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Eating its Own Tail{00:03:43} - “We've become known at Future Commerce for hosting salons, and now we have this new Future Commerce learning offering. If you are an agency operator or you're building high-performance teams in a brand, if you're a brand operator side, if you're wanting to go deeper down the rabbit hole as a brand operator on the topics of retention or new customer acquisition and learn more about things like loyalty, this is for you.” - Phillip {00:11:46} - “You see this happen in the founder ecosystem all the time. The founder actually is the brand. The founder is the product. And the things that the founder creates may or may not be good, but that's not the product. That's not why people are bandwagoning. They're bandwagoning on the founder themselves.” - Brian {00:22:17} - “Consumers hold more power than ever before. Consumers have an unprecedented amount of power in the way that brands market to them, shape the products and their offerings for the customer.” - Phillip {00:24:56} - “Hyperstition is happening in the world of commerce by people now taking a brand and making it part of their own story and fashioning it in their own liking. And when people do that in concert together, they're actually a more powerful driver of that narrative than you as a brand are on your own and can actually manifest where your brand heads as a result of this collective power through these tools and through these ways of electronic communication. “ - Brian {00:34:26} - “We're moving to this idea of the discourse being not, hey, look at what generative AI can do, but we're juxtaposing your literacy of a number of things having to... You have to be caught up in the discourse to understand the subtext.” - Phillip {00:41:49} - “All of these companies like Reddit and Quora want to prevent companies like OpenAI from training on their data because they have an unbelievable amount of human knowledge in their walled gardens, so why would they not want to capitalize on that for themselves?” - Phillip {00:49:14} - “You had cultures that would create things in the realms of science, art, literature, and mathematics. Classics that were simultaneously all occurring at the same time independent of each other. Today, that's happening in fashion and in cultural discourse and in brand.” - Phillip {00:52:00} - “We're going to use AI for the critique. We're going to use it to do a bunch of grunt work that no one wants to do. But for original art creation, we're still the center of that. Humanity has to be the one to bring the new ideas to the table.” - Brian Associated Links:Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The Hero is the aspirational archetype that inspires and motivates with optimism and strength. Heroes are there for us, offering security and a reason to be better tomorrow than we are today. We've looked at the Hero before in this season of Archetypes, but not all Heroes are alike. Listen now as Ian Leslie, CMO at Industry West, shares his take on what it means to be the Hero as a person and as a brand, including some of the pressures, the positives, the negatives, and why it all matters in the scope of the broader story. Standing in the Gap{00:04:14} “There's a lot of pressure that comes with like, "I need to fix it now. It needs to be right now. It needs to work right now." I think understanding and always kind of going back to what am I solving for, and can I solve for it?” - Ian {00:06:03} “Batman is representative of something, and oftentimes he can't be in two places at once. And so he has to, just by his presence, empower Gotham to stand up for itself. That's really, I think, probably the most important part of the Hero archetype.” - Ian {00:08:22} “I joke that a brand that doesn't come with a side order of world change is kind of looked down upon these days. But I think that's important, as the Hero brand that we are, that our side order of World Change is just accessibility and availability.” - Ian {00:12:40} “I coach varsity soccer and that's something that is ed along to my soccer players and just truly when I instruct them, it's just like, "Hey, guys, this isn't because I don't trust you. It's because I'm trying to stand in the gap between you and a decision that could really change the trajectory of your life.’" - Ian Associated Links: Learn more about Ian Leslie and Industry West Check out other Future Commerce podcasts Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

What is the often-overlooked marker of body data?{00:08:55} - “The culture of commerce right now is participatory and people right now are building on each other's ideas so rapidly and in real time that they can manifest things that it used to be only a luxury brand could pull something like that off.” - Phillip {00:11:45} - “It's context collapse. This is effectively deepfaking the world, resetting how people think about things. It's artificial context.” - Brian {00:13:51} - “The strategy is literally nothing more than getting in a room with your marketing team and even with your brand team and sitting down and just doing a whiteboarding session with a million Post-its that say, "What is happening in the discourse right now?’” - Phillip {00:19:53} - “When you're going to build a system to fix a problem that you created that involves differentiating between whether someone's a human or a robot, don't build an orb for people to line up and get signed up. But you have to look evil to get press.” - Brian {00:32:04} - “Increasingly customers outside of retail are coming to us and saying they want their B2B experience to be as elegant as possible because they recognize as people that that makes their end buyers happier, probably more likely to convert and ultimately, hopefully, save them money and drive up their actual revenue.” - Michael {00:36:38} - “The really interesting change over the last 12 months alone is that we're just seeing new buyers come to the table, especially in non-retail industries, who at the executive level have needs that when you reduce them down, are just like you said, it's about helping a buyer convert and actually exchange that value with the company.” - Michael {00:43:24} - “When money is more expensive, folks are going to tighten the screws down. And what we have also seen is the brands that are doing the best are the ones who have been leaning into their loyalty offerings because, as you and I know, a loyal customer is a happy customer.” - Michael {00:50:51} - “We believe AI truly is the future and moving beyond a world of just predictive recommendations to truly a generative future that really will change the shape of the experience for both buyers and merchants.” - Michael Associated Links:Learn more about Michael Affronti and Salesforce Amazon Blimp article Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

"In the future, every company is a media company." That’s hogwash, according to Tommy Walker. Tommy is all too familiar with this ideology and the pitfalls in the business of creating media and aggregating attention. Listen in to hear this insightful discussion and the conversation. “Committed to the Bit”{00:05:03} - “Understanding the cost structure and what it takes to hire talent and all of that, without that sort of knowledge, if you don't have that currently right now, then no, not every company needs to be a media company. You're better off spending your money in ads or some other type of growth lever.” - Tommy {00:10:34} - “With my own personal brand, I wanted to do a podcast, but I didn't have the bandwidth to do it. But I would become a Serial podcast guest. If you have an infrastructure in place, then let me just be a part of that infrastructure, show up as part of that conversation, do what I do, do what I do well, and then bounce and go do my thing that's independent of all that.” - Tommy {00:14:41} - “What I had to do at that time was just a ton of research. This is it. This is the complete unsexy answer to the entire thing. It was a ton of research…constantly looking at what everybody was saying in this DTC space…” - Tommy {00:23:46} - “There are unspoken expectations that people have that they don't even know they have until you meet them and what you're doing is setting a higher bar for production and engagement that feels much more like a consumer-type experience.” - Phillip {00:28:50} - “Are you establishing those true fans? When you start to get an executive team that is looking for a quick return or has quarterly results they have to answer to that it gets way harder to say, "The long-term success of our business depends on creating things that people actually care about.’" - Brian {00:32:24} - “If we live in a participatory economy and we have multiplayer brands, brands look more like bands in the future. And that's why you have these marketers that are so good at what they do. People like Bobby Hundreds who come from local scenes. They come from a scene, and a scene fuses fashion, art, culture, entertainment, and music. It's a state of being.” - Phillip {00:40:54} - “What makes a compelling media play is when you can continue to reinvent {the reason to exist} so that you yourself stay interested in it.” - Phillip Associated Links:Learn more about Tommy Walker and The Content Studio Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The Sage brings wisdom to those who inquire and mentors those who seek guidance in a kind, calm, and steady manner. They have accumulated knowledge and experience over time and are a valuable resource for others. A brand that acts as a wise Sage can help us open our minds to wisdom and create a more equitable world.  What if, as a merchant, you could go to that one place and get the and guidance you need? What if that one place has so much experience that you can learn from them and know they are on your side? That is the layer of value Adobe adds. Listen in as Nitu Walker represents Adobe as The Sage.  For The Heros and The Outlaws Alike{00:04:41} “Adobe has always been known to have very strategic partnerships. We have a huge partner ecosystem, but what we really wanted to do is provide a holistic commerce experience. And by doing so, utilizing our partnerships to create value-added integrations.” - Nitu {00:07:20} “You've built an entire ecosystem that can meet each merchant where they're at because there are different needs that different merchants have.” - Brian {00:11:01} “The Sage meets the Hero on their journey to give them advice and equip them either through knowledge or wisdom or by helping them bring other people around them for the next part of their journey. And that's kind of what you do.” - Phillip {00:13:08} “What really resonated with me about Archetypes, especially, which was why I was really excited to do this, was that we have to look at our base, our ecosystem, not as a linear one type of merchant or one type of partner or one type of provider, but that there are so many different ways that we interact with them and that everyone has their own archetype and their own way of how they think, feel, and do things.” - Nitu Associated Links: Learn more about Adobe Commerce Services Check out other Future Commerce podcasts Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!  Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Unless you’ve been under a rock somewhere, you probably are aware of the Barbie marketing machine ahead of the major motion picture release. What does this signify as a moment in our culture and the ways culture and commerce intersect? Barbie brought some major shifts when she first showed up in our world. What will this highly-marketed film bring with it? Alicia Esposito s Phillip for an in-depth look at Barbie: the doll, the brand, the film. All brands can learn something from this moment in time, but if we aren’t careful, we’ll learn the wrong lessons and chase some rabbit holes that just don’t make sense. There’s a lot to talk about, so get your popcorn and have a listen! Nostalgia is Power {00:04:12} - “There's cultural acceptance of certain types of media and popular media that shapes the way that we perceive the world.” - Phillip {00:05:11} - “A brand is not a logo or fonts or colors. A brand is a marker of trust of a corporation that was able to endure despite all odds, and that means that you have to remain culturally relevant. Brands away when the culture doesn't accept them.” - Phillip {00:06:25} - “If people see the outline of the little flippy ponytail, they're like, "Oh, yeah, Barbie." That's association, but relevance and true brand loyalty tie to a brand's ability to keep the core of what people initially love about a brand or a person, but also be able to adapt to some of the new realities of the consumer, and also accept some of the pitfalls or problematic nature of the past of the brand.” - Alicia {00:16:25} - “{Airbnb} is a really great example of a brand that doesn't necessarily have ties to the commercial product world, but really turns it into a commercial product moment through great collaborations.” - Alicia {00:27:17} - “Having this brand recall and this nostalgia does create a new vehicle for filmmakers like Greta Gerwig to kind of tap into the mainstream market and tell a really powerful story. But then it kind of goes down this rabbit hole of but if all of the funds are going towards these things and these big corporations that have all the IP already and selling all of the products, what does that leave for new stories?” - Alicia {00:29:44} - “Barbie represented a shift of the idea of children's playthings in culture, but it also represented a new monolith, a new way to see and perceive the world through this artifice of fashion, desirability, and idealistic standards.” - Phillip {00:40:12} - “We have to {see explicit brand tie-ins in the film} only because a lot of the Barbie dolls of the past did have product tie-ins. There were always some subtle or direct brand partnerships there. I’m curious to see.” - Alicia Associated Links:Learn more about Alicia Esposito and Retail TouchPoints Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Orchid Bertelsen has lived many lives in her journey from innovation to business ops. Ever heard of Nestlé’s digital human Cookie Coach, Ruth? Hint: She was heavily involved in the making of Ruth and its success in bridging the gap between technology and human connection. Be sure to stay tuned until the end to hear about the shifting dynamics between consumers and corporations in the digital age, the loving nature of critique, how Facebook never really died in the land of Suburbia, and in true Orchid fashion: a Scandoval reference.  Threadaverse{00:12:12} - “At the heart of {the Virtual Human Cookie Coach} was how can we serve more customers through a connected and consistent experience while utilizing technology and obviously using all of that information to make the product better, to make the experience better.” - Orchid {00:14:45} - “Microsoft is so far ahead of everything and they always fail as a result. That's the problem.” - Brian {00:16:52} - “If you use technology you can infinitely have more relationships and connectivity and serve more customers than your human constraints of the nature of having one person having one conversation at a time.” - Orchid {00:23:29} - “There is an opportunity and also a watch out that a lot of those fake relationships can take up more mental space than the real relationships that you're creating.” - Orchid {00:31:03} - “Because there's a deficiency in the services that the government is providing or a frustration around that, people are looking to the private sector, and so all of those things between the rise of social media, between just asking more of corporations, I think that's where people want to engage. And that's why there is critique because there is a higher expectation of how brands and companies conduct their business.” - Orchid {00:33:20} - “Customers and fans have an unbelievable amount of power that outweighs the collective bargaining capabilities of the workforce. And I wonder if that's a fundamentally modern problem that we've never really said out loud, but we all sense to be true.” - Phillip {00:40:43} - “They had to find something novel that they were uniquely positioned to deliver on and so that's why you had the pivot from a lot of talk about the Metaverse to all of a sudden they have released a product. And I would say one of the most successful product releases in modern history. But now they've released a product that is not shiny, it is not new, it is not innovative, but it works and it works for the people in this time.” - Orchid Associated Links:Learn more about Orchid Bertelsen and Common Thread Collective Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The Outlaw defies, disrupts, and brings change by paving their own way. They challenge established ways of thinking, by pioneering and innovating fearlessly. The Outlaw represents the world of possibility that comes when coloring outside the lines. Meet our Outlaw, TUSHY Founder Miki Agarwal, and hear how she is taking the world by [sh*t]storm and will not apologize for it. No Butts About It{00:04:52} “The more you talk about something, the less taboo it becomes, the more normalized it becomes. And that's actually the whole point is to make this be something where people aren't saying, "Did they take it too far?" - Miki {00:07:20} “I've heard you say throughout the course of this chat, "The things that we do aren't just for the sake of them. It's to open up a broader conversation.” It's not just about the thing itself. It's about what it inspires afterward.” - Brian {00:09:11} “When we show humanity, which includes humor, levity, fun, and authentic people sharing who they are through the brand, I think that has given a lot of affinity for us.” - Miki {00:10:17} “A lot of our industry, especially in trade, eCommerce trade, and digital retail trade media, try to do is they try to convince you of the validity of their argument with data and logical explanation. And very few are trying to connect with an emotional response through art and demonstration.” - Phillip {00:12:25} “The second part is can this product seemingly be an opening, a gateway to questioning everything else in our life? Can we question, "Why am I doing this in my life?" "Why am I using dry paper?" That's crazy. “What else am I doing in my life that's not actually true for me, but I'm just following the pack.’” - Miki Associated Links: Learn more about Miki Agrawal and TUSHY Check out other Future Commerce podcasts Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

In this episode, we are bringing to you a new old piece of content that is more relevant today than it has ever been as we just celebrated our 2023 edition of Visions, our annual Audio-Visual Trends report, first with a launch in Chicago at our Visions Summit at the Retail Innovation Conference and then with the launch of our multiplayer experience and our new zine, the Multiplayer Brand. Visions Volume 4 is the biggest, baddest piece of content that we have ever produced, but that makes the content we did last year that much more relevant because from the vantage point of 2023, we can see how predictions and anxieties that we had in 2022 came true or were put to rest. ‍ It’s a great interview with Michael Miraflor, an incredibly prolific thinker and the Chief Brand Officer at Hannah Grey VC, and the then CEO and now President of Trade Coffee, Mike Lackman, to talk about the changing nature of work, how our roles in society are altered and our perspectives are altered by algorithmic timelines and how automation and AI are redefining all of the above. Listen now! “Google, how do I speak to a human?”“It's creating some dynamics where a much smaller number of people can drive outcomes with a much larger number of dollars. If we're not really effective at promoting financial literacy and asking some big questions about what's different looking 20 years ahead from what the last 20 years were like, then there's going to be some collateral damage in the system that I think is really bad for everybody involved.” - Mike Lackman “You can automate things to make them more efficient, but you have to know how to do it well in the first place with a certain level of agency and authority and getting your hands dirty with it.” - Michael Miraflor “Just blatantly throwing software at problems to solve problems, thinking that it's the software that overcomes the deficiencies of an impractical product or business, I think is itself inherently a challenge that we're all facing in our industry.” - Phillip Jackson “One of the most frustrating things about customer service is when you end up on the phone with a system that is trying to replicate that of a human voice, human interaction, or human way of answering questions... You don't have to try to trick me to think that you're a person because you're just not. I would rather hit a series of numbers…to get you to answer versus me interacting with this AI as if you were human.” - Michael Miraflor “You have to get a gauge on what young people are thinking as expressed by what they're wearing and what they're doing. If you can't really get a sense of that, because the dominant form of social media is encouraging the proliferation of micro trends that really aren't a reflection, but they send a smoke signal, then you might have something that's a bit problematic on your hands.” - Michael Miraflor “The interesting piece here is that when we talk about this dystopian sort of like, well, this AI future, we're all going to get pushed around this and that. The alternative to that has to be an institution with enough trust and credibility that we're willing to let them become tastemakers, editors of newspapers, curators of fashion, pairers of coffee, those kinds of things.” - Mike Lackman “There was a dark side to those things that we do see as unifying, which is they tend to have some sort of pretty strong editorial, perhaps even tyrannical authority associated with them to be able to set those standards in place. And I guess my point of jousting with you on that when we think about AI, the counterpoint to letting the system just run the algorithm unchecked is that someone has to put guardrails on that.” - Mike Lackman Associated Links:Learn more about Michael Miraflor of Hannah Grey VC Learn morea about Mike Lackman of Trade Coffee Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Brian Lange sat down with visionary Brian Roemmele this week, and luckily we get to listen in on a couple of hours of their conversation! Are you an AI in the workplace? If so, Brian Roemmele challenges you to look at AI as a tool for creativity and empowerment, rather than replacement.  Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater{00:03:30} “We're not designed to be in safety literally our entire life. We should always be a little unbalanced and a little challenged. So the same is true with AI. And that challenge forces creativity.” - Brian Roemmele {00:16:40} “I also challenge you to accept the fact that you no longer have a cemented position on anything. That does not mean that you just don't have a position. It means the tree is flexible so the wind doesn't break the tree.” - Brian Roemmele {00:21:24} “They'll tell me, “Brian, you're crazy. You're a charlatan. It's just math.” I go, "That's interesting. Now, we're dealing with human language. We're dealing with the psychology of humans that created the math. That's what you're seeing here.’" - Brian Roemmele {00:30:06} “You're now going to become seven times more powerful because you're going to know how to use this technology in a way that's going to empower you to be stronger. It is not a replacement. It's a tool. The spreadsheet didn't fire the ant. It made the ant more powerful.” - Brian Roemmele {00:37:23} “How do you train an AI system to understand good unless it knows bad? Now you can train good and bad, but the bad has got to be in there as a reference point because it needs a contextual way to identify.” - Brian Roemmele {00:41:56} “We build a persona. We build a personality. Because that creates engagement. If you're just going to put out robotic statements and go to freaking a Google search or Wikipedia, it's not engaging. So if I'm going to have a customer-facing interface, that interface better be useful and engaging.” - Brian Roemmele {01:28:11} “That machine is actually going to be able to have a bank and understand more of how I relate to the things that I find resonance with and find wisdom in. And it's actually going to be able to relate those things back to who I am and use an even more full understanding of the things that I find to be inspiring or the things that reflect me to interact with other people and other people's extended versions of themselves, i.e. their AI component. - Brian Lange Associated Links:Dive into more of Brian Roemmele’s work Listen to our past episodes with Brian Roemmele Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

When a brand discovers the needs of their consumers and then provides them with that well, that is magic. For Keely Copeland, Founder of Second Chance Initiative, building a brand was about solving a problem that was bigger than her. She saw a need, she dreamed of a different way to meet that need, and then she began to build a brand that would bring hope to not just consumers, but also the women involved with the creation of their products. Listen now to this episode of Archetypes! Empty Vessel{00:04:27} “It was about how can we use commerce as a vehicle to create safe and secure jobs for women in recovery who are reentering the workforce so that they can come work in a healthy, secure environment for a few months, up to a year while they get back on their feet and then they can go back to either the career they used to have or something new altogether.” - Keely {00:07:48} “There's a tug of war of power between the brand and the consumer. And in this tug of war of power brands believe that they wield some power in the organization. In fact, what we're realizing is that consumers wield unlimited power over all of us. We are at their mercy and we adapt our businesses to their desires, not the other way around. You can't shape their needs. You can only find or discover the thing that they want from you.” - Phillip {00:10:08} “After Covid, there's a lot more alignment of priorities based on values that actually matter. I think for a long time we were trapped in junk values as a society, and when the world stopped for a few years, we got back to ing what matters.” - Keely {00:14:39} “For every creator, I have come to believe that the emptying out is just as important as the taking in because there's no room for the new idea if your mind's already full, if you're thinking about what you have to do tomorrow and the paragraph that you want to write next or the podcast that you want to record next. And so an empty vessel is, in my mind, exclusively possibility. And it doesn't get much more optimistic than that.” - Keely Associated Links: Learn more about Keely Copeland and Second Chance Initiative Check out other Future Commerce podcasts Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have you checked out our other podcast Infinite Shelf yet? Here is a taste of our latest episode: Succession IRL. Listen in with hosts Ingrid Milman Cordy and Orchid Bertelsen and don't forget to subscribe! There comes a time when every DTC company hits the pause button and asks, “What’s next?” Cue the Patrick Bateman and Kendall Roy mergers and acquisitions quotes. If acquisition does end up being an option, when you cede power as a founder, will you be happy with what the new parent company decides to do? Will your legacy live on? Secret Sauce{00:11:11} “When we're talking about multinational corporations or larger corporations, usually you got to make sure that you've got a healthy business that you can just put your resources against in order to grow.” - Orchid {00:16:28} “There's a reason why acquisitions don't have the most fantastic reputation for succeeding post-acquisition. A lot of that is because too much emphasis is put on the acquirer to solve those problems after the fact. My advice is to have the founder or have the people who are running that DTC business think about what is that secret sauce of the company.” - Ingrid {00:17:53} “If you're a founder and you're selling, what you also have to be emotionally ready for is if the parent company starts to make strategic decisions about how to use the brand that you wouldn't necessarily agree with because it's not yours anymore. Post-acquisition is not yours anymore. That's why they paid you the money.” - Orchid {00:25:44} “With growth comes mass, more mass opportunities. You have to be more approachable, you have to be more accessible, unless you are a true luxury good.” - Orchid {00:32:03} “The people that you hire to help you be acquired, is another huge, important decision. They have to know your business and see the vision and see the purpose and be your champion just as much as the founders.” - Ingrid Associated Links: Follow Infinite Shelf on Instagram Want to hear more? Check out past episodes here Love your new co-host? Check her out on LinkedIn Check out other Future Commerce podcasts Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Just in time for the release of his new book, Jason Del Rey sits down with Phillip and Brian and talks about his research in the histories of Walmart and Amazon, what he learned that matters to consumers today, and what he’d like to see in the future of commerce. His book, Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets is being called “A riveting investigation of the no-holds-barred battle between Amazon and Walmart to become the king of commerce.” It’s a must read, and it’s out TODAY, June 20th! Listen now to hear more and get your own copy of the book everywhere books are sold!  Tug of War{00:04:02} “I'm a sports fan, and rivalries are something that I grew up on. And this was just sort of an epic one: Amazon and Walmart. And I really wanted to just go inside and explain to readers both in and outside the industry what these companies' ambitions are, how they look at each other, and hopefully, you get some takeaways on why that matters for you, too.” - Jason {00:09:29} “Maybe the innovator's dilemma is becoming the imitator's dilemma and that this competition in the marketplace is beginning to create challenges for both companies in having to imitate each other and potentially to wind up chasing red herrings.” - Phillip {00:17:40} “What's gone on in physical retail for {Amazon} is a good reminder that your DNA is your DNA as it was for Walmart. And it's really hard to execute well and have the right vision that isn't all ing the new channel or new business to just strengthen your historical business.” - Jason {00:24:26} “The way that this new generation of shoppers, especially a Gen Z and Gen Alpha shoppers, who could be the most prolific purchasing power generation of all time, what they think about those physical in-store experiences matters more than what I think about it.” - Phillip {00:46:01} “I have a chapter about Doug {McMillon} in the book because I do think he's sort of under cover for how important of a position he holds.” - Jason {00:49:20} “ I'd like to think a piece of future of commerce is also really figuring out a way that this industry is not such a drag on the environment. I think physical retail actually can play a big role in solving at least some of the short term issues there.” - Jason Associated Links:Find out more about Jason Del Rey and get his new book, Winner Sells All, out today! Sign up HERE for eTail Boston 2023 Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!  Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Data as Enabler{00:05:24} “Like many companies, the company made technical decisions, and grew out of those technical decisions. You definitely come to a point where you have to really take a hard look at things and figure out what's the platform or pieces that are going to get you to the next level.” - Lesley {00:08:51} “Our job is really in that first 90 days. How do you make someone really see the value of having the subscription? The value that they see in the inspiration is more than just the protein. It is about the solutions that you offer around it. Our goal is to create confident cooks.” - Kiran {00:13:14} “I would be the happiest person if we could stop spending anything on marketing because our do all the work for us. That's where we need to continue to head towards in of evangelism. That's the purest form of marketing because people believe their friends.” - Kiran {00:15:33} “What Kiran and I have really worked on is at the executive level, we're working together on the strategy for the company and the strategy for the . What's great is we both have a really good understanding that these things don't operate separately.” - Lesley {00:19:17} “I love that the company won't dismiss the customer insights because they know it's coming from really good validated data that was intelligently taken. And then as they present the problems, they're going towards solutions.” - Kiran {00:22:39} “We don't need perfect data to make a decision because otherwise we'll just be paralyzed. We’ll figure it out as we go.” - Kiran {00:34:52} “Decision-making becomes a lot easier when a company is truly mission-driven.” - Kiran Associated Links:Find out more about ButcherBox Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!  Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter ,Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.We love hearing from our listeners!

Welcome to the hip revolution where suddenly airlines are the talk of the town. With a flat fee comes compromise, but are you willing to give up convenience for a cheaper price? Also, if you haven’t yet, take a look at your Shop Pay app and check your wallet out. You may have some cash to burn sitting in the courtesy of the annual “Shop Pay Shop Day,” which totally existed before this year…right? Tune in now to hear the rest. Loyalty is a Two-Way Street{00:13:14} “The loyalty in the ERP space, and what your business actually runs on that has a lot of bearing on how you choose your eCommerce stack in enterprise.” - Phillip {00:20:16} “What I've always realized, especially when being budget conscious, there's always a cost associated. It's either your time, your patience, or your dollars. And sometimes paying more means that you get a little bit more of your time and you save a little bit of patience.” - Phillip {00:25:08} “We're becoming much more isolated from each other, so naturally, the workplace has become the place that has to help compensate for this because you have to have a community of people that you work with in the workplace. And that's why we have the rise of these social groups and mandated social groups within the workplace, not just for entertainment and for bringing your whole self to work, but there's also an element of just trying to find people and connect with people who have similar life experiences.” - Phillip {00:33:00} “During economic downturns and uncertainty, brands tend to look at hips or loyalty, maybe a subscription program, as the thing that makes up the difference. It is a lever for the business and not a benefit for the customer.” - Phillip {00:38:06} “I've bought into things before where I'm like, "Man if I just bought stuff piecemeal a la carte, this would have been better." Why did I go for the bundle or the hip? And I now have paid way more than I would have otherwise.” - Brian {00:50:55} “Getting people to the Shop app, it's adoption has a lot of opportunity. There are still a lot of legs, and there's still so much growth opportunity for that, as far as people using it for shopping experiences that Shopify hasn't even touched that yet.” - Brian {00:51:51} “There is a wealth of new channel growth for tomorrow. There's something brand new happening right in front of our eyes. You want to talk about loyalty and how irrational it is, to capitalize on that, you kind of have to be thinking about the future, and you have to see this through.” - Phillip {00:53:08} “This new channel, new platform growth that is being set up in front of us could come from somewhere else in the world and I think it would probably be open source because I think that that's how you tend to see things like this play out in international contexts is through open source projects.” - Brian Associated Links:Find out more about The Visions Summit at RICE 2023 and make plans to meet us there! Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!  Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

For a customer to have a seamless experience while dealing with grief and trauma requires exceptional service and unbelievable logistics infrastructure. They need care. For the three founders at Titan Casket, Scott Ginsberg, Joshua Siegel, and Liz Siegel, this is core to their story as a brand. Listen now to this episode of Archetypes! Direct to Exhumer{00:01:38} The Caregiver continually s others, making sacrifices on their behalf. They are honorable, selfless, and loyal. The Caregiver offers unconditional love and has a strong sense of responsibility for others to protect and provide a safe place where others can feel nurtured and cared for. {00:05:36} “You may have seen us talk about being the Warby Parker of Caskets and that's not because we're direct to consumer. It's because what Warby saw was there was one manufacturer that controlled all the supply and they also owned the channels of distribution. And so they thought there was a better way of working outside of that. And it's the same thing in caskets.” - Josh {00:09:56} “These are families right in the middle of it. They want to talk about their loved one. And so we hire very carefully, and the team we put in place has no limitations around how long they can spend with clients.” - Josh {00:10:53} “We have a business. We make money, but at the same time, too, the client is saving 50% or more of what they would ordinarily spend at a funeral home. And we get to help every day.” - Scott Associated Links: Learn more about Titan Casket Check out other Future Commerce podcasts Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? Just like the suiting and the apparel that KASHIYAMA provides to its customer, there is no one size fits all solution in eCommerce today. Selecting software correctly and well in your organization requires a lot of orchestration and effort and sometimes some frameworks and tips and tricks on how to do that well.  BJ McCahill knows all about this and has incredible insights to share. Listen now! In this episode:{0:10:19} - “We calculated at one point there were over 10 million combinations of types of products that you can order. So just looking at the platform where we were going to house our website, that was a huge consideration. Even though initial order volume wasn't going to be that high, we knew the data complexity needed something that was robust and something that could that.” - BJ {0:15:13} - “Obviously all of these software companies are trying to sell you something. And so maybe they're putting their best foot forward. So you may need to dig a little bit deeper with recommendations from people in the industry, recommendations from agencies that you're working with to make sure that what they're explaining to you is how it works in reality as well.” - BJ {0:19:05} - “Budget plays a huge role obviously in any business decision, but specifically in of software selection, you hear the term Total Cost of Ownership, and that is really, really key to think about. The number that you're seeing presented by this software or this agency is not maybe the total number that you're going to end up paying.” - BJ {0:30:08} - “We needed to be able to offer a seamless experience between in-store and online and not every software was going to that, but it was something that we learned was going to be key to our customer experience that we were offering to be able to really deliver that omnichannel experience for the customers.” - BJ {0:31:59} - “One of the nuances in modern commerce is that you get to this stage of growth where the choices that you make severely feed back into the mindset of how you build your business and they become sort of sympathetic to each other. Having flexibility and being able to build quickly are underappreciated parts of having a software stack.” - Phillip Associated Links:Learn more about BJ McCahill and KASHIYAMA Listen to more Step by Step episodes. Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Get your copy of Archetypes, our recently published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.com Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!  Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? us as we hear from Michael Chen, Director of eCommerce Operations at Sugarfina, to break down the term “single handshake” and look more closely at consolidation of operations in your eCommerce business. Listen now! In this episode:{0:08:20} - “From the backend side, there are a lot of softwares we have to use to eliminate all the friction points from the time {consumers} find the website and go on the website to check out and pay. That should be really, really smooth.” - Michael {0:14:32} - “Right now everything is in Magento. We have Adobe Live Search, we have Product Recommendations, and everything is working in one place. So I don't have to go to different places, which save a lot of time and headache.” - Michael {0:16:01} - “Saving money is an important thing, but I would look at it as is the software actually better. If you're going to consolidate, is it actually better for the business? There are a lot of factors, so I wouldn't say saving money is the most important thing. There's a lot of research you have to do.” - Michael {0:18:32} - “To extract the most amount of value from any piece of software requires an intimate understanding and time spent in using the software, and the hard things become easy over time. So you grow into these capabilities. You don't just turn it on on day one.” - Phillip {0:23:51} - “You have to be focused on forward progress and continual improvement because your competitors are, and if they're doing it, you have to be more efficient and more optimized.” - Michael Associated Links:Learn more about Michael Chen and Sugarfina. Listen to more Step by Step episodes. Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Get your copy of Archetypes, our recently published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.com Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!  Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? ing us on the podcast in this episode is Rebecca Hall, Director of Digital Solutions Consulting at Blue Acorn ICI, and Doug Hatcher, her counterpart on the sales side of the business,  a solutions consultant. And they're going to answer this question, "What does fully-integrated mean in the DXP era?” Listen now! ‍ In this episode:{0:11:32} - “DXPs provide: a very good way to visualize and analyze how people are interacting with the brand so you can customize it and better personalize the experience people are getting to it.” - Doug {0:14:46} - “The beauty of composable architecture and personalization is that you're really hitting those specific customers, really hitting those specific audiences, and you're serving up a unique experience almost per person. So it's not just per brand, it's per customer as well that we can really dig in and create a unique experience.” - Rebecca {0:24:57} - “The team and the tool have to be mutually aligned. it becomes much more impactful when you're making software decisions because all of them are interdependent. Future-proofing to some degree is just buying more durable software that's capable of doing more and growing over time without you having to completely rip and replace.” - Phillip {0:28:55} - “We're able to deliver, like immediately deliver, relevant experiences to your customers that may help them find what they're looking for and reduce some of the noise, as well as help you target immediately somebody who is actually looking for something specific.” - Rebecca {0:37:51} - “There are things that these platforms can't necessarily predict or just have a capability for out of the box. So there's always going to be a need to do custom development. More and more though, the customization that we're doing isn't on the front end, isn't trying to build the customer experience in a new and unique way. We try to focus that on a custom configurator piece or one thing that we can compose into the broader solution.” - Doug {0:44:47} - “ If we know what we have, we're able to use that data better and we can actually make better suggestions as we go along as well. It's all about data.” - Rebecca ‍ Associated Links:Learn more about Rebecca Hall, Doug Hatcher, and Blue Acorn ICI Listen to more Step by Step episodes. Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Get your copy of Archetypes, our recently published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.com Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? In this episdode, we are talking to Keith Menezes, who's the Director of Commercialization at Walmart, the world's largest retailer. We're going to talk about how we master omnichannel integration and provide for a seamless experience not just for customers, but also for employees and some of the decisions that are made in making the technology that Walmart has built to create incredible omnichannel experiences available for the rest of the world.  Listen now! In this episode:{0:06:28} - “A vibrant retail ecosystem where we're all really serving other merchants and customers, I think helps all of us.” - Keith {0:10:32} - “It's not just about the technology, it's about the system, and then it's also about the change management. If you deploy a piece of technology and it just doesn't make sense in context of how the employee is doing their job and the UI and the experience itself is just complicated or hard to understand, adoption will plummet, but most importantly, customers aren't going to get what they're looking for, which then will ultimately impact their perception of your brand, and then loyalty, which is going to lead to churn.” - Keith {0:14:49} - “What has happened in the market is you've seen the growth of outsourced fulfillment, other providers out there that maybe exist as marketplaces where customers may go, they'll place an order, and then this third party will go into the store, pick the items for you and deliver it for you. And brands have loved that because they've gotten the growth. But now two years later, post-pandemic, what they're evaluating is what did we give up to get that?” - Keith {0:21:41} - “Fulfillment, even though it's invisible, it is an expression of your brand and you really have to get items to customers in the way that the customer is expecting them.” - Keith {0:26:416} - “Retail companies are in the business to sell products to customers. And the evolution has been really slow. And I don't know if people have picked up on it, but we are now buying software that's purpose built to be transactional software because it's built by the people who have to power their own businesses on it. And that is a fundamental shift away from, "You need software. We build software. Here's your software.’" - Phillip {0:33:45} - “Through Store Assist, we're giving you the capability to create these white label kind of fulfillment experiences. It's all your brand. We're existing in the background and then all the data that's coming back really is yours. You understand how customers are interacting with you and then empowering you to make decisions on what you ultimately serve up to your customers.” - Keith Associated Links:Learn more about Keith Menezes and Walmart Commerce Technologies. Listen to more Step by Step episodes. Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet? Get your copy of Archetypes, our recently published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.com Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!  Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!