The Modern Retail Podcast

Barbie is Mattel's most iconic brand, but the toy company has more than 400 others that CEO and president Richard Dickson is, in his own words, looking to revive. In an age where smartphones and games like Fortnite present stiff competition for analog toys, Dickson says the company needs to create media everywhere it can. "Continuing to be where our consumers are means, today, being everywhere," D...

Some DTC founders pick a sector just because they spy an opportunity. Bloomscape founder Justin Mast said did that too with his direct-to-consumer plant company, Bloomscape, that he founded in 2018. But he had a bit of a leg up, as he's also a fifth-generation greenhouse grower. His parents met in a greenhouse, in fact. Bloomscape ships thousands of plants a week, including full-grown ones that on...

Thrive Market, which first launched in 2014, had been growing at a rate of 40% a year before the pandemic. Now, with new customers joining the membership-based online grocery service, that growth rate has more than doubled to 90% a year, according to the company's co-founder and CTO Sasha Siddhartha. "We were already a digital native experience, so there were lots of parts of the business that sca...

Most companies use social media as a way to point consumers to the brand's website. In hot sauce company Truff's case, social media -- and TikTok, in particular -- is an endgame in itself. "They eventually become customers, but we don't tell them, you know 'go to our link and buy our sauce,'" Truff co-founder Nick Guillen said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "We don't want you to go to the link and...

Jonathan Wahl sees the boom in kitchenware companies as a good thing for the sector as a whole. "Seeing others recognize the same opportunity reaffirms that yes, we're on the right track," Wahl, who co-founded the cookware company Abbio last year with his brother, said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "In terms of competing, I believe that at the end of the day the best products are going to win out....

2020 hasn't been a good year to travel or go on vacation, and Americans are spending more on home improvements instead. Furniture brand Article was lucky enough to corner that market with a DTC model that eschews the need for expensive floorspace that has gone unused for several months this year. "We saw this perfect storm for us, where not only were we effectively reaching a whole lot more people...

Sam Dennigan launched Strong Roots with a single item -- sweet potato fries -- in Ireland in 2015. The frozen vegetables company has since raised $18.3 million from private equity firm Goode Partners to expand into the U.S., where Dennigan is now based. His experience on both sides of the Atlantic helps him highlight some of the competitive differences among markets. "The key difference between th...

Back when GT Dave, founder of GT's Living Food, single-handedly proved that there was a market for kombucha in the U.S., "probiotic" was hardly a buzzword. "Fortunately today, that hurdle or barrier is no longer there," Dave said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Kombucha is big business; sales exceeded $480 million in 2019, according to Nielsen. GT's Living Foods, which was founded in 1995, makes for...

Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo wants you to know that when you pay for cleaning supplies at the grocery stores, you're mostly buying water. "Oftentimes consumers are paying really for a new plastic bottle -- and water, which we already have at home," Paiji Yoo said on the Modern Retail Podcast, which was recorded live during our Modern Retail Virtual Summit this week. Blueland sells concentrated tab...

It took a trip to London for Emily Schildt to realize that American grocery stores could do better. "I came back personally really yearning for a grocery store experience like I had there," she said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "They were just beautiful spaces in which to shop -- gorgeous products, but really thoughtful display and design." Last year Schildt founded Pop Up Grocer, a traveling sho...

Piggy banks aren't especially in vogue, but the idea behind them sticks. By saving up a little over the long haul, you can pool quite a bit of money — enough, in Reel's experience, to pay for a luxury handbag, furniture or some electronics. The personal finance app lets customers save up for specific items. Users pick something and commit to wiring Reel a few dollars a day for it, setting an entic...

Closed spaces, mingling strangers and loud music to shout over -- bars seem purpose-built for spreading the coronavirus. According to Bacardi CMO John Burke, that means people will be doing their drinking, and less of it, at home. "This summer there'll be a lot more drinking out of home because people feel much more comfortable social distancing at home," Burke said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "...

Cleo Capital's Sarah Kunst thinks the investing landscape focuses a great deal on the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- in plainspeak, that's stuff that isn't really essential. Or, in Kunst's words, the kind of product that answers the question: "what will make you feel better in the moment?" Her investments are in companies that supply basic needs. "There's the whole thing on the bottom: wher...

Before the pandemic, the zero (or low) sugar beverage brand Sanzo had all the scrappy upstart charm and aesthetic of a DTC brand. But, it still sold mostly through wholesale -- 70 to 80%, in founder Sandro Roco's estimate. That's changed. "Since the pandemic, it's completely inverted, and even more extremely so," Roco said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "During this pandemic, if you're looking at C...

Aishwarya Iyer started Brightland, an olive oil company, in 2018 with the idea of describing the products like wine and marketing it like a beauty brand. "Beauty leads the way in terms of talking about benefits, packaging -- the shine and glimmer that beauty's able to do, food just isn't able to do that. Maybe there are some standouts!" Iyer said on the Modern Retail Podcast. What's more, many DTC...

Business lost to the pandemic has rebounded for StockX, an online marketplace where people selling and buying items -- sneakers, mainly -- negotiate on a price before StockX provides authentication and shipping. "We've seen an incredible return to activity in the marketplace," StockX CMO Deena Bahri said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "By mid-April we started to see an incredible return back to nor...

The professional world may have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, but there is one thing that still powers our workday: coffee. The subscription-based Trade Coffee, for one, has seen its mail-in customer base go up by a factor of 10, alongside other food startups that have seen a bump in subscriptions. Earlier this year, company CMO Melissa Spencer Barnes told Modern Retail that the comp...

As existing commerce companies adapt to survive a global pandemic, Jimmy Wu instead launched one. Cat Person sells cat food, toys, furniture and treats in a market that Wu sees as skewed toward dog owners. The coronavirus gave pause to Wu and his co-founder, Harry's alumnus Lambert Wang. "If we were in another category in another industry -- selling travel accessories, luxury fashion -- we probabl...

Retail stores are slowly reopening, but Christiane Lemieux, founder of the DTC furniture brand The Inside, still thinks people will want to invest most in the place they're spending most of their time: the home. "What you will be doing is focusing your time and disposable spend on making your home into everything it should be -- not only for now, but for what the future of our lives is going to lo...

Looking to the past doesn't always work. For one, many current founders or CEOs were "still in high school" during the last economic crisis, according to Homebrew partner and co-founder Hunter Walk. For another, even for those entrepreneurs who survived the last global downturn, the big takeaways might not apply to current circumstances. "The answers from those entrepreneurs in 2008 may or not be...

For a time, Grove Collaborative was one of the rare places where you could order reasonably-priced hand sanitizer online. That availability wasn't for a lack of demand. "Demand had been building, and all of a sudden for a week it was off the charts. And we had a big decision to make that week," CEO Stuart Landesberg said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "Do we want to prioritize our existing customer...

Coefficient Capital co-founder Franklin Isacson describes himself as a cautious investor, especially in times of uncertainty like today. That comes in handy during a time of crisis. For Isacson, this has been a good time particularly to invest in certain companies, especially in grocery and consumer goods that can weather a recession. "The new funds that are being deployed over the next 24, 36 mon...

Biossance president Catherine Gore has always considered skin care as medically significant, and believes customers will be more inclined to share that thinking as coronavirus lockdowns continue around the world. "Our skin is our largest organ, and it's also our first line of defense against outside aggressors," Gore said on the latest Glossy Beauty podcast. Education is a big part of Biossance's...

If Nick Ling's latest brand launch wasn't so right for this moment, he would have delayed bringing it to market. "If I was launching a new brand I'd wait. There's just too much change in consumer behavior," Ling said on the Modern Retail Podcast. But Open Spaces, the second brand under the umbrella company Pattern (where Ling is CEO) is all about getting the most out of the place many consumers ar...

Through this crisis, Burrow CEO Stephen Kuhl is sticking to a piece of advice he got back when the furniture store was just another startup at Y Combinator. "The advice we got then was 'just launch your first product. Get it out there into people's hands and you'll get feedback,' Kuhl said on the Modern Retail Podcast. That's what the company has done with a virtual design consultation program del...