The Modern Retail Podcast

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."

Vuori clothing, an athleisure brand launched in 2015, is a rarity: The company, which does do most of its business direct-to-consumer, has a healthy wholesale operation, a few physical stores of its own and has raised only a small angel funding round to date. The company's founder, Joe Kudla, joined Digiday on the Making Marketing podcast to talk about why it was important for his business to not go down the VC-funding route when it launched.

Burrow is a digital-born luxury furniture company, that, like most DTC brands, put most of its marketing eggs in the Facebook basket. But it soon realized that it can't simply rely on social media to drive sales. Burrow's head of intelligence, Alex Kubo joins us on this episode.

As the traditional lines of luxury blur, luxury marketers are competing for attention and consumer spend across categories. Lee Applbaum, CMO of the high-end spirits brands Patron Tequila and Grey Goose Vodka, part of Bacardi Global Brands Limited, is making a play for more of the luxury customer’s wallet. Applbaum discussed how platform partnerships can help the brand reach customers differently, how he thinks of marketing channels and more.

In the past year, the agency world has been rife with news of consolidation. Most executives have explained this as part of a longer-term plan to create less siloed organizational structures and pitching more efficient, integrated solutions to clients. Peter Sherman, executive vice president of Omnicom Group, doesn’t buy it. Sherman discusses the best path to consolidation, how consumer centricity has changed over the years and more.

Brand purpose has become the go-to phrase for chief marketing officers. Stephanie Buscemi, CMO at Salesforce, claims brand purpose is imperative for every brand and it’s even expected by the employees.