Piggy banks aren't especially in vogue, but the idea behind them sticks. By saving up a little over the long haul, you can pool quite a bit of money — enough, in Reel's experience, to pay for a luxury handbag, furniture or some electronics. The personal finance app lets customers save up for specific items. Users pick something and commit to wiring Reel a few dollars a day for it, setting an enticing timeline into motion. Put aside $5 a day for 12 weeks, for instance, and Reel will take care of ...
Jul 30, 2020•32 min
Closed spaces, mingling strangers and loud music to shout over -- bars seem purpose-built for spreading the coronavirus. According to Bacardi CMO John Burke, that means people will be doing their drinking, and less of it, at home. "This summer there'll be a lot more drinking out of home because people feel much more comfortable social distancing at home," Burke said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "We predicted that trend back in early April, and we've switched to producing quite a lot of our bran...
Jul 23, 2020•34 min
Cleo Capital's Sarah Kunst thinks the investing landscape focuses a great deal on the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- in plainspeak, that's stuff that isn't really essential. Or, in Kunst's words, the kind of product that answers the question: "what will make you feel better in the moment?" Her investments are in companies that supply basic needs. "There's the whole thing on the bottom: where you do you live, where do you eat, how do you feel loved?' Kunst said on the Modern Retail Podcast...
Jul 16, 2020•36 min
Before the pandemic, the zero (or low) sugar beverage brand Sanzo had all the scrappy upstart charm and aesthetic of a DTC brand. But, it still sold mostly through wholesale -- 70 to 80%, in founder Sandro Roco's estimate. That's changed. "Since the pandemic, it's completely inverted, and even more extremely so," Roco said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "During this pandemic, if you're looking at CPG sales and specifically sparkling water, a lot more folks are willing to order sparkling water to ...
Jul 09, 2020•38 min
Aishwarya Iyer started Brightland, an olive oil company, in 2018 with the idea of describing the products like wine and marketing it like a beauty brand. "Beauty leads the way in terms of talking about benefits, packaging -- the shine and glimmer that beauty's able to do, food just isn't able to do that. Maybe there are some standouts!" Iyer said on the Modern Retail Podcast. What's more, many DTC beauty brands rely on less traditional revenue channels, like big box retailers. Over the last few ...
Jul 02, 2020•41 min
Business lost to the pandemic has rebounded for StockX, an online marketplace where people selling and buying items -- sneakers, mainly -- negotiate on a price before StockX provides authentication and shipping. "We've seen an incredible return to activity in the marketplace," StockX CMO Deena Bahri said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "By mid-April we started to see an incredible return back to normal -- and even better than normal -- shopping behaviors." That's the case even though the company c...
Jun 25, 2020•41 min
The professional world may have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, but there is one thing that still powers our workday: coffee. The subscription-based Trade Coffee, for one, has seen its mail-in customer base go up by a factor of 10, alongside other food startups that have seen a bump in subscriptions. Earlier this year, company CMO Melissa Spencer Barnes told Modern Retail that the company was on track to ship its millionth bag of coffee sometime in 2020. It also started selling five ...
Jun 18, 2020•42 min
As existing commerce companies adapt to survive a global pandemic, Jimmy Wu instead launched one. Cat Person sells cat food, toys, furniture and treats in a market that Wu sees as skewed toward dog owners. The coronavirus gave pause to Wu and his co-founder, Harry's alumnus Lambert Wang. "If we were in another category in another industry -- selling travel accessories, luxury fashion -- we probably would have made a harder decision" about delaying the brand's launch, Wu said on the Modern Retail...
Jun 11, 2020•39 min
Retail stores are slowly reopening, but Christiane Lemieux, founder of the DTC furniture brand The Inside, still thinks people will want to invest most in the place they're spending most of their time: the home. "What you will be doing is focusing your time and disposable spend on making your home into everything it should be -- not only for now, but for what the future of our lives is going to look like," Lemieux said on the Modern Retail Podcast (people are spending so much time in doors, in f...
Jun 04, 2020•37 min
Looking to the past doesn't always work. For one, many current founders or CEOs were "still in high school" during the last economic crisis, according to Homebrew partner and co-founder Hunter Walk. For another, even for those entrepreneurs who survived the last global downturn, the big takeaways might not apply to current circumstances. "The answers from those entrepreneurs in 2008 may or not be the right answers for companies in 2020. But the questions they asked themselves might be the things...
May 28, 2020•42 min
For a time, Grove Collaborative was one of the rare places where you could order reasonably-priced hand sanitizer online. That availability wasn't for a lack of demand. "Demand had been building, and all of a sudden for a week it was off the charts. And we had a big decision to make that week," CEO Stuart Landesberg said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "Do we want to prioritize our existing customers or do we want to prioritize going after new customers? Grove ended up focusing on existing custome...
May 21, 2020•36 min
Coefficient Capital co-founder Franklin Isacson describes himself as a cautious investor, especially in times of uncertainty like today. That comes in handy during a time of crisis. For Isacson, this has been a good time particularly to invest in certain companies, especially in grocery and consumer goods that can weather a recession. "The new funds that are being deployed over the next 24, 36 months are likely to be very good vintages, much like the '09 and '10 funds were excellent vintages," I...
May 14, 2020•36 min
Biossance president Catherine Gore has always considered skin care as medically significant, and believes customers will be more inclined to share that thinking as coronavirus lockdowns continue around the world. "Our skin is our largest organ, and it's also our first line of defense against outside aggressors," Gore said on the latest Glossy Beauty podcast. Education is a big part of Biossance's marketing strategy and value to customers. One of Biossance's central ingredients for skin care, for...
May 07, 2020•32 min
If Nick Ling's latest brand launch wasn't so right for this moment, he would have delayed bringing it to market. "If I was launching a new brand I'd wait. There's just too much change in consumer behavior," Ling said on the Modern Retail Podcast. But Open Spaces, the second brand under the umbrella company Pattern (where Ling is CEO) is all about getting the most out of the place many consumers are stuck in these days. "How also do we help separate home into different activities, where now work ...
Apr 30, 2020•34 min
Through this crisis, Burrow CEO Stephen Kuhl is sticking to a piece of advice he got back when the furniture store was just another startup at Y Combinator. "The advice we got then was 'just launch your first product. Get it out there into people's hands and you'll get feedback,' Kuhl said on the Modern Retail Podcast. That's what the company has done with a virtual design consultation program delivering an "in-store experience" to customers from their homes. It had been in development for a whi...
Apr 23, 2020•32 min
Americans may have more reason than ever to appreciate the comforts of home and the value of making theirs their own. But even a company like Parachute, a luxury linens and home goods company founded in 2014, is feeling the pinch from the downturn in retail. "Our [physical] retail is about 25% of our business -- but it's a profitable part of our business," the company's founder Ariel Kaye said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "And it's really also how we connect with our customers and build relatio...
Apr 16, 2020•29 min
If Benjamin Witte talks about his beverage brand Recess as if it were a budding empire, it's because he's noticed the same broad ambitions among the sector's big players. "Red Bull is a media company for the action sports community that monetizes through selling cans," Witte said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "We're speaking to creatives, just like Red Bull is speaking to the action sports community, and Gatorade is speaking to athletics." To that end, Recess -- which sells fruity sparkling wate...
Apr 09, 2020•28 min
Rhone CEO Nate Checketts said his company "saw the writing on the wall really quickly" in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Companies like his men’s activewear brand would soon be bloated with inventory and feel the pressure to boost e-commerce promotions. "If everybody's getting promotional all at once, that's going to shift customer demand away from us if we're continuing to operate at full price," Checketts said. "So I challenged our team in 24 hours to get a promotion ready and to ...
Apr 02, 2020•29 min
When people go shopping for mattresses, according to Resident co-founder Eric Hutchinson, they often know more or less what kind they're after. "The person who wants a memory foam mattress opts into that category very quickly," Hutchinson said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "They say: 'I am looking for a memory foam mattress,' so they're doing the comparative shopping versus other memory foam brands." In other words, people don't go mattress shopping as much as they go "memory foam" or "tradition...
Mar 26, 2020•34 min
Much has been written about the Chinese consumer that shops abroad in stores. But there is a growing movement among customers in China that, through livestreaming apps like ShopShops, are shopping at stores outside China, just through their phones. ShopShops founder Liyia Wu explained the experience from the customer's perspective: "Open up your phone, and with a click of a button you can be [on] any street, anywhere, opening the doors of stores that are interesting." The app allows viewers to w...
Mar 19, 2020•32 min
Shark Tank investor and co-founder of RSE Ventures Matt Higgins thinks a change is coming to the DTC playbook. "I think it's amazing that you can come along and challenge taboo thinking around ED, or you can go ahead and create an entirely new cereal brand, launch it right away and get scale. That's not going away," Higgins said on the Modern Retail Podcast. What is going away, he added, is the idea that digitally-native companies can stick solely to the online world and survive. "That part is n...
Mar 12, 2020•34 min
When it comes to financial technology, China has Silicon Valley beat. WeChat is a big part of that. What started as a messaging app in 2011 is now a mobile payments giant. "People use it for everything. For utilities, for gaming, obviously to communicate with their family and friends, and to do business," said Yiren Lu, a software engineer (at Google) and a writer who covers WeChat and Chinese technology. WeChat users can transfer money to their friends. But they can also pay for groceries, look...
Mar 05, 2020•25 min
The direct-to-consumer model didn't exist when Ariane Goldman started her first clothing brand in the mid-2000s. But by the time her second company, Hatch, launched in 2011, "the only way to really start the business was DTC," Goldman said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Hatch makes clothes to be worn at all stages of pregnancy -- and before and after too -- sold both online at stores in New York and Los Angeles. "The genesis was really what didn't exist out there. I was pregnant with my first dau...
Feb 27, 2020•28 min
Studs co-founder and CEO Anna Harman recently got a second piercing in her ears. One place she looked at would have charged her $500. The other, which she went for, was a tattoo parlor. "And while the piercing experience was great -- they pierce with a needle, it was healthy and safe -- the overall environment was really not suited to me. I felt really personally out of place there," Harman said on the Modern Retail Podcast. She reached out to Lisa Bubbers, who would go on to co-found Studs -- a...
Feb 20, 2020•36 min
Coulter Lewis got the idea for Sunday when he saw the state of his local Home Depot's lawn care aisle. "You can smell it before you get there," Lewis said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "It's pallets stacked high with bags of chemical fertilizer, covered in caution labels." That was in 2017, the year before he launched the company out of Boulder, Colorado. First, Sunday asks customers to ship it a bit of soil from their property. Then it analyzes that alongside pre-existing soil and weather data ...
Feb 13, 2020•33 min
For the Body Shop, it's about selling where the customers are -- even if that means it's not necessarily on your own sites or in your stores. "Stores for us are the bread and butter of the business, the biggest portion of the business, and will always be," U.S. general manager, Andrea Blieden said on the Modern Retail Podcast. At the same time, being on Amazon has been a big boon to the business, mostly because that's where a significant part of new customers are. "I just don't think that you're...
Feb 06, 2020•34 min
Lo & Sons launched as a direct-to-consumer brand in 2010. That's practically prehistoric as far as the recent crop of DTC companies is concerned. "We were kind of an accidental DTC company," co-founder of the brand, which makes high-end handbags, Derek Lo said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "We started before the term even existed." The idea to start a family business came from Derek Lo's mother, Helen Lo, who despite her frequent travels couldn't find a bag that was easy on her back. She sta...
Jan 30, 2020•32 min
Iris Nova founder Zak Normandin is betting on a suite of "no or low" sugar drinks -- sparkling teas, seltzers and lemon juices -- and on a new way to sell them. "Every brand has a phone number," Normandin explained on the Modern Retail Podcast. "When you want to place an order for a product you just pull out your phone, you text the brand directly." His lemonade brand, Dirty Lemon, has sold more than 2 million bottles since its founding in 2015, and per Forbes, 90% of those sales happened via te...
Jan 23, 2020•34 min
Roman launched in 2017 with a specific mission: Treating erectile dysfunction online, with doctor consultations and medication delivered right to customers. The company has raised $176 million in funding. It's also changed its name to Ro and turned Roman into just one of the the brands it owns, expanding its telemedicine offerings to also tackle nicotine addiction (with a brand called Zero), perimenopausal conditions (Rory) and more. "We really realized that we had built a platform that could tr...
Jan 16, 2020•37 min
Rebecca Taylor dresses aim to land between the feminine and something more irreverent. "Back in the day there was cool people and feminine people, but they didn't really cross over," the company's president, Janice Sullivan, said on this week's Modern Retail Podcast. "In Rebecca Taylor, it's where that meets," she added. "It's okay now to be a feminine feminist. It wasn't, maybe, years ago." A year after the departure of its founder, the designer sells dresses in six of its own U.S. stores, and ...
Jan 09, 2020•33 min
