Podcasts about B8ta

ITビジネスメディア「CNET Japan」に掲載された記事について、担当記者に取材の裏話などを聞いていく音声番組「CNET Japanのニュースの裏側」。今回ピックアップした記事はこちら。 ●b8ta、関西に初の常設店--「売らない小売」が阪急うめだ本店に出店する理由 https://japan.cnet.com/article/35203379/ 【トーク内容】 ・b8taが大阪の阪急うめだ本店に常設店を出店 ・b8taのこれまで振り返り ・発表の概要 ・取り組みのポイント ・大阪どうだった？ 【毎週水曜日と金曜日に更新】

第210回放送。 ▼流行りモノ通信簿（#ハヤツウ）ではみなさまからのおたよりを募集しております。WEB｜https://kohehone.com/ MAIL｜hayarimonopc@gmail.com Twitter｜@hayatsu_podcast

Episode Notes:Solana Spaces founder and CEO Vibhu Norby sits down with Brian Friel to talk about creating crypto's first interactive retail experience that aims to onboard the next wave of users to web3.Show Notes:Brian Friel (00:06):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist. The show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers for pushing the Web3 space. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Vibhu Norby. Vibhu is The founder and CEO of Solana Spaces. The first in real life crypto retail experience. Vibhu, welcome to the show.Vibhu Norby (00:27):Thanks Brian.Brian Friel (00:28):Real excited to talk to you today. I think of all our guests, you have some of the most unique backgrounds of somebody who's now full-time in crypto. If you don't mind, could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your journey to what is now launching Solana Spaces?Vibhu Norby (00:41):Yeah, I definitely do. Our team is a different type of team from what you mostly see. I used to be a respectable tech entrepreneur raising VC from tier one firms and building cool companies, writing code for Google. And then sometime over the last two years, like everybody else, I became a degenerate crypto guy. Pretty much my whole life, I have been writing code since I was a kid, and my first job was at Roblox. Funnily enough, I built their collectable system back in 2009.Brian Friel (01:08):Wow.Vibhu Norby (01:08):This was a long time ago.Brian Friel (01:09):Sneak peak to NFTs.Vibhu Norby (01:11):Yeah. I worked at MySpace. My big break came when I joined a startup called Nest, which was the smart learning thermostat company that Google acquired while I was there, and I was still writing code there, but I kind of got interested in what we were doing with retail. I got exposed to a couple of projects that the company Google was doing to build out an experience inside a Best Buy and Target an Apple stores and so on. And I fell in love with the idea of building a physical store for hardware products.Vibhu Norby (01:43):So I left Google with a bunch of other people, and directly prior to Solana Spaces for seven years, I built this national retail chain called B8ta. We opened stores all over the country. Japan, Middle East, at some point we owned Toys R Us for a good six months, which was a very interesting project.Vibhu Norby (02:00):And then a lot of people during Covid started getting interested in crypto. First Ethereum and then Solana, and at some point B8ta, this was a physical retailer that was super affected by Covid. So I started thinking about what I want to do next and I was pretty convinced that I want to get into this space. And I tossed around a bunch of software ideas. I'm not really, by my nature, a physical retail person, but by chance, met Raj in November last year. Although we had talked a long time prior to that, at that moment we connected around building a IRL Solana store. Both thought it was an interesting enough and weird idea that had a very small chance of being important, and those are kind of the best ideas to build. So between November and March we figured out a deal with the Solana Foundation and created Solana Spaces.Brian Friel (02:53):That's awesome. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you guys are already live in New York. You're planning a store in Miami, is that correct?Vibhu Norby (03:00):Yeah. We opened Solana Spaces at Hudson Yards at the end of July and that was our first store, and the next location opens the first or second week of October in Miami. And these are two very different spaces. The first one is a 1500 square foot retail space, very much a store in a major shopping mall. The location in Miami, we call the Solana Embassy, because it is the craziest store on planet Earth I believe. It is a store, it's a coworking lounge, it's a nightclub, it's the best events venue in Wynwood, and it's all dedicated to teaching people about Solana.Brian Friel (03:38):That's awesome. So like me as an end user, let's say I was walking through Hudson Yards, I see this store, can you paint a picture and walk us through what can I expect when I walk into one of these stores?Vibhu Norby (03:48):The store is modeled around being your first crypto friend. That was how we designed it. And we asked for ourselves, how do people get crypto pilled in the first place? And pretty much everyone will share a story of someone in their life or someone they knew that got them a Phantom wallet and gave them NFT or gave them some tokens. So we wanted to build that kind of experience for people that maybe don't have a crypto friend yet.Vibhu Norby (04:13):So when you walk in, first of all, the space looks unlike anything you've seen in a typical shopping center because it's full of NFT artwork. And we have this crazy immersion screen that shows you what's happening on Solana in real time. And then we've got amazing merch products everywhere. So it's got this stunning welcoming look. And when you come in, there's two paths you take.Vibhu Norby (04:37):One path is, you can come and learn about how blockchains work, if you have more time. If you have less time, which is the average person, your first step is going into the Phantom Seed Phrase booth, which is a privacy pod where in three minutes you learn about how to keep your seed phrase safe and you get little cards you can write it down on, and then we drop you a PO App for completing that. And after you exit the seed phrase booth, you can walk around the store and scan your phone at all these different tutorial displays, and each one of those will open the DApp Browser in Phantom Mobile, and walk you through a tutorial about Orca, about Step'n, about MetaPlex, about Degenerate Ape Academy, about Form Function, or any number of our other partners. And once you've completed those learning materials, we give you another NFT. It's all gas list, no transaction fees.Vibhu Norby (05:30):Once you've collected enough of those badges, you show our store ambassador and we'll give you USDC. So basically we are paying people to learn about crypto in the store. And this is literally a micro version of what a good friend is supposed to do, right? Give you their wallet, give you some NFTs, give you some money.Brian Friel (05:49):Right.Vibhu Norby (05:50):And of course if you want to, if you're a degenerate like me, you can also spend that money immediately on the merch in the store.Brian Friel (05:56):The shoes. I want the Solana shoes. I see those on Twitter and I'm pretty jealous.Vibhu Norby (06:01):Yeah. We've got the Solana shoes, we've got the best socks in crypto, we've got hats and designer wear. And everything in the store is something that we designed and is exclusively available there, so you can only get it in the store. So it's kind of worth your time to come out of your way and try this.Brian Friel (06:17):That's super cool. And was there anything in particular from your experience founding B8ta, that impacted this vision that you had for Solana stores?Vibhu Norby (06:24):Yeah. If you know what we kind of did at B8ta, this is in many ways a direct descendant. It's a more fleshed out version of some of the big ideas that we were on to. B8ta was a... and my team hates that I'm always talking about it, but it was important part of my life. I started it when I was 27 and kind of grew up with it. We raised a hundred million dollars of venture capital, we opened stores everywhere and we had quite a large team and made a big impact on industry. We were the National Retail Federations retailer of the year. And the thing that made B8ta very innovative at the time was we had re-engineered the store business model to basically run auctions on top of space, like physical space, and we'd sell the space to the highest bidder. And so it was a more accessible way for newer brands to enter into a store.Vibhu Norby (07:07):And what we did here was we fixed a bunch of the things that we didn't like about that model, and benefit from everything from the rewards layer that crypto can offer companies to some very, very wild things that we're doing that we have not announced yet that we will soon. But in fact, the whole business model of this company we have not revealed yet to the public. And that business model is going to blow people's minds. That is probably the thing that is the most built on top of the learnings of my previous venture, and it's really a big idea on how quickly could you grow a retail business.Brian Friel (07:42):That's really cool. That's quite the cliff hanger. I'm tempted to press you on that but I won't because we have a ton of stuff to get through already on this. But I am curious, switching back to, you show up to this store, you walk in for the first time. I'm sure you're seeing both people are completely new to crypto who just think this store is interesting and they want to walk in, then you know have the crypto native degenerates like yourself, me and people listening to this podcast. But for the folks who are new to crypto specifically and they're coming into the spaces, what do you find that is resonating with them the most and maybe what is giving them the most friction about this crypto experience?Vibhu Norby (08:13):I think the hardest part has been teaching people about how the blockchain works. I think I was a bit more optimistic that people will be interested in the technology, but what clearly resonates to me is without a doubt, NFTs is one thing to kind of read the news about NFTs and write them off as write click saving, why would you need this? I'll just save this image to my computer. But it's another thing for someone to open up a wallet and see that this is something that's theirs. Even if it's a worthless NFT, people connect with those. And there's something called the endowment effect in retail, which is why most stores are loosely optimized around getting you to put your hands on the products, because once you feel a shirt in an apparel store or you pick up a video game, and nobody buys video games in real life anymore, but at GameStop, there's like a little part of your brain that doesn't want to give it back.Vibhu Norby (09:11):So our job in the space is give you things, tell you that you own them and get that endowment effect started. We've had some really cool experiences that have been shared with us. We had a guy that came from Ethereum and he walked into the store, this was a couple weeks ago, and he maybe had heard about it, but he didn't have any of the Solana tooling and didn't have a Solana wallet, and all of a sudden he was telling us on Twitter that he was investigating all the NFT projects and Solana and he had applied for y00t lists, and I feel like he was fully down the rabbit hole, right?Brian Friel (09:45):One of us. Yeah, that's awesome.Vibhu Norby (09:47):That story we've heard a bunch of times. So I think NFTs and then the merch, I cannot tell you how surprised we were how much people love merch. I don't know, it doesn't matter whether you know about crypto or not, you know about Solana or not, people are coming in and buying the gear. And that's a beautiful thing because I think what it says to me is crypto is really a community building tool, and one of the ways to be part of the community is to wear the stuff that community wears, and that's another way to kind of participate. So we really do focus on making high quality stuff that people want that's eye catching and interesting. And if you walked in and you didn't understand the crypto stuff but you like the products, that's a win. We'll take it.Brian Friel (10:30):Yeah, that's cool. And I guess taking that a little bit further, the store is really highlighting the whole Solana ecosystem, but for a given crypto project, say there's a crypto project that's building on Solana right now listening to the podcast, should they be thinking about in real life retail experiences? I think this is something that has been basically on no one's radar in the crypto space for a really long time and you're showing that there might actually be a reason for individual projects to pay attention to this.Vibhu Norby (10:53):I think there has been a lot of theory. I mean we can talk about payments for example. Payments are theoretically the very best use case of crypto, whether that's like remittances or that's paying a vendor, and not to shill Solana, but I do love me Solana.Brian Friel (11:10):I will note real quick, you're not actually part of Solana even though it's called Solana Spaces, it's a separate organization. Just to make that clear.Vibhu Norby (11:18):Yes. But we did call the company Solana Spaces and it's pretty hard to go back at this point.Brian Friel (11:22):Yeah, right.Vibhu Norby (11:24):Yeah, I think Solana particularly should be an awesome tool for payments because the fees are basically zero and that certainly isn't true with even credit cards. So I think that was a hypothesis, but making that come to life for somebody and building a mental model for other businesses has yet to happen. So I think if you're a store or you're a cafe, you absolutely should be looking at Solana pay. The question on that side is, how does it benefit the consumer and how do you overcome that acquisition cost and time of getting someone to download Phantom and fund it and swap it over to USDC and all that kind of stuff. It's a lot of steps today.Vibhu Norby (12:00):The two areas I think that are interesting, one is merch, and I have to talk about that, but I think every NFT community should be thinking very hard about what experiences they can build that represent and amplify their brand and their ethos.Vibhu Norby (12:14):If the first month of the store taught us anything, it was that there's an intense passion for these projects and I would love to see that problem space explored. In the Embassy, we have a Degenerate Ape Cafe, and it's an NFT coffee shop. We'll serve you hot coffee. It's all a roast made by a community member and it's got the monolith designer coffee bags and-Brian Friel (12:35):Nice.Vibhu Norby (12:35):... it's designed out of crates. And we have these cool branded cups. I don't know if this made it into production, but at the bottom of the cup there was going to be a QR code that you could scan and get a proof of caffeine NFT.Brian Friel (12:47):Oh, that's a cool little Easter egg. Yeah, finish your drink and get that.Vibhu Norby (12:50):It kind of starts that way, but then you can imagine that maybe you can take your proof of caffeine badge and next time you come back you get a discount on it. So you start to build the rails of loyalty. I was sitting there waiting for NFT collections to break into IRO experiences, but at this point, we're just going to build all of them for the Solana community. Whatever they want to build, IRL, they need to come talk to us because we are very much interested in setting examples for what this space will look like in the future.Brian Friel (13:19):So thinking five to 10 years out, I know that's a really big ask in crypto, but how do you see these two worlds converging? Right now, I'd say that most of crypto culture lives on Twitter and you guys are making really big inroads into the retail space. Do you see you guys really catalyzing that and most projects going through you? Do you see individual NFT collections spinning up their own entities to handle in real life venues? How do you see about five, 10 years out in the retail space playing out?Vibhu Norby (13:48):I'm going to confess, I'm pretty much a token MAXI. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that every IRL business in... Five or 10 years is way too short. But if you fast forward it a hundred years, I think every IRL business, every fashion brand that matters, every coffee shop, it will have started digitally and we'll start with digital assets. Why not five to 10 years? Because everything physically just takes forever to be disrupted. It's just not even possible to move that fast. But over a long period of time, I do think that it's inevitable. The reason being, that every talented creative person on earth right now is either exploring NFTs, creating them, dabbling in them, and maybe it can extend to not just NFTs, but I think NFTs and token AMEX and all of the kind of interesting combinations of those things. Crypto is an incredible creative sandbox for entrepreneurs. And it's also the most accessible way for entrepreneurs to get started. The composability of the ecosystem and the tooling.Vibhu Norby (14:50):Great entrepreneurs are attracted to things that are accessible because it's so hard to build a business in the first place, that if someone else is out there offering a tool that makes life easy or makes it easier to monetize, they're going to find it. So you're seeing it right now. I think digital art... What's happening right now with NFTs on Solana is a historical thing. It is mind blowing how many NFTs are minted every day on Solana. It's actually crazy. And that's coming from still a very small audience. We're at a hundred-thousand plus a day. I think there was a day the other week that was like 300K in a single day. So not a stretch of the imagination to say that the next great coffee entrepreneur, the next great fashion designer, the next great retail entrepreneur, is going to start with an NFT collection, with digital art, with digital assets.Vibhu Norby (15:40):And what happens when you have a sandbox that's accessible to the greatest entrepreneurs, things are going to come out of that that are incredibly disruptive. Of course the hit rate will be very small, but there aren't that many massive businesses in the world. And so I think it's pretty likely that we're going to start seeing crypto companies picking off certain use cases and industries, obviously creating new ones as well. And you're going to see this fastest in the things that are most simple on the sensory side, that's why I think art. Art has already been massively disruptive. I've dabbled in traditional art collecting and that whole world has been turned over in the last two years completely. And to me, it makes sense that that was the first thing to go because I think from a form perspective, it's the simplest to represent digitally. I think the latest adopting things will be hard physical assets, things like commercial office buildings in real estate, these things are very, very difficult to bring on chain, but it will happen and there are smart entrepreneurs working on it today.Vibhu Norby (16:42):So I think if you think five to 10 years... Maybe it will happen faster than we think. But the whole tree of ideas around IRL is going to be explored in that time period. The question is just, how long does it take for those things to become very meaningful and very large. I think that's a much longer process. Starbucks was in obscurity for 20 years before they figured out the formula for scaling. So maybe Solana Spaces, is that right? You never know over a long enough period of time. But I just think that the greatest creatives are working in crypto. So I'm just very excited to see what kinds of ideas these people create and how we can support them.Brian Friel (17:17):That's awesome. Yeah, this is a very exciting future you paint. And you say you are a Token MAXI. I'm curious though, do you have any contrarian views on the current state of crypto?Vibhu Norby (17:27):Yes.Brian Friel (17:28):Do you have anything in particular that you think the space should be focusing on that it's not?Vibhu Norby (17:33):How many people do I want to offend?Brian Friel (17:37):I'd say go big.Vibhu Norby (17:38):This is going to piss everybody off that listens to this show, but so be it. I think token going up and going down is very bad. I think if Solana... We never talk about price by the way. We never talk about it as an investment vehicle and I very much think that that's caused a lot of problems. But I think if Solana never changed where it was, I think if it became a USDC level of stability, this would be the greatest boon for the ecosystem. Because I think that you have within every interesting crypto project, it's flooded with speculation from the very get go, and these teams get obsessed with the price instead of the experience. And in the earliest days of a company, you just want the founders to be obsessively focused on the product and just making the product really good.Vibhu Norby (18:21):And I've seen a lot of communities, they won't say it necessarily, but I think I've seen a lot of projects get focused on how these things perform as an investment, not just as a product experience. So stability in this arena would be very good. People will be mad at that because obviously everyone wants the tokens to go up, but the best companies will be built when the founders are able to focus on building great things only. So that's one thought there.Vibhu Norby (18:45):I think some of the ideas we've shared around fashion are kind of contrarian. I think it's the next thing to go. I think after art, because the fashion world effectively was built for NFTs. You have limited supply items, you have great design wins, you have provenance, you have intense loyalty and identity formed around fashion products, products from runway level stuff to the things that make into Macy's. You see the same thing with collections. They do collection one, becomes very expensive, they do collection two, they do collection three, and it becomes more accessible over time. That's basically how the fashion world works.Vibhu Norby (19:19):And we tweeted recently that fashion designers today, they don't go to the fabric store and select fabrics and then go home and put them in front of a sewing machine. They open up Blender, they open up 3D modeling software and build the fashion that way. So by default, the fashion world is already moving to a 3D and digitally native format. Definitely in the next five or 10 years, that category is going to be completely disrupted by NFTs. What I see and what the ecosystem talks about as merch, this is not merch, this is actually about modern fashion and it's about people connecting with the things that they own in a deeper sense. And so crypto merch is going to take over the world. Merch is how a hundred, 200 million people are going to find out about Web3. And we're not going to call it merch, it's just going to be fashion. I really believe that and I'm seeing that on the ground level in the store every day to be honest.Brian Friel (20:12):That's super cool. One last question we ask all our guests. You paint a great picture here of the future blending in real life experiences with crypto, how crypto and entities are taking over the art scene and then soon to be fashion. But looking ahead, I guess one last question we ask everyone is, who is a builder that you admire in the Salona ecosystem?Vibhu Norby (20:33):I don't know if this is a unique answer, I'm going to give you two people that are totally different ends of the spectrum. One is. I'm obsessed with Frank DeGods.Brian Friel (20:41):DeGods. Yeah.Vibhu Norby (20:42):I just don't think there's another person like him, like another entrepreneur out there like him. He's just a unique marketing machine that the world has never seen before. He basically broke the Twitter algorithm for millions of people for two weeks straight. And it's not unintentional. He's maniacal about understanding how people are going to react to things. And I know he's been taking a break recently, but I'm definitely a Frank Maxi. I don't own DeGods by the way. I don't have any financial interest in it. I just think that he's an awesome builder. I wish more people in crypto would be thinking about marketing the way he is because it is making a real impact. His fervor single handedly brought over so many people for me to take a look at Solana.Brian Friel (21:25):The y00t list has passed, so we know this is a genuine recommendation. There's nothing at stake here.Vibhu Norby (21:31):No, no, nothing at stake. No y00t list. And then number two is Akshay BD from Superteam.Brian Friel (21:37):Yeah, Superteam.Vibhu Norby (21:38):He's brilliant, but I don't think anybody else thinks like him. I've been observing how he's building Superteam Dow and very closely because, well I can't really share why I'm looking at that, but they are building the first truly decentralized entity. Every detail of how they built that company is just different from a typical company. To how you get employed, how they pay people, where the people are, I think is a much bigger deal than they get credit for. I'll give an example, they just launched this product called Earn the other day, and I posted a bounty on there and I swear, I had 25 people who just did the work and sent it to me without even asking. That's pretty dope. And I'm a big fan of his. He knows that.Brian Friel (22:19):Yeah, we saw something similar. Just to plug that if it's further. When I was first getting started on Solana, we started this Solana cookbook to help engineers share resources and Superteam Dow just took that and ran with it. And I'd say most of the heavy contributors were tied into that in some way. And it's really cool to see them organizing and leveling up the whole space. I couldn't agree more.Vibhu Norby (22:37):Both he and Frank, they're both cult leaders of different flavors. Akshay much more understated but true visionary, and Frank, completely the opposite. More obviously cult leader. But yeah, thanks for the question.Brian Friel (22:50):Yeah, that's awesome. Well Vibhu, this has been an awesome discussion. Really appreciate you taking the time to jump on, share your background and also your vision for the future of crypto and in real life experiences. If people want to learn more about Solana Spaces, where can they go?Vibhu Norby (23:04):You already know, at Solana Spaces on Twitter. It's the best Twitter account in Solana, if I do say so myself.Brian Friel (23:10):Beautiful. Yeah, I actually spent more than I'd like to share on Sunday trying to figure out your seed phrase like crossword puzzle. That was awesome that you guys did.Vibhu Norby (23:18):We do it every week. I have another one dropping this Sunday. I have another one dropping Sunday after. We're going to do a crossword pretty soon. Yeah, Sunday puzzles.Brian Friel (23:26):Super cool. Well keep us posted on when you guys are opening a store on the west coast. I'm pretty jealous of all our east coast friends who get to do what you're doing. But thanks for coming on. Definitely want to have you back at some point.Vibhu Norby (23:36):Thanks Brian.

As KCBS has been updating you about, Bay Area retailers have been hit with a flurry of large scale theft in incidents that seem to be getting bolder. After closing because of an armed robbery, the fancy tech store B8ta recently reopened with a lot more bells and whistles in place, including expensive bullet proof vest-protected private security, coming out to about $30,000 dollars a month.  For more on this, KCBS News Anchor Megan Goldsby spoke with KCBS Insider Phil Matier. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Von Wong reacts to his conversation with Philip Raub - the CEO of Model No. and co-founder of B8ta.Subscribe on SpotifySubscribe on Google PodcastsSubscribe on Apple Podcast 

If you look at the furniture industry as a whole, it has always been predicated either on design or functionality, and these two ends have largely ignored the environmental impacts of what it takes to make furniture. One company looking to address both the customization needs of customers and sustainability concerns is Model No. Furniture, who believe that one size does not fit all. They produce custom 3D-printed pieces made from food waste. The company’s CEO, Phillip Raub, joins us to share his insights into where the world of furniture is headed.We kick off by hearing about the impetus for founding the company and how its mission has grown over time. By addressing their own pain points, the founders have stayed committed to their vision of running a low-volume, high-impact business that is rooted in transparency and innovation. We then hear about some of the unique business strategies the company hopes to leverage, like micro-factories and allowing customers to redesign pieces based on their changing needs. After this, Phillip talks about his personal shifts in consumption patterns and how this led him to join Model No. after his time at b8ta. Wrapping up, we discuss accountability, creating a culture of mutual learning, and why companies who are truly mission-driven should be altruistic. Tune in at one of the links below for the full episode.The conversation took place live on Clubhouse under the Impact Everywhere Club. See upcoming conversations here!Subscribe on SpotifySubscribe on Google PodcastsSubscribe on Apple PodcastsKey Points From This EpisodeModel No. carved a niche for themselves when they realized that though 3D printing was being used in other spaces, it was not utilized in the furniture industry.One of the many sustainable aspects of the company is that the material used in the furniture is made of food waste. Phillip provides the inedible parts of corn as an example, which can be ground into pellets and eventually be 3D printed.Other interesting aspects of Model No.’s business model/future plans:1. A goal to eventually ensure customers can continually customize an item of furniture they’ve bought2. A strategy to utilize micro-factories, which reduce some of the environmental burden that is created by furniture production.With the advent of fast fashion and other factors, our views around consumption have shifted over time. We no longer value craftsmanship and reusing items in the same way as we used to. It is important to try to get back to these kinds of values, where we do not view items as disposable.Some of Phillip’s business insights:1. Companies should help one another if they truly care about their mission (example of Allbirds offering advice to Amazon Basics on how to make their shoes more environmentally friendly).2. Companies should be recognized for their commitment to improving, not just berated for what they have done wrong (especially when related to sustainability).3. We need to hold large companies accountable and ensure that if they say they are committed to sustainable practices that they actually follow through.

In episode #1682, we give you actionable steps to decrease the amount you are spending on ads while continuing to keep conversions high. Advertising online means advertising in an auction-based environment, which means prices are not going to go down anytime soon. Hear how you can use product lear growth, A/B testing, solid SEO strategies, and more to hack online advertising today. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:29] Today’s topic: Ad Costs Will Continue To Skyrocket, Here’s How To Fix That [00:30] Social platforms are auction-based, meaning prices will keep going up. [00:58] Optimize conversions to squeeze more revenue out of each visitor. [01:32] Experience a new form of shopping and selling using B8TA. [02:10] Experiment with product-led growth instead of paying per click. [03:38] The compounding effects of a solid SEO strategy. [03:47] Targeting people based on what parts of your site they interact on. [04:10] Rotating between different versions of an ad. [05:46] Partner with relevant products and splitting the costs. [04:42] That is it for today! [04:45] Go to marketingschool.io/pro to learn more about our free community.   Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: VWO Optimizely Google Optimize B8TA   Leave Some Feedback:     What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.     Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #1682, we give you actionable steps to decrease the amount you are spending on ads while continuing to keep conversions high. Advertising online means advertising in an auction-based environment, which means prices are not going to go down anytime soon. Hear how you can use product lear growth, A/B testing, solid SEO strategies, and more to hack online advertising today. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:29] Today's topic: Ad Costs Will Continue To Skyrocket, Here's How To Fix That [00:30] Social platforms are auction-based, meaning prices will keep going up. [00:58] Optimize conversions to squeeze more revenue out of each visitor. [01:32] Experience a new form of shopping and selling using B8TA. [02:10] Experiment with product-led growth instead of paying per click. [03:38] The compounding effects of a solid SEO strategy. [03:47] Targeting people based on what parts of your site they interact on. [04:10] Rotating between different versions of an ad. [05:46] Partner with relevant products and splitting the costs. [04:42] That is it for today! [04:45] Go to marketingschool.io/pro to learn more about our free community.   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: VWO Optimizely Google Optimize B8TA   Leave Some Feedback:     What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.     Connect with Us:    Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

来店するお客さん、そして、出店する企業にとっても予期せぬ発見が創出されるお店の仕組みをひも解いてきましたが、コロナ禍も踏まえた「消費」の「これから」を考えてみたいと思います。

優れたCX（顧客体験）を実現しているサービスやプロダクトを表彰する「CX AWARD 2020」の１つにも選ばれた「b8ta」。「ベータ」がユーザーに対して届けた具体的な"偶然の出会い"を掘り下げました。

「リテール・アズ・ア・サービス」という新しいビジネスモデルでプロダクトとユーザーの偶然の出会いの体験を創出する仕組みに注目。 その体験を提供する仕組みを提供しているのは、最新ガジェットからデイリーライフをデザインするアイテムなど幅広い商品がそろうリアル店舗「b8ta」。シリコンバレーで生まれ、日本では去年８月に新宿と有楽町に2店舗がオープン。その独自の戦略と体験の提供は、優れたCX＝顧客体験を実現しているサービスやプロダクトを表彰する「CX AWARD 2020」の１つにも選ばれています。 「b8ta」というお店の特長について、ベータジャパンの代表の 北川卓司さんにお話を伺いました。

③となる今回は、ビジネスモデル「Raas=リテール・アズ・ア・サービス」に注目。ベータジャパンの代表・北川卓司さんに解説していただきました。

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) host the podcast together today with no guest. In today’s episode you’ll hear: An update on Sam’s whereabouts and how he ended up buying a house in Austin (0:30), Shaan pitches an idea about “Class Pass for Billionaire’s Houses” (5:30), the best ad read in the history of MFM and how to growth hack your ads (11:00), Sam and Shaan talk about the pros and cons of a business like Baremetrics (14:25), Shaan contemplates publishing his total financial snapshot over the past year (20:35), Shaan pitches an idea on a Shopify app that connects all DTC brands (26:40), how Italic made smart deals with luxury Chinese suppliers (37:45), Sam and Shaan think someone should gamify a Facebook Ad learning program (42:37), Why Mario Level One is genius (51:27).Thank you to Lemon.io for sponsoring today's episode! They are offering a 15% discount for the first 6 weeks of work for all MFM fans. Go to Lemon.io/mfm to claim the offer!Companies mentioned:Simon's Escapes: https://www.simonescapes.com/Inspirato: https://www.inspirato.com/Sponstayneous: https://www.sponstayneous.com/List of open startups: https://openstartuplist.com/Coop Commerce: https://www.coopcommerce.com/The Fascination: https://thefascination.com/B8ta: https://b8ta.com/Italic: https://italic.com/The genius of the first level of Mario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRGRJRUWafYHave you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

又要防控疫情（Social Distance）、又要过万圣节的加州是怎样的？ 除了不能敲门要糖吃，竟然还出现了 drive through 的鬼屋！露天经营的餐馆也让 Richer 一下子找到了童年记忆中大排档的感觉。 这期节目不是严肃的商业模式探讨，丁教 和「到海外去」第二季主播 Richer 从消费者的角度聊了聊恢复线下经济之后，美国的消费和生活方式发生了什么新变化？ 另外在 11 月 7 日，声动活泼将在北京举办线下的见面会，大家可以在公众号「声动活泼」上持续关注本次活动的最新情况。 「到海外去」第二季开启双 11 半价优惠，在小宇宙 APP 付费订阅，原先 499 的价格现仅需半价即可购买，快来订阅鸭！ 魔镜市场情报通过网页和小程序为硅谷早知道的听众提供双11预售的实时数据，可以查看各个细分类目、每日及累计的销售情况。数据查看非常便捷，大家微信搜索“魔镜市场情报”，回复“硅谷早知道”可以找到入口，或点击链接使用网页版查看→https://market1.moojing.com/shuang11/shuang11topbrand2020_yushou.html 【主播】 丁教 ，声动活泼联合创始人 【嘉宾】 Richer，到海外去第二季主播 【后期】 迪卡普里鑫，陈太太 【主要话题】 [00:40] 声动活泼双十一重量级活动 [04:15] Social Distance 下的万圣节 [05:45] 什么？Drive Through 版的鬼屋！ [09:43] 电影院的新消费形式 [11:47] 美国也有二维码点餐了 [20:05] 线下展位商超 b8ta [23:22] 中美之间无人超市的差别 【相关阅读】 b8ta， 是一家零售即服务公司，拥有 22 家独立零售商店，是消费电子产品和家庭用品的展示中心。 【往期相关话题】 #12 疫情笼罩下的硅谷 (https://guiguzaozhidao.fireside.fm/s4e12) #47 美国的社交、直播电商为什么不如中国？ (https://guiguzaozhidao.fireside.fm/shoplitlive) 【音乐】 I Feel Good (Instrumental Version) - Mama Zula 【关于我们】 网站：shengfm.cn (https://shengfm.cn/) 公众号/微博/知乎：声动活泼 邮件：admin@sheng.fm 打赏支持：https://www.shengfm.cn/donation (https://www.shengfm.cn/donation) Special Guest: Richer.

Our purchasing habits have changed significantly over time with more of us favoring to reach for a smartphone than visit a shopping mall. As our physical and online worlds continue to merge and technology constantly adapting to enhance our customer experience, what does this mean for the future or retail and how will we be shopping in 10 years' time?   Ramit Harisinghani, general manager at b8ta and host Zaid Matar take a deep dive into the future of experiential in-person stores that are analytics-powered and software-backed by retailers all over the world. And, as always, tech talk, virtual reality and smartphones also take the stage. Don’t miss this podcast if you’re curious about how you’ll be shopping in the near future.

Placing their products in B8ta stores instead of just online is part of the strategy.

Placing their products in B8ta stores instead of just online is part of the strategy.

The hottest-selling gear lately seldom even has a screen, Norby tells CNET Now What.

The hottest-selling gear lately seldom even has a screen, Norby tells CNET Now What.

今回の配信では、店舗体験を売る新しい小売「b8ta(ベータ)」がこの夏に開店したという記事から、この体験ができるガジェットの実店舗についてお話します。そのお店を利用する企業や個人のメリットはなんなのか、ちょっと先の未来を...

Deze week aan de microfoon Camiel van Dooren, één van de 3 oprichters van het innovatief retail concept Productpine. Alles wat traditionele retail mist proberen ze vandaag aan te pakken. Ze haalden hun inspiratie onder ander bij B8ta in de US, maar gooiden er al snel een eigen saus over. Ze creëerden een plaats waar merken die de status qua uitdagen kunnen groeien en hun unieke verhaal kunnen vertellen. Weg van het klassieke marge model naar retail as a service.Hoe maak je het mogelijk voor startende, opkomende merken om rechtsreeks aan de klant te verkopen?Hoe bied je als platform retail als een service aan zowel fysiek als online?Zijn er naast amazon nog concepten die de wereld kunnen veroveren? Hoe kan je focusgroepen opschalen?Dat en veel meer in de nieuwe #teamretail Podcast, met host Tim Gielen.Powered by Wave of Engagement. Alle links uit de podcast zijn terug te vinden op de de #teamretail content pagina. www.waveofengagement.com/stories

We chat with Vibhu Norby, Founder & CEO of b8ta, and Mark Ghermezian, Co-CEO of American Dream, to determine best practices with safety, technology, and change in the face of the COVID-19 challenges. See how they ensured their businesses would make it through, and learn how yours can too!The World Retail Forum provides to retailers all over the world the tools, the knowledge, and best practices for recovering from the impact of COVID-19. The World Retail Forum was created in collaboration with one thousand global retail outlets, shopping centers, brands, investors, and architects. Representatives from businesses in fifty countries have participated in our weekly On The Frontline: Navigating COVID-19 live event. Retailers, restaurateurs, and small business owners—whether they are one-person operations or organizations of ten thousand—can benefit from this level of cooperation.

もし新型コロナの影響で閉店を考えた飲食店がオンラインに対応したら │ テレワークコム UberEatsの始め方 無料でオンラインのテイクアウト受付の仕組みが導入できるPicks 余った料理を販売できるTABETE などな […]

The next generation of retail is all about discovery, and  is building the infrastructure and tools to power it. From their award-winning experiential stores in cities nationwide, to their powerful software & analytics platform used by retailers across the globe, b8ta is the company shaping the future of shopping in person. b8ta is engaged in designing, developing and selling its proprietary retail-as-a-service platform, including building and operating brick and mortar stores across the United States and licensing its proprietary retail-as-a-service software products. b8ta’s customers include brands, such as Google and Facebook, and other retailers, such as Macy’s. Listen along as we sit down with David Munczinski, President, Marketplace Platform with b8ta. We'll discuss how they're introducing new applications and services to power even more exciting online-to-offline journeys, personalized, in-store shopping experiences, and modern retail analytics.

Neste episódio, o assunto volta a ser a NRF 2020. Começo uma série de episódios falando de algumas lojas que visitei em Nova Iorque e que estão se destacando apresento B8TA, Showfields e Neibourhood Goods. Quer saber o que elas fazem, então ouve aí.

To anyone with eyes in their kneecaps, the notice outside gadget retailer B8ta's glossy store next to San Francisco's new NBA arena is obvious. “We care about your privacy,” the small plaque proclaims, offering a web address and QR code.

EP204 - 2020 Annual Predictions 2019 Recap - Predictions made on episode 159 Scot At least 5k more store closures in 2019. Yes.  9,300 US store closures per Coresight. Amazon – Prof Galloway is big on Amazon having to create a AWS spinoff and has moderated that to tracking stock. I’m going to predict Amazon doesn’t do either of those things. But this WILL be the year they break ads out. Yes. Galloway was wrong. eBay/Alibaba – I think this is the year when they both need to do something big and the stars are aligning for a combination there. Nope.  Shopify gets acquired by one of the big ad-based companies (facebook/google most likely) Nope. Walmart stumbles in e-commerce. Nope Score 2/5 Jason Amazon store count exceeds 1000 stores Nope.  571 Amazon Stores 22 Book 15 4-Star 8 Pop-ups 25 Go 2 liquor 499 Whole Foods Walmart buys a last mile firm Nope Another big  bankruptcy (going to be a tougher than expected year, JCP, category killers Office, BBBY, Neiman). Yep (Payless ShoeSource, Destination Maternity Shopko,Forever 21, ShopKo, Gymboree, Things Remembered, Charlotte Russe, Diesel, Z Gallerie, Charming Charlie, Barneys, Sugarfina, etc ...) Mobile commerce revenue passes Desktop – Aided by PWA’s, and payment API’s we see mobile gap narrow. Nope.  60/35/5 Desktop/Mobile/Tablet Nov-Dec via Adobe. Fads (Voice Commerce, Customer facing AI, SocialCommerce, VR BlockChain). Yes BONUS: Amazon breaks out prime revenue (No) Score 2/5 An epic fail for Jason & Scot! It turns out the future is difficult to see (and our case the timing is also tough). 2020 Predictions Scot Shopify wilts a bit - new competition comes out with different angles (marketcap stays static) Fedex does something drastic - buy eBay? Merge with Alibaba? The year of returns - “happy returns” - a startup raises $100M+ in space. Mallageddon continues At least another 8k stores Google gets aggressive in ecommerce 10% traffic to ‘shopping actions’ buy ebay/fedex Jason Walmart - growth slows due to completion of grocery build out. Marc Lore leaves Walmart. Amazon - Opens affordable grocery concept. Digital grocery wars heat up. Owned brands continue to grow. 5% of retail in 2019, could be 8-10% in 2020 (as measured by IRI, for CPG private label). Installment Payments heat up - At least one company is acquired (Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, QuadPay, Sizzle) Digital in-store heats up, QR codes make a comeback Bonus:  Cashier-less stores (Amazon Go), blockchain, 5G, big data, and personalization won’t have a significant impact on retail. No DNVB will break out. No major retail anti-trust actions in US. Brick & Mortar Marketplaces won’t take off (Showfields, Neighborhood Goods, B8ta). Shopify won’t compete with Amazon.   Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 204 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, January 2nd, 2020. Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. http://jasonandscot.com Google Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode at 204 being recorded on Thursday January 2nd 2020 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners will Jason happy New Year happy new decade hope you had a really good last decade and I hope you had a good holiday. Jason: [0:53] I did Happy New Year to you. I'm with you on that new decade but they're you know there's some controversy about whether it is a new decade or not. Scot: [1:01] Yeah I don't believe that it's a it's a 10 plus one problem we'll just to sweep sweep past. Jason: [1:07] Yeah it's the twenties as far as I'm concerned so. Yes but it has already happened I nailed our intro despite the fact that we typed 2019 in the show notes. Scot: [1:22] Azle Easter I got them there for you you found it. Jason: [1:25] Yeah I was I felt I felt special about myself that I was able to fix that on the Fly. Scot: [1:32] Who said the most important question is have you been able to see the new Star Wars movie. Jason: [1:36] Oh my God Scott I've been thinking about you nonstop because yes I got to see the new Star Wars movie and obviously we'll will be spoiler-free but I I was totally happy with it and enjoyed it. Scot: [1:48] Yeah yeah me too weird thing happen to me where I've gotten to where I kind of like the Mandalorian almost better than the movies so I don't know. Jason: [1:57] So here's why I've been thinking about you nonstop my 4 year old is now both feet in on Star Wars everything. Scot: [2:06] Good quality parenting right there. Jason: [2:08] So we wouldn't want some of the movies there's a ton of like kid-friendly Star Wars content you probably knew all about this but there's like the Lego movies and cartoons and all this different stuff, and like for Hanukkah he got a lightsaber which he has not been separated from since and. Scot: [2:27] Nice. Jason: [2:27] We got a bunch of Star Wars books including I got him, like a graphic novel version of episodes for 5 and 6 and so now every night as part of our bedtime ritual he's his down with me and we we you know read us a segment from the book. Scot: [2:46] Give us your Darth Vader voice. Jason: [2:48] Yeah I'm not doing any voices on the podcast sorry. Scot: [2:53] Baby geek I am your father. Jason: [2:55] Exactly I have said that exact phrase tan. The what's super funny is my wife and I like you have enjoyed Mandalorian and we were watching it one night and Stephen King in like you should have been asleep and it came in and saw I like. 30 seconds of Mandalorian which we have not let him watch Mandalorian but Steven is totally 100% fixated on Mandalorian. So he's already convinced that mandalorians are way better than Jedis. Like the only character he likes from all of the previous Star Wars work is now Boba Fett and he like he brings them up and every contact and we're like. You seen 32nd. Scot: [3:44] Team Honda. Jason: [3:47] Anything he's like he's like four and he's asking like. Like when he sees Yoda in like Clone Wars he's asking like how is he only a baby in Mandalorian. Scot: [3:59] You have time like it's really confusing. Jason: [4:05] Star Wars is super confusing to explain to a four year old white guy because you start with the premise that like the bad guys have red lightsabers in the good guys have other colors and then like, it's only Don's I knew that all the bad guys used to be good guys and then become good guys again and so I. It's super like that Santa can that it yeah yeah it's a very convoluted but suffice it to say there's a bunch of Mandalorian and baby Yoda posters up in his room and he's like we're leaving in a Mandalorian World which just makes me think of you. Scot: [4:37] Regal Walden toys are coming out so that it's going to be exciting in the next couple of weeks are all the they held them because they didn't want to spoil some of the plot elements of Mandalorian soon there's a big wave of toys coming so it's good time. Jason: [4:50] I know and in fact a bunch of entrepreneurial people because they did not release baby Yoda toys during the show because they were trying to prove your point keep him Secret. So everybody and their brother started making baby Yoda toys and like there's been like you know a huge intellectual property Crackdown and there's like you know hundreds of people from Etsy that have been. Don the cease-and-desist orders over that. Scot: [5:17] Speaking of toys I saw on Twitter that you were going to try to hit one of the new Toys R Us did you make it to him. Jason: [5:24] I did I am wearing a button right now that says I don't want to grow up I'm a Toys R Us kid. Because I went to the Houston store a few days after it open so there's, Tyreke and for our listeners like Toys R Us went bankrupt or done at super sad huge disruption in the toy industry, a company bought the the intellectual property of Toys R Us and they did a partnership with beta who's been on the show a couple times, the open initially to Toys R Us stores so there's one in New Jersey and there's one in Houston Texas. So I got to go to the Houston Texas one and it was fun it was fun to see the brand, back alive and reimagined then it was a you know it's very different than a Toys R Us a traditional Toys R Us store because these are. Kind of 20,000 square foot Mall base toy stores versus. 80000 square foot big box toy stores but it was a fun immersive retail environment with a bunch of toys and, this mall which is a a mall Scott like a week before Christmas felt like a ghost town to me like it was. Tragically empty but I would argue the Toys R Us with the second busiest store in the in the whole mall and. [6:49] Behind Apple you're exactly right side note people are only in the Apple store to get tech support but still. But this one was really busy and people like had made a special trip just to go in like the brand is so strong so it looks like these first two stores are doing pretty well and I know there's a plan to open more so kudos to them for saving the brand and beta for doing a pretty good toy execution. Scot: [7:16] Nice the so thanks for the trip report this is our annual recap and he's always run long so I think we should just jump right on into it so being the first show of the decade and the year it is our custom I guess we've done this for fact, to do an annual prediction and then Square ourselves so way back in episode 159 we had our predictions, or 2019 so I think what we'll do is score each other to start out with and then we'll put out our predictions so why don't you go to my last year predictions. Jason: [7:58] And before you jump and let me just say I despise this show I've had red leading up to the show in the reason is is I've never done very well that however will I have done I've gotten progressively worse every year and last year while I did quite poorly you did stupendous wave and so, it's like I've dreaded even seen what my predictions were last year and hearing about them so I'm just going to rip the Band-Aid off and we'll get through the show but your first prediction for for 2019 was that at least 5K more stores would close in 2019 and let's get this out of the way you blew away that prediction coresite which is the company we most often use for kind of tracking Us store closures had like 9300 stores closing this year IHL did a study in the world even more store closures than that in their in their study Dope by any measure way more than 5,000 stores closed and you know in hindsight I should have let you get away with that prediction because that's why, it was too easy. Scot: [9:12] Well no I don't know if there's a lot of people saying but that was kind of going to be the worst. Jason: [9:19] That no so if you had said there is going to be worse than last year that would have been a slightly more predict like. Tempstar 5000 was less than last year or this year but yeah I agree, most people thought there be fewer closures this year than last year in that bike by depending on how you count did not prove to be the case that much more controversial thing on the whole store closures is it more open and closed if you go by the course I track her a lot more closed than open but if you go by other studies, that are the feel more comprehensive like they're actually were more swords that open then close so. Scot: [9:58] Yeah and I know the size Matters right to some of these are mattress stores which are pretty big. Jason: [10:04] And I whoop all a lot of the people that say way more stores open then close are also counting like restaurants and stores for example and the end restaurants have a lot of charm and so, a lot of controversy but bottom line you started out of the gate strong you're one for one and. Your second prediction, you just you just jumped right into the gutter because your second prediction was that Professor Scott Galloway would basically be wrong. Which I like as a general principle but more specifically what you're talking about is the, an inner 9 people the climate a year ago he had just published a book about the the for one of which was Amazon so he was he was publicly speaking about Amazon a ton and he you know was really beating a drum around having to split up Amazon and they're potentially Amazon would voluntarily spin off some of their businesses because they're so lucrative and so you know the talk to usually about 8 if you ask until your prediction was kind of to go negative and say you always wrong and Amazon isn't going to be split up and isn't going to voluntarily split up in any parts of their business and, you were certainly correct none of those things happens. Scot: [11:28] What have I learned from this anti Galloway bet is that he throws out so many things he gets one right and then looks like a genius show his we work one with hit. The bus was other ones didn't put the he's ridden the we work one for a good six months. Jason: [11:43] Yep yeah I feel like he the first one that hit for him that really like you know he made a lot of hay en was predicting Whole Foods would be acquired by Amazon and then yeah he was instrumental in that kind of picking the, he was an early picker of the we were demise the pressure point he also predicted Amazon would acquire a bunch of other people besides Whole Foods that they didn't in my favorite prediction is about 3 years ago he said that Amazon had peaked in that you should short the stock. Scot: [12:14] I would not have been good. Jason: [12:16] Side note yeah that would turned out not to be good investment advice. So yeah for your point like anyone in this predictions face like the whole key is to throw a bunch out and just remind people of the ones you got right and not bring up all the ones you got wrong. But you're doing great you're two for two yeah so third prediction that. Either or eBay and Alibaba would need to do something big in 2019, and so you use you propose that potentially they might do some sort of joint venture or some sort of combination. And I have to say he's got as far as I'm aware that did not happen. Scot: [13:03] Yeah but itself StubHub when you said that's pretty big. Jason: [13:09] No not relative to their socks. Scot: [13:11] It was Lucy 4 billion of 30 billion market cap that's more than materiality. Jason: [13:23] Again I'm dreading my own predictions so I'm grading you very very strictly enough so I'm going to say you're two for three right now. Scot: [13:35] Another thing just point out is the eBay CEO just got up and left one day if that was kind of surprised I don't know if we count that as something big happening or not there's this line with the Borden peace out. Jason: [13:49] Yeah need to do something big. Scot: [13:50] That's kind of a shot. Jason: [13:52] Sell the property will parts of your company and then watch the Executive Suite I don't think that was the spirit of I think you were more proposing they would do something that would help them reacquired growth. Scot: [14:05] Yeah but another thing I didn't anticipate us this anti-china thing that we have going on here right now so the tariffs were one thing but there's just. A lot of anti-china going on right now that I think is going to make this murderer and possible I don't think the US government would let app. Jason: [14:24] Yeah I think there's there are some number of entanglements there that that would be challenges there aren't there were some little Partnerships there some interesting things we like, well I guess it's more JD and the Walmart in the US but. Back on track your two for three and your fourth prediction was that Shopify gets Acquired and you said potentially by one of the big add bass companies like Facebook or Google +, once again to my knowledge that did not happen are you agree or do you have a argument there as well. Scot: [15:03] I agree and you know what's really amazing is if you look at kind of your your Shopify when I made this production was their stock is like at 1:44 and they were attending. Nick on all the stuff like 3x so weather like a 1012 blade on a company now they're $47 company they're pretty much on acquirable I think at that price and then the valuation multiple is extremely lucky so if you look at all the different soccer the service companies yet uses range of like 8 to 10 x there's something like 15 to 20 x is just crazy, good as those guys they essentially don't they will be at choir and not not a choir. Jason: [15:53] Totally agree there they're killing it both in terms of their their financial success and valuations but also their they're just winning in the marketplace and they're like you have continuing to capture more Greyhound away from the Enterprise guys and they're doing a bunch of interesting things so we'll talk more about them in the future I'm sure but yeah they're a bunch of people that would like to acquire them but for your point like there is not that's not really economically viable at this point and then number 5, Walmart stumbles in e-commerce and I took that to mean. That they're the rate of e-commerce growth would slow over 2018 which was pretty solid gross at like 40%. And they actually were exactly at 40% again in 2020 so there, they're growing very quickly they're growing faster than Amazon certainly much faster than the, the market overall and their growth rate in 2020 or 2019 was basically the same as 2018 so like by that measure I'm not giving them a stumble in 2019 but do you you agree or was you think it was some other dimension they stumbled in. Scot: [17:15] Agree I probably underestimated how long they had to kind of Wind by converting grocery over but I think this year probably will give you the. Jason: [17:29] I feel like that's a common theme in all of our predictions ynm that I've noticed both you and I are sort of afraid to double down and be like wrong one year and then say say it again the next year but many of our predictions come true a year after we predicted. Scot: [17:43] Lyrics the Alexa are pause airpods I did like 2 years and then it came up here I didn't God darn it. Jason: [17:49] Exactly which is frustrating yes so being super brutal you ended up 245 which is way off your your historic average. Scot: [18:02] Yeah I usually bat 500 but it wasn't wasn't there this year I mean on the stuff I feel like e-commerce slow down a little bit. Jason: [18:13] Oh no I for sure feel like it has and I do think. Scot: [18:16] But the pace of innovation is really slowing which is makes up makes it harder to throw out big predictions. Jason: [18:21] Yeah I also feel like it is this point like it's the timing of many things is tougher to predict than the actual events themselves and the Horizon is now longer than a year for your point so that's that's that another challenge with this whole predictions thing but I'm not remotely confident that I didn't any better so so with no further Ado let's let's see how I did. Scot: [18:51] Yes yes so your prediction so let's jump into this the first one is you were very giddy you probably had just visited three or four of the Amazon stores and you said look I am sure this can be over a thousand Amazon physical stores by the end of the year so I think. Whole Foods helps a lot here in this is there were there were a bunch of Articles out there that Amazon was going to because Wall Street Journal that they're going to have, thousands of Stories the right now we're sitting in about five to six hundred so you got Whole Foods 500 Whole Foods there's some pop upstairs for Stars book stores throw all that together you get sky like 555 75 so that's a pretty big Miss 57% is f on any grading scale so sorry I did not get that. Jason: [19:53] Yeah no I'll be honest I thought, perhaps Amazon go with scale and much more you were generous that they were actually a lot more pop-up stores the last year they closed most of the pop-up store so it's possible there's fewer Stars this year than they were last year of you if you included those so yeah I wildly miss that in the only like slightly interesting thing in that in that whole thing is I feel like the one concept that has scales slightly More Than People realizes the 4-star store so there now 15 for Star stores which is like coming up on on you know the number of bookstore so pretty soon we might have more, more 4-star stores that we have book stores but nowhere close to a thousand I was wildly wrong. Scot: [20:38] What are the clothes the popups cuz I've kept an eye on them in our malls and they're pretty popular MMOs price at the. Jason: [20:46] Yeah yeah well you know for a while they had a ton of them in Whole Food stores, and yeah I feel like they opened a lot of them in places where they could get real estate rather than in places where. Where there was a like strategic audience need a few pop-up stores their main are some kind of interesting Concepts so that yeah I don't I don't know. Scot: [21:12] So that's 0 4 5 4 for those homegamers keeping track of the score then your second one and this was one where I think the timing probably is going to be what this was on the heels of Target buying ships and here we are a year later that's gone really well you have Target, Ecommerce accelerated they're constantly talking about how should you store is doing well and all those initiatives that if they can anchor on ship, so your prediction was that in 2019 Walmart would buy a last-mile firm and that did not happen I think the big idea and last-mile will there be a couple one was going to just kind of Associates kind of on their way home free stuff and then the second one is this whole body camera thing where they're going to pop Associates right in your house to deliver stuff I don't think that is really caught on either. Jason: [22:10] Yeah I know II do I agree I think they I made that prediction cuz I felt like, that honey how stuff is really growing for them and they would need more Last Mile capacity and I still think that it is true, I didn't foresee that last year but you know like as whole food as a FedEx has kind of gone push the last run away from Amazon that the company they're running to is Walmart and so we we've seen some like bigger strategic Partnerships between Walmart and FedEx and now that you know they're starting to be some some economic weakness at FedEx, I do not want to talk about this year's predictions but that you could almost imagine at one point that that could be an acquisition or some kind of deeper strategic partnership but nevertheless did not happen last year. Scot: [23:03] So that says 045 stole your third one and I think you made a comment last year that you need to be less specific to this one's kind of interesting. And they said there could be another big bankruptcy but then you said such as JCPenney one of the office guys Bed Bath Beyond need and Marcus so you kind of had an ore in there or are you know we could have took her to this again. Being generous since we're sitting here at over to there were a lot of bankruptcies so we had the seat jabri we had Forever 21. What's rue21 was that a result 2018. Jason: [23:49] That might have been 18 or not sure. Scot: [23:51] One of the maternity stores Payless shoes and we'll see we had there was one of the mattress stores. So there were there were some pretty high-profile bankruptcies. Jason: [24:07] I'm taking the win but in hindsight like that was a lame prediction like of course somebody's going to go bankrupt every year so if you're not specific at Tulane prediction and if you are specific the names I mentioned. I still am taking the win and I would point out like the one that gets talked about the most which is actually one of the smaller ones is Barney's was like the, start a story brand that went bankrupt and I know the one that almost doesn't get talked about but was most crushing and near and dear to your heart is sugarfina. Scot: [24:37] Yeah. Steer. Okay so your fourth prediction. Jason: [24:44] Wait wait let's recap the score I'm now one of the three. Infinitely improved over over the previous two. Scot: [24:50] Yeah yeah you're all on at are two more to make up some some room here so your fourth prediction was that mobile Commerce Revenue would pass desktop and lessors of the show know you are a big fan of pwa which is not a rap band it's some kind of a technology for mobile stuff and also the new payment apis and some of the other stuff you thought we're going to close the mobile, I'll defer to you since you're the guru on this didn't did you. Jason: [25:21] Yeah did we mention that that e-commerce is slowing down a lot, none of those things happened at near the scale that I thought they would end so for sure no mobile Revenue did not pass desktop revenue and I I thought I could like save face and say well that didn't happen it did happen on the big shopping days bright like so you know you could kind of make try to make an argument that oh I totally happened on December Monday or things like that but the reality is even over the holiday. If you'll get November through December, 60% of all revenue happened on desktop 35% of Revenue on mobile and 5% on tablet so bottom line I wasn't even close. Sad. Scot: [26:12] Yep sorry dude so let's see that gives us one out of four, all right last chance on number 5 on this one, Scot of one of your anti predictions you said following things are going to be fads and not take off voice Commerce AI That's customer-facing social commerce virtual reality and boxing. Jason: [26:38] Yeah and again not a very awesome prediction but I'm going to take the win on that and say that those things are all we're all basically feds at least in 2019, the one that feels like it's trying to get some traction and some some aspects of social commerce but but I would still argue they weren't like. Meaningful in 2019. Scot: [27:02] If I give you that one. Jason: [27:03] Yeah I'm desperate for I'm desperate for a win that would give me the 22052 at least IU. Scot: [27:08] Yeah yeah and then you threw out because you're you're Jason you just couldn't stop at 5 got a Bonus and you said Amazon is going to breakout Prime Revenue you're really specific I had to go back and listen. Cuz I had a feeling you're kind of get a little slippery on it so Amazon has not broken out that's that's a no. Jason: [27:31] Yeah what really happened is I misspoke what I meant to say is that callonwood breakout primary. For Amazon and I yeah I said it wrong. Scot: [27:43] Yeah but since I was a bonus will you know we won't we won't count it so it's practically a tie this year so which is to me that's a loss cuz over the over the The Arc typically beat me by three or four answers. Jason: [27:59] And so it would be a win for me but since you basically came down to my level it doesn't I don't think it feels good for either of us but at least. Scot: [28:06] What are you get better. Jason: [28:07] At least we've established our credibility now so I'm sure it was on the edge of their seats to hear our wise predictions for next year now that we've shown how I'm nipotent we are. Scot: [28:17] We're going to rebound to I can feel it go do you want to join to do yours first. Jason: [28:22] No I want to hear you're so I can potentially use them. Scot: [28:27] Yep so here's my five predictions so I mentioned earlier that Shopify is kind of gone up 3x in a year that just feels you know, very nose bleeding to me and there's a lot of new competition coming out so I think whenever you have a value creation event like that where they've essentially created 45 billion dollars out of town are there could be a lot of money chasing Shopify, I don't know what their weaknesses but every company always has one so it's going to be interesting to see, what comes after them what angles they come after and all that good stuff so that's that's my prediction is that they're going to wilt a bit and you know I'll put a. [29:14] I need to put something more specific there I'll say they did kind of stay at this market cap or go down 10% somewhere between kind of here in temperature I don't think there's going to be another kind of like huge run up type your and it's going to be largely your folks waking up to say wait there is competition out there for this business model. But you don't think that doesn't get talked about this to turn just has to be like through the roof right so just on a unit turn to have to just be turning tons of customers and now in a cohort, it probably is its revenue for the cohort pipe the GMB for the cohort crime makes up and then that's what drives the revenue, overtime it just feels like there's going to be sup Rider light shown on part of their business model that isn't, this kind of perfect kind of price for protection company. Jason: [30:09] No I would agree with that I do think that maybe the one thing that that mitigates that a little bit is they are starting to successfully go upmarket a bit and get like some slightly more. Stables lower turn customers with higher gym be so so maybe that balance is out in the long run. Scot: [30:29] Yeah it's like a million at the base of the pyramid though and it takes a lot at the top of the pyramid. Jason: [30:35] It just takes one Kylie Jenner. Scot: [30:37] That last. That's my first prediction my second one and another prediction we would kind of I can't remember which was did that for a long time is part of me just like the earpods I was saying, Amazon will get into delivery that is, that would be a double a man because it sucks such an obvious once and for the longest time FedEx UPS said no no no there are partner or not our competitor the bloom is totally off that one right now where was like okay this is bad in fact you mentioned earlier FedEx is like getting hammered over this and so did Amazon kind of dug the knife in further where they won't even let seller fulfilled Prime sellers use FedEx because they say the service level isn't good enough. Jason: [31:32] Yeah you talk about throwing some holiday shade. Scot: [31:34] Ouch ouch so as a result of FedEx is under a lot of pressure right now and I think it's going to cause some kind of interesting thing to happen you know you got eBay out there kind of rudderless right now you could see FedEx eBay you could see you mention Walmart I think there's going to be some interesting, kind of marriage that happens with FedEx in and it's can be driven from the world of e-commerce. Jason: [32:04] Get I like that one. Scot: [32:06] Predictions for 3 this is not my forte but there's just a lot of Buzz around returns so there's several startups you could probably write them better than I can save Mall. BCS contact me about this which means it must be like just kind of, yeah they're all trying to solve returns problems and there's all kinds of clever ways of doing this of no Consolidated return centers different ways of managing the supply chain that kind of thing so I'm going to say 2020 will be the year where you know they're just probably be some kind of a winner that emerges from that and they'll be kind of like ShopRunner has try to do and not to successfully the offer a prime and a network of retailers that form an alternative prime one of these startups will be successful and I guess I'll Define it as. Raising over a hundred million something like that something that's like pretty pretty. Obvious that their leader they'll be pretty successful in in kind of taking a run at offering an on Amazon, multi retailer multi-brand approached returns. Jason: [33:25] So that's funny I wrote a similar prediction I didn't end up using it because I thought it was two wonky but I totally agree with the sentiment it does like I think it's returns it become a huge acute problem and so you know we're seeing lots of new investments in the hole reverse Logistics base to try to solve it so it that that seems reasonable although somebody raising a hundred million dollars is not peanuts so the so I like your. You're taking a stance. Scot: [33:58] That's my third and fourth one is a keeping with my mall again which has been a winner for for two years in a row I'm going to say you know what you call 9000 store closures in 2019 it's a good start. So I think we're going to have many more store closures I'm going to say at least eight thousand so continuing to keep, about the same as last year if not more I think we are going to see, I just feels like we're still over stored in a lot of different categories like drug stores that kind of stuff so I put that one out there. [34:34] And then this one this is one of these I've made a long time and I'm always wrong but I've some reason I'm back to it this year I just finally believe Google has is waking up to the Amazon Fred and and starting ticket much more seriously now they're there, terrible branding job at it but I think execution wise there is something there they have this Marketplace which is essentially called shopping Google shopping. Actions and you know the sink, they're getting pretty serious about it and I think this year they're going to get really really serious about it so what's that mean so I think I think. Overall I think I could see them actually in the hunt to buy an eBay or FedEx or something like that that could be interesting and then you know another one is the shopping actions is it's always just been this kind of on the edge like well a little Beyond 2% of Android latest Android lollipop popsicle Twix and yes it is a being like percent of a percent of a percent and not Material so so I'm thinking they get pretty serious about it meaning it's going to get a lot of exposure I'm on not only just some fraction of Android but across all Google properties. Jason: [35:59] So I like it how like what were you cancel BC to know that that that happened like you expect them to be like I'd top 100 retailer like what would what's the. Scot: [36:11] I think yeah I think 10% of shopping traffic going through it would be material so I would come start there. Jason: [36:20] Oh wow yeah that's quite mature okay. Scot: [36:22] And I would look at like search marketing as someone like the referee on this search marketing. Was that search engine land or one of those. Jason: [36:31] Ya SE land.com. At least to get the ball rolling you know the last month they announced Bill ready who is that executive PayPal is the new, like VP of Commerce a Google so they like they haven't a new person to sort of weed that initiative so that maybe bodes well for your prediction. Scot: [36:53] Yeah I worry about it because these payments guys want you when you've been in the payments world everything looks like a nail so so I worry we're going to get Google pay 8.0 embossing. Jason: [37:07] So yeah supposedly and I I don't know but I think he's got some non-competes and supposably like is being hired explicitly not to get involved in pain. Scot: [37:17] I did not know that. Jason: [37:19] So maybe that will benefit you. Scot: [37:23] Let's we can only hope. Jason: [37:24] Yes yes I like it though. Scot: [37:27] All right those are my five what are your five. Jason: [37:29] Awesome duck so my first one is I'm just going to take yours from last year and protect them for this year. Thinking of you just missed the timing and given all the ones that that have happened the past that's my new strategy so last year you predicted it Walmart, would would have a hiccup in 2019 so I'm going to say in 2020 is the year that the Walmart rate of growth slows down and I don't, actually mean that that, is a distressing anyway I just think sometime this year they're going to finish rolling out online grocery pick-up to all of their stores and they're going to have to comp against, stores that were opened last year where has for the last few years they've had this benefit of opening a bunch of stores and going from zero to some, some big number of digital grocery so I think it's going to be much tougher to maintain that 40% growth rate so I expect that growth rate to go down, which is enough kind of natural and then I'll throw out a wacky one and say I also actually think that this might be the year that Mark Laurie exits from Walmart. [38:43] Just think like, that he's probably been there awhile like we weave you know started to see some of hit a lot of the jet people have, kind of transitioned out now Andy Dunn has transitioned out that the guy has basically unlimited funds in the bank like I think he may just be like he's accomplished with what he can accomplish it at Walmart and we we might see a Changing of the Guard. Scot: [39:08] Did Nadal Ray say that he had like four years to make a trillion dollars but so it feels like they're being expensive choice. Jason: [39:18] Yeah I think it will be a I think he could afford an expensive choice I don't know how that would all work out like I could imagine him to go shooting some sort of payout, it made sense for both parties will see. Scot: [39:35] Is that a nand or nor. Jason: [39:37] Yeah so I want my official prediction to be that the rate of growth slows but if Mark Lori does away this year I want permission to go. Galloway and just like launch a website that's called Jason predicted that Mark would we. Scot: [39:52] Got it so it's amore with the Galloway Asterix. Jason: [39:56] It's the color its color exactly. So then my next permit prediction again following the trend that I like to always you always make some Amazon prediction so I'm going to steal that and. How to be honest like part of me feels like this is too easy and not a very controversial prediction but so many things don't happen that that like I do think it's fair I think this is the year that Amazon finally opens its own grocery concept bike separate from Whole Foods and I think it's going to be targeted at a more affordable price points and I think it's going to dramatically heat up the sort of digital grocery Wars and most notably, the Walmart Amazon Kroger battles. Scot: [40:44] Cool. Jason: [40:46] So number three is that I think we're going to see a lot more emphasis and talk about owned Brands this year and that's going to significantly grow as a part of retail so last year about 5% of all retail goods were, like private label type products and I think it could be dramatically bigger in 2020 I think it could be sort of in that 8 to 10% range. Which would be a huge disruption in the retail Marketplace. Scot: [41:19] What's your data source. Jason: [41:21] The 5% is actually 4.6% and I will have to I do have to get my intern to pull it out but that's predominantly focused on like the cpg and grocery space so it's one of those those Data Tracking companies but I'll find it for you. Scot: [41:47] So it's not Jason Goldberg go to himself. Jason: [41:49] No no no I we need a credible we need a credible external. Scot: [41:53] Is a data point out there were on the lam purses. Jason: [42:00] Yeah I like that one we just put it in the Echo chamber and and it'll become real. Scot: [42:06] That'll be interesting so that does that include digital native recall brands or this is more just like Target spending up. Jason: [42:17] Yeah, so I'm primary thinking about omnichannel retailers like Shifting the focus to Brands they own rather than so like to be it's more of the the, Captain Jack's of the world like I think Walmart's going to make a major effort to grow their own Brands Target you know me is is putting a huge effort into their new grocery brand and I I just think, the big macro Trend in in retailers we're going to see a couple retailers really try to can compete on, sort of Assortment and being the everything store and then in North America to me that's Walmart and Amazon and every other retailers going to try to win by selling stuff that no one else has and so I just think that's going to result in a lot bigger, Pechanga retail selling their own stuff instead of other people stuff. [43:12] We shall see ya. My fourth prediction is you know you you have on the area that there's a lot of momentum at the moment and returns and reverse Logistics another one for me is the installment payment space so I said installment payments are going to dramatically heat up and I think that's going to result in at least one major acquisition in that space so I think like, when I talk about installment payments I'm talking about a lot of these companies that are sort of alternative credit means a lot of them are kind of like, Finance your purchase in for for monthly payments that kind of thing and cities are friends like affirm and afterpay and Karma and I I just think that you know next year you see one of those acquired Maybe by a major credit card company or Bank you know I think some of the big traditional Financial folks are going to want to own a piece of that hot space And so there's going to be some good acquisitions. Scot: [44:15] Who who do you think this is an addiction but I'm curious who you think the buyers are going to be like traditional like Financial folks like City or or is. Jason: [44:26] Yeah so I think I think the big the big Banks participating banks that have a retail credit Division if you are receiving retail credit services so you do private label credit cards for like Best Buy, these guys are now taking a chunk of that space and and they've accomplished something that you've always wanted to do which is their built into the checkout flow which is super valuable to these credit card issuers and so I could easily like imagine one of those credit card firms wanting to acquire one of these guys I also think you could, you know it could be a PayPal or, square or you don't even like one of the big credit networks like Visa. Scot: [45:15] Singing payments do you have plans to move to Africa this year. Jason: [45:20] I was going to but I've been told that I only have one job and so I'm not qualified to to like move to Africa and remotely do my two CDL jobs. Who would you be referring to buy a by chance. Scot: [45:36] So Jack Dorsey CEO of Twitter and and square it's just kind of randomly said he's going to move to Africa for some. Of time if she can get Scott Galloway it really angered him he's very upset about. Jason: [45:52] Yeah but In fairness like I think of you a shit like Square in particular you're like, why is my guys been in a lot of his time on this Twitter thing and then now he's going to do it from Africa like that that would seems like, that would be a legitimate reason to have some concern. Scot: [46:12] Yeah yeah yeah. Jason: [46:14] Yep I would love to visit Africa but I think it would be on vacation and then my V prediction. Is one that I feel like I used to do all the time and then you know I skipped a year, so what will try it again I think this is going to be a year that digital in-store really heats up and the surprising piece of that is this much-maligned a technology that people in our industry like to make jokes about the the ugly QR code I think is going to make a a major comeback at retail and we'll see a bunch of of a Retailer's deployed QR codes for various forms of mobile wallets and particularly for like, letting you scan products and read reviews and things like that ends in retail stores. So those are my five and then. Scot: [47:08] DuckTales risky people hate QR you want a visceral hatred of York. Jason: [47:12] Yeah I feel like it's it's a bit of sneaky success I feel like there's a lot of people but they're pregnant primarily pendants that like have all this negativity around the QR code but didn't secretly you know. There there's a bunch of of use cases where the QR codes have been like Paramount like it's, it's you know a huge chunk of all payments at Starbucks and it's Walmart pay which is secretly been a success and it's you know it's it's Snapchat and if you go to China it's everywhere is WeChat so, so hopefully we'll see you by usually I am dead wrong in these things so I am not overly confident about any of them but. But I'm at least throwing it out there and again because the bonus is always treated me so well I thought I would throw a bonus in this year. Scot: [48:03] What do you have for this year. Jason: [48:06] So my bonus is I'm just going straight negative because I'll be honest when I first read these forecasts all five of my forecasts are things that we're not going to happen and then I realized that I can't I can't be that guy right so so I tried to make more optimistic reasonable forecast but then I reserve the right to point out all of the Ebenezer Scrooge bah humbug, moments so here's my long list of things that are not going to happen this year cashierless retail stores like Amazon go blockchain 5G big data and personalization none of those those Technologies are going to have a major impact on retail Talking Heads are going to go crazy about them and write stories about how you know if you don't do it immediately you're going to go out of business, but I think they're going to be the examples of success are going to be few and far between I don't think, everyone loves to talk about DJ need a vertical Brands but I don't think any of those are going to break out in a be particularly successful in 2020, I for sure don't think we're going to see any major retail antitrust actions in the US. [49:11] So that would be my negative Scott Galloway prediction I also don't think the the brick-and-mortar marketplace stores so that's beta showfields neighborhood Goods I don't think they're going to have a huge success or break out in 2020 and Shop of eyes getting a lot of Buzz right now but the the, thing I hear most about Shopify is that they're going to become a viable competitor for Amazon and I actually don't think they're going to compete with Amazon at all in 2020. Scot: [49:42] Yeah that the people that say they can compete feel like they think it Shopify would have some front door kind of marketplace Tech experience that kind of what you think people are looking. Jason: [49:54] There's people that talk about maybe they aggregate traffic and have some kind of marketplace experience where you could shop across multiple vendors you know they they bought a logistics company this year in the rapidly building out there with just aches and on paper that looks like, fulfillment by Amazon and some people are like oh that's competing with a fulfillment by Amazon but as I as we said earlier in the show I admire Shopify think they're making a bunch of the right decisions and they're doing really well. None of the services they provide to a client in my mind. Replace or compete with any of the services Amazon provides in anyway and like, I think they're for the most part synergistic in there they're going to have a lot of customer overlap but it's the end of the day Amazon is in the business of generating a huge amount of traffic and monetizing that traffic and they sell that traffic to their customers and that's exactly the opposite of what Shopify does Shopify does everything for you but get you any traffic whatsoever and you are totally responsible for bringing your own traffic and so I just think, that's a that's a, both sides of that strategy makes sense for both companies but I just I think all the pendants that are like oh you know the secret competitor for Amazon's going to turn out to be Shopify I just don't see it. Scot: [51:15] Any other bonuses you want though there. Jason: [51:21] No no no no I think I press my luck enough hopefully that you know there's some nuggets in their our listeners will be able to use they shake their 2020 and that will be able to redeem ourselves when we unquestionably I enter the new decade next January. Scot: [51:43] Yeah you know what maybe it would be fun as if listeners I'm just doing this off-the-cuff so what if listeners wanted to add some and we could kind of like aggregate some of the better ones in and talk about them on the next show but then also when we do the recap see what had a third competitor which of these listeners and see how they do against you. Jason: [52:05] Yeah that's a great idea because I it's it's kind of boring coming in second so I feel like third would be that's why I've been to just. Scot: [52:14] Looks like it would feel better if it smells cancer. Jason: [52:17] Fair enough. So maybe I try to take only the worst products that be funny I try to cherry-pick the worst predictions and then it still be me so yeah I'm totally in on that if listeners want to jump on to Facebook and we leave any of their own predictions or hit us up on Twitter will be happy to aggregate them put them in the show notes and include them in our recap next year and that's going to be a great final call to action because it's happen again we've used up our a lot of time so definitely love to hear all of our listeners predictions and also feel free if you just think, Scott and I are crazy and you want to refute any of our predictions we'd love to hear your thinking behind that and as always the beginning of the year before you get really busy at work is a perfect time to jump on iTunes and finally give us that five star review. Scot: [53:10] Things are running Jason congrats on salvaging a tie out this year. Jason: [53:15] Thanks very much it it it it feels good to be West behind than I usually am thanks everyone for listening and until next time happy commercing.

Chris Walton sits down one-on-one with b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby to discuss the history and business model of b8ta, "Retail-as-a-Service" theory and practice, and his company's new partnership involving Toys R Us. The conversation was frank, spirited, and quite frankly left us with even more unanswered questions about the long-term value surrounding what we have seen so far from b8ta's first footnotes on the chart of retail history. For the full transcript of this podcast: https://omnitalk.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/MXZKmr_1581001407.txt

EP192 - Macy's VP of Innovation Parinda Muley  Parinda Muley (@parinda), the VP of Innovation and Business Development at Macy’s.  In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss a number of Macy’s innovation initiatives including ThredUp, Macy’s Market @ Macy’s, B8ta, Story, and Style Crew.  We also talk about the strategies for fostering innovation, and how retail innovation is likely to evolve in the future. Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 192 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, August 21st, 2019. live from the eTail East trade show in Boston, MA. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this episode is being recorded live from the etail East trade show in Boston on Wednesday August 21st 2019, I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and unfortunately Scott was unable to join us today so you’re getting twice the Jason for half the usual price which as I understand it is a bargain but the sweeten the pot we have an awesome guest adjoining on the podcast is parinda movie. Malay thank you very much she’s the VP of innovation and business development at Macy’s prenda just finished a keynote panel discussion entitled fostering Innovation rethinking the omni-channel organization today thanks very much for being on the show. Parinda: [1:09] Thank you for having me. Jason: [1:10] We are thrilled to have you you have a slightly unusual title to me and I mean that in an exciting way what does a VP of innovation and Business Development do for someone like Macy’s. Parinda: [1:23] Yeah so the whole team is fairly new to Macy’s on this group is about 2 years old and I think it was when retails really focused on how do we continue to drive change in an organization from the inside and I think that was what about 2 years ago and they were looking to establish a team that was focused on Innovation and what’s new what’s next which is one of our pillars and so I think establishing this group was really around focusing on new business models new initiative how do we solve for a customer for tomorrow’s customer and we are opportunities that we can continue to play in a game chair in if I knew Sharon and play it with an authentic voice. Jason: [2:04] That sounds fabulous and I want to dig into that a little bit before we do what’s her background you have to have to get real like that can you talk a little bit about your background. Parinda: [2:13] The absolutely so I very new to retail I have been in the business development Innovation function for a very long time but mostly within the media sector I came from timing. I’m where I served as a sort of a business development lead mostly on the digital side. Prior to that I was with MSNBC and then with a startup before that and Consulting before that but I’ll really in the media space and so I think I spent a lot of time focusing on driving new revenue streams for companies and how do you start relying Less on the core and sort of innovating in the news of the function and the you know start of shift to retail was actually not that big of a job after I did it and it stopped felt a little daunting initially but it was the same problem different industry and I think you know there’s a running joke in my family that you moved from one struggling industry to another but I think that’s what’s so exciting is that there’s so much opportunity to to reinvent and change and that’s sort of the perfect time to do that I’m in the perfect role to be in to help. Jason: [3:11] Well I’m super excited to have met you because I feel like I have a bunch of Industries I can recommend for you. Parinda: [3:16] What’s next. Jason: [3:19] Erica rejected have you thought about the buggy whip at all. If you. Not done. I teased I have to be honest you give me hope I feel like this the new trend on the show is all the gas are reformed Consultants. And as a current practice in consultant I like to see that there’s a chance for me to redeem myself at some point so so thank you for setting a good example. Question about Innovation cuz it comes up a lot in retail in my mind there’s there’s two opposing philosophies you you mean a lot of retailers that have set up these dedicated. Innovation functions and I’ll call it the Ivory Tower approach like hey. Protect these people that just focus on Innovation don’t distract them with the day-to-day rigours of the organization you know when the normal profitability kpi is and let them really focus on. Innovative stuff and you know ideally iron interdisciplinary team that have a lot of complementary capabilities and on the other end of that extreme is. Dodge for Innovation be valuable it really has to be grounded in the organization’s unicor problems and we really got to develop Innovation organically from. The company’s practitioners and I suspect the answer is somewhere in between but like how do you guys think about Innovation at Macy’s. Parinda: [4:43] Yeah I think it’s it’s it’s a great question and when we started it was probably the former in terms of what you describe we were working very much and isolation and we were able to do big things we launched very big Concepts we spent a lot of time studying that space and we were able to do it with our own budget our own team and we went and ended stuff I think well that was exciting I don’t. The rest of the organization is is onboard completely because you’re working so much and isolation. Version 2 was well that’s kind of come more towards the middle but we probably song a little bit too much and we started doing a bunch of tests and and more smaller impact but it wasn’t. It also wasn’t the right solution to when I was swinging a little bit in version 3 of this sing a little bit more to the left I don’t think there’s a perfect answer I do believe that you need a dedicated team that focused on this day in day out because it doesn’t otherwise it’s not top of mine they’re still obviously we have. Afloat until focusing on the core and making sure we’re delivering for holiday and that’s it has a very important it’s always going to be in. How do you balance that with making sure we’re solving for tomorrow and I think there’s a bridge in between but you do have to infuse that mindset and bring your stakeholders in earlier and get them onboard earlier because I think that’s the only way that you can have the greatest impact is getting more people aligned to the vision in the way that were that were working. Jason: [6:05] No I think it’s a universal retail conundrum that revenue is always urgent and Innovation is always important and if. One human being is left to prioritize between urgent and important unfortunately important I was going to list. So can we talk about a couple of the cool examples of things that have come out of your department. Parinda: [6:27] Play so I think one of the ones that are very that I was very excited about was you know we’ve been studying as most of the details had been its growth in on direct to Consumer brands are these digital native brand and there was a flood of them and I think it was exciting to see was a lot of them were manifesting into. Spaces and they were using their physical space and wanted to be in physical space to to get to the customer to allow the customer to touch and feel their products in a different way and so that’s real kind of studying that and started talking to more of these digital brands and we recognized that they were struggling with finding the right real estate is expensive to find the right real estate then they have to figure out a way to Garner the audience to come to them so they were spending a lot on marketing activations and and and getting customers to come to them they also we’re struggling it’s running a store when you’re kind of doing it. [7:17] Hopsin I’m having the right teams in place to operationalize the space was also challenging so that was put me putting Macy’s in the perfect position to say we have. Real estate everywhere Best in Class we have, operations and Logistics is what we do that’s our bread-and-butter and we are able to we have staff we can we can put a lot of resources against these guys and we can give it we can give them space that’s economically viable for them and they’re going into space where there’s cuss inherit customer traffic and so I think being able to take that to some of these Brands and actually really quantify they’re spending 345 exmoor on a weekend pop-up forces being in our space. 4 a month in in with the same value proposition and I think that opened up a really interesting opportunity for us to take could we create. Retail as a service and it was a mice in my shift for the company because we’re such a sales heavy organization that sort of our our our core and now we’re saying what let’s. Feel the secondary here let’s try to create this package and bundle package for the digital brand would they can come in and a very flexible model that they want to come in for a month they can come in from us if they want to come in for 6 months they can come in, 100 square feet 65 it’s really up to them and what works best for them. [8:33] But now we’re giving them away to literally just all that we needed their inventory and we will staff at we will educate our staff on their products we ask for a lot of what differentiates their products that we can speak to it in the right way, and you know the first version of when we launched if we want chicken tenders when we started and we didn’t mark it at all and it was called The Market at Macy’s. [8:54] And we really just used our internal team of four or five to just go out to our own connections and see if there was interesting, and demand for coming into our space and what was really fascinating as me again I’m coming from the mediaspace I didn’t have a ton of retail connection then all the sudden I started hearing that media companies were interested in coming and testing Sony Pictures came in to say we don’t get customers watch a movies we’d love to activate a trailer in your space Downey came in to say I know your customers by detergent but I don’t get the same visibility in your stores as I do in the visibility that yet in cpg or Target, is one of many verses no one else is in your space and I can tell a different narrative and so we started getting a lot of different types of companies wanting to come and in addition to the digital native Branson say this is great for us I cannot be in 5 locations and not just wanted I physically don’t have to be there and so it was really kind of flipping the lid on on the business model and saying we think they’re still profitable model here I’m which is what I sort of live by I don’t want to just launched for the sake of lunching there’s a compelling business model around it but there’s value to the brands that are coming in and it was just a happy medium to say Let’s test and I’m since then we launched into Mordor then once things are sort of. [10:09] We have an initial model that’s when we like to push it back into the business and so at the same time we had acquired story until Rachel shechtman leads our brand experience and it made sense a ton of sense for the market at Macy’s to live I’m in that world so now she is she’s managing. Jason: [10:24] Very cool so. Like I couldn’t see the value to these brands are getting access to like the enormous put traffic that you guys have and I would assume it’s a nice surprise and Delight moment for the mini z shop. Parinda: [10:40] Solutely and that’s what we wanted to make sure you know when you go back to our other than here at what are we solving for it’s this freshness discoverability being able to what you see today might not be here tomorrow and that sort of in a surprise and Delight was really important for us to continue to make sure that we have a way to Showcase these was also a really great way from Macy’s to test Brands to say now we have an ecosystem that allows us to see what’s our customers, for some of the stuff they’re seeing and then could we actually move it into a larger relationship partner relationship I’m in that’s happened within the. Case isn’t so it’s been really an interesting sort of way to test and learn for us as well as any other compelling piece of this was. I think there’s an expectation with digital brands to and turn to the metrics that they get in the data that they have at their fingertips when they’re online and how do we make sure we deliver that in-store until we outfitted each of these faces with, with cameras that allowed us to measure and customer engagement allowed the brands to access in real time who is spending time with our product what’s the dwell time in that space what’s 12 to conversion and again giving them that data allowed them to a b testing her in a real time in a physical store in a way that they couldn’t do. Jason: [11:48] Yeah it would just totally awesome. Now I’m imagining that the relationship does brands have with Macy’s is also somewhat unique in that it’s not the traditional wholesale model where they’re just telling you goes in your setting a price in your merchandise. That they’re I’m assuming they’re sort of renting space from you. Parinda: [12:06] Play it is 8/8 a retail as a service so it’s a service offering we are they keep 100% of their sales. I mean that’s what we had to sort of change the mindsets it’s not about the sales for us it’s about giving our customers the right experience with new brand it’s allowing activations to happen in our space and it’s allowing Brands to tell the narrative that they want to do in a physical in a physical store and I think that that new proposition is what sort of it was very different from Macy’s but it also was very compelling to Brant because now they are allowed to come into a space where they can keep 100% of what they. Jason: [12:40] Shirts and when the things I appreciate about your execution so this is becoming some sort of a popular Trend and I I won’t put you on the spot by asking you to comment on other Zedge execution but there is a lot of sort of retail is a service targeting these digital native brand so I think I would like the neighborhood Goods or showfields or Four Corners in WoW, the assortment in the product selection in those doors can be really interesting in a similar way to Market to Macy’s the retail execution is actually very traditional, I just a shelf put yourself on the Shelf figure out how to do some static merchandising and we have some salespeople and the. The market at Macy’s execution has those components but then there is also some digital storytelling for every product and there are these Richard Analytics you know a lot of these products that tend to make it in the marketplace feel like products that require. Some demonstration enter video storytelling they benefit from this more digitally enabled shopping experience than. Simply like sitting in a box on a Shelf. Parinda: [13:54] Absolutely and I think that’s what was what we are trying to achieve is its first understanding what’s what’s your goal like talking to these Brands and saying what are you trying to get out of this expense are you testing right now are you trying to understand what what demos run it resonate with your product are you are you just focused on sales are you trying to do a marketing activation and I think, we could help Taylor that for them because it’s really about their experience and we want them to be successful in that in whatever they’re showcasing because. That would prompt them to want to come back and I think, defrost it if you looked at the market when we launched it it was very plain vanilla I mean it was not we didn’t focus a lot on the Frills of what it looks like it also wasn’t overly curated it was a little bit like. A market right and it was you would see Ferrari next to a barbecue sauce I mean that was the reality of what we were showcasing having some of that has to change and we are as we serve in the next version of it it’s now how do we Elevate the space how do we make it stand out from an experience perspective it makes a lot of sense to live in Rachel’s world because she does that so well until I think it’s that’s the next version that needs that will come out but I think it’s a. It’s a little bit about us making sure that we’re delivering what is and managing expectations of what these Brands want out of there. Jason: [15:05] For sure that’s going to be fun to see how that involves wheat we certainly have been pulling her stuff so that that’s a great success story what else have you done. Parinda: [15:18] So I think one of the other ones will one, that I’ll add about aftermarket is I think what was really interesting from a business development Innovation perspective is nowhere very limited with how many Brands we can on board and there’s a technology that you know just from a technology perspective. Dbrand so quickly and I think that was when we were started looking at the market today is there a way that we can onboard that brand and manage the entire brand experience perspective beat at the time was doing the same thing in this that technology space and speed actually came into Macy’s at the shop and shop and we started having more dialogue around here are very similar philosophy how do we serve work together in launching. Rocket Macy’s so we invested in beta and they became the platform that sort of. Operation behind the market at Macy’s to make sure that we could scale this in the right way and I think that was a really great partnership to bring to life because it was say it was. A company saying we recognize that we have limitations in our own technology let’s bring in the right partner to make sure that we can operationalize this in the way that we need to. Jason: [16:23] It’s funny so they boo one of the founders of it has been on the show and we have this good natured ribbing so I was one of many people to be able to talk to early on when he was thinking about this concept and I told him I thought it was a super interesting concept I said I think it’s particularly interesting as an enabling technology that could be leveraged inside of traditional retail stores that I might oh and by the way that probably is your exit strategy and a focused on. We’re going to be way better than traditional retail we’re going to put all the traditional retail out of business and this is the new model we’re for sure not going to want to partner with any of these right so in my mind. I gave him some Sound Advice he wasn’t ready to hear and now he’s very successfully following so I like had this sense of satisfaction, she remembers that conversation slightly difference. And he he remember some other suggestions I gave him when he was asking for other business models to protect potentially pursue and he’s not one of them was particular wacky so he tells everyone this wacky advice I gave him and I may I tell everyone this this you know Savvy business model advice I give him and I suspect the truth is somewhere in between, but I digress so awesome story certainly been following the bay. Concept closely and and it seems like the collaboration with you guys has been particularly interesting but we were going to give it to another win. Parinda: [17:50] Yeah and I think you know again I think the way that the bd-team really starts and thinks about any initiative is. Where’s our customers standing there time their share of wallet their energy and do we have the authority to play in that space and if we do what are we bringing to the table and I think that’s a piece that a lot of. Other retailers forget is just because we’re an older company and we’re trying to innovate into from the inside how do you balance tradition with disruption, and I think it’s really interesting to see that we have such valuable and Rich assets that sometimes need. Theory utilized in a more creative way and so one of the other initiatives that we launched which I’m super excited about is something we’re calling Macy’s style crew and essentially was saying me a hundred thirty thousand employees can we actually make them, sort of sellers of our brand in a completely new way we’ve been following video Commerce in as well and we’ve been studying that space a lot of players were coming into that space we’re following the influence our world and kind of seeing what’s happening in that space and we think and we can emerge the two and create something new that allows us to activate video cameras in a new way but use our own assets to do it and so what we did is we started with a pilot of 20 colleagues across the company so you had engineers and developers yet accounting. People you had a lot of people in the store and said let’s just start with these funny and let’s give them the tools to create content. [19:15] Any content that they want that somehow talks about their Macy story so it could be a walk down the street and they’re showcasing what they’re wearing it could be we had one person that does animated stories and and somehow incorporate the product but we wanted to make sure that they have the tools to tag products. And put them in their videos and we said let’s just just show them to your own network when I’m going to put it on Macy’s anywhere that’s one of the biggest challenges want to take down the guard rails we couldn’t fully take them down but we said you don’t see it with your own network and let’s see what happens. Our numbers were pretty outstanding and we and what we did as we’ve said. Everything that you said we kind of bake them into the reward so there is an incentive to salad and and commissions and what was what was fascinating is a lot of them didn’t care about that a lot of them just wanted to. Wanted to expose their voice to create their followings or to add to the following. We are now close to almost 5,000 employees and it’s just unlock so much for us in terms of now having sort of a geographically relevant marketing tool that we can that we can use at a moment’s notice in real-time so if. You get a really warm day in the middle of December in Chicago you could actually talk about shorts and you don’t have to activate this big campaign but you can do it in real time with. [20:29] With the Macy’s style crew and it’s been really fun to see the type of people that are interested in being in this is unless of it for like a new love for the brand and you know people are talking about you good and bad all the time so why not give them a forum to talk about, your brand in a new creative way and it’s been exciting to create this community which is essentially what we’ve done to to Showcase new brands that they loved it also been really interesting cuz we’ve been hearing from The Venture Community to say it is an interesting can we participate in this do we have Macy South we talked about our brand we haven’t activated that in a a a formalized way yet but. We certainly can we can we did a test with Clinique and with it was an opt-in program and and you know it allows RR our colleagues to be able to genuinely talk about products the way that they like it and it gives real content for some of these Brands to use and so you can imagine where we can go with us if we can scale to not only our employees are our colleagues but then our best customer that can be a loyalty play and there’s a lot I think that’s that this program could enable down the road and we again as a BD team with built it and now it’s living in our marketing world. Jason: [21:38] Yeah it was just awesome I love style crew. [21:43] It’s funny because I can we talk about influencer marketing a lot for like a lot of people’s mind goes to these Mega in the Kardashians of the world and to me that’s mass-marketing people understand that she’s Hocking product that she’s paid to and so like. I can be a good reach play for some opportunities but I’m really excited about the micro influencer space and they these more much narrower markets but much more authentic advocacy for products and this huge challenge with micro influencers a scaling them. Ride that to get a reach it’s meaningful for Macy’s you know it’s very hard to go scraping YouTube to find. Thousands of people like in a particular genre that each have I don’t know you know $10,000 or something like that. So turning inside and saying hey we have all these brand loyal as they like shows to work in our store instead of some other retail store because they already have an affinity and gravitated to a pretty good apartment like. It feels like the perfect audience to evangelize as influencers. And it’s crazy I’ve done some shopping in China and you go to like these luxury experiences in China and you meet these super high-touch sales associates. [23:03] That might have a hundred thousand followers on WeChat. And it’s like you got oh my God there’s like so much power here so I feel like that’s a super exciting initiative I’m eager to see how played. 2 questions so. [23:17] In my experience when you when you have a you know when you come into the office and say hey we have an idea we’re going to empower a bunch of our in-store Associates to start publishing content. There’s some institutional inertia that the typical corporate antibody start flowing in like God forbid there’s a lawyer on your Innovation team it can be very hard for an organization except that was that the case at Macy’s or was. Parinda: [23:45] Absolutely and I think we’re public company so we have to be smart about the stuff that we launched and we have to be strategic and I think there was there’s always red tape that we have to go through I’m legally even using initially we have the idea of could we leverage Macy’s handles does showcase some of this and that was you know we said no and then and I understood it said we don’t know the type of content that’s being created and so okay well then let’s put it around that and so it hasn’t prevented us from doing things but it absolutely is something that we have to overcome now that we’ve launched a few initiatives I think building The credibility internally has made it easier for even our legal team to get behind some of the stuff is a okay well let’s let’s focus on that the stuff that we think are really showstoppers then and we can talk about the rest or we can you know we can. We can figure out the rest and I think there’s just more openness and there has been a little bit of a shift in mindset internally to say we can get on board with this or we can Fidelis Cat Tattoo in a smaller way but let’s test it and I think the appetite for doing more has been as an incredible this past year. Jason: [24:47] That’s awesome and I was like to remind people like all of these dialogues and content are already happening. Like it’s not like they’re not happening because you don’t put some guide rails around it and structure it in so like I’ve been having these programs gives you an opportunity to. Put the appropriate guide rails on a 10:00 amplifier but it’s not like it’s that there aren’t Macy’s employees with social media, so then the other challenge is there some new technology enablement that you would need like in organization like Macy’s. You go out and find like startup partner that’s interested in that same experience and kind of Leverage their their tools or do you build tools from scratch or what do you do. Parinda: [25:30] It’s always a conversation so kind of going back to the store the process that will use a weirdo customer spending their time and energy third share of wallet do we have the authority to play in that space if we do what the business model around and with the value of bringing and then it’s saying okay do we need to build this internally or do we partner with someone to help accelerate or to enable something that we don’t have or to build credibility even if it’s whitespace opportunity that we’re not in we need to partner with the right. Great company to help Drive some of that credibility in that space and so are our team is very external focused so we are keeping a pulse on what’s out there who’s out there who’s doing what that will never start with the technology were really starting with the concept in the initiative and then saying is there a partner that would help drive this forward and that’s sort of how the beta partnership came about we’re partner with a company called TV page on for Macy’s style Crew That’s. A very small company based out of San Diego initially but they were allowed they were able to customize a lot of the program for us which house. Is because there are a lot of video cameras to hold out there but a lot of them are geared for marketing teams and we want to put the tool in front of the user that’s not necessarily A sophisticated as a marketing team until how do we want to make sure that it was. Seamless it was easy to use and so there was a lot of custom work that was required so it’s a little bit of a bridge but when you find the right partner who’s willing to customize for you it makes it a lot easier. Jason: [26:55] That’s awesome and I I particularly like digital shopping vendors emerging and San Diego I grew up there and so I feel like I. Parinda: [27:03] Amazing. Jason: [27:03] I need a retirement Opportunity by Journey. Turn vibrate companies I can work with in San Diego one day so those are two terrific examples I’m super excited about I’m going to go out on a limb and say like not every idea turns into a. That kind of sort of public-facing success Nike are there any examples of either Runnings Macy’s had from trying things that may be like weren’t valuable to the customer or or even just like General pitfalls you think about an innovation. Parinda: [27:35] Yeah I mean I think there’s there’s always ones that we will go after that you know that need we launched the wine club early in our days I mean wine is something that people surprisingly search a lot for on our sites and it’s not it’s a very litigious space and it we couldn’t figure out a way we actually have a lot of liquor licenses but we can’t activate in all of our stores in the right way so it’s how do we get around this problem and how do we solve for what people are asking for it so so what if we launched the wine club as opposed to actually selling wine in our stores. And so I think that was a really interesting task we found again I read the right partner that has the distribution and all of the the rights and all of all the states to be able to service that and we launched and I think launched successfully, at the end of the day it was a really was a marketing Ploy and if you don’t have the right marketing tactics and place you’re not going to be able to get it to the right consumers and consistently it’s a clubs and I think he’s a scription recurring. Revenue in all of that so I think that one is one that it’s still alive and it’s still good but we have to do a lot of work to continue to revamp like how are we getting this event of our customers in the right way and I don’t think it’s perfect. Jason: [28:39] I do have it on good authority that how often is one of the highest volume users of the Wind. I’m just saying I don’t ask me how I know that but just when you you reference Macy’s having a lot of liquor licenses that’s predominantly on from for your food service and what not. Parinda: [28:56] Absolutely and we run a very big food food group you know it’s people don’t. Look at us as a food destination but I think that’s another one that’s a really challenging one that’s been on my radar in terms of Engagement we think I’ll wear to customers spend their time and their their energy a lot of times It’s associated with food and so how do we play in food in olestra dishin away because food is a very infrastructure heavy offering and so and the the price points are very low submerged the business model around food is not always great until can we activate food in an interesting way that less infrastructure heavy but we can think about ways to engage the customer is it pre-packaged is it is it things that we could is it instagrammable moments that we have to share around food and and how do we continually conceptualize around that we haven’t landed a great answer to that yet but we’re working very closely with our food seem to say how do we make sure we can bring food to more location because we know that. Just one coffee offering coffee in our stores amount of radiated sales that it drives it’s pretty significant so how do I activate that and more location. Jason: [30:00] That know I’m certainly very grateful to your food team it’s a cohort of one but I spend an awful lot of time doing store visits and I’m well known for having a significant Starbucks problem. It’s a wagon traditional retail I had to always like visit a Bass Pro Shop or a Macy’s in the middle of my day because I could rely on that that Starbucks fix I’ve been doing a lot of working grocery lately and that’s why I like revolutionary for me because they all they all have a Starbucks franchise. That that is a totally fun and a great example of where there’s maybe opportunities that people haven’t. Haven’t totally figured out yet. Parinda: [30:39] Yeah there’s so much disruption happening in the food space everything from the delivery side to just Innovation and food Concepts as well so I think there’s just opportunity. Jason: [30:47] Yeah it’s I feel like one of things we talked a little bit. The show is as a result of digital disruption in the old days you had restaurants that mainly focused on on frame consumption you had Quick Serve that mainly focused on these like eat utility-based me occasions and you have grocery that you you know focused on it at home consumption and digital is blurred the lines between all those Concepts in so you now have people like using mobile order and pay to get fast casual food faster than they used to be able to get quick-serve, and you have grocery store serving Ready-to-Eat meals and doing home delivery and in like the good news, addressable market for all those Concepts just wildly expanded the bad news is the competitive set for all those landed at the same time. [31:37] Awesome I can talk about this stuff all day but I am giving your your role in Innovation and I know you have to always be looking forward and I’m I’m always interested get other practitioners povs about where the markets going so if you were to put your sort of Futures hat on or jump in the hot tub time machine with me and come to etail East, I know that was just a bad visual you didn’t want. I should have done the DeLorean Bedouin tells me when I do the time machine DeLorean that I’m dating myself so I’m trying to have more contemporary references but I digress 2025e tail has the shopping experience involves like like any any premise about you know sort of things that may be on. Typical today that will be common or what. Parinda: [32:24] Yeah I mean I think probably no surprises here but I think the concept of personalization is increasingly important convenience is increasingly important, I think connected experiences so you know just what we were talking about in the panel this morning is really about making sure we are everywhere I’m along the customer journey and making sure if she’s on her phone if she’s at home if she’s in the store we can deliver the same experience throughout and that’s connected I think that’s increasingly and important. I also think what, exciting for me is just their new places that our customers are hanging out or they’re spending their time when you think about there in rideshares there in. Places that we are not there and so can we be there or do we have the authority to play in that space and so I think there’s a lot of more white space than there was before I think our traditional competitors are no longer our only competitors and I think that, that the volume of where you could be it has increased and I think that’s just more it’s more that we could be doing and I think, using our space continuing to use our space differently so I think there’s going to be a lot more activations and experiences I think that’s. Something that our customer is asking for and so how will the retail shopping experience I don’t think it’s going away I don’t think physical is going away but I think what they see in the store could be wildly. [33:44] And so I think that’s what’s exciting about continuing to operate stores and having really Prime real estate to say how can we use this differently and how do we start thinking about activating new things. Jason: [33:55] Jansen what sounds like that’s some job security for you. And that’s going to be a great place to leave it because it’s happen again we’ve used up all our listeners a lot of time so if you’re dying to continue the conversation you can always hit our Facebook page or I reach out to us on Twitter as always this would be a great time to jump over to iTunes and finally give us that five star review that you’ve been holding back but Brenda if folks want to find you online do you live anywhere on the digital web. Parinda: [34:23] I mean I do I’m on LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me a 4 in the Malay it’s a pretty straightforward there’s not a lot of friends out there but what. Jason: [34:32] The exact right amount. Parinda: [34:33] Pretty easy Vine. Jason: [34:37] Awesome so we’ll put that your LinkedIn Link in the show notes and thanks again for coming and spending some time with us today. Parinda: [34:44] Thank you for having me. Jason: [34:45] And until next time happy commercing.

Our guest is Phillip Raub, Co-Founder and President of b8ta. A merchandise and marketing expert with a focus on customer experience, Phillip shares his retail insights and reveals the story behind his entrepreneurial success. We explore the evolution of the store, the "Retail as a Service" business model and what we can expect from the new Toys "R" Us relaunch.

Collaboration at work is on the rise and so are work management tools to help team members manage progress. Chris Farinacci is the Chief Operating Officer at Asana where he is responsible for the company’s, now global, go to market strategy. Chris breaks down execution of this strategy into three parts: revenue, customer, and market. With over 70,000 paying customers and another three million free companies “that have activated since inception,” Chris has his hands full.   “I always get asked, ‘what do you worry about?’ or ‘what keeps you up at night?’ It's the prioritization because there are so many opportunities for us and the sequencing of how we invest in those and when,” says Chris. “You can’t do it all at the same time. It's sort of the mapping of our core competencies and momentum to the product to market fit and the market opportunities.” In order to keep on track with their business goals, Chris explains that the team stays focused on the company's mission, “Eliminating work about work.” He wants team members to be focused on doing their work as opposed to spending time discussing where the work stands.  On this episode, Stephanie and Chris discuss how the team at Asana is using their own project management tools and practices internally to scale the company globally, how and why collaboration tools are growing faster than ever, and some of the practices Chris uses to manage day-to-day operations within Asana.  — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away three Skylight touch-screen photo frames. Enter the giveaway here for a chance to win!  — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

Everyone knows that data is exploding. What most people don’t realize is the pace and ways in which data is changing our everyday lives. According to Rahul Pathak, we’re seeing a “roughly 10x increase in data every 5 years, and the types of data that’s being generated is changing” as new devices are created every day. What does this data explosion mean for the future of business? And how is blockchain able to help with structuring and securing data? “So what you have is data volume exploding. You have the need for more control of data, but I think you also see customers realizing that data is a key strategic asset for their businesses. And so they need to be able to operate with data and use it to help them prove their businesses and drive competitive advantage while still complying with everything that's related to regulation and data protection,"says Rahul.  On today’s episode, Ian is joined by Rahul Pathak, Executive and General Manager of all things big data, data lakes, and blockchain at Amazon Web Services. Rahul has been with AWS since 2011 and focuses on providing customers access to large scale databases and computing. Today, he is passionate about the use cases of blockchain and is working with customers to solve their business goals with this new technology. Rahul joins us to discuss blockchain, the use cases of data lakes, the future of tech, and more! — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away three Skylight touch-screen photo frames. Enter the giveaway here for a chance to win!  — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

From Senior Military Cyber Advisor at the Pentagon to VP and Federal Chief Security Officer at Palo Alto Networks, John Davis is an experienced cyber security professional focused on educating the public on cyber threats and preventing the next national and international cyber attack. Palo Alto Networks is at the forefront of cyber security and uses the latest in tech such as artificial intelligence, analytics, automation, and orchestration to prevent cyber attacks on their integrated platform.  John has had first-hand experience with cyber attacks from his time at the Pentagon. In 2008, John was in charge of directing operations and defense for the Department of Defense’s networks. While in the position, he was made aware of malicious code in one of their networks. As a response to the threat, John developed and implemented Operation Buckshot Yankee to find the code and identify whether any sensitive information had been hacked. As a response to his hard work and leadership, the U.S. Cyber Command was created in 2010 and John became its first director.  “It was a near catastrophe for the military. And in my view, that was the event that was like the straw that broke the camel's back in the decision to create U.S. Cyber Command. As a result of a near catastrophe, senior leadership realized the consequence of the failed organizational structure and model that we had in 2008, and made the decision to bring together the people who operate the network, the people who defend the network, the intelligence that supports them as well as the ability to provide cyber capabilities to integrate offensively along with every other military capability, air, maritime land capabilities.” On today’s episode, Ian and John dive into John’s first hand experience with cyber security attacks, what to know about the current security landscape, and bits of advice and tools companies can use to improve their security. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away three Skylight touch-screen photo frames. Enter the giveaway here for a chance to win!  — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

The pace at which technology is becoming obsolete is ever increasing. What was cutting-edge a decade ago, gathers dust in storage sheds today. Or, at least, most of the tech should be gathering dust in storage. Unfortunately, many organizations are lagging behind in upgrading their systems and while they may be able to stay afloat now, where will they be in another decade? Marc Murphy is the CEO of Atlatl Software, a growing tech company that provides visual configuration and CPQ tools to enable a better, more efficient sales process through the use of VR and AR. Atlatl sells to the top 10% of companies looking to move away from manual processes and commit to a digital transformation. Investing in technology can create huge ROI and improve efficiencies across an organization, and it’s something Marc sees as necessary for success in the future. “We're moving the sales process for B2B complex and industrial products outside of brick and mortar and into a virtual and augmented reality space. And we really believe that as our consumer lives change and we become more comfortable operating in a virtual space and buying and selling in a virtual space, B2B is going to move in the same direction as it has for other technologies. We've spent time creating a really unique enterprise-level capability to do B2B commerce.” Marc loves the fast-paced start-up culture, likely due to experiences throughout his life and career. First, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army, then in the private sector as a director and partner at Deloitte, and then as the CEO of Sparc, which was acquired by Booz Allen Hamilton. Marc took note of all the ways he worked as a leader, what he did well and what he would do differently if he ever got the chance to lead another company. On this episode of Mission Daily, Marc and Ian discuss all of that and more, including the importance of integrations and why he is so passionate about life in the start-up world. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away a Withings Body+ Wi-Fi Smart Scale. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win or use discount code “MissionDaily20” to receive 20% off online at Withings.com! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” – Mark Twain Did you know that there are 5x more infusion barrels than people in Scotland? Do you understand the difference between whiskey and whisky? Should you put ice or no ice in your scotch? To answer these questions and more, we turned to Callum O’Donnell. On this special episode of Mission Daily, we are joined in studio by Callum, a Brand Ambassador for Aberlour. Founded by James Fleming in 1879, Aberlour is a distillery in Scotland that makes Speyside single malt Scotch whisky. Callum travels throughout the Silicon Valley region bringing Aberlour to tech firms, startups, and companies that are changing the world. James Fleming was known for saying, “Let the deeds show.” In modern English, this translates to, “Actions speak louder than words.” Aberlour commemorates Fleming’s legacy by continuing to support businesses that are letting their “deeds show” by making a positive impact on the world. Callum, Ian, Steph, and Albert (VP of Ops at Mission and new to the studio) discuss the whiskey industry at large, explain how to draw flavor from your favorite adult beverages, and share their favorite drinks. Continue the conversation on socials by using the hashtag #LouderThanWords or by following Aberlour (@aberlour_us). Reach out to Callum to set up your own ‘whisky’ tasting here. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away a Withings Body+ Wi-Fi Smart Scale. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win here or use discount code "MissionDaily20" to receive 20% off online at Withings.com! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“Thinking different is the engine of creation, innovation and wealth. And if we are all connected together 24 hours a day with our devices, it's very hard to have a different idea.” — Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly is co-founder and former Executive Editor of WIRED magazine. Prior to starting WIRED, Kevin was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news that featured tech-related trends and is known for being the first consumer magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, Internet culture, and artificial life. On today’s episode, Kevin shares his vision for the future of technologies such as A.I., driverless cars, and augmented reality. Kevin predicts it will take more than a decade for driverless cars to become the norm on our roadways. He attributes this largely to the fact that there needs to be a significant amount of infrastructure built before autonomous cars hit the road — things such as smart traffic lights and other technology that can interface directly with your vehicle. “You need a smart environment as well as a smart car,” says Kevin. What about artificial intelligence? Kevin believes it is the “most fundamental technological change coming that will touch every aspect of our lives.” However, his vision for A.I. is different from the pop culture narrative. Instead, he predicts that A.I. will be very intelligent, just not intelligent in the same ways that humans are. “If we want the answer to a question, we will ask a machine but if we want a good question, we hire a human,” Kevin says. Much of our time as humans will be spent managing A.I. systems and setting the values that determine their behavior. In the end, though, Kevin believes that it is very possible that A.I. will make the human race better, pushing us to identify and define our ethics. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away a Withings Body+ Wi-Fi Smart Scale. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win here or use discount code "MissionDaily20" to receive 20% off online at Withings.com! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“I grew up loving maps. They draw your eyes — you just want to go look at them and find a new place you’ve never been or look at the places you are familiar with.” — Karin Tuxen-Bettman Karin Tuxen-Bettman is a Program Manager at Google where she’s worked for more than a decade helping develop Google’s mapping projects. The field of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) married together all of her passions — economics, environmental science, and public policy. Now in the GEO division at Google, Karin’s job is to “help public benefit groups around the world use mapping tools to make the world a better place.” For the last five years or more, Karin has been focused on Project Air View, a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, creating air quality maps for every city and town in the world so that cities have the data they need to change behavior and therefore the health of its residents and surrounding areas. “90% of the world’s population lives in conditions that the World Health Organization says are below the livable air quality,” says Karin. A portion of Google’s street view cars are dedicated to collecting air quality and environmental data in order to power Project Air View. The data collected is then shared with research scientists to produce studies that inform actionable insights. On this episode, Stephanie and Karin sit down to discuss the various projects she has worked on while at Google, how she is using Google Maps to help nonprofits and public benefits around the world, and why mapping tools are a huge multiplier for these organizations to tell their story. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away a Withings Body+ Wi-Fi Smart Scale. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win or use discount code "MissionDaily20" to receive 20% off online at Withings.com! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“Nothing is more powerful than the truth when you run a company.” — Emmanuel Schalit Emmanuel Schlit is CEO of Dashlane, the safe and simple way to store all of your passwords in one place. With over 12 million users and a recently finalized Series D round, Dashlane is growing faster than ever and well on the way to their next goal of 100 million users. (At which point, Emmanuel may or may not get a tattoo, a promise he made to the hardworking employees of Dashlane.) “The average citizen has about 200 different digital accounts because everything in our life has taken on a digital life of its own,” says Emmanuel and “almost everyone uses the same password everywhere, because that is simple and more convenient.” Emmanuel describes this password problem in three parts. The first is that almost everyone is using the same password everywhere. Second, the size of the problem is exploding because people are creating more and more accounts online. And thirdly, everyone has more devices per person today than ever before. “The problem is truly growing on the consumer side,” says Emmanuel, which is allowing bad actors to take advantage. Prior to joining Dashlane in 2011 as CEO, he held a range of roles, including CEO of Flipside.com, SVP at Vivendi Media, and CEO of CBS Outdoor. Throughout his experiences, he’s found that working for and scaling a smaller company is more fulfilling than joining a large ship already on a set course. “When you start a company from scratch, you have a unique opportunity to apply all the things you’ve learned before. So you get this unique opportunity to do things right in terms of culture. When starting Dashlane, we wanted to build a company of people that fundamentally have one thing in common: that care about solving this problem.” On this episode, Chad and Emmanuel discuss the importance of protecting your digital identity in today’s world, how Dashlane is doing this differently, and lessons learned from Emmanuel’s diverse and accomplished career. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away a Withings Body+ Wi-Fi Smart Scale. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win here or use discount code "MissionDaily20" to receive 20% off online at Withings.com! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“I enjoy looking at companies, their futures, their strategies and how their financials work. It’s something I’ve always had a passion for.” — Jennifer Ceran How do companies make money? When do they choose to invest or pass? At what point in a company’s timeline should they IPO? What are the reasons to accept an acquisition? These are all questions many, even the business owners among us, don’t know the answers to. But they are all questions Jennifer Ceran has been obsessed with answering since she was in college. Jennifer, the CFO of Smartsheet, started her investing career while still in college and sold her first stocks to fund her trip to France to study abroad. “I was really curious about how the market worked,” says Jennifer, and that experience was just the start of what would become a lifetime interest. After completing her undergraduate and before attending business school at the University of Chicago, Jennifer went to work for Merrill Lynch as a Financial Analyst on Wall Street where she learned how Wall Street evaluates companies for investment. Following her time on Wall Street, Jennifer wanted to understand corporate finance and went to work for the Sara Lee Corporation and then Cisco. But in 2003, Jennifer got the call she was looking for — she was asked to join eBay as their Treasurer. With over 1 billion in revenue, Jennifer couldn’t turn down the offer. It was a chance at her dream job and a place where she could learn about technology’s impact on investing and the finance world at large. Jennifer served as Treasurer of eBay and Paypal for over 7 years. When she saw the impact of the financial crisis, she decided to transition into investor relations at eBay, doubling the company's stock in the two years she was in this role. But Jennifer wasn’t stopping there, she had her eye set on the CFO role and it wasn’t long before she found it at Box, a work collaboration platform where she led the company into a successful IPO. Now CFO at Smartsheet, Jennifer is helping companies and teams work more efficiently with Smartsheet’s collaboration software. “About 60% of your work is unstructured, it’s ever-changing. Smartsheeet helps you to manage that better. The platform can work with your marketing department and your finance department to give you real-time updates on work projects.” On this episode, Chad and Jennifer talk about the differences between Wall Street and Silicon Valley and how both places look at investing in companies. They also discuss her extensive career and where she sees innovation in financial management heading in the future. — We have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away a Withings Body+ Wi-Fi Smart Scale. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win here or use discount code "MissionDaily20" to receive 20% off online at Withings.com! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

After Hours is BACK with an all-new segment! Elon Musk’s Neuralink project and controlling smart devices with your mind, investing in culture with the new Otis app, and the return of Toys “R” Us in partnership with B8ta are just a few hot topics that Pat & Posh discuss. Make sure to tune in! SUBSCRIBE TO TFH NEWSLETTER & STAY UPDATED > http://bit.ly/tfh-newsletter FOLLOW TFH ON INSTAGRAM > http://www.instagram.com/thefounderhour FOLLOW TFH ON TWITTER > http://www.twitter.com/thefounderhour INTERESTED IN BECOMING A SPONSOR? EMAIL US > partnerships@thefounderhour.com

“Don’t take any wooden nickels.” A depression-era saying that encourages people not to be cheated or duped, it was a phrase that Kmele Foster’s father told him a lot as a child - and one he never quite understood. But in today’s world of media overload, it can be hard to find the truth in the noise and even harder to tell when you’ve been misled.  Having worked as co-host of The Independents, a daily news show on Fox, Kmele is intimately familiar with the pace at which journalists work. And while he believes mistakes aren’t intentional, he knows just how easy it is for the truth to slip through the cracks.  Today, Kmele is trying to change that. As co-founder and Lead Producer at Freethink, a media company telling powerful stories about today’s pioneers changing the world, Kmele is helping create media that promotes what he thinks is the most important story to share.  “We live at the best, most incredible time in human history. A time when people have this enormous individual capacity and ability, because of all the technology at our disposal, to make massive change in the world. That does not mean that there's a world with no problems, it means that we've never been better positioned to be able to tackle the world's big problems.” In this episode, Chad and Kmele discuss the current state of journalism, what it's like starting a media company today, and what’s in store for the future of the industry. — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Neo Smartpen 1. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

Sean Whiteley has been in the tech business since the internet was first taking off back in the 1990s. In fact, he was early enough to the party to snag the sean@aol.com email address. But a lot has changed since those early days, and Sean has been through plenty of highs and lows along the way. He’s loved his time in Silicon Valley, but he recognizes that life in the Bay Area isn’t all that the world has to offer. “Don't get too stuck here in Silicon Valley,” Sean cautions. “There's a lot of greatness and I love it here. I love the dynamic here where risk is rewarded and arguing is okay, it's a good thing, it's not personal. You're just trying to come up with a better solution. I identify with a lot of the qualities that are here, but I also realize that this is not representative of most of the world.” Still, though, Silicon Valley is where Sean built his family and founded his current business, Qualified.com, which is making its mark in the new and emerging field of conversational marketing applications. Qualified — which is an app built to alert your sales team when qualified leads are visiting your site — offers a full stack of meeting tools that you can use to engage your customer be it through chat, phone calls or some other conversational interface.  On this episode of Mission Daily, Sean talks about his life in the Valley, the importance of finding the right business partner and building the right culture, the stages of building success and the role luck plays into it all. — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Neo Smartpen 1.  Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“I think we are standing on the cusp of an explosion in creativity around media.” —Yves Bergquist As the Director of AI & Neuroscience in Media at the Entertainment Technology Center of the University of Southern California, Yves Bergquist is leading the charge to connect the fields of neuroscience and entertainment. At ETC, Yves and his team are pioneering a new way to test an entertainment project’s narratives, what audiences they will resonate with and why.  Yves is thinking more broadly than traditional Hollywood studios and asking deeper questions.  “How do you we understand stories and narrative from a purely cognitive standpoint?” he asks. “And how do we understand what kind of stories resonate in what way with what kind of people to generate what kind of behavior?”  Yves was exposed to the entertainment industry at an early age thanks to his single mom, who worked in wardrobe on film sets in France. As a boy, he naturally gravitated towards psychology, and has successfully married that passion with his love of entertainment in his work at ETC and his start-up, Corto. Corto is an AI startup which Yves hopes he can utilize to continue his work leveraging A.I. research to understand what attributes of media content resonate with specific audience segments.  In this episode, Chad and Yves discuss the two types of knowledge — narrative and procedural knowledge — how AI will learn to outpace humans on procedural knowledge, and how we can begin to understand the oldest and most human form of knowledge — storytelling.  “Building something and selling something are going to be the two skills that are the most valuable in an A.I. or AGI future. Those are the two things that we can be confident are going to be the monopoly of the human mind for a while.” — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Neo Smartpen 1. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“You have to pick and get to the core of what makes you the most uncomfortable, what makes you cringe when you are sharing it, what makes your palms sweat - that is what you have to work on.” - Chad Grills Our greatest fears can become our greatest sources of strength if we are willing to face them… and facing them with friends by your side makes that transformation a lot easier. Unfourtantly, as hard as it is admitting a personal fault or problem to yourself, it’s even more difficult sharing it with someone close to you.  In today’s episode, Chad discusses the importance of talking to a friend when you are in need of an outside opinion. He also opens up with listeners about a time he reached out to a friend for advice on something he’s been struggling with for years. — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Neo Smartpen 1. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

Can you imagine growing up with 30 fish tanks in your room? That’s 30 tanks stock full of fish that each needed their own special care. Seems a bit excessive, maybe even a little weird, but that’s exactly the environment Brian Linton, CEO of United by Blue, chose to grow up in.  Since Brian was a little boy, he’s engaged with the world in his own, unique way.  “My parents allowed me to be a little bit weird and that definitely spawned the entrepreneurship spirit in me. I never thought about doing anything else. It never occurred to me to not do my own thing.” Having grown up surrounded by tanks of blue, it’s no surprise that one of these things Brian wanted to pursue was ocean conservation and clean up. After spending years searching for effective ways to help clean the waterways, Brian finally began to conceptualize an idea in 2008 and United by Blue was born.  United by Blue is an apparel company dedicated to cleaning our world’s oceans. For every product sold, they remove one pound of trash from oceans and waterways. Since its inception, the company has removed more than 1.6 million pounds of trash and has over 1,000 stores nationally. On today’s episode of Mission Daily, Brian joins us to discuss his unique background, the struggles and rewards of building a social enterprise, and United by Blue’s plans for the future. — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Neo Smartpen 1. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I’ve always had a side hustle no matter what it was.” –Steven Galanis  Steven Galanis’s career has spanned from options trader, to film producer, to now CEO and Co-Founder of Cameo, a platform where fans can book personalized video shout outs from their favorite celebrities. Founded on the idea that “selfies are the new autograph,” Cameo has more than 15,000 notable talents on the platform today, making it larger than any agency on earth.  Cameo is changing the way the entertainment industry has traditionally worked. It used to be that an agent represented the talent and booked work for them. Now, Cameo provides talent the ability to opt-in only to opportunities they want, which creates an authenticity Cameo can thrive on. Big names such as Cassius Marsh, Brett Farve, and Snoop Dogg have joined and love the platform, which just raised their $50 million dollar Series B round and are hiring new staff. Prior to founding Cameo, Steven was an options trader for the Chicago Board of Trade, where he quickly realized that the trading pit was hierarchical and slow to adopt technology.  “Everybody was always talking about what had been,” Steven said. “When I moved to tech, everybody was talking about what could be.”   Steven didn’t settle on the trading floor for long. He quickly found his way into the film industry, where he produced movies and television shows and eventually was introduced to his co-founder of Cameo.  “You hear about product market fit a lot,” Steven said, “but founder market fit might be even more important.” Each founder filled an important role with specific skill sets that worked well together for founding Cameo.  In this episode, Chad and Steven discuss the founding of Cameo, how the company is changing the way the entertainment industry has traditionally worked, and the importance of founder market fit.  — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Qwerky Keyboard and one Muse Brain Sensing Headband. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“Comedians build up the tension so that you can release it.” — Hannah Gadsby After leaving her promising career in the tech industry, first at Yahoo then Google, Sarah Cooper realized she needed something more. Sarah wrote 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, while at Google and when it went viral, it gave her the confidence to leave the corporate world and break into comedy.  She quickly realized that comedy would act as her guide for finding her own personal mission. Today, we are surrounded by nuances that are hidden beneath the oftentimes suffocating world of “politically correct.” Sarah wanted to stay true to herself on stage and online, so instead of hiding behind these rules, she saw it as her mission to dig up the nuances and present them in a humorous, tasteful way.  In today’s episode, Chad and Sarah discuss why she left Google, where she finds inspiration for her comedy and writing, and how she got her start in stand up comedy. She also shares how she developed her voice and found her niche audience.  — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Qwerky Keyboard and one Muse Brain Sensing Headband. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“We’re living in a story-based world. We’re hard-wired to process things through the lens of stories which are linear narratives.” - Neal Stephenson Writer and futurist Neal Stephenson sees mythology everywhere; from the stories we tell ourselves, to the stories the media tells the masses, to the stories about the future of humanity. These “myths” define our past, outline our present, and will build our future… so what can we do to make them realistic, optimistic, and (capital “T”) True? Neal walks this line of thought in his latest book, Fall, where he asks the reader to question how close we are to emerging technologies that will allow us to learn and evolve more quickly.  In this episode, Chad and Neal discuss the concept of ‘islands’ online, the impact of social media on our collective imagination and our ability to live out our agreed upon realities. Neal also shares how he came to be the first employee at Blue Origin, a company founded by Jeff Bezos, which is committed to advancing space travel. Currently, Neal serves as Chief Futurist of Magic Leap, a company working to bring transmedia projects such as AR and VR to the masses.  You can catch Neal on his book tour here as he is traveling the next few weeks across the United States! — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Qwerky Keyboard and one Muse Brain Sensing Headband. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“In the modern world, there are still many event horizons left to have the courage to go through and discover, and the only things worth doing are the things you currently think you can’t.” In today’s episode, Chad and Stephanie review last Monday’s newsletter where Chad dives into three key themes that we’re going to be integrating into our current and future episodes on Mission Daily. Those three themes are: extinction, evolution, and event horizons. What do these mean and why are we focusing on them?  Extinction - 99% of all life on earth has gone extinct. We are an extremely adaptable species, however, it’s important for us to think about existential threats to humanity. How can we make this a daily conversation so that we are progressing humanity towards evolution and not towards extinction? Evolution -  In order to evolve, we must accept the next biological singularity or our own species may be at risk. Think Elon Musk and Mars. We must embrace our own evolution and step forward into the future.  Event Horizons - The emergence of human language was the first singularity that humans faced. We often fall into the trap of near term thinking. But what does the future hold thousands of years from now and how are you helping to create the next event horizon for humankind- good or bad?  Check out the full newsletter here and sign up for our daily newsletter here if you haven’t already! — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away one Qwerky Keyboard and one Muse Brain Sensing Headband. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

In the words of artist and graphic designer Paula Scher: “If you’re not in a state of play, you can’t make anything.” As creatives, the moment we take our work too seriously and lose our sense of play is the moment we hit artist’s block. The world is your playground; emotions are the jungle gym, relationships the merry-go-round, your career the swings... and humor is the cushy rubber under it all.  Comedian Alex Weber is a big believer in humor and its power to transform lives. From participating in American Ninja Warrior to speaking at TEDx to being an award-winning TV host, no matter the project, Alex always incorporates humor and humility. “Humor is just an express route to being very honest about where we are, where we want to go and how we’re gonna get there.” From a young age, Alex understood the power of comedy and he used it as a way to overcome struggles, take on bigger challenges, and express himself. For Alex, humor is “an effective means for success;” one that keeps you from taking yourself or your work too seriously. In today’s episode, Chad and Alex discuss the importance of humor in our daily lives, why being unafraid of failure is key to achieving greatness, and what healthy competition has taught Alex about life. — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away the Misfit Vapor 2, a sleek touchscreen smartwatch that puts everything you need to stay on top of your day, right on your wrist. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“People, when you arm them with the right information, the right insights, and the right systems and processes, can make great things happen.” What do you think of when you hear the word “boss”? Do you imagine someone like Bill Lumbergh from Office Space? Or maybe your mind does cartwheels and immediately jumps to Bowser and the Koopa squad from Super Mario Bros 3.  However you define “boss,” Jennifer Tejada has a new definition for you: someone who sacrifices, who works tirelessly to build a sense of community, who puts in those early mornings and late nights to make ends meet. Jennifer is the CEO of PagerDuty, a digital operations management company. Its cloud-based platform manages real-time operations for any type of business to ensure its digital services are always on. Since its founding, PagerDuty has drawn a lot of attention from investors, raising over $173 million over the course of several funding rounds. The company went public earlier this year and at one point was valued at $1.8 billion dollars. That valuation, and the relative success of PagerDuty in such a short amount of time, is thanks in no small part to Jennifer’s leadership. Her unique brand of management style was inspired by her father, who ran and operated a hospital when she was young. Growing up, she spent a lot of her free time in that hospital - doing everything from selling Girl Scout cookies and serving pancakes to the night shift, to filing papers and making copies. Those experiences left their mark and today, she’s turned those lessons of community and leadership into inspiration for how she runs PagerDuty. In today’s episode, Jennifer joins Chad to discuss her work with PagerDuty, how she uses her father’s “serving others” mentality on a day-to-day basis, and what she foresees PagerDuty doing in the future. — Don’t forget, we have a new partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away the Misfit Vapor 2, a sleek touchscreen smartwatch that puts everything you need to stay on top of your day, right on your wrist. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

We tend to think of consciousness and the waking world in black and white terms. One minute you’re awake, and the next you’re asleep. But what if there was something in-between? A zone between consciousness and unconsciousness. A place where you can get a pure, unfiltered look at your subconscious, where you can think freely and unencumbered by the issues of the waking world.    Jennifer Dumpert, author and dream researcher, is here to help you understand this in-between space, a space she writes about in her book titled, “Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep.” Liminal dreaming provides a great opportunity to bring back important lessons from your subconscious mind. It also offers a chance for us to tap into our pure, unfiltered creative potential. Not to be confused with lucid dreaming, liminal dreaming is a much simpler skill to learn and master. As Jennifer points out, not everyone can control a lucid dream, but everyone is a natural at liminal dreaming. In today’s episode, Jennifer breaks down the basics of Liminal Dreaming. She discusses how to begin experimenting with liminal dreaming to enhance your life and wellbeing and how the art of liminal dreaming has impacted her own life. Don’t forget, we just announced our newest partnership with b8ta! B8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we will be giving away the Chilipad, a water cooled & heated mattress pad that allows you to control temperature for optimal sleep. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win! Quotes: 2:47-  “There is a continuity of consciousness between awake and asleep. You can really stretch it out. You can be 80% awake and 20% dreaming or the opposite.” 3:07- “Waking and sleeping is not binary. We often think of it as on or off, one or zero.” 8:58- “My hope is that people will go into this state [hynagogia] and actually do things with it.” 13:23- “The creative process is the point, not the end point. Creativity is the way you that you  take what you learn from the subconscious into the waking world.” 29:47- “I really want to democratize the visionary experience.” 49:31- “Liminal dreaming is kind of like surfing the edge of conscious and unconscious. It’s learning to surf the space where your both dreaming and awake at the same time and kind of surf down the middle of them.” Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

B8ta’s “retail-as-a-service” model brings new and innovative products to retail faster. Co-founder and President Phillip Raub talks about the company’s unique model and how its retail spaces elevate the discovery experience in the physical world. Learn more at retailgetsreal.com.

Retail as a service—It’s a thoughtful and forward thinking model created by b8ta, building stores that let people experience products the way their makers intended, serving to open pathways to discovery and purchase, and changing landscape for the better… Vibhu Norby, Founder/CEO of b8ta (a platform and  store designed for discovering, trying, & buying the latest tech products). joins Rob Sanchez on location in Palm Spring, CA at eTail West.In this episode: Seeing retail as an engagement and marketing engine, not as a supply chain mechanism Retail as a service A lot of ownership over experience in stores The intersection of physical and digital sides Quality of survey data What products work for b8ta’s offering, largely electronic products of some type Design differences to other platform such as Amazon Four Star Products are not “verticalized” Why the product is the hero Overhead cameras important in b8ta’s stores The “war for space” Experience retail is the future How multi-brand retailers should stay away from being logistics companies Same-day is inevitable

In this Weeks TechtalkRadio, Justin and Andy talk about the Foldable Phone that manufacturers have been racing to achieve. The Cost for this technology will more than likely drive the price tag of smart phones in the 2k region. Justin talks about some new smartphone technology that could be coming from Google. Justin adopted the Pixel 3 as his smartphone not too long ago and loves it! He shares his reasons. Snow Day in Tucson has Andy taking photos with both the iPhone and Canon DSLR and has a tough time viewing the differences on Instagram - Justin talks about the compression used on Social Media on Images. An upcoming trip to Japan has Justin talking about ways to use technology overseas and stay connected. Justin also shares the love for Pokemon and how the game has been reenergized recently by groups playing the game and looks forward to catching creatures in Japan. Justin talks about a New Super responsive Mouse from Logitech he purchased. The G-502 Hero Mouse. He shares the differences between an "office mouse" and Gaming Mouse. A story on a New USB 3.2 Standard which could achieve speeds of up to 20Gbps transfer speed. Justin shares a story from How To Geek on Transferring a Windows Licence. The guys talk about the Battle of the OS and the different versions of Windows. Justin talks about some new updates to the XBoxOne with the introduction of Dolby Atmos Sound. Justin tells us about Playstation Vue for watching Content. Blu-Ray and 4kUHD Players may eventually disappear, More content is going digital however Andy shares info on an older gentleman who purchased a VCR on Ebay and wrote a letter to the seller on how appreciated he was to be able to purchase the older technology to watch content he hadn't see in a many years. Andy talks about Nuraphone headphones available at B8TA in Scottsdale as well as online at Nuraphone.Com. A recent story about Stevie Wonder trying them out a CES and loving them so much he bought three pairs! Connect with us on our Social Media sites. Facebook Techtalkers https://www.facebook.com/techtalkers Twitter @techtalkradio Instagram techtalkradio

Show Highlights  Terri talks about what the JP Morgan Life Sciences conference is all about, what she learned, who she met, and some of the trends and innovations in women’s health.   Terri talks about the importance of normalization language and conversations around women’s health and wellness, including sexual health and wellness.    Terri and Jacqueline talk about changing the norms around aging, especially around body image, and taking charge of our health in our midlife in setting ourselves best for life after 65.    Terri is excited about how digital health is being embraced within biotech and pharma in various areas including medication adherence, better patient targeting, better clinical trial design, and better leveraging of data to optimizing drug development and delivery.    They talk about data and data ownership being a big topic in 2019 and the ramifications of deals like 23andMe and GSK.    Terri and Jacqueline discuss the $8.1B invested in digital health in 2018, and what is included in digital health including the blurring of lines between health and wellness.        Terri’s Key Takeaway  We need to normalize the language and conversations around women’s health, wellness, and body parts.      References in the Podcast  TechCrunch article on CES / female sex-tech:  https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/08/ces-revokes-award-from-female-founded-sex-tech-company/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage  More Men Named Michael Present at JP Morgan (2018):  https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/07/jpm-gender-diversity/  JP Morgan Life Sciences conference: https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/healthcareconference  Panty Prop: https://www.pantyprop.com/  RESI: http://www.resiconference.com/  Startup Health: https://startuphealthfestival2019.splashthat.com/  Healthcare Innovation Popup: https://medium.com/humble-ventures/teaming-up-with-mount-sinai-co-lab-for-open-innovation-in-healthcare-pop-up-ec3852b4bcb5  Humble Ventures: https://humble.vc/  Ogilvy: https://www.ogilvy.com/  Biotech Showcase: https://ebdgroup.knect365.com/biotech-showcase/  Springboard: https://sb.co/  True Wealth Ventures: https://truewealthvc.com/  Lisa Health: https://www.lisahealth.com/  Genneve: https://genneve.com/  Mighty Menopause:  https://www.mighty-menopause.com/  Madorra: http://www.madorra.com/  Pulse: https://lovemypulse.com/  B8ta: https://b8ta.com/  Astarte Medical:  http://www.astartemedical.com/  Watkins-Conti Products:  http://www.watkinscontiproducts.com/  Prima-Temp:  http://www.prima-temp.com/  Ceek Women’s Health:  https://ceekwomenshealth.com/  JLabs:  https://jlabs.jnjinnovation.com/  Saama:  https://www.saama.com/  Rock Health article on digital health: https://rockhealth.com/reports/2018-year-end-funding-report-is-digital-health-in-a-bubble/  Sandstone Diagnostics: https://trakfertility.com/  MyHealthTeams: https://www.myhealthteams.com/    Contact  You can follow Jacqueline Steenhuis on Twitter @TipsyCopilot or through her website https://www.jacquelinesteenhuis.com/.    You can follow Terri on Twitter at @terrihansonmead or go to her website at www.terrihansonmead.com.  Check out Terri’s new Medium publication:  https://medium.com/terri-hanson-mead  Feel free to email Terri at PilotingYourLife@gmail.com.  To continue the conversation, go to Twitter at @PilotingLife and use hashtag #PilotingYourLife. 

EP158 - NYC Holiday Store Visits  We're in the peak of the holiday season, which means Jason is going to be visiting stores.  This year he went to NYC and visited 33 new or updated store concepts.  If you'd like to follow the tour yourself, here the Retailgeek NYC Retail Map. Some favorites this year included: Nike Dyson Allbirds Amazon 4 Star Casper Covergirl FAO Schwarz Glossier Google Hardware Macy’s (especially the B8ta shop-in-shop) Showfields Some disappointments included: Restoration Hardware Saks Apple Away Amazon News Bloomberg article had a great piece about the 1099 amazon delivery network Amazon extended delivery window Amazon new air hub in DFW WSJ article on CRAPfest Amazon Go in airports Small format Amazon Go Opening Amazon Go in UK Other News IBM sold its commerce platform (Websphere) to HCL Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 158 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, December 17th, 2018. Happy holidays everyone... talk to you in 2019! Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 158 being recorded on Monday December 17th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host. Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:42] Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason it's been like 10 days but your life has changed a whole lot since we last talked so you you had a birthday happy belated birthday. Jason: [0:55] Thank you much it's depressing the type that even bigger number into the the elliptical machine at the gym when I am frequent occasions when I use that. Scot: [1:05] WG&R on verify so go ahead and round down. Jason: [1:10] Yeah I don't want to only be cheating myself and I feel like my my I don't know if the math actually works out this way but in my mind I mean year older so it should be more impressed. Scot: [1:22] And then you have an exciting new gig or title something like SVP of digital Commerce retail payments and chief strategy officer. Jason: [1:37] I think that's exactly my title I've had to go to jumbo size business cards for the three people that still use business card. Scot: [1:44] Or hang out 3 like a like a tweet storm you have a business card storm. Jason: [1:48] 1 of 2 of 3 of I like that. Scot: [1:50] But in all seriousness you are now the chief Commerce strategy officer tell us what's this entail and the upwardly-mobile thing what's going on. Jason: [2:03] That was a lie the very least would like to think of others agree but yeah it innocence for the last six years have been working for a particular agency that was originally razorfish and then you know we merged with Sapient and became sapientrazorfish. But that agency is part of a much bigger a holding company called the pupusas group and so essentially, took a new role at the group level so you know hopefully I'll get to keep working with a lot of the. The colleagues and clients from from sapientrazorfish that I've always enjoyed but I'll have more responsibility and work opportunity to work with. A broader selection of group clients across a bigger geography and. Like most of these holding companies were a little more Silo then we should be done to best serve customers and so a big part of my job is to kind of. Pull together all the the capabilities within the group to better serve our Commerce clients and so. [3:15] That should be fun and you may know it was important that I get that promotion on my birthday because. When you have a birthday on LinkedIn you get a lot of well-intentioned well wishes. [3:34] And annoyingly LinkedIn won't actually send you emails with your mail from LinkedIn though just sending you an email each time you get something saying, go to LinkedIn to read this one sentence can the message and so basically on your birthday your email is is, put under a denial-of-service attack by LinkedIn and so that also happens when you change your your job and so I felt like, smart to do both on the same day so that like I might email would only be down for one day. Scot: [4:05] Cuz it's me you give me like a bull in a china shop in there tearing down silos and making people work together. Jason: [4:14] Hopefully it's a little more carrot than stick wouldn't be the first time I was inadvertently a little overly aggressive so I shall Endeavor to find the right balance there are a ton of of great capabilities and in groups in pupusas and it's it's, as far as I'm concerned I went from the the 32 pack of crayons to the hundred pack of crayons and so you know it's going to be fun to paint more colorful pictures. Scot: [4:47] I know it's hard to put a number on it but would you say over 80 to 90% of getting this new gig is related to the podcast should we thank listeners for their contributions. Jason: [4:59] Possibly that's slightly conservative. Scot: [5:02] We forget individual performance I think the the pr halo effect from, this kind of cited ever that we have this is probably responsible for most of your career trajectory hear the last at least 58 weeks. Jason: [5:19] I feel like that's absolutely true I feel like the listeners absolutely would have put me over the top but you alone are so influential with all the the leadership in Paris that I feel like just you putting in a good word, was was enough to drive the new promotion so thanks very much to Scott and thanks very much to all the listeners for supporting me. Scot: [5:40] I said you listen up French dude Jason needs promotion and he doesn't need one of these like. Everyday sea-level gigs he needs to be a double sea level and they came up the new tunnel ccso your CC level you like c-squared level. Jason: [5:58] Etsy I like that c-square that's how I'm that maybe it's cuz I'm more sort of exponential growth than I am linear growth I like that I like that alot. Scot: [6:08] I didn't go to the sea level meeting cuz I'm c-squared level. Jason: [6:13] Exactly I feel like the one negative ramification as we are now going to have to do a deep dive on the Peter Principle. Scot: [6:20] Well you hit the ground running and you have been in New York I've been watching your tweets my favorite is your Covergirl tweet that was a little. It's surprising and shocking to see on the cover of Covergirl so congratulations on that. Jason: [6:37] Yeah I feel like that would be more than any person needs to be thinking about but then I got in a Twitter conversation today with with some of our favorite journalist talking about the latest trends in women's fashion and now they're all super excited about seeing me where like flare denim at dinner cropped flare Denim and interrupt this year so so sorry for all the Twitter followers that had to read that. Scot: [7:07] Yeah that's going to be good with there will be pictures I will take them and post them. Jason: [7:12] But in all seriousness it is sort of a annual tradition than I have around my birthday is I pick a city that has a bunch of retail going on and I like to do a bunch of store visits around the holidays is is, people will know or might imagine. There's a lot of in addition to the sort of all the Evergreen retail there's a lot of popups that they Brands open around the holidays and if you're a retail and you're going to watch a big new flagship it wouldn't be uncommon that you try to get it launched. In time for Holiday Inn so usually it's a good time of year to see some new new retail Concepts or at least see the evolution of some. Some retail Concepts so this year I went to New York City for a couple days and I walked about 14 miles and visited 33 stores. Scot: [8:02] Give us give us the highs the lows The Good the Bad the Ugly how whatever kind of format you want to do. Jason: [8:10] So I mentioned 33 stores there were 11 that really jumped out at me as. As irrelevant and interesting for for one reason or another there were kind of for that I. I'm putting in the doghouse that were disappointing for one reason or another and then you know the rest I kind of characterizes middle of the road, the reason I pick New York this year was specifically was because Nike had just opened the new store on Fifth Avenue at flagship store called House of innovation 0:01. And now there's been a lot of buzz in our industry that this was a super Progressive omnichannel digital first retail store and so I had read a lot about it and I wanted to make sure I had a good. Good first-hand experience so that was kind of the anchor that pulled me to New York and then I put together a list if anyone is super masochistic. What I tend to do is put all these things in in Google Maps which little-known feature of Google Maps is great for custom maps. And it works on all that the apps on all the different mobile platform so I can actually put a link in the show notes to my Google Map and you can you can see why these doors are if you happen to be visiting New York and one. Want to check any of them out but so jumping into that Nike store I felt like it really lived up to the hype. [9:35] So this is a big store on Fifth Avenue you know some of the most expensive real estate in North America. It's a 6-story store and some of the Marquis experiences they talked about are these kind of. [9:51] Blend of digital and experiential. So for example they have a great Reserve online fry in-store experience you can if you live in New York you can shop on the mobile phone, I find some shoes in a size you want to try on and someone will pull those shoes and put them in a locker. Waiting for you and so when you get to the store you can use the mobile app to unlock the locker try on the shoes if you decide you want to buy them you can do at self-checkout on the mobile app and so essentially you can. [10:30] Get stuffed Asian in dressing room try it on. And buy it without ever having to have any interaction with an employee if you don't feel like you needed employee. [10:41] And said to me that was like an interesting sort of. Improvement in the frictionless reserve online try and store experience another Marquis Ranch they had is this mannequin shopping so you knows is a lot of folks might know. Apparel that you put on mannequins tends to sell dramatically better than the apparel that's just on the racks or on the Shelf. But it often can be tricky to shop the outfit on a mannequin cuz you see something on the mannequin and you don't necessarily know. What model that is or where you can go get that particular Peril in that you're the one thing the store can do is they can put the exact apparel on the mannequin on. On an end cap or display right next to the mannequin but then that creates all kinds of problems for the store where the inventory is fragmented some of its out on that is custom display and some of its in line in the rack and, when someone does a boat is order or something else now they can't find the apparel because it's floating all over the store. And so what Nike did is they actually put a QR code on every mannequin and you can scan this QR codes with the Nike app and it opens up. [11:52] At the digital experience with all the. The apparel that's rest on that mannequin and again you can click on any of those things to have them sent to a dressing room in your size you can self-checkout or you don't get help from a sales associate but it, it's kind of a cool digital way to shop the look on mannequins in the store. Scot: [12:16] I've seen some of the shoe stores are now doing some of the 3D printing word out of separate experience. Jason: [12:29] Yeah no no no Nike is all in on customized and custom products so. [12:36] Nike actually has a Big 5 store in Tribeca did the bottom floor is totally dedicated to customization and it supposed to custom shoes and custom jerseys so I can round the World Cup. [12:46] Like embroidering your name on on your team's Jersey and stuff like that in real time was huge and this. House of innovation takes that even a step further in this store you actually can have your your shoe models custom ink. I mean you literally wait for the ink to dry and then they give you. That the completely custom product in the store so the ground for the store is totally dedicated to custom. They have all these kind of experiential components to the floor where you can see like. The embroidery shop they have all the people like sewing on the machines and you can watch him making the custom product they have the die shop and you can you know these that you can look through the glass walls and watch all the people handcrafting. Your custom products and they have a bunch of digital stations where you can work with a sales associate and design your own shoe from scratch or. You can pick a custom-designed shoe that was designed by an influencer that you're aligned with so that could be a celebrity or it could be. You know some some talented independent designer that Nike had partnered with so if you don't want to just. Pick a random design from scratch you can you can rely on the talent of someone else to still make a shoe that's kind of unique in that everyone doesn't have and that isn't available at Foot Locker. [14:12] Yeah so they're definitely in on custom. They also at another store we've talked about it with Nike is this Nike at Melrose which is in Los Angeles, and it's big spin is it's localized so they pay close attention to what people shop for and that store and change the assortment really rapidly. In response to the the Nike Shoppers in in Los Angeles and so the bottom floor which is a sub-basement for and this this store is called Nike Speed Shop and it is essentially is dedicated to the best-selling. Products in New York City and again, yui you walk in on you see like that you know fastest selling items while the changes you know quite frequently depending on what the popular items are and you you can scan a QR code and how many of those items popped into a, a self-service Locker for you so again there they're kind of leveraging the the crowd generation and the the seamless. Self Service experience you can self checkout for anything in the store so you don't you don't have to get in line at a particular cashier they have self-checkout station throughout the store where you can like get bags and things like that. The. [15:27] So overall I'd say like this store does a better job of seamlessly integrating digital in a physical environment than almost any other store have been in and it's pretty exciting for that. The downside is. Most of these experiences are not ones that Shoppers are already used to and so the sales associates are having to do a heck of a lot of Education that teach people how to use all these amenities in the store. And it's kind of a cannon to when Banks first ride rolling out ATM machines you know they had to staff the self-service ATM machines with the last app to teach people how to use them or you know when the airlines you step to teach people how to use. That the digital boarding passes you know the Hope Is overtime everyone learns how to shop that store and use those amenities and they can cut back on the amount of staff that they need to train customers but then on the flip side. [16:18] Fifth Avenue is like one of the the highest tourist traffic shopping areas in the United States and so. You know the frequency of visit is probably a lot lower it's probably you know the one and only time a bunch of these people are going to shop that store so I think that the. [16:37] Education think could be an ongoing Challenge and one of the sort of pet peeve or suggestion I would have for Nike is the. All of these digital experiences are totally dependent on you having the Nike app which I. I hate having that app dependency because it's really hard to get users to download the app and to help users get their password and to get users to consistently use the app. And you know these days with Progressive web apps we could have all the same experience on a web experience. All these QR codes that are all over the store the the Apple phones now natively Sant scan QR phones in the app in the the camera app so you know you could have. Given the customer 90% of the same functionality with an iPhone with no app in it and Nike intentionally chose not to do that so when you scan any of those QR codes. That work in the Nike app with the the iPhone camera for example instead of giving you the the digital experience it takes you to the iTunes Store and tries to get you to download the Nike app so. You know they're there I can understand their goal to try to get good penetration of the app but I'd rather see him give him more seamless experience to the customers. Scot: [17:51] Yeah cuz the apps are pretty beefy and you know you're in the store on cell and is 4 Wi-Fi never really works it's always get glitchy and yeah. Talking to it and it just kind of creates a lot of friction. Jason: [18:07] Yeah I know and you know getting their stores that are worse like that Amazon go stores that you'll see a huge queue outside these doors that require an app to shopping. Yeah they they call him frictionless doors cuz it's just walk out technology and the irony is they just move the friction from the the cashier to the front door to the store. Scot: [18:26] Yeah it is one time that which is good. Jason: [18:28] No totally true. I mean I overall super favorable impression on the Nike store or I'll be excited to watch it continue to evolve as always anything new it's pretty easy to find a, a few refinements and and you know hopefully Nike works for those overtime if you go to that Nike store literally right next door to that Nike store is a Dyson Factory Store and I haven't seen this store talked about very much but this to me is a great store, in terms of experiential retail so like obviously Dyson is super premium product like that you know tend to be at at very premium price points to their competitors in the marketplace and so it requires it's already considered sale it requires a lot of explanation and demonstration about why the products are better and so this Dyson store does a really good job of, immersing you in all their products they show you exploded you know versions of all their product so you can see the inside and you can see all the craftsmanship and design in the products and Wyatt's. [19:32] Better and more expensive and then they do all kinds of clever things to let you experience the product so that the world's most expensive hair dryer as far as I know and so in the back of the store they have a Blow Bar where you know if you want you can go in and have your hair styled and they'll blow it out and dry it using that Dyson product info, you know you get this kind of great story that you you went shopping on your vacation on 5th Avenue when you got your hair done at Dice and then you got to experience this, this one-of-a-kind hair dryer and and hopefully it sold you the hair dryer if you want to buy a vacuum. [20:12] They next to all the vacuum displays they have like a complete assortment of. For treatment so they have carpet and tile and hardwood and they have a funny wall of. Different desserts that you can pick so you can you can like literally grab a beaker of dirt or a beaker of confetti or rubber balls or whatever you want to test and throw it on whatever kind of floor surfaces you want an, and literally vacuum up those those products and so I just to me it's a great example of experiential retail and really. Helping customers understand the value proposition in kicking in this, this a psychology we called the endowment effect where you feel like you already own the product in the store and and you feel like you have. Remorse if you walk to Home walked out of the store without taking the product. Scot: [21:06] Did you take advantage of the dry bar the blow dry bar. Jason: [21:09] I did not I do like sometimes it's funny I try to go in and test products that are maybe not, not targeted at me but I did not have time to get my my sending unit 3 centimeter hair. Can and I kind of think it would have dried in the time it took for my hair to get off the base into the chair so maybe when it worked anyway. Scot: [21:34] Yeah that have I think they're sold out of that hair dryer that I mean it is very expensive but it's quite popular it's kind of the the bee's knees. Jason: [21:43] Yeah I actually am thinking about getting hair extensions just so I have a reason to get one of those hair dryers. Scot: [21:49] I think you should definitely do that before then our attic so so we can all I'll see you with your I think I'm imagining a mullet I will look. Jason: [21:57] Not that hard to imagine there's probably some of your book somewhere. [22:03] Not not true so hit a couple other stores on 5th Avenue and maybe we'll talk about it later but then I shot down to Soho in Tribeca and Albert just had a pop up there for a while that do I frankly was not a very interesting store and they just open their first. Permanent store and I think they also did a terrific job I call Brazil courses a. A shoe brand that's that's doing particularly well but very similar to Dyson. They did a beautiful job I call the visual merchandising in this store is great but they really did this Rich storytelling about all of the materials that are used in all the Auburn products and they really kind of immerse you in the war of the products. And just you know much more so than like walking into a Footlocker and seeing a wall of sneakers you feel like you get an origin story for every material that then is used in every shoe. You know and you know they just made the product feel really aspirational and they try to use sustainable products in the shoe and they like you know really made you believe in the purpose and I just thought it was really, well design store from a visual merchandising standpoint like they're not relying on a lot of digital technology in that store but I felt like. [23:30] That's for combined with some of the other stores that I visited that are kind of newer I'll call them digitally native Brands although that's debatable in the case of all birds or Dyson, and I really felt like like some of the best retail we're seeing right now is from these new emerging brands. And an Auberge was another good example and a huge progression from their prop up to this permanent store so definitely congratulations to them on that. Scot: [23:55] They do a lot of really cool kind of seasonal exclusives in City exclusives like. Jason: [24:09] Yeah and exclusive that are the trigger scarcity is a huge play across a bunch of these brands in a bunch of these products and really really smart you know again in a world when you're a teenager that has to act cool amongst your thousand followers on Instagram you know. Getting the same product that's available in every mall in America you know does not fly very well but being able to get you know something that's exclusive or scares you know that's super well and we're seeing that and you know all of these these you know unique limited edition shoes from Adidas and supreme and g-star and all birds and all of those brands are seeing them in the super young kids toys all the laugh out loud surprise toys I know you buy a bunch of these Star Trek, Kinder surprise toy or Star Wars excuse me that was a horrible, not for a DM but a horrible swppp. The I don't know it maybe it's Friday and in some super weird creepy way that we don't want to get into. Scot: [25:15] Klingons. Jason: [25:17] Yeah but yeah scarcity I think is super smart are you are you a big all birds guy. Scot: [25:24] I think I have one pair but if I like him. Jason: [25:30] And that store is now like literally across the street from the Amazon forest our store we we've talked about that's or a lot in the past I did go back to that store I was interested to see how it involves since I was there on the grand opening and obviously that's a story that's. Allegedly completely curated by customers and so I walked in there in a very curious to see how much of the assortment had really changed since the last time I was in and I was pleasantly surprised that. A lot of it had changed like all the feature displays that you see when you walk in the front of the store were prominently featuring, different merchandise than they were at the Grand Opening and even a lot of the product categories. In the store had changed or evolved and so you know my my early indications are you no props. Amazon for living there promise on on sort of. Frequently and rapidly changing the mix in that store based on on customer curation. Scot: [26:31] I wonder if they do it or if they just kind of like close down and reshuffle for a day or if they're just kind of like nibble away at it, like you know 2% a day. Jason: [26:40] No it's a great question and I I don't know the answer. But yeah I would have to live there or visit a lot more frequently 10 notice that but I did I took a ton of pictures the first time I was there and I retook all those pictures and so on. I'm probably going to do a deeper dive in comparing the two sets of pictures but anecdotally it definitely felt like a lot of stuff at churned and obviously we're much closer to Holiday now and they're all these right. Seasonal products for holiday that are selling really well so not surprisingly those products all moved forward. You're secretly I feel like that store is first and foremost designed to sell Amazon branded products and those are kind of the Evergreen product that did not change. Oh, there's some new product since last time I was there so that the first time I got to see the microwave in person. Scot: [27:29] I'd like it. Jason: [27:30] I was surprised it's smaller than I was anticipating it does not feel like I feel like that was a load capacity microwave them then I have so I would have been a little scared to. Scot: [27:43] Talk out at the gym have Alexa make you some popcorn. Jason: [27:46] I did not I was pleased to see that it was plugged in so you could infect talk to it but you like they did not give you product and give you a chance to actually. Cook anything in it and I'm curious if the demo unit even had that hopefully it did not have them element in it but who knows. Scot: [28:03] The at this is a little bit off topic but the switching of the storm made me think of everyone's in retails favorite store in York stories did you get swing by there. Jason: [28:14] I did not swing my story I always love to go to this is story about the it just wasn't geographically convenient with all these other stores I did go to Macy's. Macy's is now a minority owner of story and I was curious to see if they had a disa story iteration in Macy's. And if they did I was not able to find it but the. Beta who's been on the store has has the shopping shops inside of Macy's and I went to that Macy's expecting. Then I go down to the basement where where they historically have put a lot of these Concepts and I was actually constantly surprised the beta store. Is like prominently featured at the front door in like one of the highest traffic entrances and so kind of smart around the holidays since a lot of the beta product is. Is very holiday gift friendly items but that all of the pods in the the beta display inside the Macy's were really hopping and it felt like. The exact same experience you'd get if you walked into a dedicated beta store and then. Scot: [29:22] Call Diem one of our interns just handed me a note make sure we reference episode 139 when we had beta founder the boo on telling us all about that. Jason: [29:33] Yeah absolutely and if you do remember that episode of Yuri wissen he'll tell you a story about how he called me early on in the evolution of that concept and I gave him some stupid advice, is his version and my version is I told him that in the long run, that he would be funded by a bunch of retailers and he would be shopping shops inside of a bunch of these stores, and your side note almost all the betas are now in Macy's and so I'm saying I'm right here saying I gave him bad advice you can judge for yourself. Scot: [30:06] He is not a c squared executive Teresa CEO. Jason: [30:12] He just has the one one see you in like Risk a bunch. Scot: [30:14] Yeah it's your on a whole nother like you're in another orbit like. Jason: [30:17] Yeah he would tell you this lame story about how he left his cushy job at Google to take this big entrepreneurial risk and worked really hard to build something and all that but you know as opposed to just like telling other people what to do and then running before they actually do it. Scot: [30:32] Helios One C drop the mic. Jason: [30:36] Potato potahto exactly. The also sort of in that that area I visited the Casper store you know again another great kind of showroom a store that has a bunch of experiential components like they have all these, design house vignettes where you can in fact, close the door and sweep on all these various mattresses but they even had they actually have and they have a cool branded term for it that I'm going to not remember unfortunately at the back of the store is is actually dedicated to a service where you essentially can rent a in isolation pod with a bed in it and take a nap, and if they've done like a really good job of creating this like super relaxing atmosphere and you know it. The hustle and bustle of a busy City you can come and take a timeout and catch up power nap and then kind of recharge I looked at that thing and said man like these guys up to be partnering with we work like you ought to have one of these. Nap stations in all the the work on demand. Scot: [31:50] If it's at Casper ride to go people are always surprised how many skus they have I think everyone kind of Associates in with kind of essentially once you a mattress live really expanded the offerings have got some pet stuff now right and they've got pillows and sheets. Jason: [32:09] Yeah betting and so that they have all that but also I thought you're going is they have a variety of different. Material treatments on the mattresses so there is a pretty good diversity of mattresses you can buy a different price points and so you can imagine, people wanting to to actually try those out in the United States they talk a lot about how you know retail and trying is an important part of their. Their growth strategy that that you know they like the pure digital experience and obviously they're kind of original Innovation was the ability to make a UPS shippable mattress and bypass the store but in the long run like you know the total addressable Market of people that are willing to buy a mattress sight unseen is much smaller than the, you know all the households in the US and so even these retail showrooms have been, become a big part of their growth strategy I can't remember if I threw it up on social media or not but they also have kind of a social photo booth in the store and that's why I took a picture in the Casper store and to me the, that these these instagrammable scenes inside of retail stores is another strong retail Trend like we talked on the show little bit in the past. There are these dedicated Concepts to instagrammable moments like the ice cream factory in in San Francisco and idea here is. [33:38] Pay a significant amount of money I 20 to 40 bucks to go into what amounts to a bunch of like unique photo sets to take your your selfies and all these you know unique and interesting ways. And there scarcity because that museum goes away after a couple of months and it creates a cool, sort of photo that you can share on on Instagram in a bunch of retailers have jumped in on this action and so the the Casper score was one, you mentioned earlier that cover girl had a pop up in Time Square and they had a great social photo booth so you got to go take, a glamour still Anna and impact video in the store and so I use that that glamour photo booth and put my shepherd girl picks her up, it's super smart as they capture your email address which you give them in order for them to send you the photos and you you share those photos on your social channels and amplify it and become an influencer for Casper CoverGirl, or a bunch of the other retail brand so I feel like that was a common trend. [34:46] Also up near 5th Avenue Rockefeller Center FAO Schwarz reopen. So that you know they were longtime icon on 5th Avenue their space is now being used for Apple. They went out of business but a new company bought the brand and they reopen the toy store in what used to be the NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center. And I. Scot: [35:13] Does it have the f e o clock in like that same kind of vibe that the old one. Jason: [35:17] Yeah it totally does it has all the iconic displays that the old store has it has the cost you and Toy Soldiers dancing outside the store and taking selfies with everyone and again another one of these instagrammable moments. And you know a round holiday in Rockefeller Center this was the busiest store in the area and had a shoe deal 9 to get into the store and so again like, you know creating scarcity just buy, you know you go to Rockefeller Center to check out what's going on and look at the ice rink and see the Christmas tree and blam there's a huge line of people waiting to get in somewhere and it instantly makes you want to get in there too and it it it. It seems like there's definite evidence that the debt brand still carry some weight with consumers and at least around holiday. Seems like it was doing terrific. Scot: [36:07] Did a baby geek get like a drivable little Rolls-Royce Wraith. Jason: [36:13] She did not I have as I think documented on some of these other shows already made the mistake of buying him some drivable Vehicles like only two. How to get home and come to my senses and realize that I'm now paying for a separate City parking space for my son's truck my three-year-old son's truck yes. Scot: [36:33] Five of them in one city park. Jason: [36:35] Yeah that's true I probably could fit more but we don't need to tell him that. So glossy are is another great digital brand is doing really well in the beauty and cosmetics base and they open the store in Tribeca again. These guys do a lot of custom assortments instead of the whole store is really a showroom and you shop the store you you, you know try Cosmetics you pick stuff that you want and then you go to a will call window and actually pick up your custom, serrated bag with your name on it of your Cosmetics you can do that online and they have a a pick up station at the very front of the store for for online orders or or you know they have an in-store pickup station, for folks that have shop the in-store experience and this door was hopping like there was a line at almost every display for people to check out, and again a big chunk of the store was dedicated to both them like doing your makeup and glamming you up and taking an Instagram photo in you know a bunch of staged. [37:42] Scents that they had and so you kind of Sharon amplify The Experience so another good example of that. Google has a pop-up store in Chicago and New York called Google Hardware I visited the one in in Chicago earlier and talked a little bit about it on the show The New York one is sort of a, bigger better laid out version of the exact same store again a great place to experience a lot of the Google hardware and get you know live demos and some real-world vignettes but the whole you know downstairs of the store again is dedicated to, taking cool photos of you in a unique environment and sharing those on all your social platforms with all your friends and so for Google it's a double win there they're getting you to take advantage of this social photo booth experience or catching an email all the same things as all the other retailers but they're also getting to demonstrate some of the unique features of the Google pixel camera and as a speaker called best shot so essentially they put you on this way cool interactive swing set and take a bunch of pictures of you and the AI in the Google Phone app, looks at all the photos they took of you and pics of the two or three best photos and shows you though so kind of a double win there. Scot: [39:01] Did you agree with the ones I picked. Jason: [39:03] Yeah it seems optimized for obvious thing so you know I picked the ones where you're smiling and looking directly at the camera and that are in good Focus I don't know that I took enough pictures to. To pick up beyond that what it's it's criteria were but definitely the the photos it recommended were keepers. And yet it just a cool well design kind of theatrical set like it's in there cases funny cuz you walk up and it looks like a really Bland background with a bunch of wood paneling and a swing and you sit on the swing in there I have this doesn't seem like all that interesting of a, have a background but then the guy triggers the display and as the swing starts moving, all of the wood panels drop down in there all these colorful animated things moving around and it becomes a Thun Thun set for a photo so it's just fun. Watch the surprise and Delight moment when. When that happened to other people as well. [39:58] And then the 11th of my my favorite retail stores is a new store. In kind of the upper end of Tribeca called show fields, and to me this is a similar concept 2 Beta so this is a a Marketplace store it's a permanent store that. Emerging Brands can rent a Pod in all of the pods have facilities for live demonstrations they all have digital signage, until you got a bunch of like digitally native products you know that each had their own kind of, shop and shop inside of this Schofield space then I guess the one thing that was different about Schofield from beta is, the beta store is staffed by Beta employees and all the displays are largely self-service except for the beta employees most of the Schofield vignettes were actually staffed with branded employ so when you went to each of India, you are likely to get a representative from the brand that was in that vignette talking to you. Yeah so it seems like the the. Marketplace at vacation of physical retail is continuing the happened so Scott. You may have been right that marketplaces are a thing. Scot: [41:23] Yeah the other they're catching on. Jason: [41:26] Yep. So we're super deep into the show project more time than we intended on the store visits super quick, for they were a little bit of a letdown for me Restoration Hardware has this great reputation they move their store to the Meatpacking District, is there a flagship store New York went to the store it's a beautiful piece of visual merchandising and has tons of their product in it, but I just really think that it's a hard store to shop there's no way finding others no way to know what inventory is in the store I could keep that a lot of folks have a Restoration Hardware is. You know you want to try this furniture before you buy it, they have a website with all these different formations of all their products but no one on the website can you find out which store has the products you want to try, and you just kind of have to pop into the store and you're going to see one sofa that represents a family of 10 and not get a very good story about the other nine so, I just feel like it was a lost opportunity for a Restoration Hardware to take their retailing a little further than they had in the past and it seems like they stuck with. [42:31] Beautiful visual merchandising and architecture but not really anything new or interesting and customer experience so that was a disappointment to me, on 5th Avenue there's a the original Saks Fifth Avenue they made a bunch of hay earlier this year about doing a huge remodel to their Beauty Department which of the second floor of the store are you walking the store on the ground floor and they're all these signed same check out Beauty 2.0 on the second floor and they really hype up this beauty 2.0 concept. Until you know it frankly raises your expectation that they are inventing a better way to shop for cosmetics and beauty and you know when I got up there and Shop did it felt like a very traditional department store Beauty experience to me like the. The again the fixtures in the visual merchandising might have been a little nicer but you know you work at like all the exponential stuff going on at Sephora or an Ulta or the ability to shop based on a use case or need instead of exclusively by brand you know they're all these opportunities to kind of reinvent Beauty and to me, like sacks raised expectation by calling Beauty 2.0 in it it to me it was Beauty 1.1 Maybe. [43:46] I hit up about for Apple stores in New York City and you know I continue to have this, this impression when I walk in Apple stores that they had become to me super boring and the problem I think is did they have curated down they dramatically diminished the amount of third-party product they offer in an Apple store and so, you know it's almost all first-party product you know most of us know all of Apple's product before we walk in the store so we're not going to see some new Apple branded product at school or that we want to see you except maybe once a year and you know that the stores always super busy but it's also always super busy because there's a bunch of people in line at the Genius Bar to get help getting their iTunes password so they can download the Nike app for the Amazon Go app it that stores really become a customer service door and they're just really isn't a lot of. Serendipitous Discovery or surprise and Delight like you know I just don't feel like I have a reason to go there and find anything that's going to be exciting for me I don't know, Scot do you still go to an Apple Store when you're in a a new shopping district. Scot: [44:54] But Jason it's a town hall don't you just go there to meet people diet ice cream I used to I used to get the most joy out of kind of a few know looking at they had a kind of robust drone section and all these wacky accessories like Golf Club thing you can play with and I save if they've taken that stuff away I do think it's Dimension a part of it is once they get into the headphones Beats that's a big section out. Jason: [45:23] Yeah they kicked over all the third party headphones out and yeah. Scot: [45:26] Yeah so so it is a bit of a bummer because like you I think I pretty much have every product covered so there's no new Apple product I really need to discover. Jason: [45:37] Same same deal so if I forget to pack a power supply I might pop pop in the Apple to get a replacement but yeah I miss the surprise and Delight moments I hope I hope they find a new way to bring those back and then last store in this is sadly for me cuz I really wanted to be excited. [45:57] My raspberry award is going to a digital native brand that folks on the show are probably familiar with all the way which is. Kind of a great digital suitcase that's doing really well. And the reason I'm disappointed is I had visited their pop-up store and thought it was fabulous right so, you listen to the founders talk about the away brand and they say like hey we recognized early on we do you want to be about selling suitcases we wanted to be around selling aspirational experiences and destinations and so you went to the pop-up store and it was, merchandise to be all these exotic locations that you wanted to go to and it just so happens that there was a luggage in each one of those locations that you could check out and it made you want to buy the luggage so that you could go to, to Milan and you know have the experience, and I thought that was really smart and it it you know the you know their presentations at Shopkin and shop at Oregon places like that you know they told the story that really kind of match the retail environment so, now they've opened a permanent store and I and you go me and I like the pup I'm expecting you know some big stuff out of the permanent store and I feel like the permanent away store took a giant step back and it's a bunch of shelves with suitcases and no storytelling and, and none of that destination merchandising or aspiration like it did have kind of a a like. [47:23] Unremarkable Cafe inside the store but mostly it was you know it it felt just like your typical Mall luggage store that just happen to have a bunch of away suitcases on. Scot: [47:33] I am a proud owner of a real of masochist. Jason: [47:37] Do you get yelled at every time you get on the plane that you have to take the battery out. Scot: [47:40] I know it pops I got the later generation that works pops right up. Jason: [47:44] Yet so I think that's most of the products but there is a slight slightly unfortunate thing that one of them are key features if they have a smart suitcase that has a big battery in it that you can use to charge a lot of your gadgets and there must have been some bad experience on the airline somewhere because like it's now built into the FAA announcements on a lot of planes but if you have an away branded suitcase you must take the battery out before you come on the plane and again away his design the suitcase to allow that so it's not a big deal but I'm online from a brand or erosion standpoint it's. Anime be favorable maybe negative that every single time you get on a plane they make an announcement saying like you have to do something with an away suitcase or you're not safe. Maybe it helps that they're reminding everyone that there's this new pool suitcase call the way. Scot: [48:31] Yeah it's not nearly as bad as when they said if you had a Samsung Note they would just like grab it. Off the plane. Jason: [48:38] Exactly incident I guess the last take what's a bunch of great retail I do feel like a bunch of the new emerging brands or are the ones that are really moving the ball forward a lot of the the start of. A long time retail Brands I feel like I'm seeing glass Innovation out of them even Nike you know I mean arguably they been in retail since 1990 but as a major retailer like they're moving the ball forward and and you know the Saks Fifth Avenue's of the world not as much. That one other kind of antidotal take away I have talked a bunch of times on the show about electronic shelf labels and you know I would point out of the 33rd three stores I visited four of them now I have 100% electronic shelf label so you know potentially we're starting to see the the slow Evolution to this more real-time updatable Dynamic pricing retail environment so I hope we see more of that. Scot: [49:37] Well we just give me the last show of the year so we want to give you guys kind of the double bang for your buck so in addition to Jason's detailed report we're going to do, quick 10-minute news run and it wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without. Jason: [50:01] The news your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [50:10] Cool so briefly the big news for Amazon right now here we are in the heat of pizza delivery time is not surprisingly deliver you were in it so there's been a bunch out around delivery. [50:23] I can see light interesting stuff on Amazon Jason by frequent Amazon order this time of year for estimator and it's really interesting they're kind of my Prime orders are defaulting to to de-flea a message in there that says choose one day and you'll get your item tomorrow and it's really it's a really weird user experience like why why are they making me choose it there's no extra cost I did notice a day I didn't order and it did that and I chose it and then it did this interesting math over on the side where it said your shipping charge is $20 and then Midas out the shipping charge almost to make me feel like you know I was getting 20 $20 worth of value it felt like some kind of an A B test there but that's just been pretty unusual one here in Chicago you've probably already always had kind of same-day delivery in and next day but that's pretty rare North Carolina so you know I'm definitely seeing that they're using language like. [51:27] Using our express shipping partners and stuff like that so and around this area I'm seeing a lot of the Prime vehicle so I will talk about that little bit so since it's been pretty interesting as a user the Bloomberg had a friend Spencer super over there I had a great peace out today about the Amazon delivery Network and you'll notice he's there around delivery. [51:55] Very intimately familiar with these various platforms most famous and well Love's truck platform is from Europe in is the Mercedes Sprinter and so Amazon in September a news article came out that they had ordered 10,000 of these thousand and what they've done very rapidly is they have out the field but it feels like a lot of them they have set up people in their own businesses these 1099 businesses I am they will guarantee your route though rent the truck to you very inexpensively and this article had some really interesting case studies profiled someone that had a 42 and 70 drivers they're doing 250 deliveries per day per driver I am making $1,000 a month in profit so if you're interested in that kind of thing will put in the show notes and I definitely recommend you read that and then you saw one to Jason. Jason: [52:53] Yep so inside notice there's a slight irony to me the same time you're seeing all these Amazon branded Sprinter Vehicles showing up it's also the time of year when UPS and FedEx don't have enough trucks until you start seeing a lot of Enterprise rental vans with with UPS drivers getting out of them in the course there's always the problem of, people thinking they're not not legitimate UPS drivers when they roll up in the in the unmarked white van. [53:21] So you like people going in different directions there is an interesting thing that Amazon did this year you know there's always this battle for free shipping amongst retailers and who's going to lower their, their threshold for free shipping and what they're going to charge and so you know Walmart does free 2-day shipping for any order over $35, Target came out for holiday and said hey free shipping on anything and you know it's always curious, Target made this better shipping offer than Walmart would Walmart match him in Walmart didn't, and I I kind of thought that was interesting and that would be the end of it but then Amazon surprised is all about coming out with a new offer for this holiday that they were offering free shipping, for the holiday even without a Prime Membership in this this is not their 2-day shipping but that it was interesting that Amazon was getting more promotional around holiday we've all been watching to see if that might Force Walmart. To react so far we haven't seen that but now they're extending this free shipping and they're starting to really promote their, they're cut off date so you know I think tomorrow is the last day to get free slow shipping from Amazon but as you pointed out they've beefed up there. Their same-day delivery options in a bunch of markets and so you'll be able to continue to Christmas shop up to the 24th in a lot of markets and still get them. [54:47] As you mentioned Chicago was one of the first so I for a long time I've had this experience where, you order something that's available with one day delivery and then in the cart it defaults to 2-day delivery and it goes you can get it's Tuesday you can get this on Thursday for free or you can cook this to get it Wednesday for free, cuz even though it says same day it usually is after the the early morning cut off so you get it the next day and so you know you constantly have this thing where of course why wouldn't I pick, to get it a day earlier for the same free price of a new thing I just saw this week on on my own Amazon experience in Chicago is there launching some new service called Amazon weekly delivery and it seems like they're trying to incentivize me to bundle more of my purchases and have them delivered one day a week instead of on an ad-hoc basis and so it almost feels like Prime Pantry for. Non-prime Prime Pantry items so I have to dive into that and get a little more details but that was a new GUI I had never seen before. Scot: [55:54] What's the incentive. Jason: [55:56] Yeah so that was part of the problem it did not like it was a new button I could put to put it on my weekly delivery which to my knowledge I didn't have a weekly delivery but it did not seem like there was any monetary benefit to do that so it was again it was weird it was like free same-day delivery get it on Monday standard 2-day delivery to get it on Tuesday or put it in your weekly delivery on Wednesday. Scot: [56:21] They will there be there always playing around with incentives for slow shipping so I've noticed now they seem to have detected on my pretty heavy Prime now users they're offering me kind of somewhere between 5 and $10 for slow shipping at all do in a prime now single use coupon, iPad audible coupons Whole Foods variety of different free song a free app to put around look like a thousand things on that side. Jason: [56:49] Yeah no for sure and I agree with you I think they they seem pretty smart about seeing which offers you're most likely to accept and then turning up the volume on those offers. I do an audible and I keep getting more and more audible offers on or better offers on that regard stuff definitely get that you link to an article this morning about Amazon's new air hub in the Fort Worth airport so that his listeners that will probably already know they have a big air Hub in Cincinnati now they're adding a second big Hub in Dallas and again you know these guys are getting more airport capacity and more planes and and it just seems totally obvious that they're their bulking up there their internal delivery capacity and you know it it's it's hard to imagine it's not a competitive threat to our friends at UPS. Scot: [57:48] Amazon names are fulfillment centers after the airport so for a long time there are us tracking this and Phoenix had the most so they would do like PHX and when they open the second one they Rebrand the first one to one and then they start new muriatic so Phoenix had like PHX 1 2 3 and 4 in the Dallas for long time didn't have anything there then suddenly when the span of like four or five years David have all the way from DFW 1 to 6 and then and then they expanded out the rest of the day of the Houston and Sentra so no it's it's a it's a huge state for Amazon so I imagine you know that that's going to be a busy Hub and then it's interesting cuz they diagrams for the kind of have a book helps Earth Day kind of building the supply chain that looks it's kind of a hybrid of like what Walmart Walmart does to get stuff to a store and what FedEx UPS do so they have this kind of benefit of Products near you and then if it goes out then it goes to this other level and another level up there it is really fascinating how they're the kind of layer to supply chain, elements on top of each other maybe we'll do a show where we get a supply chain Guru in to explain that privately digested. Jason: [59:05] Yeah and I would add just one thing like these are not just hubs where they're like shipping Goods to then drive them to your house this is mostly about moving Goods around between the various for filming Center. And there they're just getting crazy Advanced like I literally think we have a pop-up fulfillment center in Chicago right now so it appears Amazon his rented all the parking under Millennial Park and they like literally staged a temporary fulfillment center in downtown Chicago for holiday. Scot: [59:36] Brickell lots of machine learning lots of data. Longtime listeners will enjoy this article because it's pretty much a topic we spent a lot of time on a I didn't think there is much you in there but it is paid gated tarp a waltz and it really talks about introduces the concept of crap can't realize a profit and that you know it makes it sound like news that Amazon's pushing back on manufacturers to to change their packaging and figure out how you solve this problem of you know that these items that are too bulky you too heavy to low asp2 to make money who's a good read good summary of of kind of what Amazon's doing but, I kind of made it feel new and and we know that they've been doing this for years. Jason: [1:00:26] Yeah I didn't think I'd almost argue that there's a slight trim the other way there that I feel like Amazon's been progressively getting more and more aggressive about targeting crap and more recently liked in last few months and feels like they they may have loosened things likely in some category. Scot: [1:00:44] Yeah yeah and then there was a smattering of Amazon go you touched on it and your your trip reports what are. Jason: [1:00:54] Yeah so they're there is some rumors that one of the use cases for Amazon go could be airports and that is one of the categories where it seems like you could, Amazon go would be a really good fit so I really fast grab-and-go Self Service experience in an airport and as we talked about like a lot of the go merchandise is food and so you think about, man what happens a lot of airports you have a limited time to get something to eat before you get in the plane and you know you're not going to get served anything to eat on the plane now and so seems for a lot of reasons the Amazon goes strength online really well with that airport use queso that that made a lot of sense I won't be surprised to see that deploy and deploy fast they also open their first. [1:01:45] Small for my Amazon go store so this is like a hundred square foot store and it is kind of like a self-contained shop and Shop, where you know you can have a bunch of quick grab convenience items, in a you know Anna is self-contained pop up store format and you know from the first time I saw I go one of these cases I always thought of was like the hotel. Gift shop for the hotel snack shop kind of thing where it doesn't make sense to staff the store with the a person but you know you can sell a lot of snacks to the guess that just check in and they're going up to the room and so this the small-format store seems like a perfect fit for a potential Hotel use case for exam. [1:02:30] And then I think go is now going to the UK so we've seen like three new new retail for mastering Amazon open up in in London in recent times and now they're going to get their first ghost tour. Scot: [1:02:42] Cool it's everyone laughed when they said they weren't there could be thousands of these so you put 10 in each airport and 50 in each City and boom you're there. Jason: [1:02:52] Exactly so they are not sitting still there doing a lot of interesting stuff it's been fun to follow them. Scot: [1:02:59] Awesome so I know we're up against time but there is that concludes our Amazon news there was one big news item that I wanted to pick your brain on and is there she might this kind of slid under my radar I'm sure you were really you're attracting it but there was this announcement that IBM sold a bunch of software stuff to this company called HCL I don't know who that is and the ones that made the headlines I saw where I was he Lotus Notes and just some kind of, old stuff that seemed then I saw a kind of kerfuffle on LinkedIn where several of the smaller e-commerce platforms were really kind of riling up retailers and saying you know, where you going to do now that IBM no longer supports websphere which is there their kind of you know their e-commerce platform that a lot of the largest retailers are on and. Turns out that they have sold that whole platform to this company HCL what I'm sure a lot of our listeners out there I'm sure if they're on websphere they're they're painfully aware this but I was a little shocked about that what do you what do you make of it does this mean IBM just as getting out of the retail game or why would they sell it and then what do you think it means going for. Jason: [1:04:14] Yep it's even potentially more confusing than that so it's totally cut me out of left field the, you know if you'll get the last call at 5 to 8 years in retail there have been these three Enterprise platforms that have emerged as sort of the most competitive, platforms for launching your e-commerce site so you know IBM has had Webster Commerce which is one of the products they sold the ACL Oracle has that a product called atg was originally stand alone company Oracle bottom, there's originally a German stanaland company called hybris the sap bot and so you know if you were a big retailer or you wanted to you know be selling hundreds of millions of dollars online, you likely were going to pick one of these three platforms to launch your website and and you would likely have a shootout between two or three of them, and you know that pay a company like razorfish millions of dollars to to implement it for you and and pay the vendor, you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year in maintenance on that platform and so in some ways like totally shocking IBM which you know. [1:05:27] Arguably had the biggest retail market share of those three platforms. So the entire websphere business to HCL HCL is a very large integrator and so you know frankly from my standpoint, whatever traction IBM had in the marketplace that platform is totally going to lose now that a single integrator, because you know all the other integrators in the world are not very likely in to be promoting and implementing a platform, it's owned by one of their competitors so you know usually when an integrator buys a platform it's kind of the end of life for that platform and it just becomes, an in-house piece of Ip that that that integrator uses you don't becomes much harder to see other third parties. Integrate that's an IBM had this Rich echo system of integrators that were aggressively selling their stuff so there's a ton of customers that are on it it's but yours was super fragmented about this. [1:06:31] They sold the on-prem version of the software 2hcl at the moment IBM still owns, the cloud version of the software which is the newest version but the cloud version is based on the on Prim codebase so if you're one of the few customers that bought the, Cloud version of IBM or you were thinking about migrating now you have to ask yourself. Is HCl going to keep updating that code base so that IBM's Cloud version continues to stay. Competitive or contemporary or what's going to happen there IBM owns a bunch of other retail software that a lot of retailers still rely on most famously they own order management system called Sterling. It's still doing really well and they did not still sell sterling so in the old days. You know I didn't had a lot of success getting people to use their o&s and their web platform together because obviously most most businesses need order Management in and then you conversate. Now those things are getting split up so at the moment there's a lot more questions than answers. I probably already taking too much time but the one thing I will say is in my mind all of these Enterprise platforms are losing momentum and losing customers and so you know the likely reason I'm selling it is. They just feel like the super expensive enterprise software is kind of end-of-life because. [1:07:54] To me what's happening is the very largest e-commerce sites are are all largely on custom and house built stuff. And increasingly the biggest customers that were on these Enterprise platforms are. Writing more the software themselves and using less of the Enterprise platform and negotiating to Payless licenses for that software. Everyone wants to move to the cloud and none of these products are particularly graceful at offering a cloud version, and then every new business that's been born every new brand that's been born in the last eight years that was more likely to be digital natives, probably started doing e-commerce on something like Shopify or Bigcommerce and they're actually finding that those those platforms continue to meet all their needs even as they scale and so you know even if you outgrow Shopify once you're used to paying $10,000 a year for your eCommerce platform you know it becomes really hard to pay for a you know orders of magnitude more for that you know and then orders of magnitude more on top of that to implement it just became a tough value prop for these old Enterprise platform so a lot of us in the e-commerce software space have a lot of nostalgia for IBM at the you know they were definitely King Of The Hill in retail for a long time but you know I do probably selling them because you know it was becoming a financial loser for them and and it does not seem like that's where the growth is going to be in retail. Scot: [1:09:23] Feels like Financial. Kind of yeah she'll games though too. Maybe a negative phrase but maybe I'm just wanting to show Wall Street more SAS Revenue so that's probably why they kept that piece but you know you can't possibly do well if you're not enjoying the underline code and if I'm an integrator I don't want to make this a surgeon that are so seems like there's instant mi

Planet Smart Home Friday - 11/30 - News Roundup - Lowes, B8ta, IKEA by Jason Wade

In 2013 I wrote an article called The Store is Media where I projected a new era of retail where the primary purpose of physical stores would cease to be to sell products but rather to create and monetize customer experiences.  Today, a new class of pioneering retailers and industry players are bringing this concept to life. In this episode, I caught up with several of them to tap their thoughts on this seismic shift and what it means for the future of retail. 

EP139 - B8ta founder and CEO Vibhu Norby  Vibhu Norby is the founder and CEO of b8ta.  b8ta is a software-powered brick and mortar retailer designed to improve the customer and maker experience. They help people discover, try, and learn about new tech products while empowering makers with a simple retail-as-a-service model that puts them in control. In this interview, we cover Vibhu's background, how he came to the idea for B8ta, b8ta's retail partnerships (including Lowe's and Macy's), their unique marketplace dynamic, their experiential retail as a service offering, their recent fundraising success, and Vibhu's vision for the future of retail. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 139 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, August 1, 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.   Transcript Jason: [0:26] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show. This is episode 139 being recorded on Wednesday August 1st 2018. I'm your host Jason retail geek Goldberg. And as usual I'm here with your cohost Scott Winslow. Scot & Vibhu: [0:42] Jason and welcome back Jason's Ghosheh listeners. Jason I don't know about you but I've been on pins and needles this week no we have a special guest tonight. You and I are both probably the biggest gadget geek ever and we have a new favorite store and it's pretty exciting to have someone from that store on the podcast. There's a company that we have talked a lot about on the podcast so I'm hoping longtime listeners can kind of guess what we're talking about here. The company is beta and that's B the number T.A. Beta is such a unique company. I don't want to get in the middle of describing it to everybody. I want to kind of leave that for our guest who is the CEO and founder of b8ta, Vibhu Norby. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited I've been listening since the first episode. Jason: [1:37] We are we're thrilled to have you. And I do think Scott and I are the target market for your concepts. We'll get to that in a moment. But before we do normally we'd like to start interviews is get a little rundown from our guests on their career progression and what led them to their current role. And in your case. Beta is not your first cool gig. So definitely want to share that with the audience. Scot & Vibhu: [2:10] Yes so I I grew up programming, and fell in love with computers and software when I was an early teenager and sort of joined a series of startups and then end up leaving to do one of my own. And we got funded by Y Combinator and then raised a couple of million dollars from, some investors and that we were making a social network for the phone and back in 2011 when snap chat and a bunch of these guys got started and we didn't make snap chat. So the company didn't totally work and we we found a home at Nest a few years ago. [2:53] At the time when they had one product and were just starting to think about launching multiple products and so there I joined as an engineer and brought my whole team and company over. It was sort of an acquisition. And that was where I got introduced to retail for the first time really from the brand side. Nest was a really pioneering company. A lot of ways we were were really introducing the idea of smart home to the consumer not just the Nest Learning Thermostat and doing that was complicated. It was a complicatedproduct. We also really love retail because a lot of the team had come from Apple and understood the value of retail beyond sort of sales. And so we used we used retail as a as a place to store and make people aware of the product and get them hands on and that was what the genesis but actually I want to talk about the first time I talked to you Jasonbecause, it's kind of you know four years ago I actually didn't know very much about retail and so when I was trying to learn about the first thing I did was like you know basically typing like who who to follow about you knowin retail, and your name came up and I ended up falling on Twitter for a bit. And at a point when I wasn't sure if I should we should actually do beta. I called him LSU and is like hey can we get a call I want tell you the idea that working on and just get your feedback and so we got on the phone. Do you remember this. Jason: [4:20] I totally remember this. I wasn't sure you wanted to disclose it. Scot & Vibhu: [4:25] Yeah. So we we got on the call and I was like hey you know this is what we're thinking about doing. We don't know much about retail what we understand the problem. And I think you said you know this is like been done a lot, or it might work but you'd be much better off if you could solve this other problem that I have which is that people are not buying chewing gum anymore because they're looking at their phone and they're checking out atthe supermarket. And I was like oh that's that's interesting like I me think about they actually spent way too much time thinking about how to get people to buy chewing gum after that conversation. But I'm very thankful that we decided to move forward with this. Remember that. Jason: [5:05] Yeah I totally do. I might slightly I don't. I'm not sure I necessarily tried to completely pivot you. But I'm also glad you stuck to your guns. Scot & Vibhu: [5:17] If you ever saw the chewing gum problem I'm not sure what. Jason: [5:20] No no. I feel like there still is an opportunity as the world moves to auto replenishment for for you know all of those consumable items like you know impulse purchases are likely to go away. So if there's any entrepreneurs out there with a clever idea you know we've got to we've got to figure out how how we're going to do impulse purchases in all digital purchases path. Scot & Vibhu: [5:45] So spoiler alert but I think we should put a gum station in every beta Boom problem solved. Jason: [5:51] Yeah that that's one way to go. The part in conversation I remember us talking about though which I think we should come back to later is the role of other retailers in your concept. Scot & Vibhu: [6:09] Yeah. I mean you have I think if I remember you had suggested that we should talk to some other retailers who were pretty focused on building something for ourselves on the software side. But that opinion obviously change in the last 2 1/2 years. Jason: [6:25] Yeah I was gonna I mean that you probably got the sequence right. But I think I feel like I mentioned that, there would be potential interest in some established retailers and partnering with you or potentially funding the idea you had and at that time, as any entrepreneur you were you were laser focused on crushing all the traditional retailers and doing it all yourself. And so I think that's that's how you started that. You may have progressed since then. So one other thing before we jump into beta hardcore though is you were at Neste pre Google right so you were actually acquired by Google is that do have the timing right. Scot & Vibhu: [7:08] That's right. Yeah. Very shortly after I joined, and it was you know the acquisition was I think we learned about it like January 11 2015 14 and then it closed in February and I had joined just four months or five months prior to that. But it was the company was at an inflection point when I had joined and it made a lot of sense. Jason: [7:33] Yeah for sure. I feel like a super friendly product to everyone now but, if you go back to that Genesis you original concept was sort of, what with a smart thermostat look like if Apple were to design one and when you guys want that first product it was one of the original digitally native vertical brands right. Like you you made this product that you were predominant you were selling direct and partnering with retailers on it required a bunch of education because no consumer knew they needed it. And so I feel like there was a big retail education play in it which is of course interesting. Scot & Vibhu: [8:15] As funny. I mean we didn't see it that way at the time. And even it took even after we started the company I didn't realize that but every single Early Stage Harbor company was a DnD VB as you noticed, because they were selling the product direct and and that and the advantage that a lot of Harbor companies have relative to other types of, DNA BS is that they always have the users contact information because most of them have an account sign up as part of the onboarding process. And so it sort of they're sort of natively by default dnt Bebe's. Jason: [8:59] Absolutely. Scot & Vibhu: [9:02] Yes. Let's let's jump into beta so let's start at kind of the the origin story. Anything kind of tell us how you got that idea and maybe kind of tell folks what how you describe it today. [9:21] Sure. So I don't think any good idea is sort of, a singular eureka moment maybe it is but for us it was a lot of different kind of influences came together to create this. The the biggest the biggest thing for me was working at NASA and, understood and sort of seeing this disconnect between how we as a brand and as a supplier to stores thought about are the value of our presence in their stores versus the value that a retailer saw. And the presence in their stores and that disconnect is is incredibly fundamental and incredibly hard to fix. And so you know as a brand we wanted stores to be education point for customers. We needed a scalable way to get our product Nest thermostat in the hands of customers. And and we felt that you know when we came into a store we wanted to present the product in a beautiful manner kind of let it let it live like a hero product there. We never came into a store without uncap or display or you know something that was sort of taking the product out of the box. [10:45] And and in order to do that you know we end up spending a lot of capital a lot of time you know deploying a lot of people into the field to sort of ensure that like every time we had our product out there that cost. And when a customer saw that it was presented beautifully and and frankly retailers back then and it wasn't that long ago. But you know how fast things have changed in this industry. [11:10] This was not a totally common idea for them I think they had an Apple shop and shop and maybe a few of their large brand partners but to allow of any new company to come in and build a cool experience wasn'tnative to their business. And you know they their business model of retail is really set up to to be the end of the supply chain the store right. They've got a buyer they figured out that this is a product they want to bring in. This is how many units they want to get. They think they can sell and the store is sort of like this the warehouse with a pretty face as a retailer wants described to me and you know for us it was the start of the consumer journey. And so. [11:54] This basically what happened is I learned about this because I had asked our Head of Retail who's now my co-founder Philip RHA UB and he had a retail analyst. I asked him why we weren't in more stores. You know we were in Target. Apple Best Buy Home Depot Lowe's. And I was looking at our sales force. One of the bucket in sales force and I just noticed like hundreds of retailers from you know globally who are asking to get its products in their stores. And I was like This is a you know an amazing opportunity. And he said well because we don't see retail as a surprising pivot you want to make sure the products are presented well and so we just can't, give away it to anyone who asks and that was like you know that that gave me this aha moment that maybe there was, a way to fix that. At the fundamental level for a retailer. [12:53] But but you know we. You know I sort of sat on that kind of learning for a while and then I got more involved the retail team at NASA when they asked me to build a training system for associates inside of other people's stores. And you know when I started working with the customer support team on trying to figure out how to, address you know sort of this you know when a customer buys a product at a store but then they call, our support center and then you know where we said that customers should they return the product and I realize that like a retailer like a brand like Nasz never wants the customer to go back to the store. There's all these kind of weird things that I was finding out and I wondered if you know if we were having these issues that probably means that every other supplier in Best Buy. That is like us like GoPro for example or Fitbit at a similar stage was probably having a similar similar fundamental issues. And and you know if we were building sort of code bases and processes to solve this and they were as well that that's a very inefficient use of all of our resources. So beta was this idea to create a retail platform from the ground up that supported a customer experience as the primary use case for the store. [14:20] And supply chain as a secondary or test Cherry use case. And then we I mean it is really that simple honestly we just want to we didn't you know the business model kind of came around later. You know if you're if you're going to separate yourself from the supply chain use case of a store then you can't buy the product and so it kind of made sense to rent space to companies. But yeah the disconnect was the genesis. And as it turns out like you know now nowadays anytime we find a disconnect between, two parties that are doing business you know a customer brand or a brand and a retailer or a retailer and a customer we think there's an opportunity to deploy business new business models or software to fix it. There's but anyway that's that's a bit about the company but we can talk more. Yeah. So. [15:19] Maybe this is a good place to start. How big is speed of just kind of from a store footprint perspective. [15:27] So we have eighty two stores that we managed today and own operate 70 of those are inside of LOEs so we have a quite large partnership with them around smartphones. We've got a store with Macy's inside of their flagship store and we've got, 13 actually I think 12 owned like kind of flagship in line stores or kiosks inside of malls. And in terms of the scale of people we about 350 people that work inside of these stores and we're at our per post office call so I've been in Palo Alto is kind of what you would think of as the flagship store, flagship for us we have. We have a number of flagship. So we just we just mean any kind of any store that has our flag our logo on it that it was our first store. That's actually a very unique store none of our stores look like that today it was it was built on a budget in a woodworking shop. Beautifully done. But but definitely a one off. So the newer ones are fancier who's that Congressman. [16:42] Yeah we spend a lot more time in designing them. It's the series a store the Series B stores are much nicer. The Up series is this the series a sort of the best and then you start to realize that you've got to build a business and that every single thing that you see in the store has to be cut from a tree. Yeah. Jason: [17:02] Yet it's all the timbre turns in all the hardwood turns into a particleboard is basically what happens in other curves. Scot & Vibhu: [17:09] 100 percent is exactly exactly right cool. The way I've described it is it's kind of a you know Apple Store like kind of feel with seems like about 2000 square feet there. And but you know literally hundreds of different kinds of products you can interact with mostly in the kind of gadget electronic category. It's not fun because you come to the folks that work there are super helpful so if you had an idea of what you wanted they were ready to leave bailable. But I thought my experience was just kind of spinning like two or three hours and they're just kind of touching everything and trying it out and learning about it. Is that kind of how you think about the old experience at this point is that a decent description. Yeah. So each store is about 25 100 square feet features that are 120 different brands. You know maybe 130 different products. Every price out of the box and it's a real live working demo. Like we when we get a new product in a store we actually take like the first one out of the shipment and just take it out and set it up like we were a customer. [18:20] There's a lot of space between the products. It looks like an Apple store although that wasn't the intention it was really designed around actually or analytics system and how overhead cameras capture information. But you can definitely spend two to three hours in there because everything that you're seeing is kind of a one of a kind. Interesting thing that you probably haven't seen before and these are complet. You know the price to carry the tech products are complex and and they were hard time to understand. And so you know having really good staff is super important to us. I think two to three hours is definitely way above the average visit which is about 15 minutes. But the average customer only usually look at about a third of the assortment on a given at a given time. So but we have a tremendous amount of customers who kind of see it like a museum they come and they look at everything one by one and want to make sure they don't miss something. Jason: [19:25] And it's funny because in one way I would argue you're sort of the the opposite of an Apple store in that, there's not a lot of surprise and delight moments in an Apple store anymore. They actually used to carry more third party products than there was a little more variety but my sense today is you know exactly every single product you're going to discover in the Apple store before you walk in there.Right. So it's it's most people that walk into an Apple store are walking in with some kind of mission in mind. Like they're either coming for service on an existing product or they're coming to buy a product that they already know about and know that Apple has there or maybe they want to see it and make a final determination inin a big way. I would I sort of feel like your story is the opposite. I'm not likely to know. I know the kind of products you're going to have in your store but I'm not likely to know exactly what you have and I'm almost certain to discover some products I didn't know about. And so to me it feels much more like a sort of serendipitous discovery moment for the shopper versus a specific mission in mind a moment like I might have at Apple is that. Scot & Vibhu: [20:37] Yeah. So the data proves that out for sure. So 70 percent of the products at a average customer season are store they're discovering for the very first time. So and actually on the other side of that and Apple and Apple stores about 70 percent Apple products. [20:55] Oh you're probably 70 percent Sandras seeing something that you you definitely saw before. But we have two types of shoppers in our store. There is there is the shopper who kind of wanders into just be surprised and be delighted by everything that people are making in the world. But we definitely serve a use case for a lot of our brands of high quality demonstration. So a lot of the company and you can if you if you like google some of the companies that we have in our store you can see when you go to their website they have a store finder and the store finder is just pointingcustomers to us you know saying hey if you want to check this thing out in person. This is the place for you to do that and we love those kind of visitors because they come in for one thing and we give them that amazing demonstration experience that you know no one else could give except for beta. But of course while they're there they'll find a bunch of other things that maybe, they didn't know about and that's that in terms of a percentage of traffic about 40 percent of our traffic is driven by the brands that individually use case but in a mature store for us that that that tends to go up and up. So basically like if you lived in Palo Alto once you've been to the store once and you've seen everything are a couple times the next time you come, back is because you saw like a prophet on the Internet that you were interested in trying out first and then you'll come in for that specific thing and try it out. Jason: [22:21] Yes. That makes perfect sense. It's funny because I imagine as people get more familiar with this door that you definitely could have some sort of mission shoppers and it it sounds like one way, they might find you is through the product manufacturer's website. But you do now have your own Web site as well. And that's another discussion you and I had when you first launched you didn't have your inventory online. And I mentioned that like in the long run customers that became familiar with your store would want to be able to see what kind of products you were carrying before they made a visit. So now that you apparently took that advice and so now I'm going to ask a terrifying question. Has that had any value or are you finding that that you do have perhaps a subset of your shoppers that that shop your website and then decide oh cool you've got a new a new kind of product in stock that I want to go see. Scot & Vibhu: [23:18] Yes so funnily enough we I mean I think we specifically avoided doing an e-commerce site for a while because we wanted to stay focused on on stories which was our kind of unique value prop for brands. And we also didn't want to do e-commerce that we didn't have something to offer that was special and we act. We launched e-commerce in August officially last year. So it's been one year to date in that time period. It's gone from obviously zero percent of our sales volume of products to almost 20 percent today. [23:55] So we've had a lot of growth there. I think you know what we learned more than anything was that our associates in the store needed a place to, can point shoppers to who maybe wanted to do more consideration or you know had some kind of education like they were traveling and you know the product shipped somewhere you know. And and so it serves an essential function. Are our sales associates. I would say more so than customers. We don't like buying from beta dot com is not better than buying from Amazon. If you're a Prime member for example so we're not trying to compete for every single sale but it's been an effective tool on the store side of the business. I would say we built the entire platform in-house for a reason which is that we have a lot of really cool things coming down the pipe that, will give us at least some advantages over maybe shopping on Amazon or from the brand's website that we can uniquely do because we have a lot of stores. Jason: [25:04] Nice. And just a clarification. I like that to me is exactly why I was suggesting you have the inventory online was sort of as an adjunct to your sales process. Not so much that you'd capture a ton of sales via e-commerce but that people would wanna know what you had in stock before they visited the store or or people would want to do that final consideration after the store. So I'm glad to hear that. That's providing some benefit to you. I get that you're you know nobody wants to our Amazon Amazon so it probably doesn't make sense to just try to compete with their exact customer experience. But one of the things that I perceive is also true and I'd be curious to hear from you is I do think it's possible for you to be selling products before they're likely to show up on Amazon. So I do think there's some early stage new new products that you know where manufacturers reach out to you as early experience and they may not be distributing through Amazon yet. Is that true or does everyone go to Amazon Day one these days. Scot & Vibhu: [26:16] No that's totally true. And in fact it's not just that they come to us. You know before Amazon but they also come to us after Amazon a lot of brands that we work with. They start selling there and they don't necessarily get what they want out of that experience and it was a bit more control they want more data and they'll come back and you know will be sort of be one of the onlymultibrand experiences that can carry it. We also have a lot of international companies that don't have a, local distributor or as a Web site where you can you can buy from here and so there are a lot of cases where we are the only place you could buy that wasn't necessarily our strategy initially but, you know more and more I think that will be a focus for us. The other interesting thing is I think you know. [27:07] When you sign up with beta as a brand, your entire experience of managing your stores with us and deploying content and training and materials is all through our dashboard. And so we've found that companies don't want to have to sort of manage all these different silos of of you know information and marketing information. And so our our our system allows a company to sort of make a change once in it and that content reflects everywhere in-store online, in our accounting backend in our checkout you know everything all at the same time and that's for the right type of company at an early stage that's actually better than even selling on their own website. Jason: [27:52] Yeah. And I think that teases something that's unique about your model that we haven't totally covered yet which is you are not a pure traditional wholesaler where you just, go discover some product you want to sell the people you buy a thousand of them at a wholesale price you mark them up to retail and sell them to someone else. You're actually closer to Scott Wingels favorite thing a market marketplace right where you're essentially providing a platform and you're letting manufacturers, leverage your platform your drive you're generating traffic and then you're letting them sell to do that traffic through your platform. Do I have that right. Scot & Vibhu: [28:37] Yeah we're actually a two sided marketplace and it's it's hard to see from the outside because we look like a kind of technology store brand. But on the inside you know brands are subscribing to space in a store. But we also work really closely with landlords and on that side they're competing through lower rents or things like you know funding for store build outs or you know marketing. They're actually competing for these brands dollars and our store is sort of the glue that that brings those two together. And so you know across our every store of ours is different because companies that sign up with us they can choose where they want to be and they don't have to be in every everywhere if they don't want to. And they can also in every store sort of price differently and so you'll oftentimes you know you might see a company that is you know maybe moving from store to store or trying to figure out the right markets for themto be in. And what really makes their decision is how good the data is in that in that spot and what and what the economics look like and that's driven by the landlord in our case that you know we didn't. Again a lot of the stuff we didn't really see going into it we were just like we wanted to solve this really central problem that brands had. [30:00] But it's evolved to look more like a marketplace on the business model side than any other type of retailer today. And I think that you know just I can anticipate your next question but I think that's where we started getting interested in working with other retailers because you know there are effectively some of the largest landlordsin the country. And and I think as we export our model further we knew that square. Good square footage was going to be the thing that the supply side that sort of drove a lot of the demand. Jason: [30:37] Yeah and I want to come back to that in a bit. It's even it's good square footage with high buying content which is even more exciting. Scot & Vibhu: [30:44] Of yes. Yeah. Jason: [30:45] But the so one of the things that I'm always curious about. So a brand has to want to work with you. The economics have to work. They have to see the benefit. You know they likely they have to have a product that requires some storytelling or some demand. And so there's a bunch of factors that would make a brand want to work with you. But it probably wouldn't work for you to just accept any brand that wanted to work with you. Right. So you know you wouldn't want to end up with a bunch of brands that just were struggling to sell their crap. And so therefore were were willing to you know be a tenant in your store and sell their stuff. It does feel like you have a curated assortment of cool gadgets that people like Jason and Scott Wingo would like to buy. So like I guess I'm I'm curious how you work that curation in a in like a traditional retail model of curation is easy the merchant decides what they're going to carry and what they're not going to carry. It feels like your emergence if you even have a of merchant sort of has a harder job because they have to both decide what they want and then it has to be an appealing model for that stuff. Scot & Vibhu: [31:58] So we actually philosophically are anti-corruption. We think that a lot of the problems that brought that retailers have encountered over time is is because of their you know quote unquote curation process on the buying side. The way curation works. And the reason that that the products in the store are actually you know out to be really good is that their business model we chose. [32:29] Weeds out bad products extremely quickly in the same way that maybe you know an advertiser in an auction system like Google AdWords weeds out bad ads as well. Basically when you have a product that doesn't resonate with customers they don't want to spend money and so they leave. And when it comes when a product is resonate with the customers they never want to leave because they're making money. And in fact they start to expand with us and take over more space and more and more stores. And we've seen this effect really dramatically in three years of running this model where you know we've built up you know for every 10 companies and maybe you know two or three of those company turns out to begood. And we've built up a roster of you know the best brands in the world who again have great economics and would never want to go. But it's important for us to compete you need to bring in new things, because you know and we don't want to make the choice upfront all the time as to whether that product you know would sell because that you know frankly like you know maybe buyers have some some algorithmic helpand you know spreadsheets all kinds of stuff. But like you know a lot of decisions are made at the gut level and I can tell you from our kind of internal game of trying to guess what their product going to do well with us. We just get it wrong so often that it's not even worth trying to be honest with you. [33:55] I think where we have a couple of of sort of post launch with beta curation moments for example with a product return block and we have an algorithm for that. [34:06] We take it out. You know if the if the product doesn't have a you know a return policy that jives with ours. We oftentimes won't accept it but we're pretty open. I mean we I think to be honest that's what makes us really unique and. And the other thing is like I think for customers retail can be a decision making tool and sometimes that decision is a negative decision. This learning that that you don't want this product. Maybe you saw this thing in mind but you know after seeing it in person it's not for you. Disserve that kind of function you have to take things to that are kind of on the edge. So I don't know if you expected the answer but I we we we take this. I mean we've really thought a lot about this and it's it's a big part of our business. Yeah. I'm intrigued on the marketplace side of building a two sided marketplace. Seems easy but it's hard because I always tell folks that are starting on it is kind of like rowing if you row on one side of a canoe or a kayak or something like that too much then you just go in circles ChAFTA. There's a there's a balance you have to fall and there has been harder building this on the supply side which I think you call makers or on the demand side or tussle bit about it. Any interesting stories there. I'd love to. I think other marketplace people would love to hear. Yes the supply side for us is there a state side. On the demand side as the Brandts. [35:30] So it has been hard. And one of the reasons it's been hard is that we we have grown significantly faster than the category itself. And so you know we ended up finding a lot of opportunities on the supply side. You know really early on and so we've we've had to actually really control how many locations were launching every year and keep in lockstep with our best companies. But the thing is like there's enough there's enough brands out there that are launching every day every week that we've been able to. We've been able to open stores that are added and grow at a pretty good rate. [36:16] You know the I think there I think there will be a point in the future that where it's not clear that you know opening another store is best for all of the brands. But you know so far so far it's been working and it hasn't been as much of an issue as maybe you would think. [36:39] Another interesting challenges like where do you stop. We all kind of like as a soccer guy your practice. You know you like to solve customer problems. I have this problem of where stuff. So I imagine it's kind of interesting. So on the brand side you guys have done a really cool job of you know I can be in five stores in California and then I can kind of like you give me this life cycle that I can use right allthe way to. You know I think you call it store open concept flagship when I looked to your site you have this kind of like model that I could even see on the soccer side. You know if someone wanted to start selling on on Amazon there's no reason you couldn't like you know launch them there you know. So. So that's interesting and then you know maybe you can almost become their PM. You know there's there's because like you said earlier you've got their product data. They've started with You Can you be you know is that an interesting place to go or do you start there and then on the landlord side. I imagine you guys are you know generations ahead of a lot of these landlords on now to think about Dhara why are these things what's resonating with their customer. So I can see you going deep there too. How do you think about those aspects. [37:49] Yeah we we actually I mean we've we've talked about projects like that a lot. But we've I think the opportunity that we have stumbled upon is really in physical retail becoming. [38:07] Experiential rather than supply chain focused. And I often started to to think that you know experience for retail is a third channel. It's a new channel you know compared to maybe wholesale is the first one and an online as a second because it doesn't cannibalize your, or other channels you're the focus is different you're capturing customers at maybe a different part of the of their lifecycle. [38:40] And so. For us we think about growth really on three vectors I would say. One is on the contacts where one might find products. So today we have like you said we have owned stores and they come in different flavors. We have that flagship in line. We have the open air format and then we have this full store as a service product that we launched called built by beta. And then you know in other contexts there's Lowe's. We just added Macy's as a big partner for us. And maybe you can imagine others as well coming down the pipe. There's environments so these are the different ways that a brand might want to represent themselves in the physical world. So you know we started with a two foot display that was the only option that companies had. And then we we started adding more options you could take forefeet you could take a table you could take a room you could take half of the store you could take a TV, you know create a whole store and and then on the on the third vector you have, product categories and we've been really focused on tech for a long time but I think if you watch us closely especially if you watch our product assortment over time we started to to bring in other things like apparel andcosmetics and and so on. [40:04] I think those each of those three vectors is is is growing for us and we're we're exploring them as far as we can take it. But we've I mean I think you can. I think one day we we've imagined sort of building that that software distributions system that you're talking about, but the online experiential retail opportunities is such a fast growing category that, we'd be remiss not to to see how far we can take this. There. Jason: [40:38] Very cool. And you you mentioned something in that answer I want to drill into a little bit more of the built by beta program. Real quick you guys have like I mentioned that right from my perspective you guys have built a platform you engineered a lot of the pieces yourself like as opposed to a lot of retailers go out and buy, a POS from company eBay and they buy you know gondolas from Company B. You guys built the digital signage system for the stores and a content management system that the that the brands have access to to publish content to those digital signs you you build your POS you alluded earlier to thefact that you have. Scot & Vibhu: [41:18] Training system. Jason: [41:19] Yeah. Training for the sales staff. You alluded to that, detail the in-store analytics package that's not just purchase analytics but actual browse analytics so you're you're watching shoppers flow through the store. So you're using that in your own stores and obviously in your shop in shops in Macy's and was, built by beta is you selling that whole platform of tools to another brand that wants to have their own branded store is that right. Scot & Vibhu: [41:56] Yes so as I mentioned like experiential retail is a different channel and what we realize what we noticed you know in sort of trying to find the right tools to build the business. We notice that everything has been subtly architected around the store as a sales channel as a place to get a box out the door. And and and you know as it is as one example a lot of the companies that we work with don't see the first purchase from a customer as the as the last time they're going to make money from that customer. Right. They are thinking about it as a customer acquisition cost but they maybe have a subscription package or accessories other things that they are or are you know consumables that they think are going to drive longterm value from a customer. And the typical In fact every single point of sale system in the world today, does not support a customer or checking out and adding on a cloud subscription or does not support a customer or checking out and adding on accessories or or other sort of options like that. And so we we you know in order to serve the brands that we work with the best we had to we had to think about those challenges. And we ended up just sort of building a lot of the pieces ourselves. [43:17] But that that kind of example I mean that's just one of many many things where like the existing tools out there are just not good enough for this new channel thats being created. And so when we you know I think as Scott was mentioning before like this this continuum of like you know a company is the way we are. The ideal path for a brand with us is that they start with something small in a handful of stores that they think are really good. Maybe a display is two feet and as they find success though maybe take out a room and build something thats a, more custom and and a bit more of an experience and I think we started to hear from some of our our our best customers are especially our large customers that, maybe a room inside of our flagship store wasn't enough and they wanted, a much larger kind of representation. And so we said Well of course like why not like we can easily take a lot of the stuff that we built and help other companies. [44:18] But the store just like we have. And I think even the business model that we have was useful in thinking about this because, when you are a new brand opening a store and maybe your vertical brand and you sell a few products but you don't have that many. It's actually hard to figure out like what your store looked like and what other like should you bring other third party products in there like you know should you have like you know a product duplicated. You know 20times in the same space. So our business model actually helps companies who deploy stores with us, find other brands that that may want to participate in their ecosystem and so they in effect. The the people who consume our platform on that side also kind of plug into this marketplace as a supply supplier. And so it's a unique product I don't think anyone else has ever worked or built a turnkey storefront that has staffing and build out and all the things that you need included. It's I mean we launched in April it's super early but you know we've there's a couple of. [45:34] But you know definitely a lot of interest on that saw from companies across categories not just in tech. Jason: [45:39] Nice in my remembering right. So I feel like I read something about him. There was a TED store that may have permanently or temporarily opened using built by beta. And then I think you guys did a net gearcompany in stores right. Scot & Vibhu: [45:56] Yeah. So we. So we launched it at TED. TED had asked us to come in and build the store with them. So that was that was a really cool experience for us. But yeah the net net your flagship was the first one that we announced and is live today in San Jose at Santana Row. So basically it's it's a it is it's a Netgear store it has their signage. It's got you know their logo on the receipts it's got their logo on the bags and on the employee's shirts. But behind the scenes we've actually we're actually running the store so it's our people they're on our payroll. We designed the experience with them and then we worked with them to find other third party products that would be sort of merchandise around theirs. But it's the first time that they've ever done something like this before. They've typically I mean they're gigantic company but they've typically, you know a wholesaled to Best Buy and a lot of multi-brand retailers like that and like a lot of enterprise company a lot of large companies they had been thinking through, this transition that's happening from wholesale direct to consumer and they don't want to miss out. And so you know in in that when you become a direct to consumer brand you start to think about retail differently. And I think we were we really worked with them to define the first version of the beta to be honest with you. [47:18] But they're just one of many companies that are going through this right now. This transition very well girl. It's kind of like experiential retail as a service. So everyone you know you have to have as a as a service on your name these days that is exactly how we talk about it. [47:37] Very cool that is a good time to pivot. Fellow entrepeneur so I love to talk about the nuts and bolts. I was looking on base and it said that you guys have rates 38 million. So progress on that and you have some really good blue chip investors like Khosla Ventures Comcast and then some strategics like me. And there I imagine it was kind of fun. Two or three years ago when you started pitching VCs on a retail concept because you know every headline is about end of stores and mageddon and whatnot, but you've restarted it. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that journey there. [48:13] Yeah. Yeah. We've we've raised a lot and in a short time frame. So what I'm going to say it doesn't sound authentic but it's true. It wasn't easy to raise the money. I think we you know in our seed round we must have approached about 75 investors and a lot of them didn't even want to talk to us. They didn't believe in brick and mortar the kinds of things that we heard about stores were apt to be honest with you were ridiculous. We we you know I think retail is kind of interesting in the sense that like everyone thinks that they know it because they shop in stores but very few people actually understand the dynamics. And we definitely face that a lot. But as as time has gone on I would say each year of our company the environment has gotten easier and easier for brick and mortar are concepts. And you know in this year Larry you've seen a lot of direct consumer brands getting funded and a lot of that a lot of funding is going into opening stores. And so I think our business case has been validated increasingly so. But you know a couple of years ago when we started it was definitely like you said like the headlines were just not good and a lot of people based there in vestment decisions on how the group is thinking. And that was probably a mistake. Jason: [49:41] And we're coming up on time but I want to ask this question because you guys you know you guys have developed some interesting category leading experiences up to now. Do you have a vision for where experiential retail is going. Like if we jump in a time machine and move forward like five years what's awesome experiential retail environment going to feel like that as it is it just a slightly more polished version of, what we're doing a day or do you see some significant changes. Scot & Vibhu: [50:14] So we were not a gimmicky company. So I don't you know we don't think a lot about how the store experience itself is going to change. But I would say that if you look at a macro level every. I mean you know this as well as I do but every bad retailer is going to go out of business. Between now and like you know 2040. [50:34] And they're you know a lot of them are going to be replaced by these new brands who are you know getting to a point where stores start to make sense. You know brands that sort of online. And and I think when you walk into a mall in the future really five years from now, it will primarily be a bunch of kind of direct to consumer and vertical brands taking up the space there and, I think that's great for customers because those products are better. They resonate with a different audience than maybe the typical traditional retailers that today occupy a lot of square feet, and and frankly like the business model these companies are using kind of naturally lends itself to better customer experience in the store because there's certain no conflict of interest between you know what a customerwants and what what the brand wants like that. These brands don't care whether that customer buys the product right there and then they they think about the store for lots of thing for customer service for learning for for events all things that people love. [51:46] But yeah we don't have a lot of insight into what the store will look like but I can tell you that if we have something to do with it a lot of stores will be designed around analytics and data and data capture. And so they'll probably look a little bit more like our stores than than not. Jason: [52:05] Yeah I hope you're right on that one. I know you and in the show you know at the beginning of the year we do this prediction show. And I feel like I used to do a prediction every year that retailers would get more serious about their in-store analytics and I keep losing on that prediction. So I would I would love your help in making that one finally be true. Scot & Vibhu: [52:26] Well it will be true by NEC and by just by companies these retailers going out of business and being replaced by new ones like us. Jason: [52:34] Yes yes. Although that cooling takes a little bit of time. But it's happened again. We've used up our allotted time serve if listeners have any questions that they didn't get answered during the show. We encourage them to jump on Facebook and ask questions and we certainly feel free to reach out to you you know to the extent that any of them are, focused on your business and of course if this show is valuable to you we sure would appreciate if you jump on iTunes and give us their five star review. Scot & Vibhu: [53:08] Thanks for joining us. And where can folks follow you online if they want to learn more about either what you're up to or beta. [53:17] Site. I look at every e-mail I get. So definitely email me via B.H. You made a dot com or you can follow me on Twitter. But to be honest with you I just tweet about beta. So if you if you want that that's the best place for Beta news. Jason: [53:34] Nice and Until next time. Happy Commercing.

Macy's has announced its partnering with electronics discovery store b8ta to expand it's Market @Macy's pop-up shops within Macy's stores. Part of the deal includes Macy's taking a minority stake in b8ta, which also helps brands build out physical stores. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ecommerceminute/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ecommerceminute/support

Vibhu Norby is co-founder and CEO of b8ta, a software-powered retailer designed to make physical retail accessible for all. Norby was a lead engineer at Nest, a company acquired by Google which makes smart thermostats. Previously, Norby worked for MySpace and founded the family social network Origami Labs.

The Omni Talk gang discovers a renewed faith in Macy's, discusses the potential Microsoft and Walmart partnership, touches on Curbside, and closes with a send up of Marc Lore and his new $44 million New York apartment that, rumor has it, comes with a doorman. — Omni Talk is a production of RedArcherRetail.com and OmniTalk.blog, hosted by leading omnichannel retail expert, Chris Walton. Chris is the founder of the retail start-up, Red Archer Retail and author of one of the fastest growing blogs in retail -- OmniTalk.blog. His Fast Five podcast dives into the top retail news headlines of the week in just five quick minutes, all in Chris’s signature candid and humorous style. including serious and sometimes comic musings on the past, present and future of retail. Want more? Be sure to check out the After the Five podcast, where Chris and fellow omnichannel enthusiasts, Anne Mezzenga and Carter Jensen, go even deeper into the headlines and what they could mean for the future of retail. If you enjoy these podcasts, please also be sure to visit OmniTalk.blog to subscribe to Chris’s blog and to get all the retail commentary you could ever want, and more, delivered straight to your inbox. Music from HookSounds.com

Vibhu Norby is the co-founder & CEO of B8ta, a new store designed for discovering, trying, & buying the latest tech products, as well as a new platform called “Built by B8ta”, which aims to power the future of physical retail experiences. Vibhu moved to silicon valley after college to join a startup. He was eventually fired from the job, but then joined another startup which was acquired by MySpace. From there, Vibhu joined YC with a social network startup of his own, raised some money, and was later acquired by Nest. It was there that Vibhu started to really get interested in the future of retail - especially for emerging hardware brands. Vibhu joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what it was like running his own startups & working at Nest, why he started B8ta, how he thinks about the retail industry, what Built by B8ta is all about, what they’ve learnt scaling to 80 physical stores, what’s next for the startup, and much more.

This week we tell you about how one business is betting on demand for physical store locations, how Checkr raised $100 million and why an investor group made a bid for Verifone. Theme music is "Bot Fest" by Alex Vaan. Opening signature by Leah Garchik. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s good witcha world?!  Tha Trap House is back, and we flossing for this one!  We had tha homie B8TA roll through tha studio to discuss music, island living, producing, DJ’ing, and some upcoming streetwear drops just to name a few topics.  We are also working on something special to create a new outlet for … Continue reading "STH Show #166 – B8TA"

This is a rerun episode so a re-release of the episode Vibhu Norby of b8ta. Why am I doing a rerun? Well, there are a few reasons for it. Rather than speed up like what most people do, I want to slow down at the beginning of the year. I am doing some energy management by not coming out with new content. Instead I'm reusing some content. This is in line with the first episode I have released this year which was about simplicity. Many times we're too busy, so busy that we forget to enjoy life and to celebrate some special episode from the past. This is the episode that you loved most in 2017, based on the number of downloads. By re-releasing it, I wanted to put a spotlight on them. Hardware startups, at least in the consumer space want to sell to the end customer and this episode has some important insights so listening to it again or the first time can prove useful. Vibhu was before with Nest, the smart thermostat maker. This is where he had the realization that retail is far from optimal and that one might have to rethink retail to bring it up to date, to capitalize on today's tech capabilities. b8ta is essentially a software-powered retailer. In this episode Vibhu talks about b8ta's contrarian belief on why brick and mortar stores are dying, how they want to bring back customers to the stores, and what the best brands do. Nowadays e-commerce topics is stealing the headlines, but contrary to this, people actually buy products in stores. You can also learn about conflict of interest between brands and retailers and how Vibhu wants to solve this conflict with his company. You can also find out how he validated his idea, what mistake he made during this time. He also walks us through the process what details make your brand sell or not sell inside a store. And many more topics will be covered, too. Enjoy! Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com Show highlights can be seen below: Why I am doing a rerun of this episode? - [0:37] How is the store model of b8ta reversing the trend of brick-and-mortar stores closing down? - [3:45] Previous professional experience that lead Vibhu to creating a platform for solving the retail conflict - [6:44] Important observations that evolved into replacing a whole system – [12:55] How did he validate the idea? - [14:28] Key ingredients that differentiate b8ta from their competitors - [17:23] How does the platform pay the makers? - [20:55] Importance of timing and speed of bringing products to market - [22:05] A walk through b8ta's four-step customer journey that they analyse - [24:58] Plan for success – mistakes the founders made while growing the company [28:05] If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [31:57] Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [32:28] Vibhu's everyday routine – [33:11] Some cultural differences that Vibhu observed throughout his career – [34:58] What is the best way to reach Vibhu? – [36:46]

My guest this time is from Silicon Valley, USA, Vibhu Norby of b8ta. This is an episode that you should simply not miss - many many things to learn from and a guest to inspire you. Vibhu was before with Nest, the smart thermostat maker. This is where he had the realization that retail is far from optimal and that one might have to rethink retail to bring it up to date, to capitalize on today's tech capabilities. b8ta is essentially a software-powered retailer. In this episode Vibhu talks about b8ta's contrarian belief on why brick and mortar stores are dying, how they want to bring back customers to the stores, and what the best brands do. Nowadays e-commerce topics is stealing the headlines, but contrary to this, people actually buy products in stores. You can also learn about conflict of interest between brands and retailers and how Vibhu wants to solve this conflict with his company. You can also find out how he validated his idea, what mistake he made during this time. He also walks us through the process what details make your brand sell or not sell inside a store. And many more topics will be covered, too. Enjoy! Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com Show highlights can be seen below: How is the store model of b8ta reversing the trend of brick-and-mortar stores closing down? - [3:45] Previous professional experience that lead Vibhu to creating a platform for solving the retail conflict - [6:44] Important observations that evolved into replacing a whole system – [12:55] How did he validate the idea? - [14:28] Key ingredients that differentiate b8ta from their competitors - [17:23] How does the platform pay the makers? - [20:55] Importance of timing and speed of bringing products to market - [22:05] A walk through b8ta's four-step customer journey that they analyse - [24:58] Plan for success – mistakes the founders made while growing the company [28:05] If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [31:57] Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [32:28] Vibhu's everyday routine – [33:11] Some cultural differences that Vibhu observed throughout his career – [34:58] What is the best way to reach Vibhu? – [36:46]

In part 2 of Vibhu's interview, he and Brendan discuss the idea of the App Store for physical products, changes across the retail category and the secular growth of ecommerce. More on b8ta: b8ta, a software-powered retailer designed to make physical retail accessible for all, was founded in 2015 by Nest alums Vibhu Norby (CEO), William Mintun (COO), and Phillip Raub (CMO). b8ta helps people discover, try, and buy new tech products while empowering makers with a simple retail-as-a-service model that puts them in control. b8ta has locations in Palo Alto, Santa Monica, and Seattle. For more information: b8ta.com

Vibhu Norby, CEO of b8ta, sits down with Brendan to discuss their retail-as-a-service business model, creating a new shopping experience for brands and customers, and how data and metrics play a major role for today's retailers. More on b8ta: b8ta, a software-powered retailer designed to make physical retail accessible for all, was founded in 2015 by Nest alums Vibhu Norby (CEO), William Mintun (COO), and Phillip Raub (CMO). b8ta helps people discover, try, and buy new tech products while empowering makers with a simple retail-as-a-service model that puts them in control. b8ta has locations in Palo Alto, Santa Monica, and Seattle. For more information: https://b8ta.com

EP071 - News Update, Amazon, Walmart, & Dept Stores Trip Reports Razorfish Tech Summit - YouTube video Seattle - Jason visits Amazon Go, and B8ta stores Toronto - AdWeek FFWD 2017 Amazon News Amazon Earning Call - Prime Estimates 60m subscriptions, First party sales grew 19%, Third Party Marketplace sales grew 43%, FBA is now 55% of all sales, Amazon Ad sales grew 73% to $2.95B. Amazon video conferencing app (Chime) Amazon in-home smart home consultations Amazon denies NYPost story about Robot store Prime Air Cameo in Echo Super Bowl spot Amazon CFO - bookstores more about devices than books Walmart News 2 day free shipping $35 (Amazon lowers threshold in response) Ecomm grew 29% Walmart aquires Moosejaw New Walmart convenience store Pilot Other FedEx launches FBA competitor E-Com was 42% of retail growth last year  Dept Store sales in decline for 10 years Google Home Adds Commerce (Bezos says voice isn't really about commerce) Target - same store sales down 3% in Nov/Dec, E-Com grows 30%, Target cuts back on innovation, RIP project goldfish JJill IPO and Snap! Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 71 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday February 21st 2017. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

‘Tis almost the season to offer gifts large and small for the loved ones in your life. In the podcast, Kevin and I focus mostly on larger gifts, because once you add connectivity the price takes a big jump. We also discuss Black Friday deals. Vibhu Norby, the CEO of B8ta, is on the show … Continue reading Episode 86: The Internet of Things Podcast gift guide

On the previous episode Mike talked about b8ta. On this episode, he talks TO b8ta. That's right, he goes directly to the source to have a conversation with Phillip Raub, cofounder of the new IoT retail store. If you're a startup looking to sell your product at retail, a big company with an IoT product or a retailer trying to figure out how to sell IoT products, this is a must listen. Check out b8ta at www.b8ta.com Listen to more Smart Home Shows at www.thesmarthomeshow.com Talk with Mike on Twitter at www.twitter.com/michaelwolf http://knit.audio/podcast-advertising (via Knit)

In this episode Mike talks about b8ta, a new IoT retail store concept, OIC and UPnP and the OnHub shell maker program. He also talks with Wendy Qi, cofounder of Sentri. You can find out more about Sentri at www.sentri.me You can find the Smart Home Show at www.thesmarthomeshow.com Follow Mike on Twitter at www.twiter.com/michaelwolf http://knit.audio/podcast-advertising (via Knit)

EP05 - Chat Commerce, Gen Z, New Retail, and Walmart Payments.  Episode 5 covers Chat Commerce including consumer behaviors in Eastern & Western markets, a discussion about Generation Z, new retail concepts including Birch Box store, Target Wonderland Popup, and B8ta store, and the announcement of Walmart's new mobile payments system. http://retailgeek.com/podcast Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.