Podcasts about andrea you

Patrick dives deep into the effects of greed and entitlement in today's society. He discusses the impact of declining birth rates on parenting, the incredible work ethic of immigrants, and the adverse influence of social media on materialism. Listeners share powerful stories of overcoming financial struggles, reinforcing the importance of hard work, faith, and self-reliance. He also tackles capitalism vs. Marxism, with a keen focus on how instant gratification can lead to dissatisfaction.   Mary Pat - Marxism tries to eliminate God. (00:36) Mark - Equity promotes the sin envy within ourselves. (05:24) Gary - We brought our kids up to expect equity, so it makes sense that they think they need equity. (08:44) Andrea - You have to seize the opportunity. I am Mexican American and my father had an 8th grade education, he worked hard and created a million-dollar company. We can't all be equal. (19:56) Brian - What is your opinion on how equity affects marriage and family formation? (27:05) Julia – If kids are not pushed to be on their own, they won't leave. (38:36) Marie - Millennials and Gen Z'ers can't afford to buy a house, but can afford many other luxury items. They need to think about priorities and stop blaming others. (41:23) David – Marxist/socialist things are going on right now.  Nathy - Discipline starts at a young age and kids need to learn how to manage time. (47:48)

Seventh House, Rising Sign, Saturn Return - ummmmm….. need I say more? If you've ever wondered wtf any of these mean then today's ep is for you. Birth Charts can be SO confusing and we get a lot of questions about them so we've packaged it all into one little ep for you. We chat:

Seventh House, Rising Sign, Saturn Return - ummmmm….. need I say more?  If you've ever wondered wtf any of these mean then today's ep is for you. Birth Charts can be SO confusing and we get a lot of questions about them so we've packaged it all into one little ep for you. We chat:

One of the most difficult tasks for new mothers is undoubtedly feeding the baby. There are so many decisions to make, and you never know if you're making the right ones. Since so many parents believe they are not receiving adequate support throughout this process, our guest for today decided it was her responsibility to facilitate this journey for them. Her name is Andrea Ippolito, and she is the founder and the CEO of SimpliFed.  Andrea is a warm and contagiously positive person who decided to devote her career to guiding pregnant and postpartum women through the journey of feeding their newborns. She founded SimpliFed as a result of her own experience with inadequate healthcare solutions. Andrea is here today to share her story about a recent multimillion-dollar success, to provide information on breastfeeding, and to swarm us with her positivity, humility and kindness. So, take a seat and enjoy the show!  You can subscribe or listen to previous episodes of the Busine$$ of the V podcast by clicking here.    TOPICS COVERED:  Meet Andrea Ippolito, a true hero in the field of mothers struggling to feed their babies. From engineering to baby feeding: How Andrea overcame all the obstacles and founded SimpliFed. Most parents both breastfeed and use formula, and this is very important as most people see them as two separate things. How Andrea's background in navigating bureaucracy helped in understanding the red-tape aspect of the story. Dr. Dweck is curious about how this platform handles the lack of hands-on approach that breastfeeding women usually require. Lactation consultants are pretty scarce in rural areas and women frequently don't have access to their services. Rachel's questions are spot on: how does the money flow and how is the company developing? Per Aspira Ad Astra: SimpliFed closed their $6 million seed round in May.  Andrea claims that the company's most important mission is to democratize access to care for all pregnant and postpartum families. Dr. Dweck wants to know how SimpliFed supports those who choose formula over breastfeeding, and how the company navigated the recent baby formula scandal. Andrea's personal experience as a mother of two, as Rachel correctly predicts, had a significant influence on her business ideas. SimpliFed does not discriminate against parents' preferences and offers plans for all parents, whether they opt for breastfeeding, formula, pumps, or combo feeding. Astounded by SimpliFed's success, Rachel asks: how did the company raise such a generous amount of money? Andrea reveals that this journey has been anything but simple or casual, and that she had to roll up her sleeves and dig in. Relationships are essential: It's vital to join as many networks as possible and maintain contact with everyone you might need later in life. But how did she manage to catch these people's attention? Andrea attributes this to a complex combination of many factors, including the sheer size of the women's health market. Andrea ends the discussion on a fiery note: breastfeeding is not a niche; it serves all people born in the US, as well as their parents! HOT FLASH: According to CDC, the percentage of babies breastfeeding at six months increased from 35% in the year 2000 to 49% in the year 2010.  QUOTES:  “Most parents both breastfeed and use formula. 85% of women start off breastfeeding and most at some point transition to formula.” (Andrea)  “What I learned is that so many women seem to need that hands-on approach, e.g. this is the way you place your breast, this is the type of pillow hold you should use, etc.” (Dr. Dweck)  “The way we see ourselves is we are complimenting [the in-person care delivery] and improving access to care.” (Andrea)  “As we are contracting with health plans, we commonly hear things like ‘There is one lactation consultant in network for 350,000 members'.” (Andrea)  “Going live with TRICARE was particularly powerful for me just because there is no better patient population to serve than military families and veterans.” (Andrea)  “Oftentimes we hear people describe their journey and it doesn't seem quite as linear as yours.” (Rachel)  “Something I've come across in practice and I don't have an answer to are some of the judgements placed on people who choose not to nurse, and I don't mean because they have a medical issue that makes it impossible.” (Dr. Dweck)  “We do a lot of listening upfront, starting during pregnancy but also, of course, postpartum, to understand what [the parents'] goals are and what their needs are. And then, based on their goals, we work to design a plan that works for them.” (Andrea)  “You said something early on in the conversation very casually, that you just closed $6 million in funding. I know that you don't pull something like that out of a magic hat, and you said it very casually, but I know that it wasn't a casual effort.” (Rachel)  “It is so important to embed yourself in networks as much as possible and look out for people that maybe don't have as thoughtful networks or as rich networks as you do.” (Andrea)  “Getting those kinds of numbers and having 6 firms with term sheets are among the best stats that I've ever heard, and I've been doing this a long time.” (Rachel)  “When you look in the market size, a lot of times people will refer to us as a niche. We are serving all people born in the US and we're serving their parents, so stop referring to women's health as anything as niche because we are half the population and our economic force is powerful as heck.” (Andrea)    FURTHER RESOURCES:  Website: www.simplifed.com  Instagram: @simplifedbaby  Andrea @LinkedIn     LINKS FOR BUSINE$$ OF THE V:  Website: www.businessofthev.com  Dr. Alyssa Dweck: https://drdweck.com  Rachel Braun Scherl: www.sparksolutionsforgrowth.com/about-rachel-braun-scherl/ 

01:13 - Andrea's Superpower: Distilling Complexity * Approaching Copywriting in a Programmatic Way * Word-land vs Abstract-land 09:00 - “Technical” vs “Non-Technical” * This or That Thinking 16:20 - Empathy is Critical * Communication Artifacts * Audience/User Impact * Programmer Aptitude Test (PAT) 33:00 - Reforming Hiring Practices and Systems * Core Values * Exercism.io (https://exercism.io/) * Retrospectives 39:28 - Performance Reviews * Continuous Feedback * Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan (https://www.bravenewwork.com/) * Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (https://www.amazon.com/Team-Teams-Rules-Engagement-Complex/dp/1591847486) * Continuous Improvement & Marginal Gains “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” ~ Arthur Ashe Empathy In Tech (https://www.empathyintech.com/) Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/) Reflections: Mando: Empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives. Jess: Help happens when you have empathy for individuals who aren't the great majority of people using the software. Casey: The best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get their feedback. Do it during an interview! Andrea: Diving deeper than code is valuable! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JESSICA: Good morning and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 237. I'm Jessica Kerr and I'm happy to be here today with my friend, Mando Escamilla! MANDO: Hey, Jess. Thanks. I am happy to be here with my friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey and we're all here with Andrea Goulet. Andrea is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others. She is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create. Andrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist. Welcome, Andrea. ANDREA: Hi, welcome! Nice to be here. CASEY: We always like to start with a question, which I think you're prepared for, that is what is your superpower, Andrea, and how did you acquire it? ANDREA: Yeah! First of all, I just love that y'all ask this. I think it's just such a nice way to get to know different people. I was thinking about this because you sent it a little bit ago and I was thinking maybe empathy, given the work I do. But I don't actually think that's it. I feel like I'm constantly trying to learn more about empathy, but I do think that what my superpower is, is distilling complexity. So I went back and looked at what the thread is of all the recommendations I've got on LinkedIn and things like that. It's not something that I would necessarily say that I noticed, but it's something that other people have noticed about me. The idea of taking a really abstract and big, gnarly, complex topic, and being able to distill it down to its essence and then communicate either what the importance is, or what the impact is to other people. I think that's why I've gravitated towards big, gnarly things like legacy code. [chuckles] Because what motivates me is impact and how do we have the work that we do make as big of an impact as possible? So the way I got into software was really a twisty and windy road. I started out as a copywriter and I think that's where the distilling complexity comes down because I would sit with clients and learn all about their businesses. And then I would write typically, a website, or some kind of marketing material and they would say, “You said what was in my head and I couldn't say it.” JESSICA: Wow. ANDREA: And when I got into software, I had a friend of mine from high school, Scott, who's my co-founder at Corgibytes, he came up to me because I had been writing about my writing and he said, “You're not a writer, you're actually a programmer because the way that your brain works, you're thinking in terms of inputs and manipulating data and outputs, and that's exactly what a programmer does.” So then, he wanted to fix legacy code for a living. I didn't even know what that was at that point, thought it was a good thing and I found that my ability to both walk in and understand not just the syntax of what's going on, but the business challenges and how everything links together. With that, you can create a sense of cohesion on a team and getting different people to work together and different people to see each other's points of view, because when you're able to distill a perspective over here and say, “Okay, well, this is what this person's trying to say,” and still, this over here. “Okay, I think this is what this person's trying to say.” I feel like a lot of times I am kind of like a translator, but it's taken me a long time. I've been in software 12 years now and I still have massive imposter syndrome like, I don't belong because I'm not the fastest person on the keyboard. I really struggle with working memory. My visualization is really a struggle, but I do really great in an ensemble. When I started ensemble programming—sometimes it's referred to as mob programming—I was like, “I can do this. Oh my gosh, this makes sense and I belong.” I think just over the years, little things like hearing the joke – I was at a conference, Jess, I think this may have been ETE when you and I connected, but I heard a joke and it was, I think Phil Carlton had first said it and it was like, “There's only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things,” and then somebody else said, “Off-by-1 errors.” I remember I was like, “Y'all think naming things is hard?” Like, help me understand how that's hard because that's – JESSICA: [inaudible]? Oh my gosh, that's hard. ANDREA: Yeah, and to me, it just comes so naturally. I think that's kind of the thing is figuring out where is your trait, where's your skillset. I remember when I first started doing open source contributions, I haven't done those in a long time, but just going in and modifying the language on help messages and turning them from passive to active voice. They got accepted, it was on some high-profile projects, and it was like, I didn't really feel like I was even doing much and I still feel like, “Is that even a big deal?” But I think that's kind of the definition of a superpower a little bit is that – JESSICA: Yeah, it's easy for you. [laughs] ANDREA: You don't recognize that it's hard for other people. Yeah, and so it's neat now that it's like I'm starting to come into my own and leaning into that, and then helping other people see that the way that I approach naming things, the way I approach copywriting is actually in a very programmatic way. It's leaning on frameworks. It's leaning on patterns that I use over time. I know, Casey, you and I have talked last week about like when I first go to a conference like using open-ended questions versus closed-ended questions and these little kind of communication hacks that I've developed over the years. So now putting those together in a framework to help other people remember that when we're coding, we're not coding for a computer, we're coding through a computer for other people. The computer is just like a code is just a tool. It's a powerful tool. But a lot of times – CASEY: I have a question for you, Andrea. ANDREA: Yeah. CASEY: About that, I find myself switching gears between word land and abstract land. So if I'm coding and I'm not thinking of words, the naming is hard, but sometimes I can switch gears in a different head space. It's like a different me and then I'm naming things really well. Especially if I'm looking at someone else's code, I don't have to be an abstract land; they did that part already. Do you find yourself switching between the two? ANDREA: Oh, all the time. Yeah, and especially, too, when you're writing prose. There's two different kind of aspects of your brain. There's the creative conceptual side and then there's the analytical rational side and everybody has both. So it does require you to come out of the abstract side in that and then move into more of the analytical space, which is why I love pairing. I love coding as a group because then that way, it's like the mental model is shared and so, I can stay in my world of naming things really well, or I don't know that we need to be that precise if we try to – like, when I was in one group and they were trying to have a timing thing and it was like down to the millisecond and I was like, “Y'all, we don't need to be that precise. We just need to have this check once every 10 minutes,” and that saved like 6 hours of work. Just being able to say that thing and be the checkpoint. JESSICA: Yeah. Someone has to be super down in the details of what to type next and it helps to have someone else thinking about it at the broader perspective of why are we doing this? ANDREA: Yeah, and that's me, typically and I love that role, but it's very different than I think what goes through people's minds when they envision a software developer. JESSICA: Yeah, maybe they envisioned the things that software developers do that other people don't. Typing curly braces. ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: I still think of that when I'm doing it. When I think of myself as a software developer, I think of myself as the person who hasn't gotten up from their desk in 5 hours and just hunched over, just blazing fast hacking on something that probably is kind of dumb. [laughter] But when I don't spend my day like that, I don't really feel exactly like I've been doing my job and it's something that I struggle with because I know that's not the job in its totality by any means and it doesn't mean that I'm not getting good work done. JESSICA: Not even close to most of the job. MANDO: Not even close to most of the job, you're exactly right. JESSICA: Like you said, if you're sitting there for 5 hours by yourself, hunched over your computer, you're probably hacking on something dumb. MANDO: Right. [laughter] JESSICA: We had gotten off on a tangent somewhere without someone to be like, “Why are we doing this again?” MANDO: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. ANDREA: Well, and I think that that has been a personal challenge of mine as well. I know there was a really flashbulb moment for me. Scott and I have been running our business together for a couple of years. We had gotten on our first podcast and he was telling our origin story and he used the phrase, “Andrea, she's the non-technical founder.” When I heard it, I was like, “How dare you? I have for 2 years been sitting right next to you,” and then he said, “Well, that's the term you use to describe yourself all the time. We had been in a sales meeting right before I recorded that podcast and that's literally the words you use to introduce yourself. So once you start calling yourself technical, I'll follow suit.” JESSICA: Wow. ANDREA: It really made me think and I think some of it is because whenever I go to conferences, I don't look like other people who code especially 12 years ago. I don't talk like the people who are typically stereotypical developers and the first question I would get asked, probably 25 to 40% of the time from people I met were, “Hi! Are you technical, or non-technical?” JESSICA: Really? ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: Ugh. JESSICA: Huh. ANDREA: And that would be the first thing out of the gate. At the time, I didn't have the kind of mental awareness to go, “I'm at a technical conference. I think you can assume I'm technical.” The fact is I was scared to call myself technical and over the years, I'm just like, “What does that mean to be technical and why do we define people by you are either technical, or you have nothing?” Non-technical, you have zero technical skills, you don't belong. JESSICA: So after you had that conversation with Scott, did you switch to calling yourself technical? Did you change your language? ANDREA: It has been a journey. I became very conscious of not using non-technical. I'll sometimes then say like, “I struggle with syntax and I'm really, really good at these things.” When I phrase things that way, or “I have engineers who are so much better and have much deeper expertise in Docker and Kubernetes than I do. I'm really good at explaining the big picture and why this happens.” So it becomes, I think what we do in software is that because we're so used to thinking in binaries, because that's the way we need to make our code work—true/false, if/else, yes/no—and that pattern naturally extends itself into human relationships, too. Because I know that every single person who asked me that question in no way was trying to be rude, or shut me out. I know that the intention behind it was kind and trying to be inclusive. But from my perspective, when half the people walk up to you and go, “Do you belong here?” Then it's like, “I don't know. Do I belong here?” JESSICA: Yeah. ANDREA: So that's an example of how, if you're at a conference saying, “What brings you here?” That's very open-ended and then it gives everybody the chance to say what brings them here and there's no predefined, “Do you fit in this bucket, or that bucket? Are you part of us, or are you part of them?” JESSICA: It's open to surprise. ANDREA: Mm hm and I think that's something that I am really good at. That's my superpower is let's see the complexity and then let's see the patterns and let's figure out how we can all get good work done together. But you can't see the complexity unless you take a step back. JESSICA: Yeah, and yet Scott noticed that when you are thinking that way, you are thinking like a programmer. Because while software starts by getting us used to thinking in binaries—I should say programming. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: It's just thinking of binaries, as soon as you get up to software and software systems, you have to think in complexity. ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: And like you were saying, Andrea, I find myself nowadays better recognizing when I'm falling into that trap when I'm not talking about work stuff. When I find myself saying, “Well, it's this, or it's this.” It's like, “Is it really this, or this?” JESSICA: Are these the only options? ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: Yeah. Do I have to eat Thai food, or pizza tonight, or could I just eat ice cream, or a salad, or…? [laughs] ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: You know what I mean? It's a silly example, but I don't know, there's something about doing this for a while that I find that kind of this, or that thinking wiring itself into my brain. JESSICA: Yeah. ANDREA: Yeah. Well, and I think that that's normal and that's human. We operate on heuristics. There's the whole neurons that fire together wire together and if you're spending the majority of your time in this thought pattern, adopting something else can be a challenge. So to me, it's like trying to describe how the way I navigate the world in being able to name things well and being able to talk to new people, connect dots, see patterns that I rely on frameworks just as much as I do when I code and trying to figure out what are those things. What are those things? JESSICA: Yeah, because you don't have to import that top level file from the framework in order to use it. So it's not explicit that you're using it. ANDREA: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that's been my challenge is that as Scott is like, “Well, help me understand.” I'm like, “I, uh. I don't know. I do this.” That was where I nailed on empathy as really critical and it's been fascinating because when I first started about 5 years writing and talking about empathy in software, the first thing I noticed were all the patterns. I was like, “A really well-written commit message, that's empathy.” That is taking the time to document your rationale so that it's easier for somebody behind you. Refactoring a method so that it's easy to read, deleting the dead code so that it's less burdensome, even logging. Looking at logging in C versus Ruby, it's night and day. JESSICA: Help messages. ANDREA: Yeah. There's a little moment. MANDO: Non-happy path decisions in code. Guardrails. All that stuff. ANDREA: Yeah. So I started thinking in terms of communication artifacts. All of these little things that we're producing are just artifacts of our thinking and you can't produce a communication artifact unless you are considering a perspective. What I noticed, of the perspective, is that a lot of software developers had been trained to take was that of the compiler. I want to make the compiler happy. I want to make the code work. That's a very specific practice of perspective taking that is useful if you're imagining okay, we don't have to get rid of that and we need to add the recognition that the perspectives taking needs to go the compiler into who will be interacting with what you're creating and that is on both the other side of the UI, if there is one, or working on the code that you've written maybe six months from now and that can be your future self. And then also, who will be impacted by the work that you create, because not everybody who is impacted by the decisions that you make will be directly interacting with and when I'm writing content, or that is the framework is getting to know the audiences really well, doing good qualitative research. So that's kind of the difference between the open-ended versus closed-ended questions. Then being able to perspective change and then along the way, there are little communication hacks, but just thinking about every single thing that you produce—and no, I have not come across a communication artifact, or a thing that is produced while coding that is not somehow rooted in empathy. JESSICA: Because it's communication and you can't communicate – [overtalk] ANDREA: It's all communication. JESSICA: At all without knowing what is going to be received and how that will be interpreted. ANDREA: Yeah. Similar to test-driven development, where we're framing things in terms of unit tests and just thinking about the test before we write the code. In the same way, we're thinking about the perspective of other people—we can still think of the compiler—and anchoring our decisions on how it will impact other people. JESSICA: It's making the compiler happy. That's just table stakes. That's absolute minimum. ANDREA: Yeah. Well, it's been fascinating because this part of this project. So I'm writing a book now, which is super exciting and by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. But one of the things that, because I'm curious, I'm like, “Why? How did we get here? How did we get here where, by all objective measures, I should have been able to go into computer science without a problem and feel like –?” JESSICA: Think of yourself as technical without a problem. ANDREA: Yeah. Why do I still struggle and why did we extract empathy out of this? So looking at the history of it has been fascinating because as the computer science industry grew, there was a moment in the mid-60s. There was a test, like a survey, that went out to just under 1,400 people called the Canon Perry vocational test for computer programmers. It was vocational satisfaction, I think. But it was measuring the satisfaction of programmers and they were trying assess what does a satisfied programmer look like. There were many, many problems with the methodology of this, including the people who they didn't define who a programmer was, the people self-defined. So it's like, if you felt like you were programmer, then you were a programmer, but there was no objective. Like, this is what a programmer is prior to selecting the audience, the survey respondents and then when they evaluated the results, they only used professional men. They didn't include any professional women in their comparison study. So the women in the study, there are illustrations and the women are not presented as professionals, they are presented as sex objects in a research paper. The scientific programmers, they're the ones who get the girl and she's all swooning. The business programmers are very clearly stated as less than and they're shy. The girl is like, “I don't want you.” JESSICA: That have like comics, or something? ANDREA: It was comics, yeah. They had like comic illustrations in there. Okay, it's a survey, what's the big deal? Well, from 1955 through the mid-90s, there was an aptitude test from IBM called the Programmer Aptitude Test, the PAT. In there, Walter McNamara from IBM, who created it, went out, had empathy, and was like, “Okay, let's talk to our customers, what does a good programmer look like,” and determined that logical reasoning was the number one attribute. Okay, sounds good. But then he said, “Well, if logical reasoning is the most important attitude, then we need to create a timed 1-hour math test.” What's interesting to me is that in that, there is a logical fallacy in and of itself, called a non-sequitur, [chuckles] where it's like all humans are mammals, bingo a mammal. Therefore, bingo is a human. That's an example of a non-sequitur. That's what happened where it was determined logical reasoning is important to computer science and programming. All mathematics is logical reasoning. Therefore, mathematics is the only way to measure the capability that somebody has for logical reasoning. That, saying, “Okay, we don't care about communication skills. We don't care about empathy. We don't care about any of that. Just are you good at math?” And then the PAT's study—I've been diving into the bowels of the ACM and looking at primary resource documents for the past several months—and there was an internal memo where Charles McNamara referred to the Canon Perry study in 1967 and said, “The PAT was given to 700,000 people last year and next year, we should incorporate these findings into the PAT,” and the PAT became the de facto way to get into computer science. So these are decisions that were made long before me and so, what you end up getting then – and then also in 1968, there was what's called, there was a NATO conference on software engineering and they said, “We really need to bring rigor into computer science. We need to make this very rigorous.” Again, there were no men at this conference. It was about standards and Grace Hopper wasn't even invited, even though she was like – [overtalk] JESSICA: There were no women in the conference. ANDREA: There were no women. JESSICA: No non-men. ANDREA: No non-men, yes. So you start to see stereotypes getting built and one of the stereotypes became, if you look like this and you are good at math, then you are good at programming. I'm very good at logical reasoning, but I struggle to do a time capsule. I have ADHD and that is something that's very, very, very challenging for me. So that coupled with and then you get advertising where it's marketed, too. MANDO: Yeah. ANDREA: So we need to undo all of this. We can recognize, okay, we can refactor all of this, but it takes recognizing the complexity and how did it all come to be and then changing it one thing at a time. CASEY: A lot of what you've just been talking about makes me think about Dungeons and Dragons and Skyrim for a little nerdy segue. ANDREA: Yeah. CASEY: You have skill trees. You could be a really, really good warrior, very good at math, very good at wielding your sword, and then if you measure how good you are at combat by how big your fireball spell can be, how many you can shoot, how accurate you are, you're missing that whole skill tree of ability, of power that you have. ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: What I find so fascinating is when I was going through the computer science program that I never finished and this was like a million years ago. When I was in college, there was a very specific logical reasoning class that you had to take as part of the CS program at UT. But it wasn't a math class, it was a philosophy class and I think that's pretty common that logistics studies fall under schools of philosophy, not the schools of mathematics. So it was really interesting to me that these dudes just completely missed the mark, right? [laughs] ANDREA: It is the definition of irony and not Alanis Morrissette kind of way, right? [chuckles] I think that's the thing it's like – and this isn't to say the Walter McNamara was a bad person like, we all make mistakes. But to me, again, this is about impact and if one, or two people can have the ability to create a test that impacts millions of people across generations to help them feel whether, or not they belong in even contributing to building software. Because I always felt like I was a user of software—I was always a superuser—but for some reason, I felt like the other side of the interface, the command line, it was like Oz. It was like that's where the wizards live and I'm not allowed there. It's like, how do we just tear down that curtain and say, “Y'all, there is no – no, this was all built on like false assumptions”? How do we have a retrospective and say, “When we can look at a variety of different perspectives, then we get such stronger products.” We get such stronger code. We minimize technical debt in addition to hopefully, staving off biases that get built into the software. I think it's very similar of human systems, very similar to software systems. It's like, how can we roll back? If we make a mistake and it impacts human systems, how can we fix that as fast as possible, rather than just letting things persist? JESSICA: When you're talking about who can be a good software developer, when you're talking about who is technical, who is valuable, you don't want rigor in that! ANDREA: Right!
 JESSICA: That's not appropriate. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: You want open questions. ANDREA: Yeah, and that is exactly what happened, was people conflate rigor and data with accuracy. There's a bias towards if it's got numbers behind it, it must be real, but you can manipulate data just as much as you can manipulate other things. So the PAT then said, “Okay, well, if you can't pass the PAT, then we'll create all of these other types of tests, so you could be a console operator, or you could be a data analyst.” What's fascinating is when you go back, the thing that was at the very bottom of the Cannon Perry survey, in terms of valuable development activities, was software maintenance. JESSICA: And that's everything now. ANDREA: Yeah!
 JESSICA: Back then, they didn't have a lot of software. MANDO: Yeah. JESSICA: They didn't have open source libraries. If they needed something, they wrote it. ANDREA: But the stereotypes persist. JESSICA: Yeah. MANDO: 100%. ANDREA: The first evidence I found, again, was in 1967. There was a study of 12 people, all of whom were trainees at a company, which that would be a wild – they hadn't even – [overtalk] JESSICA: So this is like even less than interviewing your grad students. ANDREA: Well, yeah. JESSICA: Or your undergrads for your graduate research paper, yes. ANDREA: They measured how quickly someone could solve a problem and they ranked them, and then they made the claim that you can save 25 times—this is the first myth of the 25x developer. Well, it got published in the ACM and then IBM picked it up and then McKinsey picked it up, and then it's just, you get the myth of the full-stack unicorn who's going to come in and save everything! What's interesting is all of these things go back and I think they were formed out of good intention in terms of understanding our world and we understand now, exactly like you said, Jess. That's not the right way to go about it because then people who are really needed on software teams don't feel like they belong and it's like, “Well, do you belong?” JESSICA: That's an outsized impact for such a tiny study. ANDREA: Yeah. So that gets me thinking, what kinds of things am I doing that might have an outside impact? JESSICA: And can we make that impact positive? ANDREA: Yeah, and when we find out that it wasn't, can we learn from our mistakes? I think one of the things, too, is taking the idea of as people are coding. It's like, “Well, who's actually going to read this?” That's something I hear a lot. I used to feel that way about all tags. I'm like, “Who actually reads all tags?” But then my friend, Taylor, was in a car accident and lost his vision. and he was like, “I absolutely need all tags,” and I'll tell you, that changed everything for me. Because it went from this abstract, “I have to check this box. I have to type something in, and describe this photo” to “I care about my friend Taylor and how can I make this experience as best for him as possible?” That is empathy because in order to have empathy, you have to connect with a single individual. Empathy is – and actually, when you do form empathy for a group, you get polarization. So empathy cuts both ways. It can be both very positive, but also very – [overtalk] CASEY: [inaudible] on the individual goes a long way. So for our discussion here, I can share an individual I've been talking to about this kind of problem. I have a friend who's a woman trying to get her first software developer role and she has to study how to hack the coding interview for a lot of the places where she wants to work, which is literally studying algorithms that you probably won't use in the job. I had an interview a few years ago that was the Google style algorithms interview for a frontend role. Frontend developers don't write algorithms, generally. Not unless you're working on the core of the framework maybe. It was completely irrelevant. I rejected them. I think they rejected me back, too probably. [laughter] But I wouldn't work there because of the hiring process. But my friend, who is a woman in tech trying to get in, doesn't have that kind of leeway to project. She wants to get her first job whoever it is – [overtalk] MANDO: She wants a job, yeah. CASEY: That is willing to use the bias system like that and to hack that system to study it specifically how to get around it, which isn't really helping anyone. ANDREA: Yeah. CASEY: So how can we help reform the system so she doesn't have to do that kind of thing and so, people like her don't have to, to get into tech? I don't know, my boycotting that one company is a very small impact; how do we get a company's hiring practices to change is a hard problem. ANDREA: It is a very hard problem. I can share what we are doing in Corgibytes to try to make a difference. I think the first thing is that in our hiring process, we have core values mapped to them and these are offshoots of our main core values, one of which is communication is just as important as code. So we have that every single applicant will get a response and that seems so like, duh, but the number of people who are here who are just ghosted, submit an application and it goes out into the ether. That is, in my opinion, disrespectful. We have an asynchronous screening interview, so it's an application and it's take your time, fill it out, and it's questions like, “What's an article you found interesting and why?” and “What do you love about modernizing legacy code?” Some people need that time to think and just to formulate an answer and so, taking some of that pressure off, and then at the end of our – we have all of our questions mapped to our core values. I'm still trying to figure out how we can get away from more the dreaded technical interviews, but we don't use the whiteboard, but we also have a core value of anything that someone does for us, in terms of whether they show up for an interview, they will walk away with just as much benefit. They will have an artifact of learning something, or spec work is I think, immoral to some of these core things. So we use Exercism for us, so Katrina Owens, as a way of like, “Okay, show us a language that you're like really familiar with.” And then because with what we do, you just get tossed into if it's like, “Okay, let's pick Scala.” It's like you've never tried functional programming before, but then just, it's more of seeing the mindset. Because I think it's challenging because we tried getting rid of them all together and we did have some challenges when it came to then client upper-level goals and doing the job. So it's a balance, I think and then at the end of our interviews doing retrospectives telling the candidate, “Here's what you did really well in this interview, here's where it didn't quite land for me,” because I think interviewing is hard and like you said, Casey, especially now post-COVID, I think more and more people have the power to leave jobs. So I think the power, especially in software development, for people who have had at least their first position, they have a lot more power to walk out the door than they did before. So as an employer and as somebody who's creating these, that's what I'm doing and then if we get feedback and the whole idea with empathy is you're never going to be able to be perfect. Because you don't have the data for the perspective of every single person, but being open and listening and when you do make mistakes, owning up to them, and fixing them as fast as possible. If we all did that, we can make a lot of progress on a lot of fronts really fast. CASEY: I'm so glad your company has those good hiring practices. You're really thinking about it, how to do it in a supportive, ethical, and equitable way. I wonder, we probably don't have the answer here today, but how can we get more companies to do that? I think you sharing here might help several companies, if their leadership are listening. and that's awesome. Spreading the message, talking about it more—that's one thing. Glad we're doing that. MANDO: Yeah. The place that I work at, we're about to start interviewing some folks and I really like the idea of having a retrospective with the candidate after maybe a couple of days, or whenever after the interview and taking the time, taking the 30 minutes or whatever, to sit down and say, “If I'm going to take time to reach out to them anyway and say, ‘You're moving on to the next round,' or ‘We have an offer for you, or not,' then I should be willing to sit down with them and explain why.'” ANDREA: Well, I think the benefit goes both ways, actually. We do it right in our interviews. So we actually say the last 15 minutes, we're going to set aside on perspectives. MANDO: Oh wow, okay. ANDREA: So we do and that's something that we prep for ahead of time. We get feedback of what went well [chuckles] and what we can do better and what we can change. MANDO: Yeah. ANDREA: Because otherwise, as an employer, it's like, I have no idea. I'm just kind of going off into the ether, but then I can hear from other people's perspectives and it's like, okay and then we can change things. But that's an example of, we think of employer versus employee and it's like that's another dichotomy. It's like no, we're all trying to get good work done. JESSICA: Andrea, how do you do performance reviews? ANDREA: We're still trying to crack that, but there's definitely a lot of positive psychology involved and what we are trying to foster is the idea of continuous performance, or continuous feedback is what we call it. So we definitely don't do any kind of forced ranking and that's a branch of things that have contributed to challenges. We have one-on-ones, we check in with people, but a lot of it, I think is asking people what they want to be doing, genuinely. As a small company, we're like 25 people. I think it's easier in a small company, but part of it is – and we were constantly doing this with ourselves, too. My business partner was like, “I really want to try to be the CEO. I've always wanted to be the CEO.” So I stepped back actually during COVID. We focus on being a really responsive team and so, then that way, it's less about the roles. It's less about rigidity. There's a really great book in terms of operations called Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. It has a lot of operational principles around this. Team of Teams is another really good one. But just thinking through like, what's the work that needs to be done, how can we organize around it, and then thinking of it in terms of more of responsibilities instead of roles. JESSICA: I want to think of it as a relationship. It's like, I'm not judging you as a developer, instead we're evaluating the relationship of you in this position, in this role at this company. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: How is that serving the company? How is that serving you? ANDREA: Yes, and I think that's a big piece of it is – and also, recognizing the context is really important and trying to be as flexible as possible, but then also recognizing constraints. So there have been times where it's like, “This isn't working,” but trying to use radical candor as much as you can, that's something we've been working on. But trying to give feedback as early and as often as possible and making that a cultural norm as to the, “Oh, I get the 360 feedback at the end, twice a year,” like that. JESSICA: Yeah, I'm sorry, if you can't tell me anything within two weeks, don't bother. ANDREA: Yeah. But one example is like we've fostered this and as a leader, I want people who are going to tell me where I'm stepping in it and where I'm messing up. So I kind of use – [overtalk] JESSICA: Yeah, at least that retrospective at the end of the interview says that. ANDREA: Mm hm, but even with my staff, it's like – [overtalk] JESSICA: [inaudible] be able to say, “Hey, you didn't send me a Google Calendar invite,” and they'd be like, “Oh my gosh, we should totally be doing that.” Did anybody tell them that? No! ANDREA: Yeah, totally. So I don't claim to have the answers, but these are just little experiments that we're trying and I think we really lean on the idea of continuous improvement and marginal gains. Arthur Ash had a really great quote, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” I think that's the thing, the whole point of the empathy during development framework is that if you're a developer working on the backend writing a nice commit message, or giving quality feedback on a pull request, instead of just a “Thumbs up, looks good to me.” That's a small act of empathy that you can start doing right away. You don't need to run it by anybody, really, hopefully. If you do, that's a problem [chuckles] your manager and we've seen that. But there are small ways that you can be empowered and leaning into those small moments, doing it again and again, and then creating opportunities to listen. Because empathy, I think the other thing is that people tend to think that it's a psychic ability. You're either data, or your Deanna Troi. CASEY: Jamil Zaki, right? ANDREA: Yeah, the Roddenberry effect. Jamil Zaki, out in Stanford, coined that. I think that's the thing; I've always been told I'm an empath, but I don't think it's telepathy. I think it's just I've gotten really good at spotting patterns and facial recognitions as opposed to Sky. He can just glance and go, “Oh, you're missing a semicolon here.” That is the same skill, it's just in a different context. CASEY: I love that parallel. JESSICA: Yeah. CASEY: Recognizing small things in facial expressions is like noticing missing semicolons. M: Mm hm. [laughs] CASEY: That's so powerful. That's so vivid for me. MANDO: Yeah. Going back, that made what something that you said earlier, Andrea really click for me, which is that so many people who are professional software developers have this very well-developed sense of empathy for the compiler. [laughs] ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: Right, so it's not that they're not empathetic. ANDREA: Yes! MANDO: They have learned over their career to be extremely empathetic, it's just for their computer. In the same way, you can learn to be empathetic towards your other teams, towards your DevOps group, towards the salespeople, towards anybody. ANDREA: The flip side of your non-technical is you're not good with people because Scott got this all the time. He's like, “You're good with machines, but you're not good with people.” When he told me that, I was like, “I've known you since we were 11, you're incredibly kind. I don't understand.” So in some ways, my early journey here, I didn't come with all the baggage and so, there is this, like, this industry is weird. [laughs] How can we unpack some of this stuff? Because I don't know, this feels a little odd. That's an example and I think it's exactly that it's cultural conditioning and it's from this, “You're good with math, but we don't want you to be good with people.” If you're good with people, that's actually a liability. That was one of the things that came out of the testing of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. MANDO: I can't wait till this book of yours comes out because I'm so curious to read the basis of all these myths that we have unconsciously been perpetuating for years and I don't know why, but there is this myth, there are these myths. Like, if you're technical, you're not good with people and you're not – you know what I mean? It's like, I can't wait to read it. ANDREA: You can go to empathyintech.com. You can sign up for the newsletter and we don't email very often. But Casey actually helps me run a Discord channel, too, or Discord server. So there's folks where we're having these conversations and it doesn't matter what your role is at all. MANDO: Yeah. ANDREA: Just let's start talking to each other. JESSICA: Andrea, that's beautiful. Thank you. That makes this a great time to move to reflections. At the end of each episode, we each get to do a reflection of something that stood out to us and you get to go last. ANDREA: Awesome. MANDO: I can go first. I've got one. The idea that empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives is one that is something that I'm going to take away from this episode. I spent a lot of my career as a software developer and spent another good chunk of my career as someone who worked in operations and DevOps and admin kind of stuff. There's this historic and perpetual tug of war between the two and a lot of my career as a systems administrator was spent sitting down and trying to explain to software engineers why they couldn't do this, or why this GraphQL query was causing the database to explode for 4 hours every night and we couldn't live like that anymore. Stuff like that. To my shame, often, I would default to [laughs] this idea that these software engineers are just idiots and that wasn't the case at all. Well, probably [laughs] not the case at all. Almost always it wasn't the case at all. Anyway, but the truth of the situation is probably much closer to the idea that their perspective was tied specifically to the compiler and to the feature that they're trying to implement for their product manager, for customer X, or whatever. And they didn't have either the resources, or the experience, or the expertise, or whatever that was required to add on the perspective of the backend systems that they were interacting with. So maybe in the future, a better way to address these kinds of situations would be to talk about things in terms of perspective and not idiocy, I guess, is the… ANDREA: Yeah, a really powerful question there is what's your biggest pain point and how can I help you alleviate it? It's a really great way to learn what somebody's perspective is to get on the same page. MANDO: Yeah, like a lot. JESSICA: Nice. I noticed the part about how a lot of the help happens when you have empathy for the individuals who aren't on a happy path, who aren't the great majority of the people using the software, or the requests that come through your software. It's like that parable, there's a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray and the shepherd is going to leave the ninety-nine—who are fine, they're on the happy path, they're good—and go help the one. Because some other day, it's going to be another sheep that's off the happy path and that one's going to need help and that's about it. MANDO: Yeah. Today you, tomorrow me, right? That's how all this works. CASEY: The thing I'd been picking up is about feedback. Like, the best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get feedback, to get their perspective somehow. I've done retros at the ends of meetings, all the meetings at work I ever do. I even do them at the end of a Pomodoro session. A 25-minute timer in the middle of a pairing day, I'll do them every Pomodoro. “Anything to check in on? No? Good. Okay.” As long as we do. But I've never thought to do it during the interview process. That is surprising to me. MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: I don't know if I can get away with it everywhere. The government might not like it if I did that to their formal process. [laughter] Maybe I can get away with, but it's something I'll think about trying. I would like feedback and they would like feedback—win-win. MANDO: Yeah, I've never done it either and it makes perfect sense. I have a portion, unfortunately, in my interviews where I say right at the beginning, “This is what's going to happen in the interview,” and I spend 5 minutes going through and explaining, we're going to talk about this, we're going to talk about that, or just normal signposting for the interview. It never once has occurred to me to at the end, say, “Okay, this is what we did. Why don't you give me some feedback on that and I give you some feedback about you?” That makes sense. ANDREA: Awesome. For me, I have been wanting to come on your show for a really long time. I was telling Casey. [chuckles] JESSICA: Ah! ANDREA: I was like, “I love the mission of expanding the idea of what coding is.” So I just feel very honored because for the longest time, I was like, “I wonder if I'm going to be cool enough one day to –” [laughs] JESSICA: Ah! We should have invited you a long time ago. ANDREA: Yeah. So there's a little bit of fangirling going on and I really appreciate the opportunity to just dive a little bit deep, reflect, and think. As somebody who doesn't mold, it's nice to get validation sometimes that the way I'm thinking is valuable to some people. So it gives me motivation to keep going. JESSICA: Yeah. It's nice when you spend a lot of energy, trying to care about what other people care about, to know that other people also care about this thing that you care about. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: Thank you so much for joining us. ANDREA: Thank you for having me! MANDO: Thank you. ANDREA: The fastest way to reach out to me and make sure that I see it is actually to go to corgibytes.com. Corgi like the dog, bytes, B-Y-T-E-S, .com and send an email on the webform because then that way, it'll get pushed up to me. But I struggle with email a lot right now and I'm on Twitter sporadically and I'm also on – MANDO: That's good. The best way to do that. ANDREA: I am a longform writer. I'm actually really excited that I have a 100,000 words to explain myself. I do not operate well in the 140-character kind of world, but I'm on there and also, on LinkedIn. And then the book website is empathyintech.com and there's a link to the Discord channel and some deeper articles that I've written about exactly what empathy in tech is and what empathy driven development is. I'm writing it with my friend, Carmen Shirkey Collins, who is another copywriter who is now in tech over at Cisco, and it's been a joy to be on a journey with her because she's super smart and has great background in perspective, too. JESSICA: And if you want to work on meaningful, impactful legacy code in ensembles, check out Corgibytes. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: And if you want to talk to all of us, you can join our Greater Than Code Slack by donating anything at all to our Greater Than Code Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. Thank you, everyone and see you next time! Special Guest: Andrea Goulet.

In the wild world of ecommerce, the status quo is always changing. New companies enter the market to disrupt the norms. Legacy brands pivot to get a piece of the pie. Successful niche businesses get acquired left and right. With so much happening all at once, it takes a lot of work for brands to not only keep up but to get out ahead and win.Andrea Leigh and Melissa Burdick have made it their mission to stay on top of everything that’s happening and use their knowledge to help companies large and small make an impact in the market. Andrea, who you may remember from a previous episode where she discussed how to win on Amazon and the death of the category, is the VP of Strategy and Insights for Ideoclick, and Melissa is the Co-founder and CEO of Pacvue, a company that helps advertisers scale on big ecommerce platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart. A few customers of theirs include Unilever, Duracell, and Johnson & Johnson.These ladies each spent 10 years at Amazon “back when ecommerce wasn’t cool,” as Melissa says. Today, at their current companies, they work with disruptors and major brands alike as they come to realize that ecommerce is not just a fad, but the way of the future. And that’s why I was so thrilled to invite them on this roundtable episode to talk about all the trends they’ve been seeing recently, and to get their take on where things are headed. How are major brands moving to digital? Why are companies investing more in shorter product life cycles? What is the future of dropshipping and ad platforms? I wanted to know, and they delivered the goods. So sit back and enjoy! Main Takeaways:David vs. Goliath: In the world of ecommerce, it often boils down to small, niche brands competing against the bigger companies with a long history and much bigger budgets. In order to compete, small brands are forced to think differently, be more hyper-focused on product and customer feedback, and be intensely in tune with the ROI of any ad spend.Shorten That Lifecycle: Brands today are finding out the importance of being nimble and developing shorter product life cycles. When the unexpected happens, markets shift, or industry standards change, having a product already in process of a nine-month cycle puts you at a disadvantage to other brands that can pivot and change course quicker. Having a pulse on what consumers want, gathering data, and digging into feedback can help with the acceleration process.Show Me The Money!: In the past, measuring the ROI of advertising was a bit more challenging. Now, with the amount of data that you get from digital campaigns, measuring the return on investment of an ad campaign is much easier to track because you can correlate clicks and track customer journeys from ads. And with the number of new platforms that are constantly popping up, there is a bit of a new retail explosion that brands can take advantage of and track in unique ways. And today, regardless of the platform — new or old — brands will not advertise at all unless they can get a full view of the data and metrics from the ad platforms they work with.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone and welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today is a very special episode because it's our second ever round table and our guests are going to blow your mind or at least going to blow mine for sure. First up, we have Andrea Leigh who you probably remember. I think she was on episode 81 or so. She currently serves as the VP of Strategy and Insights for Ideoclick. Andrea, welcome.Andrea:Hi Stephanie, thanks for having me back.Stephanie:So glad to have you back. Your episode really was one of my favorites, which is why it's very clear we need to have Andrea back on the show. I think we even said that in our episode, so probably no surprise that you're here. All right. And joining Andrea and I is Melissa Burdick who serves as the president and co-founder of PacVue. Melissa, welcome to the show.Melissa:Thanks so much for having me.Stephanie:Yeah. We are excited for you to join our party. So you guys seem like you have some history. You seem like you're friends, you're in club house together. I was hoping to start there just so the audience knows who are you and how do you guys know each other. Andrea, you want to kick it off?Andrea:Well, I would love to tell the story of how I remember first meeting Melissa. We worked at Amazon together. I think this was in maybe 2006. She was the buyer for the health and personal care side of the business and I was the buyer for the grocery side. And we both negotiated with the same vendor, same brand that span both categories in the same day. We met in the kitchen afterwards and she had gotten such a better deal on her negotiation. Such better terms than me and I couldn't believe it because I was a total newbie and she was a really experienced negotiator. And so I made her teach me all of her tips and tricks. That's my memory of my first time meeting Melissa.Stephanie:Wow. Melissa, do you remember that day?Melissa:I didn't really remember it until Andrea told me and I didn't remember it that way. So it's funny the perception that she had versus what I had, but she and I both spent 10 years at Amazon. We were early pioneers of the consumables category back when ecommerce wasn't cool. And so we really got to do a lot of great stuff. I call it the cheapest MBA I didn't have to pay for working at Amazon, because we learned how to ship tubes of toothpaste probably. Well, I don't know if we've ever figured that out or will across the internet, but it really was Wild Wild West of ecommerce times and Andrea and I were there at the beginning and that's how we met each other.Melissa:We actually had a consulting practice together. We've been friends in the industry. Now we're competitors in some ways, but that's the beauty about our community and industry is that we're still friends. I tell brands, it takes a village to do ecommerce because it's so complex. And so having thought leadership and experts is what we like to do. So Andrea and I have a Clubhouse show that we do together and still keep in touch.Stephanie:Yeah, I remember when Andrea, we were like, who should we have on for a round table? And she brought you up and then when she was explaining, she was like, "Kind of a competitor to our firm, but we're friends and we work together." And I was like, "Whatever you want, girl. We'll bring her on if you love her." I'm sure I will too. So yeah, that's awesome. So, okay. I want to get into the topic. I know you all have a Clubhouse later on today that you're going to be hosting, which I think the topic that we're going to be covering there is perfect for this show.Stephanie:And like I said earlier, it'd be perfect practice all around how brands are going to market and how the world of ecommerce and commerce in general is so different now. So maybe Melissa, if you want to start with how do you even view the world now versus a couple of years ago? Like what's different? What are brands struggling with that maybe they never had to think about before?Melissa:Yeah, I mean, to the earlier point of your question, the moat is so much smaller now. The ability to create a brand is much easier. So years and years, 20 years ago, when ecommerce didn't really exist, it was, you're a big brand, you get into the shelves of a Walmart because you're tied or something like that. But with ecommerce and with more platforms and marketplaces, there's this ability to create a brand and a loyal following and base through things like social media, TikTok, or viral ways that you can build communities and brands.Melissa:And so today we're talking about a couple brands, DUDE Wipes, and Wyze camera or I guess Wyze actually they started with a camera. They both are emerging brands. They weren't the big P&Gs and Samsungs of the world. They built emerging disruptive brands and they've been very, very successful. And so that's a little bit about today's show. What about you, Andrea, what do you think about these emerging brands?Andrea:Yeah, I mean, I think another thing that has really changed is the ambitions of brands. So I think brands were to your point Melissa, they were built by large organizations and they were, you layer on this enormous supply chain and distribution and then a marketing engine on top of that in that order. And I think the two things that stand out to me as being different now with marketplaces is that first a brand can aspire to be smaller than that. A brand can aspire to just address a certain niche for a certain customer segment and do it really well. And maybe a brand wants to only be 100 million dollar brand versus a billion dollar brand and think that's posing some really stiff competition to some of the more established brands in the space, particularly in CPG.Andrea:So I think those brand ambitions are changing for sure. We did an internal panel with some clients and thought leaders and this was like a big topic there too, was these ambitions of brands and how they're different than they used to be. So I think that's a big one and then I think what those smaller brands can do better. And I think we've seen this with both DUDE Wipes and DUDE Wipes is that iterative approach to product development that incorporates the customer and their feedback. And so really thinking about why is this such a great example? They entered a super highly competitive market.Andrea:The category was already highly competitive with a lot of players and they just went in there and they did it better. And they did that because they were able to really listen to customer feedback, not just through reviews, but through all the social media channels and approach brand building in an iterative way. And so those are a couple of things that I've seen with some of our more upstart clients that have been really successful. That iterative approach and that really laser focused on a specific segment.Stephanie:Cool. So talk a bit about the ambitions of the brands. Do you think the brands that... like you said, maybe they don't need to IPO, they don't need to get acquired, they're looking to stay more niche and they're okay with that. Do you think they can sustain longterm because it feels like if you don't have goals to really make a mark, you're just going to get beat out by people who can spend a lot of money on ads and who just has a lot of other channels to create content and create content platforms. It's like they can do so much because of how much capital they have access to. What do you think about the brands who don't have those ambitions right now?Andrea:Well, I think for a handful of our clients, it's just a lifestyle business, right? We have a couple of brands who are a family owned and they've been family owned for generations and that's a lifestyle brand. They're running it because they have a lot of passion for the product or the category and they're product people. But I think in the other cases, they're mostly getting acquired. I mean, I think that's what we're seeing across the industry. They're getting acquired by a larger CPG. They get acquired by one of these newer FBA roll-ups or FBA aggregator companies that goes in and buys up all these small sellers on Amazon. But I think they get acquired. I think the challenge with that is that what I see is these CPGs either acquire them really early and then they try to scale it because most larger CPGs are in the business of scaling brands.Andrea:And so they try to scale it too fast, which kills what made the brand so special or they buy too late and they overpay. And so I don't think there's a super win-win there, but I mean, I guess it's a win for the brand because they walked away with a bunch of money. But I think that in terms of aspirations, maybe it still is to get acquired later or have investments or whatever, but still they're really focused on that segment that they're addressing.Melissa:The other kind of an offshoot of your question when you say, these brands don't have as much money to do these big TV ads. The other piece of that is they are extremely savvy and even savvier than these big brands to grow their brands. So they're actually able to do more with less because they're forced to. And so they have amazing product content or they figured out how to get to number one slot for their most frequently searched term because they understand the algorithms, they figure it out faster and they're more nimble and they have less of a portfolio to worry about. They just focus on a few products.Melissa:So they have a lot of benefits in that regard because they don't have that cushion and fluffy ad budgets and things like that to rely on. So they have to rely on having an amazing product, this iterative process of being able to mind keywords and understand, "Oh, this is the flavor that people are asking for. I need to go create this product." Product development takes a lot faster for them as well. And we've seen that with the Wyze. They're able to create more and more portfolio pretty quickly.Andrea:Melissa, do you think it's fair to say that some of these more disruptive brands are maybe more likely to channel their ad dollars towards the retailer ad platforms because they really need an ROI. For them to spend in some of the more sort of upper funnel activities might be harder.Melissa:Yeah. I mean, we see that especially with the seller marketplace. They are so ROI driven. It's all about if I pay a dollar, I better get a huge return for that dollar and ad advertising whereas these bigger brands are more focused on marketing their portfolio. And so they're much more focused on ROI of their advertising, whether it's anything from Google AdWords, Facebook advertising, whatever it is. They want real time data, real-time understanding of what's happening to their brand and it has to be profitable. And it's quite a bifurcation in how they look at advertising and marketing their products versus these bigger brands, which is more of a marketing play.Stephanie:Yeah. I think that agility to adjust and move quick is so key. I was just talking with a guest yesterday from a company Avocados From Mexico. Y'all ever heard about them? Wow. Their content strategy, like what they're doing. I mean, they've been winning the number two slot in the Super Bowl ads and her whole thing was like, you just have to be able to move quick. You need to be able to work with agencies who can try it on their own, run with creativity and just act quickly. And even when you don't have a budget, you can get scrappy and use organic growth hacky tactics to at least get up there in the beginning until you do have access to that budget. That was her number one thing though, move fast, try things out, fail quickly, and then iterate.Melissa:Exactly.Andrea:I just Googled them as we're talking and yeah, I can't wait to watch some of these videos. They look hilarious.Stephanie:Oh, her Super Bowl ad was so funny. I mean, all their stuff is funny. It was funny at first I was like, "Wait, why did Hillary schedule an avocado company for the show?" Americans super confused by this and I instantly got hungry, went out and started eating avocados. Once she came on I was like, "Oh, wow. They're a whole different level." Like you think about produce and a whole different way. I mean, they're doing AR stuff with their avocados. They're doing let's see, NFTs. They have been ahead, like years ahead trying stuff.Stephanie:I mean, they were trying NFTS and 2020 before it even became popular and they were trying to put ad campaigns on the blockchain. She was telling me a story about how they had an avocado Macy's day. What is it? Float. The only way the float would get there from Mexico to New York as if users would tweet about it. And so when you would tweet, enough tweets would happen and it would move the float to the next city. That's the only way it would ever reach New York is if they had enough engagement.Andrea:Oh, that's so fun.Stephanie:I know. It's so genius, but her whole thing was like, that's why you just try things and have that permission to experiment and a brand that can move quickly and not have to worry about competing top of funnel. Like you'd get it on that engagement level and scrap your tactics and you can win, which I think is awesome.Melissa:And I think that's harder for some of the larger companies to do, because I mean, even just that example you gave about like tweeting to get the avocado from city to city, which I think is hilarious and super fun. If that flopped, no one's going to say, "Oh, that dumb avocado company." It's just a memorable thing, but if it flopped and like, I don't know L'Oréal was doing that or something, I think it makes bigger, bigger news in not a good way.Stephanie:Yeah. Which always makes me think about the integration process of all these big brands are of course acquiring these hot D2C companies and it feels like there's so many out there right now. I mean, so many people come on our show and I always think like, "You're going to get acquired. You're going to get acquired." I mean, it just seems like that's the world we're in, but then figuring out how to integrate them into a culture, but not in a way that ruins it. I mean, have you guys seen good examples of that of companies who are acquired and then keep them in their own little startup hub of like, keep doing what you're doing. We don't want to ruin you.Andrea:I mean, we've seen it go both ways. So we have one client and I unfortunately can't share their name, but they were acquired by a really large CPG and they were allowed to operate separately because they're performing really well, but they're taxed so heavily by the rest of the organization because everyone wants to know how they're doing it. And so the amount of reach outs and coffee chats and all of that stuff and presentations and stuff that they have to give. I mean, it's an enormous burden on the small brand to try to teach a huge CPG how to be like them, you know? And I think that's hard. That's really hard for them.Andrea:I've heard that happens a lot of the time or they get folded in a little too quickly, but something that I was thinking about is what happens to the customer? Because a lot of times we buy these products from these smaller upstart brands. I mean, I think about like in beauty, two of my favorite brands are Glossier and Beautycounter and I love them. I love them partly because I feel like I'm supporting a company, well, at least in the case of Beautycounter, a company that stands for something which is like low chemicals and things like that.Andrea:I'm supporting their sales associate network and I'm supporting the smaller brand, but if they were to be purchased by like P&G tomorrow, I don't know at what my relationship with them feels like anymore. I'm not sure. I don't know. And so I wonder for some of these disruptive brands. What happens to that sort of authenticity and integrity when they're acquired? I don't know the answer to that.Melissa:The other thing that I've seen also is a lot of these bigger companies will siphon off people into a team of incubators and they just let them go. So they take them out of their company organization structure. Like you need all this approval process to go do your stuff. They then go create a direct to consumer brand or they're able to operate in that name nimble way. And they've been pretty successful getting learnings and trying to teach their organization some more nimble habits. So one route is buying the brand and then trying to keep them operating the same way and not to integrate it into that more bureaucratic process. And there's some successes and failures there. And then there's the big companies actually taking internal team to go do and not be subject to all the bureaucracy.Melissa:I've seen that as well, but I think the key that we all agree on is just this ability to be nimble, speed and if we've seen anything from ecommerce that's, what is the push.Melissa:So this nimbleness is something that's really important. In these product cycle times you need to get faster. And just the data like with this whole year of COVID when we're working with brands the question is, is this year I throw out your, because the behavior is just like totally off the chart. We know it's totally different. So how are you making decisions knowing that last year was not a good year to look at because things will return back to normal. How are you looking at it? And so getting faster at being able to look at data, to understand what's happening, knowing the trends of what's happening.Melissa:So the best example is like, MMM, Market Mix Models, where it's like, oh, from six months or a year ago, and you're making decisions on your media based on that. You can't do that. You can't look at six months ago because nobody's doing TV advertising because they didn't have any inventory. So you need to get much faster and that's what's really propelling more of this in this ecosystem. So I think we will see brands being faster because they've been given that inertia because of COVID.Andrea:Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, I read some study. I can't remember who put it out. I think it was McKinsey and they said something about, it was more than 70% of brand leadership said that they make decisions faster now than they did previously. I think you're totally right. You have to speak and COVID taught all these companies how to reduce their cycle times and be faster and be more diversified and all of those things. And I think those are the good things that we get to hopefully walk away from the pandemic with which are some changes to how decisions are made and things like that. And I would add to, Melissa, you talked about how these companies need to reduce their cycle times for everything, from budgeting to product development and I totally agree with that.Andrea:I think the other thing that these disruptive brands and particularly, Wyze and DUDE Wipes, is they incorporate that user generated content into their product development. So it's getting the cycle time down, but it's also figuring out how do you take all the stuff that people are saying about your brand in social media and in reviews and all these other places and incorporate that into your product development and your advertising and your content and all of that. I think the reason maybe that's some of the more scrappy upstart brands are better able to do that is because there aren't a lot of scalable ways to do that yet.Andrea:There are some tools that you can subscribe to and you can look across these channels and you can track your mentions and all that stuff but it's really a manual effort to be tracking a lot of that. And I think it's qualitative more than it is quantitative. And so I think some of those smaller brands that are still owner operator run just are more in tune with some of the sentiment of the customers and what needs to happen in the company versus maybe a brand conglomerate that has like 60 brands.Stephanie:Yeah. It also seems like bigger brands... I mean, I was talking with Stitch Fix a while back about how models can start running so quickly with training based off of how the consumers are feeling now, what they want right now and it seems like a lot of bigger brands do have access to crazy ML technologies and things like that to train these models to maybe make new product decisions, change their website every second based off how people are interacting with it. But I do also wonder, will we enter a year next year or the year after where it's like, whoa, what the people want now is not what they wanted two years ago and now all of our models have been falsely trained based off a two year craziness. I don't know.Melissa:Exactly. Yeah.Andrea:It's hard to look at anything. So much has changed in the world, I think in the last year that it's hard to look back at anything.Stephanie:What's real?Andrea:It's hard to go back and look at anything as a data point that's a predictor of the future. I mean, I think it's just really tricky.Stephanie:Yeah. I think about forecasting then that's my thought is like, I mean, that was exactly what I'm the VP of data science at Stitch Fix was talking about is like thinking about forecasting what clothes people are going to want and thinking about your inventory. And it seems like now you have to be able to shift so quickly, but then also you could be left flat-footed where you were planning for something that didn't end up playing out and people, all of a sudden want to be looking nice again, going out into the world, wearing high heels. I don't know. It seems like there will be a point when brands are like, oh shoot, I got to pivot again and get back to maybe our roots of where we started three or four years ago.Melissa:Yeah. And that's why it's all about-Andrea:... it's funny I would...Melissa:Yeah. I mean, it's art and science because the science, the AI models, they need data to work and they aren't very good with anomalies like COVID or like Prime Day or Sun Care member being like the sun care buyer and every single year at Amazon, we never bought enough Sun Care because it was like, couldn't predict that spike in the summer because the models were for the full year. But the modeling needs a lot of data for it to run. It doesn't do well with spikiness or anomalies and so that's where the art comes into play and the creativity you know, as well. So you have to think forward looking in terms of what are these trends, what are they going to be and Marriott together.Andrea:Well, Stephanie, you'd asked this in the beginning of what are some of the big challenges we're seeing across our clients and this one's not very sexy, but it's forecasting. It's so hard right now and they're all trying to figure out how do they forecast? Well, there's a lot of things you have to forecast. It's like, what are your year over your comps don't make any sense right now. I mean, it's like you can't even look at that. And so how do you forecast just demand on one platform because you don't know how much that platform is going to get, and then you don't even know how much of your business is going to be commerce, because that's all up in the air.Andrea:There used to be a pretty steady track of that getting a point a year or something like that. And now that's all over the place. Depending on the category you're in, you may be gain 20 points or something in ecommerce and then it's like, which retailer? It feels a little bit like a gambling exercise right now for these manufacturers trying to figure all that out. And then to Melissa's point, you have to line up an ad budget around that for these different retailer ad platforms and I think the forecasting is just so hard for them right now.Stephanie:Yeah. So let's talk a bit about the ad platforms and I know most of this right up your alley. So maybe you can speak a bit about how are companies thinking about ad platforms and approaching that? I mean, it seems like there's so much to pay attention to, so much to track, so much data. Like you're getting hit in the face all different ways of stuff now. What are you seeing behind the scenes when it comes to ads and platforms and how to go about that world?Melissa:Yeah. I mean, we've really seen an explosion of retail media. So it really started with Amazon, I think at this point, like five, six years ago when their app platform really started getting going, and Amazon makes a lot of profit from AWS and ads. And retailers can't really replicate AWS, but they can replicate advertising, which is great margin for them. And so just last year, we saw a launch of Walmart self-service ad platform, Instacart came out of nowhere. So to Andrea's earlier point, literally brands didn't have a budget allocated to Instacart and then off a planning cycle during COVID, this explosive new platform launches. Luckily a lot of brands had money because they weren't investing in TV advertising or other places. So they're able to allocate some dollars to it. But one of the big issues is nobody knows who owns the Instacart budget or platform, who's running that.Melissa:And then since then, there's just Criteo, what Target has launched, which is a slew of other retailers. So if you're not creating your own self-service ad platform like Amazon, Walmart Instacart you can leverage the network of Criteo who has Target and a bunch of other ones, CitrusAds is coming online as well. We went from not having a lot of retail media opportunities to advertise to now lots of opportunities to advertise with all kinds of different formats. And so it's a whole new brave world of trying to figure out where to advertise, but what I think brands believe is they want to be where their customers are. And so that's where it's really having a test and learn mentality of being able to get some of these test and learn budgets to see what's working well and get some data points and proof points and go from there.Melissa:And so that's where like tech stacks, like Pacvue or agencies who also have technology, like Ideoclick can help brands because they can help them figure it all out. And our value prop is really around unifying retail media so that you can see everything in one place, which is really important for these brands. So I think at the end of the day, you need savvy partners to help you, you need technology to help you, and then you need the strategist at your own company thinking through how to do these things.Andrea:Yep. I feel like right now all the money... and I also read that Dollar General recently launched an ad platform. That really surprised me.Stephanie:What? How [crosstalk] around really.Andrea:No, they did ecommerce. Sorry, Dollar General. [crosstalk]Melissa:How do you make money on that? Is that profitable?Andrea:I know, right?Stephanie:What are they doing?Andrea:It's pretty much like their value proposition is that everything cost less than $10 pretty much. So I don't know how they ship that online very economically. But in any case-Stephanie:$10. What? That cost will be less than a dollar. What happened? They really lost sight of [crosstalk].Andrea:Inflation. I think in the short term where the ad dollars are coming from. They're coming from the other ad options, like the theatrical releases or out of home advertising and TV and billboards and all that stuff. But when people start leaving their houses again, how much of those ad budgets go back to some of those more, I don't know, non retailer ad platform ad types and how much stays with retailer ad platforms. And I predict that a lot of it is going to stay with the retailer ad platforms. I think the reason is the metrics and ROI that you can get from that is like crack for marketers.Andrea:I mean, I don't even know how you would go back to spending on advertising where you don't get ROI metrics. I mean, I remember when Amazon advertising first launched, and that was one of the first performance marketing retailer ad platforms that you could work with and the reaction of the manufacturers just being like, "Oh my gosh, I can directly see a correlation between what I spent, who clicked on it, how many people saw it and then how many people bought it." And so I just don't..Stephanie:Wow. What does the ROI look like because I'm not deep in the ad world. So I don't know how to think about what retailer ad platforms looks like versus traditional. So how do I envision what you're getting in that world that you wouldn't be getting otherwise? What is that ROI look like or what are brands getting used to now where they're like, this is the only way I would do it going forward.Andrea:You want to take that one, Melissa?Melissa:Yeah. Well, I mean, I think traditionally if you're doing normal advertising, you're more focused on impression focus, right? You're really trying to get impressions. You're not tying back to sales of a product. And so in ecommerce, there's a direct tie back to, I spent a dollar, I got $5 of sales and there's like a brand halo associated with that. And so that tie back where I put an ad, if you leverage Amazon DSP, which is their programmatic display advertising, that's retargeting. So you can target to people who are looking for men's shoes within this certain zip code who shop Nike, but didn't buy it in the last 90 days.Melissa:You can get very, very specific targeting. You can show them an ad, drive them back to Amazon, to your product and then you actually know if they bought that product or not. And the actual sales attribution and return that you got from that versus just an impression buy like a Super Bowl buy, right? Where you've no data to say, "When I do a Super Bowl ad, you can try but there's no actual ROAS, return on ad spend that you get that correlates directly to an ecommerce sale. But I do think that media... people are doing all of these things, because some is upper funnel where you're more branding dollars and some as much lower funnel, direct marketing, that's conversion to a sale.Melissa:And so that's where these bigger brands are like, if there's a new product launch, you've got to get people to know about this product. So you might do like during the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl ads are like everybody's watching the Super Bowl and this year they had some weird like caveman soap. I can't remember the name of it, but on their Superbowl ad and so that was really to get attention and drive traffic to awareness of their brand. But not tied to specific ecommerce metrics.Stephanie:So how have you seen brands changing the way they're thinking about ads in a way that's focused on first party data collection, really trying to create that relationship from the start where maybe they weren't always thinking about this before. Have you seen brands shifting their mindset around creating an ad that maybe has the focus on that now?Melissa:Well, I mean, with all of the things happening within the privacy world where third-party cookies are going away. First party data becomes more important and so I think that this benefits platforms like Amazon who have a significant amount of first party data and hurts platforms like Facebook that rely on more cookies. But I think brands in general are really trying to build their own databases. So a lot of them have publicly talked about building direct to consumer businesses so they can own their customer. And so I think that they view first party data, building their own CRM and their own databases pretty highly. I don't know what have you seen Andrea in terms of brands that you work?Andrea:Yeah, I've seen the same thing. I think a lot of them are building their own CRMs, trying to figure out how to access more direct customer data. We talked about how it encouraged a lot more speed of decision making. I think it also encouraged a need for diversification in all ways like manufacturing and the ecommerce platforms that you sell on and how you source the product and I think diversification is really important. And I think there are a lot of manufacturers who've been feeling a bit squeezed by Amazon and it's nice to have options to have a D2C site. I mean, the D2C thing, I think is like a whole other topic, but I do think it's a lot more expensive to drive traffic to those sites. You're going to get a lot.Andrea:It's not going to be a hugely accretive to the business in the short term, but I do think it gives you access to your own customer data, which is, it can be a really important point of experimentation in a sandbox for manufacturers to really see what kind of marketing is working for them. So I've certainly seen that and then I think just looking across the retailer ad platforms, I mean, we've seen a push onto all platforms for a lot of our major manufacturers and wanting to access... If the customer's cross shopping, maybe it's the same customer, but also access different customers that are shopping across different ad platforms to Melissa's point earlier about wanting to be where your customers are.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. So the other day, Andrea, I was creeping on your Instagram, I think I was. And you were talking about omni-channel strategies and drop shipping as a catalyst for growth. I thought that was interesting because I feel like when I think about drop shipping, it's had this like crazy heyday drop ship, white label, everything. No one has to know who you are. You don't really need a brand. And then no one was really doing that anymore. It didn't seem like there was margins there to do that anymore or people really want to connect with a brand.Stephanie:Like, especially now everyone wants to know who's behind that brand, the story, they want to feel some connection with them. And when I saw you mentioned drop shipping, I was wondering, how are you guys viewing that? Maybe it's always been around and that's just my personal narrative I've written around it or how do you see brands maybe leveraging that right now?Andrea:Well, I think of drop shipping a little bit differently. It's still the brand. They're just bypassing the retailer and they're shipping directly to the consumer. You can do that as a seller in your own right on the marketplace platforms or you can also just do that behind the scenes. And there are a number of categories that are high percentage drop-ship and always have been. It's never going away. It's just not obvious to you as a customer. So shoes is a great example.Andrea:Those are often coming directly from the manufacturer. That's an industry that's been pretty heavy drop-ship for a long time and mainly because so much inventory, you have to carry. There's one style and then there's five size color combinations. And so it doesn't make sense to ship all that to a retailer and then have them re-ship it to a customer and try to keep the inventory levels right.Andrea:So shoes has always been a really big drop-ship business. If you pay attention to the stuff you get from Nordstrom and others, you'll notice that it's often coming directly from the manufacturer. Sporting goods is another one. Some of the bigger bulky categories have been traditionally drop-ship because you don't want to ship like a treadmill to a retailer district warehouse or whatever. It does expose the retailer to a degree of risk because you're not packaging the product. So you lose a little bit of control over the quality, the consistency of the customer experience. I think what I posted was that Nordstrom was going to try to open up more assortment through ship.Andrea:It's a little risky. I mean, I don't think it's highly risky, but I do think it presents some risk in losing control over the customer experience, depending on if the retailer is still deciding the assortment, you could lose a little bit of your credibility as a retailer. I mean, I think part of why customers are starting to shop a lot of places besides Amazon is for the curation. Is because it's a little bit of an easier shopping experience.Andrea:I would much rather shop for shoes on Nordstrom where I know that someone actually made a decision to carry each of those products versus on Amazon where it's the wild west and it's just overwhelming. So I think a lot of these retailers that are competing with Amazon and doing well with it right now, I think are doing it well because of the curation. And if you open up those retailers to just unlimited drop shipping with the brands, I think you just lose a lot of that value proposition.Stephanie:Yeah. I agree. I mean, it seems like the AMSEC could just come in and just have a curated collection and maybe they're already doing this. This is the Radan collection, this is the [inaudible] and like, you go there knowing what you're going to get, because I thought the same thing. The other day I was trying to find, I don't know, some piece of yard furniture and it was so overwhelming. I was like, "Oh my gosh, there's so many egg chairs. I know the egg chair I want, but there's so many." 90% of them are not egg chairs [inaudible] is and I just went to Walmart and they had the exact what I wanted, which I found through an influencer, or I would just go to West Elm. I just feel like they have the exact selection that I want. I'm not going to mess around, but it seems like they could come in really quick and change that if they wanted to.Andrea:They can't. it's so hard. I mean, they have a one size fits all platform and it's heavily search-based. And I remember, how do you say her last name Melissa, Kathy who used to lead soft lines at Amazon? Kathy Boudin. Well in any case, sorry, if I'm mispronouncing your name, but I remember hearing her say, in all hands one time, she was like... They came in and I think Amazon fashion had its best a couple of year run. They really created some curated lists and some storefronts and they started the Amazon Delivers for fashion and I thought it actually was really good stuff. But she said, "It's a thin veneer that we've put over the site." I remember her saying that. It's a thin veneer.Andrea:And once you scratch it, you see just all the assortment and everything that's there and it's overwhelming. I keep a little like goofy quote lists that people on my team say and this guy in my team, Jamal the other day. I can't remember the context, but he said, "If you're going to go shopping on Amazon for a Teddy bear sweatshirt, I'll see you in a week."Stephanie:That's so true.Andrea:I don't remember why someone was shopping for a Teddy bear sweatshirt or what the context was, but it cracks me up because it's so true. I mean, you could spend a week just combing through, even for something super specific like that, a Teddy bear sweatshirt. You could spend a week just coming through this.Andrea:There's this S&L sketch about Netflix, but I highly recommend that you watch because it's like a fake ad for Netflix, but it says, it's the endless scroll. "By the time you get to the end of the scroll, we've added and created new content and so it's the infinite loop." They call it an infinite loop. And Amazon is like that. By the time you get to page 10, they've probably added more assortments. So it's never...Stephanie:Yeah, people are working in the background. "She needs 10 more of these, keep going." Oh my gosh. All right. So I know you guys have a hard stop in a couple of minutes on Clubhouse and maybe I'll even try and join you over there, but I do want to get one last question. Usually I do a quick lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. But for this one, each only get one question because we're on a time crunch. So Melissa, we'll start with you and it'll be the same question. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Melissa:Oh, man. That's a hard one.Andrea:Yeah. I'm glad I get to go second.Stephanie:Andrea already had to do it once on her last episode and it can't be the same answer, Andrea.Melissa:What's going to be the biggest impact to ecommerce in the next year?Stephanie:In the next year. Yeah.Melissa:I mean, we already had COVID so that's what had the biggest impact on ecommerce? I guess, I mean, maybe it's a ripple effective. I'm going to have to say COVID because that has had the biggest impact on ecommerce because it's accelerated it so much with new people especially at different age brackets. The older age bracket is shopping online and so we know the baseline is never going to return back to where it was and it has changed behaviors and it will be accelerated. The other interesting thing, I just notice this when I walk into a beauty store, like in Ulta is that beauty used to be a way better experience in store than it was online. Now it's the opposite. It's way better online.Stephanie:I order from target all the time, just directly from Target because I'm like way better than going in store.Melissa:Because you can have virtual reality, but what's this color going to look like? When I walk into an Ulta, everything's taped down, you can't try on anything. You can't see the format of anything. I don't know how much of that's going to return. I don't think people are going to be very comfortable trying, like picking things up that other people have touched for a very long time. I don't want to.Stephanie:I never wanted to. I never wanted to try lip gloss. I'm like, how many... thank you.Melissa:I think the interesting, and then Amazon announced opening a hair salon where a lot of it is going to be tech focused around what's this color going to look like. Virtual reality of hair color. So I think that Cover Desk has accelerated this complete change in behavior lifestyle. And the other thing is, I don't know if I'm ever going to wear jeans again. I might just wear my VRA joggers to work if I ever go back to an office.Andrea:There's a great YouTube video on how to dress up joggers, that I'll send you.Stephanie:All right. Andrea, you're on the hot seat.Andrea:Okay. I'm going to go with social shopping and live streaming and I don't know if it will be in the next year, but I think it is going to be the biggest disruption to ecommerce because it is going to start taking the transaction or at least the beginning of the transaction off of the ecommerce site and onto social media. I know that I don't have a lot of agreement on this in the industry. A lot of people are like, "Oh, it's going to take longer or like people aren't going to shop on social media," but I'm feeling super bullish on this. And I think it's primarily due to my own behavior, which is that I am almost exclusively buying things that influencers have recommended to me and it's a super clunky experience. You have to go down to the bottom of the YouTube show notes and find the top she had on and it's annoying and I'm still doing it because it's preferable to the endless scroll of Amazon.Andrea:So I really think that that is going to be a huge disruptor to ecommerce and have a big impact on it. Although I was wrong about this once before, I helped start a company, I guess it was like 15 years ago now. It was about social shopping. It would like loud allow it. It was kind of an old version of a screen share before we had screen shares, but it allowed you to shop reseller websites with your friends.Stephanie:That was awesome [crosstalk].Andrea:It took a long time to get it off the ground and we eventually sold it to Nordstrom for their style boards, which is a very different application than what we originally went into the idea with, but I still feel super bullish on this. People prefer to shop together or they prefer to feel like they're shopping with someone in the case of like the curation from influencers or whatever. I'm feeling bullish on social shopping and live streaming.Stephanie:I will 1000% back you up on that because yeah, almost all my shopping behavior comes from influencers and I will go through all the hoops and hurdles to try and find something even through that, dang, like to know it app, which is horrible to work through. You're like, "I'm just trying to find my shirt." And then you're like bouncing around like 10 different apps and it throws you over back to Nordstrom and then you're back again. It's not fun. So I hope that process gets easier.Andrea:I'm a huge fan of taking the screenshot and using Google lens. I don't know if you ever do that.Stephanie:I don't do that.Andrea:If you can't find it, Google lens is... I don't know that that's their intended application, but it's really, useful.Stephanie:It is today. That's great. All right. Well, I really think we need to have a quarterly round table. This is super fun having you both join us and yeah. Where can we find out more about you, Andrea, Melissa? Where can we find about Ideoclick and Pacvue?Andrea:Yeah. Well, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I post and write a lot about ecommerce there or on my website, andreakleighconsulting.com and you can learn more about Ideoclick at ideoclick.com.Stephanie:Melissa.Melissa:Ditto. LinkedIn, you can find me Melissa Burdick there. And then pacvue.com. P-A-C-V-U-E dotcom. Yeah. We'd love to hear from folks or you can find Andrea and I in Clubhouse later this afternoon.Andrea:Yes, four o'clock. After this'll air, after that.Stephanie:Yeah. You guys are giving a preview of this, so, yeah. All right. Thanks so much y'all.Andrea:Okay. Thanks for having us, Stephanie. 

Will your clients remember you and pass you referrals? Are you working with empathy?   Carey Ann, Monte and Jason talk with Andrea Moskal, a Realty One Group Agent who has tapped into her empathetic creative flair to crush it in real estate since getting started in 2019.    ****You can listen to this and all recent episodes at: www.talkmusiccity.com   We Educate and Motivate All Things Real Estate! Have a question about buying/selling real estate and mortgages? Email questions@talkmusiccity.com or use #talkmusiccity to get your question answered!   The Talk of Music City Real Estate is sponsored by Music City Removal: www.musiccityremoval.com     A few things that came up:   -Jim Payne with 50 offers on a Murfreesboro property -JASON Market update, national inventory issues 4:00 -Andrea working in Real Estate since only 2019 -ANDREA I don't know the difference between COVID and non COVID times as I started during COVID 6:45 -MONTE you have to have a caring heart and be willing to serve others 7:45 -ANDREA losing her mother as she was getting into RE 8:30 -ANDREA understanding her mother's end of life care enabled her to be of massive service for those buying homes in a similar position 11:00 -ANDREA MOTTO STORY Meaning of a Flamingo "Stand Out Stand Tall Be Different" 14:00 -ANDREA Where to go Wednesdays 15:45 -ANDREA/MONTE taking what you have and making it amazing 16:25 -CA you're executing and making BEING DIFFERENT happen 20:00 -JASON Andrea is more than interested, she's committed....therefore she's flourishing 21:00 -CA mental preparation and past experience is key 22:45 -ANDREA You have to stay positive 23:10 -ANDREA if not one day at a time, go one hour at a time 23:30 -JASON baseball, rub some dirt on it 24:50 -JASON baseball closing pitcher story, slapping him to get primed 26:10 -MONTE Hal Elrod, feel the pain and move on 27:00 -ANDREA Don't compare yourself to other agents 28:35 -CA Social Media can be vastly inaccurate 30:05 -ANDREA I was coachable 31:10     Follow Casey and his company: tnradonservices.com   __________________________________________ Carey Ann Cyr manages and operates one of the Top Branches for CMG Financial in Franklin, TN. She and her team have become known for closing nearly impossible deals! They have processed over 300 million in mortgages since 2016 with over 613 families ushered into their dream homes! Contact Carey Ann: www.yourtnlendingsolution.com Monte Mohr owns Realty One Group Music City and has sold over $1 Billion dollar's worth of real estate and over 3000 homes sold over his 30+ year career! Interested in joining Monte as an agent? www.topagentsuccess.com The Talk of Music City Real Estate is Produced, Voiced and Edited by www.jimmccarthyvoiceovers.com          

What if we told you that you may be approaching Amazon in all the wrong ways? Many brands, especially more established ones who started out in brick and mortar, have been playing a game of catch up while trying to quickly figure out how to sell on Amazon and win. But it may feel like a confusing place to win. Especially if a brand is trying to apply a brick and mortar sales approach, like winning a category, to online platforms like Amazon, Target, or Walmart.But we all love a good underdog story, which is why we invited Andrea Leigh to the show to share her secrets. Andrea is the VP of Strategy & Insights at Ideoclick, a full-service ecommerce optimization platform. Before Ideoclick, she spent nearly a decade working for Amazon, so she is coming to the table with a true insider’s view and strategies in her back pocket that she’s seen work on Amazon and other marketplaces.In this interview, which was one of my favorites I’ve ever done so far this year, Andrea and I discuss why brands need to accept the death of the category and start thinking about how to stand out against an entire competitive set. Doing that means repositioning your brand and winning the share of search, it means optimizing for SEO, and it also means going back to the basics of differentiation so that you’re not just another option in a sea of products that look exactly the same. Plus, we talk about selling across multiple ecommerce platforms, and how to think about Amazon releasing “white label” product lines. I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as we did!Main Takeaways:Category Chaos: Brick-and-mortar shopping lends itself to categorization, but in the world of ecommerce, particularly on Amazon, categories are not something brands should focus on. Customers shopping online are fed suggestions based on their entire history of shopping, so when they search for something like peanut butter, they don’t just see Jif and Skippy, they see that and then anything peanut butter adjacent that might resonate with them even a tiny bit. With this in mind, brands need to figure out how to compete in entire segments, rather than specific categories.One Metric To Rule Them All: Share of search is one of the best metrics an ecommerce brand can look at to measure everything from how customers are finding them, to what the customer experience is when they search for something, to who the competition is in their set.  Mining For Gold: One of the places that Amazon has excelled is aggregating consumer complaints, and then coming out with an Amazon Basics product that addresses all of them, which then becomes a top-seller. CPG brands large and small should be employing a similar approach. And, they should be highlighting the bells and whistles of their product that separates them from the white-label product that any marketplace offers because that is what differentiates you from the mass amount of search results a consumer will be combing through.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Andrea Leigh, the VP of strategy and insights at Ideoclick. Andrea, welcome.Andrea:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on too. I was looking through your bio and I saw that you were at Amazon for almost a decade, and I'm sure you have some good juicy stories from that those 10 years.Andrea:I do. It was a wild, wild ride. I think when I started, I was employee 4,012 or something like that, and then when I left, 99.9% of the company had started working there after me, so I was literally a dinosaur. Yeah.Stephanie:Oh my gosh. That's amazing. So what were, high level, some of the things that you did at Amazon and are any of those things still relevant today?Andrea:Yeah, I think they're super relevant. I spent my entire career there working on their ecommerce business, and everything from the early days of helping launch their price matching software, the software they use to price-match other retailers. I worked on Harry Potter book launches back when print books were the only way to read books. We also had some things that we did with Oprah's Book Club. I worked on the launch of the grocery category on Amazon.com, and the Fulfilled by Amazon program there, helped launch the baby registry and built the baby category after Amazon severed ties with Babies R Us.Andrea:I was general manager for Amazon Fresh for a little while. At my last three years there, probably the most exciting, I moved onto our Canada business and I launched 15 product categories for Amazon Canada. I ran the Prime program up there, and then I also managed our transportation network. And that was probably my most exciting role because it was certainly cross functional. But I think the common thread is, and probably why I liked Canada so much in the later years was just, I really, really enjoy working with the manufacturer community.Andrea:I think that the process that they go through to really understand the customer, to build products, to address customer needs, and then to figure out how to connect consumers to the values that they've built in their products, I think is just really exciting, and figuring out how to do that online is even more exciting. Certainly, in the early years of Amazon, we spent a lot of time working with brand manufacturers and partnering with them because we weren't very big back then and we were really trying to get these categories built and to get customers shopping online for things besides books.Andrea:And I found that to be really enjoyable because every manufacturer has a unique set of challenges. It's like a puzzle to be and to collaborate on. And that's still what I get a chance to do today at Ideoclick and really, really enjoy that process of helping manufacturers solve those puzzles. And we certainly don't have all the answers, but I think it's a similar process to go through with each manufacturer to identify where they are on their ecommerce journey, and then help them figure out how they're going to build a sustainable business.Stephanie:That's awesome. So tell me a bit about Ideoclick. How did you think about creating Ideoclick? And what is it? What does it do? How does it help companies?Andrea:Yeah. We're an ecommerce optimization platform, and we're a hybrid of a software solution and a services organization. And my husband actually started Ideoclick about 13 years ago. We were both working at Amazon together at the time, he left and started Ideoclick and I stayed at Amazon for 10 more years. And I joined up with him about, it was probably like four or five years ago now, to help him run Ideoclick. And really, it came from the same place that I was talking about earlier, really wanting to work more closely with the manufacturers, help them figure out how to navigate Amazon.Andrea:As Amazon became bigger and bigger, not only did it become more important to the manufacturers' business, but it started to become a little unwieldily in terms of how to be successful, how to make sure your products stand out, and how to negotiate and operate. With such a big player, that's so unique and looks so different from brick and mortar, which is what most manufacturers have been really accustomed to for so many years. And so Ideoclick was really born out of that to help manufacturers navigate these waters. And we are a full service, white glove providers.Andrea:So we do everything from setting up the items in the digital catalog, writing content, running all of the automated advertising on Amazon, Walmart, Target and Instacart, and also going back and assisting with operations, managing the chargebacks and fees that the retailers often slap on the manufacturers and recovering some of those fees. So we're a full service agency, we're in a category called managed services.Stephanie:Got it. So what are some of the biggest maybe missteps that manufacturers or sellers are making on the platform where you're like, "I've got all these secrets from an exec at Amazon that I know how to prevent that or why you shouldn't be doing that." What kind of things are you preventing from happening when you're working with them?Andrea:Yeah. I think my answer would have been really different a couple of years ago, especially COVID impact on ecommerce. Amazon's not the only game in town anymore, and these other platforms, more specifically Walmart and Target, but if you look category by category, they're a becoming a really big player in each space, whether it's Wayfair for furniture, or Sephora and ULTA for beauty, or Chewy for pets, there's a player there that's starting to represent a sizeable portion of the business. So a couple of years ago, I would've said getting these Amazon foundational things right is the most important and it's the biggest misstep.Andrea:But I think now we would say not having a strategy across all of these eCom players is a real big misstep, and shooting from the hip, because I think we're in a world where these retailers are in fierce competition with one another, they're price-matching each other, they're very closely watching what one another is doing. And you don't want the customer to suffer as a result of that. And so having a strategy that does things like differentiating assortment or helps you figure out how you're going to allocate your ad budgets, now that all these platforms have ad platforms associated with them as well.Andrea:I think that shooting from the hip is probably the most common misstep that we see. But I think some of the same things still hold true from several years ago, which is just getting those foundational elements right. There's certainly little tricks you can do and little black hat tactics that will get you some more reviews real quick or help you get to the top of search. We don't focus on that stuff, it's not sustainable, most of it's against Amazon's policies. So it's really about making sure your products are in stock, making sure you have the correct information on your product pages, making sure that you've got resources internally within your organization to support ecommerce and to drive it, making sure that you have good SEO and you're making use of the ad platform in appropriate ways.Stephanie:So now that you just mentioned SEO, I do want to talk a bit about categories. I know that you've been on, maybe a brand or whatever it may be for a while around like, categories aren't the way forward anymore, and that you really need to optimize for search, just like you would anywhere else. So tell me a little bit about how ecommerce owners should think about that going forward. Why is Amazon not as focused on categories anymore? Or maybe the buyer's not focused there?Andrea:Yeah, I think it really starts with the customer, and the customer not being as focused on categories. I can tell a little story that might help illustrate it. We had a manufacturer come to us and say, "I'm like the number two or three bottled water brand in the world, and so I should be number two in my category on Amazon." And there are a number of reasons why that thinking is a little bit out of date or flawed. When a customer goes to Amazon and searches for bottled water, they don't just see bottled water, they see tea and electrolyte water and powdered electrolytes for water and ice, flavored water, and all kinds of things that are category adjacent. But they may also see things that are out of category.Andrea:Peanut butter is another great example. If you search peanut butter on Amazon, you're going to get some peanut butter, you're going to get peanut butter crackers, you're going to get peanut butter bars. And it's not because like Amazon is not thoughtful about deciding what to return in those search results, for example, they're returning those products because those are the products customers are buying. Their algorithms are very, very smart. And even from an advertising perspective, you can't win those ad slots unless there's a history of customers making that search and buying your product.Andrea:And so the concept of a brick and mortar category totally makes sense if a customer is going to a store, they're going down an aisle, they're presented with bottled water, they choose from what's available to them, and then they move on to shop at a different category. But eCom customers don't shop that way, the category is dynamic, it's continually evolving, shaped around that customer. And what they've specifically looked at when retailers are using automation and personalization. And so you can't really apply that same mental model to ecommerce. You have to really think about that entire competitive set.Andrea:And so that manufacturer who thought he should be number two or number three bottled water brand his competitors on Amazon, aren't just bottled water, as we stated, they're tea and they're electrolyte water and all kinds of other things. So his competitive set is different, but also because ecommerce platforms and more specifically, Amazon, has frictionless entry, so any manufacturer can sell on Amazon, the competitive set is going to look a lot different than in a brick and mortar store where you have like a buyer making assortment decisions.Andrea:So, whereas there might be five or 10 nationally recognized brands in a brick and mortar store and maybe a couple of local players and private label, on Amazon, there is a huge long tail of brands that are not nationally distributed, maybe only sell on Amazon so that competitive set looks entirely different. And I think that's a big misstep that manufacturers make, is applying that same mental model, trying to look at like market share and category and ranking category, versus moving their thinking to the ecommerce world where there's really no such thing as a category.Stephanie:Yeah. The only time I can see categories being helpful is if you're in the browsing mood where you're like, I'm going to be having a baby, and I just want to see, what do you buy for babies? So like if you're in that browsing mood, which maybe isn't always high intent to buy, more just kind of looking around and maybe you buy, or if it's a curated category, like here's the guest for Father's Day. I have found those helpful where I'm like, I don't know what to get my dad, and on the homepage, it's like, "Here's a whole... " Maybe it's not a category, but the whole curated collection, pick one and go.Andrea:And that's where I think some of these category specific players win over Amazon. They do encourage more browsing because they are curated assortment, because their browse and data are really clean, and it's a more enjoyable experience. But if yo did try to shop by category on Amazon, the data shows that more than 90% of customers just go and start searching, you would maybe not like what you found. It's an overwhelming experience, it's not curated in any way. And then the categorization data is bad because Amazon doesn't use it. They're building a search platform more than they are building a browse platform. And I do think these other eCom players, this is where they can win over Amazon, is they make the shopping experience more enjoyable, they encourage browse, and they curate the assortment.Stephanie:Yeah. We just had on a company called The Fascination. It was about discovering new D2C companies and being able to browse around. But once again, that's highly curated versus just going to a category and being like, "Whoa, let's see what's here today. Oh, there's like 1,000 things. No, thanks." So if we're in a search world now, where you need to optimize for that instead of just worrying about being the number two water bottle, showing up in the category, how should a brand be thinking about that? How do you optimize for search? Are you bidding on keywords? Do you have to use just Amazon platform? Or is it more of like a holistic approach of like, you got to have a good product, you have to have good reviews, and all encompassing?Andrea:Well, certainly it's a whole package deal. There's not like one thing that drives all of the success. But I do think that really understanding that customer and the process we go through at Ideoclick and manufacturers could go through a similar process on their own is we identify these customer search groups. Identify the customer that you're going after and the product that meets their needs. And then from there, what are all of the search terms that customer might search when they're looking for that product? And then bouncing that against if there's any search philosophy. Amazon publishes that data, so it's knowable to know if a search actually has any volume associated with it. And then that's your customer search group. And then we're able to measure progress on achieving placement in search on that customer search group relative to the competition. So the way that we're doing that is, in a brick and mortar world, this would be like market share.Andrea:Like you'd say, "What are my sales over the entire category sales?" And in ecommerce what we do is share of search search. So we say, "What are all of my positions within those first 20, 30 search results relative to the entire set?" And obviously, there's some weighting associated with that, because like if you're up on top, that's more valuable, drives more sales than if you're like down at the bottom or the customer has to scroll a lot on their phones. So measuring that share of search for your customer search group relative to the competition.Andrea:And it does a couple of things that I think are a lot better than a brick and mortar market share model. The first is it very quickly identifies who your competitors are. So if you didn't know which... Most manufacturers don't know who their Amazon competitors are, and that's because manufacturers, when they're checking on their products on Amazon, tend to search for their brand name. So of course you're going to get your products. But if you take a step back and instead of searching for your branded facial moisturizer, you search for face moisturizer, you're going to see an entirely different picture of who's turning up.Andrea:And so this allows you to really measure your percentage of that customer experience, essentially, going back to the customer. And in addition, it gives you more of an upstream look at what's about to happen. So market share is, it already happened, your sales occurred and now you're measuring as a percentage of a total. This allows you to affect what's going to happen in the future, so it's an upstream, maybe an input metric versus an output metric. And then lastly, the share of search is measuring like a finite amount of the first or second page, which is really, as far as the customer is typically going on like a basic search...Andrea:And that looks a lot different in terms of number of brands than what you might see in like a finite category on a brick and mortar shelf. So there may be more brands, more types of categories represented, and measuring that as the percentage of a customer experience really allows you to develop some advanced strategies against those competitors.Stephanie:Is Amazon providing the tools so you can see your share of search, or are you doing this for your customers? Or if I was by myself trying to be like, "Who are my competitors?" Would I be going through the first three pages and being like, "Here they are? How do I figure out that share of search?Andrea:Yeah, it's really tricky. So we have software that does it for us, and share a search is our proprietary offering that we provide to our clients. But it wouldn't be hard to do a very simplistic view of this, which is identify like five terms that you think matter for your product, run a search and count how many of the first page you have. It's not a difficult activity. To get more nuanced about it and track it over time and track all the competitors and all of that, obviously you need some software, but you can do a really simplistic look. And this is often what we do for a manufacturer who is considering working with us, we'll take a look, we'll do a quick share of search audit and do exactly that exercise.Andrea:What are the five terms that we think matter? How much of the page they have, and who else is showing up? And you can really quickly see how you fair relative to those competitors, not just in the position of search, but like how many reviews do you have versus the competition? What's your star rating? What's your price point look like? What is your packaging look like? It's a very fast view of how you compare in this marketplace. And there are some really aggressive brands out there. We have clients that come to us and they say, "I'm private equity backed, I am a new go-to-market brand," no one has ever heard of them, "I have no distribution, and I want to get distribution in Costco next year, in a year. What is your plan for me?"Andrea:And we have a program for that. It involves a really, really large marketing investment. But but that's what these traditional manufacturers are up against, are these really upstart brands that are doing pure play Amazon and really trying to make a presence for themselves. And while they feel like ankle biters when you're just looking at the Amazon search results, next year when they are in Costco, they're no longer ankle biters.Stephanie:Yeah. Which is what's great about it. How do you think about when someone comes to you and says they want to be in Costco... I mean, I've read amazing articles about how Costco will make sure that your product... Like their product always has to be slightly better, but they'll also still work with you to make sure that your yours is selling as well. So one example was like Starbucks. They made sure that their coffee, Costco brand, Kirkland brand was a little bit better than Starbucks based off whatever criteria, but then they also made sure that Starbucks was also being sold, or whatever the brand name was, in a way that it wasn't cannibalizing.Stephanie:But Amazon feels a little bit different when they come out with white label versions of things. You see that, and you're like, "Oh crap. There goes my products."Andrea:Look out.Stephanie:Yeah. That's the one thing that I think sellers are scared of now, is Amazon just copying you? How do you deal with them?Andrea:Well, I think you touched on a couple of things. The first is the beauty of a value-added retailer like Costco for a manufacturer. In that model, in the value-added retailer model, the retailer takes responsibility for the inventory, for the promotion, for making sure it sells, for the profitability, for curation, deciding what the product should be. All of that happens on the retailer side. And that's true across traditional retail, whether you're talking about an ULTA or a Nordstrom or whomever, they own that responsibility. In marketplaces, the responsibility is all shifted back to the manufacturer, so they decide what assortment they're going to carry, they decide how they're going to price it, they have to promote it and market it. And it's a really different model.Andrea:So I think that's one interesting thing about what you were talking about, is that Costco does that. And when retailers complain about Amazon or say how much of their business Amazon's stealing, I think it's important to remember they're there to lean into their strengths, which is providing this value add for these manufacturers and reducing a lot of that burden, and usually, producing a higher profit margin for that manufacturer because they don't have to take on all of that work themselves. On the private label front, it's really interesting what Amazon's doing there. Some of the categories like consumables are getting up to about 10% of the sales being Amazon private label, which is really... And fashion, I think, was maybe even higher than that.Andrea:As a part of Amazon's antitrust hearings, they had to release that data and you have to dig around to find it, but it shares the percentage of each category sales that are driven by Amazon private label. It's really interesting. And manufacturers will often come to us and they'll say, "Oh my gosh, my life is over. Amazon just launched a private label in my category." But I think really, it's an opportunity for the manufacturer to really be more on their toes. And a great example of that is, if you take a look at Amazon Basics, they have a luggage spinner. And if you search luggage spinner, suitcase, or whatever, you see Amazon Basics and you see Samsonite and a bunch of others.Andrea:And the Basics, it's like a third of the price and it looks just the same. And I think what's really interesting here is that Samsonite has an opportunity. If you actually click through to the product pages, you still can't really see a difference. But as a part of an article I was writing, I then went to the Samsonite manufacturer site and actually specked out what's really different about it, and there were enormous differences. It was like a TSA compatible lock, it had all of these extra features that weren't even coming through on the product page, that certainly weren't coming through in the title and the search results and the hero image.Andrea:And so I think Amazon is going to usually come in at this lower price point and this more value driven offering. And for these manufacturers who have better bells and whistles on their products, talk about them. I mean, it's classic differentiation stuff, just the way you differentiate looks a lot different in an ecommerce marketplace. Like you have to do it through the images and you have to make sure that the bullet points really display that, you have to have a title that calls out something about the feature that's really unique. I do think Amazon's seeing a lot of success with their private label because they are able to leverage their own platform and they know it best.Andrea:But through share of search, we've also identified enormous holes in their strategy from a marketing perspective, like entire categories of keywords they aren't bidding on, and then you can get really granular and really go after those holes that Amazon's left wide open. And I think it's because I think the reason Amazon has those holes is they're using an algorithm to drive their private label. It's not people back there saying, "Okay, we got to bid on these five keywords. These are the ones that matter, and here are the features that everyone cares about." And then I think if you don't have a point of differentiation against Amazon's private label, it's time to take a real hard look at your product, because if it's that copyable, it's not just Amazon private label that can copy it.Andrea:But also, if you often look at the differences between the top selling product in the category... Soup's a great example, you can search chicken noodle soup on Amazon, and Amazon has totally innovated the packaging and the format of the product to address all of the customer complaints. Canned soup is terrible online, it dents. No one really likes to eat anything out of a can anyway. So Campbell Soup showing the can traditional format, you look at Amazon's chicken noodle soup, it comes in a reclosable box, which is one of the top complaints in the reviews about the Campbell Soup, which is like, "I can only eat half of it. And then what do I do with it?"Andrea:It ships in its own container, so they're all nicely tightly packaged into a box so it doesn't dent or get damaged in the shipping. It's way more profitable for both the retailer and the manufacturer. So I think there are some areas where Amazon's really innovated on the behalf of the customer and it should be keeping manufacturers on their toes.Stephanie:Yeah. That's such a great point. So many things to unravel there, thinking about, you need to be different and leaning into your differences. And the whole point of having a product is to have a great story and showcase your features and don't get complacent. I love that. I could see even being able to look through the data and find opportunities, just like Amazon is, of like going through reviews and seeing what is someone complaining about? Oh, so many people keep talking about this, creating a whole spin off product, I guess Amazon could do the same, but it seems like there's a lot of opportunity in the data that's already there too.Andrea:There is. And I think this is one area that large established CPGs really struggle, and it's because they have so many brands and they carry so many products. If you're a nutrition bar and you only have 20 items on Amazon and you're growing really fast, it's really easy for you to look through the reviews on your 20 items and come to develop some insights and say, "Okay five people are complaining that they think it's a little bit too sweet, or 10 don't like the sugar content," or whatever. And you can re adjust your product in your next product development cycle. But if you're a large established CPG working across so many brands, so many different categories, I did my air quotes there.Andrea:But if you're a large established consumer brand, maybe you've got 1,500, 2,500, 5,000 items, there's no scalable way to do that right now. And I think that's an excellent business opportunity for someone to get into, which is like really analyzing some of that consumer feedback. I actually just had an MBA student from Northwestern reach out to me through a connection wanting to talk about like that very business idea. She's like, "What about all the customer reviews? Who's got data, that's mining that?" And I'm like, "No one." There are some players out there like Reviewbox and I think Profitero, and maybe even Salsify to some degree that allow you to access them, because Amazon doesn't even provide them, you have to just look at them, and develop some basic insights and maybe some word clouds and things like that.Andrea:But there's so much more to be gained from those reviews that would really help inform product development.Stephanie:We've even heard from so many of our guests talking about the long tail reviews or where the insights are. I think we had someone from HP and then Stitch Fix, of course, talking about like, that's the ones that you need to dive into to see... If someone's providing paragraphs of data to tell you how to make your product better, you better be looking at that and seeing, are enough people saying that? To pivot whatever product you're working on.Andrea:Yeah. You really need some natural language processing technology to really make the most of those reviews. But either Amazon has it or they're just really good at it, because if you look at... I could give so many examples of this, but if you search short-sleeve wrap dress, they have an Amazon Basics, it's a top seller, I even have it. It's a great dress.Stephanie:How did they stick that one up?Andrea:And relative to like the top three other results, I mean, you go through the negatives on the other top three results, and it's like, "It's too short, so it's not work appropriate. It doesn't wrap enough to be able to sit down in it well enough at work. It doesn't come and extended sizes." Those were the top three complaints. And Amazons comes out with an offering that's more conservative, slightly longer, comes in extended size. It immediately just addressed all of the things, all of the negative reviews about the other top three sellers. They've either got something that's helping them do that, or they're just really good at it.Stephanie:Yeah. But I think that also just plays to the point of needing to be diversified and beyond all the platforms. I look at Walmart right now and so many influencers are showing me stuff from Walmart, I'm just even thinking... I've bought rugs in the past month, I bought an egg chair from Walmart, all because these influencers are talking about stuff at Walmart, which also I think has increased quality a lot, and they are becoming a larger player. Maybe their tech and backend still needs a little bit of work and out of stock issues and all that, but I do see them coming up strong. Target also. How do you advise the companies you work with to think about all the platforms and be on all of them and optimize for each one in a unique way?Andrea:Yeah. And I think that's really the million-dollar question, because up until a couple of years ago, those other eCom platforms didn't really matter as much, up until last year, they didn't even have ad platforms. The world is moving and changing so quickly. I actually was just giving an internal speech right before this to our employee base and I was like, "Retail, if you really go back, is meant to be a really simple business. It's, a manufacturer has a product, they sell it to the retailer, and the retailer resells it." And the people who grew up with that model, it's relatively uncomplex or simple process. But if you just look at what's happened over the last five years, even five years ago, you had to be advertising on Amazon and search engines like Google and maybe even Facebook at that time.Andrea:Now, there's social live streaming, there's social media networks, and you have retailer ad platforms. The level of complexity that these manufacturers are faced with right now, and if you think about the ones who lived through all of this, they weren't attracted to this field because it was a technology field, they were attracted to this field because it was really based in sales and product. And so the level of complexity that they are faced with is an enormous. And I was in a share group the other day where a manufacturer called the...Andrea:In our space, we're like the service providers, it's super fragmented, it's a ton of point solutions that help these manufacturers be successful across all these different platforms. He called it a Frankenstein, and this company that was presenting at the share group was working with 35 different service providers from data and analytics to execution, to strategy and execution and strategies, where we set to operations and EDI and inventory management, and how do you allocate inventory across all these platforms. So there's certainly no perfect answer to how do you think across the different eCom platforms, but I do think it's important to really think about, where's your customer?Andrea:Is your customer shopping on Walmart, Target and Amazon? And most of them are because most of them are cross shopping. Where else is your customer shopping? What category specific players should be really important to you? And then where are you most profitable? And where can you get a good ROI? And what platform do you use for what? For Target, it's a little bit more about that curated assortment being on trend with merchandise and being associated with, Target gives your brand a little bit of a boost.Andrea:Walmart stands more for value, Amazon is about assortment, and obviously, price and all of that, but I think really aligning yourself with the marketplaces that are core to your brand's identity feels really important. So the customer, what's consistent with your brand, and then in terms of the investments to make across them. A lot of the fundamentals are pretty similar, so that's good, you have to have those, you have to be retail ready. And the ad platforms are similar, but different in very important ways. And so I think when you think about how to allocate those investments, then it really comes down to profit and what you're trying to accomplish, if it's awareness, if it's maintaining your position in the market, whatever it is.Stephanie:Yeah. I always think about the opportunity that exists for manufacturers of creating a piece of tech that allows them to plug in all the inputs that they have to deal with, even when I'm having companies come on and say, "Oh, we feature D2C companies on our website and they have a backend place to log on." And like, okay, that's one place. Then they're on Amazon and then they're on Walmart, and they're trying to figure out their own inventory stuff. There's so much stuff for them to keep track of that it feels like there's no unifying source right now for them to be able to get a holistic picture of their company as a whole.Andrea:In fact, I got this urgent call yesterday from this guy, this colleague of mine that I've worked with in the past, and he's teaching a course at Harvard right now called The Future Of Work in one of the courses. And he called me yesterday, he's like, "Okay, I'm preparing for this thing, I'm making a deck, I'm showing this crazy environment that we're in with all these providers and all these different things that these manufacturers have to keep track of." He's like, "Who are the service providers who can help them unify it?" And I was like, "There aren't any. It's not because you didn't look hard enough, it doesn't exist."Stephanie:I always think like, "Who is out there?" I even asked an exec, I'm like, "What do you do?" And they're like, "Oh, it's just hard." I'm like, "Someone needs to solve this."Andrea:Someone needs to solve it. It would be a really big job, but even just take like logistics like 3PLs. So you can outsource your warehousing and your purchase order fulfillment either direct to customer or to retailers to a three PL. I just did this as a part of an industry trends report. There are tons of 3PLs 70 some percent of them have fewer than five customers each. So it is a super fragmented industry. It's so fragmented in fact that the new trend is a 4PL. And a 4PL is a broker that helps you manage all your 3PLs.Stephanie:I have not heard about that yet.Andrea:Isn't that crazy? That's like a new cottage industry, is 4PLs, and that's the broker that helps you manage across the other PLs, I guess the other 3PLs. And that's just in logistics. So it's a really challenging space and I think what ends up happening, the ones that end up suffering... Right now, I think the manufacturers are suffering because all of this complexity deteriorates their profit margins. And then they also have to advertise on the reseller platforms now too, which is new, and pay and pay for that. But I think in the future, eventually, if no one figures this out, the customer's going to have to pay for it because the prices are going to go up.Andrea:The manufacturers can't shift from 5% of their business online to 50% of their business online, which is a much lower margin business for them and not raise their product costs. I just don't see how that happens. So hopefully, someone will figure it out.Stephanie:Yeah. Do you see any manufacturers doing it well right now where you're like, "Oh, I just talk with someone and they are doing it this way," that seems like it's streamlining at least a piece of the process. It might not be all of it, but any stories there that highlight someone doing something really good?Andrea:I think there are a few folks who are doing a really nice job designing for online. So that's first and foremost, make the packaging and products such that it's low weight and it ships economically, because that's number one. If you can't do that, if you're trying to still try to sell dry bags of conventional dog food or cat litter online, you have no future in that. And so we've certainly seen like Clorox do some really interesting things in the litter space, Purina36:10 they're doing lightweight litter. There's some great examples of companies designing for online.Andrea:So, how do you build a sustainably ecommerce business? Well, make sure that it can ship well or the retailers aren't going to want it, and you don't have a future in it. So I think there's some good examples of that. Clorox is also doing, they did a green works product a while back that instead of selling three bottles of spray cleaner, there's one bottle with two tiny concentrate refills, so it's less water, it's less waste, it's more sustainable packaging. I'm certainly seeing some really cool stuff from some upstart brands. There's one called Ethique, which does shampoo and conditioner bars.Andrea:That's, again, less weight, ships really well, online store as well, it doesn't leak. And then we're certainly seeing a lot with Liquid I.V. and all of the electrolyte powder drinks. So moving from selling it as a bottle that has water in it that you can't ship to powder. So some interesting stuff on designing for online. I think there are some companies who do a really nice job like aligning their org structures to support ecommerce. I think some good examples of that would probably be, L'Oreal does a really nice job there, P&G has a pretty solid and smart eCom department.Andrea:There are a few CPGs who do a really good job there. And then I think the one that everyone seems to struggle with those logistics, especially the larger CPGs, they're built to scale products and ship truckloads and not necessarily fill direct customer orders or ship like super small quantities to all these little Amazon warehouses. So I think logistics is really been hard on the CPG industry, ecommerce logistics.Stephanie:Yeah. I only see it getting harder and worse. I'm thinking about my interview with Domm from Fast, and him talking about one click checkout where they'll batch the orders on the backend for you buy, buy, buy all in separate transactions, but that's still also encouraging one-off orders that maybe you wouldn't have had otherwise that maybe brands aren't used to, someone just coming in and buying one shampoo or something because normally they have limits. So I only see it getting more difficult as technology gets better and they figure out how to make things easier to buy, it just makes it harder logistically.Andrea:Yeah. And I'm starting to see, I just feel like ecommerce retailers have gone I've really come a long way on this in the last couple of years probably to compete with Amazon, but I can't remember which retailer said, he was Wayfair, I was shopping on the other day. And they suggest that, they're like, "Batch my orders, you can select it. It's like defaults to batch my orders, so they all show up on one day or you can check the other boxes, no ship them each as they become available. And Amazon has been also doing that because in ecommerce, at least on the Amazon, the average order's one.Stephanie:Yeah. And I think that's what Domm said that Amazon's been doing this for a long time, it's that most ecommerce companies aren't doing that. So that's why on Amazon, you can always go and hit, buy now, buy now, buy now, and you don't even think.Andrea:And they'll try and batch it.Stephanie:They'll try and figure it out, but you don't even have to worry about a cart anymore. And that seems to be the way of the future, but I'm just thinking about these smaller brands who are trying to, up and coming, trying to get their foothold and then be like, "Oh my gosh, customers are expecting to be able to just hit, click buy for one thing, and I wasn't prepared for that."Andrea:I think we're going to continue to see... We'll certainly continue to see Amazon grow, they had an amazing quarter, but also I think we'll continue to see customers really being less loyal. And I think that because these other retailers are really upping their game. And if you look at, there was a study that came out that showed the top reseller app downloads in 2020, Walmart was right there under Amazon. And granted Amazon is a huge in-store base, so we need to take it with a grain of salt. Wayfair was on there, Wish, all these other retailers.Andrea:And so I think the pandemic has forced us all to shop more online, but also due to product availability, shop more across retailers. And as a result, we have discovered that the shopping experiences on some of these other retailers sites are more favorable to the types of products we're looking for. Maybe even more fun or more curated or whatever it is that you're looking for, and I think the retailers are starting to figure out how to be more efficient with batching orders or, remember when you used to have to go get your credit card every time you placed an order online?Andrea:They're all saving it now, I mean, stuff that we take for granted because Amazon set a really high bar. Stephanie:Yep. I love that. I know we don't have a ton of time, so I want a quick touch on Bezos. I know he just recently stepped down as CEO from Amazon, so I want to hear your hot take on what does that look like for Amazon of the future? How do you see that changing things?Andrea:Yeah. Well, first I should probably say, I don't know, Jeff personally, and I don't have any inside information. I've been gone from Amazon for five or six years now, but I do think if I were him and knowing what I know about him as the fearless leader, he's an inventor, that's what he's really good at, he's really good at inventing and disrupting industries and inventing on behalf of the customer experience. And when I look at what he has really had to focus his energy on the last couple of years, even pre-COVID, you had the antitrust investigation, they were under intense scrutiny for their treatment of their warehouse workers, counterfeits on the site and fake reviews, labor unionization efforts, here in Seattle, they've been under just a ton of intense pressure for contributing significantly to local elections.Andrea:Our local government put in place a headcount tax just to stick it to Amazon. And it's been really intense here, and also a lot of discussion about their role in increasing housing prices and driving the Seattle's homelessness epidemic. The stuff that he's had to deal with, a super public divorce, all of that stuff. And then you layer in COVID and all of the operational complexity of that that he had to deal with, nothing in there is inventing. And if I were him, I would not only be exhausted because I think the best way to exhaust an inventor is to tax them with a bunch of drama.Andrea:And so if I were him, I would be exhausted, and I'd be really bored, there's no inventing in there anywhere. They've made some really interesting inventions, I guess, disruptions more, I think of them less as inventions, more of disruptions as it relates to transportation. And in the earnings call yesterday, they said half of their packages now are being delivered by their own fleet. Incredible. They are a huge transportation company now, and they'll probably license that out and just walk out, but there's not a lot of inventing happening now, it's all about scaling, managing under scrutiny and really going head to head against some super fierce competition for ad dollars and for customers.Andrea:And so if I were Jeff, I'd be looking at the future and I would just be like, "Not interested, if I were an inventor and I was Jeff. So I think that speaks to why he would step down, I think timing it with going out on the high note with the Q4 earnings being just astoundingly positive probably makes sense. It's interesting, I don't know a lot about Jassy, but I think he was the CEO of AWS for a very long time and he's really good at scaling a business and scaling a business against adversity or fierce competition. If you look at what they are up against with Microsoft, and I think they even like filed a lawsuit against for an RFP that they didn't feel like was handled correctly, he really has gone head to head.Andrea:And I think that that's maybe signaling that Amazon's going to be a bit more about scaling and more about competing and a little bit less about inventing going forward, which maybe that's the stage that they're in.Stephanie:Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, with a couple of minutes left, we have a quick lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask a question, but this time, you only have 30 seconds or less. Usually I get people a minute, but you're so quick, I'm like, you can't have a minute. You get 30 seconds.Andrea:I'll do my best.Stephanie:All right. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Andrea:I'm going to go logistics. I think the ability for other retailers and D2C to prevail against Amazon or compete effectively with Amazon, is going to be their ability to ship fast and for us to see some consolidation and maturity in that industry.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. If you were to have a podcast, which you're about to, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Andrea:Our podcast that we're going to have is Melissa Burdick of Pacvue, who is a competing agency for us in the ecommerce advertising space, and myself. And we're going to be doing a hot take on ecommerce current events. And my job as VP of strategy is all about staying current on ecommerce trends and news. And it's even hard for me to keep up, there's so much happening right now. And so we wanted to really try to provide a value to the manufacturer community of helping keep them current and tell them what they need to know. And then more importantly, tell them what we think it means for them.Stephanie:I love that. I can't wait to listen. What's up next on your reading list?Andrea:On my reading list, oh gosh. Well, I guess on my reading list is a lot of research because I'm trying to write a book about eCom.Stephanie:You're a busy lady.Andrea:I'm a busy lady. I'm trying to write a book about ecommerce and really transitioning our thinking beyond that physical aisle, kind of some of the things that we talked about today. So a lot of my research right now is reading some other pieces of thought leadership around that. And in fact, on my immediate reading list is I need to read a case about Unilever for my class with Harvard on Friday morning, and it's all about Unilever and how they have successfully transitioned to an ecommerce framework and mindset.Stephanie:Oh, I could come to your class too, that sounds good. Awesome. And then the last one, one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Andrea:I don't understand, well, I think a couple of areas, one is that as a manufacturer thinking about when is the right time to invest in the most forward-thinking ecommerce technology, which in my mind right now is live streaming. And I don't know a lot about live streaming, I'm learning more about it, I'm certainly watching some of it and trying to participate in it. So nascent here in the United States, but in China, it is incredibly powerful. And in this Harvard class, they had a woman who's a super influencer in China comes to the class and she live-streamed in the class and she was selling Harvard t-shirts, and I think she sold, I don't want to say like hundreds or thousands in a minute.Andrea:It was insane. And then they projected what was on her phone to the screen and we got to see it. And it really blew my mind that we're in such a different place as it relates to ecommerce. So I don't understand it super well, and I want to understand more of it so we can do a better job of helping our brands transition.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a really good one. Definitely one I don't fully understand either, but I know it's very different market there, so maybe people shop differently, but any insights, bring in my way, because I don't get it either. Cool. Well, Andrea, it's been a blast having you on, I hope we can bring you back for round two in the future because I feel like I could probably keep going on for an extra hour if I didn't have a meeting in a couple of minutes, but where can people find out more about you and Ideoclick?Andrea:You can follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter, you can visit my website at Andreakleighconsulting.com. I write and speak and post very frequently about ecommerce. And you can find Ideoclick at Ideoclick.com.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much for joining us. It was a blast.Andrea:Thank you. Thanks for having me.

A few years ago, Annie thought it'd be fun to do yearbook-style posed photos of dogs graduating from classes at School For The Dogs. She mentioned the idea to a few photographers and they all gave her blank stares. Then, she was scrolling through Instagram and she found a photographer whose entire feed was... posed, yearbook-style photos of dogs. Annie got in touch with the person behind the account: Andrea Castanon. Andrea was working as a professional photo retoucher and during her downtime was making these hilarious photoshopped portraits of her friends' dogs for fun, and to raise money for rescue organizations. Annie invited her to hold some shoots at School For The Dogs. Two years later, Andrea -- whose company, BowieShoots, is named for her own rescue dog -- has shot hundreds of dogs (and even some other types of pets as well) all over the country, delighting their owners with her backgrounds and knack for catching doggie smiles. While she has had to stop shooting dogs in person during the COVID-19 crisis, she tells Annie about the creative way she has both been able to continue her business and help adoptable dogs find homes during quarantine. BowieShoots Bowie Shoots Instagram Social Tees Animal Rescue Train Your Dog Without Pain, Using Your Brain" Sticker School For The Dogs Partial Transcript: Annie: Hey everyone. I am here today with a wonderful photographer whose name is Andrea Castanon. You might know her by her business's name. Her business is called Bowie Shoots. Bowie is the name of her rescue dog. Andrea, it is so good to see you. Andrea: You too. Didn't know the next time would be virtual. Annie: I know, I know. So I am so excited to be talking to you. Well I, Andrea, I would really love to talk to you about how you got into doing what you do. And then I want to talk about how you're working currently, which I think is really interesting. But... Andrea: Yeah, all involved. Annie: It's so, it's so cool. It's so cool. You’re a hero to me. But I want to maybe just describe how you came into my life or how you came to School from the Dogs from my perspective. So for years we have had this, kind of like, school theme to School for the Dogs, kind of, playful sort of retro, like decorations and just a vibe and theme of, like, old school way to put it. Like if you have, I'm trying to think of like how I would describe it to someone who doesn't know about us or hasn't been to our studio, like just old chalkboards but also photos that are, kind of like, a retro throwback to school days, as you know, adults today might've experienced school in like a fun, playful way. And so years and years ago, I think, even before we opened up our first storefront location, we got a big like laser photo background made and we started having our graduates pose in front of this laser background photo, like kind of, something like from the nineties. And we were always just like doing it with our cell phones and it was never like it was particularly literally thought out. But it was kind of like just a fun, silly thing that we did. And I kept thinking like, we should go farther with this. It would be cool to, like, actually have more sort of styled like school photo kind of photos that we could take of graduates or puppies or whatever just to kind of go with this theme. And I couldn't really figure out like, just like how to make that happen... Full Transcript at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts

Andrea Thompson, LMT, has been a licensed and practicing massage therapist in Oregon. Her passion is utilizing modalities, such as Craniosacral Therapy and Arvigo Techniques of Mayan Abdominal Therapy ®, to  bring a deep sense of awareness to the body while tapping into its inherent healing capabilities. Although she enjoys working with all ages and genders, her main focus is working with female-bodied people to assist them in the process of attaining healthy menses and natural conception, as well as aiding them through the physical changes of pregnancy.   Today’s episode is sponsored by The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. The Fifth Vital Sign is available for purchase on Amazon, and you can head over to thefifthvitalsignbook.com to download the first chapter for free.  Topics discussed in today's episode: The benefits of massage therapy and body work modalities for a woman’s fertility How body awareness can change your health and mindset What is Craniosacral Therapy? How can vaginal steaming help with your menses? Castor oil pack benefits The importance of having your cervix and uterus aligned Why having a healthy and clean womb not only helps with fertility and your menstrual cycle, but also helps your baby in the long run How pregnancy massages and prenatal yoga are beneficial to your ever changing body How body work can be healing for women (or any individual) who has been through trauma, whether physical or emotional Connect with Andrea: You can connect with Andrea on Facebook and on her website.   Resources mentioned Andrea Thompson, LMT - AJA Family Health Fertility Awareness Mastery - 10 Week Group Program The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility (Book) | Lisa Hendrickson-Jack Get The First chapter of The Fifth Vital Sign for FREE | thefifthvitalsignbook.com Related podcasts & blog posts: FFP 202 | Vaginal Steaming for Period Problems | Steamy Chick | Keli Garza FFP 198 | The Balance Plan for Healthy Cycles | Angelique Panagos P 191 | Cervical Health & Fertility Awareness Charting | Lisa | Fertility Friday FFP 173 | Reclaiming Menstruation | The Wisdom and Power of Your Menstrual Cycle | Lara Owen FFP 018 | Arvigo Abdominal Therapy | Vaginal Steaming | Traditional Maya healing for Fertility and Menstrual Cycle Irregularities| Dr Rosita Arvigo FFP 050 | Journeys in Healing | Arvigo® Therapy for Fertility and Pregnancy | Donna Zubrod & Diane MacDonald FFP 067 | Healthy Menstruation | Fertility Awareness | Fertility Massage Therapy | Rachel Eyre FFP 071 | Connecting With the Wisdom of Your Menstrual Cycle | Fertility Massage Therapy | Clare Blake FFP 201 | Pelvic Floor Alchemy | Isa Herrera Join the community! Find us in the Fertility Friday Facebook Group. Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast in Apple Podcasts! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by J-Gantic A Special Thank You to Our Show Sponsor: The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility This episode is sponsored by my new book The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility. Click here to buy now. Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Mastery Live Group Program This episode is sponsored by my 10 Week Fertility Awareness Mastery Group Program! Master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles and how they relate to your overall health! Click here to apply now!

This weird world/ Uber is a weird thing/ An Uber co-pilot/ Randy wakes up seething/ A quaking/ Old Spice and Apathy/ The Panty Man/ a sweet little pervert package/ counting his panties/ The first live show/ “How check that”/ How long until girls start getting plastic surgery to look like their favorite Snapchat filters?/ Who Wants to Be a Snapchat? - the game show/ a Hello Kitty neck tattoo/ A masters in the selfie/ Have some selfie steem/ You can’t send a double message/ It’s like trying to reheat fries/ All the inside jokes/ Getting the ribs for a very long time/ World’s Biggest Scrublord/ Flashback to college/ The College Tale of Thin Lizzy/ The Disaster of the Live Show/ Tommy’s injured ankle/ “Come meet my stepfather backhand, it’s about time”/ Andrea/ “You’re not Howard Stern, buddy.”/ Horny goat weed/ A call in from TRB from “Welcome to Rantyville”/ Tommy is a sofa/ Epic Fail Guys/ David the Producer from The Unwritable Rant calls in/ Tommy’s got a show coming up in Chicago/ David’s baritone voice and karaoke choice/ bad water, bad Internet, bad podcast/ Bert Kreischer on The Unwritable Rant/ Bert is responsible/ Tommy almost fell out of a 20 story window one time/ We invite Juliette Miranda and David the Producer onto Episode 200/ The man with the boll weevil face/ carved from meatloaf/ Nick from Epic Film Guys hates our framerate/ Missed Connections/ Seeking a woman to have a baby with on Craigslist/ “He’ll email you sex back”/ “You’re a 110% beautiful!”/ Buzz balls/ We’re the Titanic and we hit the iceberg/ Randy retires   Visit the Patreon page at Patreon.com/MiserableRetailSlave and get access to exclusive content! Call The Miserable Hotline!!! (810) 328-3826 "LIKE" us on the Facebook, would ya? Even better, come join our closed Facebook crew and enjoy the insanity. Just search “Miserable Retail Slave” on the Facebook! Leave us a 5-star, positive iTunes review...that would be so kind of you! Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miserableretailslavepodcast Follow Randy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mretailslave Intro: “Hard Times” by Dan “D-Boy” Amboy Check out his music: https://soundcloud.com/dan-amboy You should most definitely subscribe to the show if you dig what you hear: If you like that iTunes, point your Internet right here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/miserable-retail-slave/id527775275?mt=2 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/miserable-retail-slave If you enjoy grabbing your pods using something else: http://miserableretailslave.libsyn.com/rss (Episode 189)

Andrea is a Natural Foods Chef, an author, and a television host dedicated to alternative healing and green, sustainable living.  Andrea was a featured contestant on Bravo’s hit reality TV show, Top Chef.  She is a regularly featured food and health expert on CBS News and has appeared on Barbara Walters, The View, Emeril Live and Whole Living on Martha Stewart Radio.  She is also the host of the Award Nominated Fed UP! A cooking show that educates guests and viewers on how to cook for, and cure, bodily ailments. Andrea is also the author of The Whole Truth - How I Naturally Reclaimed My Health and You Can Too!, The Whole Truth - Eating and Recipe Guide, Health is Wealth – Make a Delicious Investment in You! And her newest book, Happy Healthy Thyroid - The Essential Steps to Healing Naturally is coming out this fall. In today’s show, we talk about thyroid health, how thyroid health relates to fertility, and the ways thyroid conditions can be healed naturally through nutrition and dietary changes. Topics discussed in today's episode Why is proper thyroid function so important for health and fertility? What role does the thyroid play in the body? How is thyroid health connected with the health of the endocrine system and the adrenals? What role does stress play in the thyroid, the endocrine system and the adrenals? What are some of the ways we can reduce stress by activating our parasympathetic nervous system? What role does diet play in thyroid health? How does thyroid disease negatively impact a woman's fertility? Is it possible to heal thyroid disease naturally through dietary changes and deep nutrition? What role do traditional foods such as organ meats and bone broths play in healing the thyroid? How does gluten impact the thyroid? Connect with Andrea You can connect with Andrea on her Website, on Facebook, and on Twitter! Resources mentioned Andrea Beaman | andreabeaman.com The Whole Truth - How I Naturally Reclaimed My Health and You Can Too! | Andrea Beaman The Whole Truth - Eating and Recipe Guide, Health is Wealth – Make a Delicious Investment in You! | Andrea Beaman Health is Wealth – Make a Delicious Investment in You!| Andrea Beaman The Red Tent | Anita Diamant Join the community! Find us on the Fertility Friday Facebook Fan Page Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast on iTunes! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by Sirc of (The Nock)