The Modern Retail Podcast

Goodbuy is trying to be the anti-mega-retailer.Goodbuy, launched in 2021, is a startup that gives shoppers small-business alternatives to bigger retailer websites. The company offers a browser extension that, when launched on a site like Amazon and Walmart, highlights other smaller brands that offer similar products. Goodbuy also launched a mobile shopping site that lets users search for brands based on different criteria such as product type, region or founder demographic."I wanted to create a really efficient way to have folks be able to shop consciously," said co-founder Cara Oppenheimer. She joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the idea behind Goodbuy and its plans for the future.Over the last year, Goodbuy has amassed a brand list of 180,000 companies it links out to, 40,000 user profiles and has helped facilitate nearly $2 million in sales. Now, the focus is on growing both the user and partner brand base -- while finding new ways to monetize. That includes paid brand offerings, as well as growing affiliate business.In its first year of business, much of Goodbuy's focus has been around proven out the concept. While the future business model will be based on affiliate commerce -- brands will pay Goodbuy a cut of the sale if a shopper used the platform to discover a product -- Oppenheimer wanted to get more people to try the service out before she started charging a fee. So for last year, Goodbuy didn't charge a fee and instead focused on building out its list of brands and customer base.With that, she and her co-founder built a tech stack that would automatically onboard small brands into its search capabilities and then categorize them by different attributes. That is, a Goodbuy user could search for women-owned brands or companies that pledge to be more sustainable.Now, with tens of thousands of shoppers and growing brand attention, Oppenheimer plans on implementing the affiliate program this year.The hope is to create an online shopping experience that can rival Amazon, while still focusing on small businesses. But that will require scale."A lot of our priorities are around onboarding more businesses at scale," said Oppenheimer, "so there's more opportunity for our consumers."

Bedding brand Sunday Citizen first started in 2018 as a small side hustle. In 2018, Mike Abadi was living in China and helping connect entrepreneurs with product suppliers. The owner of a boutique hotel asked him to make a soft yet hearty blanket. Abadi met the request and realized he had stumbled upon a pretty great product.A year later, that blanket became the beginnings of the brand Sunday Citizen. And today, Sunday Citizen has grown into an eight-figure business that makes blankets, pillows, bedding and more. It's sold online, in stores like Nordstrom as well as in its own store in New York City. Abadi joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about the company's growth and expansion plans.In many ways, Sunday Citizen is a very traditional DTC brand. It chose to be online-only from the beginning, despite having a product intended for business purposes. According to Abadi, this is because of his background in brand building and digital marketing."I felt comfortable at the digital advertising game -- acquiring customers online," he said. "And my wife, her background was also on the website side of things. So we both felt that that's where we felt a little bit more comfortable."This online-only strategy worked and helped it stake its claim as a premium bedding brand. In fact, he said this helped Sunday Citizen ink wholesale customers. "Most of the wholesale partners that we've had, they've come to us," he said.But now the company is hoping to grow beyond its online roots. While wholesale represents only about 5% of its business, "the wholesale business is growing faster than our website business at this point," he said. And with its new store, which opened in December of last year, the hope is expand its customer base even more.The secret to growing the brand, Abadi said, was in creating a product that people would remember. "The way we've always developed product has been: we start with engineering," he said.

Two years ago, grocery delivery platforms like Instacart saw huge gains thanks to pandemic-induced consumption changes. Now, the road is a little bit bumpier.But Instacart's vp of retail partnerships Ryan Hamburger is conservatively bullish about the future -- both for his company and the overall grocery delivery industry. He joined the Modern Retail Podcast and went deep into the trends he's observing as of late. One thing is for sure, though: given the tough economic climate and recent industry-wide rocket ship growth, gains won't look like what they did a year or so ago."What you'll see in '23, is we have a new resting heartbeat," Hamburger said. "We've had all of these gains in the sense of e-commerce penetration in the grocery space ramp since Covid hit that haven't gone back, and so that new resting heartbeat is how we all need to be acting in this industry. And so you'll see probably '23, from a growth perspective look more like pre-pandemic years."This resetting of expectations comes amid some industry tumult. For example, e-commerce growth is beginning to flatten out, a number of quick-delivery grocery platforms have started to fizzle and even Instacart itself recently reportedly slashed its valuation.But Hamburger still sees big gains ahead for both grocers and platforms. One things he's focused on, for example, is Instacart's Canadian expansion. Over the past year, the platform has grown its presence in the country by 60%, he said, and has plans to grow that store fleet even further.Additionally, Hamburger has been working to get retail partners to use a variety of in-store tech that Instacart powers. This includes smart carts and other omnichannel bells and whistles that the platform is trying to introduce. "We've been a delivery company, but we want to bring some of that magic to our retailers' stores," he said.But even with these areas of growth, Hamburger is cognizant of the precarious economic environment. "I think the unfortunate reality that we're in today is customers have a weekly budget that they use for their grocery shopping, and that we haven't really seen change," he said. "So while they might still be spending that same $100, they're coming home with fewer items, which means they need that money to stretch further."For retailers and platforms like Instacart, that means there's a newfound focus on affordability and accessibility. This is a big topic Hamburger said he works with retail partners on. And, in his mind, the problem isn't going away anytime soon."At the end of the day, grocery costs are not coming down anytime soon," Hamburger said. "And so we're still going to be in a world in '23 where your grocery bill is higher than it's ever been."

This year, brands and retailers faced a myriad of changes. Inflation went up, demand for some products went down and marketing became an increasingly difficult nut to crack.This week on the Modern Retail Podcast, our reporters sat down and talked about the biggest themes they wrote about. They ran the gamut -- from consumer demand shifts to price fluctuations to the difficulties many c-suites faced.Senior reporter Melissa Daniels spoke about shifts in consumer sentiment that led to product and marketing changes. "There were some big shifts in what people were buying," she said. For example, home goods were huge during the 2020 and 2021 but started to stagnate this last year.This impacted even the biggest players, according to reporter Maria Monteros. Retailers like Target miscalculated demand early in 2022, and that hurt profits throughout the entire year. "I think they really expected that growth to continue," she said. "And so they ordered a lot of these goods, only to find out that consumer spending has really shifted from discretionary items to travel and experiences."This is just a snippet of the wide-reaching conversation that covered all the ups and downs the retail industry faced this year.

Esprit was once a luxury California apparel brand, but it has had a rough couple of decades.In its heyday in the '80s and '90s, it was known for its high-end clothing like sweatshirts. But most of its U.S. business dried up in the 2000s, and the company's German and Hong Kong business began to lose their luster with shoppers. As part of a major restructuring beginning in 2021, William Pak became CEO. Earlier this year, the company posted its first profit since 2017. And now Esprit has big plans to relaunch in the U.S.Pak joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about his plans for the brand refresh. "What happened was prior teams or management have kind of changed Esprit from a bold, creative, high-quality product into what was prevalent at the time, which is fast fashion," Pak said.Esprit is the first apparel brand Pak has worked for, but he and his wife have spent much of their professional life helping businesses on the brink. "We've done a lot of business turnarounds, and expansionary business plans," Pak said. "We're quite an optimistic couple, so we like to [take on] optimistic projects."The first phase of the plan was a complete business restructuring, and bringing the company back to profitability. Now that's finished, and Pak is focused on the fun part: rebranding. With that, Esprit is moving its entire business to New York City, with the plan to make it an apparel leader once again. "Whe brand will globally be created, designed, thought through, photographed all in New York City," he said. "And it will resonate globally from there."Currently, Esprit has a pop-up in Soho, but it plans to open a new flagship store next year. What's more, the company is completely refreshing its assortment, and plans to unveil all the new designs later in 2023.In Pak's estimation, now is the right time to relaunch such a brand. Decades like the '80s and '90s are in vogue these days, which gives Esprit the chance to resonate well with multiple generations.But Pak has bigger hopes for the brand beyond regurgitating its prime from 30 year ago. "But we're not just a brand from the '80s, we're now a modernized version of Esprit," said Pak.

GoodwillFinds is trying to bring the century-old Goodwill network to the era of ThredUp.The new e-commerce platform has only been live since October, but has already seen pretty steady growth. When it first hit the market, GoodwillFinds offered 100,000 items for sale from four different Goodwill locations around the country. Now, that number is approaching 200,000 items. CEO Matthew Kaness said the organization plans to have a catalog of over 1 million products for sale by the end of the year. GoodwillFinds is in the process of onboarding four more locations -- and Kaness said dozens of other locations are in the pipeline to be added in 2023.Kaness joined the Modern Retail Podcast to talk about the growing program. While most anyone in the U.S. knows about Goodwill, the organization has never had a centralized online presence. The idea with GoodwillFinds is to try and do just that -- as well as compete with other digital resale leaders like Thredup and the RealReal.While the platform has only been around for a few months, Kaness said that the struggle hasn't been finding customers, but instead making sure the program can run smoothly while scaling. "We didn't expect the consumer response to be as great," he said. "So we are chasing some of the operations -- staffing up customer service, and adding more staff at pick, pack and ship [sections] within the various Goodwills."The business is also trying to figure out what sells best on the online platform. While apparel has been one of Goodwill's most popular categories, Kaness said GoodwillFinds has seen "such a strong demand for non-clothing." In fact, apparel currently only accounts for one-quarter of the platform's sales.The platform is still constantly being upgraded, with more products and features being added everyday. But the hope is to create the Goodwill experience online. That being said, Kaness was clear that the well-known treasure-hunt Goodwill experience can't be mimicked by an online app. "What we're trying to do is augment and expand and enhance the experience," he said.

Lee Jeans is over a century old, but it's trying to remain hip with younger generations.One way it does this is with collaborations. For example, the apparel brand recently worked with the menswear company Brooklyn Circus on a new joint collection. The products are an update on some of Lee's oldest designs -- an attempt to bridge a heritage brand with something newer.According to Chris Waldeck, evp and co-chief operating officer at Lee's parent company Kontoor Brands, the philosophy behind these types of collaborations is to tell a story that one brand alone couldn't tell. "There's no connection between Brooklyn Circus and Lee," Waldeck. The strategy behind joining to disparate brands is "bringing them together to tell a fantastic story and to make some great products."Waldeck joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about the denim brand's updated strategy. Lee has been around since 1889, but has had its ups and downs. Lee used to be a part of VF Corporation, which owns brands like North Face and Timberland. But in 2019, VF spun out both Lee and Wrangler to their own parent company Kontoor.Now, the company is focused on bringing Lee to new -- and younger -- shoppers. A lot of that, he said, is about finding Gen Z on new platforms, and figuring out ways to make its products accessible to youth audiences.Waldeck joined Lee in 2017. He said his mandate was "to energize the brand." At the time, he said, "we had gotten old and our consumer was getting older." As such, he's spent the last five years trying to give the legacy brand a facelift of sorts.The challenge, he said, has been keeping with Lee's legacy and styles while still reaching new people. To make it even more difficult, the strategy isn't the same around the world. For example, China, which is one of Lee's biggest markets, has a markedly different selling and marketing strategy than the U.S. and Europe."What underpins [our approach] is a really strategic approach to segmentation," said Waldeck. "And that goes back to our icons, to our archives and how we think about the different products that we bring through."

Voyage Foods envisions a world where the most popular food products aren't reliant on their source ingredients. And it believes business-to-business is the best way to reach its lofty goals.The company, which is only a couple of years old, currently makes peanut-free peanut butter spread, cocoa-free chocolate and coffee-free coffee. The idea is that these are some of the most popular foods in the world, but they all carry their own allergen, environmental and political baggage. CEO Adam Maxwell joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about Voyage's trajectory.Voyage is different from other brands for a few reasons. For one, it isn't targeting wealthy consumers looking for food alternatives. Instead, it is making competitively-priced products in the hopes that it can reach the masses."The people who need food tech and these kinds of food tech solutions aren't rich white people in San Francisco or New York City," Maxwell said. "It's the parts of the world that can't afford the real thing."That is, cocoa and coffee are expensive commodities and Voyage thinks it can replicate its flavor more cheaply.Voyage first started out online, but just launched in Sprouts supermarkets a few weeks ago, and is hoping to continue expanding its retail footprint. But Maxwell said the real business plan is to focus on B-to-B. He hopes to partner with large CPG brands who want to expand their flavor offerings in more sustainable and allergen-friendly ways. For example, an ice cream company could partner with Voyage on a peanut-flavored ice cream that people with peanut allergies can enjoy.Grocery, he said, is a way to initially build the brand. "Retail is a small function of what this business will be," he explained. "It's the easiest, fastest way to get to market."The company is still small -- it raised a $36 million Series A last May. But it hopes to ink key partnerships to continue its growth in the coming hear, with the plan to become a CPG powerhouse."We're bringing our next facility online, around this time next year," he said. "We'll have around 100 million pounds of annual capacity."

Livestream shopping has yet to hit true mainstream levels in the U.S. but Ntwrk thinks it can help.The platform has been around since 2018, and says it has doubled in size every year since launch. Ntwrk's approach to livestream commerce consists of a combination of brand, retailer and celebrity partnerships, along with limited-edition drops.As Aaron Levant, Ntwrk's CEO, described it, the idea at inception was to create a "live, engaging, entertaining platform where some of the biggest brands and celebrities in the world are dropping exclusive products creating that kind of FOMO and tune in moments that you feel like you can't miss -- and things sell out fast." Now, he went on, "we've done that at scale -- and now we've gone much beyond that we've moved into new categories, new verticals, new supply side of the product."Levant joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about Ntwrk's growth and ambitions, along with the overall U.S. livestream shopping market. One of the early inspirations for Ntwrk was the game show app HQ; "Once or twice a day, you get a push notification. And people would tune in at mass and be highly engaged. And I wanted to take that same ideology, but apply it for a product drop," he said.Levant has a background in fashion and streetwear, and those past professional connections helped give Ntwrk its initial cultural cachet. Leveraging past celebrity relationships, he said, "allowed us to build a pretty big audience base very quickly for very cheap because of these relationships we had." The platforms has featured drops from brands like Nike as well as celebrities like Billie Eillish and Odell Beckham Jr.It's this direct relationship with the brand or creator that Levant said makes Ntwrk successful -- and different from competitors. "We're not a peer-to-peer platform," he said, "not just anyone can sign up and start using our tools to sell."While Ntwrk is still seeing growth -- and is expanding to new categories like collectibles and toys -- it still represents a niche market in the U.S. Levant, however, still thinks the U.S. will catch up with other countries like China where livestreaming is more prevalent."Their use and adoption of intuitive mobile-first technology is still drastically ahead of us," he said. "I think it's just a few years before we catch up."

PetSmart is trying to maintain its dominance as a leading pet retailer.The privately-held company, which has been around since 1986, reportedly brought in $2.5 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year. But the retailer is also trying to stay relevant with its shoppers and find new ways to engage them. Stacia Andersen, PetSmart's chief customer officer, joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about her role and the evolving pet space.PetSmart is not a startup by any means. Its loyalty program boasts 55 million members, and it works with a variety of talent, like HGTV's Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent. But the landscape is getting more competitive. With that, Andersen said PetSmart has been evolving its marketing strategy."We evolved our brand voice most dramatically probably a couple of years ago, when we went back and looked at our customer base," she said. "Our brand voice evolved from individually marketing different sales or individually marketing services … to this overall brand platform and voice about why customers do what they do." The idea behind it was to connect with customers. "This is really what our brand voice is about," she said. "It's far more emotional, it's far less transactional."With such a large business, figuring out the customer profile becomes difficult. But Andersen said the retailer has figured out a few things. For one, most of PetSmart's customers are female; they often have multiple pets; lastly, they're often from families with children. Understanding this overall profile, Andersen said, has helped PetSmart refine its overall marketing strategy, as well as its loyalty plan.One of Andersen's most important mandates is establishing a retail presence that is more than just a place to buy pet food. With that, she's been leading various campaigns and partnerships to make the company more of a lifestyle brand. The idea isn't just to grow sales, but to do something deeper and give the brand more credibility."There is a buzz factor," she said, talking about PetSmart's influencer partnership strategy. "There is a wow factor. And it also lends credibility to our own design."