Visions Episode 1: A Prologue

Announcer: [00:00:12] Welcome to Visions. Visions is an annual audio-visual trends report that covers the changes in culture and commerce. This series is meant to be a companion guide to our 100 page report. Download and follow along at Visions.Report. Episode 1: A Prologue.

Phillip: [00:00:41] Hi there. I'm Phillip. And what you are about to hear is a conversation between myself and Brian Lange, my Co-Founder here at Future Commerce. We've been producing podcasts about eCommerce together since 2016, most notably the Future Commerce podcast, which has over a half million downloads and hundreds of thousands of listeners. And this, our first episode of this new show, Visions, we thought it would be useful to you, our listener, to understand how and why we set out to create this new property and what this new show's charter is meant to be. I think we're fairly normal people. We both have steady, full time jobs. We didn't set out to become part time amateur philosophers or students of brands. Brian and I come from similar traditions and backgrounds. In fact, we both grew up middle class. We're both home schooled kids, and we both have pretty decent careers working in tech and eCom. The story that follows is how we got to this point. And what we're trying to do and how we're trying to grow as to people who are fascinated with the pace of growth and change in our retail and eCom industries and what makes people do what they do. How they behave. What they think. How they find satisfaction and fulfillment in life. And not just consumers or customers, but people. Real living and breathing people. It's an honor that you would spend any amount of time with us on this journey and that you would give your attention to the things that we create. From Bryan and me and from the entire Future Commerce team, thank you. And without any further ado, we present Visions. How did we get here?

Brian: [00:02:33] We got here because we were trying to do something new. You came out to Seattle...

Phillip: [00:02:43] Oh, my gosh. Yes. Okay. Yes.

Brian: [00:02:45] And you and I had to sit down and we're like...

Phillip: [00:02:49] What are we doing?

Brian: [00:02:49] What are we doing? We were a podcast.

Phillip: [00:02:51] We were a podcast.

Brian: [00:02:52] We were more than a podcast. We were a podcast because that's the way we knew how to get our ideas out.

Phillip: [00:02:58] We early on... So we had this podcast called Future Commerce. Early on we're like, "We want to talk about eCommerce, but we don't want to talk about eCommerce platforms or necessarily technologies. We kind of want to cover a bunch of different things."

Brian: [00:03:15] Stuff that we felt wasn't being discussed in our industry. We were seeing the same stuff over and over.

Phillip: [00:03:21] And sort of like frustrating conversations too, where people were like "Conversational commerce," and we're like, "Yeah, maybe."

Brian: [00:03:28] I mean, we were kind of hype on that one.

Phillip: [00:03:30] One of our early conversations on that podcast, which still exists, obviously was, well, what are the kinds of roles and the psychology of the people that would make an audio-centric future possible. And it was writers and humorists, comedians...

Brian: [00:03:51] Artists...

Phillip: [00:03:51] Like who are people that communicate via spoken word. Those are the people who become the heroes in an audio-centric future. And at its very outset, Future Commerce had a bigger idea of what would make that successful. It's not necessarily the technology or the medium. It was in reality, sort of the art behind it.

Brian: [00:04:23] Zip forward three years.

Phillip: [00:04:25] And we had sort of an identity crisis.

Brian: [00:04:27] We were like, We've got this incredible audience. It wasn't even what I would consider a community.

Phillip: [00:04:33] No.

Brian: [00:04:33] We had an audience. We had built up an incredible set of content over those three years.

Phillip: [00:04:40] And partners too. And that's, when you look around the podcast ecosystem, finding partners that will go to bat with you and sponsor your content and sometimes even have to take heat for the things you say, but they back you anyway. We had one partner early on for two and a half, three years and they just underwrote everything we did.

Brian: [00:05:05] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:05:06] And I remember when I flew out to Seattle and we sat down, it was like, well, what the heck are we trying to do? And I said "I've never started a company before. I think we need to start a company, like a real company. And I think the way you do that is you sort of write a mission statement like, what are we about?"

Brian: [00:05:23] It was our first vision. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:05:25] {laughter} It was our first vision. That was in like October or something like that.

Brian: [00:05:49] It was Fall.

Phillip: [00:05:49] It was in the Fall.

Brian: [00:05:50] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:05:50] And I remember us saying, "Okay, what we need next year is let's do this like a real company. We need sales goals."

Brian: [00:05:57] We need sales goals. We need a mission. We need a vision. We need a reason why. And that will allow us to start doing more. That will give us the framework we need to go out and get after the things we want to learn and talk about and accomplish.

Phillip: [00:06:16] We had a vehicle to actually employee curiosity, and for us to explore new ideas beyond just talking about a couple of platforms that were dominant in the eCommerce ecosystem.

Brian: [00:06:30] And that's actually right about the time when it really hit us hard that commerce touched everyone.

Phillip: [00:06:36] Yes. Yeah.

Brian: [00:06:37] Yes.

Phillip: [00:06:37] Yeah. So you did what you do best and you committed us to deliver a trends report. I remember. And it was supposed to be done by NRF.

Brian: [00:06:48] Yes, it was supposed to be done by NRF.

Phillip: [00:06:51] Which was two and a half months away.

Brian: [00:06:52] And we were doing the rebrand at the same time because when we decided to like go after this, we were like, "Okay, we need more than a pink rocket ship.

Phillip: [00:07:04] {laughter} Our prior brand, I designed it in Squarespace as a logo designer and I didn't even pay for it. I screenshot it and then I traced it with Illustrator, but that's a whole other...

Brian: [00:07:12] A little tiny side note. Future Commerce was the first name we came up with.

Phillip: [00:07:16] Oh, we didn't think through it. We didn't concept, but we did... When we decided to.

Brian: [00:07:21] It hit hard, it did hit hard.

Phillip: [00:07:22] We decided. We made it. Give us some credit.

Brian: [00:07:26] I am going to give us credit.

Phillip: [00:07:30] So how did I get... Even before that...

Brian: [00:07:32] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:07:33] Even before that.

Brian: [00:07:33] Yeah. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:07:34] How did I even get out to Seattle in the first place? You called me because you were working for Amazon. Do you remember this conversation?

Brian: [00:07:42] Yeah, I do.

Phillip: [00:07:42] You called me and you said, "I think I'm going to quit Amazon." And I said, "Dude, I think that might be the best thing for you."

Brian: [00:07:51] If you've ever seen the movie Whiplash.

Phillip: [00:07:57] Oh gosh.

Brian: [00:07:57] J.K. Simmons was Amazon and I was Miles Teller.

Phillip: [00:08:01] So and... {laughter} Let's let that sit for a moment.

Brian: [00:08:06] It's actually more truth to that than I even want to let on.

Phillip: [00:08:09] And Brian, you called me. You said, "I think I'm going to quit Amazon." And I said, "I think that's the best thing for you." And you said, "But I don't want to go and just get another job. I need to know that you are committed to Future Commerce." And that's how I wound up in the Fall of 2018, maybe... Yes, 2018.

Brian: [00:08:37] 2018? Oh, my gosh. Wait, hold on. Was that four years?

Phillip: [00:08:39] Three years ago?

Brian: [00:08:40] No, it's 2022.

Phillip: [00:08:41] Ok. It doesn't matter. We relaunched the brand in 2019 at NRF.

Brian: [00:08:45] We can count, I promise.

Phillip: [00:08:47] So we got to work and it seemed very clear to me what we needed to do. We needed to do...

Brian: [00:08:55] Research.

Phillip: [00:08:55] We needed to do research and figure out who our audience was because we didn't know. And if you're going to build a biz dev arm, you need to know what it is you're selling people on. And so we got to work doing research. And we also hired a branding agency. We used the research that we did to power a rebrand, and we were going to launch both of those things, our insights and our rebrand at NRF, where we had booked a number of live podcasts on the show floor. And then you did what you do best.

Brian: [00:09:29] Which is we found someone to partner with. Gladly, an incredible long-term partner of ours. We love Joseph Antonelli. Such a great guy.

Phillip: [00:09:36] And they came alongside us and said, "Hey, we really believe in you guys. Can you do this thing that you've never done before?"

Brian: [00:09:43] Yvette Black who's at Microsoft now, such a great person to work with over there. Anyway, so yeah, they were like, "We want to launch something at NRF," and it was October and we're like, "All right, this is the opportunity we needed. Let's go do some real research and go find out what's happening. Be curious about what's happening in the world."

Phillip: [00:10:06] And we said, "Well, what is this report?" And well, it was coming out in January. It was coming out at NRF. It was going to be a printed piece. Remember that?

Brian: [00:10:14] Oh, yeah. It was a printed piece.

Phillip: [00:10:15] And it was okay, "Well, let's I don't know, let's do trends. Let's just look at ten trends. And that's how Vision was born."

Brian: [00:10:39] I want that fast-forward sound now.

Phillip: [00:10:41] Yeah, we gotta fast forward {fast forward sound}. So Vision was a trends report.

Brian: [00:10:49] It was, and what that allowed us to do is to start annual reports.

Phillip: [00:10:55] It built a whole line of business beyond podcasts for us.

Brian: [00:10:58] Yeah, well beyond podcasts. And it led to Nine by Nine, which was a report we did later that year with another incredible sponsor. When we did Nine by Nine, we started to reshape how we were thinking about what it meant to consume content in our industry.

Phillip: [00:11:20] Yeah.

Brian: [00:11:20] A lot of the ideas we'd had early on in Future Commerce: art, people, storytelling, we were like, "How do we infuse that in?" And so by the time we got back around to the next Vision report, we were set to run another snapshot, another time capsule of what was happening in the world. But when we came to it, we're like, "We got to think this all up again."

Phillip: [00:11:45] Yeah, you have to start back over because I believe that the first round of trends was, well, "Amazon was copying Allbirds and they released an Allbirds-looking shoe." It's a lookalike, but it didn't have any of the environmental or material science innovation or any of its sustainability or climate commitment. And so the question was Amazon's growing its private label, what does this mean? Those were the sort of trends that were in the first report. Then after we went through Nine by Nine and the success of Nine by Nine because you're thinking, think about it now, that was after we came up with CARLY, Can't Afford Real Life Yet.

Brian: [00:12:24] Yeah, that landed in GQ.

Phillip: [00:12:26] We already had so much feedback from the folks not just in our community but in the whole of the ecosystem now that we're looking at the bigger ideas and we said, "Let's just lean into that," and Vision last year really proved, our second go-around, really proved that we could get people to care about the things we care about, which is not the tactical or even the strategic conversations about the how we do, what we do or the what we do, but the why we do what we do.

Brian: [00:13:01] Which changes.

Phillip: [00:13:04] I really do believe the why changes all the time. Missionally, we believe that commerce is a catalyst for change. And you can say, "Oh, commerce can change the world." And it's sort of like at such a scale or a scope that it kind of loses any sort of meaning.

Brian: [00:13:21] Yes.

Phillip: [00:13:21] But if you could say commerce can change the world around you. Commerce has the power, it can be used or employed as a tool. It's a catalyst to change just your immediate world around you. I think every entrepreneur can look at that and say that that's true. I think every single person who buys something that really changes their ability to, I don't know, be more productive or more embody their identity or feel more comfortable in their own skin or perform better on the dance floor or as an athletic pursuit. The things you buy can actually radically change an alter your perception of the reality around you. And so much of that is tied up in the art and the science of why people would ever want to part with money for the thing that enables that.

Brian: [00:14:14] Commerce is identity exchange.

Phillip: [00:14:17] Hmm.

Brian: [00:14:17] And I think you absolutely nailed it.

Phillip: [00:14:21] Say that again. Hold on. Dive into that.

Brian: [00:14:23] Commerce is an identity exchange. When you give your hard-earned money, the career that you poured your life into, and the fruit of your labor, everything that you have put yourself into as a person, and the compensation you get back from that and you're exchanging that professional identity for something that someone else put themselves into, you're saying, "I am taking part of you that you have invested yourself in (You being the brand), and I am making that my own. And I'm giving up part of myself to you to now empower another part of your world."

Phillip: [00:15:09] And even then, like resources or time, money is really a proxy for time spent that you can never get back.

Brian: [00:16:02] Yes. Correct.

Phillip: [00:16:03] So if someone is parting with money, and we tend to disembody the person on the other side of the transaction money.

Brian: [00:16:10] We disembody money. What money means.

Phillip: [00:16:10] Sure. Oh, gosh, yes. Yeah, absolutely. And so this bigger idea or even ideal of what brands exist to accomplish really made us think bigger about what Future Commerce really could be.

Brian: [00:16:27] And I think I just want to hit one more thing that you talked about.

Phillip: [00:16:30] Please. Please.

Brian: [00:16:31] I think that the distinction you made between commerce can change "the world" versus commerce can change the world around you or "your world," the world, if you see anyone put the world there, I think that's where you see washing. That is that enables washing.

Phillip: [00:16:49] That's amazing. So yeah, greenwashing, pride washing.

Brian: [00:16:53] Whatever washing.

Phillip: [00:16:54] Trust washing of any kind.

Brian: [00:16:55] All of the washing.

Phillip: [00:16:55] Yeah. {laughter}

Brian: [00:16:56] I think that disembodies the actual change.

Phillip: [00:17:02] Just to link it back to something in popular culture. One of the major criticisms of the reason for DC's Universe, the Cinematic Universe, had failings compared to say Marvel Cinematic Universe, they draw this comparison in film criticism to DC's big villains or their big climactic moments in their films always have world or universe ending consequences. They're not grounded in a way that makes you care, which is interesting because really the stories that I think have the most impact are the ones that are deeply specific and personal.

Brian: [00:17:40] Yes.

Phillip: [00:17:41] They're highly specific. They're really relational between one or two or a handful of people. They're not giant world-changing, world-altering cataclysmic things that actually give you an emotional reaction. It's "Can I see myself in that person's shoes?" And if a brand can accomplish that in some meaningful way, then I think they do have an impact on a person. And that brings us really to this moment because Future Commerce used to be a podcast and then Future Commerce was a company and those two things were sort of unexchangeable to some degree for the longest period of time, but we needed a home for our bigger ideas. We needed to be able to not have to correct people when we say Future Commerce. No, actually the podcast, that's what we mean. It's the podcast.

Brian: [00:18:45] So I think what's interesting about Future Commerce is we have all kinds of different content that live in there. And that's one of the beauties of Future Commerce is that we kind of just cover what we want to or what we are really interested in or ideas that are like awe-inspiring to us, stuff that we think is interesting or important.

Phillip: [00:19:05] For sure.

Brian: [00:19:05] What our next iteration, this new podcast that we have just created, Visions, this new property, I should say that we've just created, Visions, is allowing us to do is to talk and to consolidate some of those ideas into a single place and our most adventurous ideas are going to be here.

Phillip: [00:19:29] Yeah. And that means that we need to talk more about the things that actually impact the way that people think and the way they behave and what they feel. And in reality, we've talked about this a lot, and this was one of the guiding principles of the last few reports that we did, is that our key differentiator of Future Commerce versus everyone else in the commerce or retail trade ecosystem and every newsletter, every podcast that exists, what makes us different is that I believe that we have an opportunity to be able to connect emotionally with people and resonate emotionally with people because we employ art in a way that very few others do. Yes, most of the content creators in our ecosystem will try to logic or reason their way into trust with their listener and their consumer. They're going to make reasoned arguments. They're going to present data, and they're going to try to create an ironclad case as to why their perspective is valid and true. The problem is, "Well, it depends," is actually the correct answer for almost every single situation.

Brian: [00:20:42] Everything is contextual.

Phillip: [00:20:43] There are no best practices in the world. To quote a good friend of ours, Alex Greifeld. And so, yes, everything is contextual. So let's change the conversation and let's talk about the things that actually affect people's emotional state and their well-being. Let's talk about art. Let's talk about spirituality.

Brian: [00:21:03] Let's talk about modernity. Let's talk about what people are experiencing.

Phillip: [00:21:08] The culture that we all happen to inhabit.

Brian: [00:21:10] Yes. Let's talk about psychology. That's another thing that we get into quite a bit.

Phillip: [00:21:14] And philosophy. So understanding why people think and behave the way that they do, I think is a real opportunity. And to connect art to it has always been really at the core of who we are. If you have been around for any period of time and listened to any of our properties, you might be surprised to know we don't use any stock music. We create everything from scratch. We really do a lot of introspection of sort of like the audio branding. We're very intentional about the visual identity of the things that we create as well.

Brian: [00:23:00] That was another reason why we had to do Visions because we made these incredible reports and it was just a single thing that was kind of over. The beauty of Visions as we're going to have the opportunity to explore and iterate and grow. And yes, we're going to still have moments in time, but we're going to be able to dwell on them a little longer. It's going to be great. And the new design is so cool. Jesse Tyler and his team. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:23:30] Jacob Scout and Jesse Tyler are just incredible creative people. They've really made the visual parts of what we do connect to the ideas.

Brian: [00:23:41] Which is so hard. It's so brilliant.

Phillip: [00:23:43] Ideas really don't resonate, I think, if you're just explaining them, although conversation and discourse is at the core of what Visions is all about, so we'll get there. But that's how we got to this moment. That's how we got here. And so this year, when we're planning this huge shift and this creation of this new property recontextualizing what the Future Commerce podcast is really all about and maybe planning for its eventuality of shifting the conversations that happen there into a completely different format.

Brian: [00:24:29] Several formats.

Phillip: [00:24:29] And we needed to put a plan into place to get there. We actually started that out at the beginning of this year with a series that we called Casting Visions, and we tried to get to the topics of the report by doing two things. One, building in public. And two, really doing a lot of that design work and the concepting work with various and different people from around the ecosystem. And I don't know that I would say that that effort of documenting it was terribly successful.

Brian: [00:25:04] We tried that, and I think what we ran into was you and I, the only way we can get to some of the stuff is like holing up somewhere for...

Phillip: [00:25:13] For days.

Brian: [00:25:13] Days, late into the night. It takes a lot of diving deeper and deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. And for us to get to the things we got to.

Phillip: [00:25:23] It's so unfortunate, too, because so much of that process is just not digestible in a discrete form. My ultimate goal was, let's just record everything that we do and we'll try to figure out how we put it out into the world or we'll live stream it and somebody out there will pay attention to it and then we'll go and harvest good stuff out for the show afterwards.

Brian: [00:25:43] But there are moments where like you and I are sitting in a hotel room somewhere.

Phillip: [00:25:47] We're not even talking.

Brian: [00:25:48] We're not even talking.

Phillip: [00:25:48] It's on Slack.

Brian: [00:25:49] Yeah, we're sitting there thinking. And then all of a sudden, one of us will burst out with something and we'll chatter about that.

Phillip: [00:25:56] So not terribly digestible. So we tried the build in public thing. We did actually have concepting round with a good friend of ours, and that's something that maybe we'll touch on in one of the later episodes of Visions as a property. But just like this recording right here, we took two or three shots. We tried, we started two or three times in concepting and it just wasn't working and we just decided it's bad, stop. Let's just start over. So we figured out what not to do.

Brian: [00:26:40] I think we threw away way more of these ideas than we actually left.

Phillip: [00:26:44] Oh, yeah. I mean, it started out as twenty real hard and fast,  discernible new stories, basically. And then it got down to ten ideas, and then...

Brian: [00:27:02] I think we threw all of those ideas out.

Phillip: [00:27:03] We did. All of them went away. Vibe shift, Brian.

Brian: [00:27:07] Vibe shift.

Phillip: [00:27:08] So here we are. Visions this year, new property. The report that is its companion piece can be found at Visions.Report. Our 2022 edition is eight themes. Eight trends. You could call them trends, but it's really a time capsule. It is a snapshot of this moment right now. And we're going to luxuriate in this moment and spend some time exploring them in a way that we never have in our content before.

Brian: [00:27:41] And we did that by sitting down with 16 incredible creators from our community.

Phillip: [00:27:49] Incredible.

Brian: [00:27:50] I mean, I think that what sets Vision apart from Visions is that Vision was our singular vision. Visions is actually multiple people's takes and visions. Vision is something that Future Commerce did. Visions is something that way more people participated in.

Phillip: [00:28:15] Ooh. We all do.

Brian: [00:28:19] Yeah, we all do. That's right. That we all do. And what I hope is that Visions is something that you are listeners also do. What we want out of this is to hear your thoughts.

Phillip: [00:28:31] Yeah.

Brian: [00:28:31] To talk with you. We want to hear your critiques. We want to hear you. Yeah, tell us that we're wrong.

Phillip: [00:28:39] That's actually the thing that when I had a conversation, so one of the guests that you'll hear that came to our Visions Summit. So we actually held a summit at the time of this recording about six weeks ago. We brought all of these creators down to Palm Beach. We set up a space inside of this historic home on the Intercoastal Waterway. You'll hear a lot in the coming weeks about the sort of historical significance of that place. Really why it matters is the home's filled with art, so much purpose and really intention, and in the place that we actually recorded the content that took place at the Visions Summit. But we invited all of these people who come from all different walks of life and they have incredibly diverse backgrounds and very different takes on things. But one of our early prep calls was with one of these creators, and when we got done with our pleasantries and introductions, she launched into a 20 minute dissertation about all the ways she disagreed with me. And I said, "This is what we need." It didn't deflate me. It didn't frustrate me. It excited me because finally, we are going to model discourse, the kind of conversation that is lacking in our community. There's a lot of head bobbing and a lot of samey samey conversations. There's a lot of echo chamber and reverberations about the things that may or may not be true.

Brian: [00:30:05] Memorized diatribes.

Phillip: [00:30:06] And what we really need is less groupthink and a lot more challenging of ideas. And so, if anything, the hope here is that we spur a conversation with you, our audience, our listeners, to become more of a community that challenges each other. And that is really our biggest goal. If you want to back into what success looks like for us, it's having a bigger conversation, asking questions that don't have answers yet, and really trying to pull at the threads of the things that really we all wrestle with, the things that we're all afraid to say. Saying the quiet part out loud and really calling into question some of the things that we all maybe hold to be true that maybe aren't true anymore or maybe never were.

Brian: [00:30:58] And that is why art is so essential for this because it's hard to do this with just language. We're talking about questions to which we don't have answers yet, or maybe never will. Sometimes you have to feel the answers more than hear them spoken out loud.

Phillip: [00:31:15] And so stick with us. This is something new. We have plenty of time. Over the next 12 episodes, you'll hear from a lot of various people about these eight ideas that we believe are changing the world around us. Thank you so much for tuning into this prologue, this first episode of Visions.

Announcer: [00:31:39] Next time on Visions.

Miya Knights: [00:31:41] I know my customer. I don't need to be told what they like. But then, on the other hand, retailers are absolutely drowning in data that should be able to tell them what we like and what we don't. And it's marrying that tension, finding the balance between the two, and using that to guide your business model and who you collaborate with, and products you innovate with.

Grace Clarke: [00:32:02] Every company needs to build a culture of being curious in every single level of the business, and everybody has to be a behavioral psychologist. There's no way around it, no matter who your customer is you have to understand, to everyone's point here, what it is that they want.

Mike Lackman: [00:32:19] We've gotten pretty deep into the rabbit hole on this thing, and you understand what these segments are. You've identified some correlations between them. There wasn't anything really all that coherent about what customers do in fact, like what's missing and what strongly grounded hypothesis you have about what would make them happier. And it got to this point where they said, "Well, I'm not sure what they want." It's like, "What are you talking to them?" "What do you mean?" "I mean, I have the data in front of me. How do I talk to them?" Pick up the fucking phone.

Announcer: [00:32:53] The Visions podcast is brought to you by Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast and all Future Commerce properties at FutureCommerce.fm. Download our 100 page companion guide on Cultural and Consumer Trends by visiting Visions.Report.