Ingrid: [00:00:22] Hello and welcome to Infinite Shelf, the human-centric retail podcast. I am your host, Ingrid Milman Cordy, and welcome to Season 3. And honestly, I'm super, super excited about Season 3 in general. But the thing I'm the most excited about in Season 3 is the introduction of Orchid Bertelsen. I'm so excited to have Orchid here because she brings such a level of expertise, such a great perspective, and she's also really fun to talk to, which is really important around here. So Orchid, thank you so much for joining us as the host for Season 3. And I just can't wait to get on this journey with you. Welcome.

Orchid: [00:01:40] Thank you so much. Ingrid. Yeah, I'm super thrilled. I know we have so much to talk about. And just even in the planning stages of this, we get into very friendly debates, which I love because it gets a little boring if you just agree with each other all the time. Although we certainly have those moments where we yell at each other about how much we agree with each other, which I also love. So I could not be more thrilled to be here and to go on this journey with you and happy to share some background about myself and how I got here. Does that sound good to you, Ingrid?

Ingrid: [00:02:13] Oh, please. Yes, absolutely.

Orchid: [00:02:15] Okay, great. So I am currently the Chief Operating Officer at Common Thread Collective, which is a growth marketing agency. I've been here for about two years, working across a lot of eCommerce clients, whether it's clients who started in very traditional avenues in brick-and-mortar going eCommerce or digitally native darlings. Prior to this, I spent about six years at Nestle USA as the Head of Digital Innovation and Strategy. And I would say my responsibilities kind of ran the gamut from building Tollhouse's first, digital human using artificial intelligence, which apparently is very relevant, again.

Ingrid: [00:02:58] {laughter} No, AI? Really?

Orchid: [00:03:00] That's so strange. And also standing out the DTC capabilities within Nestle because as many of you may know across, the company is over 150 years old... And DTC, I would say, past ten years has really been setting the pace for how brands should be engaging with consumers digitally. So while I was at Nestle, I really became passionate about the eCommerce space and found myself gravitating towards small and medium businesses. Although one would argue that any company or any business smaller than Nestle is just every business. But that's really kind of what drove that change or that career change for me to go from large enterprise, very traditional, very retailer centric in order to focus on eCommerce.

Ingrid: [00:03:54] Totally. Yeah. I mean, and it's funny because we sort of approached our careers in completely diametrically opposite directions, which I think has made for some very interesting conversations one on one that I hope that we'll be able to start sharing with the audience. But like I grew up in eCommerce first, DTC, always with like big companies. I worked at the Estee Lauder companies and so on. But so now I'm at Nestle, but the other side of Nestle, Nestlé Health Science, and you would think we met through the Nestle network, but of course we didn't because that's how the world works. But I just find so many exciting and fun nuggets of perspective and information that we kind of like come together from our different angles and share. And so I'm just excited to go on this journey of Season 3 with you. And I think if you heard the wrap-up for Season 2, we teased a little bit about what the season was going to be about and the season is all about DTC and what do we do with DTC now? We're a good ten years into the DTC journey, we are no longer, or DTC is no longer, but we are still very much the belles of the ball. {laughter}

Orchid: [00:05:08] Always.

Ingrid: [00:05:09] Always. Or the disruptors, however you want to look at it. I think sort of both things are true and it's been really interesting because our careers and our time in the workforce, frankly, due to our age, has been very parallel to DTC. And so there's a lot of commonality between sort of these aging millennials in the workforce and DTC and how it becomes a mature business and how do we continue to think about DTC and how do we evolve? How do we evolve as people and people who are hopefully adding value to the people that we work with, the companies that we help build and advise, and how do we add value to the world and what do we what are we putting out into the world that makes sense, that is beyond just thinking about things differently? Because it is important to always think about things differently. But I think there's a part that it starts going from the disruptor phase into, okay, now what? This maintenance phase. And there's so much to explore there and I'm just excited about coming along that journey with you all. And definitely Orchid on Season 3. So I'm so happy that you're here.

Orchid: [00:06:25] Same 100%. I mean, even before Nestle, I was creative agency side and consulting side. And I would say to build on what you said about us coming up with or maturing with DTC, I would argue that's the same with social media.

Ingrid: [00:06:41] Totally.

Orchid: [00:06:42] I refuse. I reject the label geriatric millennial, but I will accept millenni-old. And I think it's interesting that we have lived through so much of digital history, right? I remember being ten years old and signing on to Prodigy, going online for the first time. At that time, I probably shouldn't have done that unsupervised. But, you know, hindsight. And then Mark Zuckerberg and I are the same age. So Facebook really launched my sophomore year of college. And so we grew up with that. And DTC, when you think about Warby Parker, I mean Warby Parker, I want to say launched probably around 2010 because I was in New York at the time and it was Warby Parker, Bonobos. My husband had an online shirt company and I would say that DTC has followed that Gartner hype cycle where there was peak hype cycle of cheap CPMs on Facebook, and there was a lot of arbitrage that was happening. And I think that if we fast forward to 2022, that was the year that nobody expected. The quote that I continue to use with my team to describe what happened in 2022 leading into this year is a Warren Buffett quote. And he says, "You don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out."

Ingrid: [00:08:04] Oh my God, Orchid. I literally said that to my team yesterday. I swear I'm not even kidding. Yesterday. And it's so true. And I love that you brought up such a valid point about social media and DTC, and they're just inextricably linked. [00:08:22] There is no DTC without social media, and there just would never have been. They complement each other. They enable each other to exist. [00:08:32] One of them purchases all of their media from social media and is their biggest customer. And then the other just allows them that ability to go direct to consumer. We were thinking about, I was talking about this with a colleague the other day where it used to be that the packaging team, the people who designed the actual physical packaging for a product was the brand strategy team or the marketing team because ultimately, the only way that you can talk about your product to a consumer was through your packaging on the shelf or through your packaging in a visual likely print ad. And so you really did have all of your communication to a consumer through packaging, which made total sense. Enter social media, to your point, and it's almost like I liken it to The Wizard of Oz, so it was like this black and white world where it was like very simple. You have your packaging and you have to talk about your claims and you talk about your brand colors and your font and all of these really still very important things. But then you open up social media and all of these other ways to connect to your consumer directly, and it's like the color opens up in the world. And all of a sudden these brands that are 1 or 2 dimensional have to become three-dimensional. You become like where you have to have a tone of voice. Are you coming through as a friend? Are you coming through as a trusted advisor? Are you being a big sister or an authoritative figure in their life? There are all of these characteristics that start to become necessary for a brand when you have social media that enables both. It enables the ability for a brand to go direct to consumer because now you have this connection that you need to foster and build with your consumers. And then you also have the social media piece where now you have access to actually tell those stories and tell those jokes if you want to tell a joke or give those statistics, if that's your brand and it just completely changes the game. And that I think is one of the components, spoiler alert, that I think is going to live on forever. That is one of the things that DTC, the floodgates that DTC or the Pandora's box, I should say, that DTC opened, that social media enabled that is just table stakes at this point.

Orchid: [00:11:23]  [00:12:05]I'll add to that that the combination of social media and DTC really inherently sparked the change in power dynamics between brand and consumer. Prior to social media, if you look at television, if you look at out-of-home, if you look at packaging, the brand was exactly what the brand told the consumer they were. It [00:12:27] was very much push messaging. And now with social media and with DTC, I think that is an interesting offer that DTC has to their consumers is to say, "Hey, build with us. Let's get your feedback. Let's tighten the feedback loop. What do you think about the product?" You've got the founder emailing the end consumer. I was just DMing on Instagram with a couple of founders this weekend giving them feedback on their product. And I remember when Gin Lane rebranded and pivoted to Pattern brands and they published this manifesto on Medium that I thought was fascinating. And one of the things that really jumped out to me was this idea of they weren't direct to consumer, they were direct with consumer. And I think that's so incredibly powerful. And I think that that really summarizes very well, again, the power dynamic shift from brand to consumer. And then now this idea of doing things together, which can be very scary for brand owners.

Ingrid: [00:13:31] A hundred percent. And I would also say there's for sure a scary part and a vulnerability part that owners need to have in order to be open and just like not always assume that they have all the answers and start to bring in their consumers. But then there's even a scary part with consumers where sometimes and I think we're in this phase right now, this is truly like how I feel, that consumers are actually kind of tired of having to contribute to be part of it. I think they want to feel like they are connected and that that brand understands them. But I really think that we're in a place now where there's so much choice fatigue and this is just a result of all of these disruptor brands coming in and all of these options now all of a sudden flooding the market after decades of just really being only like 3 or 4 options. And I think that consumers now, they don't want more choices. They want to be, and this is, of course, Scott Galloway says this, so I can't take credit, but I totally agree. But he says, you know, consumers don't want more choices. They want more confidence in their choices. And I think that's another piece that is needed to be considered by brands. What is that balance between making it feel like you have a dialog with your consumers and you're connected to your consumers, but ultimately if you're making the greens powder that they take every day, like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing designing a greens powder. I know that I probably need more greens in my life and I want an easy way to do it.

Orchid: [00:14:38] In powder form. {laughter}

Ingrid: [00:15:15] In powder form. And I want to make sure I just get it in and everything else is a bonus from there, right?

Orchid: [00:15:21] Yes.

Ingrid: [00:15:22] And I don't know how much magnesium you need to put in that. Can you just figure that out for me? But I'll tell you that, yes, I am probably not eating nearly enough fruits and vegetables as I'm supposed to, even though I have hopefully a very balanced diet.

Orchid: [00:15:36] I eat way too much pasta. Yeah, and I think that confidence will come from a couple of different sources. And so Andrea Hernandez of Snaxshot really coined the phrase "Curation is a service." So when we think about this idea of the infinite shelf of infinite choice and that confidence... I mean there's a saying that people will believe absolute strangers on the Internet over their friends and families and certainly over brands. So you do see the Erewhon's of the world, you see Foxtrot, you see I mean, even Goop, right? What they end up doing is they become this trusted voice in the category that they operate in. And sometimes it crosses categories, but they're very specific about their audience. So people lean in because that platform or that brand in and of itself has credibility. And they say, "Oh, Erewhon. If Erewhon says it's good, then I'm just going to buy whatever they tell me," effectively.

Ingrid: [00:16:35] Yeah.

Orchid: [00:16:35] And so we do talk about this idea of infinite choice or the illusion of choice, because even as an operator and as a business owner, you can't afford to offer infinite choice. So how do you design your offerings in a way where the consumer feels like they can choose something that speaks specifically to them? But at the end of the day, you still only have maybe a ten product assortment.

Ingrid: [00:17:01] Right. It's that 80/20 rule where it's like 80% are the tried and true things that you go to. And then the 20% is a little bit of that here's what's new and trending and let's try this together and kind of jump into the deep end kind of thing. It's funny because the power of that trust used to live exclusively with retailers. So you would go to Target and you would go, "Okay, this is available for purchase in Target," or in Costco. Costco is like the...

Orchid: [00:17:31] I trust both with my life. So you're speaking my love language. {laughter}

Ingrid: [00:17:35] {laughter} Don't even. Brian is salivating right now hearing me talk about Costco. But so those two retailers, I would argue they've built their business on having incredibly savvy buyers, incredibly savvy people who stock their shelves and design what their store experiences look like and that power is still incredibly strong and hot. I know if I go to Costco, that Kirkland signature brand, they're giving me Gray Goose vodka. They say Kirkland signature on the bottle but I know it's private label Gray Goose. And so the savvy consumers are always going to know that. But my point is that power has always been with retailers. It's very interesting to now see, I think, enabled by the ethos of DTC, maybe not the business constructs of what DTC is as a single channel, but the ethos of DTC being "We are one brand and we are going to be incredibly narrowly focused on this audience, this type of consumer," thinking about the Goop consumer that you brought up. That brings a very, very specific human into mind. And that person is going to be serviced by this particular brand. And then like I said, it used to be retailers and now it's brands. And I think that power shift or the ability to shift that power is magical if you can harness it if you can do it.

Orchid: [00:19:04] And I'm excited to debate you on this because I actually think that I agree with all of that. And I do think the power dynamic is shifting back because the barrier to entry is lower of something that looks and feels DTC. And so I do think [00:19:21] one of the biggest threats to DTC is private label. [00:19:23] And I think that you see that with Target. Love Target. They have such amazing private-label brands. And as moms, Mondo Llama is one of my favorite ones and that is their kids crafts line. And they have all these little crafts packages for $5 or less. And Mondo Llama, it is private label. You would never think that by looking at how it is packaged, how it is designed. But they effectively launched overnight with, in 200, I think, 200 Target stores and having the front page takeover of their app. And so that power of scale is just really unrivaled. I think.

Ingrid: [00:20:01] I agree. I would say, though, that there is no Mondo Llama without the foundations that the DTC brands created.

Orchid: [00:20:10] Yes, I agree.

Ingrid: [00:20:12] The reason it feels like it's so specific to your needs is because what Target does, I'm a Target stan. So just to be clear...

Orchid: [00:20:22] Me too.

Ingrid: [00:20:24] Just to be very clear. But I'm about to say something that might not... If I work at Target, I'm going to give me a side eye, but I do genuinely feel this. They are not the innovators. They're not the people who are going to disrupt, but their ears are to the ground. And so they're like, "I'm going to take these great ideas and I'm going to learn from what is happening in popular culture what brands are resonating with mothers, with parents, with families, and then I'm going to distill that magic into these very, very tangible things, whether it's their packaging or their fonts or all of the branding things, they're brilliant at doing that and not making it feel cheesy or made up or secondary. Which I think is the problem with a lot of private-label brands. It just feels cheaper. And Target was like, "Well, why do we have to do that? Why do we have to dumb down our private-label brands? Why don't we just make them as cool and rad and DTC-esque as the brands themselves?" And I just applaud them for that. But I don't think they're ever the innovators. So I think it's this combination. They need DTC and then DTC needs them to scale.

Orchid: [00:21:43] Yeah, I agree. And I think part of it is that large companies don't, there is no reward to be an innovator in a niche space. Where their strength is, is to be a fast follow. They can take a good idea and by the time that it reaches a large enough audience or a large enough audience adoption, they can just put massive scale behind it. And so the way I think about it is that if we were to title our episodes like Star Wars episodes, I think it's Return of Private Label because it's not your mom's private label, right? I think Kirkland is an interesting case study in and of itself, which we can talk about in a future episode. But the fact that Costco sells Kirkland branded sweatshirts and I almost got one, by the way.

Ingrid: [00:22:27] I saw one on someone very fashionable the other day and I was like, "This is so smart on them."

Orchid: [00:22:33] Yes. So I actually need to buy it online. It wasn't in Costco. And so there's one that has it's a sweatshirt with Kirkland embroidered across it. And then there was another one that just had little Costco logos repeating all over the sweatshirt. It was like $21. I was like, "Of course I'm going to do this. I'm a Costco stan."

Ingrid: [00:22:50] Is it even Costco that's selling it, though? Or are there third parties that are?

Orchid: [00:22:53] No, Costco is selling it. It's on their site. It's really quite remarkable. Though I'm sure you can go on any of those other sites and get a knockoff one. But I do think, I'm excited to continue to explore this idea of brand, of brand interpretation. And I think [00:23:10] in terms of power dynamics in this new world where we don't have this laser focus on DTC. DTC does not equal eCommerce. DTC is a subset of that. [00:23:22] And I think that what we're seeing, too, is a lot of these DTC purists kind of growing up and understanding that the world is far bigger, which is why a lot of the conversations it feels like we're in Groundhog's Day, right when we talk about MMM or attribution or awareness drivers where you can't really measure it or tie it to conversion. All angles of attribution that I think large companies have been battling for decades. And it's just interesting that the DTC purists are kind of "rediscovering" that.

Ingrid: [00:23:58] It is fascinating to me. And I think that DTC, ultimately it started as a channel, right? So it was like you had your website probably on Shopify, if you were lucky enough to start when they were starting because otherwise, it was very difficult. But you still did that. And it was a place to sell direct to consumer. And then what happened was [00:24:25], I don't think they realized this at the time, but they were creating the blueprint for what a modern brand activation looks like. And so consumers went to Glossier or Warby Parker or Bonobos and they learned, "Oh, I could have a relationship like this with a brand." And it kind of opened up this world where and I'll use, you know, it's the Pandora's Box thing again, where it became slowly over time, I'd say it took about ten years to get there, but now they're kind of looking at everything in their lives as something that represents who they are on this much deeper level. And so it graduated to not just being a sales channel, but being like a brand ethos or a marketing strategy. And I'll be the first person to admit how important that is while at the same time, out of the other end of my mouth, I'm going to say not every brand needs to touch your heart.  [00:25:37]My window cleaner, like my Windex or whatever. I don't actually, I don't need that to be an extension of who I am as a human being. I just need to clean my windows.

Orchid: [00:25:50] {laughter} Yeah, totally. And I think that [00:25:52] along with the rise of DTC and this idea that you can get what you want immediately in the way that you want it, and this increased focus on what the digital shopping experience is, that also happened at the time of like the erosion of the in-store experience. [00:26:09]

Ingrid: [00:26:09] Yes.

Orchid: [00:26:10] And so I think that DTC actually gained much more traction because soon that experience just outshined the in-store shopping experience because how many times you'd go into a store, you're going to a mall likely, and you're fighting for parking spaces. You're walking forever. You don't know where the store is. You go in and there's a limited offering because there's, again, an infinite shelf online. You have a much larger offering. And so you go in store, you don't find the thing that you want or you find the thing that you want and they don't have your size. And so I do think those things happened simultaneously to create this perfect storm. So over the last five years, I would say, retail dollars are also kind of rethinking what that in-store experience needs to feel like and look like and using digital as an extension of it or an enhancement.

Ingrid: [00:27:06] The smart ones are. Yes, I would agree. And again, we keep saying this word and it's so played out and I kind of hate continuously saying it, but the word disruption, when you really think about it, you can only disrupt something that is primed for disruption. So it basically is a reflection, to your point, of retailers, physical retailers and the more traditional retailers that have been around for 50 or 100 years that have been getting away, frankly, with not thinking about their consumers and not improving the experience or the product and actually kind of the opposite. In the chase for expanded profitability, they've actually decreased, so there's less... So think about the years, the few years before DTC really, really became a thing. You walked into that mall experience that you were saying. And the hairs on my arms sit up because it's so icky. The people that they hired were not trained properly and not qualified to talk about the products. If you had actual questions, God help you. And it was like then you bought, let's say you bought and you invested in a cashmere sweater or something like that. It was nowhere near the quality that it was the years prior, and so it was this combination of like this really stale in-store experience, these really stale brands, and these brands that are trying to find efficiencies. So they're going offshore with their manufacturing. They're finding different materials. Everything starts to become a blend versus like 100% cashmere or wool or whatever, and all of those things. And then you have all of these younger brands that are like, "Oh, I'm so tired of..." And every, every single founder story is that exact same story. Like the Warby Parker story. Why do glasses need to cost $600? Casper. Casper the mattress. Yeah. It's like all of them. And those were real consumer problems. People never set out to go and buy a mattress in a box like that wasn't a thing. But they were like, "Look, this is actually going to be faster, cheaper, smarter, better for you." And so they had this go-to-market ethos that I think was necessary and ultimately is a response to the classical and traditional retailers just falling asleep at the wheel a little bit. And now I think everyone's waking up. And I think [00:29:42] the people that are going to have these more successful businesses, omnichannel going forward, are the ones that just are constantly innovating. They're making their in-store experience better. They're making their online presence better. They're improving their products. And I think that's a beautiful thing. [00:29:58]

Orchid: [00:29:58] Yeah, absolutely. I will blame the in-store experience on Abercrombie. I mean, remember when we were in high school and my mom hated to go into those stores with me because it was so loud, so dark. They were pumping all the perfume through their vents. And to your point about customer service. They weren't hired or trained. The staff in-store weren't hired or trained to deliver customer service. They were there to look like models modeling the clothes. I think, in fact, they called them models. That I think is really fascinating because they looked at in-store as a marketing tool, as a way to reestablish the lifestyle that you are buying into rather than the $100 sweatshirt with Abercrombie and Fitch on top of it. And so that worked until it didn't. And so I think even the re-rise, I guess, of Abercrombie and this new digital age, but they had to fix their product, I think that's a fascinating case study for us to look at as well. But I do think like all of those things and what we're coming down from is the boom and the promise of DTC, because a lot of those companies were floated by venture dollars when there was plenty of it and so profitability wasn't a challenge. So they could continue to invest in things that didn't have an ROI for three years or five years payback period because everybody pointed at Amazon as, "Well, Amazon's not profitable." It's like, okay, well that's missing the forest for the trees here. And so back to our Warren Buffett quote. [00:31:30] The tide has receded. And so I think what you're seeing now is that the strongest, most holistic thinking brands will win when they view every channel as a lever that they can pull. And I think the smartest business people who balance business and experience will win. [00:31:48] But I think a lot of those folks who were very idealistic when it came to DTC, they didn't have to have the financial discipline of running a business because they rode the wave of venture dollars and then also a boom cycle of everyone just having more money.

Ingrid: [00:32:04] Totally. Totally. And I think a lot of our episodes are going to go into a lot of these much more deep conversations, so we have conversations talking about growth and channel and acquisition strategy and what does it all look like now with the landscape of social media changing and CPMs going up? And does ROAS even matter anymore? And it's funny because all the more traditional marketers are finally knowing what ROAS means and they're using it. And it's kind of cringey now. It's really, really fascinating. So that conversation is coming up. Growth versus profitability, just like real talk. What does that look like? How do we reconcile those two? Is there a world in which those two live together?

Orchid: [00:32:56] Which we're on different sides on. I don't know. I keep thinking because, you know, I think every CEO in 2021 was like, "Growth." And then they go back and they're like, "No, no, no, no, no profitable growth. Not just top-line revenue growth." And so you and I, I'm so excited to dive into that together because there's a part of my brain that thinks profitable growth is achievable. But then everything, when I put my operator hat on, is like, "I think it's a choice." {laughter}

Ingrid: [00:33:26] I mean, I think like the people who've listened to me from the beginning know that I definitely think it's a choice. And so, yes, these are all of the reasons I am unbelievably excited to go on this journey with you for Season 3. There's so much to talk about and unpack from the business side of it, profitability, the venture and shareholder side of it. What does it look like? Exit strategies, acquisition and retention, LTV, creatve, messaging... There's just a lot to unpack. And I'm excited and I also would really love for the audience to share what they think, ask us questions, challenge us on our positions. Let's have this be a dialog because frankly, I would be the first to admit that none of us have the answers. I think we have some pretty experienced and educated assumptions and guesses based on all of the things that we've been exposed to, but I think it's definitely a dialog that is worth having, and very timely. And I hope everyone will join us along the journey. Orchid, anything that you'd like to close with?

Orchid: [00:34:36] I was going to say I have all the answers. No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding.

Ingrid: [00:34:40] That's why you're here. Thank God.

Orchid: [00:34:42] I have so many opinions and people who have worked with me before know that if I say I don't have an opinion, it's because I'm extremely disinterested. {laughter} There are no perfect answers, I think. And I think that a lot of our answers will feel dissatisfying, but marketers will understand because the answer will be, "It depends." And so I'm really excited to go through the season and really just talk about the nuances of a lot of these things, because I think a lot of folks in the industry think that answers are very binary or black and white, and the reality is that when you are maturing along with DTC or social media is still evolving, that you can only make decisions and have answers based on the information you have at the time, but that may be irrelevant maybe 5 or 10 minutes from now. So I'm excited to go on this journey with you. I'm excited to hear your opinions and your experience on these things because I want to pressure test a lot of these ideas that we have, and obviously to your open invitation to the audience as well because only when we come together and bring different angles or philosophies to this can our own thinking become clearer and stronger. And so I'm really, really excited to go on this journey with you for Season 3 of Infinite Shelf.

Ingrid: [00:36:03] Amazing. We're super lucky to have you. See you guys soon. Thanks for joining us.