Overdose & Chill: Live

Today on Chill, we’ll chat with the wonderful Lindy Crea from ReCharge Payments.

After spending 4 years in Global Partnerships with Swedish FinTech behemoth Klarna, Lindy is now Director of Strategic Partnerships at ReCharge – a leading SaaS subscriptions solution.

Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz will chat with Lindy about the accelerated rise of subscription during Covid, rolling out subscription offerings, Shopify’s new integrated checkout, and more…

About ReCharge Payments

Since 2014, ReCharge has helped over 15,000 merchants launch and scale their subscription business. Be it a curated monthly box, recurring necessities or access to exclusive perks, ReCharge powers billions of dollars in annual processing for nearly 30 million consumers.

The ReCharge team of 250+ is building the future of subscription commerce, set on their mission to connect and empower the world through payments.

In this episode of Chill, we chat with the great Dov Kaufmann from Tolstoy. The Co-Founder and CEO of Tolstoy, Dov spent 7+ years as VP of Business Development at Yotpo before embarking on this new venture in 2020.

One of the coolest techs we’ve seen in quite a while, Tolstoy is “next level” when it comes to on-site engagement. Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz and Dov discuss entrepreneurship, growth, engagement, video journeys, guided selling, and more…

Tolstoy

Video has been a popular play for marketers for a while, but now an even more powerful and persuasive option is becoming the hero: interactive video. Interactive video enables hyper-personalised face-to-face communication, without actually being in person.

A fresh, innovative start-up, Tolstoy, is leading the charge in this ‘next level’ engagement tech space by creating a sophisticated, yet simple and easy-to-use video builder.

The crux of the tech is the fusing of interactive and linear video to create video branching: viewers respond to the Tolstoy video message with clickable on-screen choices which take them on a customer journey based on their needs. The tailored messaging steers viewers to the right content for them.

Described as a chatbot on steroids, a Tolstoy not only grabs user attention, but guides, educates, and qualifies potential customers. It’s cost-effective, technically easy to deploy, and can be embedded in a business’s website, landing page, emails, or used in social media. It sends out a notification to you whenever someone engages with your video, so you can reach out immediately.

To top it all off, Tolstoy enables businesses to collect critical data they would miss with traditional video—providing truly comprehensive marketing intel.

Dov Kaufmann

Dov was employee number nine or ten at Yotpo when it was just getting off the ground. He started in support, then quickly moved into managing events, and then managing business development and starting up the partner team.

By nature of being a people-heavy organisation, Dov says Yotpo was difficult to scale up. “It becomes very, very difficult to manage at scale, and a lot of things, especially in a SaaS company, end up being very repetitive and you’re just having the same conversations with partners.”

The Tolstoy idea came from the pains Dov experienced at Yotpo. He had been thinking for years about whether there was a way to provide the benefit of face-to-face communication in a self-service asynchronous video platform.

Eventually, he made it happen—he jumped out of Yotpo, teamed up with his Tolstoy co-founder, and together, they built the platform to answer those pains. Yotpo became one of Tolstoy’s earliest customers.

This week on Chill, we chat with Michele Landis @ Accessible360. The co-founder of A360, Michele is an industry authority on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), WCAG, and myriad other digital compliance initiatives.

Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz and Michele discuss ADA, WCAG, threat letters, legal action, and how to make websites compliant.

About Accessible360

If you are a business owner in the U.S., you need to adhere to a law that specifies businesses cannot discriminate against customers on the basis of a disability. For a brick and mortar store, this means physical measures like door and aisle minimum widths, signage readability, counter and basin heights, and other such things that enable access to your store for people with disabilities. 

The same principle applies to a website or other digital property. In digital terms, accessibility may be ‘alt text’ for images, or screen readers, or alternative options for online forms. 

Many people are unaware of what is required, and often, it’s not until they are faced with a lawsuit that they are spurred into action. 

Whether a business’s response is reactive or proactive, there are companies which specialise in assisting with the process of making sure your digital property is suitably accessible and legally compliant; Accessible360 is one of these.

Accessible360 background

Michele Landis and her co-founders started Accessible360 (A360, for short) with a resolute vision: a digital world that is accessible to all. Their mission is equally steadfast: create and maintain digital environments which offer equal access. 

Their passion for inclusivity and accessibility comes from the core: co-founder Aaron Cannon was born blind and became a software engineer. As a full-stack web developer working at an agency, Aaron could code in a ton of different languages. 

A360 has a team of auditors—some are blind, some are sighted—all with a technical background. Michele explains what they do is reconcile the experience of a physically-able user with that of a user with a disability. They follow an auditing process and cover four disabilities: visual, physical, cognitive, and auditory.

They work across many organisations and industries including ecommerce, education, financial, healthcare, government, law firms, and real estate.

In this episode of Chill, we chat with digital passionista Suzie Young at the Australian B2B brand Signet. As Head of Digital and Direct Marketing, Suzie drives growth through digital strategy, ecommerce, and data-driven digital and direct marketing.

Suzie and Overdose Melbourne MD Laura Jackson discuss B2B commerce, using an innovative tech-stack to drive personalised experiences, and the challenges of maintaining corporate culture in 2021.

Signet

From its humble, family-owned business beginnings 50-odd years ago, Signet, a supplier of packaging and industrial products, now sits comfortably as one of the top 100 private companies in Queensland. With a current staff of around 300, and an extensive nationwide distribution network supplying the biggest retail and FMCG manufacturers in the country, it’s still a family-owned business. Their global brands include 3M, Velcro, Tesa, and Uvex; and they manufacture their ‘Signet’s Own’ brand—a range including stretch films and plastics, marking paints, inks and aerosols, and labels and signage.

Signet and their sister company, Insignia, a label manufacturer and distributor of top international thermal printing and coding solutions, together make up the Winson Group.

Suzie Young

Suzie says she’s one of those rare species of people that’s been with the same group for her whole corporate career. She started at Insignia in B2B sales and says what she loved most in that role was learning about the businesses and the inspiring brands she worked with.

It was 2001 when Suzie joined the Winson Group and, in the past 20 years, she says she’s seen the business double in size, twice. With growth comes opportunity, and Suzie has never been afraid to run with the bulls.

Her career pivoted when she returned from maternity leave and was asked to spearhead a project to look at integrating a new CRM across both Insignia and Signet. She jumped in and worked closely with the IT team to select and implement the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform across the group’s sales and customer experience teams. Simultaneously, they executed marketing automation across the call centers.

Later, she worked on a digital transformation project with Insignia’s field service and technical service departments. They went from using dockets and very manual triple, or quadruple, key-in processes, to re-platforming (Microsoft 365) and automating texts with mobile apps.

She became Head of Customer Experience and worked steadily on website and digital marketing, which was quickly becoming the number one lead source. As that channel grew, she was heavily involved in SEO and paid search—an area of her role she especially loved.

Just when Suzie was realising she wanted digital to be her specialty, some divine timing occurred­­—the group’s MD approached her with an opportunity over at Signet to head up the Digital and Direct Marketing team. “Our GM of Signet is Matt Henry, who is really well known and regarded as a great digital guy in the Australian industry and has an awesome management team of people who are quite specialised in their field. I was like, okay, I’ll jump brands and go work for Signet.”

Quitting the nine-to-five grind to chase a dream is the story on which the legendary apparel maker Vineyard Vines built its brand—and it’s an authentic one, not one woven by a marketing department. 

Vineyard Vines’ success story began humbly after its two founders, brothers Shep and Ian Murray, tossed in their uninspiring desk jobs to recreate the ‘good life’—the happy and carefree days of their childhood summers spent on the iconic New England coastal island of Martha’s Vineyard.  They started making ties so they didn’t have to wear them.

The original designs for the ties were fun and quirky, symbolising the ‘good life’ so that while people were at work, they would be reminded of the cool stuff they did on their vacations or the fun they had on their weekends. A noble notion that grew into a full range of apparel for men, women, and kids. 

 How did they pull it off and how hard was it to realise (or rather, “realize”) this American dream?

The Interview

Overdose Americas MD Gary Benerofe chills and chats with Vineyard Vines’ Vice President of Creative Strategy, Jory Benerofe (yes, same name—they are cousins), to discuss the brand’s strategy, and its successes and challenges along the way. 

Jory joined Vineyard Vines in the early days when it was merely four to five guys in a two-bedroom pseudo-office—the modest beginnings of a big dream. Jory had fortuitously met one of the founders who hired him on the spot because he knew a bit about Photoshop. 

Fast-forward two decades and Jory has transitioned from tie designer to overseeing a team of 28 including designers, copywriters, content creators, photographers, videographers, social media content developers, print editors, and digital editors—the full spectrum as everything is done in-house. 

Although much of the brand’s creative success can be accredited to Jory and his team, he humbly suggests it boils down to the authenticity of the founders’ story and the fact the company has always stayed true to their beliefs.

In this Chill episode, Overdose’s Brisbane MD, Elliot Schoemaker, chats with Adobe’s illustrious Head of Customer Strategy, Kevin Wordon, discussing growth, challenges, successes, marketing channels, marketing automation, and key strategies for 2021.

About Adobe

We all know about Adobe’s genius when it comes to software in the creative space–its flagship suites Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign have reigned supreme in desktop-publishing for some 40 years—but recently it’s boosted into the digital marketing management software arena. In 2018, Adobe acquired ecommerce services provider Magento Commerce; later the same year it acquired Marketo, a marketing automation software company; and in late 2020, it acquired Workfront, a provider of marketing collaboration software.

These were major acquisitions which bolstered Adobe’s offerings to provide businesses with their digital foundations—customer journey management systems, market automation, commerce engines, content management systems, asset management, personalisation, and analytics, to name a few.

Now, armed with a wide gamut of ecommerce solutions, Adobe is a key player in the world of digital marketing.

The Interview

Kevin Wordon lives and works at his Queensland ‘acreage’—a mini-farm where there are chickens to feed and llamas to entertain. It wasn’t Covid that drove him to his bucolic hideaway; he chose this lifestyle for his young family and because of his love of animals.

Adobe has long supported its remote workforce—well before the pandemic began closing office doors—and you can easily get a sense of the benefits of work-life balance as we chat with Kevin (in between his trots down to the hen house); he’s a super-chill guy.

As Adobe’s Head of Customer Strategy for the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region, Kevin explains his role is about helping customers on their digital transformational journey. This involves things like addressing customers’ pain-points objectives and navigating their marketing automation landscape or commerce landscape.

Today on Chill, we’re chatting with legend John-David Klausner from Yotpo.

As Director of Partnerships, JD has overseen some epic growth with Yotpo in the ecomm ecosystem over the last few years.

We talk UGC, growth, ecomm ecosystem, partnerships, challenges, successes, and key strategies for 2021.

In this Chill episode, Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz chats with ecommerce powerhouse Alicia Radabaugh, covering growth, digital transformation, marketing, operations, the partner ecosystem, and what’s on tap for 2021.

Getting to know Alicia Radabaugh

Alicia works across multiple brands—she’s Head of Commerce at both 11 Honoré and Thirteen Lune and is Founding Partner at City Shoppe. A collaborator and a connector, Alicia does what she does always with a sense of purpose.

When Alicia tells Andrew a bit of her backstory, particularly her career progression which has seen her rise from waitress, to bookkeeper, to total legend in the ecommerce world, we see how she gravitates towards conscience-led commerce­—the new breed of business where breaking barriers, inclusivity, and a sense of duty are what matters.

In this Chill episode, Overdose Auckland MD Jodi Irving chats with Dylan Brennan, eCommerce & Digital Marketing Manager @ Kitchen Things, covering growth, omnichannel marketing, the evolution of marketing in Covid, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

Kitchen Things

Kitchen Things is a nationally recognised New Zealand kitchen appliance retailer, specialising in premium European brands. They are 100% family-owned by the long-standing Jones Family Business and have grown to a network of 19 retail stores throughout the country. They are New Zealand’s exclusive supplier of Smeg and Asko and represent premium brands including Miele, Bosch, Gaggenau, Neff, and Samsung.

Kitchen Things recently implemented a digital transformation to meet customer needs, strengthen engagement, and focus on the customer experience. It’s an omnichannel approach providing ‘The Kitchen Things Experience’—expert knowledge, service, sales, and aftersales support.

Getting to know Dylan Brennan

Dylan launched into his adulthood studying robotics to appease his logical, data-driven mind. But, starting a family at a young age meant he never finished his study; instead his analytical mind ended up in the appliance industry (appliances are machines and so are robots so we can see the segue there).

His career was largely founded during a phase at Fisher & Paykel, an iconic New Zealand­ born-and-bred appliance maker, where he worked on their direct-to-market digital strategy in the UK. A few years later, he was recruited into the Jones Family Business, starting as a Digital Marketing Specialist, before progressing to be the eCommerce and Digital Marketing Manager.

This week on Chill, Daniel Höhnke, Overdose’s MD in Berlin, chats with Alin Vlad, CMO at Otter Distribution, covering growth, omnichannel commerce, the evolution of marketing in Covid, and what we’ll see in 2021.