It’s been an unpredictable year-plus for the spirits industry, as alcohol consumption shifted away from bars to the home and, now, slowly back to bars. But that presented a unique opportunity for the apéritif brand St-Germain. The Bacardi-owned elderflower-based liqueur has benefitted from growing demand for apéritifs. But according to Emma Fox, the VP of the brand, St-Germain has also been taking great pains to get more people to know it exists. Fox started working at St-Germain about a year and a half ago. Her mandate, she said on the Modern Retail Podcast, was about “making sure that we have the right ambassadors and people that work with us.” Before, a drink like St-Germain would focus predominately on distribution in upscale bars. But Fox has updated her marketing strategy to get the bottle in the hands of both consumers and influencers. Of course, that doesn’t mean bartenders are no longer important. Hospitality professions, she said, “are a part of the fabric of St-Germain.” But, with the coronavirus causing many bars to rethink their businesses, so too did St-Germain have to update its marketing playbook. Much of the focus over the last year, she said. was on making “very very simple content.” The idea was to get more people to understand exactly what the aperitif is. Now, things are accelerating even more -- and Fox is planning bigger promotions and events. At the same time, she said, St-Germain is trying to stay focused on what it is and to whom it caters. “You’ve got a North Star to guide you,” she said. “[Otherwise], I think you can get very easily distracted in a number of ways.”

Cuisinart is generally known for one thing -- its food processor -- but the company has been expanding its reach in the kitchen for decades. In fact, the brand is moving beyond the kitchen into new parts of the home. Most recently, Cuisinart launched an air purifier. That makes for a tall order as a brand marketer. This week on the Modern Retail Podcast, Mary Rodgers, Cuisinart’s director of marketing communications, spoke about how her overall approach has evolved as Cuisinart’s product line has evolved. Rodgers has been at the company for 25 years. That’s a long time -- but her role has only expanded over the years. “The real reason I’m still here is because I work on all these exciting aspects of the business,” she said. “Sometimes when you get in certain companies, you’re very narrow in your field of vision. I like that I have a lot of influence over all of the brand marketing for the company.” Her scope is quite large. She runs the brand’s DTC business, which in 2018 moved from outsourcing fulfillment to bringing it all in-house. The company purchased a fulfillment center in Arizona and used it as a hub for all of its distribution. It held all the inventory for online orders, as well as handled customer fulfillment for online orders from other retailers. In essence, Cuisinart now controls all of its own distribution. “It tightens up the whole system,” she said, “because we’re not shipping an item to a retailer who is then shipping an item to a consumer -- you’re compressing the entire system, basically.” Beyond that, she controls all the other aspects of brand marketing -- which includes well-known channels like search and TV, as well as more experimental channels like TikTok. While Cuisinart is testing out the new app, Rodgers was clear that marketing campaigns must “always tie everything back to strategy.” Since the early days, Cuisinart has tried to compile as much first-party data as it can about its customers. Today, Rodgers is trying to systematize that even more. One of the big things she’s paying attention to is lifestyle changes. Before, items like Cuisinart were often gifted during big life events like weddings. Now, wedding culture has changed and Cuisinart is trying to find ways to remain relevant. With that is the main goal and conundrum of her job. “We have to understand the big picture,” she said. “Where are our consumers?”

Eric Girouard hadn’t planned on launching his company during a pandemic, but that’s what ended up happening. Girouard is the founder and CEO of Brunt Workwear, an online apparel company that began selling its first products -- work boots -- a year ago. While Brunt had been in the works well before the coronavirus first hit, Girouard was faced with a decision in March 2020 of whether or not to delay the launch. Ultimately, he decided against it -- and, in fact, did the opposite and ended up launching earlier than planned. He joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and discussed how the last year has gone. Sales thus far have been good. “We’ve consistently grown 63% month-over-month since we’ve launched, said Girouard. Brunt was able to grow because people in the trades have had to continue working, pandemic or not. “There was about a two week [work] hiatus,” he said. “And then a lot of our core customers -- the real construction worker, the trades worker that was really building the economy in the country during one of the most challenging times -- were deemed essential.” What’s more, most of these people bought their work gear in person at stores -- but they were forced to find new products online. Those two issues meant that Brunt had a possible way to enter the market. Another big facet of Brunt’s strategy is its brand ambassador program. Before Brunt launched, Girouard spent hundreds of hours seeking out influencers in the trades. These weren’t your usual Instagram-famous accounts -- they were people who recorded themselves doing grueling work and amassed an audience of fellow workers. These are the accounts Girouard wanted repping the Brunt brand -- and this growth strategy, he said, has worked. While Girouard is happy with the current trajectory, he’s excited to get Brunt’s name in front of more people. “At the end of the, day being less than a year old, less than 99% of the country knows Brunt Workwear exists yet,” he said. “We’re just so early in our life cycle.”

According to the dog toy and accessories brand Bark, that’s led to an increase in demand. During its latest quarterly earnings report, the company reported that subscription shipments shot up 52.4% year-over-year, hitting 3.6 million. And revenue grew 57% year-over-year, coming to $117.6 million. According to CEO Manish Joneja, the plan is to grow and expand. Joneja joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the last year and his big plans for the brand -- which went public via a SPAC in June. Joneja is relatively new to Bark, which first launched in 2011. He was brought on as CEO in September of 2020, coming from Amazon. “What brought me to Bark is what I shared: my love for dogs,” Joneja said. “The market right now serves you as a transactional commerce.” Bark, conversely, is built more on building a relationship. “The foundation of Bark is built on high-level personalization with high-touch service,” he said. The focus is on expanding into new areas -- such as food and dental care -- as well as acquiring more customers. For now, Bark will remain focused on dogs. “We want to make sure we serve the 63 million households [that currently own dogs],” he said. “That’s a tremendous opportunity -- you want to get that right first.”

Gabi Lewis thinks the cereal world is ready for an upgrade. That’s why a few years after he sold his first company, a cricket protein startup, he co-founded Magic Spoon. The brand, which first launched in 2019, is sold entirely online and offers a variety of different protein-filled cereals for around $10 a box. The idea with Magic Spoon, said Lewis, was to “take cereal through the innovation that we’ve seen in categories like ice cream or candy -- where brands have come in and they have just flipped the protein and sugar on their heads.” Lewis joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how he built the Magic Spoon brand, as well as where he sees it going from here. The one thing Lewis is intent about is Magic Spoon’s focus on cereal. “We’re not entering 20 new categories,” he said, “we’re not going into 30,000 retail stores.” Instead, the company has just focused on just offering its cereal, which currently comes in eight flavors -- including ‘cookies and cream,’ ‘maple waffle’ and ‘fruity’ -- as well as limited edition products that get released every few months. The idea was to create a standalone brand for health nuts who want a healthy breakfast that’s reminiscent of their childhood. According to Lewis, growth has been steady for the last two years. And demand grew even more during 2020. Like many other online grocery-adjacent brands, Magic Spoon saw an explosion of demand during the early days of the pandemic. “We did see a massive increase in demand across the board,” he said, “I think just because there was an increased desire to purchase food online period.” He added that “obviously some of that is continued [and] some of it hasn’t.” Despite industry fluctuations, Magic Spoon has tried to find new ways to discover customers. Rather than focus predominately on Facebook and Google, the company has built out a robust network of influencers who have evangelized the brand since the beginning. Similarly, Lewis has been testing out other new advertising channels like podcasts and television. All of this, according to Lewis, has helped prepare Magic Spoon to continue its steady growth. He is insistent that, despite the look and feel of the product, Magic Spoon is not out there to totally eat General Mills’ lunch. And that, he maintains, is its ultimate competitive difference. “We’re not cereal,” he said. “We are protein powder in the shape of cereal.”

E-commerce saw unprecedented gains in 2020, especially in areas like alcohol that historically relied on in-store sales. Indeed, Minibar Delivery -- a platform whose name aptly describes its services -- saw a 500% increase of new customers in March and April of last year. Now, the company is trying to keep growth apace while adding more cities and liquor store partners to its roster. CEO and co-founder Lindsey Andrews joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and talked about Minibar’s trajectory. Right now, Minibar is available in 18 different states with its on-demand delivery offering. It also has a shipping service up and running in 40 states too. In 2020, said Andrews, “a flip was switched and things went crazy.” It wasn’t just more customers seeking out delivered booze either; “We did see a massive spike in new stores wanting to get on the platform -- and we tried to move as fast as possible to help them do that.” With that, the last year has been about keeping up with the demand. Now, Andrews says Minibar is looking toward the future. That includes onboarding more retail partners, as well as seeking out new cities to expand to. Even with stores reopening and more people going back out, Andrews thinks consumers have built up a new muscle around this kind of delivery. “I’m 100% bullish on the category,” she said. “I think there’s tons of whitespace and room to grow.”

Designer Brands Inc., parent company of DSW, has been trying to prove itself to be a bonafide digital retailer. This past quarter cemented that the current strategy may be working. After a year of losses due to the pandemic, Designer Brands swung to a profit in the first quarter of this year hitting $703.2 million in revenue. “We were really just trying to manage what was there until we could get our arms around how long this thing was going to last,” CEO Roger Rawlins said on the Modern Retail Podcast, describing the initial days of the pandemic. “That was by far the biggest and most disruptive thing that we had to deal with.” But now, according to Rawlins, things are looking up. After furloughing 85% of the workforce, “we were able to bring folks back,” he said, “and [we were] really proud of how we made it through.” Rawlins joined the podcast this week and spoke about how he’s been leading the company. He has been at Designer Brands for 15 years -- and helped bring the company online. This was a behemoth task; “I’m a stores guy by trade, even though I ran dot com,” he said. But that work over the last decade-plus, according to Rawlins, has helped make a robust online strategy. Designer Brands, for example, doesn’t rely predominately on warehouses and uses most of its stores for fulfillment. Last quarter, nearly 70% of its inventory was fulfilled from a store. What’s more, Rawlins worked to make it so that store associates weren’t focused only on in-store sales. “We gave stores credit for all of the dot com demand they fulfilled,” he said. The idea, he explained, was so that “they could see the benefit of engaging in an omnichannel way.” That program helped the company throughout the pandemic. “[We saw] store associates posting on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook,” he said. That drove significant volume “by just fulfilling that digital demand,” he went on. It was those kinds of programs over the last year, Rawlins said, that “really did save our fannies as an organization.”

Convenience store startup Foxtrot is trying to become a national name. Over the last few weeks, the company announced a series of expansion plans. For one, it plans to open 50 new locations over the next two years. Foxtrot is also launching a national delivery program called Foxtrot Anywhere. The retailer’s CMO Carla Dunham joined the Modern Retail podcast and spoke about the company’s big ambitions. While Foxtrot is positioned as a quasi-convenience store, it tries to highlight the quality of its products and fast delivery. Each store features an assortment of local products and Dunham said curation and selection is about “an obsession with whatever is delicious and worth enjoying.” Right now, the focus is on growing Foxtrot’s presence and getting more people aware of the stores. Currently, there are 13 stores in Chicago, Dallas and Washington, DC, and Foxtrot plans to have 18 in total open by the end of this year. As part of this expansion, the retailer is focusing less on convenience items and becoming more of a food service destination. “We’ve really been leaning into our cafe food program much more aggressively, and you’ll see that in our new store format,” Dunham said. What’s more, Foxtrot has been actively building out its own private label -- which includes gummy snacks and ice cream. These products are less economy-priced unbranded items and more Foxtrot-specific delicacies. “The products that we’ve created can stand alone comfortably outside of our stores,” she said. All that put together equals Dunham’s national expansion playbook. Now, the challenge is to get more people to notice.

Furniture became a hot item in 2020, and resale platform AptDeco was ready for that demand. The company’s sales grew more than 300% last year, and is trying to ride that wave through this year. According to co-founder and CEO Reham Fagiri, the company’s emphasis is now on expansion. AptDeco began in New York in 2014, and has been slowly growing ever since. Over the years, it added delivery to Northern New Jersey as well as Washington D.C. Now, more cities are being added. “We launched in Philadelphia earlier this year, and now -- literally two weeks ago -- just launched in the San Francisco Bay Area,” she said on the Modern Retail Podcast. “We’re seeing a lot of opportunity.” Part of the reason for this growth is because AptDeco was able to capitalize on big consumer shifts. More people were stuck at home in 2020 and were buying nicer furniture. “We also saw people selling their products and looking to upgrade to more higher-end pieces,” she said. While many furniture companies have had supply chain issues due to logistics bottlenecks, AptDeco owns its fulfillment network and was able to mitigate much of that thanks to its delivery network. “We are logistics,” said Fagiri. “The reason why we own [delivery] is because we want to make sure we control the experience.” It’s these elements that have helped AptDeco grow. Now, with expansion on the horizon, the plan is to have it become more of a household name.

Sometimes, the best way to figure out product-market fit is to go on Craigslist. That’s what outdoor furniture brand Yardbird did in 2016 when it first launched. Co-founder Jay Dillon had spent some time in Hong Kong learning about outdoor furniture manufacturing. He brought back some items to Minneapolis and marketed them on Craigslist. “We sold about $100,000 within two weeks,” he said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Over the years, Yardbird has outgrown its scrappy online marketplace roots. The company has its own website, as well as seven showrooms around the country in cities like Minneapolis, Denver and Washington DC. More are slated to open this year, and Dillon said business has been consistently doubling year-over-year. But 2021 is certainly an interesting year -- especially after a pandemic. The outdoor furniture category saw a big boost, and many new competitors entered into the mix. Before 2020, many of Yardbird’s competitors were what Dillon described as “middlemen.” These were large furniture showrooms operating out of big cities like Chicago that sold most of their goods to big businesses like “ski shops in Colorado that are looking to offset their seasonality.” He added, “almost none of these guys are sourcing direct from factory.” But now new brands are emerging that, like Yardbird, take great pains to have connections with where the furniture is manufactured. “We view that it’s just largely great for the consumer,” said Dillon. Things are beginning to return to normal, and that could mean the outdoor furniture sales bonanza may begin to temper. Dillon, however, is optimistic because many people have changed the way they lived. Millennials are “moving to suburbs, and increasingly wanting to be outdoors,” he said. As long as that continues, that means more business for him.

A lot of changes have happened at Asheville, North Carolina-based East Fork Pottery over the last year. For one, its CMO and co-founder Connie Matisse became the brand’s CEO earlier this year. Her husband Alex had been chief executive since its launch in 2009, but the two decided that Alex would begin focusing on more longterm plans and Connie would become the day-to-day top leader. What’s more, the ceramics company grew during the pandemic -- and became profitable. “We are coming up on 11 months of consistent profitability, which is huge for us,” Matisse said on this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast. But economics are only part of the equation for East Fork. Indeed, the brand has been trying to make its name known while remaining both transparent and true to the company’s core values. On the website, East Fork lists its values as compassion, equity, sincerity, accountability and adaptive tenacity. Much of that work involves making sure East Fork’s workplace is equitable, which has been a years-long process for Matisse. The company has had to rethink how it finds talent, for example; it was about “recognizing that our recruiting and hiring practices were not working as far as like fostering a truly inclusive and equitable culture,” said Matisse. Another part is telegraphing a transparent brand in an honest way. For Matisse, East Fork’s voice and ethos is an extension of her very being. “I don’t have a good filter, I’m getting better,” she said. “But that kind of lended itself quite easily to being really transparent, because it seems like the only thing to do.” East Fork began as a boutique pottery outfit and grew into a national brand. That came with a lot of growing pains. For one, it meant figuring out how to scale up production while not losing its identity. It also meant creating a business plan for a brand that began very organically. All this put together makes for a stressful -- but exciting -- time for Matisse. “I’ve been working on my staffing plan for [the next] one and three years,” she said. “I need to hire like 12 people in the next six months -- actually, completely overhaul, restructure, create a sales and marketing and like build a whole new company in a year. So I’m a little freaked out right now.”

It’s not easy launching a new brand -- and even harder doing it during a pandemic. But that’s what United Sodas of America did. The startup soda company hit U.S. shelves in 2020 and has been growing ever since. Co-founder and CEO Marisa Zupan joined the Modern Retail Podcast and talked about the past year’s trials and tribulations. When United Sodas launched in May of 2020, many stay at home orders were still in place. As a result, the company focused mainly on building out its online presence. Moreover, the brand launched with 12 different flavors. “We went in with open eyes knowing that that was a heavy lift,” Zupan said. But, it was a necessary risk to take, in her eyes. “If we wanted to create this brand that was all about variety, then we knew that we needed to make a decision about the product,” she said. “And we went to the extreme and said, okay, we’re going to do 12.” The company also tried to make as much of an initial splash as possible. At launch, Zupan garnered a fair amount of press -- with write-ups in outlets such as Fortune and Fast Company -- and went heavy on digital ads. This strategy worked, she said. “To be honest, the demand for us outpaced and our velocities outpaced the stock that we had,” said Zupan. The brand also ran a large out-of-home campaign last summer. “By the time that push was over,” said Zupan, “we actually ended up exceeding our sales goals based on what we wanted to spend.” Now, the focus is on keeping the momentum. While United Sodas started as DTC only its now expanding to retail nationally. It has focused on getting into local stores in large cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Dallas -- and is now working with broadline distribution partners to expand to retailers beyond those urban areas. Meanwhile, Zupan is thinking about ways to continue expanding both the company’s reach. That likely means increasing the SKU count beyond the 12 currently on the market. “We’ve been working behind the scenes on a product expansion that we’re really excited about for the next year,” Zupan said.

It’s been a crazy year for brands in the CPG space. That’s what Debbie Wei Mullin, founder and CEO of Copper Cow Coffee, said on this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast. The home-brewed Vietnamese coffee company has been around since 2017 and has been growing over the years. But the pandemic changed some strategies, as well as many of its revenue channels. When Copper Cow first started out, it relied heavily on wholesale. It inked deals with both grocers the department stores as a way to get its name out. In those early days, it only had one SKU of pour-over coffee -- and 90% of Copper Cow’s revenue came from wholesale accounts, including Williams Sonoma and other high-end stores. Over the years, as Copper Cow built out its digital marketing and grew its product line, the revenue mix has changed. Today, only 20% of Copper Cow’s revenue comes from wholesale. The pandemic accelerated that revenue shift -- before the coronavirus first hit, department stores made up 50% of Copper Cow’s wholesale revenue. But when stay-at-home quarantines first began, that channel completely dried up. “We had purchase orders that were sitting on the dock,” Mullin said. Going forward, she said, “I don’t see [department stores] being a core part of the business.” But even with department stores closed, Mullin said wholesale revenue still spiked. “Our wholesale sales grew immensely, even even with the department stores falling off -- just because the grocery opportunity suddenly became much larger,” she said. Direct-to-consumer sales have also been growing -- the brand appeared on the show Shark Tank recently, which gave it a boost. For now, said Mullin, the focus is on growing -- both sales and Copper Cow’s SKUs. The e-commerce business, she said, was “the number one place for us to be able to really form community -- and to be able to experiment with our products.” With that, she went on, “we’re excited to be launching some new products, to be able to try out a lot of new exciting flavors.”

Last year, when razor startup Harry’s backed a cat food company, it was -- in part -- due to the work of Tehmina Haider. Haider is the head of Harry’s Lab, which both launches new CPG brands as well as invests in and acquires existing ones. Haider described the operation as being a “diversification engine.” She joined the Modern Retail Podcast and explained how she’s built out the program over the last three years. Haider’s background is in consumer investing, hailing from L Catterton where she helped fund brands in the beauty and personal care space. She joined Harry’s in 2018, around a year after Harry’s Lab first started. Her mandate was to take her past investing experience and put that toward the task of building out an expansive Harry’s umbrella. The idea, she said, is that “we, at Harry’s, can really help brands that are focused on the same things that we are: Disrupting categories and serving consumers better, scale and successfully grow.” So far, Harry’s Labs’ work has materialized in a variety of ways. The first company Harry’s Labs launched was Flamingo, a women’s body care brand. But the company also invested in Cat Person, a DTC cat food company. Harry’s Labs began as a way for the company to launch its own brands, but has evolved into a growing M&A engine. This work, of course, is easier said than done. Much of Haider’s day to day is finding the next big brand to either build or acquire. This, she said, is where her work differs from her investing past. While investors are focused primarily on the economics (something Harry’s, of course, is also focused on too), her team is also looking for companies that have long-term ambitions. She’s not trying invest in a company and make a quick profit. “We’re buying to own,” she said.

It’s good to have celebrity boosting your brand. That’s what self care wellness brand Asutra, which sells products like soaps, sleep aids and anti-aging serums, learned when Venus Williams reached out to the company asking how she could be involved. After some meetings, Williams became the chief brand officer and the company’s most prominent spokesperson. “She talks a lot about active self care and Asutra in the press and on social and makes big announcements for us,” said CEO Stephanie Morimoto on the Modern Retail Podcast. She added, “we obviously did not set out to have a celebrity partner -- we frankly would not have done it if Venus had not come to us.” Celebrity spokespeople aside, Asutra has had a wild few years. In 2018, Morimoto bought the company, which first launched in 2015. She described the original owners as “serial entrepreneurs” who put the business up for sale when she was looking for her next business venture. At the time, Asutra sold most of its products on Amazon, and she believed she could help transform it into a DTC wellness player. Part of that has been about rebranding the company as “active self care,” as she described it. Another big part has been on diversifying channels. “Our big focus as a team has been to diversify our revenue channels so that we’re not so reliant on Amazon,” Morimoto said. “Hopefully, depending on how a couple of retail partnerships go this year, we’ll probably go from 99% Amazon to about 60% Amazon -- with a good chunk coming from retail, and then also from what we consider DTC, which is our own website.” Retail has certainly been an interesting nut to crack. Asutra’s first major retail partnership was with CVS. While it gave the brand widespread distribution, Morimoto learned a few things about matching customers with products. “People mostly go to CVS to fulfill their prescriptions and use the pharmacy,” she said. So it was hard to catch shopper’s eyes when they weren’t necessarily thinking about self care products. But one recent retail partnership is proving to work better: Target. “We just launched in Target about a month ago, which has been awesome,” she said. “Target was really our holy grail goal.” Now, the focus is on making the Target partnerships work, as well as inking more retailers as well. Two new retailers Asutra is working with are Athleta and Grove Collaborative. But, for now, she’s thinking about making current partnerships work. “The rest of the year, we’re really focused on making Target a success so that we can continue to grow with Target over the next couple of years,” Morimoto said

Sometimes, businesses start out as direct-to-consumer. Other times, they’re forced into it. That’s essentially what happened with Farmer’s Fridge, a company best known for its salad vending machines. Since 2013, the company has been growing its vending machine presence -- first in the Midwest, and then beyond. Its core customers were workers looking for quick and healthy lunches on the go. But the pandemic changed all of that. Over the last year, Farmer’s Fridge focused less on its vending machines as fewer people commuted to the office, and more on building out its own home delivery program. According to founder and CEO Luke Saunders, this pivot worked. Farmer’s Fridge now has three primary channels: vending machines, business-to-business and home delivery. This year is [about] getting back to growth,” said Saunders on the Modern Retail Podcast. “We’re doing [that] across all three channels.” For most of its life, Farmer’s Fridge didn’t need to spend much money on advertising. The vending machines were billboards unto themselves and sales grew pretty organically. But over the last year, the company has invested in some performance marketing. “That’s probably one of the biggest transformations for the businesses,” said Saunders. “Now we do a considerable amount of performance marketing for that delivery channel.” Things are now beginning to open back up and Farmer’s Fridge is going from defense mode to offense. While it grew its delivery network, it is now also ready to focus on its B-to-B and vending machine business. “It’s now an omnichannel business,” said Saunders. “The idea is we’re gonna bring the food to wherever the customers are.”

It’s tough transforming a local brand into a national name. But that’s what Oregon-based dairy company Tillamook is trying to do. Over the last few years, the company began an eastward expansion -- going beyond the Pacific Northwest as far as the East Coast. And, according to CEO Patrick Criteser, it seems to be working. In 2017, he said on the Modern Retail Podcast, 95% of Tillamook’s sales were made west of the Rocky Mountains. Today, “we’re about 10% to 15% east of the Rockies.” The dairy company added 4.6 million new households to its customer base this past year, most of which, Criteser said, were on the East Coast. Even during the pandemic, Tillamook was still able to grow. Tillamook launched in 1909 as a local dairy cooperative, and recently became a certified B corporation as well. Despite the company’s storied history, it’s never seen a year quite like 2020. According to Criteser, there were many demand spikes -- as well as supply chain hiccups. “There were certainly a lot of challenges in the last year,” he said, “but a lot of opportunity for us to play an important role in making sure the food supply stayed there and reliable for folks as they went to the grocery store.” One big change he noticed was the rise of home cooks testing out new ingredients. “We definitely saw people cooking more at home, certainly eating more at home [and] experimenting with ingredients.” These constant fluctuations meant Tillamook had to re-strategize throughout the year to handle the ebbs and flows. Ultimately, Criteser said, “it played out pretty well for us as a business.” With all that in the rearview mirror, the focus is now to continue expansion. “We’re a growth brand,” said Criteser, “and we’re continuing to gain new distribution and make sure that we can sell through that distribution and keep it.”

It’s been a good year to be a homewares brand. Indeed, cookware startup Caraway was a hot commodity during the pandemic. According to its founder and CEO Jordan Nathan, the company’s popularity created some headaches. Many items were out of stock more often than not in 2020, and supply chain issues continue to persist. But, “we were very fortunate to be on the right side of the equation,” Nathan said on the Modern Retail Podcast. According to Nathan, part of what made Caraway especially successful was its specific niche in the cookware space. Right now, there seem to be endless online brands hawking aesthetically pleasing pans. But, as Nathan described it, most cater to home chefs looking for professional-grade tools. Caraway instead focuses on people looking for good, sturdy equipment -- but not necessarily the restaurant stuff. “We really felt like there was this just massive gap,” he said. As a result, sales have been booming. Now, Caraway is trying to grow even faster. One way it’s been going about that is through retail partnerships. The brand has forged partnerships with a number of retailers and marketplaces, including Crate and Barrel, West Elm and Food52. In Nathan’s eyes, DTC is a great channel to start out -- but it’s imperative to find more eyeballs. When it comes to being available on other retailer’s shelves and websites, he said, “we very much see them as acquisition channels.” What’s more, he said, is that retail collaborations “give us the ability to offer different assortments than what’s on our website.” In a sense, it’s about catching customers’ eyes and then reeling them into the other sales channels.

Marc Rosen has worn many hats -- or, perhaps, pants -- at Levi’s. Today, he’s the president of the apparel brand’s Americas business. But he’s been at the company for seven years -- first joining to grow Levi’s e-commerce business. As such, he’s seen a lot of changes, both within the company and in retail as a whole. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Rosen spoke about what he’s been observing, as well as how his role at Levi’s has changed both over the years and during the pandemic. Thinking back to the retail landscape almost a decade ago, Rosen said, “I think almost everything has changed.” But, of course, many of the most drastic changes happened in the last year. And that also coincided with a new position for Rosen. Instead of just leading the online business, Rosen began overseeing all of Levi’s Americas business -- including wholesale -- in January of 2020. As such, the pandemic was certainly a crash course in navigating a new facet of the brand’s business. “The wholesale world, to some extent, for me was new,” he said. “It was really a learning experience about building that relationship.” Much of that learning experience was focused on figuring out where and how people were shopping. For example, while Levi’s is available in many brick and mortar stores, it also has wholesale relationships with online retailers. “Consumers moved so quickly into digital,” Rosen said, and the first part of the pandemic was working both inside Levi’s and with partners to try and navigate that shift. This also brought about a big change in how Levi’s as a company rolled out new products. For large companies, it’s hard to adopt a startup-like ethos of test and learn. But during a global pandemic, that’s all retailers were able to do. They had to adapt in an instant, launch and figure things out from there. The big lesson Rosen learned, he said, is “we can be a lot faster.” Instead of very slowly building something internally, more programs can see the light of day faster and be iterated upon. The pandemic, he said, brought about these lessons. Normally, he explained, “we probably would have built [out a new feature or program], and waited until it was perfect to roll it out. But in a pandemic, you don’t have that luxury.”

Google wants to make it crystal clear that it’s not a marketplace. True, people can buy things on Google, but it also lets sellers link out to other marketplaces. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Bill Ready, the company’s president of commerce and payments, discussed this important nuance. “We’re not a retailer, we’re not a marketplace,” he said. In his estimation, Google is about helping shoppers discover products (and sometimes letting them transact with in the platform). While the site looks and feels like a marketplace, he insisted that Google’s utility provides something markedly different. Google’s shopping capabilities have had quite the evolution. Its offerings have had fits and starts, to say the least. Currently, any merchant can upload products to be listed on Google’s shopping website. They can use Google’s commerce options -- called ‘Buy on Google’ -- or they can link out. Last year, the company made the decision to make its listings completely free. Before, merchants had to purchase an ad in order to surface on the platform. All these moves, according to Ready, are because of Google’s belief in the open web. But making product listings free also meant more merchants tried out the platform; the company saw 80% more listings in 2020 compared to the year before. The focus now, according to Ready, is to continue making services and products for merchants and get more brands comfortable with selling on Google. This includes testing out shoppable ad units on YouTube. Of course, continuing to grow the ad business is also important. And who remains a big advertiser on Google? Amazon. “We partner with retailers of every size, including the largest and you know, Amazon is a partner that we work with quite closely as well,” said Ready. “It can oftentimes be a good storyline to say ‘hey, is this a competitive thing?’ [but] it really is a return to first principles for Google.”

It’s been a crazy year for Ocean Spray. The 91-year-old cranberry product company not only saw an increase in sales over the last year, but went viral on TikTok. It saw increased demand in 2020, according to CEO Tom Hayes. “Ocean Spray as a category leader has probably disproportionately benefited [from the pandemic],” Hayes said on the Modern Retail Podcast. This episode was recorded live at last week’s Modern Retail Summit. There, Hayes gave a fireside chat -- talking about the company’s product development strategy and how it tried to ride the TikTok wave. Last year, a TikTok user named Nathan Apodaca videotaped himself on a skateboard listening to Fleetwood Mac while drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice. It went viral, and the company’s products flew off the shelves. The Ocean Spray team was forced to react. Before going viral, Hayes said the company’s social media strategy was more traditional. “If I were to put a picture on it, it might be that Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving,” he said. Now the company is “trying to move the brand to be a little more edgy, and to be a little more attractive to the younger consumer.” TikTok aside, Ocean Spray has other big plans. It recently unveiled new products -- including a dried fruit snack and a caffeinated sparkling drink -- and is trying to establish itself as a category leader outside of just cranberry juice.

It’s been a big year for Crocs. The popular shoe brand, known for its ubiquitous plastic slip-ons, saw revenue grow 12.6% year-over-year, hitting $1.39 billion. E-commerce was a big driver of its business, growing 92%. About half of the company’s revenue comes from digital channels. According to the company’s president Michelle Poole, this success was thanks to the brand keeping its ear to the ground and remaining scrappy. “I’m most focused on how the brand comes to life across the globe, in all channels,” she said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Poole spoke about how the company dealt with all the changes brought on over the past year, as well as how it approaches large branding campaigns and influencers. Part of Crocs’ growth was thanks to its varied marketing campaigns. The company has unveiled a number of collaborations with companies like KFC and celebrities like Justin Bieber. These campaigns are a way to keep the shoe brand relevant. A few years ago, Crocs was less choosy when it came to celebrity partnerships. “At the beginning, we were just frankly, we were grateful to have someone to partner with,” said Poole. “And we’ve now really got the opportunity to be more strategic.” A Bieber-branded Croc isn’t Poole’s only focus. Currently, she’s thinking about international expansion. “We actually have three key markets that we’re really focused: China, Japan and Korea,” she said. “I would say that the playbook we are really focused on in Asia... is [to] really establish icon status.” This is how the company has approached growth in all its regions, she said. Poole added that “where it does need to be tailored is in our marketing strategy.” That is, the campaigns -- and influencers -- Crocs work with in Asia are slightly different than those in North America. Despite the recent growth, things haven’t been a walk in the park. For the last year, Poole said, Crocs was in defense mode. But now, she went on, “I think as we move out of Covid, [we] move back into I would say is offense mode.”

If you text the phone number on a can of the coffee drink Taika, chances are that a human will respond. This is by design. The company, which boasts a caffeinated canned drink that contains so-called adaptogens, launched in 2020 -- right when the pandemic hit. And it’s used a text-based branding strategy to help it connect with customers. Co-founder and CEO Michael Sharon joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about how the company has been able to grow over the last year. Sharon’s background is in tech, hailing from companies like Facebook. His co-founder Kal Freese was a barista champion. Together, they are trying to build a coffee beverage that wasn’t tailored for snobs. “Most of the ways coffee is marketed, is focused on the origin -- like, where does this thing come from? Is it from Honduras? Is it from Guatemala?” said Sharon. “These are just marketing labels and definitions,” he said, adding that most people can’t tell the difference between coffees based on their country of origin. The thesis behind Taika, he explained, is “to focus on a destination.” That is, “how does the coffee make you feel, how’s it gonna make you feel after you drink it after you consume it?” The company also aims to have approachable marketing. That includes having a phone number prominently displayed on the can that people can text at anytime with product questions. While some companies, like Iris Nova, use text as a means for ordering. Sharon said that the SMS strategy was more about fostering a connection with Taika’s customers. Texting, he explained, “is a brand experience touchpoint for us more than anything.” In 2019, Taika began beta testing its selection. Then, the company focused predominately on selling to local businesses like co-working spaces and using those customers to get direct feedback. But when the pandemic hit, the coffee brand had to pivot. It launched both its DTC business, as well as started selling in retail stores around the country. After a rough month or so when the coronavirus first hit, Taika is now seeing the business take flight. According to Sharon, Taika has been growing around 30% month-over-month. He is forging new retail partnerships, but is also focused on growing the DTC channel, which currently represents 40% of its business. It’s a difficult but important channel to grow. “It’s really hard to scale beverage to DTC,” he said.

The Shazam for wine had quite a big year. Vivino, an app that lets users search for wines by taking a picture of the label and read customer reviews, raised $155 million last February. The app now has over 50 million users worldwide, and says it facilitated around $250 million in sales last year. Founder and CEO Heini Zachariassen joined the Modern Retail Podcast, and spoke about this newfound growth. The app is over ten years old, and only a few years back began adding commerce to the mix. Before getting users to transact, the first order of business was getting people to use it. “This is a land grab,” said Zachariassen. “We want to be the biggest wine app in the space.” In its early days, Vivino was focused on being an intuitive app that people would use for wine research. The idea was to build a user habit -- people would pull out the app while they were perusing bottles at the wine store. Commerce, said Zachariassen, would come later as it’s “a bit of a complex thing to do.” The focus at first, he said, was to “learn about the user.” But since 2016, the company has been building relationships with wine retailers to make it easier for Vivino users to buy wine. The pandemic, however, was when wine sales really began hitting their stride. Said Zachariassen, “2020 has been really a breakthrough for us.” With more people using Vivino to buy wine, the focus now is to find more app users -- and add more retail partners to the mix. Zachariassen said that this latest investment is about growing the 200-person team and putting marketing on the front burner. Now, he said, he wants to prove how big the online wine business can grow. “If this reaches scale, there is money to be made,” Zachariassen said. “This is a real business -- now we’re going to push the accelerator.”

Comfy clothes certainly had a moment last year. Indeed, as Sarah Rasmusen, chief customer officer at the apparel brand Lands’ End said, “it could not be a better time to be in the elastic waist business.” While the company’s revenue slightly dipped year-over-year according to its most recent earnings, online sales grew nearly 8% and the company is bullish about its products remaining in demand. Rasmusen joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how the decades-old company has been navigating the changing tides. It began as a catalog business, and even made the jump to online quite early. Lands’ End, in fact, launched its website the same month as Amazon. But in the mid-2000s, the apparel brand lost its way. Now, Rasmusen has spent the last four years trying to right the ship. That meant completely reimagining Lands’ End’s online experience, as well as testing out new ways to keep customers engaged. Indeed, last year the brand launched its own marketplace. Why would other brands want to list their products on Lands’ End? “It’s the pay to play equation,” she said. That is, on a site like Amazon a sandals brand will be competing against tens of thousands of other listing. But on a smaller site like Lands’ End, where people are there to buy similar items, there are much fewer. For now, the strategy is to continue building on earlier momentum. Digital innovation is a big part of that. “If you are not going to invest in your digital property,” said Rasmusen, “you fall behind.”

It’s been a big year for online shopping -- not just for Amazon. The live auction site Tophatter, in fact, had a record year. The nine-year-old company saw sales grow 20% year-over-year (and said that were it not for supply chain bottlenecks, that growth would have been even higher). According to the company's president Andrew Blachman, Tophatter's focus on entertainment and discovery is what helped its popularity surge. Blachman joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about all things digital commerce. More people are buying online, and customers are increasingly looking for new ways to discover items. Said Blachman, more people are open to entertainment-based commerce. This change has impacted how he's been building out the marketplace. Tophatter considers itself somewhat of a fun pastime for customers rather than a utility to buy necessary goods. Users scroll through its app or website (though most people use the app), which features thousands of low-cost auctions for random items. The average item costs around $10, but they go as low $1. It has hundreds of thousands of registered sellers, but only about 5,000 are usually active at a given time. The focus for the last year has been on perfecting the platform. While Tophatter has been around for over a decade, the company has gone in a few different directions that didn't work out. A few years ago, for example, the company tried to operate more like a traditional e-commerce platform by having sellers upload items for static prices, rather than risk selling them in an auction format where they could get undercut. "That was a huge mistake," said Blachman. Why? "While we gained a lot of inventory, or a lot of access to inventory from sellers that were afraid of risk and wanting to just price things at a fixed price, we lost their engagement," he said. Now, the company doesn't offer such a program. Instead, sellers are part of the auctions themselves, and Tophatter keeps them engaged by offering incentives -- like better product placement -- based on past performance. According to Blachman, the plan now is to continue growing while ensuring that it can handle all the back-end logistics. He also believes that user interest in the U.S. will only increase, as game-like commerce experiences continue to explode overseas. Right now, he's focused on getting more Americans on board. "It's a complex but a really fun business challenge," he said.

The coronavirus changed the way people shopped for groceries, and King Arthur Baking Company was no exception. The 230-year-old company had one of the hottest pandemic commodities: flour. And while it did face huge supply chain constraints early last year, King Arthur has been able to see historic sales growth and consumer behavior changes. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Bill Tine, vp of marketing, spoke about all the curveballs thrown at the company over the last year -- as well as why it decided to rebrand from a flour company to a baking company last summer King Arthur’s marketing approach was upended overnight when the country went into lockdown. Over the last five years, he said, the brand has “built out essentially our own media company.” It published recipes, partnered with influencers and focused on growing its audience. Some of that was in person at its own baking schools. While King Arthur’s marketing strategy didn’t necessarily change during coronavirus, the underlying system did. “When Covid hit and people really shifted their media consumption, we were a place to turn to because we had a lot of assets already in place,” Tine said. “We had a team internally of bakers that could create [content] at home with their iPhones. And I think having that in-house was something where we’re able to really react quickly.” Indeed, King Arthur’s website got over 60 million unique visits in 2020. Reacting quickly helped boost King Arthur’s sales. Most grocery stores sold out of essentials like flour during the early days of the pandemic. With that, more people bought all-purpose baking items on King Arthur’s website. The online business doubled over the last year, and Tine thinks that momentum is going to remain. For now, the focus is on staying relevant with its customers. “One of the things that we really hone in on and rely on is the consumer insight for what the consumer wants,” he said.

When the New York Times writes about your product, sales inevitably explode. That’s at least what high-end sofa company BenchMade Modern experienced. It was featured in a trend story in 2016 and then, in 2019, became highly rated on the newspaper’s review website the Wirecutter (it remains the site’s top choice). When the Wirecutter review hit, said founder Edgar Blazona, “our web numbers spiked.” Blazona joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how he’s grown his company over the years. This isn’t his first furniture foray. In the 2000s he began selling modern children’s furniture online on websites like Wayfair. But he decided to get into the sofa game in 2015. BenchMade Modern makes furniture that averages between $3,000 and $6,000. It focuses on having as short of a lead time as possible while still being custom made. Currently, its lead time time averages five weeks, but Blazona said it can be as low as three. Unsurprisingly, the last year was big for the company. Sales did nosedive in March, which caused BenchMade Modern to temporarily pivot to manufacturing PPE. But in May, things picked back up as people were stuck at home and in need of nicer furniture. According to Blazona, revenue went up 100% year-over-year in 2020. The focus now is on keeping this growth. Blazona said the company is still facing some supply chain hiccups, but he doesn’t think demand for furniture is going to dip post-pandemic. The company has slowly been adding new products like rugs and lighting. The strategy, he said, is “just fine-tuning all of that and adding these new categories so that we can be a little bit more of a one-stop-shop.”

Emilie Arel joined mattress brand Casper for a personal reason. “I have two little kids -- they both slept on a Casper before I worked at Casper,” she said. “The way I realized how great a Casper was, I would fall asleep on their bed every night.” Arel joined Casper in late 2019 as its president and chief commercial officer. She oversees all the disparate and growing parts of Casper’s retail business. Arel spoke on the Modern Retail Podcast about what she’s focused on during her tenure, as well as how the pandemic through everything into disarray. “I don’t think we recognized how much people would invest in their home so quickly,” she said. “We had no clue we’d still be sitting in our houses almost a year from then that was not on the horizon.” Her first mandate as CCO was to tie all the business threads together. Casper has over 60 stores around the United States and is sold at retailers including Target, Nordstrom and Raymour and Flanigan. Wholesale specifically has been a real emphasis for Arel. True, Casper began as an online brand, but it needed the help of national chains to really grow. “The majority of beds in the United States are still bought in a trial location somewhere you can lay down in the bed,” she said. So Arel has spent the last year thinking about which retail partners would be best for Casper. One of the most important aspects of the wholesale retail experience, she said, is making sure every sales associate is armed with the proper training -- “so that they understand our product, and they understand our focus on sleep.” But Casper’s real focus right now is making a name for itself beyond just mattresses. The brand has launched a bunch of new sleep-associated products, including blankets and pillows. And Arel said Casper is seeing huge growth from these ancillary products. The intent now, she said, is to continue to launch new sleep products, while making more people -- not just hip millennials -- aware of the brand. “Soon we’ll be talking to consumers in a different way, with a slightly different voice,” she said.

Candice Matthews Brackeen is looking outside of typical Silicon Valley circles for the next billion-dollar company. She’s a general partner at Lightship Capital, which raised a $50 million fund last summer that’s focused on companies from the Midwest that have Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPoC) founders. “Right now we’re trying to build the best portfolio possible to return capital to the LPs,” she said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Matthews Brackeen first got the investing bug when she began working with startups in the Cincinnati area. She had difficulty raising money for her own company, and made a group for other Black entrepreneurs to talk shop. This group gave proof to how difficult the landscape was for non-white founders. With that, she launched an accelerator program five years ago. Slowly but surely, those experiences led helped Matthews Brackeen launch a venture capital fund. On the podcast, she talked about how the investing landscape has changed over the last year. Following last summer’s Black Lives Matters protest, funds like hers began to get more noticed. Institutional investors began reaching out looking for funds in which they can participate. “We’re not a social impact fund, but there are investors who are involved with us for a social impact reason,” she said. Part of her role as at Lightship involves helping both portfolio companies and other investors. Matthews Brackeen and her spouse, fellow Lightship co-founder Brian Brackeen, have spent weeks living nearby to founders to get a sense for their daily rhythms. They would have portfolio companies come out to Cincinnati or Miami and spend time together -- eating all meals together and spending most of the daylight hours working on business development. “I think that it’s important that we break down those barriers,” she said. “That’s the way that we grow relationships with our founders.” Over the years, Matthews Brackeen has also found herself to both a liaison and a teacher at both ends of the table. She’s instructed other VCs about their invisible biases, and coached founders about presentation styles. “Not only are we teaching our LPs, but we’re teaching our founders, like, how to have grace when people screw up,” she said. Ultimately, it’s about positioning Lightship as a fund that should be considered alongside every other top VC firm. “I want to be a VC,” she said. “I don’t want to be a Black VC.”

2020 was the year the Fly By Jing soared to new heights. The company, which is best known for its array of Chinese sauces, has taken the direct-to-consumer food world by storm. It’s been written about in major publications like the New York Times and Eater, and has become a popular pantry staple in many Instagram kitchen posts. Before the coronavirus first hit, founder Jing Gao told Modern Retail the company was growing around 30% month-over-month. Then the business exploded last spring thanks to pandemic stocking and heightened media attention. “We ended 2020 about 1000% up from 2019,” Gao said on the Modern Retail Podcast. On this episode, she spoke about how Fly By Jing started as a pop-up restaurant concept, her branding and marketing approach as well as what the company’s future plans are. “I feel like there’s an unspoken understanding between our customers and our brand,” she said. Fly By Jing first got off the ground because Gao had a core group of friends and followers who supported her vision. She raised an initial Kickstarter (“the highest-funded craft food project [on the platform],” in her words) and was able to grow the business in its first year as a result of this community. Now, Gao is putting herself more front and center. When Gao founded the brand, people knew her as Jenny -- an Anglicized version of her given name. And over a year after the company launched in 2018, she decided to go by Jing. For her, this was a way for her to present both herself and her brand in their true lights. When Fly By Jing rebranded last fall, Gao unveiled her new first name, making herself more of a focal point of the brand. The idea behind Fly By Jing is to be a food company that doesn’t try to fit within traditional U.S. brand parameters. So far, it’s worked. Demand outstripped supply for most of 2020. Gao’s current mission is to continue the growth by creating new programs and ways to keep customers engaged. Earlier this month, for example, Fly By Jing launched an OnlyFans account that lets people see pictures and videos of “hot noods.” For the founder, the most important part is to make sure she has a direct line to those who love her products. “We are putting a lot of thought into how do we create a real community around our biggest users,” she said.

Even during a pandemic, people still needed glasses. As a result, online eyewear brand Zenni Optical has been riding a rocket ship. After an initial slowdown in March due to supply chain constraints, Zenni says it saw record growth in 2020. With people stuck at home, the company received an influx of new customers trying to avoid going to the eye doctor. And since most were working from home, Zenni’s line of blue light blocking lenses grew at an unprecedented clip. According to chief product officer Bai Gan, this past year was “the beginning of a new era” for eyewear brands. He joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and talked about why. Zenni, which was founded in 2003, makes very affordable eyewear -- glasses as cheap at $7. According to Gan, this is because the company uses a vertically integrated business model. Zenni owns much of its supply chain, meaning it cut out middlemen most other brands deal with daily. It owns a one million-square-foot manufacturing facility outside of Shanghai, and works directly with suppliers to get the best rates. For its first decade as a company, Zenni focused on creating this infrastructure. “Originally, we just focused on that core competency -- the backend,” said Gan. Now, Zenni is in hyper-growth and trying to make more people aware of its products. It wields, however, a double-edged sword. “It was a little bit harder to really communicate quality to customers when the price was so exceptionally low,” he said. As a result, over the last few years the company has been on a marketing blitz trying to introduce itself to more customers. One of Zenni’s big PR approaches is influencer marketing. The company has worked with online personalities and well-known designers -- including Rashida Jones and Coco and Breezy. On the podcast, Gan describe the brand’s “sector by sector” approach. This includes working with gaming personalities to evangelize Zenni’s blue light blocking lenses. According to Gan, the growth is only beginning. For years, online glasses sales stagnated, but the coronavirus changed all that. Now, he said, Zenni is trying to implement a growth strategy its slowly been building. “That vertically integrated business model,” he said, “now seems to be giving us a lot of edges over the competitors.”

2020 was a tough year for casual dress shirt brand Untuckit, but the company was able to adapt. While many retailers that catered to workwear completely changed their product lines to mesh better with the pandemic lifestyle, Untuckit opted to wait it out. “The decision was no -- no massive overhaul of our brand ethos was necessary,” said Aaron Sanandres, co-founder and CEO. Sanandres joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about all the changes his company experienced. While Untuckit didn’t drastically change its strategy, it did make some smaller tweaks. Much of that had to do with marketing. The company has become known for casual dress shirts, but it has other products too. “We never really heavily marketed our non-core button-down shirt,” Sanandres said. The new focus, he said, “was shifting the messaging.” Fulfillment was another big change. While Untuckit began as a digital brand, it’s also opened up over 70 stores over the last few years. The company quickly made those locations fulfillment centers -- which Sanandres said was no easy feat. “I’m almost certain almost all DTC companies were late to the game when it comes to buy online pickup in store,” he said. Why? “The fact is, if you’re on Shopify, you will have a very difficult time executing a very clean [experience].” These changes -- along with many other -- meant that 2020 was a year of learning. Sanandres described it as humbling. His brand has been in growth mode for the last decade, but had to rethink priorities when stores closed and shopping patterns shifted. “I’m an optimist. I’m always seeing the glass half full opportunity that things are going to get better,” he said. “So this did test me a bit.” While Sanandres maintained that his company is still growing and healthy -- he said the business is still bigger than it was in 2019 -- he viewed this year and last as a way to rethink fundamentals. “Maybe it’s an opportunity really to rebalance the business,” he said.

It’s been a big year for online shopping -- online car shopping too. Last summer, for example, Edmunds.com reported that used car and truck sales were the highest they’ve been since 2007. And online used car retailer Carvana was able to ride that wave (or, perhaps, drive that used ’09 Camry). It reported year-over-year revenue growth of 41% at its third quarter earnings. According to chief brand officer Ryan Keeton, the nine-year-old company was able to use the momentum it built over the last decade to capitalize on retail shifts during the pandemic. Keeton joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and discussed his company’s overall strategy. Carvana relies on a predominately contactless experience, which has worked during a pandemic. But beyond that, this past year’s strategy was about making sure the company was a household name. It was known to many as the online company that also had a car vending machine -- which some thought of as a marketing gimmick. But as Keeton described it, the vending machines are “a very low cast way for us to get our name out there.” In 2020 Carvana also focused more on inventory diversification. The company had for years relied on wholesale channels from which most other used car lots sourced as well. But over the last few years, Carvana began trying to buy cars directly from consumers. 2020 was the first year that the retailer really let that program hit its stride. When you buy inventory directly from customers, said Keeton, “you can really diversify that and find different vehicles that customers are looking for.” Which is to say that over the last 12 months, Carvana really tried to make itself stand apart from other used car sources. Part of that is continuing to double down on new inventory sources, as well as heavily marketing people all the time. “Our goal is to build a national brand,” said Keeton, “to change the way people buy and sell cars.”

Canteen Spirits was ready to take on the hard seltzer industry -- and then the coronavirus hit. The company launched in late 2019 and began 2020 expecting to grow to new heights. According to co-founder and CEO Brandon Cason, the first few months of the pandemic were hard when the country shut down and many channels slowed down. But things began to quickly ramp up once the first coronavirus peak subsided -- and the beverage brand is in growth mode once again. Canteen makes canned vodka-based sparkling beverages. Cason joined this week’s Modern Retail Podcast and described the year’s journey. According to Cason, Canteen hit on the right space at the right time. Most hard seltzers are malt-based, but many people have been seeking out similar drinks that are made from spirits. “We recognized that consumers wanted to elevate and go premium when it comes to what they’re drinking,” he said. In the third quarter of last year, things began to take off, with sales doubling month over month during that period. Now, Canteen is about to expand into a new area -- Tequila -- with a soon-to-launch sparkling beverage called Cantina. Cason has a history in both liquor and CPG -- hailing from both the sparkling water brand Waterloo and the vodka company Deep Eddy -- and thinks that with new types of beverages it’s better to be the disruptor. “Big companies are usually not as good at innovation as they are mergers and acquisitions,” he said. Which is to say that a big company like AB-InBev may only invest in making a brand new product if the market has already bore out the results. Even with this current success, Canteen has a lot of growth to do. For one, it’s yet to build out its DTC channel and has only been focusing on wholesale. In his view, growing a direct online presence is a mid- to later-stage step for a spirits startup -- getting retail traction was the most important first step. The company is also waiting until the world opens back up, so it can begin more heavily marketing in person. Events, he said, are “still just a big placeholder for us” -- for obvious reasons. But once the vaccine is deployed and people are socializing once again, “there are dollars ready to go.”

Healthcare and insurance aren’t the sexiest areas, but they are both ripe for disruption. That’s why Matt Gamache-Asselin, co-founder and CEO of Alto Pharmacy, decided to enter the space, as he said on the Modern Retail Podcast. The five-year-old company has raised over $350 million thus far and has been building digital pharmacy to compete with the likes of CVS and Walgreens. Pharmacies are a big umbrella to tackle. Gamache-Asselin estimated the entire industry to be worth half a trillion dollars. For him and his co-founder, the idea was to first and foremost fix one very big problem: health insurance. Rather than selling over-the-counter prescriptions or charging a concierge fee for healthcare services, Alto is quite simply an online pharmacy that works directly with insurance companies. He described going to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription as “an experience I think everyone would agree is bad -- if not at least kind of weird.” To figure out how to go about it, Alto bought a small pharmacy in the Bay Area and to understand the industry. He learned “how different operationally [pharmacies are] from retail,” he said. From there, the company launched its digital platform -- which is now available in five major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. On the program, Gamache-Asselin spoke about the overall pharmacy industry, and why he believes there’s so much room for improvement. He’s even excited about the big dogs coming in. “What I’m most excited about is the new entrants into the space,” he said, “especially a company like Amazon.” Why? In his words: “It can be a bit of a wedge to drive change -- which is clearly sorely needed.”

Lauren Picasso is both an athlete and an entrepreneur -- and she used both skillsets to help launch her company. Picasso is the founder and CEO of Cure Hydration, an electrolyte beverage that comes in powder form. She has a background in e-commerce, hailing from startups like Jet.com, but Cure was her first foray in beverages. On the Modern Retail Podcast, Picasso described the process of launching and growing Cure -- and the lessons she's learned. Picasso has grown the company over the last two years, using social media and national distribution. The products are both available online and in stores, including CVS, Walmart and Whole Foods. At launch, her strategy was to have Cure available in boutique retail environments, like high-end gyms. "Post-pandemic, I really shifted gears and focused more on essential retailers," she said. Now the company is trying to scale by attracting new influencers to rep the brand, adding new products to its portfolio and expanding to more stores. Right now, the business is about 60% wholesale and 40% DTC -- which she thinks is a good breakdown. Both have their pros and cons, but Cure's focus is on getting more people to trying the product and then convincing then -- of course -- to repeat the purchase. "Retail is a great to grow your business really quickly," she said. "But DTC is important for us for our loyal customers and that direct access to our customers."

It's an understatement to say that 2020 was a strange year. A global pandemic turned everything upside down, and retail was no exception. In this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Podcast, a few members of the editorial team take a look ahead at what 2021 may have in store for the retail industry. We cover quite a bit -- from a quiet time for IPOs to a bill targeting e-commerce companies. But the one tying bind is that things are very different from what they were a year ago.

It's easy to talk about retail doom and gloom, given a nearly year-long shutdown for brick-and-mortar stores and bankruptcy filings by many big name retailers. But Shopify president Harley Finkelstein is bullish on the sector's resilience and potential -- especially in e-commerce, which has grown by double digits in 2020 (even retail sales generally were up 6.6% in the January to November period this year, if you exclude gas, car and food services). "In many ways Shopify is a proxy for independent retail," Finkelstein said on the Modern Retail Podcast, adding that the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday this year generated $5 billion in sales on the platform. "And so what that tells me is consumers have completely shifted their buying preferences towards buying more from independent retailers and buying things from brands whose values reflect their own," he said. Shopify allows users to set up their own e-commerce websites. Last year, according to the Canadian company, it surpassed eBay as the second-biggest online retailer in the United States (behind Amazon, obviously). "Our philosophy is to create more value for the partners we capture for ourselves that keeps growing," Finkelstein said.

The pandemic has quickly changed the typical office chair shopper. It's no longer entire companies investing in ergonomic seating, but individuals working from home. "Most consumers have never had to think about this type of product purchase before," Herman Miller Retail president Debbie Propst said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "They've relied on procurement teams or ergonomic specialists who have decided what chair you sit on while you're working." Herman Miller Retail includes Herman Miller, Design Within Reach and HAY. Propst joined the company in January, overseeing a year of momentous change. "One of the things that we've done over the spring and summer months, specifically for the Design Within Reach brand, is really soften the way that we look and feel so that we can be more relatable," Propst said. "We used to showcase a lot of museum-like homes that don't look lived in. And we've used this time period to really transition into much more realistic, livable modern homes."

As the pandemic's third wave mounts, Clorox wipes are still a hot commodity -- the product's shortage is expected to last into the new year. That outsized demand has led to a bump in sales for the company overall, and a stock that's risen by a third this year. Clorox's general manager of DTC Jackson Jeyanayagam, who oversees new digital business ventures and brands for the CPG giant, said that the edge extended to hiring power. "Here I come at Clorox trying to sell someone to come from a Netflix, an Airbnb or Warby Parker or Peloton and come work for me at Clorox, which no one ever thinks of as DTC," Jeyanayagam said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "It's never easy to hire great talent. But it's not nearly the same as it was exactly 12 months ago." On this week's episode, he spoke about how he approaches hiring, what new ways Clorox is trying to build out its DTC channel as well as how the company is looking into new areas and product lines. Burt's Bees, a subsidiary owned by Clorox, recently launched a CBD line, for example, and it brought about a few unique challenges. Some marketing channels are unavailable to a hemp-based products, Jeyanayagam said, and the product line can only sell in 25 states. "It's very saturated despite that. There's a lot of noise, and there's a lot of bad players."

In Karla Gallardo's estimation, the world got tired of fast fashion just as the direct-to-consumer model was being proven out. "By 2010 there was fatigue, there was dissatisfaction with the quality," Galardo said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "A lot of of news was coming out in terms of the conditions of the factories where these products were made. There was an opportunity for something better right after that bubble burst." Gallardo co-founded Cuyana with Shilpa Shah in 2011. The idea was to do to fashion what Warby Parker did to glasses "The choice was really obvious back then. It was 'well, this worked in the frames vertical, can we can we do this on the accessories and apparel side?" But, over the years, the program has changed a great deal -- even more so as a result of the coronavirus.

With a pandemic driving its six brick-and-mortar stores to little use, lingerie company Adore Me has relied on a try-at-home model. "We basically send you a bunch of items, you decide what you keep, and you only pay for what you keep," Adore Me vp of growth Camille Kress said on the Modern Retail Podcast. At the height of the pandemic, half of the brand's new customers were shopping this way. "The key metric for this model is the 'keep rate.' You definitely want people to keep as much as possible, otherwise you're basically paying for shipping back and forth, which is really not the best use of your time or your money," Kress said. The company also seizes the mail-in relationship as a chance to send prospective customers products from other categories like swimwear and sleepwear ("anything that you could basically find right now in our assortment, which is not only intimates," Kress said). This direct connection the company has long fostered with customers has helped Adore Me launch brands beyond lingerie, like Joyja, a line of period-proof underwear. "We want to accompany women through all the different stages of their life," Kress said. "So we know that we're going to need something for their first period, then for their pregnancy, for menopause, and anything that comes in between." Looking at all of these stages, the company tries to find the next untapped market on which it can capitalize. "We're thinking that there's an appetite somewhere," Kress said.

GDP and unemployment are one set of statistics, but another way to measure the extent of the economic slowdown brought by the pandemic is a bit more mundane: Traffic. According to the maps and navigation app Waze, traffic was down around 70% in the early days of the pandemic. "It was like a light switch," Suzie Reider, a managing director of global ads at Waze, said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Within its app, the Google-owned company can offer ads for nearby businesses for drivers, including pins on the map and larger "takeover ads" filling the top third of a user's screen ("it doesn't actually play until you're stopped," Reider said). That part of the business suffered from the drop in traffic too, of course. "We saw a marked decline and decrease in our own advertising revenue in... it started in March," Reider said. "Then we saw these incredible, super exciting, quick gains as we started to move through the summer and then back into the fall." But recent signs indicate that the next wave of the pandemic may not to as harsh on the retail economy as it was earlier in the year. In France and the UK, where lockdowns have been reinstated, "you see immediate pausing of campaigns but you don't see the cancellations," Reider said. Waze Ads' biggest categories are quick serve, "casual dining," entertainment and gas, and it works with both big chains and with small businesses that can spend as little as $2 a day on ads. Before the pandemic, according to Fortune, the app had 130 million active monthly users around the world.

If you're going to ride behind another brand's success, Ikea isn't a bad choice. That's, in fact, what Semihandmade did. Semihandmade makes and sells cabinet doors for the giant retailer's fixtures, which can themselves be bought without the doors. For a small price increase, according to founder John McDonald, you get a big step up in quality. But even though business is good on that front -- Semihandmade has been profitable every year, according to McDonald -- he's looking to cannibalize his own market with Boxi, a soon-to-launch, more premium offering that can fit out a set of kitchen cabinets in its entirety. One big opportunity McDonald spots is the lack of name recognition beyond the top spot filled by Ikea. "There's Ikea in the U.S. and then there's 50 others made by the big guys," McDonald said on the Modern Retail Podcast. With Boxi, McDonald is starting with just a few types of cabinet doors. "You do four or five things great. And that's how we're able to be highly competitive in terms of pricing and high quality, but it's not for everybody. To me that's the clearest path to scale," he said. There's nobody else out there doing this, he claimed. Absolutely, there are cabinet companies. But they're faceless. There's Ikea in the U.S. and then there's 50 others made by the big guys. Part of what we want to do is be nontraditional, looking at what the other guys are doing and say 'we're not doing that.'

It's hard to find good coffee online, and roaster Blk & Bold found that to be a competitive advantage. The company saw huge growth over the last year, thanks to its placement on retail shelves at stores like Target -- as well as being a top-selling brand on Amazon. On the Modern Retail Podcast, which was recorded live during our Modern Retail Summit this week, co-founder and CEO Pernell Cezar Jr. spoke about how he has grown the company. Being on Amazon became a competitive advantage -- especially once the coronavirus hit. More people were buying groceries online, and supplies like coffee were selling out. Thanks to being on national shelves, he said, Blk & Bold was able to gain authority. "When we looked at Amazon and e-commerce we were allowing that authority we were able to gain by brick and mortar to tie that back into scaling and acquiring new consumers on e-comm," he said. Still, coffee is a hard business. "We were entering into the second highest commodity beverage space -- being coffee, right behind water," Cezar Jr. said. He approached growing the company by finding ways to differentiate. "When you are shopping in a coffee aisle in any grocery store, let's say excluding Whole Foods, there is not a premium assortment experience," he said. Ditto Amazon. The bet was that he could grow a coffee business by becoming a rarely-seen premium brand on those shelves.  Cezar Jr. described how he was able to capitalize on all of these elements to grow the business. Amid a pandemic it grew from two people to twelve, and got a brand new warehouse as well. "Our whole business is can we convince these consumers that they can also make great quality coffee at home," he said. 

Luxury retailers have historically been slow to go online. But in the age of coronavirus, digital remains one of the only viable channels. Kelly Kowal, chief platform officer at Farfetch, is one of the people heralding this transition. Farfetch offers both its own consumer-facing marketplace of luxury items as well as sells white labeled services to brands and retailers that want to create their own online experiences. Both sides of the business have been booming over the last few months, she said on the Modern Retail podcast. "We are seeing a lot of interest from brands and retailers now really understanding how important that e-commerce channel really is," she said. But the industry is certainly not static. Different regions are seeing varied demands. According to Kowal, that is tied to countries' health and safety. "China, as it's recovering, is doing really well," she said. "The Middle East is doing really well." The only consistent things she's observed is inconsistency. The markets that were once reliable, said Kowal, no longer are. The demand you see one day may be gone the next. Meanwhile, competition is only increasing. Amazon is beginning to launch its own luxury offerings, giving brands more choices for which platforms they should work with. "We're always watching the competition," said Kowal, adding that Farfetch has a head start. "The difference for us is that we already have 1,300 partners," she said. "We already have the best brands and the best retailers." Amazon may be big and powerful, but it's yet to forge the important partnerships. In Kowal's eyes, the key is collaboration. Brands and retailers in the luxury space aren't looking for quick marketplaces to drop inventory. "We really genuinely want to be partners," she said. "That's how we see these relationships."

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," Dickson said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Mattel is producing short videos for YouTube, on its own and via collaborations with influencers. It also has a show on Netflix, and last year announced 22 animated and live-action TV programs last year. The likes of Nickelodeon are still huge for Mattel to reach young consumers, but YouTube Kids is the biggest growth spot, Dickson said. "I would call YouTube the one that has accelerated the most in the last several years." Mattel also recently launched a DTC platform named after the company's original name, Mattel Creations. This program will feature special edition Mattel collectibles -- aimed at a more adult audience. The hope is to figure out more ways to tap into direct sales (though Dickson is quick to note that Mattel loves all of its retail partners).