The Modern Retail Podcast

On this week's episode of the Modern Retail Rundown, the editorial team dives into some of the updates announced at Amazon Accelerate, the company's annual sellers' conference. Then, we discuss two prominent bankruptcies: Tupperware and Red Lobster. The Tupperware news was just announced this week, and Red Lobster has emerged from bankruptcy with a new owner.

"I'm like a dinosaur," said Reggie Milligan.

While literally hyperbole, there is some truth to his claim. Milligan is the founder and CEO of Mantry, a male-targeted food subscription box. Mantry, which is available in the U.S. and features up-and-coming American brands, has been around since 2012 -- it experienced the precipitous rise of subscription boxes and its fast decline. But the company is still around, still seeing growth and has some plans for expansion.

Milligan, a Canadian entrepreneur, joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the rise and fall of the subscription box industry. He was one of the first in the space, and Mantry got prime media placements in magazines like GQ and shows like Good Morning America. But in 2017, he said, "the bottom fell out."

While Mantry has received acquisition offers over the years, he's focused on continuing to bootstrap the company and still sees growing demand -- especially during gift-giving seasons. And Milligan also believes that while his business won't become a billion-dollar unicorn, the subscription brands that focused on profitability and speaking directly to their customers are the ones that can be around for decades.

"A lot of the smaller bootstrapped ones that were always profitable along the way kind of stuck it out," he said.

On today's Modern Retail Rundown, the staff kicks things off with the latest on Big Lots' Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, including a private equity takeover bid. With a valuation of $2 billion, Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty is reportedly pausing plans to sell the 4-year-old company given the current instability of M&A activity. Finally, Amazon sent out a notice to sellers that it plans to sell ad space for its AI assistant Rufus, which launched in beta in early 2024.

Many department stores and apparel retailers are facing industry headwinds. But one New York-based retailer has been able to buck the trend.

Menswear retailer Rothmans has been around for decades, and continues to see sales grow every year. It's also become a well-known destination for media personalities and entertainment industry designers.

It also helps that Rothmans is in a part of retail that's especially hot right now. "I don't know if I'm the first to say this, but menswear is the new womenswear," said Ken Giddon, the president and owner of the company.

But it's not enough to just be selling products in a popular sector. According to Kiddon, vibe and assortment are even more important. "I would say the key is hospitality. Think of it as a restaurant or a hotel," he said.

Similarly, while other stores focus on trimming down their inventory, Rothmans has gone the opposite way. "As a small business, we watch our cash flow very carefully, but we believe in inventory," he said.

Still, Giddon said, being ahead of the trend curve also helps. "People care about what they're wearing now, and young people are so into it," he said. "That's probably one of the benefits of social media."

On the Modern Retail Rundown this week, the staff discusses three retailers' latest growth roadmaps. First, Walmart Marketplace announced a new partnership with sneaker bidding site StockX. Then, the founding Nordstrom family is bidding to buy out the retailer to take it private. Finally, nearly a year after Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy, the now privately-held drugstore has a new CEO and plans to operate fewer stores.

Croissant believes it has found a way to get more retailers and brands excited about resale.

The business isn't a resale platform, per se. Instead, Croissant users can go to any retailer or brand's website and see a guaranteed resale value price that they would recoup if they bought the product new and then resold it to Croissant sometime later.

"We describe ourselves as the first shopping tool that provides guaranteed resale values at the point of sale and beyond," said co-founder and CEO John Howard. He joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how it's growing its offerings and reaching new customers.

Croissant works in a few ways. It works directly with retailers, in which, on their e-commerce listings, they publish both the retail price as well as the guaranteed buyback price. Croissant also has an app and browser extension that automatically provides buyback values for products that aren't within the company's existing retail partners.

The idea, Howard said, is that "it's not just the out of pocket money that you're spending up front that should be as part of your purchase consideration." Instead, "a lot of what we buy is a value-retaining asset that has ongoing value after you purchase it." In essence, Croissant is letting shoppers know that they could probably make some money back on a higher-ticket item.

According to Howard, conversion rates go up when shoppers see an item's estimated resale value.  But, for now, the focus is on getting more people onto the Croissant platform. That involves marketing, including on new channels like Substack, to make sure people know about the program.

"We're benefiting consumers," Howard said. "And we're benefiting the resale ecosystem, writ large."

On this week's Modern Retail Rundown, the staff discusses the issues plaguing Dollar General as it tries to lure bargain shoppers with its low-priced products. Lululemon's stalled growth in the U.S. also shows that the company isn't as economy-resistant as it has been over the last few years. Meanwhile, Foot Locker is scrapping international growth in favor of cost-cutting to improve profit margins.

Liquid Death is masterful at going viral. But the man leading its marketing team doesn't like it described as such.

"I hate the word viral," said Dan Murphy, svp of marketing at the canned beverage brand Liquid Death. In his mind, it's not precise enough.

Liquid Death, by all accounts, is a viral product. Its very concept is meant to make people laugh and share. The company is best known for its canned water products that appear like beer cans. And as it gained prominence, the viral campaigns continued -- most recently, for example, Liquid Death ran a giveaway offering a lucky customer a fighter jet.

But what Murphy was focused on wasn't virality but eliciting an organic response. "We needed people to walk down the beverage aisle and see a thing and stop," he said.

Murphy spoke at last week's Modern Retail Marketing Summit and dove into how the brand approaches its campaigns and is so successful at getting people to engage with it. This week's Modern Retail Podcast is a live recording of the conversation. He shared many tips of the trade. For one, he said, "we're entirely in-house."

The other part that's so important, Murphy said, was to hire people in comedy to create comedic campaigns.

"We don't have people with traditional marketing backgrounds in the creative group," he said. "It's people that are Adult Swim writers and wrote for movies and wrote for The Onion."

This week’s Modern Retail Rundown starts by unpacking why price cuts are drawing shoppers back to Target but not Macy's. Next, Peloton is slowly digging itself out of the red through price cuts and new revenue-generating initiatives. The company's latest strategy is to charge a $95 activation fee on pre-owned bikes and treadmills purchased through resale marketplaces. Finally, Chick-fil-A is reportedly counting on creating unscripted shows for its own streaming service as part of a bigger marketing push.

Walmart is heavily investing in new technology and trying out new programs and processes to be more consumer-friendly. Helping lead this charge is Jon Alferness, the big-box retailer's chief product officer.

What does Walmart's chief product officer do? In his words, he "[acts] as a nexus point to bring together [employees across teams] -- whether it's folks in design, engineering or business science -- to solve customer problems that deliver against the business goals and the business outcomes at scale." Essentially, if there's a big project that requires many different teams, Alferness is likely helping spearhead it.

Alferness joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about his approach to the role, Walmart's latest product updates and his philosophy to buzzy emerging tech like artificial intelligence. He dove into how he approaches big product launches that transcend departments, as well as the data and research he uses when launching a new endeavor.

The tying bind behind all of this is that new products need to solve for a real need. When it comes to AI, for example, the product can't exist for its own sake. In fact, in his estimation, a new AI project shouldn't even have the technology in the name.

"From my point of view, it's not important to say, 'Hey, so we built such and such product, now powered with AI,'" he said. "I don't think customers care one way or another. I think they just want their problem solved."