The Modern Retail Podcast

At any given moment, millions of articles of clothing are coursing through ThredUp's logistics behemoth. Founded 10 years ago, the company will send you an empty bag for you to fill with clothes that you want to cash in on. Then they'll take them off of your hands to photograph, price, and ultimately sell online -- after which, of course, you pocket some consignment money.“The source of all of that amazing product are the closets across America. It turns out that people buy a lot of stuff, and even when they don't need to buy more, they buy more," said Anthony Marino, ThredUp's president (and formerly its CMO). "If you look at some recent statistics, in the United States, people buy on average 65 to 70 new items every year, and they wear them maybe 6 or 7 times and then never again.”Selling stuff through ThredUp, Anthony says, users can both experience the "life-changing magic of tidying up" so astutely promoted by Marie Kondo -- and feel like they're doing their part to reduce waste.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more beautifully packaged product than The Laundress's detergents. The company, which was acquired by Unilever in January for a reported $100 million, started off as a special-care laundry brand, and now makes a line of detergents and cleaning products.“We've had, since early on, women and men contact us about how we've saved their christening gown that's been in their family, or we saved a quilt of their grandmother's,” said Lindsey Boyd, co-founder of The Laundress, on this week’s episode of Making Marketing.Lindsey joined Shareen Pathak on this week’s episode of Making Marketing to discuss how to balance a brand's growth ambitions with reality, why retention is more important than acquisition, and what it means to be direct to consumer.

Direct-to-consumer is coming to furniture. The Inside, a one-year-old startup, is going down the path of companies like Burrow, by selling furniture online. The twist: It's also customized.  

When Kara Goldin founded Hint in 2005, she was searching for a way to get herself to drink more water. Her solution: adding chopped fruit to pitchers of water, to offer flavor without the sweeteners of traditional flavored beverages. Thus, Hint was born. Now, almost 15 years later, Hint has become one of the largest independent, non-alcoholic drink companies in the U.S., boasting over $100 million in sales each year. The brand sells on Amazon and inside grocery stores, as well as through its own site. It's even launched new lines of products, such as kids' drinks and sunscreen. On this week's episode of Making Marketing, Shareen Pathak sits down with Goldin, to discuss turning a product into a company, avoiding too much reliance on a single platform and expanding the brand into new categories.

Amy Fuller, CMO of Accenture, is overseeing an expansive list of functions throughout the company, and she likes it that way.  For a company that seems to offer an endless list of services to its clients, this isn’t much of a surprise. Accenture hosts an expansive offering of services, which include everything from strategy, technology, consulting, operations, and with its recent acquisition of ad agency, Droga5, it now boasts a strong creative services offering as well. On this week’s episode of Making Marketing, Shareen Pathak sits down with Fuller to dig deep into why B2B marketing is converging with consumer, and how the company thinks of in-housing and the role agencies play in the industry.

Rachel Drori started a company because she was hungry. But once the seeds of Daily Harvest were planted in her head, she dove in, and started trying to build a brand. Now, with a cushion of VC funding, Drori is looking towards the next evolution of her company. According to Drori, some of the funding will be used to build out the brand's content strategy and help them share their story. On this week's episode of Making Marketing, Shareen Pathak sits down with Drori, the brand's founder and CEO, to discuss how she built her business, why she worked with investors before taking funding and how she's pushing back against rising customer acquisition costs.

In the past few years, Foot Locker has been making headlines for its aggressive push to modernize, and according to the company's CMO, Jed Berger, that innovation has pushed their marketing department to start thinking about their customers in a new way. From investing in a handful of consumer startups, to rethinking their retail spaces, to launching their own incubator, the company has been working towards what it will be the next evolution of the retail industry. For Berger, this forward-thinking push means that how the company is marketing itself has to evolve as well. Now, Berger is getting involved in the products from the design stage to ensure that the consumer draw is built-in, and sees himself as more of a business partner, than a marketer. On this week's episode of Making Marketing, Shareen Pathak sits down with Berger to discuss the changing role of marketing at Foot Locker, why the company chose to incubate and invest in new brands and the shift of the overall marketing industry.

Electric toothbrush DTC brand Quip wants to grow up, and it is doing so by going beyond DTC. As is common with many direct-to-consumer brands looking to scale, Quip participated in a pop-up, took to the New York City subways, and recently began selling its products in Target stores (although refills can only be bought directly from their website). Now, following the acquisition of dental insurance brand Afora, Quip is looking to expand its offering into services. Quipcare, which will be rolling out this summer in New York City, has two options that will let customers partake in either a pay-as-you-go model which offers services at a discount or a $25-a-month model that resembles traditional dental insurance. When asked about how the company plans to balance two very different businesses -- products and healthcare -- Shane Pittson, Quip's vp of growth, said it's all part of the same ecosystem. Customers can pick-and-choose which parts they would like to subscribe to, or they can subscribe to the full Quip "universe." On this week's episode of Making Marketing, Shareen Pathak sits down with Pittson to discuss how Quip learned from its DTC peers in its early days, why its move into Target is part of an accessibility-focused mission and how it's working to control the brand experience in places where it doesn't have total control.

When sustainable bedding brand Buffy, launched in late 2017, it looked like the archetypical direct-to-consumer company: online presence, purpose-driven marketing and no middlemen. However, that didn't last very long. In one of their earliest rejections of the direct-to-consumer tropes, Buffy did not take any VC capital. Instead, the founders opted for a few angel investments, and bootstrapped the rest of its funding strategy. According to Paul Shaked, Buffy's co-founder and vp of growth, growing has been at the core of Buffy's mission since day one, so shortly after launch they moved into selling third-party on Amazon, and then into physical retail. Now that the company has reached a point of scale it is happy with, it is starting to explore non-Instagram and more non-digital forms of marketing as a way to continue growing. In this week's episode of Making Marketing, Shaked sits down with Shareen Pathak to discuss the many tropes of a DTC brand, Buffy's approach to marketing and why it's investing in its own editorial platform.

When David Wolfe co-founded premium mattress brand, Leesa in 2014, he already had almost two decades of experience in the DTC world. Throughout that time, he says, he's learned to keep an eye firmly planted on technology.In the years since its launch, Leesa has expanded beyond DTC -- it now sells in West Elm, on Amazon and on its own site. Now, Wolfe is focused on finding new, more efficient ways to market the company, going beyond what he calls "traditional" digital marketing channels. On this week's episode of Making Marketing, Shareen Pathak sits down with Wolfe to discuss how a brand purpose can be built authentically, why he's a big believer in video advertising and how he defines the word "omnichannel."