Building the Customer Journey featuring Louisa Schneider of Rowan
05/23/24 • 37 min
How do you craft a customer journey for brick and mortar retail? How do you get to know your customer deeply? How do you build a company with the customer at the center? This episode features Louisa Schneider, CEO and Founder of Rowan, who will talk about how Rowan built a focus on the customer, from the earliest days through their retail expansion to over 40 locations.
Topics:
- How Louisa thinks about fundraising for a brick and mortar business
- How the Rowan model evolved based on the need for better branding and customer focus
- How product and service problem areas became opportunities to improve the customer experience
- Why Rowan hired a firm to do customer research and the surprises they found
- What the customer journey looks like
- How the brand reflects the customer experience and how that consistency is maintained across 40+ stores
- Which metrics Rowan uses to track their customer cohorts
- Louisa’s advice to be present during the key foundational activities in your startup
Music by Eino Toivanen, kongano.com
Learn more at Retail X Series and follow @retailxseries on Twitter and Instagram.
To submit a pitch or to find out more about Sapna Shah, check out Red Giraffe Advisors.
How do you craft a customer journey for brick and mortar retail? How do you get to know your customer deeply? How do you build a company with the customer at the center? This episode features Louisa Schneider, CEO and Founder of Rowan, who will talk about how Rowan built a focus on the customer, from the earliest days through their retail expansion to over 40 locations.
Topics:
- How Louisa thinks about fundraising for a brick and mortar business
- How the Rowan model evolved based on the need for better branding and customer focus
- How product and service problem areas became opportunities to improve the customer experience
- Why Rowan hired a firm to do customer research and the surprises they found
- What the customer journey looks like
- How the brand reflects the customer experience and how that consistency is maintained across 40+ stores
- Which metrics Rowan uses to track their customer cohorts
- Louisa’s advice to be present during the key foundational activities in your startup
Music by Eino Toivanen, kongano.com
Learn more at Retail X Series and follow @retailxseries on Twitter and Instagram.
To submit a pitch or to find out more about Sapna Shah, check out Red Giraffe Advisors.
Previous Episode
Getting to a Successful Exit Featuring Ju Rhyu of Hero Cosmetics
When you’re just starting up your company, it may feel too early to be thinking about a future potential exit. But how does that exit ultimately happen? This episode features Ju Rhyu, co-founder and CEO of Hero Cosmetics, who sold her company for $630 million dollars to a strategic acquiror. Ju will talk about the decisions she and her co-founders made along the way that ultimately led them to a great outcome.
Topics:
- Why a focus on what your ultimate outcome is important for how you set up your business from the beginning
- How bootstrapping and a deep focus on profitability set up Hero for success
- When and why Hero thought outside investors would be helpful
- The key metrics that the co-founders of Hero focused on to be ready for exit
- How the co-founders decided it was time to exit
- How the exit process works, including if founders stay post-acquisition or not
- The emotional side of selling your startup
- Why a focus on fundamentals is the most critical thing you can do in your own company
Music by Eino Toivanen, kongano.com
Learn more at Retail X Series and follow @retailxseries on Twitter and Instagram.
To submit a pitch or to find out more about Sapna Shah, check out Red Giraffe Advisors.
Next Episode
How to Build a Marketplace with Innovation at the Core featuring Trisha Bantigue of Queenly
Everyone knows that markteplaces are hard to build. And apparel marketplaces are even harder. This episode features Trisha Bantigue, CEO of formalwear marketplace Queenly, who talks about how she built a fashion marketplace using tech innovation to create a better, stickier customer experience, in an apparel sector that has historically had low trust, low frequency and high return rates.
Topics:
- How Trisha’s background made her uniquely qualified to start Queenly
- Why starting with power users was important and why she chose to start with a P2P marketplace
- Why and how adding brands to the marketplace made sense for Queenly
- The various technologies that Queenly has built and incorporated into the app
- Why Trisha believes the tech Queenly built works well for them
- How Queenly started selling their virtual try-on as an API to other brands
- Why your “why” is so important in the startup journey
Music by Eino Toivanen, kongano.com
Learn more at Retail X Series and follow @retailxseries on Twitter and Instagram.
To submit a pitch or to find out more about Sapna Shah, check out Red Giraffe Advisors.
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