Future Commerce

How do you scale truly personal customer experiences? One-to-one CX takes time, talent, and experience. But when you train your customers to be your frontline CX team, that's where the magic happens. In this episode of Step by Step, CEO and Founder of women's swimwear brand, Andie, unpacks how they use technology to scale their brand promise while making every interaction personal. Hosted by Simpl...

Step by Step continues with Episode 2! "Selling is Good Service" says Kate Showalter. She should know - Kate is the Senior Director for Customer Service at Crate and Barrel, overseeing global CX for the storied retailer. Since COVID under Kate's direction, Crate and Barrel has nimbly transitioned their once store-bound frontline sales operation to a fully-digital-capable organization. In...

Welcome to Step by Step Season 3 by Future Commerce, presented by Gladly. This season of Step by Step is all about customer experience. Consumers have reimagined the customer experience, and they expect far more from a service interaction than issue resolution. The service experience is now as important, if not more important, than the product experience. As customer expectations are evolving fast...

Who is Michelle Grant? Michelle got her start studying the retail industry in 2015 with Euromonitor, focusing on overall global strategy. She started this year at Salesforce in their Strategy Insights group with a focus on technology in retail and consumer goods. Michelle just launched Becoming Retail with Rob Garth—a content series focusing on executive interviews to understand the digital transf...

Shipping is extraordinarily complicated Shipium helps businesses by providing the tech behind the complicated processes of shipping to consumers. Jason says that shipping is a series of events that needs to be coordinated well to give customers the optimal experience: “Our belief is that coordination should happen with good technology.” - Jason Murray Jason had a long career at Amazon in which his...

We discuss digital shopping experiences, their experimental evolution, Instacart, CARLY brands, and more.  The New DIY DIY used to have a connotation of poor quality or poor craftsmanship but today, it’s more indicative of participation. Online marketplaces are booming with consumers and creators having more meaningful connections with items that could otherwise be more easily purchased. Partnerin...

Today we acquire skills online, and those skills shape our purchasing habits. Our newest report dives deep into the Passion Economy, and the era of "do it yourself". We explore what this means for brands, and what retail stands to gain. Get the report today: https://futurecommerce.fm/thenewdiy Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collect...

Damian Soong, co-founder and CEO of Form Nutrition joins us to talk about Form and building a B-Corp brand that serves a wide audience. The New DIY DIY used to have a connotation of poor quality or poor craftsmanship but today, it’s more indicative of participation. Online marketplaces are booming with consumers and creators having more meaningful connections with items that could otherwise be mor...

In this episode, we talk about marketplaces, subscription services, the K-Shaped economy recovery, and more. “The Future of Every Brand is a Marketplace” In Future Commerce #041 , Sucharita Mulpuru said that marketplaces are where businesses are going to thrive. “Consumers want more in their online shopping experience and they want to be able to transact more often with the brands that they know a...

Jack DeFuria, Chief Digital Officer and Co-Founder of Parade , joins the show as he talks about founding Parade while in college with his co-founder, Cami Téllez , how Parade approaches their brand, and the pursuit of building America’s next great underwear company.  What is Parade? Parade is a women’s underwear brand focused on ages 18-30. They were able to connect with potential customers in the...

Human Centricity Sari is an early stage investor, a lead strategist at a startup studio, and a newsletter writer. “To me, being human-centered means you’re far more obsessed with the problem you’re solving than you are with a product that you’ve built. And what that gives you is the flexibility to evolve with your customer.” - Sari Azout “Being human-centered ultimately means that you don’t really...

The New Dadaism Dadaism was an intellectual movement post-WWI that focused on subverting the serious. In response to the popularity of minimalism, maximalism has been on the rise. Brands have been using absurdity to reach their markets - specifically with Gen Z and Millennial brands. An Exploration in Brands in this Moment “Topicals really is the Anti-Bland” - Phillip Topicals is a skin care brand...

Jackson Jeyanayagam, VP of DTC at Clorox, joins us today to talk about Clorox’s DTC strategy, launching a new brand for an underserved, generation segment in the marketplace, and how his past experiences have prepared him and brought a fresh perspective to his current role. What’s Jeyanayagam’s story? Jeyanayagam started at a PR agency working with T-Mobile. Whenever the Sidekick was launched and...

What is BEHAVE? BEHAVE makes candy that is better for you: low sugar, natural ingredients, no artificial ingredients, and good taste. Currently, BEHAVE offers two options of gummies, sweet and sour. BEHAVE started from a lack of alternative options in the candy department, which typically had people giving up candy altogether. Originally, BEHAVE planned to be a mix of DTC and retail. Due to COVID,...

We chat with Ingrid Milman Cordy about business growth and decline in 2020 and Walmart’s new partnership.  Our Economy The way our economy is set up, big businesses are bound to thrive, even during economic disruption like COVID-19. Small businesses seemed to be the ones to cope best with the disruption, but the distinction of “essential businesses” shifted from small business to big business. Bus...

Read the Retail Rebirth Report here . Read Insiders #045: The New Dada Here . Read Insiders #046: The New Formal Here . Find us at Futurecommerce.fm , or reach out to us on Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , or LinkedIn . Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at Hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners! Hosted by Simpl...

We chat with Nilla Ali , the Senior Vice President of Commerce at BuzzFeed.   Can content and commerce coexist within a platform? How does the shift into shopping digitally affect the way that retailers and advertisers reach to consumers? CONTENT AND COMMERCE There has been an Increase in traffic and consumption on BuzzFeed during COVID-19. BuzzFeed Shopping has been introduced, a native checkout...

We talk with Jeremy Cai, CEO of Italic . We discuss what Italic is and how it is different than other DTC brands today. ITALIC Italic offers subscription memberships with access to a thousand plus products at-cost - stepping away from mark-up retailing. Italic is moving less in a brand specific, single category product direction and more into a value driven lifestyle. Italic’s ‘secret’ lies in par...

What is NBC Universal Checkout NBC Universal Checkout is a native shopping experience embedding within any NBC content page. Whether it's a text based article, a static page, or even a video, it can be transformed into a native shopping experience. When the viewer encounters a product, they can click on the product to see more information about it, add it to a shopping cart, pay, and check out all...

What makes a brand meaningful? We sought to answer this question in our recent report, Nine by Nine: 81 Brands Changing Our World . In this episode, Part 2 of 2, we sit down and reflect on the report and the categories included.   See Part 1: Episode 165: What Makes A Brand Meaningful? Purpose Driven Brands Purpose driven brands are focused on having alignment with their worldview. They state a pu...

Listen to Part 1 of the Nine by Nine Retrospect here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, we chat with Kyle Hoff, co-founder of Floyd Furniture.    What is Floyd Furniture’s approach? Floyd started from looking at the amount of furniture consumed and thrown out after its use and the idea that furniture can be sustainable, adaptable, and kept for long periods of time. They began with a Kickstarter campaign based around their core idea and kept it simple with one product...

What is Profitero? Profitero is a platform for eCommerce performance, measurement, analytics, and optimization for brands primarily in Europe, North America, and Asia. Profitero isn’t an agency, though it has similarities. Profitero doesn’t actually perform the work for the brands, but does create data and create tech to make that data valuable. Agencies have seemed to be expendable or interchange...

We all feel it: the rhythm of retail has been disrupted. Current events have changed the way consumers shop and Future Commerce has partnered with Gladly to bring you Retail Rebirth: a report that will inform retailers what this "new normal" is and how consumers plan to spend. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of pers...

DAILYLOOK is a personal styling service that sends you a box of hand-picked fashion items right to your door every month. In this interview, Brian shares with us how he started his first business at 15 years old, created and then sold a newsletter with over 450k subscribers to a poker company, and then raised over $11M to build his company DAILYLOOK. Brian uncovers the challenges he faced from piv...