Future Commerce

• “Shipping is a growth engine. The entire web is possible, all eCommerce is possible because you could ship stuff. The question is, how do you master that in a way that is intentional as a brand or as a marketplace?” - James 
• As the largest resale marketplace, the mechanics of Flyp are run differently. Flyp works to connect owners with sellers, creating a different experience. In the process they use bulk shipping to diversify the engagement in the marketplace. 
• “We have an entire matching system that is designed to essentially incentivize pro sellers to behave and to perform better with their customers. A lot of our analytics are done around the efficiency of distribution that our resellers are offering to their customers on Flyp.” - James
• Shipping is constantly changing and Shippo is changing with it, providing new ways to execute and build fast. 
• “One of the benefits of having Shippo is they've got this really cool feature where you give the information that you need and then you can pick the one that works for you, and we are able to leverage that in different ways.” - Dani

• Get connected with Shippo!
• Find Flyp here: https://www.joinflyp.com/
• Listen to our other Step by Step seasons
• Find our Future Commerce episodes on our website.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

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• With the rise of shipageddon, shipping has become about getting products to the customer as safe and quickly as possible.
• Due to the different mentalities and thought processes of shopping during COVID, many customers choose different methods causing businesses to shift their concerns of shipping.
• “It's not just a cookie cutter thing where you're doing clothes or a hat or a shirt where you just throw it in a box. What we found is with the batch function on Shippo, we’re able to copy a certain order numbers into the search bar up top, search those and batch print those out, saving us a tremendous amount of time.” -Keith Austria 
• “So many of us buy things online and really don't think about what the business challenges are around operations that make it all work.” -Phillip Jackson

• Get connected with Shippo!
• Check out Decorware. 
• Listen to our other Step by Step seasons.
• Find our Future Commerce episodes on our website. 

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

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• Michelle McNamara joins the show to talk about the common pain points of shipping among merchants, and how the pandemic has impacted e-commerce with the shifts of consumer behavior. 
• Shipping is not one size fits all, it's unique to every business. Shipping should be thought of as a key differentiator to add value to your business.  
• “Think of ways you can increase your order value without increasing the weight of the box by too much.” -Michelle 

• Get connected with Shippo!
• Listen to our other Step by Step seasons
• Find our Future Commerce episodes on our website. 

Have any questions or comments about the show? Contact us at Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

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• Kevin shares his incredible work at Nuun Energy and their growth of being acquired by Nestlé Health Science.
• Sustainability and ESG are at the forefront of product innovation for Nuun, but category innovation and form factor are top of mind in fast moving consumer goods and CPG, as well.
• When it comes to health and creating new connections, information is right at our fingertips. Having information right when we want it is evolving our purchasing behaviors. This evolution means that we can make better decisions around health.
• “I'm less worried about competitors coming in at this moment because I think it's going to continue to expand functional hydration — because it's a universal need that is bigger than the plant based revolution that's happening within food. I truly believe that.” -Kevin
• “Think about plant based milk alternatives, where it started. It was soy milk and a tetra pack in the center of a store. Commerce wasn't even really a factor then. Today, it's sold and surging within eCommerce, but also now positioned in the dairy case right beside the milk alternatives. What I foresee happening is it's going to be looked at less as functional hydration as an alternative; [instead] it's going to be toe to toe, side by side with the way people look at beverages now... It's going to be a substitute, much like you're seeing in dairy alternatives [versus] dairy itself.” - Kevin
• “We have the toolset to capture new data points that we can optimize for our personal bodies.” - Brian 
• “Innovation is renovation. It's innovation for new need states” - Kevin 

• Check out Nuun Energy here: https://nuunlife.com/
• Get our latest report here: Service is the New Storefront
• Find our other episodes here: https://futurecommerce.fm/future-commerce-podcast

If you have any comments or questions about this episode, you can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels. We love hearing from our listeners!

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• Shipping chocolate is challenging enough, but sourcing and housing craft chocolate from global suppliers, and creating a marketplace for consumers who have very specific expectations around buying and consuming chocolate is harder still.
• The challenges of creating a great customer experience with shipping delays in the midst of COVID created issues in the logistics industry, and those had massive impacts on the quality of the product at the time of delivery. Some chocolate only arrived a month post-purchase, at which point it wasn’t consumable. This represents a problem in a luxury chocolate perishable category, when you’re at mercy of carriers and covid-related delays.
• “I don't think the mission makes us grow slower, but I think my focus and laser focus on becoming a profitable company, you know, kind of meters our growth. And because we're not funded, because it's like something that has been bootstrapped, we don't have the luxury of throwing thousands of dollars into ads or marketing and having that long cycle of seeing a return on our investment with customer acquisition.” —Pashmina
• The connection formed to chocolate as a kid reflects the outcome adults make in wanting to take the leap towards craft chocolate.
• “You have recipes and a whole ecosystem built around chocolate and the brands with those...so you're not just unseating a single experience, you're unseating experiences across multiple food ecosystems, which is another challenge and also an opportunity.” -Brian
• Bar and Cocoa are MBE-certified as a minority-owned business, and supports minority and BIPOC growers and founders. Their focus on doubling their Made at Origin chocolates have allowed them to support more people who are growing cacao at the source. As Pashmina says, “rather than just for these countries importing beans, the chocolate is staying there and being sourced locally, made locally by local manufacturers, whether they own the farms, whether they're working directly with the farms there.” 

• Check out Bar & Cocoa here: https://barandcocoa.com/
• Get our latest report here: Service is the New Storefront

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• For the Love is a DTC newsletter covering mission-driven companies and aims to provide meaningful content for entrepreneurs and founders.
• The trio shares the joys and pains of producing weekly content and how that informs their own understanding of the market.
• Creating content is a means of learning and growing, and developing a cadence that requires you to get better over time.
• “I don't think of myself as the authority on all of these topics. I am trying to learn about them. And so I'm having these conversations and trying to convey that as best I can.” - Aja
• There is a lot of good conversation and community building happening in the DTC media world, but there is still so much room to grow in providing spaces for diverse voices to provide their perspectives. For The Love seeks to have conversations with founders about the things that help to build a more charitable and equitable brand community.
• Aja aims to invite open-ended conversations from those she interviews to make deeper, more tactical information more readily available.
• “Something needs to be meaningfully different to be relevant” - Aja
• On innovation in DTC companies: “Can we provide premium product to people without a premium price tag? And I think that was the original intention of direct to consumer.” - Aja

• Subscribe to Aja’s newsletter, For the Love!
• Find Aja on Twitter here. 
• Sign up to receive our newest report, Service is the New Storefront, dropping next week!

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• Rob shares the story of how Rally acquired a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and their plan to make it accessible to the public
• Gen Z is growing up to be a completely different wealth creation cycle then the one that currently exists
• Rob breaks down how Rally operates, the legal system that makes their IPOs possible, and how the system they created is both an online and in-person museum
• “We tried to create an ecosystem that is built around access but has a little bit for everybody involved, people that care about these assets individually.” - Rob 
• “It's more important to have one of those sort of the Genesis moment of a franchise that I truly do believe has staying power and will live forever, then it is to have stock in a company where I'm beholden to, you know, a car manufacturer and something that's a little bit disconnected from the CEO of that company right now.” - Rob 
• By keying in on nostalgia, Rally is unlocking the interest of a new type of investor. Nintendo’s mark on the culture has a strong nostalgia with a current generation experiencing new liquidity, looking to invest into new asset classes.
• “Anything that has that huge enthusiast group, the people who really care about it, has gotten out of reach because of access or price, that's a space that we want to be in.” - Rob
• Speculative future assets may be absurdist in nature. An example Rob gives is a Theranos centrifuge. It may not be worth much now, but acquiring it now for its potential future value is something that Rally thinks a lot about as they build for the future.
• You cannot buy spent Chernobyl fuel rods on Rally (yet).

• https://rallyrd.com/
• https://www.instagram.com/rally/?hl=en

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The agency world doesn’t get enough respect

• Agencies are a necessary part of fractionalizing expertise. Legal and accounting are good examples of fractionalized professional services.
• The more mature you are as a business, the more it becomes imperative to bring those capabilities in house.
• Proof points of DTC brands who acquired professional services: Ro and Glossier
• Agencies are concentrators of expertise. Commerce platforms, like Magento, require domain expertise and platform specialization to implement — and many brands lack the ability to run this kind of operation in-house.
• “I don't think the agency world gets enough respect and agencies are concentrators of talent. Like they are concentrators of expertise. And the last time I looked, technologists make the decisions that create the experiences that your customers interact with.”
• Creating an anti-competitive ecosystem in eCommerce requires rethinking power structures. Brian recapped thoughts on this process of questioning those power structures, relating back to his Insiders piece: Rethinking Brand Power Structures
• “You are who you are because of the things that you've seen and the experiences you've had. That has a huge bearing on the way that we think of whatever the future is, because the future is determined by what's happened in the past”

• Check out Brian’s Insiders piece: Insiders #080: Rethinking Brand Power Structures
• The Future of Services Is Value Orchestration 

Let us know what you thought about the episode on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

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• The core idea of the pivot from physical products to software was the basis of our piece in Insiders #070: Phenomenological Brands, which is how we booked Arfa (now Chord) to the Show.
• The Chord team’s background in deploying technology at Glossier informed the need for unique eCommerce experiences, and headless represents a shift from the template-driven sameness of eCommerce today, to a new limitless future
• Henry breaks down a new announcement, the name change from Arfa to Chord, a stronger  focus on business software, as well as acquiring business intelligence company, Yaguara.
• Arfa was rated as #4 in our “Amazon Prime Challengers” category in our Spring 2020 Nine by Nine report
• The technological evolution of headless commerce allows for a fundamental revolution in direct to consumer 
• “To make real value at some point, you’ve got to walk away from something that's worth something.” - Henry 
• Proprietary competitive advantage is a meaningful way to make your entire business better, and what will impact everything else.
• “We need to move the conversation beyond build versus buy. It's really buy the right thing and then build around it. And if you can't build around it, then it's not the right thing.” - Bryan M.
• “Our very unique position on this is not just about headless, it's about the brain as well. Having the tools is half the battle. Knowing what to do with them is the other half. And that's our very strong position that we arrived at as operators.” - Henry 

• Nine by Nine Report
• https://chord.co/
• https://www.glossier.com/

Let us know what you think on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

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Society and Audience Connection

• There’s a difference in connection with audiences—connection through logic (written) and connection through emotion (art).
• On emotional connection: “...when it connects with somebody, it deepens the experience of the things you’re trying to say through words.” - Phillip Jackson
• Lumi is a software company connecting packaging manufacturers to brands and creating lasting relationships between those brands and manufacturers. 
• Not only has COVID-19 affected manufacturing, but there’s a generational gap between manufacturers and brands. Lumi is bridging that gap.
• “I feel like we’re going to be in this golden age of business as performance art, where people are doing things that don’t make sense, but they’re doing it on a large scale when it comes to marketing.” - Stephan Ango

Tools with Soul

• “How do you create, give your company a soul, give your thing that you’re doing a soul? That’s very hard. It’s like trying to define why your thing should exist…” - Stephan Ango on what his podcast, Well Made, is trying to define.
• Slash Packaging is a hobby project of Stephan’s—and has helped brands tell the stories around their packaging. 
• Slash Packaging isn’t trying to be the source of innovation for packaging, but they do want to build a framework for understanding what the more sustainable options are in your industry. 
• “I want people to learn how to think about other ways that tools can be used so that they could find creative uses of these tools to expand all of our understanding and imagination and our horizons.” - Phillip Jackson
• “This idea of default, the idea of sampling, the idea of ubiquity in the tools that we use has created other problems that weren’t easy to anticipate and I think harder to solve for, which leaves room for challengers.” - Phillip Jackson

Links

• Listen to Well Made.
• Check out Lumi’s status tracker for their factories.
• Check out Slash Packaging. 

Have any comments or questions about this episode? Reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels. We love hearing from our listeners!

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