The Modern Retail Podcast

Even during a pandemic, people still needed glasses. As a result, online eyewear brand Zenni Optical has been riding a rocket ship.After an initial slowdown in March due to supply chain constraints, Zenni says it saw record growth in 2020. With people stuck at home, the company received an influx of new customers trying to avoid going to the eye doctor. And since most were working from home, Zenni’s line of blue light blocking lenses grew at an unprecedented clip.According to chief product officer Bai Gan, this past year was “the beginning of a new era” for eyewear brands. He joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and talked about why.Zenni, which was founded in 2003, makes very affordable eyewear -- glasses as cheap at $7. According to Gan, this is because the company uses a vertically integrated business model. Zenni owns much of its supply chain, meaning it cut out middlemen most other brands deal with daily. It owns a one million-square-foot manufacturing facility outside of Shanghai, and works directly with suppliers to get the best rates. For its first decade as a company, Zenni focused on creating this infrastructure. “Originally, we just focused on that core competency -- the backend,” said Gan.Now, Zenni is in hyper-growth and trying to make more people aware of its products. It wields, however, a double-edged sword. “It was a little bit harder to really communicate quality to customers when the price was so exceptionally low,” he said. As a result, over the last few years the company has been on a marketing blitz trying to introduce itself to more customers.One of Zenni’s big PR approaches is influencer marketing. The company has worked with online personalities and well-known designers -- including Rashida Jones and Coco and Breezy. On the podcast, Gan describe the brand’s “sector by sector” approach. This includes working with gaming personalities to evangelize Zenni’s blue light blocking lenses.According to Gan, the growth is only beginning. For years, online glasses sales stagnated, but the coronavirus changed all that. Now, he said, Zenni is trying to implement a growth strategy its slowly been building. “That vertically integrated business model,” he said, “now seems to be giving us a lot of edges over the competitors.”

2020 was a tough year for casual dress shirt brand Untuckit, but the company was able to adapt.While many retailers that catered to workwear completely changed their product lines to mesh better with the pandemic lifestyle, Untuckit opted to wait it out. “The decision was no -- no massive overhaul of our brand ethos was necessary,” said Aaron Sanandres, co-founder and CEO. Sanandres joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about all the changes his company experienced.While Untuckit didn’t drastically change its strategy, it did make some smaller tweaks. Much of that had to do with marketing. The company has become known for casual dress shirts, but it has other products too. “We never really heavily marketed our non-core button-down shirt,” Sanandres said. The new focus, he said, “was shifting the messaging.”Fulfillment was another big change. While Untuckit began as a digital brand, it’s also opened up over 70 stores over the last few years. The company quickly made those locations fulfillment centers -- which Sanandres said was no easy feat. “I’m almost certain almost all DTC companies were late to the game when it comes to buy online pickup in store,” he said. Why? “The fact is, if you’re on Shopify, you will have a very difficult time executing a very clean [experience].”These changes -- along with many other -- meant that 2020 was a year of learning. Sanandres described it as humbling. His brand has been in growth mode for the last decade, but had to rethink priorities when stores closed and shopping patterns shifted. “I’m an optimist. I’m always seeing the glass half full opportunity that things are going to get better,” he said. “So this did test me a bit.”While Sanandres maintained that his company is still growing and healthy -- he said the business is still bigger than it was in 2019 -- he viewed this year and last as a way to rethink fundamentals. “Maybe it’s an opportunity really to rebalance the business,” he said.

It’s been a big year for online shopping -- online car shopping too.Last summer, for example, Edmunds.com reported that used car and truck sales were the highest they’ve been since 2007. And online used car retailer Carvana was able to ride that wave (or, perhaps, drive that used ’09 Camry). It reported year-over-year revenue growth of 41% at its third quarter earnings.According to chief brand officer Ryan Keeton, the nine-year-old company was able to use the momentum it built over the last decade to capitalize on retail shifts during the pandemic. Keeton joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and discussed his company’s overall strategy.Carvana relies on a predominately contactless experience, which has worked during a pandemic. But beyond that, this past year’s strategy was about making sure the company was a household name. It was known to many as the online company that also had a car vending machine -- which some thought of as a marketing gimmick. But as Keeton described it, the vending machines are “a very low cast way for us to get our name out there.”In 2020 Carvana also focused more on inventory diversification. The company had for years relied on wholesale channels from which most other used car lots sourced as well. But over the last few years, Carvana began trying to buy cars directly from consumers. 2020 was the first year that the retailer really let that program hit its stride. When you buy inventory directly from customers, said Keeton, “you can really diversify that and find different vehicles that customers are looking for.”Which is to say that over the last 12 months, Carvana really tried to make itself stand apart from other used car sources. Part of that is continuing to double down on new inventory sources, as well as heavily marketing people all the time. “Our goal is to build a national brand,” said Keeton, “to change the way people buy and sell cars.”

Canteen Spirits was ready to take on the hard seltzer industry -- and then the coronavirus hit.The company launched in late 2019 and began 2020 expecting to grow to new heights. According to co-founder and CEO Brandon Cason, the first few months of the pandemic were hard when the country shut down and many channels slowed down. But things began to quickly ramp up once the first coronavirus peak subsided -- and the beverage brand is in growth mode once again. Canteen makes canned vodka-based sparkling beverages. Cason joined this week’s Modern Retail Podcast and described the year’s journey.According to Cason, Canteen hit on the right space at the right time. Most hard seltzers are malt-based, but many people have been seeking out similar drinks that are made from spirits. “We recognized that consumers wanted to elevate and go premium when it comes to what they’re drinking,” he said. In the third quarter of last year, things began to take off, with sales doubling month over month during that period. Now, Canteen is about to expand into a new area -- Tequila -- with a soon-to-launch sparkling beverage called Cantina.Cason has a history in both liquor and CPG -- hailing from both the sparkling water brand Waterloo and the vodka company Deep Eddy -- and thinks that with new types of beverages it’s better to be the disruptor. “Big companies are usually not as good at innovation as they are mergers and acquisitions,” he said. Which is to say that a big company like AB-InBev may only invest in making a brand new product if the market has already bore out the results.Even with this current success, Canteen has a lot of growth to do. For one, it’s yet to build out its DTC channel and has only been focusing on wholesale. In his view, growing a direct online presence is a mid- to later-stage step for a spirits startup -- getting retail traction was the most important first step. The company is also waiting until the world opens back up, so it can begin more heavily marketing in person. Events, he said, are “still just a big placeholder for us” -- for obvious reasons. But once the vaccine is deployed and people are socializing once again, “there are dollars ready to go.”

Healthcare and insurance aren’t the sexiest areas, but they are both ripe for disruption.That’s why Matt Gamache-Asselin, co-founder and CEO of Alto Pharmacy, decided to enter the space, as he said on the Modern Retail Podcast. The five-year-old company has raised over $350 million thus far and has been building digital pharmacy to compete with the likes of CVS and Walgreens.Pharmacies are a big umbrella to tackle. Gamache-Asselin estimated the entire industry to be worth half a trillion dollars. For him and his co-founder, the idea was to first and foremost fix one very big problem: health insurance. Rather than selling over-the-counter prescriptions or charging a concierge fee for healthcare services, Alto is quite simply an online pharmacy that works directly with insurance companies. He described going to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription as “an experience I think everyone would agree is bad -- if not at least kind of weird.”To figure out how to go about it, Alto bought a small pharmacy in the Bay Area and to understand the industry. He learned “how different operationally [pharmacies are] from retail,” he said. From there, the company launched its digital platform -- which is now available in five major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.On the program, Gamache-Asselin spoke about the overall pharmacy industry, and why he believes there’s so much room for improvement. He’s even excited about the big dogs coming in. “What I’m most excited about is the new entrants into the space,” he said, “especially a company like Amazon.” Why? In his words: “It can be a bit of a wedge to drive change -- which is clearly sorely needed.”

Lauren Picasso is both an athlete and an entrepreneur -- and she used both skillsets to help launch her company.Picasso is the founder and CEO of Cure Hydration, an electrolyte beverage that comes in powder form. She has a background in e-commerce, hailing from startups like Jet.com, but Cure was her first foray in beverages. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Picasso described the process of launching and growing Cure -- and the lessons she's learned.Picasso has grown the company over the last two years, using social media and national distribution. The products are both available online and in stores, including CVS, Walmart and Whole Foods. At launch, her strategy was to have Cure available in boutique retail environments, like high-end gyms. "Post-pandemic, I really shifted gears and focused more on essential retailers," she said.Now the company is trying to scale by attracting new influencers to rep the brand, adding new products to its portfolio and expanding to more stores. Right now, the business is about 60% wholesale and 40% DTC -- which she thinks is a good breakdown. Both have their pros and cons, but Cure's focus is on getting more people to trying the product and then convincing then -- of course -- to repeat the purchase."Retail is a great to grow your business really quickly," she said. "But DTC is important for us for our loyal customers and that direct access to our customers."

It's an understatement to say that 2020 was a strange year. A global pandemic turned everything upside down, and retail was no exception.In this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast, a few members of the editorial team take a look ahead at what 2021 may have in store for the retail industry. We cover quite a bit -- from a quiet time for IPOs to a bill targeting e-commerce companies. But the one tying bind is that things are very different from what they were a year ago.

It's easy to talk about retail doom and gloom, given a nearly year-long shutdown for brick-and-mortar stores and bankruptcy filings by many big name retailers. But Shopify president Harley Finkelstein is bullish on the sector's resilience and potential -- especially in e-commerce, which has grown by double digits in 2020 (even retail sales generally were up 6.6% in the January to November period this year, if you exclude gas, car and food services)."In many ways Shopify is a proxy for independent retail," Finkelstein said on the Modern Retail Podcast, adding that the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday this year generated $5 billion in sales on the platform. "And so what that tells me is consumers have completely shifted their buying preferences towards buying more from independent retailers and buying things from brands whose values reflect their own," he said.Shopify allows users to set up their own e-commerce websites. Last year, according to the Canadian company, it surpassed eBay as the second-biggest online retailer in the United States (behind Amazon, obviously)."Our philosophy is to create more value for the partners we capture for ourselves that keeps growing," Finkelstein said.

The pandemic has quickly changed the typical office chair shopper. It's no longer entire companies investing in ergonomic seating, but individuals working from home."Most consumers have never had to think about this type of product purchase before," Herman Miller Retail president Debbie Propst said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "They've relied on procurement teams or ergonomic specialists who have decided what chair you sit on while you're working."Herman Miller Retail includes Herman Miller, Design Within Reach and HAY. Propst joined the company in January, overseeing a year of momentous change."One of the things that we've done over the spring and summer months, specifically for the Design Within Reach brand, is really soften the way that we look and feel so that we can be more relatable," Propst said. "We used to showcase a lot of museum-like homes that don't look lived in. And we've used this time period to really transition into much more realistic, livable modern homes."

As the pandemic's third wave mounts, Clorox wipes are still a hot commodity -- the product's shortage is expected to last into the new year. That outsized demand has led to a bump in sales for the company overall, and a stock that's risen by a third this year.Clorox's general manager of DTC Jackson Jeyanayagam, who oversees new digital business ventures and brands for the CPG giant, said that the edge extended to hiring power."Here I come at Clorox trying to sell someone to come from a Netflix, an Airbnb or Warby Parker or Peloton and come work for me at Clorox, which no one ever thinks of as DTC," Jeyanayagam said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "It's never easy to hire great talent. But it's not nearly the same as it was exactly 12 months ago."On this week's episode, he spoke about how he approaches hiring, what new ways Clorox is trying to build out its DTC channel as well as how the company is looking into new areas and product lines.Burt's Bees, a subsidiary owned by Clorox, recently launched a CBD line, for example, and it brought about a few unique challenges. Some marketing channels are unavailable to a hemp-based products, Jeyanayagam said, and the product line can only sell in 25 states. "It's very saturated despite that. There's a lot of noise, and there's a lot of bad players."