By Krissie & Rich
The podcast currently has 21 episodes available.
Thank you for joining us today for our Expert Training with the Wonderful Anne Thomas from Design Packs. Anne is a longtime supporter of MindfulCommerce so we're delighted to share the floor with a beloved member of our community.
Join the MindfulCommerce Community for free here: https://mindfulcommerce.io/join-the-community
Visit Design Packs website here - https://design-packs.com
Some of our examples of great design - https://eu.patagonia.com/ and https://www.allbirds.com/
Enjoy!
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Thank you for joining us today for our Expert Training with the fabulous Jeanne from Spark and Bloom. Jeanne is near and dear to us as a person, but also as a professional. We love to support her because she does more than talk the talk, among other things. She's part of 1% for the planet. And she offsets the carbon footprint of her business, which is Spark and Bloom, a design studio that specialises in helping ethical entrepreneurs, make sure their impact is seen. Through careful strategy and market research Spark and Bloom designs beautiful brand identities, which fit business goals with and resonates with the right people.
Jeanne will talks about what branding is and why it's important to make sure we're on the same page and we're talking about the same thing, what specifically is an ethical brand and why you should be one. And finally, Jeanne shares with us a lot of actionable tips and ideas.
Join the MindfulCommerce Community for free here: https://mindfulcommerce.io/join-the-community
Visit Spark and Bloom's Expert Directory listing here: https://mindfulcommerce.io/directory/spark-and-bloom/
Enjoy!
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Series 4, Ep #3
In this episode, we'll be learning about how your ecommerce brand can stand out and profit with mindful marketing. The perfect harmony!
Delivered to us by Aleana Bargaoui from Brands Are Alive!
Join the MindfulCommerce Community for free here: https://mindfulcommerce.io/join-the-community
Visit Spark and Bloom's Expert Directory listing here: https://mindfulcommerce.io/directory/brands-are-alive
Enjoy!
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Series 4: Ep 2 - Shownotes
Super excited to publish the second Expert Training to the MindfulCommerce Podcast!
Monica Sharma-Patnekar delivered this fantastic training to the MindfulCommerce Community - if you'd like to see the video, join the community for free and you'll find it in the Expert Training Library.
In this session, we learn about ways to build an ecommerce brand that's both conscious and irresistible – the best of all worlds!
This episode helps creative & conscious product ecommerce businesses to build a brand that inspires their audience to take ACTION. By nailing your positioning, bringing your customers back & consistently showing up, tracking & testing.
Monica talks to us about:
FREE resource: discover your customers needs, wants & desires with the 4 types of questions to ask your customer, and build a brand that inspires your audience to action!
Where can you find Monica?
Find Monica's business profile on the MindfulCommerce Expert Directory here.
Instagram: @businesswithmonica
Not yet a member of our community? Join for free here - https://mindfulcommerce.io/join-the-community
Want to feature on the podcast? All info on how to do so can be found here -
https://mindfulcommerce.io/support-packages
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Series 4: Ep 1 - Shownotes
We are so excited to introduce a BRAND NEW SERIES for the MindfulCommerce Podcast 🎉
This series (series 4), will allow people outside of the MindfulCommerce Community to learn from some of the knowledge, skills and expertise brought to you by our ecommerce and sustainability experts who contribute to our Expert Training Library inside the community platform.
This episode is the first of many in this series and is brought to you by our Co-Founder Krissie.
Krissie is not a co-founder of MindfulCommerce, she is also the founder of Kollectify - a content marketing agency for ecommerce tech and agencies.
In this episode, Krissie shares her expertise on how to Harness the Power of Technology to Build & Scale an Ecommerce Business With Mindful Foundations. 🌱
Krissie discusses various ways we can build and scale our online businesses to not only "leave no trace" on the environment, but to have a regenerative business which helps our environment to thrive.
Krissie will run through the 6 sustainability pillars in The MindfulCommerce Sustainability Framework which guides ecommerce businesses to reduce their environmental footprint through tech.
You'll walk away feeling good - armed with new ideas for how to have a more mindful business and inspire others to do the same.
Not yet a member of our community? Join for free here - https://mindfulcommerce.circle.so/home
Want to feature on the podcast? All info on how to do so can be found here -
https://mindfulcommerce.io/support-packages
Links mentioned in podcast:
The MindfulCommerce Sustainability Framework & Guide
Mindful Business
Mindful Sourcing
Mindful Products
WaterHaul
Mindful Deliveries
Mindful Communications
Mindful Footprint
Our Challenge and top tips
Our contact details
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Find us:
Where to find One Circular World:
Shipbob - Website
Where to find Casey Armstrong:
Casey Armstrong - Email: [email protected]
Links Mentioned in Episode:
Pachama
noissue
Shownotes:
Krissie Leyland 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands and service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie
Rich Bunker 0:11
I'm Rich, and we're your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community.
Krissie Leyland 0:18
The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of ecommerce as a force for good.
Rich Bunker 0:30
You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io, and clicking "community". See you there.
Krissie Leyland 0:35
Hello, everyone. Today, we'll be speaking to Casey, who is the CMO of Shipbob. We will be discussing when if ever is the right time to outsource warehousing and fulfillment for your ecommerce brand. So welcome Casey, it's really great to have you on here. I've wanted to for ages because you are one of our very first community supporters. So thank you so much for that. Would you like to just introduce yourself and tell me a bit about shipbob? And why Shipbob exists?
Casey Armstrong 1:09
Yes. Well, thank you very much for having me. You know, we're very happy to be part of the MindfulCommerce Community. We take the carbon neutrality and everything very seriously over here at Shipbob, which I know we're gonna dive into. We are a global fulfillment platform. We serve and are partnered with over 5000 brands. We ship millions of items every single month. We actually are up to almost 25 fulfillment centers, including one in the UK, one in Canada, one in Ireland, one in Australia, which we just announced last week, and about 20 in the US. So, I'm very happy to be here.
Krissie Leyland 1:51
Wow, that's amazing. That's a lot. I was actually gonna ask you how many fulfillment centers you have but you just answered that question. It's great that you've got one in the UK. So in your opinion, when is the right time for brands to outsource their warehousing and fulfillment to companies such as Shipbob?
Casey Armstrong 2:13
There's no hard answer where it's like, "once you're doing 100 orders a month." I think it's when you start seeing that the time it takes you to fulfill,and ship items starts to impact the time that you have to focus on sales, marketing, community development & product development, because that's what's actually going to drive your business. I know a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of hesitant to like hand things over. Unless logistics and operations is your differentiator from your competition... I think it behooves a lot of founders to hand that off sooner than not so they can focus on the right things, logistics, and fulfillments, very time intensive, which is often your most valuable asset. If you're staying up till eight o'clock at night, midnight, 2am, during peak season to pick and pack boxes, it's probably not the best use of your time.
Krissie Leyland 3:18
There are brands doing that.
Casey Armstrong 3:20
Oh, we hear that all the time. It's honestly the catalyst for [almost all of our customers] to reach out to and start working with us rather quickly. They start seeing the time that they're spending on it. Sometimes, even worse is subconsciously, they're purposely thwarting their own growth: "I want to double my sales. I want to double my business but that means I'm gonna have to ship twice as many items. I don't want to stay up for an extra two hours or four hours every single day to pick and pack boxes." Then if you're gonna start hiring people, why wouldn't you hire more people maybe for marketing or product development, or somebody to help on the entire supply chain versus just packing boxes? So it's something that we hear rather often.
Krissie Leyland 4:14
Yeah. I mean, that's definitely not why they would have started their business. The first thing that came to my head then was like thinking of when they reach that specific moment, they might also be thinking about internationalization. So do you help brands with going global, because you have these big fulfillment centers around the world and what does that look like?
Casey Armstrong 4:41
We don't handle the freight, per se, but we have partners that can help with that (with duties, taxes and everything like that). We can also ship globally, just from the United States. Something that we do with the majority of our customers, is we do what's called a "time in transit analysis". We'll help you understand what is the best and most effective way to distribute your inventory, whether that be just in the United States or whether that be globally. It's all based off of your historical data on where your customers are purchasing from. We definitely help with that. Then within Shipbob as well, there's our analytics reporting tool which updates in real time. There you can start toggling on and off different fulfillment centers to start seeing what type of cost and time saving you'd actually have by you know, let's say distributing some of your inventory overseas.
Krissie Leyland 5:32
I'm also thinking of, if they do see... for example, if they're in the US, but a lot of their customers are in Europe. It might make sense to have a fulfillment center in Europe. It might be about cost, but if you're shipping at a less of a distance, then it's probably better in terms of your emissions and your carbon footprint.
Casey Armstrong 6:02
Yes, it's much better for the environment. Then also, sometimes there's marketing arbitrage opportunities overseas, where maybe that type of product, or just in general, some of the customer acquisition costs might be lower. You might say, "Well, I don't have a lot of sales in this region" but maybe that's because you're focusing all of your paid efforts in the United States, but there could be opportunities in the UK, across Europe, or somewhere like Australia. So obviously, once your inventory is there, there's less impact on the environment. It's also faster and more inexpensive. Sometimes you can even test it by marketing in those regions, before you start to distribute inventory. Just to see what type of opportunities are there, both from a demand side, but also the costs.
Krissie Leyland 6:51
Definitely. On the subject of cost... it might be a good question to ask: On average, how much are brands spending with Shipbob in terms of just handing over their fulfillment to you?
Casey Armstrong 7:09
There isn't a hard dollar number or pound, but what I'll give is a percentage. At Shipbob, we do the receiving, we store your inventory and then we do all of the fulfillment. So, the pick pack, the packaging & the actual shipping label. What we typically see is that it often ranges between about 8-15% of your of your total sales goes towards again, all things included within fulfillment, including the shipping label.
Krissie Leyland 7:47
Awesome. That's not that's not too bad. I was expecting more to be honest.
Casey Armstrong 7:51
It can go up at times. Again, it depends on how efficient brands are with their inventory: both the amount that they that they order & keep on hand, how quickly they can replenish it, and also how quickly they can sell it. I'd say typically, it's in that range.
Krissie Leyland 8:12
Do you help with knowing how much stock to bring in? So for example, you know, if they've run out of something... you mentioned that analytics part. Do you help with brands knowing "Oh, I need to order this much of this product"?
Casey Armstrong 8:30
Definitely. Yes, we do. You can start creating notification rules within Shipbob when you're getting low on certain inventory. We're going to continue to invest heavily there to help our customers be smarter through technology. We also have some partners that help with inventory tracking, inventory, planning, order replenishment, and pushing that back up to their manufacturers as well.
Krissie Leyland 9:01
That's really good. I can see that saving a lot of time and money as well. You know, knowing where to spend your budget, and what what's selling more than other products, etc. That's cool. Let's get on to the exciting bit. So how did you become carbon neutral?
Casey Armstrong 9:22
This was something that we'd been talking about internally for a while. As we thought about it as a company, businesses and businesses like Shipbob need to lead, not just follow. We were actually talking about this with some of our partners a couple weeks ago where consumers are pulling and governments at times will push but the businesses have a responsibility to be ahead of the curve, and do what's right long term. So we need to put our money where our mouth is and lead by example. We can't solely look to, let's say, policymakers or some macro level decisions to force us to do what we actually should be doing. And as we get bigger, there's an additional responsibility for us as well. A couple years ago, we were obviously much smaller. We only had locations in the United States but we've become this global platform. We work with 1000s of brands, soon to be 10s of 1000s of brands, so we need to lead by example. What's important there is that similarly sized companies or smaller companies, and maybe sometimes even larger companies, will hopefully, see what companies like us are doing and then proceed accordingly as well. It's something that we were really excited about and we felt it was our responsibility as somebody who's a global player in the space, and especially such a fast growing space like ecommerce. It was very well received internally, of course, by our colleagues, but by our customers as well. So we wanted to make our entire fulfillment network carbon neutral, and then also allow for an easy option for all of our customers so that the merchants or the sellers to make it so all of their last mile shipments are carbon neutral as well.
Krissie Leyland 11:15
That's amazing. That's so good. I was gonna ask about that. So the fact that you're carbon neutral, does that then mean that your customers' shipping is too?
Casey Armstrong 11:27
Right so what we did is that we made it so all of our fulfillment centers, and our HQ, and all of our operations are carbon neutral. All of our customers get the benefit off of that. Then through our partnership with Pachama, we allowed for a very easy way for all of our customers to easily activate it so their shipments are fully carbon neutral as well. By Shipbob being carbon neutral that way, at least all of this part of their supply chain, and everything that we can control is carbon neutral. We are looking into ways to help impact things higher up in the supply chain, such as before items hit our docks. But at least for now, you know, we wanted to make sure we took care of everything that's that's in our control.
Krissie Leyland 12:20
Wow, that's cool. Do you say that your customers say at checkout, or just before the shopper makes a purchase, does it say "this will be shipped to you in a carbon neutral way" or anything along those lines?
Casey Armstrong 12:37
A lot of brands will leverage that. If I recall, the stat correctly, I think it was close to 92% of consumers so that they're more likely to trust a brand that has ethical sustainable practices. A lot of brands truly believe that and some of them are just capitalizing on it. But regardless, it's for the better so that's fine. A lot of brands will, will promote it but some also like to do it behind the scenes as well. So it depends.
Krissie Leyland 13:09
Yeah, definitely. I think it's really good to talk about it wherever you can, and like you said, being a global player, it's really important to build awareness & for you to do the right thing to then influence other people too. Then if your customers are doing the same, it just goes round around like a nice little circle of positivity. So one question I did have actually came from the community. So before we organized this, I did a little poll in the Facebook group. One thing that they said about the possibility of outsourcing fulfillment, was that they would be worried that they would lose the personal touch or the customer connection. So for example, they'll do handwritten notes and then carry on the conversation on social media. How can you reassure them that you would be able to keep that when they outsource?
Casey Armstrong 14:12
So there's a handful of ways and I totally get that. At the beginning if you do some of the fulfillment yourself, that's probably the smart move. You get to understand the the the mechanics of what actually happens on a very small scale within the fulfillment centers, such as waiting to store your items where you're gonna store your boxes, how are you going to pick and pack it most efficiently? How are you going to actually package it? How are you going to wrap that up? And when are you going to hand it off to the carriers and doing timely manner. So I think that way, again, at some level of scale, you start to understand what what actually goes into it and that will allow you to be more informed when you're having conversations with your future fulfillment provider, versus just maybe outsourcing it on day one, which is which is always an option as well. From the customization standpoint. I totally get that. You need to think through costs and time efficiency though as well. Like you mentioned, like custom handwritten notes. If you're doing it that yourself, you know, how long is that taking you to actually write that and put that in there? At the beginning, it maybe makes sense but once you're really starting to, let's say, sell 1000s of items every single month, that becomes rather laborious. So thinking through where should you best spend your time, maybe it is there? Anyways, back to to answer your specific question... We offer a handful of ways for people to still provide levels of customization. You can have custom boxing and custom polymailers. With some of our partners, like noissue and others, we have green options for those those custom boxes and polymailers. Also, we actually very recently started rolling out gift notes as well. So they won't be handwritten notes but that's something that we're evaluating for later this year, early next year, but we do offer levels of customization.
Krissie Leyland 16:09
That's really cool. I was envisioning how you could write the note, and although you can't put the name of the customer, you can still write it and then just have a digital version of it. Like you said, when you're scaling, you can't write a personalized note to 1000s of customers. That totally makes sense. It's good to know that you can still have some kind of personal touch. Oh, I've run out of questions, that's not normal for me but did you have anything that you'd want to share outside of that?
Casey Armstrong 16:52
Our mission at Shipbob really, is to democratize fulfillment for brands of all sizes around the world. So whether you're just getting started, or you're doing 10s of millions in revenue every month, you know, we can flex up and down and help support brands. Especially as we start to go more and more global as well, location becomes much less of a barrier. We already work with brands from all over the world. So all I say is, you know, don't hesitate to reach out. Worst case is, you get some of your questions answered in advance so when you are ready to move over to a fulfillment solution, like Shipbob, you're a little bit more informed. So again, I'd say don't hesitate to reach out.
Krissie Leyland 17:38
Yeah, it could be in the roadmap for when they do reach that level, they know who to go to... and it will go to Shipbob! I guess the only other question actually would be around the process of becoming carbon neutral. Do you have any insights that you can give? What does it take to become carbon neutral?
Casey Armstrong 18:03
A lot of what we did was through credits & through different programs, such as supporting like the Amazon rainforest forest. The reason why we did that is we wanted to be able to take advantage of something that was available immediately, versus something that would take a much longer time. While we know that that option is not perfect, per se, we knew that that'd be the fastest way that we could start being proactive in our ultimate goal of being carbon neutral. A lot of that comes from calculating "Well, what are offsets? What is the energy used across our company?" All of our employees, travel packaging, what's actually happening in the HQ and at the fulfillment centers. And then making sure that with the trial months on some of our partners that we were selecting the right projects and everything to support to make sure that we were putting back in as much as we were taking out as well.
Krissie Leyland 19:08
Thank you for that answer. That was really, really great. I think there's gonna be lots more to come in the world of Shipbob and I'm very excited to see what comes next! So thank you. Thank you so much, Casey, that was a really good conversation. I hope that everybody listening got something from that and if you'd like to learn more about Shipbob, please head to mindfulcommerce.io/directory/shipbob and you'll find everything you need to know and links to their website, their social media, and our little MindfulCommerce summary. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and I'll see you next time. Thank you!
Rich Bunker 19:51
We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you'll probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.
Krissie Leyland 19:58
So don't forget to join by going to mindfulcommerce.io, click on "Community" and register from there.
Rich Bunker 20:04
If you liked this episode, please share, leave a review and remember to subscribe.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Find us:
Where to find One Circular World:
One Circular World - Website
Where to find Claire Potter:
Claire Potter - Email: [email protected]
Where to find Recurate:
Recurate
Where to find Adam Siegel:
Adam Siegel - Email: [email protected]
Links Mentioned in Episode:
University of Sussex - Product Design
Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI)
Surfers Against Sewage
Patagonia
Patagonia - "Don't Buy This Jacket" Ad
Loop
Fairphone
Mud Jeans
Rent The Runway
Cradle to Cradle - book
Ellen MacArthur Foundation
LimeLoop
Peak Design
La Ligne
Re-Ligne - La Ligne's Resale Marketplace
Brass Clothing
Jackalo
Totem Brand Co
Lululemon Resale Launch
Shownotes:
Krissie Leyland 0:00
Hello, and welcome to The MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands and service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie!
Rich Bunker 0:11
I'm Rich, and we're your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community.
Krissie Leyland 0:18
The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of ecommerce as a force for good.
Rich Bunker 0:30
You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io and clicking "Community". See you there!
Krissie Leyland 0:35
Hello, this is the second episode of our series where we upload our special panel events with our ecommerce and sustainability experts. This event is all about the circular economy: why ecommerce brands should get involved and how can they go about it in the easiest and most efficient way possible with our incredible guest speakers Claire from One Circular World and Adam from Recurate.
Claire is from One Circular World, which is an educational resource exploring the circular economy – not just for business managers, politicians or policymakers, but for all of us, including those in the ecommerce world. And Adam is from Recurate. Recurate enables a beautifully integrated resale marketplace directly on ecommerce stores. So this means you can very easily integrate a secondhand store directly on your website, which is great for your brand and great for the planet. If you're a regular listener, follow us on social media or have gone through our incredible Sustainability Framework, you'll know that I talk about Recurate a lot, so this was a long time coming. So thank you, Adam and thank you Claire, so so much for taking the time to deliver your knowledge to us. Thank you to those who attended the event live and thank you lovely listeners for being here with us on the podcast. So if you enjoy this event, you'll love being in our community. We are introducing live training events in our community group, so it's a great time to get involved if you want to learn about growing your ecommerce business in the most sustainable and positively impactful way. You can join the community for free by going to mindfulcommerce.io and clicking on "Community". I'll also link to the direct link to join on the show notes. Okay, let's get right into it and let's go over to the event. Enjoy.
Claire Potter 2:50
Good afternoon, everybody. Hi! Thank you so much for having me. We're gonna be talking about circular economy, and what can basically people do with it, particularly from a commerce perspective. Firstly, I'm going to give you a quick, quick introduction to me. So like many of us, I wear many different hats. I run a design studio, I identify as a designer, I trained as an interior architect, and I specialized in eco sustainable ways of working that eventually became a circular economy way of thinking. That was founded in 2008.
Also I'm a lecturer at the University of Sussex, and I'm the head of the product design course at University of Sussex. Mostly because of my interference, I suppose we've become quite a sort of a hub for circular economy learning with regards to products, and how it can become an integral part of the educational process because our product designers are making all the stuff that we have in the world. So that's another day job.
As far as volunteer stuff, I'm actually the working group coordinator for the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, which is a bit of a mouthful, but basically this is end of life fishing nets, stuff that's been abandoned, lost or discarded. And this is a global thing. So we've got members of the GGGI that are really little organizations like me and my design studio, all the way through to governments. So it's really far reaching and an amazing set of people doing incredible stuff globally. On a more load local scale... I'm based usually down in Brighton, in Lincolnshire. I'm actually based down in Brighton & Hove and I'm one of the regional reps for Surfers Against Sewage, which again is a volunteer role and I'm the plastics person. As I say: disclaimer, I don't surf but I can snowboard and I know nothing about poo, but I know a lot about plastic. So that's basically the stuff that I do for Surfers Against Sewage: leading beach cleans, educating people about plastic, in particular marine plastic, and that's been my specialist nerd niche, as I call it for the last year 12 years.
Then everything sort of came together with One Circular World, which is the hats that I'm wearing today and I'm going to talk to you a little about that in a second. But how does all of that knit together: it all knits together because of design – because everything we have in the world is designed from our systems to our stuff. The way that we behave has been designed and influenced in multitude of different ways. A lot of that can be influenced in a good way, I think through behavior change, circular economy thinking, and the value of the products and the materials we have in our lives, regardless of whether there's something that is relatively short term or something that lasts for a very, very long time. So basically, I deal with people and I deal with stuff. That is the sort of the top line of everything I do.
I know a lot of you have probably joined this and know a lot about the circular economy but just in case you're not too sure about the terminology, this is the kind of way I explain it to most people: It's basically how the natural world works. So if you think about it, you can have a leaf, that leaf will get eaten by Caterpillar, the caterpillar gets eaten by the bird, the birds sadly dies, that bird falls to the floor, it composts, and then it ends up nourishing the earth itself and allowing a tree to grow more leaves, which can then be eaten by more caterpillars. So you can see here that even though I've put this in a line, it's a system that works in a circle, or a loop in a way, because it's a little bit more complex than that. So whatever is at the end will eventually go back to the beginning. But we don't work in that way.
We're the only species on the planet that creates any kind of waste, which is quite staggering. So we work in this linear way: we dig things up, we make something, we sell, we buy things and then it gets to the end of its life, regardless of how long that life is. It mostly ends up in landfill, or ends up in incineration. Sometimes it gets recycled, but it works in a linear way. Not all of our systems work in that cyclical way, just like nature does. So if in doubt, when you're thinking about the circular economy, because it can be pretty complicated, we're going to dial into a few bits of that in a second, think about how nature works. Does nature do this? If it doesn't, then it probably isn't part of a circular system. So another way of calling it is "cradle at the beginning to the grave at the end": it's a linear lifeline.
Now I have a bit of an issue with the word sustainable but it is genuinely the word that most people associate with green living, eco living & sustainable living. But if we think about that linear model we just looked at, in the truest sense, that isn't a sustainable way of working. Because we have finite resources & we have finite amount of carbon we can put up in the atmosphere. We're really reaching the limits. So to sustain that way of working into the future, it's going to be hard, if not impossible. This is why I tend to try to not use the word sustainable when I'm teaching because I really need to tell the students, "they need to shake up the system a bit and make the system better."
So a lot of people go, "Amazing. Well, that's the reduce, reuse, recycle, isn't it? We've been doing that for a long time." Well, not quite, because we've got the linear economy, the cradle to the grave, stuff gets made stuff goes to the bin/ Then we have the recycling economy, which is better, you can see the bin I've drawn is a lot smaller. But it means that things might take a little bit longer, but invariably, they get to not being a greater quality, or they get broken, and variably they just end up in the bin anyway. But the idea with a circular economy is that we don't have a bin at all. Everything goes round in a circle, or loop. It isn't as neat and tidy as this but it goes round and round and round, sometimes in the same form, ie a plastic bottle to a plastic bottle, sometimes in different forms like a fishing net, all the way through to a carpet tile, for example. But it gets transformed in different ways or it's the same thing again, it goes round and around.
And it is a lot more complicated than just making stuff. We have what we call a hierarchy of actions and this is a really important thing to think about when you are understanding how to engage in a circular economy either as an individual or as a brand. So we have the reduce, reuse, recycle in this spectrum here and you can see the biggest one we have is reduce. We need to reduce a lot of things that were buying, using and consuming so quickly. We have got recycling there and we got rubbish, which is basically at the very end. But we've got reusing the stuff again, and again, we've got longevity, we've got repairing, which is part of reuse. So if you have something that needs to last a long time, you might need to amend it to be suitable for how your life has changed. It might be that it needs repairing as it goes along and we know that so many of our products are not designed to be repaired. They are produced with snap fittings, which means that you can't really easily get into them, they break as you try to get into them. It might be we can't get parts. So the way that our stuff has been designed has meant that circularity in the sense has become much, much harder. So that's something we're trying to shake up in the educational system. We do have recycling, of course, but recycling is a destructive process, ie the thing needs to be dismantled, taken to pieces, smashed apart, melted before it can be turned back into something, which of course takes energy. Then we have recovery, which is a fancy word for incineration with energy that is taken from the incineration process. Then hopefully, if we've got a biological waste, we might be rotting it, turning it into compost. And at the very, very, very bottom: we have rubbish, which might be landfill. As you can see here, this is the hierarchy of what we want to be doing: rubbish at the very bottom, and actual reduction at the very, very top.
But when we really think about circular thinking, you get even fancier little sketches like this one, which is called the butterfly system or the butterfly sketch. You can see here we've got each of those different hierarchies that we've just looked at but we've sort of split them into halves. So we've got us, as the people in the middle & at the bottom. Then at the very top, we've got our linear system. So we're grabbing the stuff out, we're manufacturing our things, we're distributing, selling our things to us, but instead of it going to the grave at the very bottom, the landfill incineration, it gets split into two elements. So technical materials, which is everything synthetic. Metals go into that as well. Everything that's biological is everything that's organic, not in the certified sense, but in the sense that it's been grown.
I just want you to take five seconds to look around your room now and look at every single thing in that room. You will not be able to find anything that is an either a technical material, or a biological material. So where I'm sitting at the moment, I'm sitting at a table, and it's got a wood core. So that's very much a biological material, but it has a plasticized top to it. So that's a technical material. So some things might be pure. I've also got a cotton tea towel looking at me. So that's pure cotton. But we might have something that's a mixture of the two just like this table. So you might have something that's purely technical material, synthetic, like a plastic, something that's biological, like this tea towel that's looking at me, or we might have something in the middle. But each of these things can be split. And we could be thinking about how we might be reusing them, how we might be repairing them, how we might re manufacture them, or at the very end recycle them. Hopefully, the recycling goes into some kind of remanufacture stage. So nothing really drops through the bottom. If this is a big sieve, all of our stuff is sitting in the sieve and nothing's falling through the gaps at the bottom. It's a landfill, or incineration. As soon as we start to mix things together, just like this table I'm sitting at, it makes it harder to reprocess. So when we're thinking about circular systems, we really want to try and keep them as pure as possible to either being a biological material, or either being a technical material if we can. This is basically how circularity works. It's a series of systems that interconnect and crossover in a multitude of different ways. I'm happy for you guys to have these slides as well, because these are all my little doodles in here. It makes it much easier to look back in it when you're thinking about this.
So if we go back to our hierarchy of actions, I want to look at a few examples of how different brands are doing really great stuff in different stages. I have a few hero brands that I talk about. Some you might agree with, some of you might disagree with. Yeah, really happy to chat about this. One of my favorite brands is Patagonia and they've been going for a long time. I actually had a very interesting conversation with a friend who wondered whether Patagonia were doing the good stuff, because they needed and wants to do the good stuff, or whether they understood that the good stuff would make them money. In some ways, it's kind of a bit of both because business makes money. Circular economy has economy in the second half. It's not done for fun. It's done for business. So this is something we really need to understand: that you can be a business and work in an ethical manner. Really you should be, there's no question about it. But when we look at the refuse and the reduce, which is the first two of our hierarchy of actions, we can see that this is something that Patagonia did quite a few years ago now, which was the ad that they ran in the New York Times, just before the Black Friday events. And it said, "Don't buy this jacket." Now, that isn't the sort of advert you'd usually see around Black Friday, it would be like "buy this thing", "this thing that you own isn't good enough anymore", "this is how you should upgrade it" & "this is what you spend your money on". Patagonia went the other way and went, "We don't want you to buy this jacket, unless you really need it. We don't want you to buy this jacket unless you pledge to actually repair it and keep it going for as long as possible." So it's almost like you were entered into a contract that you were saying, "okay, I take ownership, and I take stewardship of this jacket." It isn't something that is just a throwaway item, because you understood that the brand wants to help you keep it going for longer. Patagonia do this, they have one of the largest repair facilities in the US and they will help you find a second market and Patagonia stuff holds its value really well, because it's good quality. So this is one brand that's working really well in the kind of the refuse and the reduce sections. Yes, they're massive. But this doesn't mean to say that smaller brands can't do similar things as well.
When we get to reuse, we can look at systems like Loop. Now Loop again, originated in the US, and it's just come to the UK. And it's functioning through Tesco, which is really interesting. Loop is a deposit return scheme, but it's actually maintained by the Loop manufacturers themselves. So the interesting thing with refill stores, and I'm sure wherever you are, there's probably somewhere you can go and get a refill of beans, pasta etc. But it's not really a branded item, it's a generic item of pasta, rice, etc because quite often we're not really wedded to any particular brand when it comes to these kind of items. Whereas when it comes to some other things like your deodorant, your ice cream, your tomato ketchup, some people will only buy a particular brand. Now, how did you get somebody who was that wedded to a particular brand to engage with the reuse system because it's very much you go to the shop, you buy it, you use it, it ends up in recycling. Loop bridges the gap: you basically do your shopping as you would do, usually you pay slightly more for your items. But those items come packaged in glass, in stainless steel, and in refillable packaging, and then when your next delivery arrives, you can put your empties into a Loop box and they go back for refilling. So you're getting the actual items in a reusable container, which looks pretty awesome. It doesn't have any leaching of chemicals from the plastic into the item as well which some people are concerned about. But it means that you're able to get your Heinz tomato ketchup, or your Haagen dazs ice cream or something that you really are wedded to. So again, this is a massive example. If you run a business that has any kind of item that is used up, is there a way that you can try get that packaging back to be able to refill it for your customer. There's huge amount of benefits for this because you have to buy less packaging, because you're not giving away the packaging with your item. It also means that you're taking responsibility for that packaging as well, which is actually a really great thing in the eyes of the consumer. So there's lots of wins, if you can incorporate any kind of reuse system into whatever business model you have.
As we said earlier, repairing is something that we used to be able to do, there were screws that held things together. Now, if you want to try and get into your iPhone, you need special tools to get into your iPhone because Apple doesn't want you to get into it. But there are lots of companies that are challenging this and Fairphone is one of the best examples of repair. So the Fairphone is designed to be taken to pieces and to be upgraded. So it's sort of every 18 months or so when your telephone provider rings you up and say hey, you're entitled to a free upgrade. Nothing's free. By the way, if it's free, it means somebody else is paying along the way. And all they want is for you to carry on paying your monthly subscription. If you own your handset, you're not making them any money anymore. The way that Fairphone works is that they don't really want you to have a new phone. If you want to upgrade your camera. Great, buy the camera module, take it to pieces, plug your new camera module in and then you can send the old one back to them. So it's an upgradable system, not the entire handset like we have with most of the other manufacturers. So if you have anything that's electronic that will get out of date batteries get old, they wear out. Is there a way that you can take it to pieces which makes it actually easier for you to be able to repair it as a manufacturer, as a producer. But it definitely means that other people are empowered to want to keep it going for longer. As we said, circularity means keeping stuff in the loop for as long as possible before it gets towards the bottom of that sieve, and could potentially fall through the bottom.
Redirection. eBay is the best example of redirection. We've had booth fairs, charity shops, anything that means that you are giving something a different life in a different way, with a different owner. But what is interesting from retailers is that it hasn't really been tackled much. It has been very much a person to person or business to business kind of model. But IKEA has literally just launched their circular system, which means that they will take back your old IKEA furniture, and they will help redistribute it. So this is second hand IKEA furniture. Yeah, of course it has to be in working order, it can't be falling to pieces. That is one criticism of some IKEA furniture, that it is designed to be put up and kept up. It's not designed to be put up taken to pieces put back up again, etc. But a lot of IKEA stuff is very solidly made, whether you like it or not. So it is actually great to be actually redistributed. A lot of IKEA furniture isn't seasonal, it doesn't come in and out of fashion, so you find the same thing for years and years and years. It has got quite a utilitarian way of being designed, which means that it's great for redirection. If it's in good condition, why not distributed to somebody that needs it? So this has just been launched, I had a bit of a hold because of COVID. But it's just been launched in the UK. It's be interesting to see how it goes. Hopefully really well.
Renting is something we don't really think about. We rent, hotels, Airbnb, we rent cars. But we've never really think about renting clothes. This is something very circular. Sometimes it's you rent something for a small amount of time like a tuxedo or a prom dress. But there are actually companies like Mud Jeans, which allow you to lease your piece of clothing and at the end of that lease period, you can send it back to either be leased to somebody else, to be purchased by somebody else or re processed, if it's completely smashed to pieces. As the founder of Mud Jeans likes to say, they don't weather an age their genes, which is what happens in a lot of brand new jeans, they go through multiple processes to make them look weatherbeaten and worn with holes in the knees. He's like, "Lease the jeans from us and you do the wearing out for us. So if it's a brand new jeans, you know, go climb a mountain in them and rip them for us." It's a really interesting model, it makes you understand a little bit more about fast fashion. So even if you're a clothing retailer , it doesn't mean to say that you can't engage in a rental way of working. Mud Jeans is one of the best examples working at the moment how this is going to work.
Here's a quick wrap up for you: Consumers do want change. About one in three consumers that were polled just last year, said that they had stopped purchasing certain brands because they either had ethical or sustainability related concerns about them, which is you know, a fair chunk. One in three, that's a fair chunk. And actually it was the lack of simple information that people found is a barrier to making choices and good choices. So again, about a third said that this is the reason they haven't changed their behavior. People want to change but a good chunk of people don't know enough. So if you can be really clear about what you're doing, the benefits, you could capture quite a large and growing amount of people across a lot of sectors.
A quick word of warning: don't ever greenwash. Be very truthful about what you're doing, be very truthful about the lengths that you've gone to, but also the steps you still need to take. Don't make anything sound better than it actually is. Through social media you can be called out very quickly if somebody finds some little loophole that you're trying to misdirect people to. This happens a lot with big brands. And so just be truthful, people really do value the truth. So really, when it comes to thinking about anything about making your business models more circular, it is very complicated, for sure. But always be honest about what you're doing and what you want to do. Always be clear about the steps that people need to take to engage with you and to become more circular in their own way of living. Take responsibility, whether that's through rental, through that deposit return, or even allowing customers to send things back to you packaging wise or the product wise as well. And ultimately create value. If you're creating value for the your customer and you're showing that you're creating value for the planet, you are certainly going to keep those customers for as long as possible. This is what Patagonia has always done and you have brand evangelists for Patagonia. So really, always strive to be more circular and always do the very, very best that you can.
So here's a lot of details. If you do want to get in touch, you can find us on all the usuals and website, onecircular.world. Drop me an email, say hi on Instagram. I'm on clubhouse as well, as you can find me on there occasionally getting up on stage and yabbering away about anything circular. It's been really lovely to present to you guys. Any questions? I'd be delighted to help hopefully,
Ayesha Mutiara 25:40
Wow thank you, Claire. I love hearing you speak. It's no wonder to me that your lecturer. I wish I could have you narrate everything in my life. I would love that and I definitely learned a lot. So yes, before we get into the questions, I see some people joined us since before we started Claire's presentation. So please feel free to share your contacts in the chat. Especially if you didn't sign up through Eventbrite, then please share your contacts so we can keep you in the loop. Other than that, we will open up the floor. Now if anyone has any questions, please make sure to unmute yourself so that Claire can hear any questions that you may have for her. I think this is a sign that you just explained everything so clearly. No one has any questions... Hi Janice!
Janice Wong 26:31
Oh, hi Ayesha. Hi, Claire. I'm sorry, my technical difficulty... I unmuted a little later than I wanted but thank you so much for this presentation. Oh, my gosh, you broke down complicated thoughts and information in such a digestible way and I really appreciate it. Claire, I have a question surrounding your thoughts on the current culture of how some customers think that, "Okay, when I'm going for sustainability, everything has to be perfect. Everything has to be sustainable." And I think as a startup ecommerce owner, I don't have the capital to to offer that, even though that's my goal of where I'm heading to. What are your thoughts on how I can explain to my customers that I'm working towards it? I think I am having this self doubt, or I'm feeling guilty of calling myself a person of sustainability, but not kind of being able to offer that, if that makes sense.
Claire Potter 27:43
Yeah, that makes a huge amount of sense. And actually, the Eco anxiety we've seen absolutely explode over the last sort of few years of people saying, "These Instagram/Pinterest, perfect, beautiful, sustainable, oh my god, I live such a wonderful life." That's not reality. We all have the times we forget our reusable cup. You know, even though this is literally my life, and what I live and breathe and teach and love. We all have things. It's like we can't be perfect all the time. So that's the main thing is to really communicate is that nobody's perfect but we are all striving. If you are striving to reach a particular goal, so for example, have only 100% home compostable packaging, great. How would you communicate that to your customers? Say this is the end goal, this might be somewhere that we would love to be at the end of our second year or third year. The other thing is to think about what would make the biggest impact for you and for your customers now. Packaging is a great one. If you're sending anything out the thing that people get really aggravated about is packaging. So even though on your scale of things that you think is most important might not be packaging, if you think about it from that customer experience perspective, that might be the thing that is their biggest bugbear, ie what do they do with this bit of packaging once once they receive it in their home?
Actually I've got something. My friend got a new job. So I've got a really lovely brand of donuts. I met this guy through clubhouse, and they sell keto doughnuts, which sounds amazing. So basically, they were like guilt free, apparently. But what was lovely about the package is that the instructions and the different bits and pieces information about the doughnuts came on paper that was really small. It wasn't big, it was really small bit of paper, and it was seeded paper and it quite clearly said we need to tell you all this for legal reasons it was about ingredients and stuff, but we know you don't need to keep it. So basically here's some paper that you can compost. You can grow seeds. And it was a lovely little thing because I was like that is amazing. I have to do this, but they're gonna make sure this bit of paper is as good as this bit of paper can be. It was a lovely experience opening that, of course the doughnuts were insane as well, but that little thing was just a really lovely touch because it made me think that they thought beyond just their ingredients in their doughnuts. They thought about everything that was being packaged as well. So think about that your customer experience, whatever that might be, whether it's face to face, whether it's virtual, and be really clear and upfront about what you can do now, as well as the way you love to be in one year, two years, five years, whatever your vision might be. And get people involved in your journey through your social media, on your website & keep people up to date, the good stuff, and the stuff that's not going so well as well. Always Be honest.
Janice Wong 30:43
Thank you so so much.
Ayesha Mutiara 30:47
Great. That's such a great question as well as an equally great answer. Actually, we have another two questions and maybe we can try to answer these quickly before we move on. They're from Steven, who always has great questions. First of all, he asked, "Will Loop scale?" and two, "Are there efforts in the zero waste retail world to standardize on reusable containers (that you can use at multiple locations)?"
Claire Potter 31:20
Both really good questions. So will Loop scale? Hmm. They've scaled very quickly in the US. What I also thought was interesting when they came to UK is, I automatically thought putting the stereotypical "who would be the consumer that would buy into this type of system" well I thought they would have gone with Waitrose & Ocado, that kind of target market. They didn't, they partnered with tesco, so a much wider customer base, which I think was a really great strategic choice. It's introducing a system to a very wide customer base and maybe people that, as I say, aren't the stereotypical will only buy organic kind of consumer. So I have real high hopes that this could be something that scales as long as people are able to swallow that quick & small cost at the beginning, which is the effectively the deposit. So you do pay a little bit more for products in the outset. That is going to be the barrier and quite often with anything that is ethical, sustainable, eco, you know, however you want to label this type of product, it does come with a higher cost, because our upfront costs are more. Our labor is more, and our packaging might cost more. It is a higher cost. So that's the only thing that might be the barrier for a large scale at the moment. But as everything, the bigger it gets quite often the cheaper it can become.
With regards to the zero waste retail world, this is a really tricky one as well, because some places will only allow you to wrap things in paper bags, and then weigh them at the counter. Some things that some stores, particularly smaller ones do, particularly in Brighton, is allow you to put your own containers and put their own stickers at the bottom. So effectively it zeros your container and if you're going back to the same stores, again, you can use that. I haven't seen anything as yet. But it would be really helpful because again, this is a barrier for a lot of people wanting to bring their own containers not understanding the system. Iit would be great to have that as a more standardized system. We will wait and see. It's something that definitely should be tackled.
Ayesha Mutiara 33:27
Great, fantastic. So with that, Adam, I would like to give you the floor. Now it is your turn to give us your lovely presentation.
Adam Siegel 33:35
Well, thank you Ayesha. Actually, do you mind if I ask a question to Claire before I jump in? Claire, if you're still there? It looks like you just jumped off camera. I had a question and I was curious to hear your answer before I jump in, which is specifically with regard to rental. I had been thinking a lot about clothing rental, a couple of years ago and eventually I got turned off of it. I'm actually not certain of the environmental benefits relative to just outright purchasing an item, especially a used item. So I guess I I'd be interested in your, your thinking about the benefits of rental.
Claire Potter 34:21
Yeah, I mean, the benefits of rental take a lot of weighing up. When you say about environmental cost, it's getting the item to the person who's recovering the item from the person & it's cleaning the item. Now because of COVID we've seen a lot of people being a lot more hesitant about something that is owned or being used by somebody else and quite rightly so. So that is put a little bit of a pause and a lot of rentals. But what we have seen is more people being interested in in the rental of very high ticket items, stuff that they would like to wear once or twice but don't maybe want to or cannot afford to actually own. So this is like the prom dresses & the event dresses... Yeah, when we have events, remember that, everybody? We actually used to go and see people in real life. So... that's the kind of way of working. I think it's where it will continue to get much, much bigger like Rent the Runway, which is a US example, we've got other ones around the world as well. What has been interesting with Mud Jeans is that even though it's sort of leasing rental, they're much at the lowest scale. It's still expensive as an item, but it's allowing access for people over a period of time to get something that's a higher ticket, maybe a 150 pound pair of beautifully made organic Italian jeans. If you can't spare 150 quid at the outset, then it's spreading the cost effectively but then it is also rental in the sense that you can send it back. So that is a new way of working that is really started to grow, and is continuing to grow. I think I'm with you. Clothing rental is something that we've had forever and it hasn't really changed too much. So it's an interesting one to watch but it's one that one that I weigh up more than maybe some of the others scrape point.
Adam Siegel 36:04
Yeah, in my mind, maybe there's two different types of rental and we can switch over. But there's the occasion where, and I think that makes sense: you don't need to buy a ball gown, if you're only ever going to wear it once makes more sense to rent it so that multiple people can enjoy it. But then in the US we'd start we started to see the growth of monthly subscription rentals. Rent the Runway was pioneering it, where you'd get different items every month and to me, it just seemed like the the costs of the transportation associated with it, as well as the packaging, as well as the cleaning and everything else kind of outweighed the environmental benefits. And it also promoted this culture of, you know, continually wearing new items.
Claire Potter 36:57
Yeah, it does, it scratches the itch of fast fashion that some people have but ultimately, you're not changing the behavior, it just means that you're getting something on subscription, rather than just buying it and, chucking it off for a month, which is unfortunately, what a lot of people still do. So should we be scratching that itch in a better way? Or should we just put in something and making that itch just disappear?
Adam Siegel 37:17
Yeah, great way to put it. Well, very good to meet all of you this morning. I am representing from this side of the pond. So it is still morning for me for another 20 minutes. Very cool to be here because I recognize a lot of your names from the community, the slack community in particular, but haven't had a chance to see some of you yet. So, glad to be here. Claire, that was an awesome presentation and it makes me wonder what the heck I'm doing here. I'm not sure there's anything more to present. But I was trying to furiously change my presentation as I was listening to yours, to see if there's something new that I could add as well. So I'll share my screen and go through the presentation rather quickly. I'd say that I think what you did was lay a really good foundation for how to define circular economy, which of course is the objective of this call. But then all dive a little bit more into the like actionable or practical steps that small and mid sized brands can take to engage or begin to engage in circularity. I really like what you said at the beginning of your presentation, Claire, defining the difference between circularity and sustainability. I'll try to highlight some of those differences through the examples that I share. I also really liked your hero brands at the end. And I have a few other hero brands that I'll share as well, just for examples, maybe on a smaller scale, that might resonate with some of the folks on the line.
So first, I'll just start with myself: Who am I and why do I have relevant experience to talk about this subject? You know, I started my journey in sustainability, I think maybe a good bit later than you Claire. But for me, it was 2006 or 2007 maybe at that point where I read the book called Cradle to Cradle. If anyone's familiar with that, it's basically an early Bible for circularity, you know, thinking about how you can keep materials and products in circulation for indefinitely. I was an engineer at that point and it's written from sort of an engineer's point of view so it it really resonated with me. At that point, I was going back to get my MBA, so I spent two years focused on sustainable business and really understanding corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility.
In 2010, I was hired into the trade association here in the US, that represents the largest retailers and brands. My role over the course of eight years was to build and then lead their sustainability and ethical production program. So I had a chance to lead industry collaborations on issues like conflict minerals, worker safety and human trafficking, as well as a number of environmental issues like renewable energy generation, waste and recycling toxics, and chemicals and products. Of course, over that time, circularity was becoming a bigger focus. There's plenty of organizations that are working on circularity, but one of the premier ones that seem to come to prevalence over that time was the Ellen MacArthur Foundation so we had the chance to work with them as well as a number of others. Then specifically, with regard to circularity, one of the programs that we spun off was a global case competition, where we would get MBA students from around the world to engage in circularity challenges, and then ultimately bring the winners to Montreal, Canada. So that started about five years ago and is still going today.
So let me just get into things. I'll just say, that if you're a business, the trends are clear: engaging in sustainability and circularity are going to be beneficial for you. I think Claire said it well, but consumers are certainly interested in increasingly so, especially with younger consumers. They actively look for the term sustainability or circularity in the products they sell. Again, it's important to be honest and straightforward about it so you can't greenwash. But customers are looking for this, and that's one of the biggest drivers of change in the corporate world. These business models are becoming a lot more prevalent, as well.
I tend to think about circularity from the perspective of individual products. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with a lifecycle analysis or lifecycle assessment and that would generally measure the environmental impacts associated with different stages of a product's life. We're looking at a linear system right here, a product's linear lifecycle, and what we tend to find, now this is over generalized because you have to look really on a product by product basis, but especially with fashion, you'd find that there's two lifecycle stages that provide the biggest impacts: One is the raw materials and you can think about like cotton, for instance, that requires a significant amount of water, fuel and chemical inputs to produce so there's a lot of embedded environmental costs associated with that. Then the second biggest, often tends to be the use of that product. The rationale, again this might be obvious is that you wash your your items a number of times, often in hot water, and it takes a significant amount of energy to to generate that, that heated water. So you know that this provides them a framework for us to think about how we can find the biggest opportunities for reduction. We'll talk about a few of these over the next several minutes but the short of it is, if you can find ways to reduce the raw material inputs, by using recycled material, for instance, as opposed to virgin resources, then that can significantly reduce the impacts at that stage. At the use stage, of course, the individual can wash in cold water wash less frequently, the additional benefit of that is that the product will last longer.
If you can find ways to keep items in circulation, rather than rather than needing to dispose of them or recycle them, then that has the potential to significantly reduce the impacts across the board. So let's talk about a few of these. First is materials, you know, I already mentioned this. There's several types of materials, Claire went into it as well. Circular materials would be those that are recycled and recyclable and I think there's probably more that we could add to it as well like, repairable. So if you can if you can find and and design products that use recycled content as much as possible while keeping the quality of the item, and are made in such a way that they can be recycled, then that would ensure that those materials stay within the system.
When you're engaging your suppliers, there's really three key questions that you should be asking them because, of course, not all of us have control over our supply chains, but you can still have influence over them. The first is: what's in the product? You know, if you're designing the product, you're likely deciding what's in the product, but there are certain categories of products where you're not that decision maker. And so you need to make sure you know, as well as ensure again, that as much recycled or non virgin content as possible is in it. Second, where does it come from and then third is how it's made. So this is more generally a framework around sustainable production, but it can certainly be applied to circularity.
With regard to packaging & the growth of ecommerce, and that's my focus now, there's been a significant increase in packaging as it relates to ecommerce deliveries. So there's the traditional cardboard packaging that's recycled or recyclable and often recycled. That's good. But if you think about Claire's hierarchy, it's not great, that will ultimately go to landfill, and often sooner rather than later. There are new packaging systems that are coming around that are being developed. The one that I have in the middle there is called LimeLoop and it's made out of recycled material. I believe it's a PVC material but that means that it is extremely durable and can be used a number of times. LimeLoop actually rents these out to retailers and brands, who will then use them for their deliveries and returns. Then when they are beginning to scuff or tear, they would then be returned to LimeLoop who will use reuse as much material as possible.Then also thinking about a different level of the hierarchy, there are some new materials that are being developed now made out of natural contents like mushrooms. That's an interesting one and the benefit, of course, to that is that they can rot. I like that hierarchy, they can they can go into compost bins.
So shipping is one of the most important legs in the lifecycle of a product. And depending on how you're shipping your product has a drastic influence on the carbon impacts associated with it. Now this is what I would call a linear impact because you know, you can't recycle transportation, you have to deliver it. But as much as possible, you can, you know, reduce the length of shipping and find a mode of shipping that reduces the impact to the greatest degree.
Of course, where we're really focused today is circularity. So again, Claire showed that great butterfly diagram, but I'll try to distill this for small and medium sized brands to think about like how can we specifically engage in circularity and taking this linear system and making it more circular? You know, we already talked about resale and reuse and I'll give you a few specific examples of that. That is top of the hierarchy because you can use the product as is without necessarily requiring any recycling operations or handling of the product so there's there's no degradation.
Refurbishing: there are some brands now that are doing some really cool things by allowing customers to send in their items to be refurbished. Or, over the course of resale to refurbish products to to increase the resale value of the items. For post consumer recycled content, of course, if an item does eventually end or get to the end of its useful life, then then there are ways to keep the materials in circulation rather than requiring virgin materials. Then there's pre consumer recycling of course and rental which we just discussed.
So here are my hero brands, just a few examples to kind of make this concrete. I didn't say it but the work that I do now is very specific. It's with direct to consumer brands, ecommerce brands, and allowing them to enable peer to peer resale directly on their website. We chose resale because it's at the top of the hierarchy. You know, if you have something that's stored under your bed or in your closet or garage, or wherever it might be, then it's not being useful right now. And we want to get that item back into circulation so that somebody else can enjoy that item, rather than having to buy a new item. So one of the brands that we really love that are certainly pioneers in this space is Peak Design. They're based in San Francisco but they sell globally, they have higher end camera accessories like this everyday backpack. It's primarily geared for photography enthusiasts and professional photographers and they just implemented with us this great option to buy used. So if you don't like this item, you can buy it new. It's kind of expensive for a lot of people so there's also USD options available directly on their website as well. This is where it gets you. For all of their items, they have peer to peer listings. So that's one there's 29 listings currently available between $100 - $240. If you were to click into it, you can see all of the different conditions of the items, the colors of the items, and then it would be shipped directly from the first customer to the second customer. We launched with La Ligne recently as well, they have a program that they call Re-Ligne. This is a higher fashion brand based out of New York. The great thing about them, it's beautifully on brand, this is a great visual experience for cost for customers who want to buy pre owned, instead of going to a place like eBay. That frankly is just not a great experience but all of these now are pre loved items. So items that the first customer is looking to sell to second customer.
We work with a brand called Brass Clothing. They're based in Boston. This is not our work, this is just their own awesome work for takeback. They offer their customers several times per year the option to buy this bag. It's just a bag, but I think they charge something like 18 USD, they'll send this bag to you, you fill it up with whatever you want and then it ships directly to a clothing recycler. The awesome thing about that is just that it makes it super simple and they actually get tons of interest, you'd be amazed. They get tons of interest.
This is a brand that I came across a couple of years ago called Jackalo. They primarily focus on kids clothing, and have this awesome trade up program where you can send your items back to them. They'll clean them, they'll upcycle them and they'll give you a $15 discount on your next purchase. Then, they have a beautifully designed webpage, if you have a chance to go to it where you can see all of the upcycled kids items.
Totem Brand Co is also a US clothing brand focused on outdoor fashion. They have implemented the LimeLoop program. But what I think is especially cool is that it's not just that they send it, it's that they create an experience around it and use it as a way to educate the consumer. So anyway, I'll skip the summary since we only have a couple of minutes left and and open it up for questions.
Ayesha Mutiara 53:59
Thank you. Thank you, Adam. That was such a great way to kind of go more in depth from the groundwork that Claire laid out for everyone in the first half. So yes, does anyone have any questions for Adam?
Steven Clift 54:14
Alright, so I got to come in here. Hey Adam, nice to see you. So my big question is, will efforts like resale circularity... Do you think this is going to be brought to more consumers via new upstart brands versus the big established corporate brands that are already kind of there? Obviously you want both, right? but I sort of feel like there's maybe we need to better understand how will this help upstart brands breakthrough by being more circular?
Adam Siegel 54:54
Well, I'll say now I've had a chance to work with the large brands in my last role and now small and mid sized brands. I'll say that the small and midsize brands are always the pioneers, you know that they're the ones that are willing to be more innovative and try things differently. You know, their legal teams are not as big so they they don't have as much to worry about in terms of legal risks and that sort of thing. So, you know, that's almost always the case. But I do believe or I'm already seeing that large brands are engaging in circularity, some of Claire's hero brands like IKEA, and Patagonia, of course, Patagonia isn't pioneering this, but IKEA as well. But then, you know, here in the US or Canada, Lululemon just announced a resale program. They're certainly huge and we're talking with a number of large brands about implementing resale with them as well. So it'll go that way for sure. That said, almost always the case that smaller mid sized are the pioneers.
Ayesha Mutiara 56:03
There are a lot of fans of Patagonia here. Peter was just saying his applause for Patagonia in the chat. But yes, definitely, for sure, fans. I hope that of all the hero brands that were mentioned today, basically a spike in their sales, hopefully. We can continue to show them that there is a demand and a desire to support brands who participate in these kind of practices.
Krissie Leyland 56:29
Wow, what an incredible, valuable educational, just brilliant event that was. Thank you so much to Claire, and Adam once again. And thank you to everybody who came. Thank you for listening to the podcast. If you enjoyed this, we do have our MindfulCommerce Sustainability Framework, which is available for you to download from our website. It covers six pillars of sustainability and positive impact, specifically for ecommerce businesses. So whether you're an ecommerce brand, an ecommerce service provider, or tech solution, then this is for you, if you want to make a difference in the world with your business.
Of course, please do join the free community. We are doing lots of different things all the time is very, very exciting. And you can join by going to our website, mindfulcommerce.io and clicking on "Community". You can download the framework from our website as well. You just go to mindfulcommerce.io/sustainability/framework. I hope to see you in the community and at other events that we run. We are going to be doing 15 minute live trainings inside the Facebook group soon with our experts. And so yeah, just come and join in and let's have fun and make a difference in the world. Have a lovely day!
Rich Bunker 58:00
We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you're probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.
Krissie Leyland 58:07
So don't forget to join by going to mindfulcommerce.io, click on "Community" and register from there.
Rich Bunker 58:13
If you liked this episode, please share, leave a review and remember to subscribe
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Find us:
Where to find Packhelp:
Packhelp - Website
Where to find Zuzanna Mazurek:
Zuzanna Mazurek - Email: [email protected]
Where to find Byrd:
Byrd - Website
Where to find Sinem Yazici:
Sinem Yazici - Email: [email protected]
Links Mentioned in Episode:
Planetly
Indie Do Good
DHL - Go Green Solutions
DPD - Sustainability at DPDGroup
GLS - KlimaProtect
Bezos
Luminia Tandem
GoodCarts
Shownotes:
Krissie Leyland 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands and service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie.
Rich Bunker 0:11
And I'm Rich, and we're your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community.
Krissie Leyland 0:18
The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of ecommerce as a force for good.
Rich Bunker 0:30
You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io and clicking 'Community'. See you there!
Krissie Leyland 0:37
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The MindfulCommerce Podcast. So today, you'll be hearing a replay of a special panel event that we did in April. This event was all about sustainable packaging and shipping. The reason why we chose this subject is because as always, we polled the MindfulCommerce community. The biggest topic or challenge that they had on their mind at that time, was how to package and ship their products in the most environmentally friendly way. So we thought, "right, we're gonna get some experts to talk about this so that our community members can learn and ask questions." And and that's exactly what we did! So we speak to two experts. First, we speak to Zuzanna from Packhelp, and they provide custom designed packaging solutions for ecommerce brands. Then, we speak to Sinem from Byrd. Byrd is an ecommerce fulfillment company. So that's the perfect blend, we thought! So if you have any questions after listening to this event podcast, please feel free to find Zuzanna and Sinem's contact details in the show notes or join the MindfulCommerce Community to carry on the conversation. We will also be adding a handy guide on this subject to the MindfulCommerce Education Hub. So be sure to check that out for more tips. I'll link it to the show notes, of course. So thank you very much and enjoy!
Zuzanna Mazurek 2:21
My name is Zuzanna Mazurek and I'm going to briefly tell you what I do at the Packhelp. So at Packhelp, we have this creator where you can design & personalize your own packaging and that's my responsibility. We also have this feature for eco friendly, eco minded people. You can add any kind of icon or symbol related to sustainability and also you can plant trees with us. So that's pretty cool.
Just a few things about my agenda: So I'm going to talk about making your packaging sustainable, about eco properties... so what's really important, and the third point: are inspirations. I'm going to skip this part where I explain why sustainability is such an important topic. I know that since you voted for this topic, then you must know that already. I'm just going to give you very quickly, a short statistic that I read in many different reports: that almost half of the population worldwide pays attention to information about packaging, if it's sustainable or not. They're looking for some information. So that's why I think it's very important to have sustainable packaging, and also to share the message that you have sustainable packaging.
So first point: how to make your packaging sustainable. You can follow two different paths. The first path is that you use something that is already on the market, available. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. But this one, is very convenient in a way that you can check some kind of reviews online on this package. You can actually read the opinions from end customers how they liked the packaging, if it's strong or durable, these kind of things. But also there is another path you can follow: So it's ordering something custom made for you. Well, I think this path is very exciting because you can invent something totally new. But on the other hand, it's riskier, because you have to put effort & invest money. The result, you can't really predict. Also you have to bear in mind that regulations regarding disposal are changing. So that's why I think it's riskier, but also, when you follow the second path and you get something custom made for you, then it's also connected to some kind of publicity. So a lot of different newspapers can write about you & your packaging can go viral. So I think that's, that's pretty cool. So both ways, very attractive. You just have to choose something for you.
Then, there are several strategies how to achieve sustainability in packaging. But the very important point is that sustainability is not just one moment. It's the whole supply chain. So you have to think about sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, use an end of life. So the whole life cycle. That's why there is a term we call "life cycle analysis". So you analyze the sustainability in the whole supply chain. It's basically your responsibility, it's up to you how your packaging is going to end up: if it's going to be disposed properly, or if it's going to be recycled and used again. You as a business or business owner, you have to decide about that. This circle you see on my slide shows this kind of circular strategy to packaging. However, you can use different strategies. For example: use fewer materials. That's a bit easier, because circular economy is still something we are working on but still, there is much to be done in this field. But using fewer materials, it could be actually a solution for you. Another strategy is sourcing alternative materials. So, search for something that is not made of petroleum. Another way is finding multiple uses for your packaging, you can also improve practices in the whole supply chain so as I said, delivery & storage. The last point, I think that's something pretty cool: once you follow this sustainable path, you can share your eco friendly approach with your customers.
So now going to my second point. I'm going to tell you about free eco properties that I personally think that are important. The first is certified wood. This is a certification that shows that your packaging, if it's made of paper, or cardboard, that the pulp comes from responsibly managed forests and meals. There are actually three types of these certifications. So it could be 100%, meaning that it totally comes from this well managed forest. If it's a mix, then obviously it's a mix. And recycled means that it's recycled, but that it still comes from these well managed forests. So this kind of certification, I think it's really important and it's also worldwide known. So I am pretty sure everyone has seen it somewhere on some of packaging. The certification is just a simple sign that this cardboard or paper comes from well managed forests. So that's important. Also, another one plastic free, as you know, plastic is something that really, first of all, has bad publicity. Second of all, you know, it contributes to marine waste. That's a huge topic and nowadays. You can avoid petroleum based plastics, either by using cardboard, or you can actually go for some plastics that are not based on petroleum, for example those that are made of starch. So here, you will usually see these two terms that something is compostable or biodegradable. And you have to bear in mind that those things are two different things. So a lot of customers they actually think that if they put in their your garbage, something that is compostable, it will compost in their garbage and it's not true. Usually, it has to land in some kind of industrial facility for composting.
For volume reduction, that's something that is probably quite easy. It doesn't require a lot of money and it's simple. You just have to use something that is lighter, smaller than your usual packaging. I had this conversation with my friend at work yesterday, actually, that sometimes you just receive a tiny, tiny product, but it's packed in this huge cardboard box. And you think, "Oh, my God, somebody who just shipped me, across the whole country, for example, a box of air!" and that doesn't make sense, because it always takes your money, and also CO2 to ship something is empty. So that's why I think it's something that can be easily made and it will lower definitely our co2 emissions.
If I may give you just one hint: it's to do your own research. It's very important to find what is important to you, what are your values, and what kind of properties you want to follow. Also, if you're selling something globally, not only in one country, you have to know that the rules are regional, so the disposal rules are different in every country.
For the inspirations, I have two examples. One is kind of an innovation. The second thing are two different packages that were actually our products from Packhelp, and you can see them later. So for the innovation, I have this mycelium. I don't know if you have ever heard of that. That's an innovative material and so there is still much to do about this material. It's not very popular nowadays yet but it's organic. So it doesn't contribute to marine waste. It's a massive reduction of carbon emissions and you don't need a lot of energy to produce it. And the funny thing is that this material is made of mushrooms. In order to produce it, you have to grow mushroom in this special form, it takes five days. So I mean, it depends on the mushroom, definitely, but you need at least five days. It grows in this form, then you have to kill the mushroom, you take the form and it will stay in this form. I think it's a very interesting material. As you can see in the pictures, you can, for example, ship a glass bottle in it, or cosmetics. This material is very durable and strong. I heard that there are companies that are making buildings out of mycelium and also a lot of very fancy furniture. So, a very interesting material and I think it's the future for packaging.I also know that IKEA is working on this mycelium packaging in order to replace the plastic forms that they use.
So the green inspirations that I prepared for you, refer to the strategies I discussed before. So first one, you can see that it's cardboard. It's not a very big box, right? We don't know what is inside. But also you can see that on one side, one wall of the packaging, it's written "You just planted 10 trees." So you can actually plant trees in order to reforest what it took. Basically, when you use cardboard, you use trees so you can plant trees in order to pay back. That's one strategy, and also in the other picture, you can see packaging that is very simple. It's paper but it's very light and also quite small, right? So you can see that it's not very innovative but it's not going to cost you a lot of money. Since it's very simple and very light, it's cost effective. In the shipment process, if it's durable, and you can make it durable, then it's going to be very effective. You just send you know the product in a very small pouch, and it goes to your customer. Also, as you can see, they're both good looking. So it's not only about sustainability, but also it keeps a great opening experience for your customers. That will be all from me. As you can see my email, so if you want, you can always email me with questions, or we can go request questions right now.
Ayesha Mutiara 15:54
Wow, thank you so much. That was so interesting! I used to make fun of my brother a lot because he didn't like mushrooms and I'm going to tell him this was one more reason that he shouldn't be more of a fan. I would have never thought. It's great that it seems to be durable. It's just five days of growing mushrooms. That's so cool. But everything else was really, really insightful, like the viral packaging like Krissie said. I think we have a few questions. Does anyone else want to ask any questions? The floor would be yours now.
Maria 16:31
I am not sure if I can ask a quick question... So Zuzanna, my name is Maria and I'm from Bezos. Just to give a quick overview, at Bezos we partner with ecommerce sellers, and we help them to fulfill and send their orders. So sometimes we also arrange packaging for them. Right now we're also working on a more sustainable delivery through cargo bikes, and I'm looking as well into packaging. As I was looking into packaging, I actually found out that the extraction process of the cardboard is far more emmissions, then of plastic and petroleum. I was shocked, because I was also thinking, "oh, but surely cardboard must be the most unsafe, sustainable!" I was wondering if you could help me understand why, at the end of the day, is cardboard still more sustainable? If the extraction, in terms of tonnes, is almost 10 times higher than the one from from plastic?
Zuzanna Mazurek 17:28
Thanks for this question. It's a difficult one. It refers to this "lifecycle analysis" I was talking about. If you think about the whole process, not just one part of it, you can clearly see that there are so many variables to think of. So if you think just about CO2, then probably plastic is better than cardboard. But if you think about the end of the life, then cardboard is something that is organic. So even if your customer, when he stops using this packaging, for example, if this customer doesn't dispose properly, like he just puts it on the streetor anywhere, then this cardboard cardboard is organic, and it will just simply compost, right? If it's plastic, that's the problem, right? Because as we know, we have these huge islands of plastic in the ocean. While it's always a choice that you have to make, like I said do your own research and find what's important to you. Because maybe it's marine life or maybe it's CO2.... You always have to make choices. It's always a trade off, unfortunately. You can't find something that is perfect, not yet.
Maria 18:55
Let's hope that the research will lead to better materials, then!
Zuzanna Mazurek 19:01
You also asked why it's cardboard that's so popular and not plastic. Well, I think it's mostly because of the fact that cardboard is used mostly for shipping, right? And it's just a better material than plastic because plastic is a strong material, but I think it could break. You know, when when it's shipped then it could break while cardboard is strong, but it's also flexible. So it's just more about properties for shipping. That the purpose
Maria 19:44
Thank you. I'll definitely look into the disposal of packaging a bit more. Thank you.
Ayesha Mutiara 19:50
Thank you, Maria, for that great question.
Zuzanna Mazurek 19:52
Yeah, it's a very important question.
Ayesha Mutiara 19:55
It's always like that. The questions that most interest us don't always have a clear cut answer.
Zuzanna Mazurek 20:01
There are there are no answers like that, unfortunately, in sustainability.
Ayesha Mutiara 20:05
Yes, and you explained the reality pretty well. I think it seems we have another question from Luminia (Tandem): "Would you know any Miss mycelium packaging supplier in Canada or the USA?"
Zuzanna Mazurek 20:16
Oh that's a difficult question. So I'm definitely not an expert in suppliers so I can't tell you the names. I've done some research on that and if you just type on Google: "mycelium packaging", you will find few different names of companies who produce it. And you just have to check it because honestly, I have no idea. I'm in Europe so it's also quite difficult for me to name a company.
Ayesha Mutiara 20:51
Here's a suggestion that maybe you can give: while she's searching for potential suppliers, would there be specific things you would suggest for them to look out for, like maybe on the website, that would help them decide which of the suppliers are the best fit for them?
Zuzanna Mazurek 21:08
Well, I know from my net, from my experience, but for my colleagues experience that what do you have to look for is if they are able to ship it to you. Sometimes, there are like many problems with shipping. So I would look for some company that is in near proximity from you, not far away. That's I think one thing. Other than that, nothing comes to my mind, but definitely how easy it is to ship to you. Yeah, that's all. Some of them, they sell like ready made products and you can also find like Do It Yourself kit. So I think that's quite exciting if you can grow your packaging by yourself.
Ayesha Mutiara 21:55
Oh, that's so cool and I think Steven (Clift) just shared a link. So thank you, Steven that's really awesome. We're all very appreciative for you to share your knowledge. Does anyone have any other questions for Zuzanna's Q&A, before we move on to the next portion? Or she did an amazing job and already answered all your questions in our presentation it seems!
Zuzanna Mazurek 22:18
You can always send me an email.
Ayesha Mutiara 22:22
Great. Well, thank you very much, Zuzanna! I think now, we will move on to Sinem. So please introduce yourself and let us know what you'll be speaking about today.
Sinem Yazici 22:31
Hi, thanks a lot. So, I'm happy to be a part of this. Basically, I was mentioned by Packhelp. It was a great time for us as well at Byrd. Just from our side, we are a ecommerce fulfillment shipping company and I'm leading the strategy and partnerships at Byrd. Just a quick background on basically what is outsourced fulfillment & what is ecommerce fulfillment: We basically help ecommerce merchants for their warehousing picking, packing, shipping and returns handling procedures. So as we have discussed or as Zuzanna has touched base on: packaging is an important aspect of how to position the brand as well as shipping because these touch points are the only physical touch points when it comes to ecommerce and when it comes to online shopping. These touch points also have a great impact on the sustainability footprint or CO2 footprint or generally, environmental footprint that you have in your brand. So in order to make it as consistent as possible through the whole supply chain it is important to look into. At Byrd we are basically covering the Europe region at the moment, with worldwide shipping of course, but our operations mainly focus in Europe. We basically cover inventory management and order management for it.
I just want to give you a brief information on our sustainability journey and basically what we have lived with sustainability and went through. So as Zuzanna also mentioned, a statistic that 79% of the consumers reported that it's important for them that the brands provide transparency, authenticity, and certifications when they are purchasing the goods. So it is becoming more and more important for buyers, thankfully, and basically from a supply chain perspective, it's good to give that understanding. So there's the warehousing part. So like, there's the production part, which we don't basically look at, but we are looking at the warehousing, picking, packing and shipping part of the thing. So if you think of Byrd or a fulfillment company, there is the company's overall emmissions. The dashboard and server use, and there's the warehouse, and also shipping. So there are three pillars actually in carbon neutrality or sustainability. Those are the areas to improve, if you look into it that way. What we did, basically, was looking into it from our company perspective.
So I don't know if you're familiar with Planetly, but they basically provide some options for consultancy for merchants, and also companies to calculate their CO2 emissions. Basically they consultant them to reduce and enable them to offset these emissions. So what we have done with Planetly is that we made sure that we calculated our overall office carbon emissions. In 2020, we basically submitted a offsetting project with them in two different areas, one of them in Netherlands and one of them in Indonesia, to make sure that we are basically offsetting it. I think that's a start. So basically, from the supply chain perspective, like Zuzanna said, there is no perfect solution. So, you start with offsetting projects, you start with reducing the carbon emissions and then move towards carbon neutrality. Also for for your brand from production side and the materials that are used side, it is the same so you you basically start step by step, and it is the same for shipping, as well.
Basically, the one pillar we had was the office emissions, the other warehouse emissions, and then the last was the shipping emissions. On the warehouse ones, we tried to compensate it with sort of three plantations for the 2020 period as well for our customers. For the overall project basically, for our offices but this will cover the servers that you're using & all the external providers like Google Cloud, Amazon cloud that we're using, or whichever cloud based system it is, and how much emission we are actually causing in these terms. There are lots of different calculation points we analyze. Together with Planetly, we had 321 data points for us, and we basically offseted it with two different projects. And this journey depends and differs for every company & every merchant. In terms of what today is for fulfillment and and shipping, offsetting is the best solution and basically that's what we are working on as well for the next years too.
I will come to the shipping options. Basically this is what we also provide and I think it's useful for merchants to understand that shipping sustainably is an important aspect at the moment DHL ,DPD & GLS provide Climate Neutral shipping options. With DPD it comes directly with the contract. With DHL gogreen, you pay a surcharge of additional cents per parcel. And with GLS, it comes automatically as well. These are the options that are available in Europe. And there are other options across the world as well to enable and make sure that there are sustainable shipping options. Fulfillment providers also use these sustainable shipping options. With this said, I think this is a stat from Germany, but with the next generation, the millennials say that companies influence their purchase decisions and they would choose environmentally friendly shipping, rather than paying less for it. So it is something thankfully that we are as a society are getting more conscious about and we are providing these options for brands to make sure that the proposition is also eco friendly.
I think one other thing I can add is, basically this is just a start to a journey in general. We are working with Packhelp, as well as other partners like Planetly, to make this journey as full as possible. So we are working with Packhelp on a deal that we can offer to our clients: a sustainable package deal that we can offer to to our customers & to our to the merchants, so that it's basically easier for them to opt in for that option. I basically tried to summarize key takeaways for any merchant to start their sustainable shipping journey. So in order to understand the demand, talk and have a conversation with your end user. You need to make sure that you have sustainable shipping options, especially if you have an eco friendly brand. Basically shipping and packaging is the last and only physical touch point that you have with your consumers so that's a very important aspect. Outsourcing fulfillment: if you have sort of like grown out, so we don't recommend outsourcing fulfillment, if you were having less than 100 shipments per month. But outsourcing fulfillment helps automate the processes and increases efficiency and therefore, it is more efficient to outsource and look out for a fulfillment service if you are growing and working on growth. And one other point is that other than choosing the sustainable shipping options, is decentralizing the inventory. This also helps because then there will be again, more energy saved on custom clearances and high shipping costs and for a long haul. For example, if you're a US brand, and are selling also in the EU, let's say 40% of your merchants are in EU, having your warehouse set up in the EU as well will help you with the CO2 emissions and the efficiency as well since you wouldn't have to ship your goods or use air freight for getting your goods across to Europe every time you have a delivery from your end user. That's basically a wrap for the key takeaways. I kept it a bit short but I'm happy to have questions and I will also post my email as well in the chat.
Ayesha Mutiara 33:39
Wow, thank you. That was a great presentation. Did I see a question that was asked?Krissie did you have one before the outsourcing fulfillment one that you might want to ask?
Krissie Leyland 33:50
Yes, it was actually me! So have you thought about green last mile? As in, partnering with people who do that?
Sinem Yazici 33:58
Green last mile meaning the shipping options I provided? Or is there something I'm missing?
Krissie Leyland 34:07
I know that Bezos offer a green last mile solution. So perhaps they're the guy on a bike who cycles to do the last mile and delivers to three houses on the same street or something like that to save the vehicle driving to each individual location. I just wondered if you've considered that yourself or if you could maybe partner with someone who's doing it?
Sinem Yazici 34:41
We are partnering with different last mile delivery companies ,in that sense. As I said, all the deliveries that we do with DHL, DPD & GLS are carbon neutral. So I think that those are green last mile delivery in that sense itself because it is carbon neutral and that that is the offering. I think there are amazing different options with last mile delivery with using pack stations or basically using bicycles. I know there's a couple of other startups also in Berlin. They'reusing just public transportation, basically to deliver. In terms of that question from you again, Krissie: at what point should you consider outsourcing or fulfillment? That is also related to that, because when you have higher volumes, then it might not be possible to deliver with bicycles and public transportation for such brands. But then you would use more shipping options with go green availability. I think that depends, but for outsourced fulfillment I read 200 shipments per month is useful. For Bezos, I had a chat, Maria, with one of your colleagues, Diego I think, like a month ago. I think it's basically everywhere that that's what we're going for, and that makes me happy to to hear: that everyone is basically looking for the same goal for the sustainability efforts.
Krissie Leyland 36:34
Amazing. Thank you.
Ayesha Mutiara 36:36
Yes, great. Does anyone else have any questions for Sinem?
Krissie Leyland 36:40
Oh, I think it's more of a comment, Steve, feel free to speak up!
Steven Clift 36:43
Sure. Well, I can I can turn this into a question. So I've done some research on to recommend to a GoodCarts' member's stores, potential providers in this space in the United States. There's Indie Do Good, which is the one local one here in Twin Cities where I'm at in Minneapolis, St. Paul. But I haven't yet found a sustainably branded sort of nationwide network and there may be issues related to scale. I'm just curious to hear if you have any comments on that, about folks in the US or Canada that are doing some similar things? Future count competitors or collaborators for you?
Sinem Yazici 37:20
Actually, we had sort of goal and the aim to expand to us beginning of 2020. With COVID, unfortunately, we had to put our expansion on hold. We have some partners in US at the moment we're working with. The US is a huge country and I think that's why maybe in Europe, it's easier to find a solution. So maybe that's why providers do not or cannot offer these solutions. Our reason for freezing it was basically us not being able to provide the service we wanted to begin with. I can look it up and definitely let you know if there are any interesting companies doing that in the US.
Steven Clift 38:17
We have a lot of waste here... so there's lots of opportunity! I also have a related question. This is like a pie in the sky thing butthink about all the local shops say in the of Fairtrade community. Like there's just like one or two stores, probably in each metro area, maybe a few more. I always thought, well, if there was some way that somebody could just know "Oh, that's on the shelf in your town in a small local business!" You know, have a be fulfilled from a local vendor. Is there anything that sort of like tries to connect the catalogs of multiple small shops, that are already there. They're not warehouses, but they might have a niche product available? Does that ring a bell? I've not I've not researched it so it's just been on my mind.
Sinem Yazici 39:03
You mean, a channel from local shops and linking that to the ecommerce and enabling that to them?
Steven Clift 39:10
Yeah, so basically, any small business that has some inventory. In theory, someone from their region was looking for that product. You know, there had to be obviously, a massive connection, this could be a Shopify thing, maybe down the road, but something where if you realize, "Oh, I can get that scarf... here. I actually don't need to ship it from Madagascar, or wherever it might be." You know, the whoever has it needs to make some of that money. They're not just a warehouse, fulfilling for someone else, they would want a cut. But I just wondered if anyone's ever looked at you know, ways to do that.
Sinem Yazici 39:46
That's a great idea!
Steven Clift 39:49
Yeah. Uh-oh! Shhh... let's work on it ourselves then!
Ayesha Mutiara 39:57
I mean, it's great for the environment of course, when you're not emitting as much CO2. But also, I feel like that'd be very interesting for the customer, because the shipping is probably less, if there's any shipping at all. So yeah, that is lovely. Thank you for bringing that up. I think that gives us a lot to think about.
Krissie Leyland 40:16
Shopify do have their shop pay, so you can actually like log on the app. And as a customer, you can find all the local stores in that app. So perhaps still missing something. Maybe it should be at checkout.
Ayesha Mutiara 40:33
Maybe the inventory, like knowing for sure, 100% "Oh, they have one available for you" might be a little bit more difficult, but at the very least knowing that it is available, so that you can at least get in contact with that more local or regional provider. And you could at least get in contact with them and ask them, "Is there any availability? Can I purchase it? When are you restocking?" Things like that. So that could be very, very cool.
Steven Clift 40:58
Maybe there's a fair trade wholesaler that will figure out that their products is in 60 cities, and maybe can figure out how to get more business, right?
Ayesha Mutiara 41:10
Especially in a country as big as the USA, and a country that I feel like has everything too. So it's very likely that's something you're looking for on the other side of the country actually might just be within your state, even so that's cool!
Steven Clift 41:24
Very decentralized.
Krissie Leyland 41:27
I've been calling him a genius!
Sinem Yazici 41:29
I like the idea.
Ayesha Mutiara 41:32
You know, I hope that the expansion to the US comes sooner than later. We're sure the American public would love to be working with Byrd sometime soon. Definitely. I also loved how you talked about your project and related to Indonesia, because I'm actually originally Indonesian. So that touched me and made me very, very happy.
Sinem Yazici 41:58
Yeah, that was one of the projects we were really interested in. Basically, the Borneo rain forest reforestation was one of the projects that we used. I really got excited about the overall Planetly collaboration that we did as well.
Ayesha Mutiara 42:16
Actually, I'm originally Indonesian, but I haven't lived there for the majority of my life. And one of the first times I really started caring about, like sustainable practices, and the environment was actually going on vacation to Indonesia. There were two situations. Once, I went hiking on a mountain but then last minute, my family had to change plans. Apparently, they went to that mountain when they were children and loved it. But nowadays, it's just become so trash ridden with trash that people who hike bring, and then the packaging, the waste is just abandoned on the mountain. So we went ended up going to a different location. Then another time I went to a beach that apparently had so much waste washed up on shore... it was just an immense amount that the locals have even completely given up on picking up all that trash. In their eyes, there's no point because every time they pick something up, there's just more. It's unfortunate that it's gotten to the point where it feels so irreversible, that people have stopped trying. So I love any effort that contributes to helping Indonesia. So that's lovely. Does anyone else have any last questions for Sinem after I've been rambling?
Steven Clift 43:32
I do have one Indonesia comment. So I showed earlier a link about gangs in Indonesia that are importing plastics from the United States and dumping them on towns. So that whole "end of life" thing, it's a real deal. Now that China no longer takes all the you know, basically West Coast plastics, the West Coast and the US are shipping them wherever they can, because we don't, they don't have the capacity to actually process the plastics on the coast because it was cheaper to ship it away. In Minnesota, we actually process our own plastic here, and you can buy like furniture made from local plastics. But anyway, it's Indonesia has now become like a real target.
Ayesha Mutiara 44:12
So these gangs are being paid to just dump it in Indonesia, basically?
Steven Clift 44:16
They're buying it and maybe it's an illegal business right? You know, they might not be your gangs on motorcycles. So think about it in terms of like organized crime where they can buy the plastic and then the way they recycle it is basically they dispose of it illegally in parts of Indonesia. That's what the article suggests. It's from Vice. And it's earlier in the chat. I happened to share it because, you know, it's just a really scary headline for me. I see a lot of bad things, but the idea that organized crime has figured out how to make money on dumping plastic on vulnerable parts of the world is... wow.
Zuzanna Mazurek 44:52
Yeah also, if I might add to this topic, sometimes I know that plastic is also incinerated, which means burnt. And in many countries, these facilities, they don't have any standards. Basically, it's air pollution. So a lot of communities, they don't have clean air because of the plastic that is just simply burnt with any filters. It's terrible.
Krissie Leyland 45:24
And then we have e waste as well, which is a whole other thing.
Zuzanna Mazurek 45:27
Oh, e waste. That's also very interesting topic, I think.
Ayesha Mutiara 45:32
A potential other theme for another meetup sometime!
Krissie Leyland 45:37
I was gonna say at least, you know, we can get together and talk about these things. Build awareness and figure out some ways to tackle it together. So yeah, thank you everyone, for including your own voice in the conversation. It's been very interesting. And also, thank you as well to our lovely speakers! Brilliant. I love it. I love it all.
Ayesha Mutiara 45:59
Yes, thank you again to Zuzanna and Sinem and for everyone who came today. We will send a follow up email to you. Lastly, I will share the link for the next event if you would like to carry on this conversation. And yes, if you haven't yet sign up to our community and you somehow joined onto the this event, there's more like this coming! So maybe that would interest you. But yes, without further ado, thank you everyone! Have a great, great, great evening. We were so delighted to have you all. It was our pleasure.
Krissie Leyland 46:31
Thank you.
Zuzanna Mazurek 46:32
Thank you.
Sinem Yazici 46:34
Thank you!
Rich Bunker 46:36
We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you would probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.
Krissie Leyland 46:43
So don't forget to join by going to mindfulcommerce.io click on "Community" and register from there.
Rich Bunker 46:49
If you liked this episode, please share, leave a review and remember to subscribe!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Find us:
Where to find Scott Goodman:
Scott Goodman - Email: [email protected]
Where to find Rachel Tyers:
Rachel Tyers - Email: [email protected]
Where to find Okendo:
Okendo - Website
Okendo - MindfulCommerce directory listing
Where to find Lucy Roberts:
Lucy Roberts - Email: [email protected]
Where to find Brave the Skies:
Brave the Skies - Website
Where to find Reverie the Boutique:
Reverie - Website
Reverie - Instagram
Links Mentioned in Episode:
Urth (formerly Gobe)
Activated Eco
Finisterre
WAG
Wanderer Bracelets
Foursixty
Spell
Rixo
LSKD (Loose Kid)
Klaviyo
Herbivore
Gorgias - Shopify App
Fashion Impact - Shopify App
Shownotes:
Krissie Leyland 0:00
Hello, and welcome to The MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands and service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie.
Rich Bunker 0:11
And I'm Rich, and we're your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community.
Krissie Leyland 0:18
The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of ecommerce as a force for good.
Rich Bunker 0:30
You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io and by clicking 'Community'. See you there!
Krissie Leyland 0:36
Hello, and welcome to a brand new series of The MindfulCommerce Podcast! So this is going to be slightly different. We are re-uploading or uploading events that we have done in the community. And today, this is an event we did in January-so the beginning of this year: 2021-with Okendo, which is a customer review app for Shopify stores, and Brave the Skies & Reverie The Boutique.
So we spoke to Scott, just to get a little intro into what how Okendo came about. And if you would like to hear more information about Reverie The Boutique, Lucy's brand and Brave the Skies, which is a Shopify Plus agency that she is MD for, then you can head to episode number four. There, we talk about the intersection between ecommerce and sustainability.
Anyway, let's get to the event then. So this is all about how online stores can create better connections with their customers. We talk about user generated content, influencer marketing, reviews, obviously with Okendo and email marketing as well and how you can combine all of those together to create the perfect strategy to connect with your customers on another level. In particular, we talk about this from a perspective of a small brand with not such a big budget. So hopefully, this will really help you to create your new strategy for the year going forward. Yeah, so we hope you enjoy. If you like it, please subscribe. Join the community so that you can be aware of these events and join them as they are actually happening live and you can ask your own questions! So let's now go and speak to Scott:
Scott Goodman 2:43
Hey, guys, so I'm Scott, I'm Okendo's, APAC and EU/UK market lead. I've been tasked to kind of give you some background into Okendo's fruition. What's our story? How did we come about? So Okendo is a Sydney-founded tech startup. The idea or concept that started the journey was actually to do video reviews. Now obviously, we have evolved a lot since that concept. But at that time, text reviews was the standard, there was nothing else. So we saw an avenue to do video reviews. And now you know, we're in 2021 and we do text, we do video, we do photos, we do q&a and we integrate with a wealth of different Shopify partner partners out there, cross loyalty, email, subscription, those types of things.
So we now services over 3000 customers for Shopify plus partner. And we have some of the world's biggest brands on our on our platform, so it's a super exciting time. We, strength to strength, growth to growth, milestone to milestone: everything changes every day. But with all these positive changes, we do need to be wary of the effect that we're having on the earth. So we need to support sustainable culture, support sustainable brands and we are definitely seeing a very, very positive trend of this with merchants using Okendo. We have some amazing brands who very much pioneered this and we're very happy to support them.
So I've been tasked to kind of speak to two different tips on how sustainable brands can use Okendo and facilitate that review capture. So the first one is actually a fantastic initiative, which a brand called Urth (formerly Gobe) is Australian camera gear manufacturer. What they do is: they run loyalty line. Basically, with every review that they capture, you get loyalty points. And then what they were doing is they would assign X amount of loyalty points equals planting three trees. So for every review that we were getting, my goal was was giving back to the community, giving back to the earth and planting trees. I I think that is absolutely fantastic. You know, it doesn't pigeonhole you to just doing trees. It can be given back to charities, it can be whatever you'd like, but that's a super easy way to give back and a super easy way for all your customers to be involved. I think that's fantastic.
The second idea, which I see brands doing, and the one that I want to speak about is quite Activated Eco, another Australian brand. Kudos to them down in Victoria. But basically, their pioneering product is stainless steel pegs. Super simple, but game changing. No longer are they breaking plastic pegs... The sun damage, having to repurchase them every six months. You buy once, you have them for the rest of your life. So what they're doing is they're collecting that content of photos of just clothes hanging up, but it's people's everyday experiences. And they're using that for retargeting ads across social media organic posts. And it's showcasing their five star experience with some personal UGC content. And that's going a long, long way, in showcasing the use case scenario for that product. It's a no brainer, right? But also showcasing real experiences with that product. So it's doing incredibly well for them. We're big supporters of both those brands and we do have many more brands doing different things out there like that. Thanks!
Krissie Leyland 6:24
Thank you so much, Scott. That was great, really interesting to hear how sustainable brands are using Okendo to their advantage and also for the planet. So thank you so much. Okay, now we are going to go straight into the event.
Welcome, everybody and thank you very much for coming. I'm Krissie and I am one of the two cofounders from MindfulCommerce. Rich couldn't attend but he said hi. MindfulCommerce is a community of ecommerce brands, service providers and developers who share a common goal. And that goal is to make ecommerce more sustainable and positively impactful. So we have a Facebook group, a Slack channel and an expert directory. And some of you are already in the community and it's great to see you! Kat is our marketing whiz and she's going to be co hosting with me today. This event is casual, relaxed and collaborative. It's a nice conversation between nice people. If you want to unmute then unmute, and say whatever within reason and there will be some time for q&a at the end. Over to you Kat.
Cat Hunter 7:35
Okay, thank you so much Krissie. So, as she said, I'm Cat! I help out with marketing some stuff for MindfulCommerce something I'm super happy to be involved with. I'm absolutely loving everything that I'm seeing in the community at the moment and how it's growing, especially kind of in the in the wake of the crazy year that was 2020. There's been like a huge growth in interest in this. So it's been really lovely to see the community kind of really growing legs and taking off. Just to give you a little bit about my background, I'm actually ex Shopify, so I worked on the partner programme at Shopify for three years, and ran lots of their events for them. I got super into the world of ecommerce and then eventually decided to go freelance as a copywriter and content creator, but I'm still very much working within the realms of ecommerce and SaaS. So that's my bag, but obviously really interested in sustainability and making the industry as green as possible too.
So without further ado, we will introduce our amazing panellists. Today, we're super duper happy to have them join us for this event. So first of all, we'll say hello to Lucy. So Lucy is not only the MD of a Shopify Plus agency called Brave the Skies, who are on a mission to create, launch and grow online stores with their expert crew of very skilled designers, marketers and developers, but she's also the founder of an online boutique called Reverie, which is a really luxurious, sustainable vegan brand. We really recommend checking them out if you haven't already. Krissie is repping some of the jewellery today, very subtly. So she really knows her stuff when it comes to creating these customer connections and ecommerce and most importantly within the sustainable ecommerce space.
Also joining us today we have Rachel from Okendo. Hi Rachel! Rachel is VP of partnerships at Okendo. And we're incredibly grateful that she's joined us because it's very early in the morning, where she is. Okendo, as you all know, is a customer view app for Shopify stores but it's more than just a customer review app to us that MindfulCommerce. We think they have like a sort of secret superpower for sustainability and fighting climate change. Because Okendo not only creates great customer connections through reviews and some fantastic integrations which Rachel will talk about, they also help tackle one of the biggest issues in ecommerce when it comes to carbon emissions, which is returns.
Gerry McGovern gave us a crazy stat the other day that it will take 1.5 billion trees to be planted to deal with the annual ecommerce returns in the US alone, in terms of carbon emissions. So reducing the number of returns is making ecommerce more sustainable. By having that user generated content, those reviews embedded in your site, people are able to make better choices, more informed choices about the the items that they're buying and hopefully this leads to fewer returns! Okendo is used by some really great sustainable brands like Finisterre, and WAG. They enable customers to show how the products really are. You know, how they fit into their life, helping people buy the right thing the first time.
This event today, it's the first event of the of the year for MindfulCommerce. The first of many, we're hoping. We're going to be running these throughout the year. And they are very much a community focused event, we want to make sure that we are providing you guys with the content that you're looking for. With regard to that, when we set about trying to set up this first January event, we polled the community in the Facebook group, which you should all be, hopefully lovely active members of. Loud and clear, you told us that what you wanted to hear about was customer connections. We kind of had a sneaking suspicion that the topic might be something kind of along those lines, because we've been talking about this quite a lot behind the scenes, and customer connection really matters more in 2021 than it ever has before. I think the pandemic has really accelerated ecommerce.
You may have seen some stats laying around that ecommerce has grown more in the it's basically had like five years growth in one year, in terms of how it has been accelerated by the demands placed upon it by the pandemic. And customer expectations have also kind of been accelerated in line with that. So, it's a really great area to invest your time and resources in, in terms of creating those lasting more authentic, deeper connections with your customers. We all know that retention is more cost effective than acquisition. And loyal, engaged customers are generating higher rate of ease and have better purchase purchase latency status, etc. So all in all, brands are looking to really create those deeper, more reliable connections with their customers going forward into this year.
So yeah, great topic. Thanks for choosing it, guys! And once again, we are super, super honoured to have Rachel joining us to talk about customer connection from their own experiences. So without further ado, I will pass over to Krissie, who I think is going to kick us off with a few questions. And we will have questions for a while and then we will take Q&A from the floor. Over to Krissie.
Krissie Leyland 12:47
Thank you so much, Cat. That was awesome. And so Rachel, can you tell us about like some more about Okendo and how customers can leverage the tool to create better customer connections?
Rachel Tyers 13:01
Yeah, sure. So Okendo is a Shopify specific customer marketing platform. We work with about 2000, fast growing DTC brands. And we're really focused on helping them in their marketing across the board. So not just reviews, but how can we leverage your social proof to improve each area of your business or all the channels that you're marketing from? So I think a really important thing is that we know reviews increased conversion on site. Partly all of us on this group chat look at reviews before purchasing and product. The stat is 93% of people will read reviews before they purchase something and it's just showing you that there's credibility there because you've got that social proof. "Okay, these people like this product, so I probably will too!" It really puts our minds at ease when we're used to going into a retail store and maybe looking at some clothing, trying it on... having that self experience, which we can't have anymore, unless we're purchasing a product with the intention of maybe returning it later, which of course we don't want to do: Not sustainable, we don't want those carbon emissions. So by reading other people's feedback, we're able to sort of simulate that experience. But beyond that, it allows you to sort of create these connections with your audience. With a lot of brands that we work with, we see them using reviews as a tool to leverage to actually speak directly to your customer and allow your customer to speak back to you.
We work with a company called Wanderer Bracelets. They are a sustainable brands that employs Balinese artists to make these custom bracelets. They pay the Balinese artists a fair wage that allows them to support their family. So reading through these reviews, it's so interesting to me because I'm able to connect with the person and their reviews. So this lady Tiffany, she ordered them for her girls, and her friend bought this anklet for the boys, for the preschool that they went to. They're all best friends. So all of a sudden, I'm having this deeper connection with the brand and with the product when I'm able to submit and let them know why I bought the product and how I feel about it. And then me as a reader or us reading together, we're able to see how personal and how beautiful the stories are there. So it's really helping to build out those connections that we're feeling with the brains.
Krissie Leyland 15:45
Okay, great. So it's all about showing what your current customers think of your products. And then how does that help you to connect with new customers, for example?
Rachel Tyers 15:58
So you can use those UGC, so these are generated content or the review content in your marketing as well. So you can push the star ratings through to Google product listing ads, and there, we know that if your Google Shopping ad has stars on the bottom, people are going to be more likely to click through than if it doesn't. So that can help draw more customers in. Or you can also leverage the user generated photo or video content for your other marketing campaigns. So in my decade of experience in Facebook media buying before I moved into partnership, the highest converting ad creative was always the scrappy UGC. So I put together UGC video, taking little sound bites are people saying how they love the product, how they use the product, what they think of it... And then you chop that together to make this really kind of like scrappy, bit short, sharp and entertaining. user generated content mashed-up clip. When you're using that across Facebook, or Instagram marketing, it often feels more real, more believable and more compelling. It's more natural in the setting that you're showing it because we're used to having our friends like talking to the camera, or the celebrities that we follow whatever it is, kind of scrappy. So if we're presenting something back that feels natural on that platform, sometimes it gets more attention. Because it feels real, you're also more likely to be building that the credibility and the trust side of things.
Krissie Leyland 17:36
Yeah, definitely. I think I'm the kind of person who say, for example, I'm on an online store and I've seen a product that I quite like, I'll always go to something like Instagram, and look for real life people that are wearing that product orusing that product. Kind of putting myself in that person's shoes, or the item that I'm looking at and just thinking, "how do I relate to this person? And are they you know, a similar type of person? What are they doing? Are they outdoors?" Which is the kind of person I am, I like to be outdoors. So I'll relate to it more and and probably want to buy it if I can see someone in real life using it. So that makes a lot of sense. And so with Okendo, and I'm pretty sure you work with another app, which helps with that. Can you talk a bit about that one?
Rachel Tyers 18:35
Sure. We work really well alongside Foursixty. They are a UGC platform that allows you to curate images that you're tagged in on Instagram and show those on your site. There are all of these images that people have tagged on Instagram, and then you're able to go in, and you can actually shop that product from within the image. And then you've got the Okendo five star ratings being pulled through here to add that little bit of social proof. So it's pretty nice to be able to use those together really compelling, you can put it anywhere on your site. Then of course, you as a brand own any of the imagery or any of the contents committed via Foursixty or via Okendo. So you can use it to leverage your products across all the marketing campaigns too.
Krissie Leyland 19:39
That's really cool. I'm just thinking about like, people in the audience and the businesses that they've got and that sounds really great. But with the user generated content, sorry I'm still talking about that... Can you kind of say if someone's tagged you in something you're not very happy with, and you're like my my target audience won't relate to that, can you not accept it?
Rachel Tyers 20:04
Yeah, absolutely. So on the Okendo site, you might get a review that has an image alongside it and really love their review, you love the story in it or it's just great content but this image maybe isn't on brand. It's super easy for you to hide that image and then publish the review. You can also set up automations in the back end so that all of your four or five star reviews that have positive sentiment get automatically published, so it's one less thing for you to do. But maybe if it's a four or five star review with a photo, it doesn't get automatically published so you have control to really maintain that brand image. The same thing for Foursixty on that UGC side: you curate everything in the back end, before it goes live on your site. So there are no mishaps of someone showing their new underwear that maybe isn't strictly on brand for you.
Krissie Leyland 20:59
Yeah you don't want that... [ laughs ] Lucy, I have a question for you related to UGC. I think you are a big fan of micro-influencers. So do you want to talk about that and introduce and what you're up to?
Lucy Roberts 21:20
Yeah, for sure. I think I absolutely love the whole concept of user generated content. I think it's so smart. I think there are some brands who just use it so so well. A personal favourite of mine, and I think Rachel's probably heard of them as well as they're an Australian brand, is Spell and the Gypsy. I'm not quite sure how many people on the call have heard of them. But if you haven't, like please go and look at their Instagram page on our website, immediately. They do UGC so well. A feature that I really love on their product pages is you know how at the bottom of your standard econ product page, you'll have, "you may also like" and they also have a little bit where you can toggle to like "as seen on Insta". And it's really that thing that Krissie was talking about just there, which is you can see the product that you're looking at, in a real life situation. So it's not just on a 5'11", size 8 model. I'm 5'3.5" and like a solid size 8 or 10 so that's really not relevant to me. But having those micro-influencers, who really become more like brand ambassadors for you, as opposed to kind of having that influencer tag associated to them. They're uploading their content, they're sharing it, they love the brand. And it really becomes like more of a cult following, which I think a lot of Australian brands do really well.
So I used to work for a brand called Cinnamon. And there was this insane cult following around the brand like people couldn't get enough of it. There's a few brands that we're working with, at the moment at Brave the Skies, which is the agency which I run. So for example, Rixo, Kitri and Les Girls Les Boys have this really interactive conversation with their customers, except that Les Girls Les Boys are actually using their customer base to cast for the upcoming campaign that the basically the tagline is "Show us your underwear." This is a really weird concept, but it works for them. Their tagline is "bed to street". The idea is that you wear oversized pyjamas and you wear their pyjamas shirt tucked into your leggings. And then you go to the shops like that. Stuff is amazing quality, the brand is really cool. But all of their customers, especially once you have really active social profiles, so specifically your Gen Z & Millennials have this really interesting opportunity to become micro-influencers or almost brand ambassadors. I could talk about this all day, so I'm probably gonna let someone else talk.
Krissie Leyland 24:00
I was gonna ask how can a brand do this? They're like "Right, that sounds great. I want to find some micro-influencers, and I want to generate some user generated content." How can they find the right people to create these great customer connections that they can relate to?
Lucy Roberts 24:18
I think if I could answer that one from more of a Reverie standpoint, which is the brand which I started a couple of months ago, I've actually got these little cards I'm just gonna reach behind my computer. Don't mind me guys, sorry. All of the orders that I send out have little "Thank you" cards. I don't know if you guys can see... Krissie, you've seen a few of these but essentially on it, it says "Thank you so much. We sincerely hope you enjoy your purchase from Reverie. Please tag us on Instagram with our hashtag and our handles so we can follow your daydream too!" The whole messaging of the brand, Reverie is a fanciful state of musing or a daydream. So we've only built on this.
I say we because it's myself, my fiance, he's definitely a really big part of like building the brand. It's all about involving people in this concept of the daydream. So a lot of the brand messaging on Instagram and email is very much about letters, follow your Daydream come and join our Daydream. It's really conversational.
And I find that when you're really authentic about your brand, and you really kind of back yourself, and we do this with Brave the Skies as well. We have a really heavy space-themed brand with the agency, people really respond well to that. If you really back your own brand, people naturally want to buy into it and get involved. I think I've been really lucky with the kind of brand messaging across social channels like Facebook and Instagram, mainly. It seems to attract some really wonderful people who have really similar values, who really like the brand aesthetic, who naturally want to be part of the conversation and support a small business. And especially when you send a really nice order out with a really cute little card. I always write a handwritten message on the back to say, "This is one of my favourite products, too. I really hope you love it." It's genuine and it's nice for people to want to help and to want to share it and to spread the message. I suppose in a way your customers become your micro-influencers.
Krissie Leyland 26:20
Yeah, it's amazing. Every time we... well, I've made a few orders on Reverie and also, my partner got me a really nice Christmas present from there, which is this one. Yeah, we both went, "Oh, look! It's handwritten." It's really nice. Like, it just connects to the brand. and the person behind the brands. You know, the necklace and jewellery is really nice but it's nice to know that there's a person there. And it's real and authentic. Yeah, I love it. I was going to ask about-Sorry, I am going to ask you another question-the conversation and how do you keep the conversation going from that lovely card over to social media? And which kind of, again, going back to the connections: How does it help with engagement and how do we continue the conversation?
Lucy Roberts 27:15
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think for a lot of customers, the journey tends to start on social, especially when I think with Instagram's algorithm, for example, it changes all the time. I'm sure there's loads of you guys who are listening at the moment who have your own small page or small business that you're starting Instagrams algorithm can really trip us up, and it's super annoying. At the moment, I think it's based quite heavily on whether or not somebody saves your images. So, I tried to make a lot of the images quite save-friendly. So a really nice image that you might want to come back to later, like a nice shot of interiors. Everyone might notice how fantastic Rachel's background is... I've been lusting after this call. But I love sharing content that people find some kind of escapism in. And I think that that starts to build a bit of an aesthetic for your brand.
So I find that there's a lot of customers, who are always the ones who like everything on Instagram who comment on everything on Instagram and same with Facebook. And I always reply to everybody. The thing that I've said since day one: even if it's just an emoji, I want to reply to and acknowledge that it's there. Because I think a relationship where you're not just a faceless brand. There's actually someone behind it. A lot of people messaged me now and say, "Hey Lucy, when is this coming back into stock? I really like it." And when that kind of continues on to the website, for example, if somebody places an order, I've got a really good memory. It's one of my very few very strong skills, I'm really good at names. So I'll always remember if I see a name on an order, I'm like, I'm sure she's liked a couple of things on Instagram before I'll go back and check before I write the card.
And I've had this absolutely amazing woman who was the first person to follow me on Instagram who wasn't a family member or a friend. She's called Elizabeth, and I absolutely love her. She likes everything, she shares everything, she comments and everything, she always buys a candle. And I actually did a post on Instagram might have been last week or the week before. But it was really it was really authentic. I just wanted to kind of appreciate her and give her something back. She always sends messages from her Pinterest board that she thinks that I'd really liked for the Reverie feed. So I've kind of done a bit of a story and a Facebook post about how she was the first person who I didn't know who followed my page and how it's so nice that she's been there since day one. And just like celebrating that connection that I have with her... though I've never met her. Obviously, we've only ever messaged on Instagram, but somehow we've kind of built this amazing connection and almost a friendship, just through her engagement with the tone of voice that I'm using on Instagram.
There's been a couple of people like her. I think Instagram can get quite a bad rap for being quite toxic but I've had nothing but positive experiences through doing it for Reverie. Had an amazing call with a lovely girl in South Africa last Friday, we had a coffee. She's starting a brand & we had a nice chat about it. I think the connections really come down to, as well as everything that Rachel has said, which is obviously so valuable about the reviews like collecting feedback, like simulating that in store experience. It's just for me, it's complete authenticity, and just having a really, really honest tone of voice and speaking to someone as though they're in the same room as you, I guess. Yeah, it's really long-winded answer again. I'm really sorry.
Krissie Leyland 30:49
I love that though. It's almost like everyone here. Well, I've met Alice and Cat in real life, but everybody else I've probably never met you. But I feel like we know each other and it's really nice. Yeah, just wanted to say that.
Lucy Roberts 31:10
You know, we love a good tag on Instagram. That was something that said "normalise girls messaging each other on Facebook and Instagram to be mates."
Krissie Leyland 31:22
Yeah, it's amazing. I love it. Especially at the moment, you know, crazy times. It's nice to be able to connect to people still online. Thank you internet. Me and Alice, we met in Portugal on a surf trip and now we're reconnecting over business, brands, ecommerce and how she built websites. It's just great. I love this. So Cat, do you want to ask some questions?
Cat Hunter 31:59
Absolutely. I do. I was thinking from what you were saying, that idea about starting up conversations, about that two way flow that connection necessitates by its very, very nature. Obviously, it's so important that it's a two way street. I was just wondering, Rachel, perhaps you could tell us a bit more about how brands can ensure that they're getting that right. That idea of, of listening to customers, as well as kind of initiating that conversation... making sure that that connection is a two way flow?
Rachel Tyers 32:30
Yeah, definitely. I think there are a few really great platforms and ideas you can have in your back pocket for that. And a way that Okendo allows you to connect with customers beyond the reviews is the Q&A section of the widget. So customers can actually directly ask you questions there, and you can respond to them. Another really good tool that we love working with is Gorgias. Gorgias allows you to collect any customer questions or concerns from multiple platforms, and then you have them all in one place where you can respond to them. So I think being able to offer really great customer service in that way, definitely helps you to grow your brand and create that bond with your audience, like Lucy mentioned.
Another good way to use customer feedback is by collecting information on your product, and actually implementing that in your product strategy. So we have a client: LSKD, an Australian streetwear brand that did just this. They were wanting to create the best leggings out there. I want to show what their widget looks like, actually. They used a few different slider bars on their widget to collect information around the product quality, the design and the sizing. So they actually went through many iterations of their product until they got to a level where almost all of these product slider bars were hitting excellent. And it was super important to them that they were listening to what the customer wanted, what they thought of the current product, and then continuing to build upon that. So through doing that, they'd be able to really gain that cult following. They have an incredible product now that people are coming back to buy again and every colour, which I think is always what you want as a brand. They were able to also create those bonds with the customers and they incentivize. So when somebody gave them product feedback and spent their valuable time to do so, they would offer a percentage of coupon for them on the site. So I think that has really allowed them to grow into the brand they are today.
Lucy Roberts 34:50
I love that. I think that's so cool. I want those sliders. Can you talk about the sliders later, Rachel?
Cat Hunter 34:55
I know, that's something I write about as, as a sort of technical content writer at the moment is audience segmentation and how that can be used. That's something that a lot of smaller brands want to get started with. They know that they could be using their audience data in a more informed & strategic way and really honing in on specific messaging for specific segments of their audience. Maybe they just haven't got it off the ground yet or they haven't started. But I'd love to hear maybe from either of you, if you have anything to say about audience segmentation, and what that can do to strengthen that one-to-one kind of connection that people feel with a brand.
Rachel Tyers 35:42
Yeah, I'd love to jump in here, Lucy, and then hand over to you. So I think being able to segment allows us to create these stronger one-to-one connections, because I want to feel like a brand is talking to me about something that I'm interested in as something that affects me personally, rather than just "Hey, I'm one of your many 1000 customers, and I'm just another number." So a way that we allow our brands to do that through Okendo is through using our customer attributes to collect a bit of information on our audience and then we can sync that over into Klaviyo and use it in special ways.
I'll share my screen again to show an example. This is WAG, they are a dog treats company that's made with natural and sustainable ingredients. And they have been using our Klaviyo integration. So what that does is it allows you to sync all of this customer data into your Klaviyo or Omnisend customer data profile. Then we can segment out based on the dog breed, the dog age, and the eating habits. Then using those segments, WAG is able to recommend specific products that are going to be right for that dog for your pet. So using that segmentation strategy, they were actually able to increase the revenue per recipient by about 430% just by speaking to that customer.
Then another example here, we've got Herbivore who is a cruelty free and vegan brand that we work with. They actually collect information around skin type, and skin concerns. So you can imagine if I've got perhaps acne or dryness, and I get an email that in the copy says, "Hey! Help with dry skin" in the subject line, whatever it may be and it's something that actually relates to me or pertains to what I'm actually interested in solving, then I've got more likelihood of clicking through and converting for that product. It cuts through the noise and we know that our email tends to get clogged up with a lot of other noise. So if you're able to speak directly to that shopper, then you're more likely to build that connection there.
Cat Hunter 38:11
Just speaking with my like content marketing hat on as well, that could be really interesting in terms of the way that you structure your content marketing too. Just knowing kind of which topics are going to land well, which ones to be promoting more to which segments, writing "buying guides" and things like that must be very helpful to know how your audience demographic is skewed across those different kind of attributes.
Rachel Tyers 38:35
Right, absolutely. Lucy, do you have anything to add from the marketing strategy side on segmentation?
Lucy Roberts 38:43
To be honest, I think I think you've pretty much covered it. From a kind of more of an established merchant perspective, something like Okendo, which is what Rachel's obviously talking about is amazing. Having that integration with Klaviyo as well is so powerful, because you can start to target those segments with automated workflows. But the agency side of me is like "100%, that's the way to go", but the Reverie side of me doesn't have the budget to really have a powerful option like that in-house because obviously, it's all self funded, and you're a little bit more scrappy when you're a startup. So a lot of the tools that I would use for my own brand as well would just be things like Facebook Insights or Instagram Business Insights.
Reverie's built on the Shopify platform just on one of our pre-budget plans, but you can still get a decent amount of data and understanding as to, even if it's just gender split. You know, like 70% female, largely between 25 and 35 (years). Even the most kind of basic bits of data, I find can be really helpful, especially when you are a small brand and every pound that you're spending on stock or anything really is very important. For me, I've tried to very much build a picture of who the reverie customer is. I think there's roughly three personas and I do try to validate that with any bit of data that I can glean from any of the platforms that I use. But 100% the segmentation of those one on one conversations and connections is amazing. And Krissie, we're getting some questions in this chat.
Krissie Leyland 40:28
Yes, so I was gonna go to the question that Chris Butterworth just put in there, which is a brilliant question and I love it. So we are talking about gathering data about your customers, but one thing that we talk about at MindfulCommerce is storing data and being really mindful about the data that you collect, to kind of ensure that you need the data and it's actually going to be useful. So Chris's question was, "what are people's thoughts on the ethics of collecting all of this customer data to allow this almost one-on-one targeting?" It's a great question and it's a rabbit hole that I go down often. So, Chris, do you want to unmute and talk about your thoughts?
Chris Butterworth 41:30
Yeah, I've just seen Vickie's response to it as well, "if they the customer voluntarily gives it" I mean, as part of GDPR within the EU, obviously, you have to get consent, or at least let people know that you are tracking. My concern is how much data that is collected is actually useful. Not just from an ethical standpoint, but from a sustainable standpoint, obviously, the more data you collect, the more data is transmitted, the more data is stored. So it's kind of just to try and cover both of those areas, really, just to try and get people's thoughts on it... whether it is completely ethical or not.
Krissie Leyland 42:21
So just to explain it a little bit more, like you said, it's not just about the ethics of GDPR, and stuff like that. It's about the more data that you store, the more impact it has on the planet, and the more energy that you basically zapped from the earth. What Chris and I are saying is just be mindful of the data that you collect. Lucy, what your thoughts are on that because you're a small brand. At Reverie, like you said, you don't collect much customer data, but say a client at Brave the Skies... Is it something that you might bring in conversation or do you just collect needless data?
Lucy Roberts 43:13
I would potentially suggest that no data is useless or needless, I have very strong views on not sharing data with other businesses that you haven't directly opted into. I hate it when that kind of thing, those damn T's and C's that you have to click to check out that drives me mad. I hate hearing from businesses that I haven't directly signed up with. So if something like that does happen, I do make it a personal mission to find out who sold my data and wage war with them. That in the spirit of creating more meaningful connections with customers, offering a better service offering more value, I think as long as you're using the data proactively that you have, and like you say, You're not just collecting data for the sake of collecting data, then I think ethically, I'm on board with it. As long as it's being used responsibly, and in a way that genuinely benefits the customer and not the business. Yeah, then I think it's a nice thing to be able to do because tying back to everything that Cat and Rachel were talking about, like at the started at the start of the chat, like having those better connections, being able to not necessarily sell a product better, but advise the customer better on things like the fit or things like whether or not based on your previous purchase in the previous data that we've collected, we're pretty sure we're actually 85% sure that the size eight is going to fit you then I think that that solves the problem as well. So it's interesting, it's almost a bit of a double edged sword. It's like we didn't have the data, we might create more returns which might create more questions. Rachel, help me out.
Rachel Tyers 45:04
For midsize enterprises, the data were collecting is only scratching the very surface. It's so insignificant compared to the billions of points of data that Facebook or Google stores on every single one of us. And as SMPs, we use that too. So all of the Facebook marketing targeting that we're using, which is very comprehensive, incredible, and allows us to get in front of customers that are going to be interested in our products, that is stored somewhere. And that's significantly more than, like a couple of skin type questions that you might have on your reviews widget. So I think that's like more of a consideration and there's certainly a line. You know, it's always really creepy, when I'm talking about back pain, and my phone is sitting here, and then I get ads on Instagram. And I'm like, "Okay, back pain ads? Come on. My phone wasn't even unlocked!" So it's tricky. But that said, we're opting in for this every time we use Facebook or Instagram, like we have opted in to share all of our data with Facebook. So, you know, it's definitely a grey area. It's really creepy as a consumer, but it's really fantastic as a marketer.
Krissie Leyland 46:23
Yeah, it's like Lucy said, it's definitely double edged. I think, what Chris will say and what I will always say is, just please be mindful of the data that you collect. Don't store it for too long if you find out that you don't need it or use it. Going back to customer connections, it can be really great if you can personalise things, and for example, you're using data to create an ad that's more relevant. Perhaps, that's okay. But yeah, just be mindful. Thank you so much, Chris. I love that question. And I think we should do it entirely different event with me, you and Cat and anyone wants to join about that. And so yeah, thank you!
Lucy Roberts 47:14
There is a really good question that's just popped up in the chat about sensitive versus non sensitive data, which I think is a really, really interesting question. I don't think there's any need for anyone to collect sensitive data. I don't think marketers need it. I think everything that Rachel was just saying is completely accurate. Like it is a marketer's dream to have access to loads of information and data about your age, your buying patterns, which device you shop on, that kind of thing. But I really can't find a use case for a marketer to need the full name of somebody, the full address of somebody. I don't think anything needs to be that specific. So if I was being targeted based on very sensitive data, like, you know, my exact age or my birthday, or whatever, unless i'd specifically opted in because I wanted a 10% discount on my birthday,, I would be pretty annoyed about that. So I would always say sensitive data is no no.
Krissie Leyland 48:21
I totally agree. So, again, thank you those really good questions and I like that topic a lot. Shall we go back to marketing and customer connections? So Lucy, you mentioned something called opti-channel marketing.
Lucy Roberts 48:50
It's a good little buzzword, isn't it?
Krissie Leyland 48:54
It is, it's a new one! It's anew one even to me & Cat! We were like, "what is it?"
Lucy Roberts 49:01
I've had quite a few people talking about it recently. I was just mentioning to you ladies, before we jumped on the call: I've just started as an associate lecturer on a fashion course up in Newcastle at the university there. One of the senior lecturers that I was speaking to was talking about how they're talking to the students about the concept opti-channel marketing. I was like, "but surely you mean omni-channel?" and she was like, "No, I mean, opti-channel." Okay, so I was doing a bit of research into it and the more I looked into it, the more I thought "this is actually so smart." Because for being an omni channel retailer, you're everywhere where your customer is and your brand is everywhere. But this concept of opti-channel marketing is more about optimising your brand, your tone of voice and your message for the channel that you're operating on. So you might speak to a slightly different set of customers who engage with you more on email marketing. So your tone of voice might be a little bit more salesy. It might be a little bit more, "hey, you bought this, you might like this as well!" Whereas your conversations on a social platform like Facebook, or Instagram might be more about those one-on-one connections, where you've got the same people commenting and messaging every time. So you can be a lot more, "hey, I'm the face behind the brand. Let's have a chat. I'm really glad you like this image. What do you think about this?"
So, I really liked this idea of this opti-channel suggestion. It's something that I've spoken to a couple of our clients about at the agency and it seems to have struck a chord with a couple of them. Because they think you very much do present yourself and your brand in very different ways, depending on the circumstance. It goes back to what Rachel was talking about before, which is more about customer segmentation and there are certain segments of customers who respond really well, for example to "we've got a flash sale", because the only time they're going to buy it is if it's on discount. But then you've got another section of customers who are incredibly brand loyal, and anything you put out they want to buy, because you have promised them that it's got your stamp for approval, and they're just going to buy it anyway. So I think this concept of opti-channel is actually I think it's common sense for a lot of people and I think we do it anyway. But I quite like that there's that there's a name for it, so I'm going with it.
Krissie Leyland 51:27
Love it. That's really cool. Yeah, I was just like, "what? what is this" and Cat said, "That's good! Give us the dirt!"
Lucy Roberts 51:36
Coin the term, take it and run! Go for it.
Krissie Leyland 51:42
I'll be an opti-channel marketing agency!
Lucy Roberts 51:47
I would like a revenue share please. [ laughs ]
Krissie Leyland 51:52
Yeah! Rachel, what do you have any thoughts on that? Have you ever heard of that concept before?
Rachel Tyers 51:59
I haven't heard of that concept before, but it makes so much sense. I think, when we were kind of getting used to SMS being a part of our structure, people or brands werre worried about, "okay, we're sending an email to this person and we're also sending them an SMS... Isn't that a bit much? You know, we're double handing this message." But being able to use the correct sort of address in SMS is going to be really different to what you're using an email and you know, it's so short-handed and sort of off the cuff. Maybe you're throwing in a few emojis if you've got extra budget for SMS that month. So it's really different way of messaging someone, and both are equally valuable.
Lucy Roberts 52:51
Chris is throwing me a curveball here. It doesn't seem like he's on board with opti-channel marketing.
Chris Butterworth 52:57
Sorry, it's because I come from a brand background. So a lot of the work that I've done is basically been all about kind of consistent brand experience and brand strategy, and that sort of side of things. So changing your voice depending on the medium is a little bit odd to me, purely because I would think about it is something where it's completely consistent in terms of tone of voice and everything like that.
Lucy Roberts 53:27
I totally get what you're saying. I think you're totally right in that all of your core values and your core messaging should always be the same. But the way that I thought about it was, I'm the same person as an individual. I am very much the same person in every situation, but I definitely have a phone voice. I'm definitely extra polite. When I'm around my parents friends, I'm definitely a little bit more of a wine girl with my girlfriends. And I'm to be honest, a bit of a loose cannon with my fiance, but I'm still the same person all around. I think you naturally have slightly different versions of yourself, even though you're still the same base person, it's still the same brands. You just act ever so slightly differently depending on your environment. So I'm going to go with that metaphor. I think it works.
Chris Butterworth 54:22
Absolutely amazing. Yeah, I didn't even really think about it that way.
Krissie Leyland 54:27
That is so good.
Lucy Roberts 54:28
Yes, Thank you so much!
Cat Hunter 54:29
We have a question from Bridget as well in the in the Q&A. I'll read out. So Bridget says that she has a question on marketing strategy. They recently launched a sustainability Shopify tool for fashion retailers. We know that consumers are interested in sustainability ratings, but our tool is a b2b product. Any tips on how we can get in touch with the right type of retailers?
Lucy Roberts 55:01
First of all, I would love to hear about it because I'm sure the merchants that we work with that Krissie works with at her agency and that I work with... 100% would love to hear more about that. Bridget, I'm actually going to drop my email address in the chat. So, yeah I'd love to hear more about.
Bridget 55:24
Sure! We only launched about a month ago, and we've got some traction, but we put so much work into it. Really, I guess, you know, the more work we put in, the more we thought we were just gonna blow up as soon as we launched. Guess things are harder once you're in the real world. So I'm just trying to reach out to brands, because I know a lot of consumers will be interested in seeing this, but it's just sort of highlighting the need to retailers and trying to get in touch with the right people because Shopify is so vast. Yeah, I think it's a good tool and we really thought of all the hypotheticals. What if this, what if that? It has a lot of flexibility, but in doing that, I worry that we've made our marketing more complicated. And so yeah, please let me know if anyone's interested.
Lucy Roberts 56:13
I mean, I'd love a demo of it. Maybe we could connect and kind of chat about it more. From my experience in the agency, for example, I went down & met Rixo, which is a brand that we launched on Shopify Plus middle of last year. As part of their discovery, I kept saying to them, like, what about sustainability? What are you guys doing there? I mean, you sell 350 pound viscose dresses, like made in China? What's the message? Like? Where's that price coming from? And I don't think the founders were really expecting somebody to ask a question like that. I think they have enough of a cult following that the dresses sell themselves but we ended up doing a really big section on the site about meet the makers. And like, who's actually designed the clothes where they're being made. Like, where the factories are, what factories specialise in. I think that the more you almost propose the tool to brands, even brands, who aren't actively doing anything on sustainability on their websites, they naturally want to be associated with it, because most of them are thinking about it, they're just not doing anything about it. I always think those Rixos & Les Girls Les Boys, the independently owned small-medium sized business, I think they're going to be your bread and butter for it all like that on Shopify, for sure. I'd be more than happy to help in any way I can and get you connected with merchants like that.
Bridget 57:42
That would be great. Yes, please.
Krissie Leyland 57:45
I was just gonna say... Well, I know what the apps called, but can you tell everyone what the app is called?
Bridget 57:53
That's just another example of how marketing is not my... But yes it's called Fashion Impact - Clothing. I have a data science background. It's not actually my main job. It's a hobby that we started in March when the first lockdown hit. Then my husband is a programmer for Shopify tools. So yeah, it's obviously a passion of ours. We launched it in December. In the end, I really hoping to get some traction on it. You know, because it's a business to business product, I guess it makes the marketing, a little bit more complicated for us. We're used to being at the bottom end of business to consumer marketing. So we know, how we received that and those kind of strategies at a basic level. But we are out of our depth, I guess a little bit when it comes to business to business marketing. But platforms like this are so helpful, and I'm really enjoying this.
Rachel Tyers 58:46
Bridget, I would just say, if you can get some data and metrics around how the app helps is stored, and that becomes really compelling. For me, like I really love LinkedIn for reaching out to brands. I think, like the SMB area is a really good place to start and get those early adopters on the board, get more data and metrics, and then even working with agencies. I mean, being in partnerships, I know that if I make friends with a great agency and show them with my show them my product, it's way better use of my time than going out to each company individually. So I think that would be a strong sell for you, especially if you're looking at agencies that are focused on ethical marketing or ethical development. So there are those agencies that are specialising in that space. And then for me, if anyone's interested in learning more about Okendo, I will drop my email in the chat. I'm happy to do a demo with you or chat more about your marketing strategy. And thank you so much Krissie for inviting me to share some time with you all today.
Krissie Leyland 59:52
You're very welcome. Thank you. And yes! Lucy?
Lucy Roberts 1:00:02
I've had I've had a great time like, this has been so much fun. It's been a lovely like relaxed conversation. It's been great to see some new faces and put some faces to names. I dropped my email in the chat as well. But if anybody ever needs any advice or anything on like startup brands or anything Shopify or econ related, just drop me an email, I'm always happy to help, or LinkedIn is cool, too. And everyone, make sure you're following Reverie the Boutique on Instagram, and save everything for the algorithm! [ laughs ]
Krissie Leyland 1:00:38
Yeah, if it helps, I'll save everything! Yeah, thank you so much, everyone. There'll be lots more events like this, I hope. People like Bridget, and everybody in the ecommerce space, this is a place to connect! And, yeah, I loved it... thank you so much! Thank you very much as well to our panellists, Rachel, Lucy... and Chris and Bridget for coming on in. If you're not a member of the MindfulCommerce Community yet, please, please join us if you're interested in ecommerce sustainability, and helping to make the ecommerce world more positively impactful. Also, don't forget to have a look at our brand new MindfulCommerce Directory listings for all the experts, including Okendo, and you can learn a bit more about them on there. Yeah, thank you so much. This has been great. This is the first event I've ever done like this. So yeah, thank you again.
Cat Hunter 1:01:43
And we will create a space to kind of continue this discussion on the MindfulCommerce Community on the Facebook group. So if people do want to have a space to connect or raise any issues that are questions that they had, that kind of grew out of the conversation that they've heard today, if you want to carry on the conversation, then that's very much what the MindfulCommerce Community is all about. So we will make sure that there's a clearly identified thread in the Facebook group for you to get.
Krissie Leyland 1:02:10
Yeah, and so a little task to take away: Just think about what you're going to do to create better connections with your customers this year and then let us know you know, on Instagram, whatever, and tag us! Yeah, let's start a conversation!
Cat Hunter 1:02:27
Fantastic. Thanks ever so much, everyone!
Rich Bunker 1:02:32
We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you're probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.
Krissie Leyland 1:02:39
So don't forget to join by going to mindfulcommerce.io, click on 'Community' and register from there.
Rich Bunker 1:02:46
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Find us:
Where to find Adam Pearce:
Adam Pearce - LinkedIn
Where to find Blend Commerce:
Blend Commerce - Website
Blend Commerce - Blog
Links Mentioned in Episode:
Magento Commerce
Accenture
Due West
Octane AI
Klaviyo
Clubhouse
BrewDog
Dr. Will's
ShoppingGives
Insights Profiles
'Start With Why' - book by Simon Sinek
'Find Your Why' - book by Simon Sinek, Peter Docker, David Mead
'The 4-Hour Workweek' - book by Timothy Ferriss
'Life Leverage' - book by Rob Moore
Shownotes:
Krissie Leyland 0:00
Hello and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie.
Rich Bunker 0:11
and I'm Rich. We are your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community.
Krissie Leyland 0:18
The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of e commerce as a force for good.
Rich Bunker 0:30
You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io and then clicking "Community". See you there!
Krissie Leyland 0:36
Today, we are talking to Adam who is the CEO and cofounder of Blend Commerce, a Shopify agency specializing in turning ideas into reality. Blend are driven by success with a mission to help Shopify entrepreneurs achieve significant and sustainable growth. I love Blend Commerce's motto, which is "clarify, create and convert," which we will go into more detail on in the show. So hello, Adam. It's great to have you here. How are you doing?
Adam Pearce 1:08
Yeah, very good. Thanks, Krissie. Thanks for having me. I'm really pleased to be on here.
Krissie Leyland 1:13
Good, great! It's always nice to hear that you're pleased to be on the podcast. So do you want to start by just telling us a bit about how Blend Commerce came about? So I believe you're running it with your brother-in-law, which is interesting.
Adam Pearce 1:29
Yeah, so shout out to anyone else who is in business with their family, because it's good and it's hard too. But yeah, just a detail about how it came about. So my business partner, Peter, who is also a brother-in-law, he started out developing Shopify stores about seven or eight years ago. We'd always talked about going to business together. He was banging on about Shopify, and how it was this great thing that was allowing people to have ecommerce stores. He said they're all these people in the US and Canada that were building out these stores and making really good money from it. I just kind of brushed it aside and said, "yeah, whatever... it's just another fad." People were already already use Magento for ecommerce. I was actually managing a Magento store at the time. I didn't really kind of think much of it. Then, probably about a year into developing, it really started to pick up and Shopify started becoming more mainstream lexicon. When I looked at it, you know, having the fact that I was actually owning a Magento store at the time, I started realizing what the opportunity was.
Basically what happened was that I was a sales and marketing director for an educational app company. We had been talking about this idea of going to business. I said, "Look, I've worked with agencies before, and what really annoys me about agencies is that I can't get everything that I need done under one roof. Because I come from marketing, while Peter came from development, that's how we came up with the idea with Blend Commerce. It's the idea that we are blending both development and marketing in one. So that's where the cheesiness of "Blend" comes in. We now trying to be the on demand digital department for companies. A lot of growing businesses, they think about recruiting, but actually trying to recruit a developer, a designer & a marketer: there's a lot of costs with that, as well a headache in that. Basically, we just come on essentially, as that automatic department that you can then talk to, and get everything you need from one team. So yeah, that's how we came about.
Krissie Leyland 3:46
Perfect. I love that. It's like blending your two brains together, as well, so not just your creativity from the marketing side, but also like the geeky techie side as well, which is perfect. Yeah, it's such a headache trying to find all the unicorns in the world, isn't it? So if they're all in one place, that's perfect. So I recently saw that you went through a bit of a rebrand and a new website so you want to talk a bit about that? That'd be cool.
Adam Pearce 4:19
Definitely. Well, we are you know, not unlike any any other business, we imagined what our business should be like... And it always gets to a point–and we get this with our own clients–where we go "Look. Actually, what we will be pretending to be or what we were aiming to be initially is not actually what we are." So we've been through a few different versions of websites now. The first ever website that we did, it was very copy heavy, it was very tongue in cheek... A little bit rude sometimes. That was kind of "our take" at the time, that we want it to be very different. But the problem is that people weren't really going to take us that seriously. We got some really good clients but I think a lot of people couldn't see through the fact that we were very jokey & that we had a lot of means on our site. It just didn't really fit in with the kind of customers that we were working with.
Fast forward, coming out two years after we launched our initial site, we then sort of started obsessing about this. It was actually a financial services company: They got this really cool looking black and green thing and we decided that we wanted to have that. But again, I'm not saying with the Average Joe's of the Shopify world, but we're definitely a company that values each other and has got a very strong team mentality. So that black and green at the very start was trying to be a little bit too "too cool for school" and that just wasn't us.
So we actually went through a process with our head of design Stephan to look at a different brand archetypes. Now, if you're not familiar with brand archetypes, have a look on our website, blendcommerce.com, there's a really great blog in there. Essentially, what brain archetypes are is looking at different parts of your company as a personality. While going through quite an in depth process of working out exactly who I wanting to be, we landed on the fact that we were: the Everyman, the Sage and the Hero. You can kind of look at that a little bit like an aeroplane: so the hero is the body, then we're tipped on the wings by the everyman and then on the other side there's the sage. I won't go into too much detail but when you look at our site, if you understand archetypes, hopefully you'll see that that's what we're looking for.
That was the main purpose of going through that rebrand, because we wanted to make sure that people see us as that helpful, honest, and really direct company that is going to help people rather than the typical very skinny looking site that is very flashy, and has got big brand names all over it. That really isn't us. So we wanted to make sure it reflected what we do as a company. I think the other thing as well, Krissie, is that our site is also on Shopify. It always has been, always will be. Ultimately look, you know, Shopify wasn't made for for service-based businesses, but there's definitely capability of doing it. We want to show that with our own website, some of the things that are possible with a Shopify store.
Krissie Leyland 7:26
That's so cool. So for example, when you do win a client, do you do the payment system through Shopify or is it just purely fo a front end website?
Adam Pearce 7:40
Yeah, we actually used to sell our services through the Shopify payment system. We're going to be bringing in more productized services in the next 12 months. So we'll go back to using Shopify for that but in terms of, larger scale projects, we do that externally at the moment.
Krissie Leyland 7:58
Yeah, probably makes more sense. Did you notice a difference in the types of clients that you were attracting after you did the rebrand?
Adam Pearce 8:10
Definitely. I think that the thing was, is that with the rebrand, we also made sure that our tone of voice was right. Obviously, you know a lot more on this than I do, but that was the thing: making sure that we were talking in the right way to our customers. That was also things like podcasts that were on & social media, just trying to make sure everything was aligned. I think now, as a result of that, we've definitely seen the kind of clients that we're looking for. We work best, really, with clients that are doing 100k a month plus, or maybe just below that. So helping us to get in front of those type of people was a big part of that rebrand. Yeah, it definitely has made a big difference.
Krissie Leyland 8:55
That's so cool. So the guy that you went through that process with, was he kind of like helping you to understand who your customers are and the way that you want them to feel? Was that part of the process as well?
Adam Pearce 9:09
Definitely. Stephen, our head of designed delivery, he actually came in at a great time. Because we were looking to do this and we actually tasked this to Stephen as his first first project. So you didn't kind of have that issue you've got you know, when we're usually in a company for over six months, and you get a little bit blinkered in terms of what the company is really about. So Stephen came in with a real power of sort of fresh eyes. So if you have an opportunity where someone is coming into your company, even if they're not a designer, I think it's always worth you talking to them and then getting their opinion of what they think you should actually be doing. Obviously if that's not possible then using someone external thing is a really good move because what we would have resulted with with just me and Peter, or me and the existing team, I know would have been a very different to what we've got actually today.
Krissie Leyland 10:05
You're always too close to your business to really know if what you're seeing is actually making people think what you want them to think about your business, if that makes any sense. Yeah, that sounds really cool and it's a nice process to go through, isn't it?You get clarity on who you are and the types of people that you want to work with. One of my favorite things in business! So let's move on slightly to your services. So what are your core services at Blend?
Adam Pearce 10:46
The easiest way to think about it is: we offer something that we call the on demand digital department. What this means is, as a business owner, it's likely that you are going to be facing a particular problem. Whether that is that you feel like your conversion rates too low, you feel like actually, you're not selling in the right markets or you perhaps, are at a point where your your average order value stagnated. I think with those problems, it's not just development. What you're actually going to need is some strategy, some design work, some development work, and you're gonna need some marketing work too.
So when you work with us, we are actually going to take a look at your business first and say, "Right. Number one: what's the problem? Secondly, what are the things we think needs to be done? And thirdly, in what order they need to be done it? Off the back of that then, what we then do is say, "Look, you're going to need this amount of time from development, this amount of time from design, and this amount of time for marketing to do these things. We will then set a goal, which will be related around solving that problem and then we'll just keep on reviewing that. Now we don't go down the route of doing sort of large projects. We prefer to actually kind of say to client, "Let's solve the here and now issues and then let's build on that, from the growth."
If you look at that as a model, it is slightly different to what a lot their agencies do. I always talk about an example: a few years ago, I bought a very nice, flashy car. When I bought it, I went into the garage, I asked for all the additional bells and whistles. So all the tech in there, the heated seats, all that jazz. I think after a month, what I realized is that I probably used about 10% of that stuff and it started to frustrate me that I paid all this extra money for Sat Nav, when the Sat Nav was crap, and I could've just used my phone. And I think "No, if you think about a website, it's exactly the same thing."
Ultimately, when you're having a website, you want it to get from A to B. So if you focus on solving that core problem that you've got–which might be low conversion rates, so that's your A to B–as time goes on, and you get more data and you've experienced using that site, you can then work out what bells and whistles you do need to actually add. That's the way that we work as a company. We'll have that time to sort of get settled in and then after we'll add the things that we actually do need to add, rather than just going for the add ons from the immediate start point.
Krissie Leyland 13:32
Yeah, that's so nice and probably less overwhelming as well. Because even so with the MindfulCommerce Directory, we found it really hard to give our developers and designers the exact thing that we wanted straightaway. We were like, "Oh, I don't know!" It wasn't until we got something launched, like an MVP site, that we went, "Oh, it would be really handy to have this, this and this." Yeah, so to start off small and have one goal... I like that and the bit at the beginning too when you set your goals. It's just really nice. You like wake up every morning go, "Right, how am I going to work on this, with whoever I'm working with, to reach that goal?" I guess that's part of 'clarify', which is one of the goals that we're going to work towards. Then, "How are we going to create it and then convert?" So, how does that process work if I was a one of your clients?
Adam Pearce 14:41
The "clarify, create, convert," we just felt that it summarizes exactly what we do. So the initial call that we tend to have the clients is all about clarifying, "What exactly is the problem?" I think that the interesting thing is that when when you look at a problem, typically clients can say, "We don't feel like we're selling enough." But when you drill down on that, what you're actually finding is what they're really saying to you. And that is: we have this product that we thought was going to be an absolute winner and it's not selling in the way that we thought it was. But we do have other products that are selling well. So rather than actually saying, "Well, let's try and fix that product that we thought was going to sell better. Let's ramp up on the product that is selling very well but it's not maybe kind of a sexy product that you wanted to sell, and then get your growth in that way." So I think that clarification process is kind of flipping the mindset a little bit here saying, "What actually can we change and what is the real problem?" So that's the first thing.
The next thing then in terms of the "Create" is to say, "We've got the problem, you know the cause of that problem, and now we actually need to start putting things into place that are going to actually changed that situation." Again, we don't want to necessarily go in and change everything overnight, but what we do want to do is make some smaller changes to see if we can get them to that convert point. Then basically, we're just going to loop that process around again. So, we've had three months, we clarified it, we created something, we converted. Now, let's go again and say "What are the problems now?" So it might be that once you've done that change the site–so maybe you've got new landing pages, what we're finding out now is actually the email signup rate on those pages is not as high as we need it to be because we know that email, for example, is a very good sales channel. So again, starting up that process again. It's these kind of small, iterative changes that are going to get you beyond that threshold of that 100k a month. I think that's where, a lot of our clients get a little bit sticky, because we always tend to see there's a bit of stagnation, 82k - 110k a month. Once you can get beyond that, that route to 500k a month is actually a lot smoother.
Krissie Leyland 17:00
Oh my god, I love it. I love how you talk through that it's so nice. I bet you're really good at sales.
Adam Pearce 17:07
I don't do sales anymore too much. (laughter) The reason it sounds quite polished when I say it to you, isthat its something that we've been doing a lot of work on Krissie. I would definitely recommend anything by Simon Sinek, "Start With Why". It's a little bit cliche, I suppose in a way but a few months ago, and my business partner actually did a very short workshop with with Team Simon. I think it was about $29–so, super cheap–but what it did is it helped us get our 'why'. What we did with that is that we then translated that into the "why" for our company. By having that, we can ask, "When we're doing something, does it align with that reason of why we get out of bed in the morning? If it doesn't, then that's not do it." I know, it's probably sounds like I've got a lot of conviction to it–and I do–because I see how the things that we're doing are aligned to that particular 'Why?'
Krissie Leyland 18:10
I absolutely love that. Is that the guy that wrote the book that is in blue writing ("Find Your Why")? What's his name?
Adam Pearce 18:24
It's Simon Sinek. There's a five minute version of his very famous TED Talk, where he talks about "the why, the how, and the what?" So what he says is that a lot of people are very good at explaining what they do. So if I go to a party or networking event, and someone says to me, "What do you do?" Well it's very easy: "I'm a CEO of a Shopify agency, based in Warwickshire." Well, frankly, who cares? But if I said to someone, "Look, what I want to do, my why is that I want to inspire people, so that actually everyone can achieve what they're capable of." Then if you get a few more raise eyebrows, "Well, what do you mean by that?" That's actually my 'why'. So if you kind of have that as your center point, not only can it then generate better conversations face to face for also marketing, but also then it makes you a lot easier to then differentiate yourself from other people. That's the big piece of what we've tried to do, both as individuals but also as a company.
Krissie Leyland 19:32
Wow. And is your 'why' as an individual the same as your 'why' in business.
Adam Pearce 19:40
So we've basically got two very different peopleat the head of our company, me and Peter. We're also very big into this thing called 'Insights Profiles', which basically looks at how you as a person & your personality aligns to particular colors, which represent different moods and activities, things that you're doing. So you can read more about the insights profiles but I think, me and Peter are very different. Now Peter's 'why' is more about being able to solve problems quickly to empower people to work rapidly. So his is quite different to mine. What we've done is that we're working on a company at the moment & we're there [at the 'why'] I think. But we're changing it slightly, because as more team members come in, we want to make sure that our company 'why' is aligned. So it needs to be something where everyone in the company cam feel like they're part of this. That 'why' is reflective of what people actually get up in the morning for. But equally, we can convert that into something that clients can then actually say, "Yes, I want to work with these guys for that reason!"
Krissie Leyland 20:49
Yeah because then they're aligned, hopefully, with your 'why'.
Adam Pearce 20:54
Absolutely. I'd recommend for you to do a session as a team. You know, we did one with our team probably about three months ago. The key thing that came out of our session on the 'why' with the team was that all of us had been in a situation in our lives where someone had told us that either we weren't good enough, we couldn't do something, or we weren't allowed to do something. That was a common theme that was coming across from everyone. So for me, it was the fact that when I was at schools in a careers lesson, my teacher leaned over my shoulder while I was looking at Accenture, which is a consultancy company. He said, "Oh Adam... they only employ the best people there!" From that point at 16, I was like, right, "screw you, I'm going to prove you wrong." And I did.
A lot of people on the team had similar stories about parents, colleagues, friends & family that had told them that they couldn't do something or weren't allowed to do something, and they went on to prove them wrong. That's where we're going with our company wise: If you've been in that situation, where you faced adversity or people trying to put up roadblocks to where you want to be, then actually we're a great company to work with, because we've experienced that. We know how to move past those roadblocks. That's the similar thing that clients have, they get to a certain level, and they think, "Actually, the market is telling me that we can't go any further." We'll actually, screw that. You can! You just got to work out different ways of how to get there. That's how we aligned our 'why'.
Krissie Leyland 22:32
You know what, that's amazing and that was literally touched me? I recently published an episode, just a bonus random one, talking about my experiences and why did I end up in business? Well actually, I think it's because in school, I had a bit of a shit time and had people telling me, "You can't do that. You're worthless. You're this, you're that." And it's like, actually a can! Now my 'why' is to inspire other people to just follow their dreams and do what they want to do, because they can. One of the reasons why I love Shopify is because it gives lots of people in different situations access to business.
Adam Pearce 23:23
I completely agree. I think that's what I love about it too, Krissie, because I think the nice thing is with Shopify: most industries are 50, 100 or 200 years old, for example. We're talking about an industry here that in effect is less than 15 years old. You haven't got the old boys club that you get in finance, management software–where I used to work–or in teaching, which again is an industry that I used to be in. So everyone's got that opportunity to not feel like they're being judged. We all get imposter syndrome, I agree, but I don't think it's as prevalent in Shopify, because we are all new to this industry. It's a new thing that we're doing and we've all got a damn good right to be here. So yeah, I completely agree on that front.
Krissie Leyland 24:15
Oh my god. I didn't expect you to like bring that up but I totally, totally agree. I actually also love Toby's little story, you know, snowboarding stuff. Then I can relate to that about surfing and whatever. It's just also giving people freedom, like you said, we're all in this at the beginning of something. Even though I still get massive imposter syndrome, it's about finding your niche within it anyway and then telling the world.
I need to like, take that in. So going back to your process of getting clients beyond the 100k a month threshold, do you wanna like just talk about how you have helped any particular clients to do that? And what that looked like?
Adam Pearce 25:21
Yeah, certainly. Typically speaking, when we work with a client, they've got a particular problem that they're trying to solve. Here are a couple of different examples: One is that we had a company called Due West that we work with, who are a clothing brand based out in Canada. The main thing for them was that they were seeing that their sales started to stagnate.
The reason for that was that the they had a very strong customer base and those existing customers had stopped buying at the rate they were before. Trying to acquire new customers, of course, is costly, and then the profitability of your sales is then going to go down. So the main thing that we focused on with them is really twofold. One is that, first of all, they haven't refreshed their website for a very long period of time. And also, because they have brick and mortar stores, there wasn't this alignment with the brick and mortar stores and the online shop. A lot of people were shopping in store and online. Or they have a lot of tourists who come in and shop in store, and they continue to shop when they're back home. So the main thing for them was that we need to do a redesign of the store. And it wasn't about, you know, basically fundamentally changing what was happening on site.
The first step was actually, we just need to make sure that the brand looked the same consistently through the store, so that the site actually has some alignment with the brick and mortar store. The second thing was that on their email marketing front, they again needed to do the same piece of work there. So those are basically the two key things that we did. What basically happened with those guys was that after three months, they increased their sales by I think 45%. So it had the the impact that they wanted and now we're still working with those guys to basically say, "Right, we've got the actual branding right now. People are interacting better, but what can we do to actually push them to buy more." So I think that's kind of a good example of look, where you've got an issue, you're using two different mechanisms to actually change it. You're looking at the conversion, and then right, we're back at that clarify point.
Each time, it's not just necessarily about "Just go and do a redesign." for example. It's not just about that. I can't really share with you about particular clients that we do work with but it goes a lot further than the actual online store. You know, it can be about internal relationships, within members of staff or members of the team. It can be about delivery processes. It can be about taxation issues... all these things that we're not experts on. But if we can identify it, and then we can put them in touch with someone who can help them, then actually, that then does have a trickle down effect to their sales. Because if you've got a situation where you know, two members of your leadership team aren't necessarily seeing eye to eye, but we can come in, and actually, by going through the process of working with you, get you to work better.
Then there's a lot of, I guess, unexpected changes that happen when clients work with us. Ultimately, they trickle down to the bottom line. So I think that's the important thing to know here: from my point of view, when you work with an agency, ultimately they should be looking at you as a business and not just a website. And I think that's the kind of thing that a lot of clients like is that the website is just actually an asset. It's not their business. There's a lot of things that go behind that website that are really important to try and tackle as well.
Krissie Leyland 29:00
That's so true. Cool. I've never heard of an agency doing that actually. But obviously, the Shopify partnerships is really valuable as an agency, because you can do that–as long as they live up to what they say that they're going to do, because then obviously, it will come back to you, if not. Then that helps to grow your client's business, and they'll eventually come back to you anyway. So that's interesting. I was just thinking about the client, that you sorted out the website and the branding for, and then I think you mentioned email... So how do you tend to get a potential customers from the website onto their email list and then sell stuff through email?
Adam Pearce 29:57
Yeah, good question. The thing at the moment for us, and the thing that I just absolutely love, is a product called Octane AI Shop Quiz. What this does is that you can actually have on your site, a quiz that will ask that person a set number of questions that you want to ask them. So, when you think about a quiz, we always probably think like the Facebook quizzes where you work out what Disney character you are. I'm not talking about that but the principle, I guess, is the same. Let's say, for example, you're a beauty brand. If you can ask them a series of questions about their skin type, the age or lifestyle, and then also ask for their email address, what you can do is then recommend them a particular number of products that you think they should buy, there and then on the site, but what you've also done is you've collected that data.
Now we use Klaviyo with all of our client and because you can integrate, obtain our shop quiz with Klaviyo, all of that data then get stored on that person's profile. So let's say for example, Krissie, you complete that on my beauty store. Then,, I find out about your skin type, your age group & your lifestyle. If you buy when you complete that quiz, great. If you don't, by no problem, because I've collected a lot of data about you that I can then personalize that email marketing to you. So it might be that, maybe for example, you're telling me you've got dry skin. So then I'm gonna send you an email that says, "Here's three great products for making sure that you get more moisture into your skin." Personalize without kind of feeling like, "Hi, Krissie, you must buy these products!" A lot of people do, but that doesn't really work. So, in terms of getting people to sign up, that is my hot tip for the moment, certainly.
Krissie Leyland 31:48
That is so cool. I love it. Can you do that for a normal website?
Adam Pearce 31:53
Yeah to be honest with you Krissie, well, I I've actually been talking about using it for our own website. And look, let's say if someone wanted to join the MindfulCommerce Community, you could create a quiz that would basically ask a series of questions that would assess if they're a good fit or not. If they were a good fit, you could then recommend them to apply. If they weren't a good fit, you could say please join our waiting list, you know, and kind of go through that way. So that that would be a way I would say to use it for you.
Krissie Leyland 32:23
Oh my God, I'm sold! I'm doing it. That is awesome. But I was also thinking, like, you know, if I'm a brand, I'm a sustainable brand, you could ask, "what are your values?" So: what's important to you? Are you vegan? Do you need plastic free? Like that could be the quiz! The quiz could be: What do you care about? That's just great. We can just personalize everything and then that's not spammy. While you would think it's less spammy because it's actually interesting to that person who's reading the email?
Adam Pearce 33:02
Absolutely, I think the other thing is while you can do with it is that if you were looking at sustainable brands, people would be interested in different paths. If we were talking about environmentalism, sustainability, mindfulness... If you then were selecting that then naturally, you're interesting in those different things. You could then send a guide, PDF, or an ebook related to each one of those different streams as a result of completing that particular quiz. So yeah, I think there's a bagload of opportunities with that.
Krissie Leyland 33:41
I literally want to put it in my search bar right now. How much is it? Just interested.
Adam Pearce 33:48
Um, I believe it starts at $29 a month. And then I think if you convert someone to a sale, they charge you literally cents for each conversion. There's an enterprise plan, which I think is probably into the high hundreds.
Krissie Leyland 34:09
Nice. I was on clubhouse last night at 10pm, like in bed–or was it 11? I don't know, it was really late. Anyway, the Octane AI CEO was talking. It was really interesting, I loved it. So now just in my head, I'm gonna have to probably invest in them.
Adam Pearce 34:35
It's definitely worth having a listen to Ben Parr, who's the president. And then there's also Matt Schlicht as well, who's their CEO. Those are two people definitely worth following.
Krissie Leyland 34:46
Yeah, I think that was the guy. I think it was Matt or maybe it was both of them. Anyway, are there some pointers that you would give to those who aren't quite on the 100k mark. Is there anything that they can kind of do in-house, apart from Octane AI and Klaviyo that can get them to the 100K, and then maybe they'll work with you.
Adam Pearce 35:14
To answer you, the biggest question that people ask me is: "I've got x amount of money, what should I spend it on?" Nine times out of 10, if you're not going to be working agency, I would say photography. It's one of those things that, honestly, is one of the biggest reasons for slowing down sites. So the mistake that some people make is that they'll go out, and they'll source a photographer that then put the huge high resolution images on the site. They'll see the conversion rate goes down and say, "Well hang on, what's going on here?" The reason will be is because those images are too large.
So first things first, everyone who's listening: if you do have a Shopify store, go and check your site speed. If it is poor, use one of the many free tools that are out there that you can use to actually reduce the size of images. But if you've got images, you know, where they're different sizes, you've got different backgrounds, you haven't maybe got consistent angles on all of your images, all these things are a real turnoff. There's been a lot of studies done, the real in-depth white papers produced on this. Photography is always one of the things that has an impact. So if you're able to pay for some decent photography, then I would say definitely, it's worth doing that.
I think the other thing too, is that if you're trying to drive that traffic, and you haven't got a lot of cash at the moment, try new things at Facebook groups. They can be a really fantastic way of not only driving people to your site, but also as well, a lot of market research. We have a company that we work with that actually sells candlemaking supplies and the very first thing we did with them is that we set up a Facebook group, which is all about candle making in the UK. From that, we learned straightaway what kind of products people are interested in. We understood what problems they were going through. We understood what they didn't like about the competition. So all of that was a really good thing to do. Look you know, starting a Facebook group is easy to do. You know, it will take time to build a community up around it but if you are low on cash, that's a great way to work out what you need to do next. It will give you that roadmap you need to grow.
Krissie Leyland 37:29
Completely agree. On the photography side, oh my god, it's the worst. If somebody's got terrible imagery and it's all different sizes, and Higgledy Piggledy... oh, I'll click off straightaway. Also, one thing I was thinking then is, with photography and resolution, if you lower the resolution, it not only increases site speed, but it reduces your impact on the planet, because you're taking less energy. I talk about this all the time but it's basically: solve your site speed and also help the planet. With the community thing, of course, I totally agree. There's tons out there like, eco pod. And also, at MindfulCommerce, we're going to build a second directory that will be completely free where brands can get listed and stuff like that. So yeah, there's so much out there but that was really good tips from you. Thank you! So have you worked with any brands who are trying to be better for the planet? And if so, what are those projects like?
Adam Pearce 38:55
Yeah, definitely. So there's one I wanted to talk to you about in particular. A company that actually basically sells supplies to a particular hobby–I don't want to say too much because I don't necessarily want to give too much away here–but the issue they're facing was that the owner of the company was very, I think, cognizant about packaging. He was seeing what Amazon were doing, in terms of sending out these huge boxes with very small products inside–and sometimes, you know, three or four levels of packaging within that. With his company, he wanted to bring down the cost of shipping for his customers, but he also wanted to reduce actually the amount of wastage and his carbon footprint with each of that shipping.
Now, one of the things that we were very keen on doing: "How do we basically indicate to someone that when they purchase something, they're not doing this in a very sustainable way because of the way that that product needs to be packed?" So we actually built them a tool that will allow people to build a box so that they could actually visually see the space that was left in that box.
BrewDog did this very well. So if you go and order beer from BrewDog, if I put six cans of my favorite beer in there, they're actually going to show you on the screen, that your crate, your box, is still got six spaces in there. Psychologically, that's quite powerful because you say, "Well, okay, actually, I'm being a bit wasteful here. I could actually get more in there rather than waste that space." Actually, also with that, they also do a down sell on it where they recommend that you buy less. So that actually you're reducing the amount of waste in terms of packaging. So I think that's a project that we've been really pleased with. And we're actually diong something else with another brands about just being more efficient with that packaging. So I think that's an important one.
Krissie Leyland 41:01
Wow, that's cool. One thing that I just thought of then is, if you've got a brick and mortar store as well, and you've put things on the shelves, if you could make your packaging ready to be shipped, if that makes sense. So it's already, like in a box. I don't know if I'm making sense here.
Adam Pearce 41:33
I think that what you're saying is that then you don't have to completely repackage or repurpose your product. So then, it makes sense, from an operations point of view, from a sustainability point of view, from a cost point of view. It's got to be ready to go and I think that that's exactly the right thing to do.
Krissie Leyland 41:54
Yeah and that's actually really cool of BrewDog to do that. Also, I was thinking, "Oh, I've got room for six more. Okay! But then does that increase how much you buy, so it would increase average order value as well." But then you said that they encourage you to buy less, which was quite interesting.
Adam Pearce 42:20
I mean, I think on the one hand, you could say, "Well, look. You're increasing the carbon footprint by adding more products." But it also depends on your products. BreweDog, for example, I think they're even carbon negative now, definitely carbon neutral. But if you then got an associated carbon footprint with that delivery, then actually, as a proportion, that level, you're actually being better, because you're then not gonna have that other order on top of that, to then give the extra that you would have ordered in a second order. So I think it kind of depends on the way you look at it, but it's kind of win--win. You know, from an environmental point of view, but but also from a sales and business growth point of view as well.
Krissie Leyland 43:09
Definitely. Cool. Love it. I was super excited to see that you had read "The Four Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss. I personally get stuck in my work zone, I can't get out of it but I'm trying to not work as much, like give myself time outside for doing nice things and spending time with my friends. So have you experienced burnout before and is there a way that you were hoping to combat that... or?
Adam Pearce 43:44
Yeah, I've 100% experienced burnout. The thing is with the four hour workweek book, I'm nowhere near a four hour workweek at the moment. What I have done is though, that I we only now work Monday to Thursday, so I'm getting close to it and that's basically my business partner. I think the main thing that that book taught me is that actually, if you can put structures into the way that you work, you can work a heck of a lot more efficiently.
For example, one of the things he talks about in the book is, checking your emails twice or three times a day. We've all been guilty of opening your laptop at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, spending 45 minutes responding to emails, then feeling tired and getting a coffee, then basically, killing that morning. The one thing that I got from the book is that I also do this "eat the frog" thing where you're going to be your biggest task of the day, the first thing. So I generally work from quarter past seven in the morning, till half past four in the afternoon. From quarter past seven to half past eight. I'm smashing something out that I need to do. Like I need to do a finance analysis, and I've done that, it's out the way. Then I can go and check email. Because you feel like you've accomplished something, you're also then more efficient with your time, so I think that's kind of the one side of it.
So in terms of burnout, I don't mind admitting that I still suffer from depression. I've medicated for depression for probably about four years, along with kind of a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy. The thing is with this is that, a lot of the mental health issues that I had were exacerbated by burnout but obviously, not the root cause of it. I think I'd say that if anyone is listening, number one, if you ever want to talk about mental health to me, find me on LinkedIn. I absolutely would love to talk to you about it and tell you about some of the coping strategies that I've used & tend to use.
But I also think having that awareness that is actually something that's real, and not like you're being a flake, which is how, you know, some people will tell you if you've experienced burnout. Everyone will have something that indicates when they're burning out. It might be the fact that you're not sleeping as much or it might be the fact that you're not being able to make decisions. So look around at those warning signs, and if it gets to that point, then literally take a step back. Because ultimately, wherever your business is now, or wherever your job is right now, wherever it is that you're doing, it can stay at that place for the time being. It doesn't need to be pushing forward, and you're not going to lose where you are, and what you've achieved so far. So if you do need to step away from it for a week, two weeks a month.
In my case, I basically had three months out to figure out what the hell I wanted to do in life when I had my big, I would say, a sort of meltdown–but after that point, you can pick up on the things that you've done. So I don't think it's that case, you think like I've got to get over it. If you are that point, just say, "Look, my mind is just devoid of ideas. I'm not enjoying anything. I'm not taking any benefit from anything that I'm doing." Then just step back from it, and just say, "What are the things that truly make you happy? What are the things that really don't make me happy?" I actually did this one because I actually had a breakdown when I was a teacher. I just completely was in beds in tears in a ball for probably about a month.
When I got out of that process, that period, I actually got a piece of paper and I wrote down the pros and the cons of things that I liked and the things that I didn't like about my job, about my relationship, about my life, about our friendships, and I looked at all the things that I didn't didn't like. Then what I did was that I looked at it said, "Is there a job where I can get more things that I like that I dislike, and what are the things that I disliked that I can actually remove from my life, or I can actually make better? The result of that: certain relationships or friendships that had, I got rid of. Certain things that I did, I got rid of and never did again. Certain things I know that I need to start doing, I start doing. So for example, running, exercising with a thing that I never did that I now do religiously. And that helps me with my mental health and avoid that burnout. So that will be my tip.
Krissie Leyland 48:33
That is amazing. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. It's also really brave to like talk about that kind of stuff. Yeah, normally whenever I feel burned out, I just can't do anything. I'll just sit on the sofa, sat there going, "I don't know what I'm doing my life!" But then, yeah, you just have to take a break. That's what I'm trying to teach myself is to, like you said, take a step back and just think, "you know, what do I enjoy doing?" and then just do more of that for a little bit. So for me, I have to go surfing or just be in the sea and then come back to working when I feel positive again, and ideas are coming in my head again. So, I think that's really powerful. And how you said to write down a list of all the things that you like doing and all the things you don't like doing and then what can you get rid of or delegate as Tim would probably say? Yeah, love it. So... do you think it's actually possible to reach a four hour workweek?
Adam Pearce 49:59
Good Question. I wonder, you know, whether actually, it is possible because I think delegation is something that I think I've learned to do better, I'm still not great at. I'm too much of a control freak but ultimately, that's going to be the thing that stopped me from doing that. And for me, when I initially started thinking about this, that thought the four hour workweek was like, "that's going to be amazing!" But actually, what I realized is that that's not actually what I want. And it might be that actually, for you, it might be the same: "well actually, I just want to work mornings, or I want to work four days a week, because I want to do this particular thing."
So I think the main thing for me & my business partner, Peter: two years ago, we both set it up, we would love to not work Fridays, because at that time, both our wives are both expecting children. We said, wouldn't it be amazing, while they're not at school, from birth to four, to be able on a Friday to then go out to the zoo for a day, or go and do something fun with them, or take them horse riding, whatever it might be. That's what we realized will make us happy: to have more time to that with our family. So it could be possible, but I also think there's no point putting that pressure on yourself because, ultimately, is that the thing that you really want to do? I think I for if I was in four hours a week, I would just be a wreck.
Krissie Leyland 51:44
If you just did four hours a week, you'd just sat there itching thinking "I need to work on that!" because you like what you do it. That's why you choose to be in the business that you're in. But I really liked it when you said, that progress that you've made isn't going to just go away and you don't always have to be working towards the next thing and the next thing... which is what my mind tells me quite a lot the time. But yeah, I don't think I could do four hours a week either.
Adam Pearce 52:16
No, I think it would drive me crazy.
Krissie Leyland 52:20
Oh, gosh. Well, I just love that book. But also there's Rob Moore's. Love that one. What's it called?
Adam Pearce 52:34
I don't know but again, he's he's very active in Clubhouse.
Krissie Leyland 52:40
"Life Leverage," I think.
Adam Pearce 52:41
Yes, that's it.
Krissie Leyland 52:43
Brilliant book, you should read it. So yeah, I think we've covered quite a lot. I'm very conscious of your time, it's 11 o'clock and we did have technical difficulties at the beginning. So I guess one final question would be: I'm really excited that you are officially on the mindful commerce directory... When I approached you with this, what was it that you were the most excited about?
Adam Pearce 53:16
I think the main thing is for me is that the way that you set this up, Krissie, is the fact that around the issue that we've got in the world is that there is a lot of shaming going on, around not being sustainable. What I liked about this is that you you're not basically saying with this directory, that you have to be completely 100% sustainability in everything that you do. What you're saying here is that let's start taking steps to be more sustainable. And that's what really appealed me to it.
It's the same with me and my company: I feel like we are fairly sustainable in some things that we do. You know, we don't do travel, we work remotely, all those kind of things, but there's definitely things that we do buy for the company that are sustainable. And that's fine. I'm not gonna lie that we are 100% perfect.
I think that's the thing here for brands and also for agencies. I feel that a lot of brands are scared about going down this route, because they feel they have to be 100% focused towards being sustainable and it's not the case. You can start small and start thinking about the actual impacts in your business. It's not also about saying, "We've got to do all these things, and it's going to cost us 'x' much." It's actually about saying, "You can be more sustainable and actually help yourself become more profitable, which is something I know that you know, quite a few brands, like Dr. Will's, for example, have found that sustainability is actually helped their bottom line as well. I think that's when it starts going a bit more of a two way conversation rather than something to be dictated to like some of the other kind of discussion and discourse that's out there on sustainability.
Krissie Leyland 55:05
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I think we just wanted to make it really open and just to be more of like facilitating a conversation. Like you said, definitely, there's no such thing as being 100% sustainable but there are things you can do like small things that have a big impact or have a big difference in the world, like even as simple as downloading ShoppingGives, which is an app that helps you to give back easily as a ecommerce brand. And like you said, it then comes back to your bottom line, because your customers will have more trust and loyalty and yeah, that's another episode but I'm super excited that you're part of it. Thank you.
Adam Pearce 55:53
We really appreciate being part of it, thank you.
Krissie Leyland 55:56
Welcome! Actually... this is my final question: Where can people find you?
Adam Pearce 56:03
Yep. Cool. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just Adam Pearce. If you want to find out more about Blend Commerce, just go over to blendcommerce.com and you'll find lots of different useful blogs on there. You've got to the one about brand archetypes that I mentioned. You've got different things about Shopify apps, and things like mental health, a little blog that I've written recently. So quite an eclectic blog over there so yeah, go and take a look and let me know what you think.
Krissie Leyland 56:30
Perfect. Thank you so much. And yeah, thank you for your time today. It's been great.
Adam Pearce 56:37
No problem. Thank you!
Krissie Leyland 56:38
Thank you!
Rich Bunker 56:39
We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you're probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.
Krissie Leyland 56:46
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Rich Bunker 56:52
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