The Optimizely Podcast

How do you make food and beverage products stand out, both online and on store shelves?

With consumer’s tastes and preferences changing constantly, you always have to keep up with the latest trends to help your clients succeed. Luckily, David Lemley has been in ecommerce since its inception, which means that he’s also seen the space evolve in the last few years.

Because of his passion for natural food and beverage, David founded his own marketing agency, Retail Voodoo. He’s known for helping natural and organic brands like KIND, Essentia Water, and Sahale succeed both online and on shelves.

He focuses on building brand longevity that transcends the trends. But it’s not always easy to make a snack or beverage stand out when there are so many others fighting for consumers’ attention.

Launching a new brand from scratch is incredibly challenging. No one knows who you are; no one knows the value of your products; and you have to acquire an entirely new audience of buyers. But it can be done, and done well.

We’ve all seen the digitally native vertical brands appear out of nowhere and dominate the market. But what does it look like when one of those brands is just getting started? Tracey Wallace has been in the ecommerce world for nearly a decade, but she’s a first-time founder. She launched Doris Sleep, an ethically-made pillow company, just last year while still working at her previous role at Big Commerce. But she had years of experience working at Naturally Curly, an early content and commerce haircare company, as well as Shoptiques, a YCombinator fashion company.

Despite that, Doris Sleep was a whole new ballgame. However, Tracey explains that the business was really in her blood.

Customer research is the core of every good marketing strategy. Finding product-market fit is nearly impossible if you don’t talk to a ton of people about your product, test it out, and find the audience who truly loves it.

This is exactly the method that helped Josh Zloof find the right customers for Sudden Coffee. He faced what seemed like an insurmountable challenge -- how do you change the bad reputation of instant coffee? To most people, it’s seen as cheap, fast, and pretty tasteless. In comparison, Sudden Coffee offers coffee snobs everywhere a fast and delicious cup that you can buy today on Amazon or at Whole Foods.

But it wasn’t an easy path to get there! After working at Groupon, Josh was determined to start a company in the food space, but couldn’t settle on the right idea. It took him tons of experimentation, a lot of customer research, and a complete re-brand before Sudden found its identity and core market.

Amazon is a behemoth. So much so, that sales on Amazon accounted for a staggering 68% of all ecommerce sales in 2018. And a large portion of Amazon’s massive sales go through third-party sellers that are Fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA sellers. This is exactly the market that Brandon Hendrix focuses on. He’s the VP of Marketing at Thras.io, a fast-growing acquirer of Amazon FBA businesses. Formerly head of acquisition at LovePop, he's now focused entirely on the wild world of Amazon.

Deane Barker, Global Director of Content Management at Optimizely, joins The Optimizely Podcast to define what a headless CMS is and how companies can leverage it to expedite content out into the world. Click below for more.