The Modern Retail Podcast

Cuisinart is generally known for one thing -- its food processor -- but the company has been expanding its reach in the kitchen for decades.In fact, the brand is moving beyond the kitchen into new parts of the home. Most recently, Cuisinart launched an air purifier. That makes for a tall order as a brand marketer.This week on the Modern Retail Podcast, Mary Rodgers, Cuisinart’s director of marketing communications, spoke about how her overall approach has evolved as Cuisinart’s product line has evolved.Rodgers has been at the company for 25 years. That’s a long time -- but her role has only expanded over the years. “The real reason I’m still here is because I work on all these exciting aspects of the business,” she said. “Sometimes when you get in certain companies, you’re very narrow in your field of vision. I like that I have a lot of influence over all of the brand marketing for the company.”Her scope is quite large. She runs the brand’s DTC business, which in 2018 moved from outsourcing fulfillment to bringing it all in-house. The company purchased a fulfillment center in Arizona and used it as a hub for all of its distribution. It held all the inventory for online orders, as well as handled customer fulfillment for online orders from other retailers. In essence, Cuisinart now controls all of its own distribution. “It tightens up the whole system,” she said, “because we’re not shipping an item to a retailer who is then shipping an item to a consumer -- you’re compressing the entire system, basically.”Beyond that, she controls all the other aspects of brand marketing -- which includes well-known channels like search and TV, as well as more experimental channels like TikTok. While Cuisinart is testing out the new app, Rodgers was clear that marketing campaigns must “always tie everything back to strategy.”Since the early days, Cuisinart has tried to compile as much first-party data as it can about its customers. Today, Rodgers is trying to systematize that even more. One of the big things she’s paying attention to is lifestyle changes. Before, items like Cuisinart were often gifted during big life events like weddings. Now, wedding culture has changed and Cuisinart is trying to find ways to remain relevant.With that is the main goal and conundrum of her job. “We have to understand the big picture,” she said. “Where are our consumers?”

Eric Girouard hadn’t planned on launching his company during a pandemic, but that’s what ended up happening.Girouard is the founder and CEO of Brunt Workwear, an online apparel company that began selling its first products -- work boots -- a year ago. While Brunt had been in the works well before the coronavirus first hit, Girouard was faced with a decision in March 2020 of whether or not to delay the launch. Ultimately, he decided against it -- and, in fact, did the opposite and ended up launching earlier than planned.He joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and discussed how the last year has gone.Sales thus far have been good. “We’ve consistently grown 63% month-over-month since we’ve launched, said Girouard. Brunt was able to grow because people in the trades have had to continue working, pandemic or not. “There was about a two week [work] hiatus,” he said. “And then a lot of our core customers -- the real construction worker, the trades worker that was really building the economy in the country during one of the most challenging times -- were deemed essential.” What’s more, most of these people bought their work gear in person at stores -- but they were forced to find new products online. Those two issues meant that Brunt had a possible way to enter the market.Another big facet of Brunt’s strategy is its brand ambassador program. Before Brunt launched, Girouard spent hundreds of hours seeking out influencers in the trades. These weren’t your usual Instagram-famous accounts -- they were people who recorded themselves doing grueling work and amassed an audience of fellow workers. These are the accounts Girouard wanted repping the Brunt brand -- and this growth strategy, he said, has worked.While Girouard is happy with the current trajectory, he’s excited to get Brunt’s name in front of more people. “At the end of the, day being less than a year old, less than 99% of the country knows Brunt Workwear exists yet,” he said. “We’re just so early in our life cycle.”

According to the dog toy and accessories brand Bark, that’s led to an increase in demand. During its latest quarterly earnings report, the company reported that subscription shipments shot up 52.4% year-over-year, hitting 3.6 million. And revenue grew 57% year-over-year, coming to $117.6 million.According to CEO Manish Joneja, the plan is to grow and expand. Joneja joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the last year and his big plans for the brand -- which went public via a SPAC in June.Joneja is relatively new to Bark, which first launched in 2011. He was brought on as CEO in September of 2020, coming from Amazon. “What brought me to Bark is what I shared: my love for dogs,” Joneja said. “The market right now serves you as a transactional commerce.”Bark, conversely, is built more on building a relationship. “The foundation of Bark is built on high-level personalization with high-touch service,” he said.The focus is on expanding into new areas -- such as food and dental care -- as well as acquiring more customers. For now, Bark will remain focused on dogs. “We want to make sure we serve the 63 million households [that currently own dogs],” he said. “That’s a tremendous opportunity -- you want to get that right first.”

Gabi Lewis thinks the cereal world is ready for an upgrade.That’s why a few years after he sold his first company, a cricket protein startup, he co-founded Magic Spoon. The brand, which first launched in 2019, is sold entirely online and offers a variety of different protein-filled cereals for around $10 a box. The idea with Magic Spoon, said Lewis, was to “take cereal through the innovation that we’ve seen in categories like ice cream or candy -- where brands have come in and they have just flipped the protein and sugar on their heads.”Lewis joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how he built the Magic Spoon brand, as well as where he sees it going from here.The one thing Lewis is intent about is Magic Spoon’s focus on cereal. “We’re not entering 20 new categories,” he said, “we’re not going into 30,000 retail stores.” Instead, the company has just focused on just offering its cereal, which currently comes in eight flavors -- including ‘cookies and cream,’ ‘maple waffle’ and ‘fruity’ -- as well as limited edition products that get released every few months.The idea was to create a standalone brand for health nuts who want a healthy breakfast that’s reminiscent of their childhood.According to Lewis, growth has been steady for the last two years. And demand grew even more during 2020. Like many other online grocery-adjacent brands, Magic Spoon saw an explosion of demand during the early days of the pandemic. “We did see a massive increase in demand across the board,” he said, “I think just because there was an increased desire to purchase food online period.” He added that “obviously some of that is continued [and] some of it hasn’t.”Despite industry fluctuations, Magic Spoon has tried to find new ways to discover customers. Rather than focus predominately on Facebook and Google, the company has built out a robust network of influencers who have evangelized the brand since the beginning. Similarly, Lewis has been testing out other new advertising channels like podcasts and television.All of this, according to Lewis, has helped prepare Magic Spoon to continue its steady growth. He is insistent that, despite the look and feel of the product, Magic Spoon is not out there to totally eat General Mills’ lunch.And that, he maintains, is its ultimate competitive difference. “We’re not cereal,” he said. “We are protein powder in the shape of cereal.”

E-commerce saw unprecedented gains in 2020, especially in areas like alcohol that historically relied on in-store sales.Indeed, Minibar Delivery -- a platform whose name aptly describes its services -- saw a 500% increase of new customers in March and April of last year. Now, the company is trying to keep growth apace while adding more cities and liquor store partners to its roster.CEO and co-founder Lindsey Andrews joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and talked about Minibar’s trajectory.Right now, Minibar is available in 18 different states with its on-demand delivery offering. It also has a shipping service up and running in 40 states too. In 2020, said Andrews, “a flip was switched and things went crazy.” It wasn’t just more customers seeking out delivered booze either; “We did see a massive spike in new stores wanting to get on the platform -- and we tried to move as fast as possible to help them do that.”With that, the last year has been about keeping up with the demand. Now, Andrews says Minibar is looking toward the future. That includes onboarding more retail partners, as well as seeking out new cities to expand to.Even with stores reopening and more people going back out, Andrews thinks consumers have built up a new muscle around this kind of delivery. “I’m 100% bullish on the category,” she said. “I think there’s tons of whitespace and room to grow.”

Designer Brands Inc., parent company of DSW, has been trying to prove itself to be a bonafide digital retailer.This past quarter cemented that the current strategy may be working. After a year of losses due to the pandemic, Designer Brands swung to a profit in the first quarter of this year hitting $703.2 million in revenue. “We were really just trying to manage what was there until we could get our arms around how long this thing was going to last,” CEO Roger Rawlins said on the Modern Retail Podcast, describing the initial days of the pandemic. “That was by far the biggest and most disruptive thing that we had to deal with.”But now, according to Rawlins, things are looking up. After furloughing 85% of the workforce, “we were able to bring folks back,” he said, “and [we were] really proud of how we made it through.”Rawlins joined the podcast this week and spoke about how he’s been leading the company. He has been at Designer Brands for 15 years -- and helped bring the company online. This was a behemoth task; “I’m a stores guy by trade, even though I ran dot com,” he said.But that work over the last decade-plus, according to Rawlins, has helped make a robust online strategy. Designer Brands, for example, doesn’t rely predominately on warehouses and uses most of its stores for fulfillment. Last quarter, nearly 70% of its inventory was fulfilled from a store.What’s more, Rawlins worked to make it so that store associates weren’t focused only on in-store sales. “We gave stores credit for all of the dot com demand they fulfilled,” he said. The idea, he explained, was so that “they could see the benefit of engaging in an omnichannel way.” That program helped the company throughout the pandemic. “[We saw] store associates posting on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook,” he said. That drove significant volume “by just fulfilling that digital demand,” he went on.It was those kinds of programs over the last year, Rawlins said, that “really did save our fannies as an organization.”

Convenience store startup Foxtrot is trying to become a national name.Over the last few weeks, the company announced a series of expansion plans. For one, it plans to open 50 new locations over the next two years. Foxtrot is also launching a national delivery program called Foxtrot Anywhere. The retailer’s CMO Carla Dunham joined the Modern Retail podcast and spoke about the company’s big ambitions.While Foxtrot is positioned as a quasi-convenience store, it tries to highlight the quality of its products and fast delivery. Each store features an assortment of local products and Dunham said curation and selection is about “an obsession with whatever is delicious and worth enjoying.”Right now, the focus is on growing Foxtrot’s presence and getting more people aware of the stores. Currently, there are 13 stores in Chicago, Dallas and Washington, DC, and Foxtrot plans to have 18 in total open by the end of this year. As part of this expansion, the retailer is focusing less on convenience items and becoming more of a food service destination. “We’ve really been leaning into our cafe food program much more aggressively, and you’ll see that in our new store format,” Dunham said.What’s more, Foxtrot has been actively building out its own private label -- which includes gummy snacks and ice cream. These products are less economy-priced unbranded items and more Foxtrot-specific delicacies. “The products that we’ve created can stand alone comfortably outside of our stores,” she said.All that put together equals Dunham’s national expansion playbook. Now, the challenge is to get more people to notice.

Furniture became a hot item in 2020, and resale platform AptDeco was ready for that demand.The company’s sales grew more than 300% last year, and is trying to ride that wave through this year. According to co-founder and CEO Reham Fagiri, the company’s emphasis is now on expansion. AptDeco began in New York in 2014, and has been slowly growing ever since. Over the years, it added delivery to Northern New Jersey as well as Washington D.C. Now, more cities are being added. “We launched in Philadelphia earlier this year, and now -- literally two weeks ago -- just launched in the San Francisco Bay Area,” she said on the Modern Retail Podcast. “We’re seeing a lot of opportunity.”Part of the reason for this growth is because AptDeco was able to capitalize on big consumer shifts. More people were stuck at home in 2020 and were buying nicer furniture. “We also saw people selling their products and looking to upgrade to more higher-end pieces,” she said.While many furniture companies have had supply chain issues due to logistics bottlenecks, AptDeco owns its fulfillment network and was able to mitigate much of that thanks to its delivery network. “We are logistics,” said Fagiri. “The reason why we own [delivery] is because we want to make sure we control the experience.”It’s these elements that have helped AptDeco grow. Now, with expansion on the horizon, the plan is to have it become more of a household name.

Sometimes, the best way to figure out product-market fit is to go on Craigslist.That’s what outdoor furniture brand Yardbird did in 2016 when it first launched. Co-founder Jay Dillon had spent some time in Hong Kong learning about outdoor furniture manufacturing. He brought back some items to Minneapolis and marketed them on Craigslist. “We sold about $100,000 within two weeks,” he said on the Modern Retail Podcast.Over the years, Yardbird has outgrown its scrappy online marketplace roots. The company has its own website, as well as seven showrooms around the country in cities like Minneapolis, Denver and Washington DC. More are slated to open this year, and Dillon said business has been consistently doubling year-over-year.But 2021 is certainly an interesting year -- especially after a pandemic. The outdoor furniture category saw a big boost, and many new competitors entered into the mix. Before 2020, many of Yardbird’s competitors were what Dillon described as “middlemen.” These were large furniture showrooms operating out of big cities like Chicago that sold most of their goods to big businesses like “ski shops in Colorado that are looking to offset their seasonality.” He added, “almost none of these guys are sourcing direct from factory.”But now new brands are emerging that, like Yardbird, take great pains to have connections with where the furniture is manufactured. “We view that it’s just largely great for the consumer,” said Dillon.Things are beginning to return to normal, and that could mean the outdoor furniture sales bonanza may begin to temper. Dillon, however, is optimistic because many people have changed the way they lived. Millennials are “moving to suburbs, and increasingly wanting to be outdoors,” he said.As long as that continues, that means more business for him.

A lot of changes have happened at Asheville, North Carolina-based East Fork Pottery over the last year.For one, its CMO and co-founder Connie Matisse became the brand’s CEO earlier this year. Her husband Alex had been chief executive since its launch in 2009, but the two decided that Alex would begin focusing on more longterm plans and Connie would become the day-to-day top leader. What’s more, the ceramics company grew during the pandemic -- and became profitable. “We are coming up on 11 months of consistent profitability, which is huge for us,” Matisse said on this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast.But economics are only part of the equation for East Fork. Indeed, the brand has been trying to make its name known while remaining both transparent and true to the company’s core values. On the website, East Fork lists its values as compassion, equity, sincerity, accountability and adaptive tenacity. Much of that work involves making sure East Fork’s workplace is equitable, which has been a years-long process for Matisse. The company has had to rethink how it finds talent, for example; it was about “recognizing that our recruiting and hiring practices were not working as far as like fostering a truly inclusive and equitable culture,” said Matisse. Another part is telegraphing a transparent brand in an honest way.For Matisse, East Fork’s voice and ethos is an extension of her very being. “I don’t have a good filter, I’m getting better,” she said. “But that kind of lended itself quite easily to being really transparent, because it seems like the only thing to do.”East Fork began as a boutique pottery outfit and grew into a national brand. That came with a lot of growing pains. For one, it meant figuring out how to scale up production while not losing its identity. It also meant creating a business plan for a brand that began very organically.All this put together makes for a stressful -- but exciting -- time for Matisse. “I’ve been working on my staffing plan for [the next] one and three years,” she said. “I need to hire like 12 people in the next six months -- actually, completely overhaul, restructure, create a sales and marketing and like build a whole new company in a year. So I’m a little freaked out right now.”