The Modern Retail Podcast

It’s been a big year for online shopping -- not just for Amazon.The live auction site Tophatter, in fact, had a record year. The nine-year-old company saw sales grow 20% year-over-year (and said that were it not for supply chain bottlenecks, that growth would have been even higher). According to the company's president Andrew Blachman, Tophatter's focus on entertainment and discovery is what helped its popularity surge.Blachman joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about all things digital commerce. More people are buying online, and customers are increasingly looking for new ways to discover items. Said Blachman, more people are open to entertainment-based commerce. This change has impacted how he's been building out the marketplace.Tophatter considers itself somewhat of a fun pastime for customers rather than a utility to buy necessary goods. Users scroll through its app or website (though most people use the app), which features thousands of low-cost auctions for random items. The average item costs around $10, but they go as low $1. It has hundreds of thousands of registered sellers, but only about 5,000 are usually active at a given time.The focus for the last year has been on perfecting the platform. While Tophatter has been around for over a decade, the company has gone in a few different directions that didn't work out. A few years ago, for example, the company tried to operate more like a traditional e-commerce platform by having sellers upload items for static prices, rather than risk selling them in an auction format where they could get undercut. "That was a huge mistake," said Blachman. Why? "While we gained a lot of inventory, or a lot of access to inventory from sellers that were afraid of risk and wanting to just price things at a fixed price, we lost their engagement," he said.Now, the company doesn't offer such a program. Instead, sellers are part of the auctions themselves, and Tophatter keeps them engaged by offering incentives -- like better product placement -- based on past performance.According to Blachman, the plan now is to continue growing while ensuring that it can handle all the back-end logistics. He also believes that user interest in the U.S. will only increase, as game-like commerce experiences continue to explode overseas.Right now, he's focused on getting more Americans on board. "It's a complex but a really fun business challenge," he said.

The coronavirus changed the way people shopped for groceries, and King Arthur Baking Company was no exception.The 230-year-old company had one of the hottest pandemic commodities: flour. And while it did face huge supply chain constraints early last year, King Arthur has been able to see historic sales growth and consumer behavior changes. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Bill Tine, vp of marketing, spoke about all the curveballs thrown at the company over the last year -- as well as why it decided to rebrand from a flour company to a baking company last summerKing Arthur’s marketing approach was upended overnight when the country went into lockdown. Over the last five years, he said, the brand has “built out essentially our own media company.” It published recipes, partnered with influencers and focused on growing its audience. Some of that was in person at its own baking schools. While King Arthur’s marketing strategy didn’t necessarily change during coronavirus, the underlying system did.“When Covid hit and people really shifted their media consumption, we were a place to turn to because we had a lot of assets already in place,” Tine said. “We had a team internally of bakers that could create [content] at home with their iPhones. And I think having that in-house was something where we’re able to really react quickly.” Indeed, King Arthur’s website got over 60 million unique visits in 2020.Reacting quickly helped boost King Arthur’s sales. Most grocery stores sold out of essentials like flour during the early days of the pandemic. With that, more people bought all-purpose baking items on King Arthur’s website. The online business doubled over the last year, and Tine thinks that momentum is going to remain.For now, the focus is on staying relevant with its customers. “One of the things that we really hone in on and rely on is the consumer insight for what the consumer wants,” he said.

When the New York Times writes about your product, sales inevitably explode.That’s at least what high-end sofa company BenchMade Modern experienced. It was featured in a trend story in 2016 and then, in 2019, became highly rated on the newspaper’s review website the Wirecutter (it remains the site’s top choice). When the Wirecutter review hit, said founder Edgar Blazona, “our web numbers spiked.”Blazona joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how he’s grown his company over the years. This isn’t his first furniture foray. In the 2000s he began selling modern children’s furniture online on websites like Wayfair. But he decided to get into the sofa game in 2015. BenchMade Modern makes furniture that averages between $3,000 and $6,000. It focuses on having as short of a lead time as possible while still being custom made. Currently, its lead time time averages five weeks, but Blazona said it can be as low as three.Unsurprisingly, the last year was big for the company. Sales did nosedive in March, which caused BenchMade Modern to temporarily pivot to manufacturing PPE. But in May, things picked back up as people were stuck at home and in need of nicer furniture. According to Blazona, revenue went up 100% year-over-year in 2020.The focus now is on keeping this growth. Blazona said the company is still facing some supply chain hiccups, but he doesn’t think demand for furniture is going to dip post-pandemic. The company has slowly been adding new products like rugs and lighting. The strategy, he said, is “just fine-tuning all of that and adding these new categories so that we can be a little bit more of a one-stop-shop.”

Emilie Arel joined mattress brand Casper for a personal reason. “I have two little kids -- they both slept on a Casper before I worked at Casper,” she said. “The way I realized how great a Casper was, I would fall asleep on their bed every night.”Arel joined Casper in late 2019 as its president and chief commercial officer. She oversees all the disparate and growing parts of Casper’s retail business. Arel spoke on the Modern Retail Podcast about what she’s focused on during her tenure, as well as how the pandemic through everything into disarray. “I don’t think we recognized how much people would invest in their home so quickly,” she said. “We had no clue we’d still be sitting in our houses almost a year from then that was not on the horizon.”Her first mandate as CCO was to tie all the business threads together. Casper has over 60 stores around the United States and is sold at retailers including Target, Nordstrom and Raymour and Flanigan. Wholesale specifically has been a real emphasis for Arel. True, Casper began as an online brand, but it needed the help of national chains to really grow.“The majority of beds in the United States are still bought in a trial location somewhere you can lay down in the bed,” she said. So Arel has spent the last year thinking about which retail partners would be best for Casper. One of the most important aspects of the wholesale retail experience, she said, is making sure every sales associate is armed with the proper training -- “so that they understand our product, and they understand our focus on sleep.”But Casper’s real focus right now is making a name for itself beyond just mattresses. The brand has launched a bunch of new sleep-associated products, including blankets and pillows. And Arel said Casper is seeing huge growth from these ancillary products.The intent now, she said, is to continue to launch new sleep products, while making more people -- not just hip millennials -- aware of the brand. “Soon we’ll be talking to consumers in a different way, with a slightly different voice,” she said.

Candice Matthews Brackeen is looking outside of typical Silicon Valley circles for the next billion-dollar company.She’s a general partner at Lightship Capital, which raised a $50 million fund last summer that’s focused on companies from the Midwest that have Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPoC) founders. “Right now we’re trying to build the best portfolio possible to return capital to the LPs,” she said on the Modern Retail Podcast.Matthews Brackeen first got the investing bug when she began working with startups in the Cincinnati area. She had difficulty raising money for her own company, and made a group for other Black entrepreneurs to talk shop. This group gave proof to how difficult the landscape was for non-white founders. With that, she launched an accelerator program five years ago. Slowly but surely, those experiences led helped Matthews Brackeen launch a venture capital fund.On the podcast, she talked about how the investing landscape has changed over the last year. Following last summer’s Black Lives Matters protest, funds like hers began to get more noticed. Institutional investors began reaching out looking for funds in which they can participate. “We’re not a social impact fund, but there are investors who are involved with us for a social impact reason,” she said.Part of her role as at Lightship involves helping both portfolio companies and other investors. Matthews Brackeen and her spouse, fellow Lightship co-founder Brian Brackeen, have spent weeks living nearby to founders to get a sense for their daily rhythms. They would have portfolio companies come out to Cincinnati or Miami and spend time together -- eating all meals together and spending most of the daylight hours working on business development. “I think that it’s important that we break down those barriers,” she said. “That’s the way that we grow relationships with our founders.”Over the years, Matthews Brackeen has also found herself to both a liaison and a teacher at both ends of the table. She’s instructed other VCs about their invisible biases, and coached founders about presentation styles. “Not only are we teaching our LPs, but we’re teaching our founders, like, how to have grace when people screw up,” she said.Ultimately, it’s about positioning Lightship as a fund that should be considered alongside every other top VC firm. “I want to be a VC,” she said. “I don’t want to be a Black VC.”

2020 was the year the Fly By Jing soared to new heights.The company, which is best known for its array of Chinese sauces, has taken the direct-to-consumer food world by storm. It’s been written about in major publications like the New York Times and Eater, and has become a popular pantry staple in many Instagram kitchen posts. Before the coronavirus first hit, founder Jing Gao told Modern Retail the company was growing around 30% month-over-month. Then the business exploded last spring thanks to pandemic stocking and heightened media attention. “We ended 2020 about 1000% up from 2019,” Gao said on the Modern Retail Podcast.On this episode, she spoke about how Fly By Jing started as a pop-up restaurant concept, her branding and marketing approach as well as what the company’s future plans are. “I feel like there’s an unspoken understanding between our customers and our brand,” she said.Fly By Jing first got off the ground because Gao had a core group of friends and followers who supported her vision. She raised an initial Kickstarter (“the highest-funded craft food project [on the platform],” in her words) and was able to grow the business in its first year as a result of this community.Now, Gao is putting herself more front and center. When Gao founded the brand, people knew her as Jenny -- an Anglicized version of her given name. And over a year after the company launched in 2018, she decided to go by Jing. For her, this was a way for her to present both herself and her brand in their true lights. When Fly By Jing rebranded last fall, Gao unveiled her new first name, making herself more of a focal point of the brand.The idea behind Fly By Jing is to be a food company that doesn’t try to fit within traditional U.S. brand parameters. So far, it’s worked. Demand outstripped supply for most of 2020. Gao’s current mission is to continue the growth by creating new programs and ways to keep customers engaged. Earlier this month, for example, Fly By Jing launched an OnlyFans account that lets people see pictures and videos of “hot noods.”For the founder, the most important part is to make sure she has a direct line to those who love her products. “We are putting a lot of thought into how do we create a real community around our biggest users,” she said.

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.”