The Modern Retail Podcast

Women's workwear brand Argent is back in growth mode.The company first launched in 2016, and saw a precipitous rise over its first few years -- especially thanks to well-known fans of the brand like Hilary Clinton. But the pandemic changed everything -- with people no longer going to work in offices and overall demand plummeting.During that time, said Argent founder and CEO Sali Christeson, "it really became about survival and hunkering down and going lean and figuring out what our strategy was going to be." And while the company saw a loss in both 2020 and 2021, things are once again on the up and up. "We've never seen numbers the way that we're seeing now," said Christeson.She joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about Argent's future plans, as well the overall state of workwear.Though Argent began as a digital brand, over the years it launched a few showrooms. And while many of those closed during the pandemic, Christeson said that in-store retail is a focus for this year. "I love stores," she said. "They've always been part of our story." With that, the brand has reopened its Soho store, and hopes to open more over the next year.But owned stores aren't the only area of growth for Argent. The brand recently began a wholesale partnership with Nordstrom. As Christeson described it, wholesale presents new opportunities when done right. "You have to recognize how much comes from whole partnerships, if you time it right," she said. "If it's a mutual fit, it's a win-win."And marketing is also a big push -- especially in some often-overlooked areas like catalogs. "Performance-driven catalogs… outperform digital," she said. "Catalogs crush for us."For now, the focus is on growing and keeping pace. "There's so much opportunity," she said. "We're trying to stay really focused on retail, wholesale team growth and then all the marketing to supplement it."

L’Oréal's $2.5 billion Aesop acquisition, American Eagle's supply chain shakeups, and Chipotle suing Sweetgreen over a burrito bowl

Men's apparel brand True Classic was able to become a $250 million company -- and it thanks Facebook for its success."I knew I was going to put all my eggs in the Facebook basket," said co-founder and CEO Ryan Bartlett. Lucky for him, the company launched before the changes to iOS 14, and his thesis worked. The company says it's profitable, has sold over $250 million worth of goods since its launch in 2019 and now has five stores open around the U.S.Bartlett joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about True Classic's growth strategy -- as well as what it takes to rely on social media in the current climate.Bartlett admits that the performance marketing space has gotten much more difficult over the years, but he still believes Facebook is a great channel for growth. The company spends as much as $100,000 on Meta platforms each day, which represents around 70% of its total marketing budget."We have definitely diversified away from Facebook, because we realized that if anything ever goes wrong with Facebook, we can just tank the business," Bartlett said. "So we've been very strategic about spending more on Google, spending more on non-branded search on Amazon, spending more on podcasts and OTT -- but really testing into it. We really are sticklers on data and analytics and understanding attribution at the highest levels."Even though paid social is so important to True Classic's business model, Bartlett also thinks the product is just as important. The company makes predominately casualwear, like crewneck t-shirts."I wanted to create something very narrow and a very specific SKU, which was just the t-shirt -- just the crewneck t-shirt," Bartlett said. "I wanted to make the best possible version of that I possibly could, I wanted to prove it out. And once I did, we eventually started rolling out into every single category that you see on the website now, which is activewear, denim, underwear, socks, absolutely everything."Now that True Classic has found a formula that's worked, the focus is on growing it as big as possible. For example, last year the company launched internationally -- "it was like 30% of the business overnight," Bartlett said. "So that was a monster for us. And we it was literally just flicked the light switch on and go." In the beginning, the company launched in dozens of countries including most of Europe and Australia -- but still shipped from the U.S. Now, True Classic is trying to tweak its international strategy even more by seeking out fulfillment centers overseas and producing content in native languages. Additionally, the brand is also expanding into womenswear.For now, expanding beyond the U.S. and into the women's category are what's taking up a lot of Bartlett's time. "Between those two initiatives, I really got my hands full," he said.

Every week on the Modern Retail Rundown, we analyze the most important news within the retail world.This week's episode starts with a discussion on Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette's announcement that he will step down next February and what it can mean for the department store's future. Next, we dissect Uber Eats' mission to crack down on low-rated ghost kitchens, to improve food and service quality. Lastly, a dive into Telfar’s new dynamic price model, which is generating excitement and some confusion among fans of the fashion brand.

Macy's is in the process of rethinking its entire store business.Recent moves emphasize this shift: at its most recent earnings, the company said it was focusing on opening more off-mall locations, a distinct shift from its place as a mall stalwart. According to Marc Mastronardi, Macy's chief stores officer, this shift is a long-time coming and indicative of a longstanding strategy to rethink its stores and the way they operate.The company's strategy now, Mastronardi said, is "us defining it more explicitly for ourselves to now say: what does it take for us to be great at discovery, to be great at convenience, to be great at service and engagement?"Mastronardi joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about how he approaches his role. He spoke onstage at Shoptalk, held in Las Vegas, and afterward sat down to speak with Modern Retail. While this episode was recorded a day before Macy's announced its CEO was stepping down, the theme of change was palpable throughout the conversation.One of the big focuses for Mastronardi has been rethinking how store associates interface with the entire brand. The Macy's of old was focused on specialization -- an associate for menswear, another for bedding, etc. Now, Macy's has shifted this to make most store associates generalists in all areas of the business (with the exception of very specialized departments like makeup, jewelry and furniture)."We created a front-of-the-house team and a back-of-the-house team," Mastronardi said. "And that front-of-the-house team now works the entire store on the front of the house. And you could work in many different areas on any given day, any given week."Meanwhile, Macy's has been putting more focus in new store concepts. It currently has eight Market by Macy's off-mall stores, which are located in what Mastronardi described as "power centers." These are smaller stores with more curated assortment. And then idea is to target a different type of shopper -- one who isn't leisurely perusing a mall, but has more intent. "The customer shops at a different level of frequency in a power center," he said.Putting it all together, the focus is on rebuilding Macy's by paying attention to where customers are and rethinking the role of the store associate. What's more, Macy's no longer thinks of e-commerce and in-store as separate entities -- a strategy very different from competitors like Saks."There is not a store customer and a Macy's dot com customer in this market," he said. There's a Macy's customer. And sometimes they use their store and sometimes they're online."

This week on the Modern Retail Rundown, we analyze the most important news within the retail world.This episode starts out by giving up update on the latest Amazon layoffs, in which the company announced it's cutting 9,000 employees. Next is an overview of Panera rolling out Amazon One's palm checkout, becoming the first major restaurant chain to adopt the tech. The rundown then moves into how Foot Locker and Nike planning the next phase of their partnership.

Saks has big plans to grow its business by focusing on digital initiatives and targeting younger shoppers.The company spun off its digital business from its well-known stores in late 2021. And the retailer says the two-business strategy has worked out: it's acquired 3 million new customers over the last year-plus. According to CMO Emily Essner, it's because Saks is more focused on being new than ever before.The problems the business had before the spin-off, she said, was "a lot of the things you would think about -- [Saks] was certainly much less data-oriented, much less digitally oriented, a lot of feelings, a lot less science. And then I think there was just less orientation, candidly, around the customer."Essner joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the new strategy and how the last year has gone for Saks.One of her big priorities has been reorienting Saks' marketing strategy. While the company has for decades been advertising, Essner said it wasn't as targeted as she would like -- especially on the digital side. For example, she's been focusing more on search than ever before. "I think [we] got a lot more sophisticated in our strategy," she said. The company, she added, has been investing in live commerce and continues to see it pay dividends with engaged shoppers.Meanwhile, Saks has been focusing on expanding to new customers -- such as younger shoppers and men -- while also leveraging its immense customer data to focus on loyalty. With that, said Essner, retention has been a big part of the puzzle. "We use [all the customer data] within all of our owned channels to really tailor our messaging. It plays a huge role in getting you to come back," she said.With this, Essner sees more growth on the horizon for the retailer. The focus, she said, is about "retaining more customers. And it's getting them to shop with us more frequently, which is all around figuring out -- through our personalization efforts -- how we serve them better."

On this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Rundown, we continue to analyze the latest shakeups in the industry.The program starts by giving an update on Silicon Valley Bank, including a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. It then discusses TikTok's recent pressure to sell or face a U.S. ban, and how that can impact retailers and brands' marketing outlooks. Finally, the show looks at how feasible resale is for fast fashion brands like H&M, which just announced a partnership with ThredUp.

Sneaker resale marketplace Impossible Kicks is taking a more analog approach to sneaker resale.In a world where most valuable hype beast-esque kicks are sold on platforms like StockX, Impossible Kicks has been focused on opening stores over the last two years. It now has over two dozen locations in ten states, with plans to open seven more this year. But it also is now expanding into online, trying to compete more directly with its digital counterparts. So far, the business has been working: the company brought in around $50 million last year and expects double that in 2023.According to co-founder and CEO John Mocadlo, Impossible Kicks' success has been in the way its standardized operations. "We've been extremely successful with it just because we set up all of our sneaker stores kind of like a car dealership," he said on the Modern Retail Podcast. That is, "we train the associates like essentially salesmen from a car dealership."There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the underlying ethos of what helped the company grow. Now, Impossible Kicks has big plans to expand its digital presence -- which currently represents about 10% of its revenue -- as well as go beyond footwear and apparel into luxury watches.One of the things that helped Mocadlo grow his company was partnering with the right people and being in the right place at the right time. His business was predicated on brick-and-mortar retail, and that takes a lot of capital to do well. "When we realized -- hey, we're going to be the alpha in brick and mortar' -- we knew that we had to A, raise money and B, move as fast as possible," he said.Now, the company has raised millions of dollars and is investing that into expansion. That being said, Mocadlo added that "on a consolidated basis, the box retail is extremely profitable as a whole."But even as store sales continue to grow, Impossible Kicks is trying to make sure it figures out the right formula for online. That space is much more crowded and filled with big names. "There are some fantastic companies that are DTC with resale -- StockX, Goat, Stadium Goods are all fantastic companies," he said.But the one thing he doesn't want to do is grow to big and ruin the brand cachet the company has thus far built. "We've launched [online] very slow, because there's a lot of fraud in our field of work," Mocadlo said.

On this week's episode of the Modern Retail Rundown, the team continues to dissect the new economic realities the retail industry faces.This episode discusses a few hot topics coming out of the retail industry. First up is a look at Allbirds’ first year as a publicly traded company. We then discuss the new Shein vs. Temu rivalry. Finally, we ask why a lot of mainstream brands are reinventing themselves to court the premium shopper.