The Modern Retail Podcast

It’s not easy launching a new brand -- and even harder doing it during a pandemic. But that’s what United Sodas of America did.The startup soda company hit U.S. shelves in 2020 and has been growing ever since. Co-founder and CEO Marisa Zupan joined the Modern Retail Podcast and talked about the past year’s trials and tribulations.When United Sodas launched in May of 2020, many stay at home orders were still in place. As a result, the company focused mainly on building out its online presence. Moreover, the brand launched with 12 different flavors. “We went in with open eyes knowing that that was a heavy lift,” Zupan said.But, it was a necessary risk to take, in her eyes. “If we wanted to create this brand that was all about variety, then we knew that we needed to make a decision about the product,” she said. “And we went to the extreme and said, okay, we’re going to do 12.”The company also tried to make as much of an initial splash as possible. At launch, Zupan garnered a fair amount of press -- with write-ups in outlets such as Fortune and Fast Company -- and went heavy on digital ads. This strategy worked, she said. “To be honest, the demand for us outpaced and our velocities outpaced the stock that we had,” said Zupan. The brand also ran a large out-of-home campaign last summer.“By the time that push was over,” said Zupan, “we actually ended up exceeding our sales goals based on what we wanted to spend.”Now, the focus is on keeping the momentum. While United Sodas started as DTC only its now expanding to retail nationally. It has focused on getting into local stores in large cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Dallas -- and is now working with broadline distribution partners to expand to retailers beyond those urban areas. Meanwhile, Zupan is thinking about ways to continue expanding both the company’s reach. That likely means increasing the SKU count beyond the 12 currently on the market.“We’ve been working behind the scenes on a product expansion that we’re really excited about for the next year,” Zupan said.

It’s been a crazy year for brands in the CPG space.That’s what Debbie Wei Mullin, founder and CEO of Copper Cow Coffee, said on this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast. The home-brewed Vietnamese coffee company has been around since 2017 and has been growing over the years. But the pandemic changed some strategies, as well as many of its revenue channels.When Copper Cow first started out, it relied heavily on wholesale. It inked deals with both grocers the department stores as a way to get its name out. In those early days, it only had one SKU of pour-over coffee -- and 90% of Copper Cow’s revenue came from wholesale accounts, including Williams Sonoma and other high-end stores. Over the years, as Copper Cow built out its digital marketing and grew its product line, the revenue mix has changed. Today, only 20% of Copper Cow’s revenue comes from wholesale.The pandemic accelerated that revenue shift -- before the coronavirus first hit, department stores made up 50% of Copper Cow’s wholesale revenue. But when stay-at-home quarantines first began, that channel completely dried up.“We had purchase orders that were sitting on the dock,” Mullin said. Going forward, she said, “I don’t see [department stores] being a core part of the business.”But even with department stores closed, Mullin said wholesale revenue still spiked. “Our wholesale sales grew immensely, even even with the department stores falling off -- just because the grocery opportunity suddenly became much larger,” she said.Direct-to-consumer sales have also been growing -- the brand appeared on the show Shark Tank recently, which gave it a boost.For now, said Mullin, the focus is on growing -- both sales and Copper Cow’s SKUs. The e-commerce business, she said, was “the number one place for us to be able to really form community -- and to be able to experiment with our products.” With that, she went on, “we’re excited to be launching some new products, to be able to try out a lot of new exciting flavors.”

Last year, when razor startup Harry’s backed a cat food company, it was -- in part -- due to the work of Tehmina Haider.Haider is the head of Harry’s Lab, which both launches new CPG brands as well as invests in and acquires existing ones. Haider described the operation as being a “diversification engine.” She joined the Modern Retail Podcast and explained how she’s built out the program over the last three years.Haider’s background is in consumer investing, hailing from L Catterton where she helped fund brands in the beauty and personal care space. She joined Harry’s in 2018, around a year after Harry’s Lab first started. Her mandate was to take her past investing experience and put that toward the task of building out an expansive Harry’s umbrella.The idea, she said, is that “we, at Harry’s, can really help brands that are focused on the same things that we are: Disrupting categories and serving consumers better, scale and successfully grow.”So far, Harry’s Labs’ work has materialized in a variety of ways. The first company Harry’s Labs launched was Flamingo, a women’s body care brand. But the company also invested in Cat Person, a DTC cat food company. Harry’s Labs began as a way for the company to launch its own brands, but has evolved into a growing M&A engine.This work, of course, is easier said than done. Much of Haider’s day to day is finding the next big brand to either build or acquire. This, she said, is where her work differs from her investing past. While investors are focused primarily on the economics (something Harry’s, of course, is also focused on too), her team is also looking for companies that have long-term ambitions. She’s not trying invest in a company and make a quick profit.“We’re buying to own,” she said.

It’s good to have celebrity boosting your brand.That’s what self care wellness brand Asutra, which sells products like soaps, sleep aids and anti-aging serums, learned when Venus Williams reached out to the company asking how she could be involved. After some meetings, Williams became the chief brand officer and the company’s most prominent spokesperson. “She talks a lot about active self care and Asutra in the press and on social and makes big announcements for us,” said CEO Stephanie Morimoto on the Modern Retail Podcast. She added, “we obviously did not set out to have a celebrity partner -- we frankly would not have done it if Venus had not come to us.”Celebrity spokespeople aside, Asutra has had a wild few years. In 2018, Morimoto bought the company, which first launched in 2015. She described the original owners as “serial entrepreneurs” who put the business up for sale when she was looking for her next business venture. At the time, Asutra sold most of its products on Amazon, and she believed she could help transform it into a DTC wellness player. Part of that has been about rebranding the company as “active self care,” as she described it.Another big part has been on diversifying channels. “Our big focus as a team has been to diversify our revenue channels so that we’re not so reliant on Amazon,” Morimoto said. “Hopefully, depending on how a couple of retail partnerships go this year, we’ll probably go from 99% Amazon to about 60% Amazon -- with a good chunk coming from retail, and then also from what we consider DTC, which is our own website.”Retail has certainly been an interesting nut to crack. Asutra’s first major retail partnership was with CVS. While it gave the brand widespread distribution, Morimoto learned a few things about matching customers with products. “People mostly go to CVS to fulfill their prescriptions and use the pharmacy,” she said. So it was hard to catch shopper’s eyes when they weren’t necessarily thinking about self care products.But one recent retail partnership is proving to work better: Target. “We just launched in Target about a month ago, which has been awesome,” she said. “Target was really our holy grail goal.”Now, the focus is on making the Target partnerships work, as well as inking more retailers as well. Two new retailers Asutra is working with are Athleta and Grove Collaborative. But, for now, she’s thinking about making current partnerships work.“The rest of the year, we’re really focused on making Target a success so that we can continue to grow with Target over the next couple of years,” Morimoto said

Sometimes, businesses start out as direct-to-consumer. Other times, they’re forced into it.That’s essentially what happened with Farmer’s Fridge, a company best known for its salad vending machines. Since 2013, the company has been growing its vending machine presence -- first in the Midwest, and then beyond. Its core customers were workers looking for quick and healthy lunches on the go. But the pandemic changed all of that.Over the last year, Farmer’s Fridge focused less on its vending machines as fewer people commuted to the office, and more on building out its own home delivery program. According to founder and CEO Luke Saunders, this pivot worked. Farmer’s Fridge now has three primary channels: vending machines, business-to-business and home delivery. This year is [about] getting back to growth,” said Saunders on the Modern Retail Podcast. “We’re doing [that] across all three channels.”For most of its life, Farmer’s Fridge didn’t need to spend much money on advertising. The vending machines were billboards unto themselves and sales grew pretty organically. But over the last year, the company has invested in some performance marketing. “That’s probably one of the biggest transformations for the businesses,” said Saunders. “Now we do a considerable amount of performance marketing for that delivery channel.”Things are now beginning to open back up and Farmer’s Fridge is going from defense mode to offense. While it grew its delivery network, it is now also ready to focus on its B-to-B and vending machine business.“It’s now an omnichannel business,” said Saunders. “The idea is we’re gonna bring the food to wherever the customers are.”

It’s tough transforming a local brand into a national name. But that’s what Oregon-based dairy company Tillamook is trying to do.Over the last few years, the company began an eastward expansion -- going beyond the Pacific Northwest as far as the East Coast. And, according to CEO Patrick Criteser, it seems to be working. In 2017, he said on the Modern Retail Podcast, 95% of Tillamook’s sales were made west of the Rocky Mountains. Today, “we’re about 10% to 15% east of the Rockies.” The dairy company added 4.6 million new households to its customer base this past year, most of which, Criteser said, were on the East Coast. Even during the pandemic, Tillamook was still able to grow.Tillamook launched in 1909 as a local dairy cooperative, and recently became a certified B corporation as well. Despite the company’s storied history, it’s never seen a year quite like 2020.According to Criteser, there were many demand spikes -- as well as supply chain hiccups. “There were certainly a lot of challenges in the last year,” he said, “but a lot of opportunity for us to play an important role in making sure the food supply stayed there and reliable for folks as they went to the grocery store.”One big change he noticed was the rise of home cooks testing out new ingredients. “We definitely saw people cooking more at home, certainly eating more at home [and] experimenting with ingredients.” These constant fluctuations meant Tillamook had to re-strategize throughout the year to handle the ebbs and flows. Ultimately, Criteser said, “it played out pretty well for us as a business.”With all that in the rearview mirror, the focus is now to continue expansion. “We’re a growth brand,” said Criteser, “and we’re continuing to gain new distribution and make sure that we can sell through that distribution and keep it.”

It’s been a good year to be a homewares brand.Indeed, cookware startup Caraway was a hot commodity during the pandemic. According to its founder and CEO Jordan Nathan, the company’s popularity created some headaches. Many items were out of stock more often than not in 2020, and supply chain issues continue to persist. But, “we were very fortunate to be on the right side of the equation,” Nathan said on the Modern Retail Podcast.According to Nathan, part of what made Caraway especially successful was its specific niche in the cookware space. Right now, there seem to be endless online brands hawking aesthetically pleasing pans. But, as Nathan described it, most cater to home chefs looking for professional-grade tools. Caraway instead focuses on people looking for good, sturdy equipment -- but not necessarily the restaurant stuff. “We really felt like there was this just massive gap,” he said.As a result, sales have been booming. Now, Caraway is trying to grow even faster. One way it’s been going about that is through retail partnerships. The brand has forged partnerships with a number of retailers and marketplaces, including Crate and Barrel, West Elm and Food52.In Nathan’s eyes, DTC is a great channel to start out -- but it’s imperative to find more eyeballs. When it comes to being available on other retailer’s shelves and websites, he said, “we very much see them as acquisition channels.” What’s more, he said, is that retail collaborations “give us the ability to offer different assortments than what’s on our website.”In a sense, it’s about catching customers’ eyes and then reeling them into the other sales channels.

Marc Rosen has worn many hats -- or, perhaps, pants -- at Levi’s.Today, he’s the president of the apparel brand’s Americas business. But he’s been at the company for seven years -- first joining to grow Levi’s e-commerce business. As such, he’s seen a lot of changes, both within the company and in retail as a whole. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Rosen spoke about what he’s been observing, as well as how his role at Levi’s has changed both over the years and during the pandemic.Thinking back to the retail landscape almost a decade ago, Rosen said, “I think almost everything has changed.”But, of course, many of the most drastic changes happened in the last year. And that also coincided with a new position for Rosen. Instead of just leading the online business, Rosen began overseeing all of Levi’s Americas business -- including wholesale -- in January of 2020. As such, the pandemic was certainly a crash course in navigating a new facet of the brand’s business.“The wholesale world, to some extent, for me was new,” he said. “It was really a learning experience about building that relationship.”Much of that learning experience was focused on figuring out where and how people were shopping. For example, while Levi’s is available in many brick and mortar stores, it also has wholesale relationships with online retailers. “Consumers moved so quickly into digital,” Rosen said, and the first part of the pandemic was working both inside Levi’s and with partners to try and navigate that shift.This also brought about a big change in how Levi’s as a company rolled out new products. For large companies, it’s hard to adopt a startup-like ethos of test and learn. But during a global pandemic, that’s all retailers were able to do. They had to adapt in an instant, launch and figure things out from there. The big lesson Rosen learned, he said, is “we can be a lot faster.” Instead of very slowly building something internally, more programs can see the light of day faster and be iterated upon.The pandemic, he said, brought about these lessons. Normally, he explained, “we probably would have built [out a new feature or program], and waited until it was perfect to roll it out. But in a pandemic, you don’t have that luxury.”

Google wants to make it crystal clear that it’s not a marketplace.True, people can buy things on Google, but it also lets sellers link out to other marketplaces. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Bill Ready, the company’s president of commerce and payments, discussed this important nuance. “We’re not a retailer, we’re not a marketplace,” he said. In his estimation, Google is about helping shoppers discover products (and sometimes letting them transact with in the platform). While the site looks and feels like a marketplace, he insisted that Google’s utility provides something markedly different.Google’s shopping capabilities have had quite the evolution. Its offerings have had fits and starts, to say the least. Currently, any merchant can upload products to be listed on Google’s shopping website. They can use Google’s commerce options -- called ‘Buy on Google’ -- or they can link out.Last year, the company made the decision to make its listings completely free. Before, merchants had to purchase an ad in order to surface on the platform. All these moves, according to Ready, are because of Google’s belief in the open web. But making product listings free also meant more merchants tried out the platform; the company saw 80% more listings in 2020 compared to the year before.The focus now, according to Ready, is to continue making services and products for merchants and get more brands comfortable with selling on Google. This includes testing out shoppable ad units on YouTube.Of course, continuing to grow the ad business is also important. And who remains a big advertiser on Google? Amazon. “We partner with retailers of every size, including the largest and you know, Amazon is a partner that we work with quite closely as well,” said Ready. “It can oftentimes be a good storyline to say ‘hey, is this a competitive thing?’ [but] it really is a return to first principles for Google.”

It’s been a crazy year for Ocean Spray.The 91-year-old cranberry product company not only saw an increase in sales over the last year, but went viral on TikTok. It saw increased demand in 2020, according to CEO Tom Hayes. “Ocean Spray as a category leader has probably disproportionately benefited [from the pandemic],” Hayes said on the Modern Retail Podcast.This episode was recorded live at last week’s Modern Retail Summit. There, Hayes gave a fireside chat -- talking about the company’s product development strategy and how it tried to ride the TikTok wave. Last year, a TikTok user named Nathan Apodaca videotaped himself on a skateboard listening to Fleetwood Mac while drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice. It went viral, and the company’s products flew off the shelves.The Ocean Spray team was forced to react. Before going viral, Hayes said the company’s social media strategy was more traditional. “If I were to put a picture on it, it might be that Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving,” he said. Now the company is “trying to move the brand to be a little more edgy, and to be a little more attractive to the younger consumer.”TikTok aside, Ocean Spray has other big plans. It recently unveiled new products -- including a dried fruit snack and a caffeinated sparkling drink -- and is trying to establish itself as a category leader outside of just cranberry juice.