are ethical questions that have to be addressed. This is especially true when dealing with A.I. Not only do you have to take into account the repercussions that A.I. will have on the labor force, but you also have to consider how A.I. is being trained, what kind of biases are being programmed into the model, and how and when to start and stop collecting data to build bigger and better A.I. models.Blend It Up: As we move further into the fourth industrial revolution, we are beginning to see more blending of virtual, digital, and physical experiences. Conversational technology will begin to follow us into physical stores and A.I., along with more targeting-types of technology, will be used in and out of stores.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--- 

By now we’ve all heard about the thousands of businesses that pivoted to ecommerce in the wake of the pandemic last year. What we haven’t heard as much are the lessons both companies and consumers have learned in the process.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I was excited to dive into those lessons and more with Israel “Iz” Moreira, the co-CEO of Doughp, a company that sells edible (and delicious) cookie dough. Prior to 2020, Doughp relied heavily on its brick-and-mortar stores and the foot traffic they delivered. But Iz saw potential in expanding the company through ecommerce channels, and, luckily, laid the groundwork for the infrastructure for that pivot even before COVID-19 forced Doughp to shutter its retail doors. With a now fully-online company, Doughp has started to centralize and increase its shipping capabilities and has seen success, but it wasn’t a cake (or should I say, cookie dough) walk. Iz explains some of the hardships Doughp faced on its journey to ecommerce success, including how little information-sharing there still is in the business world when it comes to cold shipping. Plus he dives into the recent revelations he’s discovered about whether free shipping actually matters as much as you think it does. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Secrets Are No Fun: Multiple players in the ecommerce space have reported struggles in optimizing the logistics of cold shipping. Some have figured it out on their own, while others have known the answers all along and have been keeping them close to the vest. Competitive advantages are still alive and well in the business world, so the level of information sharing when it comes to cold storage is still quite low in order for places like grocery stores and meal preppers to maintain their edge.Lead With Mission: Depending on your industry, you should be thinking about how to best reach customers in a differentiated way. Testing is required to find the right strategy, so don’t be afraid to experiment with personalization and messaging. And if you are in a more commoditized industry, finding that one thing that separates you from the rest of the pack is going to be the difference between a customer choosing you or not.Does Free Shipping Matter?: While 2020 was a struggle for most, there were some bright sides, including the education of consumers on the world of shipping and logistics. As more consumers became educated on the hardships businesses face when it comes to shipping and handling, the customers have become more willing to pay for shipping.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--- 

If done correctly, a two-headed strategy of driving sales on Amazon and your native website could yield huge dividends. But what does that kind of strategy look like, and how can you create a scenario where one builds off of another?The answer lies in assortment and pathways into the brand experience. Ben Knox is a bit of an expert in this area and he’s here to share his expertise. Ben earned his stripes working on Red Bull’s ecommerce strategy, and now serves as the SVP of Digital at Super Coffee. According to Ben, brands need to come up with an assortment strategy that allows customers to get what they want, when and where they want it, but also leads them back to the type of brand experience you want them to have. He also details how beneficial a subscription model can be, if done right. Plus, he gives some tips on how to get the most out of your texting strategies and what is going on in the wild west of customer acquisition.Main Takeaways:Assorted Assets: When you sell on Amazon, as well as natively on your website, you need to decide on an assortment strategy and how each site can build off each other. Whether that is only placing a select assortment of products on Amazon, or having a full assortment across channels, but offering more subscriptions and sales on your website, it’s crucial to have pathways back to your branded channels.Gotta Flex: If you offer subscriptions, you can only achieve true customer success if you offer flexibility. Even if it means that your customers can cancel a subscription ten minutes after they sign up, those are the kinds of options you need to offer. Doing so allows your customers to feel unburdened and that the experience is risk-free, which makes them more inclined to sign up.Text Me: There are benefits to separating your text strategies in order to maintain the relationship you want with your customers. Having separate text numbers for subscription management and branded content will help customers differentiate the experiences they are having and allow you to cultivate a true VIP experience with those who opt into the branded company channel.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--- 

Innovation is risky business, especially if you’re a hardware startup. But it’s not just risky on the part of those inventing a new product. The early adopters of that product are putting a lot on the line, too. Which is why certain industries, like retail, have remained mostly the same for decades. Retailers only want to bring in something new if the operational cost of installing and using the innovation are minimal, and if it doesn’t require a massive overhaul of a retail space. This is exactly what Lindon Gao found out when he started exploring this space. Lindon has been on a mission to disrupt retail since his first application for a smart security tag was accepted by Y Combinator, and while that hardware didn’t take off, Lindon kept going until he landed on an idea that stuck. Today, Lindon is the CEO of Caper, a company bringing smart cart technology into the retail space with increasing success. In fact, Caper’s tech could be coming to a store near you, as the company recently agreed to partner with America’s largest grocery retailer, Kroger, to bring smart carts into chains all over the nation. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Lindon talks us through how Caper is finally bringing change into the world of grocery, and he explains how smart cart technology could have ripple effects on ecommerce, personalization, and the entire customer journey. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Where’s The Easy Button?: Implementing new technology isn’t easy in retail. The operational headaches of launching anything new often outweighs the benefit of most of the new tech being presented. Incorporating new tech as a retailer requires finding innovations that don’t need large system overhauls, already naturally fit into the customer’s store journey and provide an added benefit (i.e. more customer data, more opportunities to upsell, etc), to make the investment worth it.Do You Want a Receipt?: Smart receipts are one of the top ways to keep track of consumers after they make a purchase. Receipts offer a window into consumer behavior, and also provide a new area for personalization and follow-up conversations that keep customers engaged.It’s Not Either Or: When it comes to ecommerce and grocery, it is not an either/or question. Both in-store and online shopping will continue, and, in fact, the move toward ecommerce will only push the in-store experience to be even more efficient and streamlined.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--- 

When people scroll through Instagram these days, they can’t avoid the ads and the influencers pushing products. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, more and more often, ecommerce is taking place in channels other than on a brand’s website, which is why so many companies are looking for ways to optimize how they execute commerce at the edge -- this means meeting customers where they are. Paloma has one way to do that, by turning messenger platforms into sales channels, which creates a more personalized shopping experience for customers, and a .5-to-10x higher conversion rate for brands.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I was joined by Kelsey Hunter, the Co-Founder and CEO of Paloma, to give us the inside scoop on why brands should be investing in conversational commerce. In the last year, Paloma has helped partners convert $9 million in sales, and she explains how that happened by simply diverting ad traffic away from a website and into a chat instead. Plus, she discusses the future of conversational commerce and how the low barrier to entry into the ecommerce industry is forcing everyone to adjust quicker than ever before. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Website Woes: Moving forward, a brand’s website will become more of a secondary piece of collateral when it comes to driving conversions. It will still be critical to have a fast, highly-efficient website experience, but more of the interactions and conversion efforts will be focused on other channels where customers are spending more time.Get To The Party: The worst thing a brand could be doing right now is not experimenting with and setting up processes in Facebook Messenger and other messaging apps. Customer service and the customer experience are two of the leading drivers of conversions, and ignoring a channel that allows you to provide a proactive and personalized experience is a huge wasted opportunity.Far Out Future: The future of commerce is being written right now with shops that are opening with simple Instagram product posts and telling customers interested to go to a PayPal link. More new brands are foregoing the traditional channels and website launches, so the barrier to entry is much lower. As more competition enters the market in this way, traditional brands will have to keep up with their own easy, personalized commerce options.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 Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postals, co-founder and CEO at mission.org. Today we have Kelsey Hunter joining us. The founder and CEO of Paloma. Kelsey, welcome to the show.Kelsey:Thank you, Stephanie. It's so good to be here.Stephanie:We're excited to have you on. I was just thinking I'm like, "How do I know I'm actually talking to Kelsey and not a chatbot?" She's put up a virtual screen and it might not even be Kelsey back there. I'm not sure.Kelsey:I have a history of pretending to be a bot, so.Stephanie:I actually, I read that. I read that you spent a little bit six weeks pretending to be a chatbot to learn how they worked.Kelsey:True.Stephanie:That's fun jumping off point. Tell me a bit about being a chatbot. What's that life like?Kelsey:It is wild. Let's see, I was working at a startup in New York that we offered mobile commerce solution for brands and publishers. So I was really deep in the mobile commerce space when the messenger API opened up. And as we're getting side projects, of course then, decided that messenger would be a good place to try to test things out.Kelsey:And before even building anything, I pretended to be a bot just to see how it would work. That's what sparked all of this. It was like, "Oh wait, if you can talk to people directly, people will talk to you about themselves." I'm asking people questions, they're telling me way too much information. That was really the spark for me. Then I said, "Oh, why are we making assumptions online? We can just ask people and they will very happily tell you things to help figure out what they should buy and why."Stephanie:That's cool. So you were doing this at another company. And then you're like, this is the business in and of itself. And that's how you went to create Paloma?Kelsey:Yeah. It was a totally side project outside of the company that I was working with. But all of the pieces tied together for me. That company is called Button, and when I left Button, I did a little bit of other experimentation in the channel. Actually, worked with a team to build a open-source software, to help people call Congress on Facebook Messenger, which was one of the first software tools that was like a MailChimp for the space, which is really cool. But brought it all the way back around to commerce and launched Paloma at the end of 2017.Stephanie:Cool. So tell me a bit more about Paloma. What is it? What does it do?Kelsey:Paloma helps brands turn Facebook Messenger into a sales channel. Essentially, we work with a lot of D2C and ecom brands across every product, category, audience, price point, and we help them drive traffic into messenger instead of their website where their customers get a more personalized shopping experience, that's powered by our software. So what that might look like for a furniture brand would be, they're running Instagram and Facebook ads and they can set them to open up a Messenger conversation instead of opening up a website landing page.Kelsey:And once in Messenger, our conversation, we'll ask them questions like what room do you want to design? What are the colors in that room? Do you have cats, dogs? Any other kind of style preferences. And then we'll dynamically route the customer to the right products based off of what they've shared. By helping the customer make the purchase decision, we're effectively seeing anywhere from two to 10X increases in conversion rates. And that's a little bit of very cap on, on how that works.Stephanie:That's awesome. I feel like just thinking about, I follow all these influencers on Instagram and they're always selling stuff, which normally I'm like, I want a lot of this. But if you respond to them, they definitely can't keep up. If you're like, does that size, would it fit me? Is that Off-White? Is that Real-White? It seems like there's a lot of opportunity everywhere to have a chatbot set up that personalizes the experience and also helps it scale.Kelsey:Exactly. And what you just described is one of the reasons that we see so much opportunity in that space. And the reason why customers messaged in the first place is because when it comes to online shopping people don't shop on websites. That's just where they transact now. But they're making decisions by what you're talking about, watching influencers, DMing folks, talking to friends, watching YouTube videos, TikToks.Kelsey:So you're basically piecing together all these different parties to figure out, should I buy this? What's the right thing for me? Whereas if you walk into a storefront, for example, you can get all of that figured out in a matter of minutes. You can talk to an associate, they're going to ask questions. Everything that you just described can happen there. There's nowhere like that online. And that's where messaging channels open up that opportunity for the brand to be part of that purchase decision process. So instead of leaving it up to all the third parties, the brand can do it themselves and they can scale it through these kinds of automated conversations.Stephanie:Very cool. And how do you go about setting up the responsive? Is it very custom based on the product? Like, do you work with a brand early on to be like, here's probably what they're going to ask you or they're telling you. What does that look like behind the scenes?Kelsey:We definitely curated a lot to the brand, a lot to the product type and to their customer demographic. So for example, Facebook recently published a case study of the work that we do with Wallow, which is a brand that sells titers, strollers. Basically goods for families and their kids. So they're really great products, but it's actually not so much about having a lot of skews. They don't have a ton of skews. It's more about why should somebody buy this Wallow stroller and how is it going to fit into their family and lifestyle?Kelsey:So essentially what we do is we'll work with them, look at the products that they sell and try to understand their customer type. In their case, a lot of their customers will buy for themselves, but there's a pretty good chunk that are gifting. So for example, the first question we ask is, is this for you and your family, or is this for a gift? Who are you gifting for? And then as customers answer these questions, we can speak to how it will fit into their lifestyle. How old is your little one? Are they eating solids yet or not?Kelsey:We don't actually need the customer to ask questions because by us asking questions first, we can preemptively answer how the value prop works for them. How it fits into their life. So we can say, "Well, they're eating solids is getting very messy. This high chair is very easy to clean." And so you're effectively accomplishing both along the way. It's basically just a really good sales conversation.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, that's really smart and I think it's a different mindset where a lot of times, when you think about chatbots, the consumer has to initiate the conversation. Has to think of the questions. And it makes me even think about when I'm hiring... I'm trying to think what I was hiring. But they're like, "Oh, do you have any more questions?" And I'm like, "Well, what do people normally ask you? Like, what's the normal questions because I don't know what to ask you."Kelsey:What should I ask. Yeah.Stephanie:If I'm buying a house or whatever it is, what are the top 10 questions you get? And so that's great being like, we'll do all the work for you. Here's some of the questions that we know will start a conversation. So it's actually less work and less cognitive load. Where you can get to the end point and still leave being like, I know what I'm talking about now with this product.Kelsey:Exactly. That's 100% right. And it's actually a really classic UX design issue. Which is actually my original background. Basically, when it comes to any digital interface or any interface at all, if you don't know where you can go, you're not really likely to do it. You're not going to walk up to a pitch black tunnel and be like, "Yeah, I feel confident walking into that."Kelsey:That's like an open free from bot conversation or like you get on a customer support call and it's like, "What can we help with?" And you're like, "Well, depending on what I answer, what's the likelihood you'll have any idea what I'm asking?" It's not great. So we find that structuring and providing a really clear interface for the customers to navigate also makes a huge difference.Stephanie:We talked about this a lot on the show that shopping is moving to the edge. Everyone is shopping on Social, they're shopping on Amazon, Walmart it's everywhere and not always on the website anymore. Do you think that websites are going to become like a secondary thing, where it's like, yeah, it's a nice to have. But people are actually on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Going directly to Amazon, they're not really going to always go right to your website.Kelsey:That's exactly right. It's going the way of retail. And that's not to say it's going to go away. It's just that it's not the primary anymore. We see a website as like the catalog and it's a transacting location. In a lot of cases that's useful, but it's not necessary anymore. And we see that with how new sellers are starting today. Especially with COVID, everything accelerates so rapidly. But one of the really interesting trends is, you've got new shops opening up just with Instagram pages and saying, "Hey, DM me for this product and I'll send you a PayPal link."Kelsey:I think those kinds of very low tech indicators of the fact that that's where the market is heading. And, I think you're 100% right. The website's really not necessary. And there are tons of great antique shops I follow in New York that are doing just well without it.Stephanie:Yeah. That's cool. So what other trends are you seeing among sellers right now? Maybe anything new popping up and you're like, pre-COVID we actually weren't really seeing this and now there's a big trend to just opening an Instagram page and selling through DMs. What other things like that are you seeing?Kelsey:I think that's huge. I think that I'm really interested in these future QVC type of models. But that's just because I grew up watching those. I don't know, did you ever watched the knife show?Stephanie:I did not watch that, but.Kelsey:The show was wild.Stephanie:Well, there's a [crosstalk].Kelsey:I think it was on a lot when I was in college. We'd always end up like late night. The knife show would end up on at very late hour and it was just like, "Hey, here's some knives and we're just going to cut all sorts of stuff with these knives." Like the silliest thing. It was so funny, but-Stephanie:[crosstalk] the Blender show. It wasn't called the Blender show, but where they [crosstalk] random things in the blender and I'm like, [crosstalk].Kelsey:Exactly. The same kind of stuff.Stephanie:How much time do we have on our hands apparently?Kelsey:It was so silly. It was like cutting shoes and weird things like that. The humor of it, I think it was really fun. And I think that online, we're seeing a lot of that, like humor come into commerce in a way that I think it's really fun. And that's really what it should be. So I like things like that. But I do think that the new selling methods are probably what some of the most interesting things to me is just, what's the version of opening a store today versus before. And like the barrier to entry is just so low now. It's pretty phenomenal. So I'm excited for that.Stephanie:Yeah. Cool. And how do you advise brands to being proactive when it comes to starting conversations versus being reactive and just taking the inbound? Because if I'm thinking like, I'm a new brand, I don't have any inbound. What's the way to be proactive and like reach out to people with your product?Kelsey:What's really nice is that these channels are often first, which I think is really important for there to be a great customer experience. If we want these channels to succeed, if we want these brands to succeed, we need to make sure that we're being really mindful of the consumer. But what's really, really nice about Facebook Messenger while it is tough to work on another platform, play by someone else's rules sometimes, but there's a ton of great benefits there.Kelsey:And one of them is the acquisition funnel. So brands are currently running ads from Facebook and Instagram and stories, all those normal places. And all they have to do is set up the exact same ads, but they can change the destination of the ad click to open a messenger conversation instead of a website. And so we're able to say, "Hey, we're basically giving you a new ad type that you can leverage. It's going to drive to a higher converting destination." And there's no reason not to try that.Kelsey:Basically, it's a win-win from the standpoint of, it's really easy to test. We can guarantee traffic and make sure that we're properly vetting it and controlling the volume. And you can compare it one-to-one to your ads that go your website. So it makes it really easy for brands to get started. And it makes it easy for the consumers because they're doing what they don't normally do, which is click on ads. So that's the most common way to start.Kelsey:There are other ways of getting customers into the channel and you can do it with short links, with QR codes, we'll link from an email, a pop-up on your website. There's a lot of different methods there. And we have partners that do all of what I just described, but ads is a really common format because again, it's just a very seamless acquisition funnel.Stephanie:Cool. And is there anything that brands are doing right now in messenger or Instagram DMs, where you're like, that's actually the wrong way to do it? Anything that you would advise brands not to do or have seen things going wrong?Kelsey:Yeah, that's a great question. I think not doing anything at all is what I would say is the worst thing. Because, whether that's Instagram DMs and you're just not responding to the people that message you there, and that's a huge, lost opportunity. We understand that it's really hard to scale responding to people individually, which is why platforms like ours can help. But I'm just not doing anything, you're losing customers every time you don't respond to them because they want to engage with you directly for a reason.Kelsey:And every time they do that, there's an opportunity for that to become either a customer or a recurring customer. So let's say that's probably the worst, but in terms of actually doing things that are, are wrong, I don't like any of the spammy stuff and I don't like any of the things where it's not clear to the customer what's going to happen. Those are the things that I find frustrating, but in terms of how to do that, well, there's not as much going on with that anymore because Facebook really did crack down on some of it. So I'll say what I didn't like before was, there was a trend where there's an opt-in check box that you could put on your website that basically said, "I'm opting into Facebook Messenger with a business."Kelsey:And that's still something that you can use today, but at the time you could actually put it on your website pre-checked. Oftentimes customers wouldn't necessarily notice it or see that it was there or see that they had opted into something. But what was even worse was there were lots of sites that were putting them behind the scenes. So it wasn't actually visible on the page at all. So a customer would add something to their cart. And by submitting that add to cart, it was opting them into messages without them knowing it.Kelsey:And then they would get messages later if they abandoned their purchase that were like, "Hey, here's the 10% off. Here's a whatever go buy that thing you were looking at." Which inherently is not a bad workflow, but to do that without letting the customer know that's what's going to happen, really not great. I'd say that's the worst thing I've seen in this space, but you can't do that anymore. And I'm grateful for it.Stephanie:Yeah. Well, that's good. How do you keep up with the changes that Facebook's going through? Because it seems like they've been definitely on like a roller coaster where very popular. And then, I feel like they kind of went through a trough where it's like, does anyone use it anymore? And now I feel like it's growing again. Even among my friends, it's like people are using the groups now and Messenger.Kelsey:The groups are huge.Stephanie:That's the only reason I go on there for the most part, but how do you keep up with what they're even doing behind the scenes and how the buying groups on there just changing. And then coming back and then leaving, and then there on TikTok. How do you keep up with that?Kelsey:I think it could be really easy to get distracted or feel like that's very volatile. The approach that we've taken is actually just been to have our own point of view that is rooted in something just so fundamental that it doesn't matter what the policy changes are really. We won't be disturbed by them essentially. So we've looked at Facebook Messenger as a sales channel since day one of the business. And we've been around just over three years now. And of the platforms that were popping up at the time were MailChimps for Messenger, were abandoned cart notifications and things like that.Kelsey:And that is really easy to get disrupted by policy changes. But if you're fundamentally saying, this is a place where you can more effectively get a conversion from a customer and have a better experience for them. There's actually not a lot that that Facebook could do that would really interfere with that in a way. Unless they just fully said, "Hey, you can't actually use the API at all anymore." They just shut the API down. Then it'd be like, okay, fine. But even if that were to happen, the US market for messaging is inherently multi-channel.Kelsey:Messenger's not being first or last for us. It's going to be one of many. So, that's the way that we approach it as yes, we keep up with the trends. We are a platform partner, so we're pretty in tune with the roadmap and what's going to be happening there. And that's really important. The relationship is really important to make sure that you can prepare for your business. But at the end of the day, I think having a really just underlying fundamental platform approach to what we're doing, enables us to avoid a lot of the mishaps that we've seen affect other business models.Stephanie:Yeah. Cool. And you just mentioned like messaging is just the first, are there other areas that you feel like there's a lot of opportunity that brands can be selling in right now. Or maybe it's not even ready yet, but in the future it's coming down the pike.Kelsey:Yeah. I think anywhere where consumers and brands can have a direct conversation, you're going to see things evolve for that. And it might depend on the platform, if the platform is incentivized towards it or interested in it. Facebook supports this because they believe in messaging as the future of consumer behavior. It's something that's been around since the beginning of the internet, we've been chatting. I don't think that's going anywhere, but Facebook is also really highly motivated to monetize on it. And so, there's opportunity there.Kelsey:But would someone like discord do something like this? I'm not sure. I'm not sure if they're like motivated towards that or if that's part of the business that they want to be building. But I really do see that any messaging channel where you can have that kind of interaction, there's no reason not to produce a better shopping experience there and tried to scale that. It's kind of infinite, I think.Stephanie:I wonder if chatbots on websites, like native chatbots have muddied up a bit. Where it's like, we've all had that bad experience with a chatbot where they're talking and you're like, "Get away, get away. You're not going to be able to help me. I already know it Verizon, stop." [crosstalk]. I wonder if that has hindered the market, with certain people being open to buying via chat bot when they've had experiences that are subpar on maybe certain websites.Kelsey:At the start of these platforms opening up and these APIs opening up, you had people making bots left and right. And they were very low quality. It tarnished it a little bit. I think tarnished it a bit for the consumer and for the brands, because, when things opened up, brands started testing things and they weren't getting performance results. It wasn't their fault. It's really hard. It's like launching your first website and then not working super well. It's like, well, yeah, this is a totally new... It's where the start of websites existing. It's like, yeah, that's tough. It's tough to figure it out. It's a whole new learning curve.Kelsey:So I think that in terms of, what can happen there. It is very easy to tarnish their reputation, but again, it's not going anywhere. So as long as again, you have an opportunity to drive a better experience. You should keep iterating on that. And again, it's like if you have customers that are willing to do directly, it's always an opportunity to do better and to turn them into a better customer for you as well. There is also really huge difference between like the customer support experiences like that, and these types of sales experiences. I think there's a pretty clear line between the two and a lot of that depends on the customer's intent.Kelsey:If you're coming from an ad to shop driver, for example, you know that's what you're doing and you know that that's what you're being helped to do. And it's pretty straightforward. But if you're going in with any level of support need, there's a lot of opportunity to get that wrong. So it's really tough.Stephanie:Someone's already coming in with a heated mindset and one wrong word from chatbot. Ooh, I'm hot.Kelsey:Exactly.Stephanie:The one thing I think about too is the payment piece and how to make sure that customer journey is frictionless because even when I hear, Oh, some brands have a PayPal link, which I think is great. Or like an MVP, get something out there. And also, show there like, do I even know my PayPal login? Like, Oh, I don't know.Kelsey:Exactly.Stephanie:How do you think about, making the checkout experience frictionless where it's not a million different options and people know it's very be fast and easy.Kelsey:Currently we actually drive to check out on the brand site and we find that works really well because it's the trusted destination. You have all of the tooling and UI that you need to be able to have a good seamless checkout experience. And that works really well. Checkout is on our roadmap to be able to process that and manage that. And we won't be like a payment processor. We have partners we're talking to on end, but in terms of the checkout, there's a lot of ways to handle that.Kelsey:And I think that there's been so much best practice learned from mobile shopping as it is, that can be leveraged there. And there's also a ton of testing opportunities, but we really do look to... We're not trying to reinvent wheels here. Stephanie:That whole space is evolving so quick and just talking to the team at fast and continuing to be here and see what they're doing with the one-click checkout. I'm like, it seems like there's such an opportunity to have that right. In every form of like, you've got your cart already loaded in like your Instagram DM, and you can just hit checkout and all your payment information save and drop onto the next Instagram site.Kelsey:[crosstalk].Stephanie:There also seems like there's a good opportunity for Amazon there. I always look at all those Q&A sections, where it seems like how much time do I spend looking at toothpaste? Is it fluoride-free? It's for my kids, is it fluoride free? Does it not have this, that, that. All these questions, but I'm actually going through the whole product page for a thing of toothpaste so much time wasted. But it would be really nice to have a Messenger on there where you could just say, "Hey, does this have this and this?" Instead of me trying to zoom in on the ingredient list, or like, look at all the reviews for something that's like $6 or whatever it may be.Kelsey:Yeah, exactly. I hope Amazon's listening. They should come talk to us. We haven't seen anything quite like that, but we have talked to brands that sell on Amazon and we have done experiences in Messenger that link to Amazon product. That is something that we've experimented with before. And I think that you have to your point, why scroll through a million questions and answers that aren't necessarily relevant to you? And one might be, when you could just have the brand get to know you better and then tell you what you need to know.Stephanie:Yeah, exactly. So when you're first starting to work with brands who are implementing chatbots, what kind of metrics do you maybe advise them to look at to see if it's going well or not? Because a lot of people I could see being new to this, not even knowing like, well, what should I expect for conversion? Or like, what's good. What's bad. Like, how do you advise them around that?Kelsey:That's a great question. So first and foremost, and I think this is a little bit of what might have gotten wrong in the early days of the channel. Businesses care about performance. They care about conversions and CACs and return, and all those things. So, we want to make sure we're mapping to that because if you don't then at the end of the day, they're going to be worth your time if it's not performing on those metrics? Probably not. So first and foremost, we can own conversion rate. That's the KPI that we really truly measure against. Because essentially we're saying if you drive traffic here, instead of your website, it's more likely to convert. That's our thesis. And so if that's true, that's what we're going to start measuring against. And we'll do that by looking at what's your conversion rate from a standard click to site ad.Kelsey:So purchases you're getting out of link clicks. And then when you run a click to Messenger ad, we'll do the exact same thing. How many purchases are you getting out of those ad clicks? And that should be able to tell us if it's a higher converting channel for you. Fundamentally we've seen anywhere from 50% increases to 10X increases in one case and anywhere in between. So it's not abnormal for that to be the initial result. But then in terms of the other things like captain role, as they should benefit from that better conversion rate. It shouldn't be approached necessarily differently than any other conversion tests that you're running.Kelsey:That being said, we have a ton of insight into the full funnel that we can leverage to optimize. And so, all of our partners start with at least a three month program because we know it takes time to warm up and we want to make sure we can iterate. And we do that on a weekly basis. So you might start with X result in month one, by the end of month three, it should be much better. And so the way that we can do that is looking at everything from a customer clicks on an ad, they land into Messenger. Do they respond to the first message, which basically ops them into the channel?Kelsey:Are they completing like a quiz? If there's a quiz or personal shopper? Are they clicking on products back to the website? And then are they adding to cart? And then are they purchasing? So we have a slightly different funnel. You're going to get your ad performance from ads manager and see the link clicks and add to carts and purchases. Paloma is going to see everything in between. So we'll be able to know exactly where people are off and why. And be able to iterate on that much more efficiently than if it were traffic going to a website, where are they clicking? How are they browsing? There's like a ton of more opaque data from a website side. From our end we can literally just see, okay, you have too much drop-off on the first question. So let's not ask that question. Or, Hey, everybody is answering the same way to this one question, that doesn't need to be there.Kelsey:Or, people are clicking on the products. Maybe we need different product batches or whatever that may be. So we'll be able to get a lot more of a finer detail on that. And we have benchmarks for each. We expect our partners to get at least a 30% opt-in rate, maybe percent completion on any type of quiz or personal shopper experience. And then at least 50% of traffic clicking back to the website. And then from there add to carts and purchases depends on what they would normally expect to see. It's kind of a lengthy answer.Stephanie:It's good to know metrics like that to aim for. How do you plug into a brand's inventory system and then also make matches. That will be something that I want to look at. I can just imagine me going in there and not knowing what I ever want being like, "I want a picture." And then someone's showing me something and maybe like, "Oh, not that one." How do you guys personalize it and show something I want, but also make sure that you're not tapping into inventory, that's like out of stock.Kelsey:So we basically can ingest inventory into our system, keep that up to sync, keep that availability up to sync. And so anytime that we're building experiences, you're able to make sure that it's the right things getting shown. In terms of what to show customers based on their selections. We have this like start matching dynamic product matching system where basically the customer's responses get associated with the inventory.Kelsey:So all of your boots are associated with like a boot selection or all of your things that come and break colors would get associated with like bright colors. If you were asking about color preference. And some of these qualities are not things that would normally be tagged onto your inventory. So we're basically expanding on that. So we make the association between the two and as customers make the selections, we basically just filter down and display all the things that would then relate.Kelsey:So like Andy swimwear, for example, if you chose one pieces and some coverage and a lot of support, you're only going to see the products that, apply to all of those qualities. And it's really simple for us to create those. Something like that can take like 10 minutes to build, whereas a quiz to put on a website can cost thousands of dollars and take two months. And so, that's kind of part of the magic and secret sauce of our software.Stephanie:Yeah, that's cool. I was just thinking about, okay, to even create that kind of filtering and navigation options and all that can take a long time. And tagging it and making sure that it's actually can be searchable. And then if you can just have it in a DM or Messenger, that's great game changing.Kelsey:Yeah. It's really fun. It's a very simple, we have like own drag and drop interface to just jag product on to the selection options. They're tagged with that in the future. And then as customers answer, we just know what to show them.Stephanie:Cool. Where do you see the future of commerce headed or chatbots and commerce intersecting. What does that look like to you maybe three to five years down the road? Where do you hope it looks?Kelsey:Really, again, I like to look to what people are doing now when they're just starting out and also at other markets. So really in terms of the future of commerce, we believe very strongly that it's on messaging channels, that that is the next door front. And so, what does that look like? It's customers going to DMs, it's brands driving traffic to DMs and customers just getting much better shopping experiences there, converting there, checking out there. And new stores not having to even open up a website. Again, I don't think website's going to necessarily totally go away, but it's just going to be a smaller part of the puzzle. If you look at what's gone on in other markets like China with Weechat, they're way ahead of the game. And that works really, really well.Kelsey:And it's a huge chunk of the commerce ecosystem out there. So we've been a little bit slower to that, but it is happening. It's happening a little bit more multichannel, and I think that's really interesting and that's a really fun challenge is that, we don't have the monolith app that will do it all. We have a lot of [crosstalk] apps. I think it's great because everyone likes to have their own different way. We're always getting new social networks and apps out there and it's fun. It's really fun. So basically, I'm not sure how many different tools there will be in the future, but we very strongly believe that messaging is the next channel and destination for commerce to happen. And we're effectively building the platform to power that. Stephanie:That's great. It definitely begs the question about keeping things organized when you're selling on so many different channels. And there's probably going to be dozens of messaging platforms that people are using. I'm just imagining a brand, trying to keep up where, they go from selling on their website and then maybe dabbling in Amazon, maybe on Walmart. And then all of a sudden it's now, you can sell on Pinterest and Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. How do you think a brand would be able to keep up or do you see anything right now? Like any innovations that are allowing brands to organize everything in one central place that they can keep track of what they're doing?Kelsey:There are definitely a lot of interesting tools. I think that what comes before the tools are just the people, expertise. I think that's what we're seeing, services and agencies that will help with coordinating all of those things or know how to best launch on Amazon. And then once you've launched on Amazon and all these other places, then you go, okay, well now I have everything in too many places I need a more scalable system. And that's when you start seeing softwares get put in place. And I don't think any come to mind immediately, but I think there's some really great tools that are coming up to try to glue things together and basically to piece together, all the different supply chain and logistics issues.Kelsey:And there's some really great things out there for that. But we're also seeing new commerce platforms that are inherently taking those things in mind. So we have a lot of commerce players that exist that are trying to catch up and trying to add on these different channels. But then you have new players that are from day one saying, "We know it's not just about one place." So you've got things like, headless commerce and no code tools and platforms like Paloma that will from day one say, "Hey, this isn't just about a single source of shopping. It's about a lot of things."Stephanie:Yeah. I completely agree. All right, well, let's shift over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. I'll ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready? You look a little nervous. Wow.Kelsey:I don't know, that's scary. It's a little daunting.Stephanie:No, it'll be fun. It'll be fun. What one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year. I have a feeling you're say message shopping and Messsenger.Kelsey:Obviously messaging. I'll just be repeating myself a little bit, but I think messaging is a bit. It's already been exploding pretty quickly and it's growing faster than ever. We drove almost 9 million in partner revenue last year. And that's just as a small, early stage team, so there's a lot ahead of us.Stephanie:Yeah. That's cool. What, one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Kelsey:Just so many people things. I find people so fascinating. I'm constantly seeing how people chat, but I would just love to talk to people about their experiences with all of these experiences and with all these different kind of shopping channels. And, I think that it's not something that I don't understand. It's just something that I'm always eager to understand people's behaviors more. So that'd probably be it. [inaudible].Stephanie:What's up next on your Netflix queue?Kelsey:I am so behind, I need to watch Bridgeton and literally everything else. I've been doing a Buffy rewatch. So I'm just like living in a very different time.Stephanie:What is a book that has really left a very big impression on you? You're like, "I always think back to this book for either business or life."Kelsey:Oh, that is a great question. I'd say, well, what are the ones that comes to mind, it's Italo Calvino. [crosstalk] is the author. And basically, it's a person telling stories about visiting a lot of different cities. And when I was younger, I found that it was just... When you're reading, it's all about picturing what's going on. And as someone who, if you didn't grow up being able to travel a lot, it stuck with me. I was like, I want to be able to do that someday, but also just being able to picture it from a book is really, really nice. I still have like the images in my head of different passages from that.Stephanie:Oh, that's cool. All right. And then the last one, what's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Kelsey:Oh my gosh. I feel like people are so nice. What is the nicest thing anyone's ever done to me? Oh gosh, there's too many things.Stephanie:Wow. You must be a very... People are sending all this nice stuff you way. [crosstalk] people around you, can I have some?Kelsey:When you run a business, or when you start a business, it's all about getting help. That's the best way to be able to succeed is knowing what you don't know and how to get help. So I will say I'm very good at getting help, but what's like the biggest part of that is having people be really nice and great. And so, there are just a lot of people that have helped along the way that I literally would not be where I am without that. From little things like making the introductions, not everyone has access to the networks that you need. And so, the people that believed in me more than the business or more than anything else, that's really huge.Kelsey:And so, I've just got like some really great, great people that helped along the way. I can't pick a single thing, but I'd say like some of our investors, some of just the people I've worked with in the past and they're really just root for you. And will be there when you say, "I have no idea what I'm doing. How does this work?" Or, "I need some help."Stephanie:I thought so. Good answer. All right, Kelsey. Well, it's been a blast having you on the show. I love learning about Paloma and your story. Where can people find out more about you and Paloma?Kelsey:You can learn more about Paloma, getpaloma.com, G-E-T-P-A-L-O-M-A. And me I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn at Kelsey Hunter. I think it's usually Kelsey AH. So feel free to message me, check out the site, chat with us. We're always around.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much.

Imagine this: it’s Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year and you’re a brand with customers on your website pushing the buy button, but instead of moving them down the funnel, you stop them and interrupt the buying process to ask them, “How are you feeling right now?” Seems like a crazy thing to do right? Especially in a world that is dominated by closing sales and doing everything possible to get a consumer to hit buy. You’re literally pausing a conversion, making a customer examine his or her activity and second guess making a purchase. Nevertheless, that was the strategy Bearaby put into practice this past holiday season and the results might just surprise you. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Kathrin Hamm, the Founder and CEO of Bearaby, tells us that that mindfulness experiment, while risky and not advised by her industry peers, paid off in big ways. Bearaby was able to gain insights into consumer behavior and gather data that helped predict whether or not a customer was likely to return a product or not. And, most importantly, Bearaby was able to build more trust with customers and foster a more authentic relationship centered around mental health and the customer’s well-being, which in today’s world goes a long way toward creating a loyal base of customers. Kathrin also explains why adding more mindfulness and behavioral queues into the customer journey could have a positive impact on return rates, overall customer satisfaction, and your NPS score.Main Takeaways:Do You Need This?: So many brands are trying to optimize for sales and push people through the funnel, but what if you took a step back? At Bearaby, by introducing mindfulness into the buying process and asking people how they feel throughout the process of a sale, the company was able to build trust with its customers, understand the behavior of people who returned products, and increased the overall net promoter score of the brand. Making it Work: As a small, independent, DTC business, being agile and having the ability to accelerate a product are assets. But when you expand and begin to take on retail partnerships, your internal processes need to adjust. Rather than thinking a month of two ahead, you need to fit into a production timeline that is already planned two years in advance. To do that, it’s critical to have the right backend operations in order to analyze data and manage inventory so you can meet the needs of your partners. Stop Selling, Start Connecting: Most brands see social media and SMS messaging as tools to sell products and get information to customers about deals or products. But what if you used those platforms to be a resource to your customers and offered them help in ways unrelated to your products? Bearaby took this road when establishing itself on social media and found that sparking natural conversations led to more curiosity about the brand overall, and subsequently led to sales with truly engaged customers.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:Hello everyone and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Kathrin Hamm, the CEO and founder of Bearaby. Kathrin, welcome.Kathrin:Thanks so much for having me.Stephanie:Tell me a bit about Bearaby. I was looking at your website, I saw how amazing your weighted blankets look. They're knitted, they're awesome. I have a couple other weighted blankets, but they are nowhere near that, so tell me a little bit about the company and how you thought about creating it.Kathrin:The idea of creating Bearaby was really when I had sleep problems myself. I used to work for the World Bank as an economist, and I was just traveling a lot. I just had moved from Washington to the Middle East, and then from the Middle East to India, all within two years. I was traveling a lot and I was never a good sleeper, but this constant travel and jet lag really put me over the top. So I was just looking for a natural sleep solution. I tried many different things and at some point I came across this really simple concept of a heavy blanket that's supposed to be 10% of your body weight, that you put on top of you in an equal way, and it's supposed to help you calm, relax and sleep better.Kathrin:The concept itself is not new. Weighted blankets have been around for more than 60 years, especially for children that have sensory disorders. I ordered one of these blankets into India, and I tried it on a Saturday afternoon, and I napped for four hours. Which never happened to me before, and I was just sold on the idea. I'm like, "Okay, that's it. I can move on with my life, I just get this blanket and things will be good." The next night I woke up again and with the weighted blanket, but I was sweating and it was really hot.Kathrin:I think that's when I realized that all these weighted blankets are made with these artificial filling materials, so usually you find 20 pounds of plastic beads in it. Obviously it makes you hot, like an oven, but it's also really not good for the environment. At that point, I was really just searching for a product myself, and I realized there's nothing out there. Even though the product has been around for such a long time, somehow no one had really innovated on the concept. That's where the idea started to make something different and use innovation and design and at the same time try to come up with a product that's addressing these needs while being sustainable at the same time.Stephanie:That's awesome. So this was back in 2018 when you launched your company and you still had your day job and you launched it on Kickstarter, right?Kathrin:Yes.Stephanie:Tell me a little bit about that thought process. What was in your head when you were like, "Okay, I have a full-time job, I'm in India, and I'm going to go on Kickstarter."Kathrin:I think I'm naturally a risk-averse person. I know other entrepreneurs are like, I had my idea and I knew I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I just went for it. I went the other way. I'm like, "Let's try it as a little side hustle and see it more of a project at the beginning." So I really mapped out in a business plan, so what do I need to have first? How do I think about the product? How do I think about the IP? And at some point you come to the funding, and when you do the numbers you realize that it actually takes a lot of money to launch a product or a brand, and you don't know in the early stages if people even will like it.Kathrin:It's when I realized that I think crowdsourcing is a good way to fail really fast or get feedback really fast. So we put together a short video, with the initial idea, and within a month, we had more than quarter million dollars already on the Kickstarter campaign. And the feedback I got from people is that this is just a product that more people are looking for, and I think that gave me then the next confidence boost to say, "Well, it might be not only a project, but this might be a real business idea that I can start exploring."Stephanie:That's very cool. So, what did it look like after you had that money in your Kickstarter account, and you're like, "Okay, this is real." What did it look like after that?Kathrin:Well, the money didn't last really long. So I actually emptied out my whole retirement funds. After I had had left my job. I think at that site, I really believed in the product and I knew I was onto something that I wanted to bring to the market. So the next step was the manufacturing. At that point, I had a prototype that I actually had developed together with my mom who's a really avid knitter. And we came up with the idea that instead of using any plastic or glass beads to make a product heavy, it's like a knitted rug. And if you use layers upon layers of fabric, you actually also get to a heavy blanket that comes up to 20 pounds.Kathrin:There was a small piece of a blanket. And then I went around and I just had a list of different manufacturers. I think I had a list of around 40, and I just picked up the phone and were talking to people. "This is my idea. Is it something that you could help me produce? Could you help me make this?" And I think one of the issues was that most people didn't know why do you even want to make a heavy blanket? We've been working in the industry since 30 years to make a light product, a light blanket. So I think that was an issue. Then I also obviously didn't have any credibility in the space where there's like, "Okay, even if we're trying to make this, how many units would you take?"Kathrin:And I'm like, "Maybe 100." And then I think they already hang up the phone.Stephanie:[crosstalk] thinks.Kathrin:So I got a lot of nos at the beginning. Yeah, I just realized that nobody had done this before, even with apparel that said we have similar we don't have these machines bedding, we don't have these machines. So I actually went back to the drawing board and without before I actually launched the Napa our product, I first had to come up with a machine to make the weighted yarn that we're using. I was working with a manufacturer in Germany, a machine maker. At first was creating the yarn to then go into the final production.Kathrin:So that took me quite some time to really figure out that supply chain piece. And yeah.Stephanie:I think most people would have given up when they found out they had to make their own machine. That's wild. What was your mom saying during that whole process?Kathrin:They thought I'm crazy. Because I left a pretty solid job that I studied for a very long time for. I have a PhD in economics. And then suddenly in my mid 30s I'm telling my parents, I'm leaving my job because I want to sell these heavy blankets that nobody had heard of on the internet. So, even my friends thought this is just a phase or maybe like a midlife crisis. And when you have these dinners with friends, where everyone is sharing like, "Oh, I got a promotion." Or, "I'm on to the next step." And I had for a very long time, I had nothing to share where I'm like, "I'm about to build a website. It's not there yet, just give me a couple of more month."Kathrin:And everyone was like, "Oh, yeah, that's very cute. Good luck with that Kathrin."Stephanie:Yeah.Kathrin:Yeah, it was sometimes not an easy time. Especially like the first year.Stephanie:Yeah I can imagine that's such a fun story. So now, you're partnering with big brands like West Elm. You've got celebrities who love your product. I saw Rachel Zoe and others love it. So how many blankets are you selling today? Yeah, I want to get into the partnership piece after that. But yeah, what does the world look like today?Kathrin:When we launched in December 2018, we just had our website, and we got an article on Fast Company. I think just five months later, where they were describing that this is the most sustainable weighted blanket in the market, and it was just a category that people got notice of and that was the time where it's like, this is a sleep solution and there are these weighted blankets and then we came already in a market where it was a product that was different, it was something you want to keep on the couch, something designed worthy and not something that you might want to hide in your bedroom.Kathrin:Then we got a call from West Elm just literally a week later. Actually first it was an email, and at that point I thought, "Probably it's not real. Maybe someone is scamming us." But I thought, "Well, doesn't hurt to just jump on the call and have a conversation." And yeah, I ended up speaking with the buyers and they were excited about the product, they were excited about a category, and we're looking into it also for some time and they liked the idea of having a sustainable option that also fits with their interior design. While they asked me where's your showroom, and at that point, we're like, "It's actually my living room. So we don't have a showroom yet."Kathrin:But they still took a chance. And we were a very small company at that point. And they helped us work through the process of getting on boarded with such a big partner very early on and working on the color collections. I think we learned a lot from a design perspective and that now we've expanded the partnership, we're now also in Pottery Barn Kids with our kids collection and it's turned out in a really beautiful partnership which I never had expected or hoped for that early in the stage of the company.Stephanie:That's amazing. Have you already sold some blankets? Were you doing DTC before West Elm approached you?Kathrin:Yeah. So we started B2C as a primary channel. That's just for the reason that I wanted to educate people around the product, because I felt a lot of people still didn't fully understand what are the medical benefits of the product? How do I choose a product? I also wanted to create something that's different from other weighted blankets where it's really [inaudible] and into something, it's healthy to talk and there is actually joy in napping. So this branded experience, I knew I could only establish on our own website. So we didn't think about any other channels at that stage.Kathrin:Really we're focusing on how do we communicate that we're different? And how do you communicate the heaviness of the product without people being able to touch it?Stephanie:Yeah, that's tough. So how did you show that value on the website?Kathrin:I think that's still one of the most asked questions that we're getting why people are figuring out what's the best choice for them. We came up actually with a customized quiz, where we work with a sleep scientist, where people just ... we didn't keep it too long. But just a couple of questions that give people a guidance. Were this is the right product, there's a recommendation that comes out at the end of it. And then we also have a detailed section that goes into the fabrics, the different options that we have and how it makes you feel.Kathrin:But I would say it's definitely an advantage for us to have West Elm as a partner because if people are still unsure on, we don't know what a weighted blanket feels like, I can tell them, why don't you hop on a bus and go into the next West Elm store and to see and test it out there on the couch there when you come and you can try it out, and most of the people actually really go right away and enjoy trying it out.Stephanie:Yeah, that's really cool. So how did you go from being DTC to then all of a sudden, you're going to be ... you have to expand your stock, you have to start selling nationally. What did you have to do behind the scenes to make it work with West Elm?Kathrin:It's really a process that we needed to prepare for from an operational standpoint, because when you are a smaller brand and let's say you have shorter planning cycles. So when we have an idea, we're saying, "Oh, we would like to come up with this color, we want to try this." It usually takes us more or less like two months to bring that style on our website, because we're very agile as we're producing in house. But now with a retailer, we had to see ... when we talk January, we're like, "Okay, let's talk March guys." And they're like, "We're already in March 2022."Kathrin:Like a year later we're like, "Oh, okay so, just the planning cycle and then adjusting the volume for it means that we need to have the analytics in place the inventory planning." It forced us to some extent to really look for the numbers and have our inventory planned out and the analytics on what are we selling and how are we converting on the website? And then how do we allocate the volume to West Elm? So that was one piece. The other piece is obviously supply chain that became in the beginning just much more difficult. So we had to onboard an additional warehouse to just fulfill the requirements ... coming from the labeling and the other requirements that we had to do.Kathrin:So it was a really ... I would say stressful time for the team. But I think having a partner who guides you through it was helpful too. And I think now we've done it and we really learned a ton in these couple of months. It also helped us I think we prospectively just be better as from a operational standpoint.Stephanie:Yep. So, what happened this past year when it came to COVID and holidays and Black Friday? Was there anything interesting there that you had either planned for or that you found out after the fact?Kathrin:Generally we saw an increase in demand, especially with people being at home. People were more looking for the product. People had struggle with sleep and anxiety levels went up. So, we've seen really a spike in demand, which we try to fulfill from our end from a supply chain perspective. Then again, on Black Friday there was another spike. But this Black Friday, we actually decided to go on a different road. Usually as you know, Black Friday is the biggest sales day of the year, and every brand is getting ready. What we actually did is we literally slept through Black Friday.Kathrin:We came out with a black blanket a black Nappa for Black Friday. And we wanted to introduce the concept of mindfulness around it, because our hypothesis was that mostly we're buying a lot of stuff at a discount that we don't really need, it ends up in landfills and it doesn't make us happy. So we wanted to see first of all how would it be if basically our website is shut down, and people are sleeping through Black Friday. And then if you still want to come back the next day, we're still making it difficult for you to get the product. So we had designed a website experience where you only were able to access the product when you actually slept on it.Kathrin:In addition, what we wanted to see and we worked with behavioral scientists on a component of feelings, so you're evaluating your feelings and how you are mindful when you purchase. We work with Duke University and the Advanced Center of Hindsight. And basically how it worked was you come to the website and before you click to purchase, another question box pops up that literally makes you pause and asks you how are you feeling right now. And not like the normal, how are you and then you move on but we wanted to have people reflect on it and ask people do you really need this product right now?Kathrin:And if yes, how are you feeling? Are you anxious? Are you calm? Do you feel lonely, sad, happy? And what we found is that, first of all people were really excited about this campaign, that it made them feel like maybe I don't need a second blanket. And what's most surprising for us was that people who were anxious, were five times more likely to return the product afterwards. But people who were calm, or people who felt grateful while buying the product, we had close to zero returns on that. So this is something which I was really fascinated because I think for us as brands as we move through the learnings that we had in the last years, I think people are more conscious about what we're buying.Kathrin:But I think for brands we also think this is now expected and what can we do actually to take the customer experience to the next level and as more and more brands are coming on to ecommerce, is how do you establish the trust actually as a brand? I think that aspect of mindfulness and not pushing people to buy, and if there's a business case that we actually can show this is not only good for the consumer, but it's also good for the brand to actually have more mindful purchases instead of driving people aggressively down the funnel, this is something I was very excited about the results.Kathrin:And we will pilot and test more and work with our community to see how we can actually bring mindfulness into the ecommerce purchasing experience.Stephanie:Wow, that's such an interesting test. So it's different than I guess a lot of brands right now who are so quick to just try and optimize for that sale, quick conversions. And sometimes, especially the earlier ones and now you're even thinking about the returns later on that are very expensive. How are you taking those learnings and applying that into your business going forward? What new tests are you doing? How are you thinking about things differently now?Kathrin:So one thing is definitely the returns for a product that on average is 20 to 25 pounds. Our shipping costs are quite high. So how can we actually optimize that we really have an experience for customers that it's a purchase decision that is well thought out through. And that we're actually helping people to guide them through the decision. One is the science of sleep science quiz that we have on the website, where we really educate people along the way to make the right decision on what product they should buy.Kathrin:But we will systematically also test in the next couple of months on what are different interventions that you can take before you click on the buy button that has a calming effect on people. Furthermore, one thing is obviously returns. But then, would that also help people to feel more satisfied overall? Is the net promoter score going up of people who basically were in a mindful state while buying and testing different interventions? And we work obviously closely with the behavioral science lab on that to find these different ways on inventing on the brand, and inventing on the consumer experience and not only having a mindful product that should bring a relaxing effect, but also how can this be a holistic experience for the brand?Kathrin:Because if I'm sending you three abandoned cart emails, you have to buy it now it's gone. It's just also contradicting for what we stand for as a brand. So I think that's really something where I want to look into how we can expand that experiment, and bring it across every touchpoint in the brand cycle.Stephanie:Yeah, what are some example tests that you're doing that you're like, "I'm not sure if this is going to work, but we're trying out this to see if we can convince the consumer to get into a more mindful state and then come back when they are." What kind of things are you testing out or are the behavioral scientists testing out right now? Or thinking about doing?Kathrin:One thing is obviously connection with people. So, if one thing is you being aware about what you're feeling right now, but then the latest is that there is a digital map where you actually can see, it opens up and then you can see close in your area, there are 10 other people at the moment that feel similar to you. So, elements of community and connection. And if it's just on a website, seeing and that makes you actually realize, it helps you realize your own feelings to a larger extent that you're not alone in front of this website and trying to buy something, but it puts things into context.Kathrin:The other things is gratefulness. So one of the things we found is that if you're feeling grateful, that increases your happiness and your satisfaction with the purchase. So how can we increase that through for example like giving back and giving consumers the option of choosing a giving back component while purchasing while checking out? That's the second thing. Another interesting approach that we already tried for Black Friday was a poem. We worked together with a poet who created a really beautiful poem that just came up before clicking to purchase.Kathrin:The topic was not generally about mindfulness, but really reflecting on who you are as a person, why are you buying this right now? And yeah, it's a very beautiful, stunning piece that Adria had developed for us. I think that emotional reaction of people really is something that was stunning from a results perspective.Stephanie:Yeah, that's really cool. That's ... like I said, just such a different mindset than what's happening right now with a lot of companies. And not only is it good for consumers, but it's good for business. So, how much did you see returns decrease compared to before when you weren't doing that? What savings was your company experiencing from now doing this and trying this out?Kathrin:My initial hypothesis was that conversion rate would go down, because if you're making it that difficult for people to get a product, you're asking them to wait, sleep on it and you're ask them ... Listen to a poem, take a breathing exercise, tell me how you're feeling and then take into a consent form before you then finally can buy the product. So I was actually expecting that we don't sell any of these blankets. I was telling the team that was working on it I'm like, "I think if we're selling two blankets that would be already a good result." And we were quite surprised that our conversion rate was double than to our regular conversion rate.Kathrin:Now our return rates again, have less than half the return rates than our usual process. And we had the project run for three months to really collect a robust set of data, and I think we're really onto something with this whole concept of calm buying, that goes a bit in the opposite direction of optimizing and driving people down the funnel of thinking if there are actually other ways more authentic and honest ways as a brand to communicate, and I think so far is what we see actually the numbers really speak for themselves.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's really fun. Such a different conversation that I've had so far on the show which is just really exciting. So what did your partners think about this test? Were you working with West Elm at the time? And if so, what did they say when you're like, "Conversions could go down to zero, but there's something better coming."Kathrin:So this was actually something we only tested on our website, because it's quite complex. So we couldn't roll it out. And I actually just got these results in last week.Stephanie:Got it.Kathrin:So everyone was like, "You guys go first." If we monitor and it's a nice idea. But let's see how that turns out for you guys. We were all nervous obviously. Black Friday is a big sales day and like having the potential that you are losing out on that day, definitely was making us uneasy. But our partners also said, "We're quite curious to see good luck with that." So I think that's why it's even more exciting now that we say, "Hey, we're actually onto something that we probably could build up on and maybe even share with the broader community of B2C brands." I know it's like a lot going on and there are a lot of shifts in what's happening and there's maybe an approach that ... yeah, we're happy to share the lessons learned that we have and maybe more people are coming on board and see if it works for them as well.Stephanie:Yeah you're reinventing the DTC playbook and thinking about it in a whole different way. Have you had other brands who are interested in trying this out or that you've talked to where you see an interest in the industry?Kathrin:I think the early conversations that we had especially brands that are focused on sustainability. That is, we had initial discussions where people are surprised that it really matters or it directly impact conversion and it impacts our return rates. So I think there is an opportunity to build that with a smaller group of friends and innovate on it. But yeah, it's early days, so I think we will work a bit more on getting some more findings and testing a bit more what works the best. And then obviously sharing it with everyone.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. So where are you headed? What are you hoping to do with Bearaby over the next one to three years? What are you guys innovating on or looking into or trying out outside of the already cool work and behavior science that you're testing?Kathrin:Yeah for us, it's I think, looking into what consumers are expecting from us is definitely I think a lot of the things that happened during COVID will stay. People are expecting such deliveries from us, almost same day deliveries, so we were piloting on same day to our window delivery options. I think that's something where, how can we make it easy and comfortable for people to not leave their house yet, but still get their product in a timely basis? How do we set up from a infrastructure perspective that we're able to hold that pace? I think that's something that we're looking into. Then just generally, we're always interested in looking into new products and new product innovation in the wellness space.Kathrin:Obviously we launched last year the children's edition that we really also launched from a direct demand during COVID, what we heard from parents that were homeschooling children. And I think that just listening to our customers is one of the things that we also I think probably started. In crowdfunding you always stick to the principle. Whenever we have a new collection coming up or a early product idea. We have a small group of people from our loyal customers, we call them the Nappa hood club, that can try out products and where we get feedback and listen to it.Kathrin:And Instagram for example when it comes to color selection, we just discussed our fall colors that are coming out. And yeah at the end, we took two colors out that people on Instagram were not excited about and literally gave the whole vote to the community of the colors that they want to see. I think that's another interesting thing where obviously we always took feedback from people, but in a less systematic way, and now we're really putting the consumer first and the decisions that people are telling us and the colors we will put on the market. Even despite maybe some other designers that would go for other colors.Kathrin:And yeah, let's see how it goes.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. How did you build up an audience on Instagram? Because I was reading it, quite a bit of it was organic and you were more interested in working on the supply chain stuff and sending out samples and get on people's radar. So how did you build up your Instagram now where people are actually commenting and giving you feedback?Kathrin:I think on the early days, I didn't have much experience on Instagram. So I really had to test and figure out what works. What I think what works well for us is one of the things is that, we're trying to be helpful for the community. So, instead of just us as a brand talking and sharing what we have new, especially during the last year, we realized a lot of the community is actually struggling with mental health anxiety. So what we did for example is that we used Instagram connect it to a SMS platform. Where usually you send SMS to inform people about the sales. But then we use it in a reverse way where we had actually an expert sitting on the other end of the line.Kathrin:Psychologist or this general mental health counselor where people could send in their questions that we got from Instagram but that also we got through SMS. So we connected both platforms and I think what the beauty of that was is that mental health often is a very personal issue, it's not something that you want to have on Instagram life, if you have a question. So that's why people could actually send the SMS question in privacy and there's an expert answering it expert from NAMI. I think that helpfulness and where people say, "Well, this is actually relevant content." And we're asking them, "So which expert do you want to speak to?"Kathrin:And ranging from people who have a longtime experience on how to homeschool children, now teaching people who just have to deal and have to get to learn how to get into that new mode. We brought all these experts and we had to message this community of helpfulness and chat. And I think that just sparked a natural conversation and I think then people stick on and want to see what else the brand is doing and I think if we listen to that and we are reciprocating and not shouting out but we're listening, it's just organically ... the community grows and is also excited about the brand.Stephanie:Yeah, and that's awesome. You're once again doing something in a reverse way. I love it. It's so contrarian but also yeah, amazing to hear how it's impacting the community. Would you take their questions or would the experts take them and answer them on Instagram Story or something so others could benefit from the questions coming in? Or were you making it more one-to-one where they were actually responding in a text to that person?Kathrin:So what we did at the beginning is like you're sending in a question and it's really a one-to-one answer. And then what we did for the community later is that we anonymized the questions and then have them on Instagram Stories for people to learn basically what the most common answers were. So you still have that one-on-one feeling especially for things that are personal, but then we're still making it available, and just routinely having these cycles where it's like, these are fixed dates where we announced this as the expert that we're having on the line. So people can share questions in advance. The experts can prepare for it because they have to take on a back end a lot of questions, because it's really this one-on-one conversations.Kathrin:But then making sure that we can scale it to a bigger community later so it's really helpful and it also stays there as a reference and as a helpful resource in the future.Stephanie:Awesome. I love that. All right. Well let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to send a question your way and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready Kathrin?Kathrin:Yes.Stephanie:All right. First, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Kathrin:I think the centralization of data. Where we have more different inputs from supply chain, from customization and customer journey and how do we actually get that centralized in one place and created experience for the consumer that's helpful and adapts to their needs.Stephanie:I love that. Have you seen anyone who is doing a good job in that space so far that you're watching?Kathrin:Generally I'm always looking at what Tesla has been doing. I think if you look at the example on how they really reinvented a space that no one thought it's doable, that you have no car dealers and that you actually have software on the car. I think just thinking about ideas that are a bit broader. So obviously we're watching what the latest trends are on B2C. But I think it's also really helpful to see in other industries that have been completely reinvented. And see what were the initial impetus that we can take as obviously as a smaller brand, we're not Tesla, but taking bits and pieces after thinking and put small bets and test what we can do to maybe reinvent the wheel at a small point and then scale it from there.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. Yeah, Tesla's always a good one to watch. What's up next on your reading list?Kathrin:I'm just finishing up the No Rules Rules of Netflix, reinventing culture. I think now that we are getting bigger as a company, we're having a lot of similarities that I guess every startup is going through. You're a small group and everything is informed and you have no rules, and then suddenly you're more than 20 people, 25 people, and how do you actually keep the culture as it is without limiting people and the creativity and establishing artificial rules and too many approval processes? So how can we stay agile as a brand? Again, we're not Netflix, but I think there are a couple of things especially early on that you can take from the book.Kathrin:One is really the transparency that even if it's uncomfortable, if things are going wrong, is that we talk to everyone. So there's no hidden desk or anything with any documents, we keep our revenue information for example, for everyone visible on the board, so people can see how we're doing. So there are no secrets. And I think that just brings a level of accountability to the team, and without us having to establish rules that limits the strongest performance and people were actually most excited about driving things forward.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah that's great. That's a good book too. What's one thing that you don't understand today that you wish you did?Kathrin:I would say, some of the new channels TikTok is one of those where I wish I would be earlier to the game. I think there are a lot of interesting things going on, and I'm getting actually taught by people who are much younger than me. What's going on? So I think, for us going forward is like, how do we expand beyond the channels that we learned and we are good at and where we have an established community and how can we go about new things and finding out about it and placing small bets, trying something and see if it sticks? But yeah, I think that's something always good to be early to the party.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, I agree. All right, Kathrin, this has been such a fun interview so different, which I loved. Thank you for coming on. Where can people find out more about you and Bearaby?Kathrin:Yes, you can find more about us on bearaby.com. And you can also find us on Instagram. And our handle is @mybearaby.Stephanie:Thanks so much for joining us. It was a pleasure.Kathrin:Thanks for having me.

Sometimes, it’s best to get back to the basics. Whether you are talking business or just general human interaction, it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of overthinking things when really all you need to do is keep it simple. Ellen Bennett knows this more than most, and she’s built her company, Hedley & Bennett into an undeniable success by sticking to that principle. Hedley & Bennett produces high-quality kitchen wear that has been featured in more than 4,000 restaurants and cafes, adopted by celebrity chefs like Martha Stewart and David Chang, and is used by hundreds of thousands of home chefs every day. But the story started much more modestly.  Ellen began with a true grassroots approach, selling aprons out of her Mini Cooper, talking to and pitching every chef she knew, and working her connections to keep growing her business.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Ellen shares the story of how she hustled to build Hedley & Bennett and all of the early struggles she had to work through to keep the train rolling. She gives advice to any young company dealing with production or shipping mishaps, and she explains how you can go about expanding through creative and authentic collaborations. Plus, she explains what it took to shift the company from exclusively selling B2B to now selling more than 80% DTC. Ellen brought a level of energy and ambition to the interview that didn’t disappoint, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Main Takeaways:Howdy, Partner: One way to expand your product line without taking on the entire risk and expense of production, testing, etc., is to form a partnership with companies that already make products you are interested in selling. By partnering with Madewell and Richer Poorer socks, Hedley & Bennet was able to expand its product line and grow its audience and customer base without having to add to or adjust the supply chain. Pick Up The Phone: As a young company, any mistake could be a dagger to the heart. But, things happen and sometimes you have to swallow the cost of a mistake for the overall good of the business. The best way to do that is to be honest, take responsibility, and do it one-to-one. Make the hard phone call instead of hiding behind an email. Your customer might be upset that their order was messed up, but you will build respect and trust when you show them you’re making a personal effort to make it right.From B2B to DTC: It may seem obvious, but moving from almost exclusively selling B2B to having 80% of your products sold DTC is a massive shift. Tune in to hear what that looked like for Hedley & Bennett, and advice for any company considering this move.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:Ellen Bennett:Great. Hi guys. My name is Ellen Bennett and I'm the founder and CEO of Hedley and Bennett.Stephanie Postles:Hey everyone. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Ellen Bennett, the founder and CEO of Hedley and Bennett. Ellen, welcome to the show.Ellen Bennett:Thanks for having me.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, I'm very excited to have you on. You're the first person with a outfit change that we've had before getting on. So it's a good day to have a new thing occur on a podcast interview.Ellen Bennett:I love color and I brought a light yellow cat and I had a dark yellow hat. So I just changed to a dark yellow hat in case everyone's wondering, what the hell is she talking about?Stephanie Postles:Yep. This is working for me more now. So now I'm ready to get into it. So your company looks awesome. I saw that Hedley and Bennett, you guys are creating handcrafted aprons and you're in over 4,000 restaurants and coffee shops, which is wild and crazy. So your story seems like one that I want to go back to the early days. Like before, you're in all these restaurants and coffee shops, how did you start? How did you even get into this industry?Ellen Bennett:So I used to cook professionally. I worked at a two Michelin star restaurant, hated our uniforms, and I wanted to make them better. I wanted to make people feel empowered and awesome. And you hear, oh, she has an apron company and you might think frilly, curly aprons, but I need you to stop what you're doing right now, go to our website to hedleyandbennett.com and check it out because you'll understand pretty immediately that we are the polar opposite of that. We are a really awesome collection of colorful, very well-made, very high quality products, which are kitchens, gear and aprons.Ellen Bennett:And it began with this idea of just make a good apron for the restaurant world, make the perfect apron. And it quickly evolved into this giant community of chefs that also felt like they needed that same product. And it was just me out of my house, out of my mini Cooper, running to farmer's markets, talking to chefs, really doing a very grassroots marketing approach to everything because frankly, I didn't have any investors. I didn't have any outside capital. I had me, myself and I against the world and my product. So I began with that and just built off of it, reinvested every penny I made back into the business and grew it chunk by chunk brick by brick. And it took time, but I believe that the good things take time. So I've been happy with our journey. We are eight years in now.Stephanie Postles:Awesome. So for anyone who has not worked in the restaurant business, which I have but I've not been back in the kitchen. I was like server, bartender, shot girl, hey. What makes a bad apron and what did you hear when you're going out and interviewing people and kind of doing that market research to create what you have today, which is an awesome, but sturdy looking apron. I saw one on your website with really cool pockets, but it was very trendy, but also look [inaudible]. How did you get there and what were you wearing before we were like, this sucks?Ellen Bennett:Yeah, totally. So before Hedley and Bennett was born, aprons were very much just a commodity as something you didn't think about, you didn't look at, it was just a very, very thin piece of material probably made out of polyester with a strap that wrapped around your neck. And that hung probably below your boobs, like really not fitting on a man or a woman or whoever. And it also had like shoe lay strings around the waist. It didn't adjust in any way and that was it. There was nothing else to it. And what I did with Hedley and Bennett is we made it a whole world. We made it a community. We made it mean something. And from the get-go we had people like Martha Stewart and David Chang and Nancy Silverton. And if you watch any show on TV right now from Top Chef to any show on the food network you will see this little red and on the chest and that is the heavily amended apron.Stephanie Postles:Wow. Okay. You [inaudible] right to the crazy success story now. Now, [inaudible] how did you get in front of Martha Stewart? How did you secure all these partnerships like that, that's crazy.Ellen Bennett:Believe it or not. And this is the 80 year old within me. I always say I'm like an eighty year... I'm secretly an 80 year old man, because I do things the old school way sometimes. I believe in really high quality always. And from day one we made a product that really worked and I've always listened to our customers deeply. Do you know what an NPS score is?Stephanie Postles:Yeah.Ellen Bennett:Yes.Stephanie Postles:Net Promoter Score.Ellen Bennett:Yes. So our NPS score is 80. And that's very high above industry standard, which ranges in the 60 camp. And we are constantly at 80 plus. And the reason we're in that camp is because we've never skimped on the quality of details. The fabrics that we use are everything from Japanese denims, to Italian chambrays to materials that you can beat up again, and again, and again, and this thing is going to last you forever. So you have the craziest chefs out there in the world wearing our products for so many years. Believe me, I got feedback throughout the years. So these kinds of guys, they just love the quality. They loved that it had a point of view and that you could have your own vibe. You didn't just need to be wearing a white apron. Why not have yourself have an identity in the kitchen that was more than just strap a white apron on.Stephanie Postles:Yep. But how did you get in front of them? Did you send them free samples to try and show them quality? How did you even get in front of these top shows?Ellen Bennett:A lot of it was word of mouth. So one chef would take it to an event and another chef would see that little red patch on the chest and be like, "what is that?" And then they'd say, "oh, there's a girl, her name's Ellen." They would call me the quote unquote apron lady. "Oh, you got to contact Ellen. She's making awesome stuff. These were the early days of Instagram. And when I went and met with David Chang, for example, in New York, I was introduced to him by a chef I met in LA. The chef from LA was like, "if you're ever in New York, let me know." And I of course let him know. So I reached out before I showed up to New York and I was like, "chef, I'm coming to New York. I'm so excited to come see your spot."Ellen Bennett:I was very interested in what he was doing and I happen to have aprons with me. So I obviously was going to show him when I was in New York. And he said, "yeah, come by my restaurant." I stopped by, I showed him aprons. He bought some from me and then he's like, "well, how else can I help you?" I was like, "you know what, I'd love to meet a few other chefs who do you know?" And he's like, "oh, David Chang is a good friend." Like, "can you reach out to him right now for me? I'll come over today." And he was like, "yeah, sure." And so then that chef emailed David Chang. He responded in like an hour later. I was standing inside Momofuku, convincing David Chang to buy aprons from me. And David was like, "I don't know who you are."Ellen Bennett:He was really nice, but there was nothing about Hedley and Bennett that existed the way it does now in the industry. But I was so excited at the idea of getting him aprons that I was like, "all right, do you need it on consignment? Do you need net 60? What do you need? I'm going to give it to you, but I'm not walking out of here without you wearing Hedley and Bennett. Because, I promise you're going to love it." And I had enough conviction in my product that I knew once he actually had his team wearing it, they would love it. And sure enough, David Chang and his restaurants have worn Hedley and Bennett for six plus years now.Stephanie Postles:And did they buy that day when you-Ellen Bennett:They did. They ordered 50 aprons, custom aprons from me. And he's like, "I don't even know how you did that, but all right, I'm excited." And I was like, "yay." And then I took a picture with him, put it on Instagram. Just using what I had, honestly, it was like focused on what you have and not what you don't have. And I was like, I have myself, I have this great product and I have a new customer. I'm going to talk about it. It was very basic, but I kept doing that again and again and again. And the flywheel just started spinning.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. That's such a good reminder too, about asking your current customers or your network for referrals. I think a lot of people feel awkward and uncomfortable about doing that. Especially when you make a sale to someone to then be like, and now I'm going to ask for that extra thing. But I found that usually people always say yes, like "yes, I'll try and find someone else in my network to help you. Yes. There's someone else that I know," but they wouldn't think about offering that up right from the beginning. But when you ask it's like all these doors open, I think not enough people ask though.Ellen Bennett:I agree. And one of the things that I've always championed within our organization is never treating people like a transaction. So when you are being friends with people and you actually care about them, and you're not just caring about making that sale, people are willing and much more willing to help you. And also if you are excited about what you're doing and you genuinely are there because you're trying to help in some capacity, I've just found that everyone is willing to get on that bandwagon. Like when that chef reached out to David Chang, he's like "this girl she's got hustle. She's figuring out. She's got this business." They appreciate when people try. And so you just kind of want to help people that are out there going out of their comfort zones.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. I completely agree. So how did you go about, getting back to the earlier days, like you're not a designer, you didn't have background in that. What was it like getting into that industry and trying to figure out, how do I get a product manufactured? How do I pivot that when I have feedback? Somethings going wrong. What did that look like? And what were some of the lessons from those early days?Ellen Bennett:I had some orders go south very frequently at the beginning. And they were very expensive as a tiny, small business. One of them being Bryan Voltaggio he ordered the biggest order I'd ever gotten. I think it was 150 aprons. And we had a mishap in sewing land and the sewers just didn't get it done in time. And we were on them and we were hounding them and they had a restaurant opening. And so you can imagine delivering 150 aprons after the restaurant opens on the other side of the United States is not right. And we had to just suck it up and make it right. I refunded part of it. I overnighted stuff. I covered the cost of it. I called the assistant and spoke to her personally and said, "I'm so sorry. This is what occurred. It's on us. We really messed up and we're going to make it right." And just owning your mistakes, especially when you're a small business hiding behind emails, this is where my 80 year old man comes out, pick up the phone.Ellen Bennett:There's nothing like human contact, especially when things go South. Do not try and resolve a problem or a deeply rooted issue on an email, have the balls to call the person and fix it. And people really appreciate that. For as technologically savvy as we all are, human connection will never surpass an email. I mean the other way around. So, that was a lot of what I did at the beginning when things went South. I would pick up the phone and call people and be like, "tell me what happened. How can we make this right. We'll take care of it." And we bid it many times where we covered costs on stuff.Stephanie Postles:Is it usually delays type of issues that-Ellen Bennett:It was delays, or there were errors on the fabric, or maybe it was a new fabric we were testing. We didn't test because we didn't even know to test fabrics. And so it may be a bled on their clothes. You name it, it happened. And there were times when customers absolutely were like, nope, you ruined it. And we had to go out and find other customers. But overall we were always very humble about our mistakes and just listened, fixed and course corrected pretty immediately. So if there was an issue with one type of material and we had several customers, we would proactively reach out to the other customers and say, "hey, it turns out there's something wrong with this. We need to fix it. We'd like to recover those products. We'll send you other ones. Let's make it right."Stephanie Postles:Yep. Got it. So how do you go about ingesting feedback now that you're in the 4,000 plus restaurants and locations? How do you take feedback like you did in the early days, which was probably much more like, one-off where you're like, "oh, good tip. I'm going to change it." What are you doing now with everything coming in.Ellen Bennett:Right. Yeah. Back in the day I was the windshield to the business. So I could kind of take it all in every single bit. Now we have a pretty extensive set of meetings and spreadsheets from every part of the business. So our social team online is feeding information in from Instagram and TikTok and direct messages that we get. My platform at Ellen Marie Bennett is pretty front and center too. So people will reach out to me directly and say things. When things are wrong, you hear about it. So I funnel that over to our social team, and then they aggregate it all and have a weekly meeting like an interdepartmental meeting between marketing and sales and production to ensure that those things are getting changed or fixed.Ellen Bennett:You can put a lot of technology behind that and aggregate surveys and things of that nature too, which we do. But I've found that just getting the right people on a cadence of a phone call has been really helpful to ensure that our e-comm team is making corrections to the site where things are difficult for customers or our product team hears about that one trending topic where this one apron is wrinkling in a way that none of the other ones do, so then we start course correcting on that. One of our values as a company is never stop improving. So we are constantly tinkering, and fixing, and tweaking, and editing and adjusting. And because we're also controlling the supply chain, it's easy for us to do that. It's not like we product one year out and then we can't adjust it. We're constantly adapting it.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. That's really great. Controlling that entire process from start to finish. As you've started to scale and grow, and you bring on more executives onto the team, you've got a CFO, have you ever felt a pull to kind of sacrifice quality here and there in the pursuit of better margins, because that seems like something a lot of businesses struggle with as they get bigger. Sometimes there's a point where you're like, eh, I remember the early days it used to be this and now... Have you felt any of that pull yet? And if so, how do you think about that?Ellen Bennett:Such a great question. Honestly, I've found that because we have a bigger team, we are able to scale with more infrastructure. It's just easier. And we actually have time to negotiate and we actually have time to buy in bigger volume on raw materials. So it helps our margin in the long run. So we've actually been able to maintain a lot of the same suppliers we used from the get-go, but grow with them. And because I started with them with one roll of fabric, and now we're buying tens of thousands of rolls monthly it's a very different relationship and they really appreciate us. Because also, back to my being an 80 year old man days, I never had any debt and I always paid everybody on time. So our vendors really valued us and value us to this day, because we're not on net 60 terms or anything with them. We pay them every month with no delays. So, that creates a lot of partnership. They want to help you because you've always helped them.Stephanie Postles:Yep [crosstalk].Ellen Bennett:So I've actually found the margin has gone up as we've scaled versus gone down. There was a long time there in Hedley and Bennett that we sacrificed quite a lot of margin to hit the quality that we wanted. And we did it anyway because we believe in quality first and foremost.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. That's awesome. And such a good point, too, of like, if you're scaling and growing your margins should get better. You don't always have to sacrifice on quality, but especially leaning into that relationship with your partners can really work wonders which is great.Ellen Bennett:Exactly. And just because somebody's price, what they offer you is the price that they're offering you doesn't mean you can't have a conversation. Just like I asked that chef do you know anybody? It's like, hey guys, is there anything else we can do to get this down? Are there other costs that we can adjust to bring your costs down? Is there anything we can do on our end to help mitigate some of this? And you find ways of being collaborative and your partners tend to say, yes. It's not just the hard balling them and trying to squeeze a penny down, but really listening to them and listening to your needs and finding a happy medium, a solution.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. Awesome. So at what point did you start to think about introducing new products? When were you like now's the time to have a new product come live?Ellen Bennett:Yeah. When we first started everything was pretty much B2B. So business to business and the company, all of these restaurants that we were in, and chefs we were outfitting like that was our bread and butter. And it created a lot of great cashflow because we would take a deposit at the beginning and ship the product once it was made, collect the other half. And the business was able to grow in that way. Organically though, behind the scenes, our D2C our direct consumer business was growing because all these people were seeing us on Food Network or Top Chef, you'll see that little red square ampersand patch on the chest and say, what is that? Oh, my favorite chef is wearing, I want to wear it.Ellen Bennett:So we were building this like online presence without even meaning to in a way. And I wanted to make product that resonated with all of our newer customers online and make something special for our restaurant customers. So I thought collaborations, that's the best way to do it. And that's where I got our toes dabbled into the world of new product. And we started with I believe one of our early collaborations was with The Hundreds, which is a really cool street wear brand here in LA. Then we did something with Parachute home, we've since gone on to do a collaboration with Vans and Madewell. But every single one of those collaborations brought us new eyeballs, it brought us new community and it brought something really fun to talk about.Ellen Bennett:And we never did it with anyone we didn't actually believe was a good partnership. It's like when you see a brand team up with, I don't know, they could be something totally different. And they team up with like an airline. And you're like, what does that even mean? What are you guys doing? We never did that. It always had to be genuine. And that really helped us get into new products because we were able to test and see what people responded to. So we launched a line of chef socks with this one company called Richer Poorer and everyone was like, "chef socks. What do you even mean with that?" And, oh my God, these chefs socks to this day, we still sell them. And we have an ongoing partnership now where they make our socks.Stephanie Postles:What are chef socks? Is it just comfy or thicker.Ellen Bennett:So you could wear them. They have compression but they're super colorful because obviously Hedley and Bennett is a really colorful fun company. And they also have fun sayings at the bottom. So it'll say like wake up and fight or whatever. So you've got, put your socks on and get out there and like kick at life.Ellen Bennett:So, that was a way that we got to test a new product be resourceful. Because, we didn't have to go make our own supply chain to create SOPs. And then we were able to tap into their network of community and world.Stephanie Postles:What does the breakout of work look like when you're partnering with someone like Madewell, because maybe it's not a sock company. It's like, we'll make the socks you target them to your audience, we'll do our thing. What does it look like if it's more of a big brand or like a Vans where it's like, okay, you've got your designs and things like that. Like who's doing what work?Ellen Bennett:Yeah. Such a good question. So when we did our collab with Madewell, we created the aprons. We manufactured them and they manufactured all of the apparel. So we did a jumpsuit and shirts and bandanas and a few other items. So things like a 12 piece collection and all the aprons were made by us. The designs came from their design team, combined with our input and edits. And the way we did it was we brought the function and the core base. And then they brought the design elements that they wanted to kind of plug in from the world of Madewell, and those are the best collaborations. When you find somebody that does something that you don't do and vice versa.Ellen Bennett:So with Vans, it's like they make shoes we don't. We made aprons, they don't. With Madewell we make really high pro-grade, high function product that's really beautiful and lasts forever and they have great designs. So you bring those two together and you end up with a jumpsuit that's made out of a beautiful stretch denim that has a towel loop on the side for towels for when you're cooking. But its also snaps instead of buttons so you can get in and out of it because if you're going to go pee while you're cooking or whatever, you don't have time to sit there and unbutton 40 buttons. So just thinking about it from a function standpoint, it really ended up being a perfect collaboration.Stephanie Postles:Got it. And do they feel pretty similar or is it very one-off, like very different kinds of relationships because I'm even thinking about like how do you break up the sales or who gets what on the backend?Ellen Bennett:I think it's really important when people are doing collaborations to be very open at the beginning about what your end goal is. And for Madewell we really wanted to tap into their audience and they wanted to tap into ours. So it was like, "okay, we're going to go heavy into marketing." I also really wanted to make a jumpsuit. We had never done work wear in that capacity. And so they were like, "great, we'll make those products. You make the aprons, we'll hit that consumer from a home and pro angle, but with the same product" and it was a perfect split. So you work it out based on what everybody's needs are. And you kind of like lay out all your cards on the table. And if someone is a bigger company, typically the larger company will cover more of let's say the marketing costs.Ellen Bennett:So Madewell did a lot of the photo shoot for our collaboration or when we did our launch with Vans, we did a huge party with them. We had it at our 16,000 square foot factory in LA, but then they brought people from the strokes to perform. So it is-Stephanie Postles:Go Vans!Ellen Bennett:Go Vans! I mean, music is their world. So that is how it ends up being really effective. You have to both pull in and pitch in from both sides or else it's not really a collaboration, it's not really a partnership. You're inventing some false thing behind the scenes in marketing land for a good reason to talk to your audience, but everyone can smell through bullshit these days. Like if it isn't genuine, don't do it.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. Have you had any partnership fails? You don't have to say any of the names that have been like, oh, this didn't work out and here's maybe why or what I would avoid next time that this is why it didn't work out well.Ellen Bennett:Yeah. I love that you asked me that because truthfully at the early days of Hedley and Bennett, we did so many partnerships with so many people. And we said yes to everything because we were learning, we were exploring, we were trying things. And I found that a lot of times we had the kind of chutzpah and initiative to make it work and sometimes the other side didn't. And so we found that we were doing a lot of the work, a lot of times. Not in any of the partnerships I mentioned, but somebody would reach out and they'd say, "oh my gosh, we love your brand. We'd love to collaborate." And next thing you know, we're like throwing them a party and I'm like, "wait, why is our marketing department throwing a party for a brand that doesn't even have any of their people coming in to support or help."Ellen Bennett:So we kissed some frogs and learned what we needed to ask. And I don't fault anyone for it, but learning to say no is just as important to learn than to say yes. You need to be able to draw the line. But if our team hadn't done all those different events, I don't know that we would have learned that. So we learned it the hard way, but sometimes experience teaches you.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. I love that. And how long does a... I'm diving deep because I've not talked about partnerships a lot on the shows that's why I'm really going in.Ellen Bennett:Oh, yeah. Go for it.Stephanie Postles:When do you start seeing the ROI kind of trail off? At what point does the excitement die down and then you kind of are like, okay onto the next partnership or how long does it normally last?Ellen Bennett:Oh yeah. That's great. Let's say it depends on how much ramp up you make to the partnership or the collaboration, and then how quickly the product sells out. So I'll give you one example. We did a big print with a print collection with a company called Rifle Paper Company. I don't know if you know who that is, but if you Google that you will recognize the floral print. Ellen Bennett:So we did a print with them and we had a 40,000 person sign up waitlist for when the product launched. And that was done three weeks before the product launched. And so we were able to pull in all these people top of the funnel and bring them in and have them be excited about it. And we were hitting them with different emails, talking about the product and when it was going to land. And then once the product landed, it was pretty exciting for I'd say like about a month, it was that time. And that product sold very well and drove a lot of traffic for the entire period it was not sold out. So we had it up, I think for two and a half months. And this was three years ago.Ellen Bennett:Now everything feels so accelerated. It's like, you get a product up, it's cool. Then something happens. And then the United States implodes in some way. And then we're off to the races. Talk about that. And then something happens on Reddit and then it goes over there. So I don't know, I think the news cycle and everything else has sped up dramatically from 2017.Ellen Bennett:So, I'd say a good two-ish months is usually the range. And with them, we did lots of social media posts on both accounts. And so she was posting about it. We were posting about it and that helped just build the hype and momentum on it. And then once it sold out, it was gone and then people were bummed because they didn't get it. So when we brought it back, like almost a year later for a limited drop, it sold so fast. I think it was gone in a couple of weeks.Stephanie Postles:So I want to circle back a little bit to the B2B, to D2C transition and talk about, how did you guys think about your tech stack and your website, because when you're doing B2B orders, they're probably used to a different, sometimes archaic system of I'm used to logging in and making my purchase or talking to my guy at this location. How did you think about that switch? And did you really change the user interface and how customers were interacting or did you just let it go and see if they would adapt to your new D2C way of selling?Ellen Bennett:We have a pretty unique kind of split in our organization because you have one team managing two very, very different channels with very different customers. And when we were smaller, it was manageable and you could figure it out. But now that we've grown so much and that we are, we're now 80% direct to consumer, it's a dramatically different tech stack. It's a dramatically different backend.Stephanie Postles:80% because the pie just grew bigger. You still probably have a lot of those B2B ones the pie just got bigger. Yeah. Okay.Ellen Bennett:That's right. So it used to be 50/50, and now it's 80/20, but growth on all levels. To your point, the 80% D2C really surpassed the B2B. So we would blend everything, which was really painful. It was really hard because you had one customer service team servicing a chef who needed something for his opening and then you had Maria from Minnesota, calling in who needed a strap change on her apron. And you had two people helping both so that was a little confusing and convoluted, but we were too small to be able to do anything more and to resource it fully in a different way.Ellen Bennett:And now that the business has expanded, we actually broke out B2B and created its own P&L. It has its own P&L, it has its own team and its own sales force that... We've always had a separate salesforce, but it was blended into the rest of the company now it's fully broken out. And on the backend, we are automating it. So we're creating a portal where our B2B customers can go log on, get the discounts and have it be a little bit more easy and automated for them.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. So what portal are you finding success with? Because, I could see a lot of businesses wanting to go the other way. Like there's a ton of D2C right now. And B2B is sometimes where people also, they wish to be. So what backend, what tech are you using to make that easy from a log-in perspective versus consumer?Ellen Bennett:We have basically cloned our site and have done a wholesale site as a V1 and are working based off of that, seeing what works and what doesn't. I've also gone the polar opposite direction when we added new things on like last year, we built a brand new site from head to toe and everything was new and we tested nothing. And that was not great either. So we kind of, over-indexed on like, let's go really basic with the B2B portal and learn what is and isn't working and then build off of that with surveys and conversations with our B2B customers to learn what is working and what isn't.Ellen Bennett:Sometimes you don't have the resources. Sometimes you don't have the time. You have to find what works for your company. And perfect sometimes gets in the way of progress. So for B2B, we just said, let's do a portal. It'll be easier. It'll help our sales team. A lot of our leads are inbound because people just love our products, so they reach out to us and we have a way to have them just buy straight from inventory without talking to someone.Stephanie Postles:That's great. I always hate when it's like contact us and we'll let you know the pricing on things. I'm like, what if I just want to buy?Ellen Bennett:Exactly. And we got that feedback from our customers where they're like, "hey, I have a restaurant I'm working all day. I don't always have time, even though your staff is awesome. I don't have time to wait for Kate to get back to me. I need to just order this and be done with it." And so we thought, oh, okay, let's just do this online and take it from there. So that's how B2B has kind of evolved and began to stand on its own two feet next to D2C.Stephanie Postles:That's cool. And do you allow for customization within that platform.Ellen Bennett:Offline, online that would have cost us a $100,000 to build that feature and I'm just not sure that we're ready to make that commitment because we're still on V1, but we'll learn. We'll learn and see how much demand we get. We have an entire ERP system offline that you can do customization within Hedley and Bennett, but you do have to talk to a sales rep.Stephanie Postles:Yeah. That seems like a tricky place. I'm even thinking about companies like Swag.com which we've had on the show. And I've used them before and thinking about trying to even get this logo, I'm pointing to my hoodie that I'm wearing, like what's hard for... And there was many times back and forth and it was a [inaudible] they were like Steph that's like weirdly centered or that's like too big. It was actually helpful having someone tell me, that looks crappy let us help you.Ellen Bennett:Yeah. So it is definitely merging an old school industry that required a lot of hand holding to optimizing it in ways where people are willing to make a few concessions because they want to ease or they want the speed and they're like, "okay, fine. I won't talk to Kate, but I'll get to order it right now. Maybe I won't get embroidery, but I'll get the aprons by Monday." And so you just have those trade-offs and people are willing to make them.Stephanie Postles:Yep. All right. And the last thing I want to talk about before we happen to the lightning round is your facility in LA it's known, and it's kind of famous for its features. I think I read it had tree houses or zip lines. And after meeting you now, I'm actually not surprised at all, but tell me a little bit about how you thought about building your facility in LA and why you built it that way.Ellen Bennett:Yeah. So when we got the factory, about six years ago, it was an awful giant, ugly, ugly building. And my team thought she's lost it. What are we doing here in the middle of Vernon and next to downtown LA. So I thought, "no, guys, we're going to build a kitchen and we're going to add a zip line and there's going to be a slide and just tree houses, and it's going to be amazing and everything's going to be done here." None of that existed in the building, but I had a vision of how I wanted it to be.Ellen Bennett:And sure enough, we now have all of those pieces in here. And we teamed up with Samsung and built this gorgeous kitchen where we've hosted a lot of events. And it's been a really wild evolution of Hedley and Bennett going from this very chef oriented company to now this very home cook oriented business with so many more customers than just our restaurant customers. But at the heart of it, it's still a kitchen. And in our factory, the kitchen still brings our B2B and our D2C customers together.Ellen Bennett:Now we shoot videos for TikTok and social media and Instagram out of that kitchen. Yet we also used to host cookbook events for a chef that was launching a book. So kitchen is at our heart, no matter what we do and Hedley and Bennett land, whether it's B2B or D2C it will always be connected to that core which is empowering and inspiring people to cook.Stephanie Postles:That's awesome. Yeah. And such a good reminder too, of how to really get the most use of a space. So many people buy it for just one little small purpose and then when that purpose is gone, they're like, "oh, shoot, I shouldn't have maybe gotten that retail location," but for you, it's like you're using it for social, and video and events, which hopefully will come back soon. So yeah [inaudible].Ellen Bennett:Yeah, exactly. I think that's in Hedley and Bennett's DNA. We're all about multi-use, being resourceful and having everything have a dual function. Our aprons are not just for chefs they're also for home cooks, they are for potters and painters and designers can wear them to protect their clothes. So it's kind of for everyone, but built specifically with chefs in mind.Stephanie Postles:Awesome. All right, well, let's move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask a question and you have 30 seconds or less now to answer.Ellen Bennett:Okay.Stephanie Postles:All right. First one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Ellen Bennett:Ooh. The one thing in e-commerce. It's such a cliche word, but it's the truth. I do believe that authenticity and brands that are real brands, not just pretty packaging and then you get a shitty product inside the pretty packaging. I believe those are the brands that will survive. There are people that care about what they're actually making and they believe in that product having longevity in life and more than just one click and then your customer is upset because they bamboozled. So, quality and authenticity in the products that you are making are always going to be important in e-com. Next year and the year after.Stephanie Postles:Yes. I love that. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Ellen Bennett:Every person that has said yes and no to me has always... I believe all the yeses and nos that I've ever gotten have been the nicest thing that I've ever gotten because they've opened and shut different doors along the way that have forced me to be resourceful. That have forced me to experience hardship and have forced me to experience amazing feelings. And when you have a robust set of life experiences, you can tackle more things, never think about, oh my God, woe is me. This happened to me. It's like, hell yes, that you got through that. And that you now have that notch on your life belt of experience. And I believe you got to live life and feel life and go through the ups and the downs of it to come out on the other side with that much more context. And then you have that much more to pull from.Stephanie Postles:[inaudible]. That is a good one. That's one of my favorite answer so far. What's up next on your reading list?Ellen Bennett:My book.Stephanie Postles:Tell me about it.Ellen Bennett:I wrote a book. It took me two and a half years and it launches in April.Stephanie Postles:Interesting.Ellen Bennett:Yes, it launches with Penguin Random House and it's called "Dream First Details Later: How to Quit Overthinking and Make It Happen."Stephanie Postles:[inaudible].Ellen Bennett:That's high up on my reading list. Also, I'm obsessed with the entire series of Lencioni books.Stephanie Postles:Okay. I actually don't know what that is.Ellen Bennett:It's very nerdy, but it's like "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," "Death by Meetings," "The Advantage."Stephanie Postles:Oh, got it.Ellen Bennett:They're all these story telling books that are about business and they're digestible and easy read. So I make my entire leadership team read all of them when they join.Stephanie Postles:That's good. And I can't wait to read your book that also sounds really good. What's your favorite e-commerce tool that you're experimenting with right now or you're having success with?Ellen Bennett:So it's not directly e-comm, but it really helps it. And it's called Dash Hudson. And it is a really incredible social media tool that drives a ton of data and analytics and helps show your team how much... We have a hard time figuring out how much traffic is being driven from social and where and how many purchases are coming from it. So this has given us a heavy dose of visibility. You're more empowered if you have more data and you can track things. So I really love Dash Hudson.Stephanie Postles:Cool. I have to check that one out. All right. Ellen, well, it's been a blast having you on, obviously you're super fun. Your company is amazing. Where can people find out more about you and Hedley and Bennett?Ellen Bennett:Yes. They have to go to our website, www.hedleyandbennett.com. And that's H-E-D-L-E-Y. And then our Instagram and our TikTok is also Hedley and Bennett. And my personal account is Ellen Marie Bennett. Our TikTok is highly amazing and packed with great videos about tips and tricks for the kitchen and how to just make you a bad-ass when you're cooking, whether you like cooking or not. So go follow all of them. And I have a pet pig that's 200 pounds.Stephanie Postles:That's enough of a reason [inaudible].Ellen Bennett:That one's on Ellen Marie Bennett. So just go join our wild world on the internet and say hi and say you heard me on this podcast. And thank you so much for having me, Stephanie. This was so much fun.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, I agree. We'll have to have you back and then maybe you'll bring your pet pig and we'll call it like a round table with your pet. That's great.Ellen Bennett:With Oliver.Stephanie Postles:Oliver, that's my son's name, how perfect [crosstalk].Ellen Bennett:Oh, my Gosh. Amazing.Stephanie Postles:All right. Thank you so much, Ellen.Ellen Bennett:Thank you.