The Modern Retail Podcast

The brains behind the snack giant Kind are now bringing their expertise to the investment space.Kind founder Daniel Lubetzky unveiled Camino Partners earlier this month, an investment and incubation platform looking to help the next wave of entrepreneurs. The idea is to harness what made Kind -- which sold to Mars in 2020 for reportedly $5 billion -- so successful into a program that will fund the next successful consumer-facing brands. That's no easy task, according to Elle Lanning, managing director at Camino Partners.She joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about Camino, and its plans with the $350 million it raised. She also talked about the overall consumer brand investing space, and what industry changes are likely on the horizon."The thesis is heavily rooted in our operating experience," Lanning said.Lanning herself is a Kind alum. She worked at the company for over a decade, starting in the marketing department and ultimately becoming chief of staff. Once the company sold to Mars, Lanning said Lubetzky and the Kind team were trying to figure out their next move. "We've amassed this experience -- we have great talent from different stages and different functions along the way of Kind's growth," she said.But the big question remains: what will Camino invest in? Past investments from earlier iterations of the platform include the snack brand Belgian Boys. As Lanning described it, the focus is on "value creation, from the sense [that] we're supporting products and services that better a consumer's life." That could be a better-for-you snack bar, but it could also be a wellness brand.This fund comes at an interesting time. Money was flowing to consumer startups over the last few years, but things have begun to cool. In Lanning's eyes, the industry may have been too flush with cash, which made it nearly impossible for some companies to stand out. Camino, then, is a way to suss out the real next industry leaders.But that may come at the expense of other brands -- and Lanning is aware of that. In fact, she thinks the next few years are going to be tough."I do believe that there will be some contraction," she said. "I think that [over] the next couple of years, you're going to see some brands that might have had early shoots of promise probably cease to exist."

Modern Retail is excited to unveil our latest podcast: The Modern Retail Rundown.This weekly program, hosted by senior reporter Gabriela Barkho, goes through all the big retail headlines of the week, providing deep analysis and insights into these large industry happenings. We'll bring in guests such as reporters and editors who know retail inside and out to discuss why these stories are important, and what they mean for the overall ecosystem.This week, we talk about Amazon's grocery ambitions -- and how the company says it's investing in brick-and-mortar stores while also scaling back some recent investments. We also dived into the latest from Bed Bath & Beyond, which narrowly escaped bankruptcy thanks to an 11th-hour investment. And we also discussed rumors that Away is looking for a buyer -- and what that means for later-stage DTC brands seeking an exit.

Sundays is trying to become the leading DTC home furnishings brand in Canada, but it also has its sights set on international expansion.The company started as a side hustle of two married entrepreneurs and has snowballed into a full-blown international business. While most of its business is in Canada, Sundays has been slowly building out its U.S. business -- and has plans to open a pop-up in the country hopefully sometime in the next year."We started just with living room pieces, and over time we moved into dining room and bedroom," said co-founder and co-CEO Barbora Samieian. "But what we really stayed committed to is that curated line. So, not going very broad in any of those categories, but really selecting the best pieces for our customers and iterating on those pieces."Barbora and her husband Moe, who serves as the other co-CEO, joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about the company's growth plans.Sundays first launched in 2019, and after about a year of trial and error -- along with a pandemic-induced home goods boom -- started seeing sales consistently grow year-over-year. Sundays sells a variety of home furniture including sofas, end tables, beds and chairs. While it has expand its product-line, the co-founders insist that its focus has been on curation over expansion.Much of its growth was thanks to leveraging social media and local influencers to grow its presence in key cities like Vancouver and Toronto. But now, with rising customer acquisition costs and changing digital dynamics, Sundays is trying to diversify its digital marketing to include a variety of channels including podcasts and Pinterest.While the co-founders admitted that the last six months didn't have the same growth as the previous two years, given the changing economic landscape, things are still looking good for Sundays."We're still able to have growth numbers even in q3 and q4 of 2022," said Moe Samieian. "But we've been we're going forward cautiously."

For years, Nutrafol has focused predominately on DTC. But now it's taking a big step into retail.This month, the hair wellness brand started selling in Sephora. It's one of the first big wholesale relationships Nutrafol has made. Though it's been around since 2014, Nutrafol -- which sells supplements to help with hair loss and other health issues like menopause -- has sold predominately on its own site, as well as Amazon and in certain physician offices. This has remained the case even after it got sold to Unilever last year.According to Giorgos Tsetis, co-founder and CEO of Nutrafol, "the Sephora partnership is really serving as credibility, but also just brand awareness overall." That is, it gets the brand's name in front of more people than it ever could before.Tsetis joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about the company's evolution. Nutrafol started as a laser-focused wellness startup. It had two formulations to help both men and women with hair loss. A few years ago, it expanded to help with more ailments but has aimed to stay true to its promise of providing researched and lab-tested wellness products."There's skepticism with supplementation in general," he said. "And that's for the right reason because there are a lot of companies that are manufacturing supplements and making claims that they cannot substantiate." But, he said, Nutrafol has been focused on educating its customers to explain how it works and what exactly it does.That's easier to do on its own website, but now the company is trying to tell its story to more people by expanding retail channels. But not every channel will have the same expectations as the others. For example, about 85% of the customers on Nutrafol's website are subscribers. That's not the same with Amazon customers. "As we scale, understanding the ratio between these channels is going to be very important," said Tsetis.For now, the focus is on figuring out how to make each channel work and growing Nutrafol's presence. While the company is dead set on making its Sephora partnership work, it may have some other announcements soon."With the Unilever infrastructure and resources available to us, I think the most impactful move in the next few years is going to be about scaling globally," said Tsetis.

XRC Labs is looking for the next consumer brand winner.The organization is both a venture capital fund and accelerator that has been around since 2015. Its portfolio companies include Outlines, Caraa and Billie. Partner Diana Melencio is constantly trying to figure out what's next -- and what market is under-tapped.On the Modern Retail Podcast this week, Melencio spoke about her investing process and the areas she's most excited about for the year to come. For example, she sees men's skincare having a moment soon. She also sees older generations as a demographic that remains overlooked by many startups."Women over 40, women over 50," Melencio said. "They're a demographic that has some of the highest purchasing power in the world in the country. They're at a stage in their career where they have a lot of disposable income, and there are very few brands that try to directly speak with them."One of XRC's main theses is that digital is the way of the future for consumer-facing brands. And even though foot traffic is coming back to some stores, there is still too much under-utilized retail space. If you go to a mall in suburban New Jersey or Connecticut on a weekday, she said, "there are not a lot of people shopping there." As such, she's looking for ways that companies can rethink the spaces they once relied on.But perhaps most top of mind for her -- and most entrepreneurs -- is how to stay afloat given the current economic uncertainty. It's true that it's tough to raise money as a startup right now, said Melencio. But now is when brands can prove they have longstanding business models that can outlast downturn."The first thing is that you should be profitable on your first sale," said Melencio.

Seed Health is a microbiome company trying to disrupt the way health, business and science overlap.While its first product is its probiotic line, Seed has more lofty ambitions to do deep research into human health and rethink the way most people think about the microbiome. The microbiome technically is the community of microbes that live inside an organism, but it's most commonly referred to as a generalized term for human gut health that supplements like probiotics help to support.On the Modern Retail Podcast this week, co-founder and co-CEO Ara Katz spoke about the company's growth and its big plans for the future. It raised a $40 million Series A in 2021 and it just announced a new partnership with a Swiss research institute to help develop a new line of home and personal care products. Its first product, Seed, comes in two versions -- adult and pediatric -- and are daily non-prescription probiotic supplements that go for about $50 a month. The overall goal of Seed Health, said Katz, is "to realize the potential of the microbiome to improve human and environmental health."But with such a big mandate comes a lot of work -- and some of that has to do with branding and marketing. For example, the very concept of a microbiome may be foreign to most people. For someone like Katz, who works with scientists and influencers, that means figuring out the best way to explain the company's message.According to Katz, it means wearing a bunch of hats and figuring out the best method of communication for the audience at hand. "We write Nature papers and we write Instagram posts," she said. "And they're wildly different."With that also comes the task of figuring out sales growth. For now, most of Seed's sales come from its website, but it has been dabbling in brick-and-mortar retail. For example, Seed supplements are available for purchase at Erewhon. But even that isn't a straightforward wholesale partnership -- because Seed relies on a subscription model, Erewhon and Seed have an affiliate relationship so that the store gets a cut of sales even after the first in-store purchase.The Erewhon partnership, she said, is working out "better than we thought better than we thought it would."For now, the focus is on growing Seed Health's research which will go into its new products. "Now that we we have an understanding of what we believe -- and we know the efficacy of our first few products," she said. She's now figuring out "how do we scale them in a way that creates the greatest amount of health impact."

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.