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....
Mar 11, 2021•33 min
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 ...
Mar 04, 2021•34 min
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 sh...
Feb 25, 2021•32 min
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 t...
Feb 18, 2021•44 min
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 off...
Feb 11, 2021•35 min
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 d...
Feb 04, 2021•39 min
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 de...
Jan 28, 2021•35 min
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 spa...
Jan 21, 2021•34 min
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 dolla...
Jan 14, 2021•34 min
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...
Jan 07, 2021•33 min
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.
Dec 24, 2020•37 min
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 independe...
Dec 17, 2020•35 min
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, ...
Dec 10, 2020•32 min
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...
Dec 03, 2020•39 min
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 d...
Nov 19, 2020•33 min
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 possibl...
Nov 12, 2020•32 min
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 p...
Nov 05, 2020•31 min
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 o...
Oct 29, 2020•34 min
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 -- espe...
Oct 22, 2020•24 min
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 sa...
Oct 15, 2020•30 min
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 a...
Oct 08, 2020•32 min
Some DTC founders pick a sector just because they spy an opportunity. Bloomscape founder Justin Mast said did that too with his direct-to-consumer plant company, Bloomscape, that he founded in 2018. But he had a bit of a leg up, as he's also a fifth-generation greenhouse grower. His parents met in a greenhouse, in fact. Bloomscape ships thousands of plants a week, including full-grown ones that only survive within a narrow set of conditions. "The thing we did differently was to say 'how do we do...
Oct 01, 2020•30 min
Thrive Market, which first launched in 2014, had been growing at a rate of 40% a year before the pandemic. Now, with new customers joining the membership-based online grocery service, that growth rate has more than doubled to 90% a year, according to the company's co-founder and CTO Sasha Siddhartha. "We were already a digital native experience, so there were lots of parts of the business that scaled naturally," Siddhartha said on the latest episode of the Modern Retail Podcast. Thrive Market wa...
Sep 24, 2020•31 min
Most companies use social media as a way to point consumers to the brand's website. In hot sauce company Truff's case, social media -- and TikTok, in particular -- is an endgame in itself. "They eventually become customers, but we don't tell them, you know 'go to our link and buy our sauce,'" Truff co-founder Nick Guillen said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "We don't want you to go to the link and buy. We want you to like our brand." Nick Guillen and Nick Ajluni co-founded the company in 2017 bas...
Sep 17, 2020•31 min
Jonathan Wahl sees the boom in kitchenware companies as a good thing for the sector as a whole. "Seeing others recognize the same opportunity reaffirms that yes, we're on the right track," Wahl, who co-founded the cookware company Abbio last year with his brother, said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "In terms of competing, I believe that at the end of the day the best products are going to win out." That last bit is worth saying because Wahl sees a proliferation of low quality products in the mar...
Sep 10, 2020•32 min
2020 hasn't been a good year to travel or go on vacation, and Americans are spending more on home improvements instead. Furniture brand Article was lucky enough to corner that market with a DTC model that eschews the need for expensive floorspace that has gone unused for several months this year. "We saw this perfect storm for us, where not only were we effectively reaching a whole lot more people who were super motivated to buy, but we also had this really compelling offering for them, because ...
Sep 03, 2020•35 min
Sam Dennigan launched Strong Roots with a single item -- sweet potato fries -- in Ireland in 2015. The frozen vegetables company has since raised $18.3 million from private equity firm Goode Partners to expand into the U.S., where Dennigan is now based. His experience on both sides of the Atlantic helps him highlight some of the competitive differences among markets. "The key difference between the U.S. market and the U.K. and Irish market is the fact that private label is much stronger in natur...
Aug 27, 2020•39 min
Back when GT Dave, founder of GT's Living Food, single-handedly proved that there was a market for kombucha in the U.S., "probiotic" was hardly a buzzword. "Fortunately today, that hurdle or barrier is no longer there," Dave said on the Modern Retail Podcast. Kombucha is big business; sales exceeded $480 million in 2019, according to Nielsen. GT's Living Foods, which was founded in 1995, makes for a big piece of that pie -- 60% of it back in 2015, as he then told a profile writer . He wouldn't p...
Aug 20, 2020•36 min
Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo wants you to know that when you pay for cleaning supplies at the grocery stores, you're mostly buying water. "Oftentimes consumers are paying really for a new plastic bottle -- and water, which we already have at home," Paiji Yoo said on the Modern Retail Podcast, which was recorded live during our Modern Retail Virtual Summit this week. Blueland sells concentrated tablets for consumers to mix their cleaning supplies on their own. The relatively tiny packaging is ano...
Aug 13, 2020•25 min
It took a trip to London for Emily Schildt to realize that American grocery stores could do better. "I came back personally really yearning for a grocery store experience like I had there," she said on the Modern Retail Podcast. "They were just beautiful spaces in which to shop -- gorgeous products, but really thoughtful display and design." Last year Schildt founded Pop Up Grocer, a traveling showcase of a few hundred products that sets up in U.S. cities for a month at a time. It had four locat...
Aug 06, 2020•35 min
