Up Next In Commerce

Mission

Welcome to the #1 podcast for commerce teams, executives, and entrepreneurs. Join host Stephanie Postles as she sits down with commerce leaders on the front lines of digital innovation. With guests from established enterprise companies to D2C start-ups barely out of infancy to everyone in between - you’ll get the inside scoop on what’s Up Next in Commerce. New episodes come out every Tuesday and Thursday. Up Next in Commerce is created by Mission.org.

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Top 10 Up Next In Commerce Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Up Next In Commerce episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Up Next In Commerce for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Up Next In Commerce episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Customer Acquisition, Seamless Experiences and Scaling with DTC expert Nik Sharma

Up Next In Commerce

01/12/21 • 44 min

Brands large and small are all fighting the same battle of customer acquisition. How you reach customers, and how much that effort costs, is in constant flux, which is why Nik Sharma is a big fan of constantly running micro experiments.

Nik is the CEO of Sharma Brands, a company that remains one of the best-kept secrets among the DTC community and which helps brands scale into the tens of millions. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Nik takes us behind the scenes of what that scaling process looks like, including his strategies around customer acquisition. Nik explains how important constant testing is, and he shares some micro-experiments he recommends running regularly. Plus, he tells us why reading every review and every comment associated with your brand is the best leaping-off point for your creative process.

Main Takeaways:

Please Rate And Review: Reviews really do matter, and you should look at every single one to have a better understanding of what customers are saying, what they see as the value props and what isn’t working. You can then work backward with that information and create content that matches what your customers want.
Mo Money, Same Problems: Regardless of how big a company gets, the main problem any brand faces is that of customer acquisition. Bigger brands can throw more money toward getting their message to customers, but ultimately it’s about getting the right content to the right people.
The Mom Test: Your website experience needs to be seamless and frictionless that even the most technically challenged, or busy, can make it through without issue. It also needs to deliver the message that you want to send right up front. No one is going to search for the thing you want them to see, so put it front and center.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder at mission.org. Today, we're hanging out with Nik Sharma, the CEO of Sharma Brands. Nik, welcome to the show.

Nik:

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Stephanie:

Yeah. Me, too. If we had video on, I would be trying to look at your whiteboard that you had on with probably 1,000 notes on it.

Nik:

All the secrets. It's got all the secrets.

Stephanie:

Yeah. What kind of secrets are on that board? I was really trying to zoom in like what's going on back there?

Nik:

It's got all the goals for the week, starting with nine hours of sleep, all the way to-

Stephanie:

That's a good goal.

Nik:

... how we plan to combat Facebook and Apple's big fight that's going to start January 15th.

Stephanie:

Oh, tell me a little bit about the big fight. I'm obviously not up to date on that. What's going on?

Nik:

Yeah. So basically in the new iOS update, Apple is going to give pretty much everybody multiple opportunities to block tracking. And so it's really going to hurt attribution for a lot of these ad platforms, especially for small business ad platforms like Facebook ads, Snapchat, et cetera. And so we're basically starting to think through how we combat that going into the new year because a lot of the businesses we work with, they're either brands that are just starting. And obviously, those are small businesses, but there's also some mid-sized businesses doing anywhere from 200 to 800 million in revenue, but they're also going to be just as effective. And so we're trying to think through how we go about combating that going into the New Year, basically making sure that there's not a ton of drop-off as it relates to the client.

Stephanie:

Yeah, I didn't realize this was happening so soon. I was paying attention a bit to the taking away cookies and tracking and all that kind of stuff. I didn't realize the iOS update was happening January 15th. So what ar...

How Kellogg's is Leveraging Emerging Technologies and Strategic Partnerships to Build a Scalable B2B2C Platform

Up Next In Commerce

07/14/20 • 57 min

You may only know Kellogg’s as the company that makes your favorite cereal. But there is so much more to the company than just delicious treats. Robert Birse is the Head of Global B2B Ecommerce at Kellogg’s, and he has been leading the charge to position Kellogg’s as one of the leaders in creating scalable B2B Ecommerce strategies. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Robert explains all the ways that Kellogg’s is upending traditional Ecommerce strategies in order to help customers find greater success. Using technology like A.I. and machine learning, and by developing a platform that all of their customers and partners can use, Kellogg’s has been pushing the ball forward on bringing small and large businesses into the world of Ecommerce and helping them get the most out of their Ecommerce strategies.

3 Takeaways:

A brand like Kellogg’s has the power to up-end the typical Ecommerce strategy. Instead of asking how to get customers to buy more, they ask how they can help their customers sell more. In doing so, their customers and partners become more successful, and it’s a win-win for all parties
Change management is important because many of the small businesses Kellogg’s works with have to fundamentally change the way they think about doing business.hey have to rely much more on technology than ever before. But the appetite is there because A.I. and predictive analytics are proving to be critical tools in helping businesses determine what to stock and how to look at consumer behavior
B2B Ecommerce is still in its infancy, but there is an appetite for innovation across the board from brands to retailers to distributors. They’re eager to test, iterate and experiment with new technologies in order to create better one-to-one engagement at scale

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Stephanie:

Welcome to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, your host from Mission.org. Today I'm very excited, we have Robert Birse on the show, the head of Global B2B & B2B2C E-commerce at Kellogg. Rob, how's it going?

Robert:

It's going great. Thank you very much, from captivity.

Stephanie:

Yes, yes. How is life in captivity?

Robert:

Well, I'm thinking about calling Amnesty International, see if they can get me out of here.

Stephanie:

Well, we were just talking about what life looks like right now, just us eating lots of Cheese-Its on our bed at home, calling into Zoom calls, or maybe that's just me. Maybe that's not you.

Robert:

No, I think that's a typical picture across the world right now.

Stephanie:

Yeah, which is okay. Temporarily, it's okay. So, I saw you have a very long history in E-commerce. I think I saw dating back to even early 2000s, right?

Robert:

I'm afraid it was in the '90s.

Stephanie:

Oh nice, okay perfect. Well, I would love to hear a bit about your background and what led you into E-commerce.

Robert:

Sure. Well, I was working for a catalog distributor, so not a distributor of catalog. We use the catalog as our medium to communicate with our customers who were predominantly engineers in factories across Europe. The business that I was responsible for at the time was a small specialist distributor, and we were struggling a little bit to find our position as E-commerce was starting to take more of a role in the consumer engagement or the customer engagement in our case. So we were on the tube and this was the late '90s, and we took a digital transformation, even though digital still wasn't really a bonafide strategy because it was only emerging. The first task we undertook was to create a digital asset library from all the bromides and things that we'd cumulated to support the catalog production.

Robert:

So we partnered with a startup in London, a bunch of basically college graduates who were trying to create the first digital content management system. And that was more than 20 years ago. So we did that and we started to work to create a digital presence online, starting with static content and then moving into transactional capabilities. It helped transform that little business into something that had a much greater future. So that was my first introducti...

The Importance of a Frictionless Ecommerce Experience

Up Next In Commerce

06/18/20 • 53 min

When Christiane Lemieux was looking to sell her first company, she knew she wanted to find a buyer that understood that the future revolved around Ecommerce. She found that buyer in Wayfair and for the next few years, she worked with the company to cultivate as much knowledge about the eComm space as possible before venturing out on her own once more. Today. Christiane is the founder of The Inside and the author of numerous books, including her newest called Frictionless. The idea of her new company and the book revolves around the concept that in order to have success in the world of Ecommerce, you need to give your customers an experience that is so easy and efficient, that they never have a reason not to buy. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Christiane explains why that frictionless experience is so important, and how to make it a reality.

Key Takeaways:

Thanks to innovators like Bezos and Jobs, the world shops in a different need-it-now way. As a result, the biggest challenge Ecommerce platforms face is creating a frictionless experience
By leveraging the design community to be consultants, The Inside is targeting customers who can buy with more frequency and create predictable, repeatable conversions
Getting online quickly and the businesses who have a digital-first strategy are successful

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Christiane, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Christiane:

Hey. It's going really well, Stephanie. How are you doing?

Stephanie:

Doing great. So, for all of our listeners, I want you to pronounce your own name since I did not do it this time.

Christiane:

My name is Christiane Lemieux. It's very French and a huge mouthful, so I completely give you a pass on that.

Stephanie:

Thank you for doing that, so I did not have to. So, you are the founder and CEO of The Inside, a direct-to-consumer home furnishing brand. I love to hear a little bit about that and how you started it?

Christiane:

Well, this is my second foray into the world of home furnishings. I started my first company, it was called DwellStudio, out of college. I went to university at Parsons School of Design here in New York. And I started a home furnishings brand from my New York apartment. 13 years later, I sold it to Wayfair. And speaking of what's up next in commerce and the digital landscape, part of the reason that I did that was that... Oh, you know what, I should cut my nail Hold on. Sorry. Let me just cut this so it doesn't ding on you.

Stephanie:

Okay.

Christiane:

Sorry, I'll go back to Wayfair. So, I sold my first company to Wayfair, and part of the reason that I did that was that I got to be entrepreneurial fork in the road where I had never really raised money before. And I realized that if I was going to continue down, the growth trajectory that I was on, it would involve me opening more than the one store I had in New York. It would involve me raising money for the first time, substantial amounts of money for the first time, to roll out stores.

Christiane:

And at the end of the day, I sat and thought for a very long time about the business model that I was on, that was growing, that I had started, and I realized that it didn't feel right to me. I really believed that all businesses were going to, at some point, in the near term or distant future, transition to eCommerce. And what I wanted to figure out was, who could I either partner with or sell to that would understand that idea and philosophy?

Christiane:

And so, I hired an investment bank in New York and they actually had me meet with a whole bunch of home furnishings companies, most of them, you would probably know. But when I walked into Wayfair's office in Boston with 1,800 people and 800 engineers, I realized that we were really aligned from a conceptual point of view in terms of what the future of DTC look like, direct-to-consumer look like. And so, it wasn't the best offer financially but, to me, it was the best offer intellectually and philosophically. So, I sold my business...

Expanding Through Collaborations and How to Move From B2B to DTC

Up Next In Commerce

03/11/21 • 44 min

Sometimes, it’s best to get back to the basics. Whether you are talking business or just general human interaction, it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of overthinking things when really all you need to do is keep it simple.

Ellen Bennett knows this more than most, and she’s built her company, Hedley & Bennett into an undeniable success by sticking to that principle. Hedley & Bennett produces high-quality kitchen wear that has been featured in more than 4,000 restaurants and cafes, adopted by celebrity chefs like Martha Stewart and David Chang, and is used by hundreds of thousands of home chefs every day. But the story started much more modestly. Ellen began with a true grassroots approach, selling aprons out of her Mini Cooper, talking to and pitching every chef she knew, and working her connections to keep growing her business.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Ellen shares the story of how she hustled to build Hedley & Bennett and all of the early struggles she had to work through to keep the train rolling. She gives advice to any young company dealing with production or shipping mishaps, and she explains how you can go about expanding through creative and authentic collaborations. Plus, she explains what it took to shift the company from exclusively selling B2B to now selling more than 80% DTC. Ellen brought a level of energy and ambition to the interview that didn’t disappoint, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Main Takeaways:

Howdy, Partner: One way to expand your product line without taking on the entire risk and expense of production, testing, etc., is to form a partnership with companies that already make products you are interested in selling. By partnering with Madewell and Richer Poorer socks, Hedley & Bennet was able to expand its product line and grow its audience and customer base without having to add to or adjust the supply chain.
Pick Up The Phone: As a young company, any mistake could be a dagger to the heart. But, things happen and sometimes you have to swallow the cost of a mistake for the overall good of the business. The best way to do that is to be honest, take responsibility, and do it one-to-one. Make the hard phone call instead of hiding behind an email. Your customer might be upset that their order was messed up, but you will build respect and trust when you show them you’re making a personal effort to make it right.
From B2B to DTC: It may seem obvious, but moving from almost exclusively selling B2B to having 80% of your products sold DTC is a massive shift. Tune in to hear what that looked like for Hedley & Bennett, and advice for any company considering this move.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Ellen Bennett:

Great. Hi guys. My name is Ellen Bennett and I'm the founder and CEO of Hedley and Bennett.

Stephanie Postles:

Hey everyone. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Ellen Bennett, the founder and CEO of Hedley and Bennett. Ellen, welcome to the show.

Ellen Bennett:

Thanks for having me.

Stephanie Postles:

Yeah, I'm very excited to have you on. You're the first person with a outfit change that we've had before getting on. So it's a good day to have a new thing occur on a podcast interview.

Ellen Bennett:

I love color and I brought a light yellow cat and I had a dark yellow hat. So I just changed to a dark yellow hat in case everyone's wondering, what the hell is she talking about?

Stephanie Postles:

Yep. This is working for me more now. So now I'm ready to get into it. So your company looks awesome. I saw that Hedley and Bennett, you guys are creating handcrafted aprons and you're in over 4,000 restaurants and coffee shops, which is wild and crazy. So your story seems like one that I want to go back to the early days. Like before, you're in all these restaurants and coffee shops, how did ...

Why Less is More for Last Crumb

Up Next In Commerce

04/07/22 • 40 min

If I told you that you could get the Rolex of cookies delivered to your door, would you be interested in that? Matthew Jung certainly was, and that’s why he went to work for Last Crumb, and since he joined the company, it’s become one of the hottest DTC brands with a waitlist about a mile long. What was the secret to creating a massively in-demand product (other than delicious cookies of course)? Find out right here.

Tune in to learn:

How to identify your core values and set priorities as a brand. (9:30)
Why would you depprioritize popular channels? (11:00)
Is email still important? (15:45)
The most interesting things about SMS. (17:50)
The magic behind Last Crumb’s organic growth. (20:25)
Even if you think you have a great unboxing experience, you’re wrong. (25:00)
How do you differentiate yourself from the rest of the brands in your category? (30:00)

Mentions:

Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Learn more at http://www.salesforce.com/commerce

Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at

http://www.mission.org.

How Getty Images is Developing The Future of Visuals

Up Next In Commerce

08/30/22 • 32 min

Finding the best visual companion to your content is often a tough task. Getty Images has been making it easier for brands and individuals for decades. On this episode, Grant Farhall, Chief Product Officer at Getty Images, dives into the predictive trends that can be found within its search tool, plus he answers questions about how the backend search engine actually works (without giving away too much of the secret sauce of course) and how Getty is prepping for a future that’s going all-in on video and the metaverse.

Tune in to learn:

Trends in the visual and image search realm (11:00)
How to present the best visual options to customers (7:55)
Best practices with visuals and data (17:40)
Why video and the metaverse are channels to keep your eye on (29:36)

Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Learn more at http://www.salesforce.com/commerce

Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at http://www.mission.org.

Flipping Ecommerce on its Head

Up Next In Commerce

03/16/21 • 40 min

Imagine this: it’s Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year and you’re a brand with customers on your website pushing the buy button, but instead of moving them down the funnel, you stop them and interrupt the buying process to ask them, “How are you feeling right now?”

Seems like a crazy thing to do right? Especially in a world that is dominated by closing sales and doing everything possible to get a consumer to hit buy. You’re literally pausing a conversion, making a customer examine his or her activity and second guess making a purchase. Nevertheless, that was the strategy Bearaby put into practice this past holiday season and the results might just surprise you.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Kathrin Hamm, the Founder and CEO of Bearaby, tells us that that mindfulness experiment, while risky and not advised by her industry peers, paid off in big ways. Bearaby was able to gain insights into consumer behavior and gather data that helped predict whether or not a customer was likely to return a product or not. And, most importantly, Bearaby was able to build more trust with customers and foster a more authentic relationship centered around mental health and the customer’s well-being, which in today’s world goes a long way toward creating a loyal base of customers. Kathrin also explains why adding more mindfulness and behavioral queues into the customer journey could have a positive impact on return rates, overall customer satisfaction, and your NPS score.

Main Takeaways:

Do You Need This?: So many brands are trying to optimize for sales and push people through the funnel, but what if you took a step back? At Bearaby, by introducing mindfulness into the buying process and asking people how they feel throughout the process of a sale, the company was able to build trust with its customers, understand the behavior of people who returned products, and increased the overall net promoter score of the brand.
Making it Work: As a small, independent, DTC business, being agile and having the ability to accelerate a product are assets. But when you expand and begin to take on retail partnerships, your internal processes need to adjust. Rather than thinking a month of two ahead, you need to fit into a production timeline that is already planned two years in advance. To do that, it’s critical to have the right backend operations in order to analyze data and manage inventory so you can meet the needs of your partners.
Stop Selling, Start Connecting: Most brands see social media and SMS messaging as tools to sell products and get information to customers about deals or products. But what if you used those platforms to be a resource to your customers and offered them help in ways unrelated to your products? Bearaby took this road when establishing itself on social media and found that sparking natural conversations led to more curiosity about the brand overall, and subsequently led to sales with truly engaged customers.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Hello everyone and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Kathrin Hamm, the CEO and founder of Bearaby. Kathrin, welcome.

Kathrin:

Thanks so much for having me.

Stephanie:

Tell me a bit about Bearaby. I was looking at your website, I saw how amazing your weighted blankets look. They're knitted, they're awesome. I have a couple other weighted blankets, but they are nowhere near that, so tell me a little bit about the company and how you thought about creating it.

Kathrin:

The idea of creating Bearaby was really when I had sleep problems myself. I used to work for the World Bank as an economist, and I was just traveling a lot. I just had moved from Washington to the Middle East, and then from the Middle East to India, all within two years. I was traveling a lot and I was never a good sleeper, but this constant travel and jet lag really put me over the top. So I was just looking for a nat...

How Reddit Became a Font of Knowledge for Alli Reed, Founder of Stratia Skincare

Up Next In Commerce

01/20/22 • 38 min

This is a podcast about digital and ecommerce, so you already know we’re big fans of the internet. It’s a portal and a tool to give you direct access to consumers, information, and communication unlike anything that’s ever existed before. And if you’re living here in 2022 and expecting to thrive as a business owner, you better be tapping into every possible resource the internet has to offer. Alli Reed has known that for more than a decade, and her company, Stratia Skincare, got its start in large part thanks to the wealth of beauty and skincare knowledge Alli tapped into to turn an interest into a side hustle and then grow it into a multi-million dollar brand.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I talked to Alli about how she turned her hours on Reddit into a brand that keeps growing, and we talked about all the ways to attract customers, differentiate yourself, and what it takes to educate the consumer beyond just knowing what your brand is, but also what it stands for and how it operates. Enjoy!

Main Takeaways:

The Reddit Goldmine: If you are looking for an engaged audience, Reddit is one of the best places on the internet to find some. But beware, not only are Redditors engaged, they are hyper-aware of any kind of inauthentic promotion or pushing of brands. When you show up on Reddit, you have to be authentic, and in return, you will see active, informed, and oftentimes helpful folks who can take your market research to another level.
Don’t Take Our Word For It: In categories that require a bit more effort to convert customers, it’s helpful to rely on UGC and customer reviews. Rather than asking potential customers to trust you the brand, ask them to trust their peers who are singing your praises. That’s a much easier and quicker way to get someone to pull the trigger than trying to convince them just based on your marketing materials.
You’re Not What You’re Not: There is always a rush to be the first to be certain ingredient-free. Whether it’s paraben-free, gluten-free, cruelty-free, or anything else, don’t let the marketing angle of being XYZ-thing-free be your crutch. Find a way to differentiate yourself that actually has a basis in need, science, or data rather than being the first to be “anything-free.”

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Scaling 101: How Leslie Kuster, CEO of Back from Bali, Intentionally Scaled Her Business From 5 to 7 Figures on Amazon

Up Next In Commerce

09/30/21 • 37 min

I want to make money. Yep, I said it, and you should too, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner. It seems obvious, but, as my guest today will explain, that idea and saying those words out loud is what holds so many people back.

Leslie Kuster is the founder and CEO of Back from Bali, an ecommerce fashion brand that she scaled from 50k to multiple millions in just a few years. She achieved most of that growth on Amazon, a platform that is always challenging but can work wonders for your business if you know the ins and outs. She does and she shared them with us, including how Amazon has been changing its terms of service around images, what kind of SEO strategies will work well, and what it takes to connect with customers even when facing certain restrictions. Plus, Leslie has a ton of advice for all kinds of entrepreneurs, and women in particular, about what it takes to turn something that was more of a hobby into a business worth millions. Enjoy this episode!

Main Takeaways:

But Why?: Success in business comes down to having a vision and a “why” behind what you are doing as an entrepreneur. There are so many ups and downs, that if you don’t have a vision that will fuel you and motivate you through all of the hardships, then you will not make it through them.
Expanding In A Limited Way: When you think about expanding your business, you typically think about how to create a more broad product portfolio. Rather than bringing multiple new products to market, look at the product or products you have that are working already and expand those in creative ways.
The Toughest Question of All: Trying to figure out where to invest your dollars is the biggest challenge for an entrepreneur. And when you are selling successfully on Amazon or on your website, you have to ask yourself is it worth it to try to drive traffic elsewhere? It’s expensive to be competitive in different markets, particularly fashion, where there is already overcrowding. So rather than throw money at a channel or website that is competing against a sea of other challengers, shift your focus to an area where you can create a niche or where you are already having success.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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For a full transcript of this interview, click here.

Creating Customer-Driven Healthcare with Hilary Coles, Co-Founder of hims & hers

Up Next In Commerce

12/22/20 • 42 min

The fact of that matter is that the healthcare system was not built with the consumer in mind. That is, until hims & hers came along.

This three-year-old company has been making waves in the industry, and for good reason. Its platform has facilitated more than two million medical visits and is valued at more than $1.6 billion. And all of this in an industry that has been immune to disruption for decades.

hims & hers is the first true consumer healthcare brand that, through its platform, creates an easy, transparent, and high-quality experience for all those frustrated with their current healthcare option. Its mission is to help people finally feel empowered to talk about and get treated for certain conditions, and Hilary Coles, the co-founder and VP of Merchandising for the company, is responsible for making that happen.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Hilary explains why humor really is the best medicine when it comes to marketing, and she talks about how brands should approach experimentation. Plus, she provides tips to anyone who is thinking about trying to disrupt a big industry, and why she thinks it’s a risk worth taking.

Main Takeaways:

Everything the Light Touches: Talking about certain things is uncomfortable — especially when it comes to your healthcare. But for a brand to make an impact, it has to have a message, reach into those uncomfortable places, and make it okay for those you’re trying to reach to talk about them too. By embracing humor and truth in marketing, you create an authenticity that is often missing and you open the door for your target consumers to feel empowered to take action.
Social Experiments: Making experimentation and ideation a social process is one of the best ways to bring the most creative ideas to the table. When you invite everyone to contribute, and when you are honest with everyone about what ideas worked and which failed, you create an atmosphere that encourages risk-taking and you are more likely to experiment in channels or with opportunities your competitors are overlooking.
But Why?: Having an endless curiosity and need to ask “why” is the best way to disrupt an industry, and also to keep improving your processes. Too often companies or entire industries fall back on doing things the way they have always been done. The company that comes in and consistently questions how and why things are done a certain way and then changes them is the one that consumers will begin to take notice of.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, I'm really excited to be chatting Hilary Coles, the co-founder at hims and hers. Hilary, welcome.

Hilary:

Thank you so much for having me.

Stephanie:

Yeah, I'm really excited. I think we're going to have such a good conversation and there's so many areas where we can take it. I was doing a bit of research, and there are so many case studies built around you guys. Did you know that?

Hilary:

I didn't actually know that. Is that true?

Stephanie:

Yeah, I found at least three and so many articles diving into your business model. So, there's a lot of content I want to cover, and maybe first we need to start with what is hims and hers?

Hilary:

hims and hers is really the first consumer health care brand, and what that means is that we prioritize the consumer and really thought through every aspect of the business in order to suit the consumer, in order to give them choice, in order to give them control, in order to give them transparency into how they take care of themselves because we thought it was way too hard to take care of yourself today and navigating the health care system is incredibly difficult. And that's really because it's never been built with the consumer in mind, and so everything we've done from ...

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FAQ

How many episodes does Up Next In Commerce have?

Up Next In Commerce currently has 287 episodes available.

What topics does Up Next In Commerce cover?

The podcast is about Retail, E-Commerce, Marketing, Founder, Entrepreneurship, Online Business, Ecommerce, Podcasts, Online Marketing, Ceo, Shopify and Business.

What is the most popular episode on Up Next In Commerce?

The episode title 'Breaking In By Breaking Free: How Zak Williams is Building PYM to Advocate for Mental Health' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Up Next In Commerce?

The average episode length on Up Next In Commerce is 42 minutes.

How often are episodes of Up Next In Commerce released?

Episodes of Up Next In Commerce are typically released every 4 days, 23 hours.

When was the first episode of Up Next In Commerce?

The first episode of Up Next In Commerce was released on May 8, 2020.

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Top 10 Up Next In Commerce Episodes

FAQ

How many episodes does Up Next In Commerce have?

What topics does Up Next In Commerce cover?

What is the most popular episode on Up Next In Commerce?

What is the average episode length on Up Next In Commerce?

How often are episodes of Up Next In Commerce released?

When was the first episode of Up Next In Commerce?

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