Podcasts about merchant prince

Remember. Every day here, you're selling. Every thing you do, every interaction you have, every breath you take needs to be in the service of selling. But it shouldn't look like that. We're not that kind of store. Our customers don't appreciate being sold to. You should feel proud to work here. We discuss THE STORE (1983), by the god of cinéma vérité, Frederick Wiseman. PATREON-EXCLUSIVE EPISODE - https://www.patreon.com/posts/506-merchant-100124429

On this episode I discuss the sleuth comedy, There's Always a Woman (Alexander Hall, 1938) co-starring Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell.Resources:James Bawden and Ron Miller, Conversations With Classic Film Stars: Interviews from Hollywood's Golden Age (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2016).Bernard F. Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).Kathrine Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934-1965 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006).Matthew Kennedy, Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 2014). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In search of a Wish spell, the Nightmare Krew worked their way into the Merchant Prince's party. There they discovered Ash's old patron, who is also searching for his soul. Unfortunately, the reunion was cut short by alarms and the appearance of a shadowy figure. Find your way to the scrying pool known as Bards of New York. Catch us live on Mondays 6:00pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/bardsofnewyork​​​ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bardsofnewyork Discord: https://discord.gg/4zVZ6BdbSA Tiktok: https://tinyurl.com/mrcbx5yj Podcast: https://linktr.ee/bardsofnewyork​​ Cast: Woody Minshew as Dungeon Master Kyle Knight as Ash of a Funeral Pyre/Fim Fam Drew Nauden as Ryujin Valtimeri Hannah Minshew as Lilith La Fleur Will Champion as Kallias Myr Dan Krackhardt as Leonidas Goldspear II Jonathan Champion as Thinker/Rek'Niht If you liked our show, leave us a comment/like. Review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and spread the word! Thank you! Tell a friend Spread some joy We love you Thank you to the talented artists who graciously let us use their music. For more info on their work, head to our about page and go to the "Magic Items" section on Twitch.

In search of a Wish spell, the Nightmare Krew worked their way into the Merchant Prince's party. There they discovered Ash's old patron, who is also searching for his soul. Unfortunately, the reunion was cut short by alarms and the appearance of a shadowy figure. Find your way to the scrying pool known as Bards of New York. Catch us live on Mondays 6:00pm EST at https://www.twitch.tv/bardsofnewyork​​​ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bardsofnewyork Discord: https://discord.gg/4zVZ6BdbSA Tiktok: https://tinyurl.com/mrcbx5yj Podcast: https://linktr.ee/bardsofnewyork​​ Cast: Woody Minshew as Dungeon Master Kyle Knight as Ash of a Funeral Pyre/Fim Fam Drew Nauden as Ryujin Valtimeri Hannah Minshew as Lilith La Fleur Will Champion as Kallias Myr Dan Krackhardt as Leonidas Goldspear II Jonathan Champion as Thinker/Rek'Niht If you liked our show, leave us a comment/like. Review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and spread the word! Thank you! Tell a friend Spread some joy We love you Thank you to the talented artists who graciously let us use their music. For more info on their work, head to our about page and go to the "Magic Items" section on Twitch.

This Episode is sponsored by Skunk Brothers SpiritsWebsite: https://skunkbrothersspirits.com/About the author:Geek entrepreneur Alexi Vandenberg's first steps in fandom started in Orlando at the age of 9. Quickly becoming known as "the youngest kid in central Florida Fandom" attending convention staples like Vulkon, NecronomiCon and joining the local Star Trek fan group.He quickly became a regular game master within gaming communities and contributor to several fanzines in the area. Alexi joined TachyCon as a volunteer and then quickly was assigned to head up a department within the convention where he served until 1996.In what he called, "quite possibly the dumbest thing he has ever done," Alexi left fandom for a period of time to run a professional political organization where he built promotional and marketing campaigns for elected officials and candidates across the country. He still ran an underground D&D game every Thursday night.Upon recovering his sanity, Alexi formed Rabid Fanboy Marketing and Promotions in order to market and promote creations in the fandom community. As he says "There is great cool stuff coming from some of the creators in fandom but most marketers have no idea how to market it because they don't know the community or worse they mis-market it!" He has grown Rabid Fanboy to represent clients including writers, artists, game designers, speakers, and independent businesses.As a geek entrepreneur and referred to as “the Merchant Prince of Fandom”, Alexi Vandenberg is an expert in marketing and promoting as well as in comics, science fiction, fantasy, history, science, event planning, media, and public relations. He was a featured writer for the Pink Raygun Magazine for women in fandom and was a leading contributor to the Evil Overlord List. He is also the owner of Prince of Cats Literary Productions and Bard's Tower, the only nationally operated literary celebrity experience devoted to pop culture entertainment.He is also a published author (of two non-fiction works), a long time game master, swordsman and color commentator on all things geek, because as he says "it's either that or supervillainy and this is more fun."He is married and lives in New Jersey with his wife Mary, daughter Madeline and son Vincent John.Discount Code: DWA10Music by Jam HansleyFollow Us and Buy Our Books!Website: https://4horsemenpublications.com/All Social Media: @DrinkingWithAuthorsThis Episode is sponsored by Skunk Brothers SpiritsWebsite: https://skunkbrothersspirits.com/Discount Code: DWA10Skunk Brothers Spirits was started by a family of disabled veterans focused on locally-sourced, quality distilled spirits. The Washington-based team is building on their grandfather's prohibition-era moonshine recipe to bring small batch spirits to the Gorge and beyond!

This Episode is sponsored by Skunk Brothers SpiritsWebsite: https://skunkbrothersspirits.com/About the author:Geek entrepreneur Alexi Vandenberg's first steps in fandom started in Orlando at the age of 9. Quickly becoming known as "the youngest kid in central Florida Fandom" attending convention staples like Vulkon, NecronomiCon and joining the local Star Trek fan group.He quickly became a regular game master within gaming communities and contributor to several fanzines in the area. Alexi joined TachyCon as a volunteer and then quickly was assigned to head up a department within the convention where he served until 1996.In what he called, "quite possibly the dumbest thing he has ever done," Alexi left fandom for a period of time to run a professional political organization where he built promotional and marketing campaigns for elected officials and candidates across the country. He still ran an underground D&D game every Thursday night.Upon recovering his sanity, Alexi formed Rabid Fanboy Marketing and Promotions in order to market and promote creations in the fandom community. As he says "There is great cool stuff coming from some of the creators in fandom but most marketers have no idea how to market it because they don't know the community or worse they mis-market it!" He has grown Rabid Fanboy to represent clients including writers, artists, game designers, speakers, and independent businesses.As a geek entrepreneur and referred to as “the Merchant Prince of Fandom”, Alexi Vandenberg is an expert in marketing and promoting as well as in comics, science fiction, fantasy, history, science, event planning, media, and public relations. He was a featured writer for the Pink Raygun Magazine for women in fandom and was a leading contributor to the Evil Overlord List. He is also the owner of Prince of Cats Literary Productions and Bard's Tower, the only nationally operated literary celebrity experience devoted to pop culture entertainment.He is also a published author (of two non-fiction works), a long time game master, swordsman and color commentator on all things geek, because as he says "it's either that or supervillainy and this is more fun."He is married and lives in New Jersey with his wife Mary, daughter Madeline and son Vincent John.Discount Code: DWA10Music by Jam HansleyFollow Us and Buy Our Books!Website: https://4horsemenpublications.com/All Social Media: @DrinkingWithAuthorsThis Episode is sponsored by Skunk Brothers SpiritsWebsite: https://skunkbrothersspirits.com/Discount Code: DWA10Skunk Brothers Spirits was started by a family of disabled veterans focused on locally-sourced, quality distilled spirits. The Washington-based team is building on their grandfather's prohibition-era moonshine recipe to bring small batch spirits to the Gorge and beyond!

Welcome Set Cards are coming! We got new merch, and a Merchant Prince problem.. Plus, a full breakdown of every card from the Winter Wanderlands expansion. https://blog.godsunchained.com/2022/12/08/winter-wanderlands-set-buyers-guide/ Leave us a voice message: https://www.podsunchained.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/podsunchained/message

Mairi done got herself arrested and thrown into Executioner's Run, all according to plan. Now all she has to do is get the attention of a Merchant Prince of Port Nyanzaru and find a guide for the jungles of Chult...after surviving a pack of dinosaurs, of course. But have faith in our hero. She wants to live and life, uh...finds a way.This episode was inspired in part by Tomb of Annihilation1PDnD is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC

In this episode of This Week in Business History, Kelly Barner tells the life story of John Wanamaker, the so-called Merchant Prince of Philadelphia. He has an unusually long list of firsts to his name, and they are not all in business. He established the first department store in Philadelphia, coined the term ‘department store,' was the first retail store to advertise in the newspaper, the first to use price tags, and the first to offer full refunds. Additional Links & Resources: Learn more about This Week in Business History: https://supplychainnow.com/program/business-history/ Subscribe to This Week in Business History and other Supply Chain Now programs: https://supplychainnow.com/subscribe This episode was hosted by Kelly Barner. For additional information, please visit our dedicated show page at: https://supplychainnow.com/remembering-john-wanamaker-merchant-prince-philadelphia-bh107

The team have a few runners at Sale today and also have Brereton and Merchant Prince set to contest the BRC Sires Produce at Eagle Farm

A party to remember! After foiling a would-be assassin, the Merchant Prince of Ashvale, Singri Mistwalker Ashking has hired our heroes to end a plot most foul. Deep within the ancient dwarven silver mines that run under the mountain, a beholder plots an attack on the city and it's up to our heroes to put an end to his evil machinations. But first our party must survive the hangover on TABLETOP TROUBLE! Theme Music Provided by Andromida - https://andromida.bandcamp.com/ Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TabletopTrouble CAST DM - Mike Isaac (Human Warlock) - Jace Whizz (Genasi Bard/Sorcerer) - Allie Kako (Elf Ranger) - Nico Raev (Kalashtar Barbarian) - Kitty   Cast member Nico Evergreen is employed by Wizards of the Coast, LLC. This content is presented with no affiliation to Wizards of the Coast. The thoughts and statements expressed by all cast members are their own and are not endorsed by or representative of Wizards of the Coast.

EP275 - Mickey Drexler on DTC Mickey Drexler is the former CEO of Ann Taylor, The Gap, J. Crew, and is a former board member of Apple and Warby Parker. He is currently the CEO of Alex Mill, a digitally native vertical brand, founded by his son Alex Drexler. He has been dubbed the “Merchant Prince” for his successful turn around of Ann Taylor, and his dramatic transformation of The Gap. In this broad ranging interview, we cover his distinguished career, his opinion about the recent direct to consumer trends, and much more. The interview is full of juicy tidbits including: Getting kicked out of a Levi's meeting after turning The Gap into a vertical integrated brand with its' own label. His efforts to sell J. Crew to Amazon. He turned down Steve Jobs first request to serve on the Apple Board of Directors, and how he later helped Steve and Ron design the Apple retail store. Steve Jobs desire to be a direct to consumer brand. The pros and cons of intuition versus data to select merchandise. His cameo on Breaking Bad. How Old Navy was partially inspired by Targets early private label efforts. And much more Episode 275 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday September 8th, 2021. 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. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 275 being recorded on Wednesday September 8th 2021 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners. Jason last week we did a deep dive into the Warby Parker and all boobs s-1 filings which was a lot of fun and we got a lot of really good conversation out there with listeners talking about digitally native vertical Brands and we thought you know who could we bring on that keep this conversation going who has experience with wholesale Brands retailers in a vertically integrated d2c brand I'm pretty sure there's only one person in our industry that checks all those boxes and it is industry luminary Mickey Drexler we are very excited to have Mickey on the show Welcome Mickey. Mickey: [1:19] Thank you for having me and I'm excited to be here. Jason: [1:23] Oh my gosh Mickey we are we are thrilled to chat with you I'm eager to get into all the juicy topics going on in the industry and kind of cover your background but we have to start with the most important thing first and you may not know this Mickey but Scott as very successful in the e-commerce industry and he's invested a lot of his earnings from that industry into the car wash industry and. The reason I bring this up is because you you have famously been on the TV Show Breaking Bad. And I think that Scott is basically the plot for Breaking Bad is that. Scot: [2:05] Yeah I'm sitting on pallets of cash right now. Mickey: [2:08] One of the highlights of my life nine takes but it was really a lot of fun and I love that show. Scot: [2:17] It is a it is a great one. Jason: [2:19] One of the best shows on TV. Yeah so yeah we could probably do a whole show about breaking bad which I'm going to resist the temptation so, Mickey normally we start up the show by letting the guest kind of tell us a little bit about their background that could be tricky in your case because a lot of us orders probably know some of the highlights of your background and your backgrounds amazing but like when you meet someone that doesn't know you like how do you describe your career. Mickey: [2:50] Well I say I'm a retailer and I leave it at that, no reason to go further sometimes people after the fact say gee I didn't know you are who you are and cetera but if they want to know then maybe answer some specific questions, but I don't give them my resume. Jason: [3:16] Nice well for the sake of our listeners I am going to break it down a little bit although I appreciate the the humility of it and you you tell me if I have a ride but like you grew up in the Northeast and and started your career in the apparel industry so you work for a bunch of storied apparel retailers Abrams and Strauss Macy's Bloomingdale's and if I ever write your first big job that I don't think that many people remember is you were the CEO at Ann Taylor. Mickey: [3:51] Yes by the way the Northeast means the Bronx to move is that was very special in my life so that's who I grew up. And my first after the three I had joined say Bloomingdale's then briefly Macy's, Then I then I decided I did not want to work in the department store business anymore and I was fortunate enough to, become CEO banjo which is a tiny company losing a lot of money owned by a larger company that happened on Brooks Brothers and probably never heard of the other companies who spoke to March around anymore, and I did that for four years and we were then taken over by big bureaucratic department store, and I decided I was never more disappointed at that point in my life I was a pretty young guy, and I wanted to leave because they didn't appreciate the business we were in it was all about bureaucracy was Alex Stewart. Who then eventually like to play towards I'm not sure who they bought but so I left I left a mess a mess I left it in Taylor. And moved to Gap in San Francisco. Jason: [5:14] Yep and then for other young kids listening to the podcast Gap is going to sound like this famous iconic brand but when you joined in the late 80s um they haven't may be achieved all of their success yet and so like, frankly you you are traded in for being that the CEO that led this, enormous expansion and growth both financially and in terms of popular awareness of the Gap and I want to say you, you watched a couple of the Gap Brands like Old Navy and Gap Kids and somewhat relevant to the conversations we have on this show a lot I think you made a pretty significant decision to take Gap from being a wholesaler that sold a fair amount of other people's Goods to a vertically integrated brand that primarily focused on making your own goods and selling them direct to Consumers through your stores do I have that right. Mickey: [6:09] Yeah yeah correct I joined Gap you don't mind if I correct details I join Gap, at the end of 1983, which is then it started as a hundred percent Levi's company they only bought from Levi's and then when I got there was about one-third of their business was Levi's, and long story short, I learned in my retail life than especially having worked alongside Brooks Brothers which was at the beginning of the decline Franklin, in the mid-80s but they were they own their label and they didn't sell wholesale them, and they did not have to worry about competitors etc etc and going on sale. [7:05] They also with the highest profit company in a relatively small conglomerate of retailers and the reason was their margins were very high. Because again they weren't dealing with competitive sales my department store experience was the opposite, if you're in buying wholesale someone else will put the goods on sale and of course today you know 30 years later plus it's the standard. [7:35] And so I decided when I got to Ann Taylor. [7:39] To own our own label over time I didn't want to deal with competitors who have the same Goods as we did and we did, to consumer or whatever you call it today and that was in 1980 1980, 1970 actually 74 5 trans legally 1980 exactly I joined them in 1980 so when I hear about direct-to-consumer today being the new heart area, it's been there has been a number of your few of us who did it, and through a profit point of view it was the only way I wanted to go not want to buy wholesale we, leave ours ironically after nearer to kick this out because they said we were copying them I'll never forget the lunch was a long boring lunch in San Francisco, and I said after I said they should have told us that right at the beginning so we didn't have to go through this long boring lunch when they when they then said would not sell you anymore well frankly I didn't really care and when you have news like that, you figure it out better than you don't have these like, so we stopped being buying wholesale from Levi's and great brand virus they were no hugely monstrous plan, and we did it on their own but that was fine and that's how it began. Jason: [9:08] That's amazing and I'm totally with you it's I talked to all these young entrepreneurs that just started a new direct to Consumer brand and many of them are under the misguided impression that it's a new business model that they just invented. Mickey: [9:21] I know well there's a few of us then and now there are many many of us, but it is what it was it was not where you could build a business and wake up in the morning and control, your inventory and your prices when I joined the apple board in, I think years later in 1999 Steve Jobs basically felt that's what he wanted to do with apple that was his first year there. And he wanted to go direct and of course she did continue doing business with Walmart and Target and all that but he became. Direct, probably the greatest retailer ever and but you know it's a standard today and there's nothing new about it in fact it's old and it is what it is. Jason: [10:18] Yeah no I tease people that the very first merchants of all times I you know made their own rugs and sold them direct to Consumer so that's that was the first Model like wholesale is the newer the newer model. And so I do so then the next chapter is going to be J.Crew and we're going to go back and talk about some of the interesting issues that you confronted in some of these places but I do want to just highlight, I assume you still follow the Gap the, I would check out because it seems like you took them predominantly Direct in a lot of their news lately I don't know you fought it but they have a partnership with Walmart for their home goods and I just saw something today that they announced that they're going to distribute Athleta which is there they're their work out a pair of brand on this doing really well through REI so it's almost like they're it's interesting that they're now adding some wholesale back to their mix. Mickey: [11:13] Yep well each company is entitled to you know they all have a point of view they have a vision and I think that's what there is is can argue with it. Jason: [11:24] Yeah no and obviously pros and cons to all of these so then you left the Gap was it around 2000 2002 something like that. Mickey: [11:33] Yes I think I left in I think 2001 yeah yeah they say I think I left in 2001, in fact September 26 to be exact. 2001 and I started at J.Crew who's counting January I think 25th or something in 2002. Jason: [11:58] Awesome and what was the circumstances that J.Crew when you started. Mickey: [12:03] Well it was a mess a complete mess by the way I know you mentioned this but I started Old Navy I do it you probably know that story right. Jason: [12:16] No no tell us. Mickey: [12:18] Well it's an interesting story there's an article in the New York Times page 4 5. In terms of some some things I never forgot that like that and I read about Target Corporation then known as they Hudson starting a company to copy the gap. And what do you do when someone wants to copy you get emotional you get crazy and then you fly to Minneapolis to the Mall of America and say okay I want to see what it looks like. And I walked in on you say probably four minutes and I said this is way way off so I was relieved, because to me everyone would sewing machine is your competitor potential, I walked out and said you know is a big research company you know they I know they do a lot of research very successful and today more than ever, stopping Chicago on the way back to San Francisco I visited. Two stores demographics would be a price point below where Gap trailer very few me we were very much. [13:29] Not expecting, and I spoke to the store managers which you have to do in this world today you speak to who deals with customers it's like I've always done that it's my rule in any case they taught me a lot of lessons, Gap was too expensive for this area things are always on sale and I knew that I pick those tubes that low-margin stores, long story short got flew to San Francisco thinking about that, check the jeans Business 80 percent of genes in America than was sold 25 years ago sold below $30 a hundred percent of our genes are above 30 dollars, so I say this is not this is not a stupid idea, for them because we are considered a little more expensive I gave 10 of our Associates, then two hundred dollars each I assign. Them to shop certain categories: Target Walmart then you came on versions and come back. [14:39] Let's discuss it in one week they all came back bottom line is, they care about product they carry about price they couldn't care less if it ended 99 Cents 87 cents as Walmart used to do, etcetera and and right after that meeting I just said we're going to do it we're going to open up, our version of it was called everyday hero, and a few people from Jenny mean who worked at Marvin's was running for the gap, Jeff Eiffel we moved over we started with a small group to do what was then had no name. [15:23] And Don Fisher was always you know he was always pretty open about entrepreneurial stuff and I said was starting his company we didn't have a name long story short, I couldn't come up with the name I was in Paris going to the airport and I see a bar on Rue Saint Germain called Old Navy. And I said to Maggie who was with me marketing I think what a great name for a company, registered the next day in America no one had it and that was the name now of course my board didn't really like name you know but to me your name your kids you're not going to have a negotiation over what you name them, we have a negotiation I hard to naming companies that have with horrible names and later on I'll tell you how we got the Old Navy from olden days, and that was the beginning first store open whole Gap Warehouse only had three names and I said, we do this and we have no gaps in five years so then the next door is called Old Navy and that's how we started today it's about probably 80 and 90% of the earnings of the Gap Corporation I'm guessing. But tremendously successful. Jason: [16:38] Yeah that has been the tide that has lifted all the the Gap boats for a while. And yeah that that is amazing you raise something that I have to ask though because it comes up a lot I work with a lot of Brands and these days I spend a lot of time cautioning them about how good the retailers are becoming it inventing their own Brands and and their first reaction is always the same is your trip to Minneapolis like you know targets not very good at this I'm not very worried right, and I think that was absolutely true back then and in many categories it still is true but I would argue that in some categories, and Target more so than most is getting darn good at this and you look today at like cat and Jack and they're very successfully competing with with Baby Gap and and you know sort of traditional brands. Mickey: [17:30] Hundred hundred percent I totally agree but you know what you're good at and the products right. And I think their inspiration I was told was the crew cuts I don't know if that's true or not I'm not the kids business anymore and I don't pay attention, but absolutely true look if it's a vision, and and the product is right and I always say the product has to be right and in their case you know the price is right well the past its product, quality of product value and that's by the way we did oh maybe that's the story in any business right product right value. Right marketing and emotional connection to it and then we had operated retail. And the style and taste is all for us it's very important. Jason: [18:23] So then we mentioned that you you started that that January a J.Crew which was a mess at the time, and I want to say one of the things you did for J.Crew kind of mirroring the Old Navy story is launched the Madewell brand there. Mickey: [18:41] Well I did that before I join J.Crew. I bought the name Madewell from a fellow named David Mullen who was it really nice company, hear that David used to work with me in wash it was a wash consult very talented guy showed me the name before I went to J.Crew, I love the longer it's very hard to name a company and the name immediately resonated with me, and I should Wanted You by Sly can't afford it, and so I paid $125,000 for the name which you know once you finish with those naming companies which I wouldn't want to do they'll charge you a million dollars will come up and bad names no offense the main companies. But but I thought the name 1937 already it had history it had a feeling it had emotion so I bought the name and tucked it away, and when we went public when we turn Jake you around, see I was there to about three or four years to you actually turn around always starts a year and a half later and that's three years later or whenever I thought it was time to start me. [20:04] So that's what we start the username and that was unlike every day unlike the everyday hero. Target this was a this was more complicated because the Old Navy was price point or two or three below gas. [20:25] This one and I might say was the first company to get to a billion dollars in sales as fast as they did until Apple get there. So it took off like a rocket at Old Navy like a rock it was really a very nice toy and maybe well was much more difficult, we took it we had a number of different people leading it, and we just couldn't get it going the right way I made a number of mistakes in opening up. Bedroom state which knows things it was real estate wasn't on Vine and that didn't work, we just didn't get our act together for at least four years in five years, and I was really upset because I said you know this is taking away from the value of our public company so we must 15 and 20 million dollars a year which I think we were maybe 15 million a year, you know you take the multiple of the stock and all the sudden you know the company's worth three hundred million dollars less because we're starting made well, so that kind of aggravated me couldn't get rid of that aggravation way things are but then some set. [21:43] I came back to the corporation he left for you or two and he was putting to be in charge of. Male and he did an incredible job and so he and I work very closely together. And I always merchandising Missouri involved. [22:06] And he did the design and he had a vision for design I had a vision well the storefront, it was kind of a I was always inspired by I think they're still around but I'm not sure a bread bread store in the village called the suvi oh maybe, I don't know if it's still there to be the bakery yes I always loved the way the storm was so we designed a store. I kind of felt like a see it was the studio I'm just actually look at a picture again we fun and we built a really I was really pleased with the store but I was not pleased with how the business was going, and some sack pinion looking at the storefront now online beautiful store and it's beautiful store goal, and emotion, and then when he came in the rest then this is starting to take off like a rocket plus woman named Mary. Who was jeans made merry new Mary knew more veggies. [23:19] And she joined us from Jay Vernon and Mary came in. Thanks Gary Pierson and she and some set and it takes people to do it we put together we became a major genes, that was our vision the best kind of jeans that not crazy designer prices and the company took off also at some point like a lock. And that was the story of Nemo. And you know all the retail to be all the over companies to Fashion they hit a wall at times and then they come back or they don't come back, and hitting a wall is part of what goes on every company I've been involved as hit a wall at some point it's a wall in any me to save it and bring it back or it or it continues to have a hard time. Jason: [24:17] For sure the side note another company hit a wall sadly was Vesuvio which is a hundred year old Bakery in SoHo I have some good news bad news they had a Hiatus and they reopened in like 20/20 so the last and I was is in SoHo they were they were open I had not heard what has happened since the pandemic and I can imagine it wasn't a great time for them so I hope they're doing well. Mickey: [24:43] We'll check it out and we'll let you know that's cool. Jason: [24:47] Awesome so then I do want to kind of just wrap up the clear stuff and then we're going to dive in a little deeper on a few of the things that we've already talked about but so today you are Alex Mill and do you want to tell us a little bit about Alex. Mickey: [25:01] Yeah sure Alex my son or Alex. Jason: [25:03] We're both I was waiting for you to tell that yes. Mickey: [25:08] Well my son started the business in 2005 13, and he just started I was very involved and I pretty much had nothing to do with it at all which he reminded me when I started here, he says you know you don't even wear our t-shirts which were famous for. And he was right I just didn't pay any attention and I probably should have but he didn't ask me really and he was a wholesale come. And we do business it was kind of cool we had a little bit of a cult following and and I'm allergic to high prices which really gets translated as too bad value, you know I don't mind high prices in certain categories or where you get what you pay for for a you know the prices are ridiculous but you might learn from his luggage or whatever from a mess, but we designer clothes in general so he went along I went along he. [26:18] When I left J.Crew I didn't think anything about his business but when some stack. Who is he quit he had a non-compete and I was his age. So we need help I hope to get jobs in the industry part-time jobs freelance because he walked away from a very very big job, and so the day his non-compete was up, I that was the day he was a beginning of a new Alex will be in some segments and do each other, and Alex was very happy that he would find some partner and some seconds considered the founder of the company he's a major shareholder long of Alex and myself, and he joined us. [27:16] And then I was very happy kind of had a job again because I was doing stuff but not doing what I love to do which is be involved in building a company Vision etcetera, so I joined I think it was about two and a half years ago I'm not even sure the day. And we had a little tiny office which I'm now we doubled the space instead, that we start to build a business and we had a vision and a woman's and Alex and I at the beginning or I would say it wasn't a marriage made in heaven, it's the it's the come one since when and it took a lot of work and a lot of a lot of help. And we finally listening I'm going to say that he's going to listening to his mother my wife about making certain that he and I get along and I did that with him, it was like another else conversation and it's been really really nice over the last number of months but it's hard. To be with your dad and I was trying to figure out is he. Someone I work with or is he my son and it's extremely difficult and he kept dealing with me as whatever I done. [28:40] And so now he's you know he's a partner along with some set and and Hussein. And we hired a team and it's very hard to start a company I had the bank of Gap in the Bank of J.Crew in my other two startups now I didn't have their back. And so we funded us elves which in a way is really good I also do want to have for the first time in my life. Too many opinions that weren't right and that was a blessing even though you know I'm doing this for a million years, if we're right we're right if we're wrong way wrong but my best board members were always people I knew anyway not necessarily on the board. But when you have a money partner which I certainly did they think about profits they think which is nothing wrong with it but, take its long-term to build a profitable company, and when you have hit a wall you succeed if you're good at it I always had a kind of ability to. Knock down and I just get right back up and I don't stop. [30:00] But some cases that doesn't happen but here we are independent Leo and not negotiating colors or Styles or what someone else thinks we should do. We're expanding in the business is starting to really kind of take off now so I'm really excited I've always been excited. It's about the taste quality I look at the landscape out there. And I think this is not a lot of things going on that I feel or what I would say are incredibly impressive there are those winners, and you all know who they are so what I'm hearing so I think we're all excited but small you know. But that's small anymore 20 people work there and we all have like multiple jobs which is good I've say snorts growing pretty rapidly, so and you know that's our mission. Jason: [31:03] My I have a some great empathy for your son Alex I'm a fourth-generation retailer and I think I can imagine poor Alex just wanted his famous dad to wear his t-shirts and he got an activist investor instead. Mickey: [31:15] What your fourth generation retailer. Jason: [31:19] Yeah yeah my family sort of started out in the in the grocery and then later jewelry business, I did want to highlight you've referenced it a couple times that you're also you had a long stint on the board at Apple and I want to say I've been, worked with Ron Johnson the number of times and I've seen some interviews with Steve Jobs and in both cases they reference you as the the retail Savvy board member and Apple. Mickey: [31:46] I met Steve in I loved Steve idolized ski and I still love him to this day, he was extraordinary and I give very slowly thinking about the way he died went through, and to excuse me per. Steve we met what he wants he gets when he doesn't stop at anything the most seductive human being I've ever met in my life, we met at a mutual friend's birthday party in Napa Valley came up to me and we start the shoes and, you don't say what's the job so long Steve you know a niche wasn't and we're talking and he. [32:32] Got in touch with me after that asked if I would join this board, and I said no I don't like public companies now I took my schmuck anti schmuck pills after the okay, because hello is that a bad word to say she's no and I realized holy shit, and I just you know I was yeah I was on a board you know bless them family board, in other words and items on a number of other boards and I get bored very quickly on boards because that's the way I am and I need to be action busy, and I'm not a technologist I don't know much about it but. So a year later he came to me after becoming come to me and said you join my board I will join Apples by Gap store, well Steve hate Sports also, but he and I said deal why because God will he be amazing on the board, just as a factor of not going along with everything already. [33:50] And he became a pain in the ass to the number of people who isn't always on Tiny going and what's up this kind of but he privately we had a really nice strong relationship. And she joined the board I would say made a few enemies on the board because he whatever he thinks he says that's it he says. And and sometimes he says it doesn't make people happy so so that's essentially what happened so in any case I join these board. And first thing he wanted me to do was to design a store. [34:31] And we had a really bad looking store and that he designed and then we got a warehouse which we used to do with my old company, and we got a warehouse you designed a brand new store in the warehouse p.m. for 5,000 square feet and. The store was really good-looking that's basically what happens students are today simple it showed off the price. And it wasn't a story that was czechia where the product was competing with the design and that was our first Apple Store, and then after that I just you know he asked me about color of iPods he always want to review the colors Etc. You know it's like you're 16 years and lives through extraordinary success and you know appreciate it I don't know you and appreciate it well he was alive and well. But just I just always you know he went to the meetings he started every single meeting for it spent most of his time on the. [35:46] And you don't find that many people and many companies they spend most of their time necessary not on product that was steamed on product, things tough he was titled in an infant in a good way in my mind you know Obama didn't call him back, one morning he wanted to President Obama to launch the first iPhone he was Furious Obama didn't get that I'll never forget that, he says how do you not call me back like this light in four hours Al Gore was on the boy houses Steve I'll get him to call you back whatever. [36:24] You know Obama told and back when you had a minute came back and says he's going to launch the iPhone pushing never did but that's what Steve wanted to believe anyway amazing amazing run, an amazing person he and Johnny I everyday had lunch and every day was you know what's the future going to hold. For apple and he the other thing he did, is he kind of made me for sure and numbers feel stupid at the end of a board meeting I wasn't in technology guys sometimes I'd say something that you look the righteousness gee how can I say that, and then you can bury yourself and say oh I don't want to disappoint Steve yeah but he was to me was a special unique gift to the world. And I miss him and I think the world misses in today. Scot: [37:18] Absolutely, because I'm the entrepreneur on the program Jason has a fancy corporate job and a title that has more words that I can keep track of the so you've been a successful entrepreneur for decades what advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur listening to the show like what are, distill down some of the things you've learned through there. Mickey: [37:36] I was explaining to him that every single day this we haven't really nice marketing business we do well but every day I come to work. And I reach for the sky. [37:52] And I'm trying to explain that no matter what we're doing oh he also time says I'm too critical of things or people or whatever and I said you know Alex everyday. I come to work I said every day you come to work I come to work and I look for what. Could be better not for what you write and I think a lot of people have a hard time with that vision is, where you going how you get there with the unknowns is critical, so people say well how do you do this that and the other thing and I said I had a photograph of what Gap should be I didn't in Maine. I didn't J.Crew and I actually I did yet in J.Crew and I didn't Old Navy and I didn't so I had a photograph in my mind we get sale in one Business book. Because it was actually misses you by I had to do with those. [38:56] That didn't work but yet not them to get up into the skill set whose huge toes. What you need to do and I can't speak about Instinct in other areas but I think Instinct judgment. Seeing around corners where they say skate to where the puck is going. Is extremely important in the fashion business and knowing when to go knowing when to stop when things slow down extremely. [39:30] Picking the right team is something rules that rules but got to pick the right partners and when you make a mistake in a partnership and so many of us don't do this for cleanup face up to you but. [39:46] And do something of that. You know and the bigger companies are no longer into the smaller company like this. About your all living together and it doesn't take long and when you're writing your own checks, that's a big difference when you're writing your own checks which I know most people probably don't have the ability to do, it's very different than the private Equity the joint venture etc etc but he country each business, as if you own it it's your money in and that's part of it and then you know we will passion, I say leadership curiosity I think anyone was not curious in my mind can't do well running a company, they have to be curious unless it's look like you speak about technology I just assumed the same rules. But building a retail company it's kind of like painting a very beautiful picture as to what we'll stick together you know I once went twice went to visit Ford motor. Design. [41:01] Headquarters and the first time I got was because Anna meaning with Jeff Sons yeah. Surrender they show the new Mustang this is probably seven. The co-host and I said he says what do you think of the car in front of all these people I said it's a very cool looking car. [41:26] The wheels are really big and I would never want to Market or sell a car for have one myself with a wheels are bad, I know it's kind of silly ish but it's not it's putting together a painting and there's nothing worse, there are worse things in wheels that stand out like a sore thumb so he invited me to, Detroit with designer factors Co didn't go with me which I thought says. He's no one not because of Nations and it was seven people designing the one car. Now you understand why the cars a lot of cases look like they look. Steve always wanted to talk he would have done now they were to get when I he was he was fascinated with Tesla very impressed night, from his point of view it wasn't I said I know if you remember the to see your test sports car. Scot: [42:28] Register yeah. Mickey: [42:29] I said Steve it's such an ugly looking Paris looks to me like you are pathetic it's not about the course looks you can always design a beautiful car it's about what's inside. Mechanics engineering but anyway I think. You know as for me I'm accused of being a micromanager you really better be, you better care about the wheels better care about this hear about that Medicare by recalling about he just you know we have a few new bad colors in Arabic in Arabic. The color is of opinion L and if you buy three good colors and then two bad ones you don't morejon out on the product because you have bad colors which I don't think people pay enough attention to. And I could know what I'm trying to think what else to go on. Scot: [43:23] You know I know we're running up on time but just quickly quickly so you you kind of were very early on what this kind of direct to Consumer now there's this whole digitally native vertical brand what what do you think's driving that Trend and where do you think it goes. Mickey: [43:39] Yeah I think it continues to go because if you're buying wholesale you know the pricing is all off. And I saw that when I was you know young guy you know like when I was at Bloomingdales I was 23. Alexander's department store maybe Fourth Generation member states they I was a swimsuit sweater and t-shirt. And everything else I wasn't I didn't do that for terribly wrong but for the year I was in there you are Alexander's cut their prices. In the middle of June and I'll never forget I had a couple my prices we had a policy to meet price. Young kid in the business and I was Furious Alexander's just here and now my my profits and margins. Then what to help. Because I hadn't worked out on my bathing suits that was a stupid rule but it wasn't a bad I kind of like the idea of Crisis competitors that was the beginning, what's happened to the last 30 or 40 years T.J.Maxx the most important department store. [44:58] And you know the word stimuli, we have all the discounts that and you go online and you we had a big discussion here yesterday you said well we sell this to Nordstrom Rack and he said well if it was an existing item, we want think if it isn't bad covers and they said you can't miss anything going to go online, given a look for this island yes my little bit Nordstrom Rack will whoever Valance T.J.Maxx before you see Alex Mill so the pricing. Is critical so white and a lot of what I did was also because who I always admired Ralph Lauren Bailey – pricing and I know all these things cost and so I said we can put together. A design team that will hopefully be as good as a design team ourselves if we do that I say I don't I don't want to have another problem. [45:59] So the prophets were always all the retailers are inflated in America in Goods that are wholesale purchases, because it is plant safety and cost, and here we might sell 250 you spend fifty yourself Bloomingdale's 425 and hundred twenty-five goes to 275 or $300 is the difference. In pricing so TJ Max knows that really long Ross stores. Everyone knows it and and I think that's why I don't think there's a future to be in that business. And I sit to the parks to excited family with a lot and probably not have to hear this but. Jason: [46:46] Yeah no department stores listen to our show I promise I'm. Mickey: [46:52] So I said I really don't want to see I said where you going to be in five years or ten years if everything you bought. Is available at a discount and that's the truth. So and I have friends in the business they do hello mrs. with teaching marks they do with most of the partner stories and what does that leave you and Caroline Woods is a great coach. And really smart nice person but what is forty fifty sixty billion dollars huge profits so, and really big believer must now this is where I'm standing in the luxury business is not. We have they probably can do it now via makes does. They do with brilliantly I guess the other one you know they have they can probably do it who's those customers probably like it exclusivity they like paying more money and so on and so forth but it works through that I think it does, so so I know if I knew the answer to that question with that pricing thing is huge. Jason: [48:06] No it's a it's a big issue for the industry to figure out and people that don't are going to. Have it have a challenging future I think as you've highlighted I did want to ask you a question so, if anyone Google's Mickey Drexler your you're gonna find all these business articles with your picture on the cover and some variation of this title that we've all given you the merchant Prince um and that the kind of just I hope you're okay with it seems like you get that title whether you want it or not. The gist of all those is that man, Mickey had a really good run of picking a lot more winners than losers of therefore it having the the products that that consumers wanted and you know they're there for achieving a bunch of financial success for your various businesses and I've always wanted to ask you, is in your mind is that success as a merchant is that we're you better than other people at, identifying the trends that were emerging in what people wanted or were you better at getting people to want what what you liked. Mickey: [49:19] I think it's a little box I think our industry is lacking. Merchants today as much as I've seen over the last many many decades. I don't know what it is but I think you have a sense of seeing around corners you must see around the corners, I believe except if you're a seller if you're a Discounter and you're good at it you don't have to see around the corners just have to Source right, and I have the right price and have a great way to view or but those businesses are out there I don't really know them well. But that's important in most business not enough you know, worthy I think mostly eyeglasses they sell what's true of all of us most of what we sell, are what we would call her oh it items iconic but you have to feel it you have to see it. You have to have an inch and in the instinct is incredibly. [50:39] I think I was talking to a friend yesterday and he said in his 15 year old is now color rather than know what need p is. The expanse was something I said you know it's interesting I said to Henry I said do, is there anyone in your family who is musical I always ask someone that question whoever I interview, and sure enough Henry's wife plays very good these though and Henry was a musician. [51:13] Growing up. And now here's their son they are very talented musician artist creative there's always some kind of. DNA is connection is fine and it always also depends on who works I was very lucky, I started working for a woman named King Marcin I didn't work for she's the best Fortune taste Isle and when I got to Bloomingdale's like this young. [51:42] And I was after the first day in the house was checking on what they gave me a department to run, Stand start that's it you're the buyer one department and Katie Mercy was my mentors go off to Europe together factories and I guess I learned from her, and she the best merchants in the company if she wasn't a woman she's Co she was fantastic but there is something you get. Fun styling taste that you were born with and I think that's true in stinking with anything in the world. Tonight and it's not a scientific illusion but I everyone I interview I kind of want to know what their parents did. [52:30] For what this family that might have been a grandfather and a lot of especially creative it. So so I think that's really important the other part of the question is mostly was what you're going with and then creating your maker, well there's a lot of things under the radar and if you go after it you create demand for the people just don't expose it so we have recording a items we bring in, old mr. white we doing that way of doing this and they take off like crazy because someone wanted. And understanding what someone might want and Steve Jobs has tasks. [53:17] Is all part of the skill set with meeting. I'm not too bad Commodities during this price I thought would worry Parker bids was absolutely brilliant at figuring. What's out there with the stylish kind of cool pumping where people are going to pay $95 for their eyeglasses the only thing I say that Neil and Davis I think we need to at times. Balance or if you read Tales they could probably leave me come to my newest company of record I said I think you can have one more fun and I prices and however Orange. But the most important so then just like friends but no I think you you kind of born I see, I see him every time you sit down and look at it woman and she gets it it's in her blood why she has. And she's had a chief Merchant and see something and feels it and knows it and you know and then you have to be go to the message you're not quitting. [54:23] You have to know numbers you have to get Four Kings you have to figure out how long it'll be around you know has has everything. To the end of the numbers of databases we've been doing data since with 23 years old, whatever you always needed you need to know how much to buy anything happens to the forecast and you need to know how many sizes you do but now they have another fancy name for it. Act like merchandising second you're not going to succeed in affection. Jason: [54:58] I think you just answered my next question but that's like so obviously the traditional merchandising you have this science part which is the math and the forecasting and open a by and all that good stuff and you have the intuition which like to a certain extent seems like a god-given talent the, what's interesting to me is lately some of these new companies that have been born and Amazon being a great example like they used to hire a lot of merchants in every category so that have a, pet food buyer and you know and apparel buyer and a battery by or whatever they've kind of gotten rid of the merchant title and they've gone all-in on the data so they call it hands off the wheel and they let the computer decide what to buy, instead of a merchant and I've told lesser extent I think Katrina it Stitch fix, has that model a little where she uses data to inform her product a lot more and then you think of like she in and the Uber fast fashion space is, is that a future Trend like do you see that mostly working for these discount categories is that. Mickey: [56:03] Well I think you can argue Amazon but you know I thought when when I was I thought Amazon should have purchased J.Crew. I thought it would be really smart purchase they get a culture fashion and style. I think they'd be dangerous if they could figure that out. [56:30] And so we had someone approached them and of course it was done yeah not the personally I won't be there. I think that. If you look you can't even Stitch fix success but you cannot argue with kind of goods they sell if you. I like what I do I love I love what I do and it's about taste and style and if you do that for. Many have a point of view you'll probably do well so I need you to it is really good at the Bronx Science I couldn't get arrested enhanced you G I was always really good, I think you have to be good so I guess I do all the stuff they do I do. We're just hiring people do single stitch. We haven't been there but then again we are you know my choices to be the style formation with fun and emotion I give credit to any company. Whatever they do is stand financially successful of your poems but I don't know enough about Stitch fix lots of opportunities and Stitch fix. Jason: [57:50] Chien have you follow them at all. Mickey: [57:52] Like they're wildly successful I don't follow them when it's but you know. Jason: [58:00] It seems like they're a lot more about like plugging into all the social media you know like picking up the latest trends on on Instagram and Tick-Tock and things like that and then like you know super fast supply chain 2, didn't get those Trends in. Mickey: [58:16] Yeah and then again I care about quality and I care about all the stuff maybe bit different but if they're really from Julia. Jason: [58:25] It is it's a Chinese company they don't love for people to know that. Mickey: [58:29] Yeah well you know I wanted but sourcing their secretary like giveaway Price is Right. Jason: [58:36] Yeah it's super inexpensive like some people call it disposable fashion which is probably a. Mickey: [58:41] Yeah this is not what we want to do it's a kid's business on young business. I don't know we'll see how I like you know my company's that well so we'll see. [59:01] But but no I think the maths we really need a good mind and and for me I'm a huge micro. I'm looking at. Right now jumpsuit made dead which is brand-new and we're going to sell a lot of it is you know we just put it it's kind of comes naturally if you have the big jumps in the cellar. And and so you know you always create but you're not creating months Salem I just looked at. [59:36] I'm just really upset I looked at it I see why did me five men were 87 and it's $295 I said that's important just came in yesterday to the bad mark. And usually they can get away with doing that as a rebuttal so when you got it. And right now syllables troops crossed because it's not being self so you kind of get something you kind of knowing side and sort of okay. It's just bad news and it's not us. And you have to have a sense like covers the same thing most of them look alike so that the finger it comes. I think it's an offender brand new bottle and it's made by making sure it's a really good looking car and. I looked at it I said I don't want to renew pop color something that's you know not everyone's driving it's a very good looking car and you can see it's going to be a big guy. Because it's really designed well you know part talking about it over. Jason: [1:00:48] No I'm trying to switch. Mickey: [1:00:50] It's called The Defender I like your car like this. Not to me but you work committee should whatever but you could see the second Network, Tina news needles and I think it is I see a lot of them and cars used to be a lot more interesting design, then they are too maybe it's because is definitely people decide on here maybe it's the vision see it's hard to find cars and is Towing it. You know you all have an interest in cars. No we talked to what good looking car and not a lot of them are right so and I used to collect isn't nice. But but I kind of collecting child fantasize you've been having some cool cars but they are all kind of well design. They were uniquely designed and today you know it's a different world. Marker 06 Jason: [1:01:52] Yeah no for sure and it's it, interesting there sort of both out there there's you know people that you know still go for that unique distinctive looking care about the Aesthetics and there's people that you know just want to take an Uber for, for transportation so seems like a parallel is going in the same direction as that there's you know strong stuff with a strong point of view and that's that's quality and unique and then you know there's some people that you know just want, affordable inexpensive sweatshirt. Mickey: [1:02:23] Sure was were those for sure but you know I like the integrity. And not expensive I personally don't like expensive too expensive you know I mean I know maybe this is for sure. Jason: [1:02:43] Yeah well is it Mickey we could go on for hours but it has happened again we have used up all of our allotted time and I actually think. Mickey: [1:02:53] I'm having so much fun here guys. Jason: [1:02:55] I know I know why we will record the Extended Cut and you and I can just keep chatting. Mickey: [1:03:02] Anytime seriously. Jason: [1:03:04] You're our new guest host you're in. Mickey: [1:03:08] All right listen thanks a lot I appreciate the time and the questions and the schmoozing you know I do like two shoes so this is a great shoes. [1:03:26] Never ever I was on that I was on Instagram for about a minute and I came off like I don't want to forget. Scot: [1:03:36] Okay well you if people want more you exclusively come to the Jason Scott show that's where you'll be going. Mickey: [1:03:41] Anytime. Jason: [1:03:42] We really appreciated the time and enjoyed chatting with you and until next time happy commercing.

A journey to the Colosseum to meet Jobul includes a chance meeting with another Merchant Prince.   Join us every Tuesday.   Please subscribe, download and review us! https://linktr.ee/TotTTBpodcast   With great thanks and love, Trolls of the Two Tonne Bridges uses music and sound from the following artists:   3 Ghosts I 8 Ghosts I by Nine Inch Nails Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/   Tempting Secrets by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5005-tempting-secrets License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   Vanishing by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4578-vanishing License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   African City  by Michael Ghelfi Arena Fight by Michael Ghelfi YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelGhelfi Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/MichaelGhelfi   (All audio may have been edited for length or context)

Merchant Prince, Jessamine gives the group the skinny on the other six merchant princes.   Join us every Tuesday.   Please subscribe, download and review us! https://linktr.ee/TotTTBpodcast   With great thanks and love, Trolls of the Two Tonne Bridges uses music and sound from the following artists:   3 Ghosts I 8 Ghosts I by Nine Inch Nails Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/   Tempting Secrets by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5005-tempting-secrets License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   Vanishing by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4578-vanishing License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/   Nobles' Garden Sounds by Michael Ghelfi African Market by Michael Ghelfi YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelGhelfi Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/MichaelGhelfi   (All audio may have been edited for length or context)

Time to fight.The gang's intrusion into Prince Fikiri's vault has gone unnoticed long enough. It's time to showdown with the Merchant Prince's elite guard, The Felis.Archie smokes, Gwathren pokes, Sally chills and Khattayab kills. Here we go!Enjoy!Vicky's World is broadcast LIVE on twitch.tv/VickysWorldRPG every Thursday at 7pm BST. BECOME A DELICIOUS SANDWICH!If you like our show, please leave us a review and tell your mates. Support your favourite rollocking role-players!See you next week xClick here to buy us a coffee!Our Instagrams:Vicky - @vic.hawleyTalal - @talalabanJon - @50_shades_of_graceyDan - @dansimpsonpoetBea Watts (Artist) - @pink.ink.artAMBA SDF (Logo) - @SoDamnFresh1Twitters:Vicky - @VicHawleyTalal - @talalabanJon - @JonGraceyDan - @DanSimpsonPoetSasha - @SashaKEllen See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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After a productive dinner with a Merchant-Prince, things heat up as Xavril takes the reigns in order to gain reputation for the company.

The party seeks assistance from a merchant prince on the ins and outs of choosing a proper jungle guide. But before they head off into the wilderness, perhaps there's a bit of time for fun? Starring Ronnie "Verge" Whitmire(Big Boss Dungeoneer), Mike Robertson(Callum), Jeffrey Nye(Alon), Brandt Wetzel(Sigil), Craig Pate(Kip) and Robert Goen(Bart). dungeoneerspodcast.com | facebook.com/dungeoneerspodcast | @dungeoneerspod

The night brings a dark meeting between Kapernicus & Cybil. When the crew awakes they find someone is missing... While Irimae and Quincy pounce on a rare opportunity to impress a Merchant Prince, a simple character flaw jeopardizes everything!

“Enter the Breaker of Knees.” It’s a heist adventure as Group tries to retrieve their map.  Port Nyanzaru can be a dangerous place if you make the wrong enemies, and it seems a Merchant Prince is powerful foe to make.  There is still the matter […]

Find more about John Paul Ried and his great books and groups we talked about at the below links:https://www.amazon.com/John-Paul-Ried/e/B00Z4OW910palamarin adventures llc at http://www.palamaranadventures.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/PalamaranAdventuresLLC/?pnref=about.overviewImperial outpost games https://www.facebook.com/imperial.outpost.7/ Here's the teaser for the book that starterd itall!Reckless Ambitions (The Medford Family Chronicles Book 1)The beloved, highly respected, and automatically obeyed Palamaran Emperor John Cardillion III suddenly has died without naming a successor. He has four very powerful sons, An Arch Cleric, a Fighter, a Wizard and a Merchant Prince (aka thief), who are eager to slay each other and claim their father’s Ruby Throne. Earl Thomas Medford, the former Emperor’s best friend and Commander of the Imperial Guard, has to decide which royal brother to support for the throne and marry his deliciously gorgeous only daughter too. Earl Medford intends to either avert or win a bloody and vicious civil war. Meanwhile Earl Medford’s daughter Christina has fallen hopelessly in love with one of the many Imperial Guard officers, Nick Armand. Christina and her best friend, Abigail Theosoar, do everything they can to hide this passionate romance. The not-so-simple Palace Gardener, Dr. Andrew Numil, who has his own agendas, discovers Christina’s secret and uses it to his advantage. Abigail Theosoar’s father, former gladiator and tavern owner Robert Theosoar, falls under a terrible curse with politics as the new Lord Mayor of the Palamaran Capitol. Finally, Professor Oliver Wendell Enalan, a middle-aged Illusionist spellcaster from the Gamemasters University, finds new psionic abilities within himself as he falls in love with a beautiful Elven refugee Princess. The Gamemasters University, of which Professor Enalan is employed, is dedicated to searching the limitless multiverse for new and exciting games to play augmenting their magical powers. Will Enalan be able to defend the GMU mission and fulfill his destiny? Is the price of ultimate power bitter loveless loss? You shall judge in the end.

Find more about John Paul Ried and his great books and groups we talked about at the below links:https://www.amazon.com/John-Paul-Ried/e/B00Z4OW910palamarin adventures llc at http://www.palamaranadventures.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/PalamaranAdventuresLLC/?pnref=about.overviewImperial outpost games https://www.facebook.com/imperial.outpost.7/ Here's the teaser for the book that starterd itall!Reckless Ambitions (The Medford Family Chronicles Book 1)The beloved, highly respected, and automatically obeyed Palamaran Emperor John Cardillion III suddenly has died without naming a successor. He has four very powerful sons, An Arch Cleric, a Fighter, a Wizard and a Merchant Prince (aka thief), who are eager to slay each other and claim their father’s Ruby Throne. Earl Thomas Medford, the former Emperor’s best friend and Commander of the Imperial Guard, has to decide which royal brother to support for the throne and marry his deliciously gorgeous only daughter too. Earl Medford intends to either avert or win a bloody and vicious civil war. Meanwhile Earl Medford’s daughter Christina has fallen hopelessly in love with one of the many Imperial Guard officers, Nick Armand. Christina and her best friend, Abigail Theosoar, do everything they can to hide this passionate romance. The not-so-simple Palace Gardener, Dr. Andrew Numil, who has his own agendas, discovers Christina’s secret and uses it to his advantage. Abigail Theosoar’s father, former gladiator and tavern owner Robert Theosoar, falls under a terrible curse with politics as the new Lord Mayor of the Palamaran Capitol. Finally, Professor Oliver Wendell Enalan, a middle-aged Illusionist spellcaster from the Gamemasters University, finds new psionic abilities within himself as he falls in love with a beautiful Elven refugee Princess. The Gamemasters University, of which Professor Enalan is employed, is dedicated to searching the limitless multiverse for new and exciting games to play augmenting their magical powers. Will Enalan be able to defend the GMU mission and fulfill his destiny? Is the price of ultimate power bitter loveless loss? You shall judge in the end.  

EP092 - Artificial Intelligence Deep Dive   "We're in the middle of an obvious disruption right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is a renaissance, it is a golden age. We are solving problems that were in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades." - Jeff Bezos This episode is a deep dive into all the use-cases for Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in retail. Insight Generation Analytics - Google Automated Insights Multi-Variable Regression Testing (Correlation)  Targeting - Best Audience / Next Best $ Social Listening / Sentiment Campaign Attribution / ROI Business Acceleration Inventory Management/Forecasting Merchandise Compliance Checkout - such as Amazon Go Product Design - such as Stichfix Tagging/Unstructured Data Fraud Price/Promotion Optimization Logistic Optimization Drone Delivery Customer Engagement Natural Language Assistants Virtual Agents Guided Selling Visual Search Search Recommendations  Fitment/Return Avoidance Personalization Loyalty/Retention AI Vendors Discussed General: IBM Bluemix Watson  Google Cloud Platform  Microsoft Azure Amazon AWS  -  including DSSTNE (pronounced “destiny”), the Amazon recommendation engine Retail Specific Vendors: Twiggle - Search Sentient.ai - Visual Search/ Personalization/ Recommendations Clarifai.com - Visual Search / Video Simbe Robotics - “tally” Robot / Shelf Audit / Inventory Focal Systems - Computer Vision / Inventory Luminoso -  Analytics Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 92 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday July 10, 2017. New beta feature - Google Automated Transcription of the show: 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: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 92 being recorded on Monday July 10th 2017 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason happy Prime day Eve. Jason: [0:44] Happy Prime day Eve to you Scott. Scot: [0:47] You were recording here on July 10th Prime deals have launched the Alexa deals exclusives came out days ago I think I don't like 5 days ago and then now here at 9 to watch somebody else it's pretty exciting. Jason: [1:00] Yeah if you made a bunch of purchases yet. Scot: [1:03] Hi man I'm kind of just kind of keeping you in Iowa. One of the things I suffer from that I think I have is already have a fair number of Amazon devices so does seem to be the most discounted items and unfortunately already have a pretty full dance card there. Jason: [1:19] Yep I'm in the same boat it feels like there's a lot of deals but it's slightly tricky to identify the deals that would be personally interesting to you like as as is a problem with Amazon in many other areas Discovery is not their strength. Scot: [1:34] Yeah did see some pretty nursing with Deco and sipping pretty dramatically off younis I've seen some 30 40 50 per cent off so it's pretty pretty good. Jason: [1:43] Yeah if you haven't invested in the hardware this is definitely the right time to buy the hardware and other way to extend till I Kindles and stuff too so the lot of interesting things you can do with Kindle tablets, you can Jailbreak come and put other operating systems and stuff on them so I know a lot of people that use prime day as an opportunity to stock up on Hardware. Scot: [2:02] This is our first show in July we took a little bit of a vacation there how was your fourth of July. Jason: [2:09] It was great my mom was in town got to spend some time with her grandson and so we had a good time everyone in my family enjoys the 4th of July except MacGyver who definitely does not enjoy the 4th of July or a dog. Scot: [2:22] I got to get my ThunderShirt. Jason: [2:23] We've escalated from the Thundershirt to Pharmaceuticals. Scot: [2:28] Quaaludes. Jason: [2:33] Yeah I don't think he's getting quite as strong enough jokes to appreciate it but at least it's helping him take the edge off. Scot: [2:38] And then I guess you're stuck around Chicago then. Jason: [2:43] We did. [2:46] Dumb like mine anything else one of the nice things about Chicago being so flat is all the windows in my home face West and so from any room in our house you can actually see like for commercial firework shows in parallel. [3:01] Yeah I see you have to go nowhere to enjoy the fireworks. Scot: [3:06] Courtney retail trips to 247 in the gun down to see the Amazon bookstore there in Chicago. Jason: [3:13] Been to the Amazon bookstore a few times and I think we've talked about my visit there I have not been to any. Super exciting new retail I was in the Bay Area since our last show and I've talked about the beta store before in Seattle that the original beta store was in Palo Alto so I got a chance to visit that and it was. [3:37] In a frankly pretty similar to the the Seattle one and I did finally get to visit a. Up in San Francisco I'm a little shame that's been been so so long but I finally got to visit a next generation Apple Store. Scot: [3:51] What was that all about. Jason: [3:53] Well it's been pretty widely covered in the Press like these are the stores that have like the expert Grove and they have a lot of the organic elements and have a big video wall these are like the the Angela Earnhardt. Next generation Apple stores in you know I think they are improvements. I don't know that they make a big deal of difference in Amazon's business model like seems like they have the same voluminous number of people and employees as. The traditional Apple Store so I'll be curious if they ever came out and said like but the it's a much more expensive store to build I'd be curious if they feel like they like their. Never better return. Scot: [4:39] Got it cool sounds like you had a good time where you able to see any good movies. Jason: [4:45] I am no I did not were woefully behind on movie so Wonder Woman's at the top of the list of ones I haven't seen I feel like being a parent of a toddler is very detrimental to my movie-watching. Scot: [4:58] Absolute you're way behind on your movie-going. Jason: [5:01] I am I am I'm jealous of you and your ear like premieres like you can take your kids to the premier's. Scot: [5:09] Yep you have already seen Spider-Man Despicable Me 3 caught up. Jason: [5:14] Is a lot of talk about how the Spider-Mans are are much worse than the last generation is that your take. Scot: [5:22] I like I like this one in the Tobey Maguire I didn't like the one in the middle so I guess I'm counter Spidey. Jason: [5:30] Got you yeah so there's some there's some like critical videos that have gained traction on the internet that compare the Tobey Maguire ones to these current ones and they there they come down pretty hard on the current ones. [5:47] Yep. Scot: [5:49] Cool solicitors we've been doing a lot of interviews lately and it's time to mix it up and we're going bring back one of our most popular segments. [6:13] Deep dive this week we're going to do a deep dive into all things artificial intelligence and how it may impact Commerce. [6:23] This year's annual letter to shareholders Jeff Bezos talked a lot about Ai and machine learning so here's a little segment from that. These pictures are not that hard to spot they get talked and written about a lot but they can be a strangely hard for large organisations to embrace we're in the middle of an obvious one right now machine learning in artificial intelligence. It's a Renaissance a golden age Bezos said we're solving problems with machine learning in AI that were in the realm of Science Fiction for the last several decades. So I also remember when Bezos kind of dropped in one of those interviews earlier in the year that they had a thousand people working on machine learning so. Jason this one is squarely in your real house so I'm going to kind of take back burner here in simply interview you for for the audience so once you kick it off and give us your definition. Of a i and she running a lot of people using these all over the place so it's want to hear your your kind of foundational of you of of how we should think about these things. Jason: [7:18] I do think the definitions are all over the place in that that creates a lot of confusion there sort of the, a technical Definition of artificial intelligence which is not what anyone in our industry means when they talk about artificial intelligence cuz they like. Real artificial intelligences was called artificial general intelligence or a GI that's the whole notion of a, computer being able to do all the tasks that a human can and being like you know technology being indistinguishable from a human being and so, nothing that we're talking about is anything approaching that and there's certainly like that technology is not in the near Horizon for us that's. You know at least 10 plus years out and their lot of people that. Smarter people to me that argue about if and when it'll ever happen and if it did you know you could have any get to that. That Singularity that Ray Kurzweil likes to talk about. [8:14] So most of the time in our industry one they're talking about with the Ruby talking about is applied AI or what the scientist sometimes call Nero AI or weak Ai and what they mean by that is. The Machine's ability to do one specific thing as well as a human being can. And so you know a classic example of of Nero AI is Siri. Being able to do a very specific set of tasks like a human can in this. Highlights the real problem with the definition of a eye is unless you also Define the set of tasks you're talking about. [8:55] You can't really understand what someone means when they're when they're talking about applied AR right so if. [9:03] I said like in the 1970s that hey we just invented a computer program that can play chess right like the. Back then the the the Nero task was the ability to follow the rules of chest it wasn't necessarily good at chess and couldn't beat a good chess player but just being able to play chess was a very classic definition of AI in the 1970s. Today for for any of us to really think of Chess as AI you have to be talking about a chess program that can beat a Grandmaster. Right and so the the task that you're talking about change dramatically from just playing chess to playing Chessa to Grandmaster level. And so it it's kind of interesting the AI is always shifting when when you know recommendation engines for e-commerce first came out, that was state-of-the-art AI you know when folks like Netflix and Amazon first launched those features, that that was the The Pinnacle of AI you know today you know you've got a dozen vendors you can pick to plug into your website to do basic product recommendations and most of us don't think of those as. A a current example of a I-44 example so, the definitions are constantly shifting and then we have this problem of their these three terms that get used kind of interchangeably in our industry there's, artificial intelligence which is what we've been saying so far there's a related discipline called machine learning that gets used interchangeably with artificial intelligence a lot and then there is this third term. [10:35] Cognitive Computing and the there are specific definitions of each of those but when you know in the in the world of, e-commerce and vendors they're all using this using them and using them interchangeably I'm in so it makes it really hard to, know what folks are are even talking about. Scot: [10:55] So that's helpful I think the thing that the listeners price struggle with is how much is reality and how much is hype so for example when we were at shoptalk if just a couple months ago really, every vendor there for so there's this explosion of new vendors so if we had a fair number of vendors are in history and now there's no. Really a doubling or tripling and it seems like every one of the vendors is a redo of an existing vendor but with a machine like machine learning a I kind of an angle so now there's on site search. Adword bidding machines product recommendations upsell engines email optimizations that. [11:36] Brazilians of these kinds of things if I'm a retailer. Should part of my 2017 strategy be to just go and figure out all the vendors I have today and find a machine learning version of them and if that's not the answer then where. Where can someone have the biggest impact for for listeners that are out there with us technology. Jason: [11:55] That's a great question Scot we should do a podcast about that. Scot: [11:59] We're right in the middle of the chest. Jason: [12:00] Oh geez alright well I'm going to start while I come up with an answer but, in in all seriousness your hypothetical is I would send it as exactly what you shouldn't do you know there's no reason to just go look for versions of all your turn to experiences, never provided by a vendor that's bolted one of the AI words onto their service because that, that word doesn't make that service any better or worse than it was before and totally agree with you you know vendors are both in these things on right or left like we. You know there's some folks that I be in that take it really seriously but it's fun to poke fun at them, they have this technology or they would call cognitive Computing technology that they branded Watson and some days it feels like they've just added Watson to the front of every product that IBM sells. [12:51] And so you know the is that a better version than the last version because it has the word Watson in front of it but well. Not necessarily should you pay more money for it because it has the word Watson in front of it like I certainly not. I was looking at the vendor list from irce there's 22 vendors that have bolted a Ion 2. You know their existing product and I'm getting these like calls everyday from vendors saying hey I know you weren't interested on probably before but we pivoted and we're now in a I you know so and so and we would love some of your time to talk about how we should take. Take our product to all your clients and. You know you sort of implied in the question that's a bad strategy nothing's going to be better by just buying an AI version of it. Going back to our friend and number one listened or Jeff Bezos. She talked about machine learning as a sort of a horizontal layer right like so it's not a in point it's a it's a technology that enables, new kinds of experiences and he has this pretty simple definite definition that I like to use he says, like over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks the programmers could describe with clear rules and Ayala grissom's in what modern machine learning does, is allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the rules is much harder right so, playing chess is a relatively defined set of rules and you could write a computer program that follow those rules but what machine learning let you do is. [14:30] Make a program that can play chess really well even though the programmer themselves might not be able to write a set of best practices for actually playing chess, and so what what we're really looking for our specific use cases in Commerce, that are made possible or made dramatically better by adding this horizontal layer by adding this ability to, to do fuzzy stuff that was hard to write rules for in the past, and so what I would say rather than looking for labels like you ought to be thinking about specific use cases, that are made much better or an able for the first time by underlying Technologies and decide whether any of those use cases are particular helpful for you. Scot: [15:20] So that's helpful what what are some. Where some examples of where retailers can use this technology in and maybe give folks a little bit of framework for helping him think about this so that they can kind of formulate a plan and figure out how to start sampling some of these things. Jason: [15:36] So so what's do exactly that was jump into some specifics and I I like to, kind of divide the experiences into three buckets the first bucket I called the insides generation bucket and that's all of the sort of, analytics data processing type things you can do and I'll go into some examples in just a second the second buzz bucket is what I've called business acceleration it's, saving time or money or reducing complexity from from various business processes. In the third bucket is customer engagement it's it's new customer experiences that you couldn't do before the customers appreciate and make you a better Merchant ER or a better solution for those customers. So let's they're talking about some of the the specific Commerce use cases that might fit in each one of those buck. [16:32] So the first one I like to talk about in the insights bucket is. Basic web analytics so we've had web analytics for a long time and you know they don't come with key and reports and dashboards and you can make your own custom reports but all of the traditional Analytics. Require you knowing the smart question to ask and then the the analytics engine being able to show you go find the answer to that question you asked. [17:03] And so you again you could you could put into find rules for what was in that dashboard and what wasn't. What machine learning let you do two analytics is find insights that you weren't smart enough to ask the question for. And so this is already being built into a lot of the traditional analytics product so there is now a beta feature in Google Analytics. Call Google automated insights and essentially instead of you having to define a segment and ask a smart question like. How do mobile users convert versus desktop users or how do first-time visitors convert versus repeat visitors or things like that. [17:43] Google will use machine learning to evaluate all your data, and suggest segments that that are particularly interesting or highlight some unique opportunities for you so it's. The the analytics engine becoming smart enough to ask the smart questions that we aren't smart enough to ask. [18:06] For the first time and that's an example to me if something is pretty exciting in the machine learning space that makes Commerce operators much better. [18:17] So another one that you and I were talking about earlier is this notion of discovering correlations outside of web analytics right so there's there's a lot of. Behavior is in Commerce that that have have. [18:35] Correlations or there's urban legends that that supposably things correlate that might affect how you run your business so I sort of the the, the famous example in e-commerce is weather and you know that type of product you should offer when it's raining versus Sonny and of course all retailers complain about whatever the weather is in playing that that was the reason that their sales were off. And so it's interesting to know what the correlation the real correlation between weather and sales are the famous not obvious correlation that turns out to be Urban myth is, the beer sales correlate very closely to diaper sales. And you go will guys would have those two have in common and it's it's in theory it was that the the dad got sent to the store to get get a new box of diapers and he also of course grabbed a six pack of beer. [19:27] And you mentioned you were using some interesting correlation tools at spiffy. Scot: [19:34] Yes yes sir. My latest company does On Demand Car Wash and detailing and you note small companies still getting off the ground essentially and. So one of our folks was playing around with the Amazon machine learning and the, play the story really is that some of the stuff feels like you have to be a multibillion-dollar company to play with it but we found the Amazon stuff is really approachable we'll put on Lincoln the show notes to took on this model that we used in essentially what you do is you can upload a. Transactional database withing about a really long spreadsheet. Spreadsheet with bunch of transactional data on every row you can put in there what you know about that transaction so obvious things like they OV the skew that kind of stuff in our world of car washing we know the vehicle. We know the location the zip code and some those kinds of things so you know what it's spit out with those really interesting and we also know the weather so. We were just doing this to really kind of. [20:32] Play around with the weather part of it but it was interesting as it said your inversely correlated to the weather which is the first inside it offered which was too obvious when we were looking for so when it's raining no one wants their car washed, but then the next thing it did and it said your model customer drives an American SUV probably Yukon and. [20:51] These are the top three zip codes that are correlated to your sales in Sunny warm weather wow those are things we had never even really. Kind of thought that you could figure out but it it is what it does you can come look at that data. And sniff out these correlations that that human just can't process so in all that is done to a pretty simple you I or you can upload a spreadsheet so, why the stuff feels like it's pretty science-fiction E when you hear about it but that was an example that I wanted to share with listeners where we were able to get some pretty interesting insights just by by using a web-based interface Steven API this with Amazon web. Web stuff. Jason: [21:31] Very cold and so that's that's an actual business user versus a data scientist in that case. Scot: [21:38] Absolutely. Jason: [21:38] Awesome yeah so those are those are great examples other common ones that we run into an in Commerce or around like targeting and best audiences so you know again, we have a lot of data about all the people that have bought from you in the past who you know what are the look-alikes that you should be, see you know buying from Facebook or other ad sources that are potentially most valuable to you you know in other all the marketing activities, that you could be doing for your business which one is going to give you the the best return for the next dollar of marketing spend you have so you know we're seeing these, these machine learning based analytics tools, get really good at defining Target audiences and helping figure out next best dollar sort of related to that are, the ability to do attribution and Roy models so you know, traditionally in in e-commerce we all use this model called the last click attribution which is whatever the last thing that guy did before they bought something, that's the activity that got 100% of the credit for the sale. That's kind of the default model in most of the analytics tools still and too many people use it and it's completely wrong headed. You know that sort of like saying like what's the most valuable thing in my store will it's the cash register cuz everyone uses the cash register read before they buy something. [23:09] The so there are all these other attribution models that give partial credit fractional credit to all the different marketing activities that led up to a purchase in the problem has always been. Will which model you know is most accurate for my business and you had to pick them out all, and you really didn't know if you would pick the right model or not so now with machine learning, the program kind of analyze your data and picks the best attribution model for you and so you know for the first time to your point business users. Using kind of web-based analytics tools can start getting these really sophisticated Roi calculations and customer lifetime value calculations. Without having to be a data scientist that could smartly pick the right attribution model. And then I guess the other area of inside generation that's getting a lot of traction right now. Is this whole notion of sentiment analysis or or more specifically for Commerce will call it social listening right and so that's this. This notion that man you have this fire hose of data of people talking about you on Twitter and Facebook and we chat and. [24:19] You know should I what should I be doing to enhance my reputation are people talking favorably about me or they speaking negatively about me which tweet should I flag for for customer service follow up. In the old world where you just had to have an army of people read all these things to make decisions on all of it it from most companies. The volume with such that it just didn't scale and didn't make sense but now with machine learning you can actually, process the entire fire hose or social media and do a pretty good job of categorizing all of the the dialogue about your brand or product or business into actionable buckets that tell you, you know. Weather weather audiences are looking at you favorably or negatively with it they like your new products are don't like your new products and more specifically what what specific, comments and social media you should be taking action on a responding to to try to improve your your reputation and customer service. [25:22] Assume you're doing all that at spiffy Scot. Scot: [25:25] We're just playing around with some correlations at this point. Jason: [25:28] Nice I wasn't. Scot: [25:30] I think some of the cinnamon stuff some of the Wall Street guys are like reading the Twitter firehose to try to get cinnamints on stocks and things it's I'm not sure that use case but it is pretty nursing. Jason: [25:39] Yeah well I didn't you know once or the interesting one is the. [25:44] Retailers are starting to report less and less data to the analyst which I know irritates the analyst to no end and so they're looking for all sorts of new tools too sore to get a read, like what weather Retailer's quarterly financial performance will be in any of those are these machine learning tools in some cases it's. Taking pictures of parking lots in malls with drones and using those two to evaluate like whether traffic is up or down in the mall and all sorts of interesting things like that. Scot: [26:17] Grateful so that's Insight generation than the second bucket you talked about was business acceleration what are some examples that you seen there. Jason: [26:24] Yeah what's up the classic one that's that's probably the highest Roi today that you see use the most by slightly more sophisticated operators is, the whole machine learning for inventory management in forecasting so you know kind of taking the the, buying a responsibility like out of the hands of the merchant Prince and and you know having them just guess how many of a garment you should make. Or how many you send to each store and instead using the data to sort of accurately tell you, what your inventory level should be in an even more accurately forecast your sales. [27:08] So there's a whole host of retail and e-commerce tools that are focused on using machine learning for inventory management and forecasting. One that I like that is not quite here yet there's some great demos and a number of retailers are testing at Target I know his testing it. Is what we call merchandising compliance. So if you think about a brick-and-mortar store a lot of the displays in that store are paid for by a brand so, Procter & Gamble might buy an end cap for tide and so the tide is supposed to not just be on the Shelf but beyond the end of the shelf and it supposed to get some special signage and Procter & Gamble probably paid a lot of money. For that in Cap Toe to Walmart or Target or whomever and so in the old days when you when you pay that money, you would then hire a bunch of college students or soccer moms, to go visit every store and take a picture of it and send these report cards back to Procter & Gamble to say whether every individual Target store, complied with that merchandising program or not because you're paying a lot of money for it and what you find is in a significant number of stores, they didn't put they didn't execute the in cap are they didn't put the signage out there used to be a stab that like half of the custom, printed signage that gets sent to the stores the merchandising the temporary point-of-purchase displays never got put out on the shelf and so all the brands had to spend a fortune sending these armies of people out up to the stores. [28:46] To measure compliance and what we're seeing now is, you can have a Roomba like some kind of robot that roams the the floors of the store with cameras and takes pictures and uses computer vision to match those those pictures against us, the planet that the planograms that the intended store layouts and you can report on, you know which stores did or didn't comply with those displays and you can take corrective action more quickly and you can save all that money of the Brand's having to spend people out to the stores to measure it. And then you can even use those pictures to tell you when, for example all of the particular SQ of tide is out of stock and not on the Shelf cuz it might be in the in the back room and not on the shelf and obviously in that out of stock situation, you're not selling any tide so so using computer vision for merchandise and compliance, you know is it's still early days but there's a ton of money and friction to be saved by doing that. And one of the expenses will talk about next Amazon go, is it a that's sort of one of the underlined capabilities of Amazon go then Amazon go extends that that. Capability by also letting you check out right so the Amazon go store that we've talked about, uses cameras to take pictures of the shells and know what products are on the Shelf but it's also using cameras to follow the Shoppers and know what Shoppers are holding which products so that it can charge them for those products when they walk out of the store. [30:22] So I would characterize Amazon go as a you know a potential future use case of artificial intelligence for retail. Scot: [30:32] Regal and then what am I favorite examples is the Stitch fix goddess they talk a lot about private label and one of the reasons they came up with private label was they would they would send all these products people. Would buy them but they would say I liked. The strap on this the design of that in the near able to synthesize all that feedback and essentially the machine morning would say you need to produce this garment. Bob for this audience of people tussle bit more about that. Jason: [31:03] Yeah I think that's that's a great use case is serve using machine learning for product selection and product design right soap, going back to the kind of old Merchant Prince model you know the Mickey drexler's of the world would decide what what you note, the design of the shirt is that was in gap or J.Crew and you know, it was as much art as it was science and you don't very often you know they would make good good selections and then sell a lot and then make a lot of money but occasionally they would design something the market didn't want and they. Have a ton of it in stock and lose a fortune so what folks like Stitch Fates are doing a saying hey let's not have Merchants what use the data to tell us what products to, to offer to our customers and eventually not just what products to buy and offered our customers but she's the data to decide what, products to design for our customers and offered them and sew and Stitch fits particular case they have like 60 attributes for every garment so, things you wouldn't think of but like how many inches is the top button from the collar of what's the ratio of the waist to the chest in the in the size 6 what you know what what kind of cuffs does it have what kind of treats does it have their defining each garment at a much more granular level of attributes, and then they're using machine learnings to say what are the combination of those attributes in a woman's blouse that sell the best to which of our customers. [32:35] And so you know originally that use that to the side, Which Wich prod third-party products to carry but more and more of their scent they're using those attributes to Define what products they should manufacture themselves and offer to their customers so it's really replacing the merchant, with with the data and then so instead of having a buyer or Merchant you you have a analyst. Scot: [32:59] Yeah and then the is a good time to kind of Jack the. The thing that gets pretty nursing your out this is when you think about business models you know one of the favorite business models the last 10 years is Network effects so the classic example is on Marketplace like an eBay where. I order more modern would be maybe an Uber where you have supply and demand and more Supply brings more to me into this flywheel effect happens. [33:22] So more drivers brings more writers writers brings more drivers or more sellers bring more buyers Etc. [33:30] I think I think when you start to think alot about this machine learning and II and you use that Stitch fix example that the reason to be able to do that is because they have all this great product data. [33:39] So [33:40] Data becomes almost the Next Generation Network effect so it's almost like this date and network effect where the more data a company can get about consumer behaviour preferences and those kinds of things they're going to have this Edge that no one else has and. [33:55] Yeah I know they're kind of called action I. Usually talk about with retailers are especially Brands is this what you need that connection with the customer because imagine your brand is not signed Direct. All that data is out of your hands right now and you're there will be a day when you will be at a severe strategic disadvantage for developing products I think. Trace how you feel about this if you don't have that direct connection to Consumers and you know also not only as the data. Important baby start flexing your muscles around these things are really understanding how to apply so he's techniques to that data. Jason: [34:28] Absolutely and in so I think you're exactly right with most of the current state-of-the-art machine learning models the big competitive Advantage is, having the data set to train the model and so the more customer interactions you have the more data you have the better model you'll be and the better you're able you be able to serve more customers into your point, you the better your flywheel will be right. An end so that's that's true for a lot of these these different cases and specifically with the manufacturer versus retailer it's. Once this data becomes key you start thinking about whoever owns that relationship with a customer has, access to a way more valuable asset so like one of the examples I always like to use as the tire industry and you think about the the tire manufacturers of the world, for the most part they have no idea what kind of vehicle in what ZIP codes, there their tires getting installed on and they don't know how the tire the the customers use those tires and have no idea for example how long those tires, last on specific vehicles in specific geographies, I'm in so they know they know very few Out reviews about their Tire once it leaves the factory but a good retail that installs those tires on the car can start collecting all these extra attributes, how many miles are on the car what kind of car is it that how frequently do they change their brake pads what ZIP code do they does the car live in and all the sorts of things and that retailer can start using those attributes of that data. [36:03] To start doing things like much more accurately predicting which Tire will work best for which customer on which vehicle in which geography, and said they're all sorts of interesting things that come into play there and so if you are that that, product manufacturer tire manufacturer whatever like one of your big strategic challenges right now is to figure out how, to start developing that relationship direct with a customer so you can be capturing that data. [36:36] In the business acceleration and I want to talk about that a little bit more and some of the customer engagement things but there are a couple other business acceleration ones that we should probably just touch on one that's getting used a lot right now is. The idea of tagging or evaluating text, so tons of brands have a lot of texts about their products that they someone typed into a super old database that they used to print the packaging that goes in the store, but the Torah conversation about attributes earlier that wasn't structured data like someone wasn't smart enough to say, we should have a field for whether all these snacks are Kosher or not and we should have the field to say whether all these next are gluten-free or not right like kosher and gluten-free might have just appeared in a, text description somewhere in so there tons of product manufacturers that have, piles of this unstructured data that isn't very useful for machine learning it isn't very useful for search and filtering and all these use cases that are super common in e-commerce and so what you know you either have to, pay a bunch of copywriters to read all your unstructured text and cut and paste it into fields, or you can start using these machine learning models to automatically tag your data and turn unstructured data into valuable attributes. And one of those common when is pictures right so you imagine that you're in a product category that's heavily uploaded to Pinterest or Instagram. [38:10] You don't know very much about those pictures which which you of yours is in that picture is it being portrayed with a man or woman, is it being for traded a beach or a ski chalet and all these different things that would be interesting to help you decide when to use that image the. Machine learning can tag all of those images and make them much more valuable in in all of your Commerce experiences. [38:37] So we're trying to see that a lot a common one that's being used right now is almost all of the latest fraud engines. Are using machine learning so this is a classic example where. You know fraud used to be a set of static rules so you would write rules if people try to shop our side in the US from Nigeria we won't let them shop and if they. Try to ship the product to a hotel we won't let them by that. And with machine learning we can be much smarter about what attributes. Trigger a secondary screen for fraud and what that does is it gives you weigh less false positives. So you're able to sell a lot more Goods to a lot more people and not offend them by by treating them like their prospective criminal when they've done nothing wrong, and said that the fraud models are both getting much better at catching fraud but equally important they're getting far fewer false positives as a result of using, this machine learning instead of a set of hard-and-fast rules one of the business accelerations that that Amazon has particularly made famous. Is the whole field of price optimization. And so you know I obviously you don't we talk a lot on the show about Amazon changing 2.5 million prices a day and they're there. Their approach is much more sophisticated than just being the lowest price on everything right like they're there a strategic low price provider and you know more and more of that, it's not possible to to just write a set of rules about what your pricing for every product out of be in so you're starting to see retailers. [40:14] Turn over the keys to their pricing models to these sophisticated machine learning systems that optimize price and optimize promotions and offers for individual customers and unity earlier Network effect point, those models are most powerful when you're you know at the high end of the volume and you have a ton of transactions and a ton of skews to apply those models against. Scot: [40:41] Yan is a reminder we had a guest Andrea who was on and relay and she was talking about how. A lot of times even a vendor's negotiating with a robot on the other side and Y episode there's not only are they optimizing the price the consumer sees but there no that's feeding into some engine that then kind of coming back to the vendor and saying you need to price the product at this. Jason: [41:00] Absolutely and so you know I think Amazon is kind of the gold standard in in Commerce for that and see you're seeing a lot of other like when you, to your point when you had to have a thousand data scientist to write your own pricing on rhythm, you know that that was a huge advantage to the people the top of the echo system like Amazon but. Today you know it is easier to buy an off-the-shelf model, that you just have to have enough data to feed so there's there's vendors out there like Boomerang which are every bit as sophisticated as Amazon's pricing engine but you know it's available too much smaller operators. You know as long as there they have enough data to put into the model and so that super interesting. At the moment the big challenge you have is how do brick-and-mortar retailers do that sort of real-time price optimization like it's pretty easy to change the price. [41:57] You know from second to second on Amazon it's much harder when there's a paper price tag next to that product. And it's on the Shelf in the store so that's that's an interesting organic when we're going to continue to see play out. Another one that I am azaan is particularly great at is this whole notion of logistics optimization. So once you're bigger than a single Warehouse you start getting you know all these issues about what's the optimum Mount of inventory have in each warehouse and where should you put all that product where is going to be most efficient to get to the most of your customers. And if you're wrong about that that whole supply chain planning you can cuss yourself a fortune moving products around or shipping products inefficiently to customers. And so using machine learning to optimize how many excused and which fuse go into each Warehouse. Is super important in you know when your Amazon and you have what do they have now Scot 112 fulfillment center something like that. Scot: [42:59] Yep thereabouts. Jason: [43:01] Yeah that that becomes a. A critical challenge an Amazon spray the only one that has the problem at that scale and they're also probably the only ones that have the solution at that scale. And then I guess the last business acceleration one that you know I don't think we're going to see immediately but gets talked about a lot is. Like obviously all the technology to get that drone to your house to deliver the goods. Is a great example of of something you can only do with artificial intelligence so if we ever see drone delivery be economical for certain customers like that you know that that will be exclusively enabled by. Buy artificial intelligence and machine learning and I would remind listeners whenever I say drone people always imagine these super expensive flying things, we are also starting to see a lot of wheelbase drones and so there's an interesting Pilots going on in in San Francisco and then, Maryland right now with with the drones that are sort of autonomous vehicles that drive on sidewalks and deliver things like pizza and stuff. [44:10] So I'm excited about renting a house in one of those markets and get a drone pizza delivery. Scot: [44:16] Call Sears a lot in the business acceleration in the country cap that sounds more like. [44:23] Cost savings um I guess there's some that impacts the customer experience but the next bucket is where you probably would customers are going to feel it the most which is what you're calling customer engagement. Jason: [44:34] Exactly and this is the stuff that that tends to be the most sexy it's the most visible to customers and, you know there a lot of things in this category that have their own buzz and then their own own spot in the hype cycle at the moment so one that we talked about a lot or natural language assistance and so that's, you know Siri Cortana Echo, Google home all of those sorts of things and you know if you if you think about them they're actually an amalgamation of multiple a Technologies right like so there's this this notion of being able to convert speech, into data and so their natural language processing and then there's the notion of being able to to. Act on those the sentences, and give proper responses and so that's the notion of virtual assistants right and so you you have a lot of these things that are like you speak to like Siri, you have a lot of virtual agents that you type to a chat box on Facebook and things like that. And you know there's an explosion between those two categories of The Voice assistance and the virtual assistants in in e-commerce at the moment. [45:53] If you tried any of the the virtual agents Jets Scot you think any of them are ready for primetime. Scot: [45:59] Now the ones I've tried pretty cheesy and there if you stay with them they're pretty unsatisfying they can't answer most your questions until they kick over to a human 20 minutes better. [46:14] I'm not believing this are quite there yet. Jason: [46:16] No and so it is funny because what what we're seeing is, customers definitely want customer service via chat and Via messenger and so it's, a mistake to say oh my gosh the chatbots are kind of not ready for Primetime and so it just hire more phone reps and do everything via phone cuz we're seeing strong indications that customers are less. Tolerant to sit on a hold line and do something asynchronous like like a talk to someone on the phone, but it's same time you're right like the virtual agents really aren't cutting it yet at the moment and so where The Sweet Spot is are our live humans at the other end of those, does chat and SMS strings and I guess the best virtual agents I've seen our kind of maybe just one layer deep and they they. [47:06] The answer some of the the highest velocity questions and they sort of act as a filter to make those those live agents more efficient by not having them have to answer the same question over and over again. Scot: [47:18] Yeah and they're smart enough to know when to get out of the way that kind of say hey did you are you looking to track a package oh I'm sorry let me write you to a human. Jason: [47:27] Exactly right and well that. Scot: [47:28] Once again a doing there like you know big kind of walk you through of of Sky knowledge-based relentlessly. Jason: [47:35] The best ones are seamless right and and unfortunately like too many of them you know keep fighting to try to keep you in the virtual realm and you know it some point you you stop asking an honest questions and you're just trying to figure out how to. How to bypass it. So another sort of adjacent thing that we're starting to see more of in customer engagement is this whole notion of Discovery and guided selling and so one of the, the ones that got the most bus here is, North Face uses the Watson implementation to have sort of a guided selling tool for jackets 800-Flowers has a guided selling experience for for gift giving, and, you know I'm a little bit you know I have similar feelings to the guy that selling tools at the moment that you you had to the virtual agents I think the idea of them is very interesting and I I certainly agree. We need to get way better at Discovery and helping people find new products but a lot of the guided selling tools I've seen at the moment just feel to linear and scripted and I'm not sure. The there there yet recommending products a heck of a lot better than then you don't sort of us structured set of rules used to last year. [48:58] So that the next one in customer engagement is one and I may have even have to go back this may have been one of my predictions so I'm going to type it again in the hopes that it helps my my annual prediction come true. One of the cool Technologies in artificial intelligence is computer vision and being able to. To process images and more more often process video to get insights out of out of that image data. And so one of the the most common use cases for that is tagging images that we talked about him business acceleration but the other way more sexy one is visual search. So that's Amazon Firefly being able to take a picture of a product. And then order it or you know even cooler use case is. Via an app like camfind being able to take a picture of the woman at the table next to you with the cool handbag and find that handbag for sale or those shoes and that's kind of the whole notion of this see it by it kind of experience. Scot: [50:02] Yeah isn't a lot of people say Pinterest is one of the better ones out there do you know what they're using under the hood for that is it is it some machine learning kind of. Jason: [50:12] Exactly and they rolled it out that, Pinterest to Lynn's they ruled that out relatively recent like so it's probably only about three months old at this point if memory serves, and that's a great example it's not products Pacific yet so it's, it helps you find similar images to the image or looking at there are some more sort of Commerce e ones I mentioned camfind is one company will talk about a couple other visual search companies at the end of the podcast that the, that the whole field of visual search I would just tell people is getting phenomenally better and so for years we talked about natural language getting. Twice as good every year and last year the natural language interfaces essentially surpassed human comprehension so the, the computers can now more accurately understand spoken words than an average human being and that's you not forgetting the fact that the computers can also understand. People in a bunch of other languages in the same sort of evolution is happening in visual search there's a an academic contest for visual search engines that the several of the universities including Stanford put on every year and the winning visual search engine, is twice as good every year as the year before and so the quality of visual search is doubling every year, so if you look at some of the best use cases right now they're already pretty impressive and you go oh man this is already useful today and if you think about the fact that they're getting twice as good every year. [51:42] You know we're very close to visual search being a super powerful tool and that's going to eliminate a lot of the friction we see in stores where people try to get you to, use NFC tags or scan QR codes or do things like that like imagine a future when you just hold your phone up to the Isle in a store, in the phone sees every product on that aisle and it visually recognizes all of them and maybe it even reads the price tag off the shelf for each one of them and it can you know instantly highlight for you, what's a good deals are in that store and what you'd be better off buying from an e-commerce site at home. Scot: [52:18] In an one thing that's interesting about this is part of the Renaissance on the visual side is it's tied to video games so you know as as people's demands for video games of higher the. The game processors that they're these high-end floating-point machines I've got more sophisticated than ends up that's a great platform for vision in. [52:42] Incognitive I think but I hear it more used for the vision stuff. So it's interesting is now is part of like AWS Amazon's leasing out you can actually lease out gpus Witcher game processing units, I end up as the cost of those is come down it's it's made this video stuff get even smarter so there's a hardware part of this that's pretty neat so this stuff is. You're not only is the machine getting smarter because the amount of data is going up but there's also Moore's law on the back end helping it as well. Jason: [53:10] Absolutely and the kind of math that all of these machine learning models use is the kind of math that that I think technically their Graphics processing units not game processing but, yeah but their primary you were right they were invented for games for sure in our friends at Nvidia like being a prime example the, that that the kind of math that those chips are good at is the kind of math the machine learning uses and so that is one of the gating factors for machine learning getting better is having access to big, server Farms of these gpus and and to your point all the big vendors of of cloud computing you know that's the new Battleground is, you know not not CPUs and cores but the gpus. And what's that that's really enable to Renaissance in machine learning that these academics can now rent. Like these these amazing supercomputers for short periods of time to run their experiments and refine their models. Another one that that's super common in this is like a classic example of. Making an existing technology better as opposed to enabling a new capability like visual searches enabling a new capability but obviously a core function of every e-commerce engine is it search function and, the, that search has gone incrementally better every year but it's a largely gotten better because we put better data into the search so we put more attributes into the surge the. [54:41] The underlying technology for deciding which product is most relevant to which user hasn't changed a heck of a lot in the last five or 10 years and machine learning is now like the first big incremental Improvement to, to search in a long time and the way to think about this is the results, of search that are most relevant to you based on all your past purchases and behavior are probably different than the search results that are most relevant to me, and so using machine learning they can say hey what's every search result I've given to every customer, and which ones are the search results had successful purchase experiences in the ends and which ones didn't, and what did the customers look like that had those successful purchase results and now you know we can personalize search much more to each use or, based on everything we know about them and make search much more effective and relevant that it's ever been before. [55:42] But that's a classic one we've always had search engines now every search vendor saying their search engine is machine learning based, and that really you know you can't just look at that label and say oh that's the new search engine to get like what you really need to do is test the search engine and make sure it's going to work, better for your audience and with your your product catalog in that that goes double for this next category, recommendation engines so you know we can take recommendation engines for granted at this point like there's so many out there and and you know for a while there's been kind of parody of these, these recommendation engines but but you know it don't lose sight of how powerful these things are, you know a few years ago we saw some data that 75% of all the views on Netflix were driven by product recommendations and this is pretty old now but back in 2013 there was a leak, that 35% of all the revenue from Amazon came from the those product recommendation tiles and I believe the, the plug recommendation tiles and Amazon emails were even higher converting than the ones on the product detail pages and so recommendations are super important and of course using machine learning, you it should be no surprise for listeners at this point you can make recommendations much more personalized and effective for each customer, then sort of static rule-based recommendation engines that are that are kind of the norm that are out there now. [57:16] So that I'm going to go a little faster cuz I know we're going to come up on time here pretty quick, Annette's category that super interesting in the apparel business returns or are crushing cost, and most of the returns are result of fitment issues so something wasn't the size you expected or didn't fit the way you wanted and Source turn to see machine learning get used, 4 to solve fitment problem so in the old world Zappos tighter going to buy two sizes of shoes that guaranteed one was coming back in that was super expensive so now what you want to do is use data about all the attributes, to accurately recommend the size and maybe even remind a customer that they bought another size before and it fit better in the order they bought this size before and had to return it, tell people get the right size the first time, and avoid buying stuff you're also seeing this get tied in with visual search where you're actually using the camera to help measure the size of the customer and then match that to fitment data tell them by the right stuff so watts of stuff, in machine learning happening around fitment and return avoidance, the whole General filled the personalization this is really hard to shop for right now cuz every vendor is hyping all kinds of new new artificial intelligence and machine learning, capabilities and it's really hard to separate the hype from the reality with all those products but it certainly is true that machine learning, generates more personalized experiences and so there's tons and tons of new vendors out there in that space you know folks they're still in loyalty programs and retention programs are those can be dramatically improved by Machine learning so we're starting to see the first generation of machine learning based loyalty programs. [59:01] And that's kind of the the main use cases that we talked about right now and in customer engagement. Scot: [59:08] Got it okay so does summarize what got three buckets Insight generation and that's kind of. [59:16] I think of that is like next Generation analytics so so analytics that not just Splats data but comes up with insights, business acceleration and that was things that that help you save money improve your forecasting pricing in even practice on, in the customer engagement which are the more forward front-office things are going to improve the user experience learn more about your customers and give him a better experience, people are interested in this soap so first of all. Maybe lay out a lil road map so so a listener is a omni-channel retailer Dave. Get out there like a lot going on in their world right now where does this fall into part ization and where are some places they can nibble and then where do you recommend they go for more information. Jason: [1:00:04] Yeah so in terms of what your focus should be like you know my high-level advised is ignore the labels don't go look for an AI product but instead look at the list that we just gave you and will put it in the show notes and say, which of those things do we feel like we're most efficient at and we're leaving the most money on the table like art, are you know we not making good decisions about who our audiences are and how we should Target our advertising or we not making good decisions about our pricing or we're paying too much for fraud, or are we in or not doing a good enough job of helping customers discover the right products and add more cards to the more more skews to their cards, and you know our returns to high-dose or two things and so focus on your biggest pain points, and then say alright you know what Solutions out there are using machine learning Technologies to best address that pain point so that would be my sort of, high-level advice and then in terms of specific vendors if you're going to build your own solution, they're they're sort of a 4 horse race for the underlying Technologies for all of these machine learning capabilities and as you sort of alluded to in your experience at spiffy they, none of these vendors require you to be data scientist anymore so they all are like pretty easy tools you probably still have to be a programmer cuz these are mostly api's that you rent, but it's really a 4 horse race it's four of the big vendors, all have these big stacks of AI capabilities that you can rent by the drink in there the really inexpensive in you. [1:01:41] Add them to your own product so if you're going to hire your own programmer to develop any of these experiences that the first one is IBM with their Watson technology and will put links to all four of these, these Platforms in the show notes one that people don't necessarily think of but is hugely competitive in the spaces Google and they they have the division called Google Cloud, platform services and they they have a bunch of api's for machine learning, they actually invented one of the underlying machine learning models called tensorflow and they've open-sourced it so they they have a lot of great tensorflow Solutions on a gcp but you'll also find other vendors now offering tensorflow because it's become so popular, Microsoft has a complete set of cognitive api's under the there as your services and then as you mentioned, Amazon has a complete set of AI capabilities that are part of AWS and. You know they're all kind of analogous like you'll find basically the same set of api's from all of them you'll find a, a computer vision Library you'll find a sentiment Library you'll find a natural language processing Library a text to speech Library you'll find all these these Legos of machine learning capabilities that you snap together yourself one that's kind of fun that I will highlight specifically for Amazon, is one of their Legos is called the destiny and it's spelled, goofy it's dsstne and that's the actual product recommendation engine from the Amazon. [1:03:14] Website that they added to AWS last year so you you can actually use, the very system that Amazon juzang and we mention this network effect, it's a huge advantage to be able to get a recommendation engine that's trained by Amazon already cuz you're benefiting from their network of fat. So that that's pretty interesting and then I would highlight that there's some more Niche vendors, there are vendors that as opposed to giving you a low-level API have sort of crafted complete machine language capabilities. Specific for Commerce vendors and so again I'll put them in the show notes but six that come up a lot there's a company called Wiggle, it has one of these machine language based search engines that we talked about in the customer experience portion, there's a company called sentient AI, that has really powerful visual search capability they also have some pretty interesting personalization recommendation engines, there's a company called clarify that that has visual search including video which is super interesting if you're someone that, produces a lot of content on YouTube, the we mentioned the robots that take pictures of the shelves so that's a company called simbi Robotics and they have the, tally robot that dumb Target is testing there's another company at a Stanford called focal systems that have the. [1:04:45] Computer vision library for doing inventory and then luminoso is one of the companies that has a specific machine language based analytics platform for Commerce and so, there's there's many many more vendors out there but those are sort of six interesting ones to look at to get you started. Scot: [1:05:03] Yes it's it seems like. And I don't mean to hang up on this but when when I was in e-commerce person just got thinking about our listeners here and I used to buy a solution know you would look at kind of feature benefit. Kind of analysis and cost and all that kind of stuff it seems like machine learning in some of these things add this like other dimension that's only important which is data so says you look at these Solutions. Yeah it's really important to understand. Is this going to operate just on my data is is my data going to be enough to really get a big get big enough bang for the buck cuz I think we're going to see his new models where you're sharing data with other people on a platform. But then you also need to be pretty cognizant about that because this is really important and watch will property you have and once it gets into these Platforms in his learned. Even when you leave and take your data the learning stay so it's really interesting kind of a way to think about things you kind of. As a user of vendor you want a lot of access to data but then you almost don't want your date at a time be. [1:06:07] In there in the system to use example let's say your. I don't know sorry blaktroniks train the system on on whatever recommendation Electronics now you switch vendors will that. Now competitor switch is there did you start using that now they've they've got a solution to spend trained on your data. Also you know it's pretty interesting that you mentioned Amazon example where it comes kind of pre learned if you will I don't know if that's the right. Verbage pre-trained maybe better in any advice on how people should think about that element of these Solutions. Jason: [1:06:43] Will know I think you have hit the nail on the head it's the wild west time Electro property and so your, you're exactly right li

EP083 - Andrea Leigh, selling on and negotiating with Amazon   Andrea Leigh is the owner at Andrea K. Leigh Consulting, which helps clients sell on and negotiate with Amazon.  Andrea enjoyed a 10 year career at Amazon where she served in a number of Buying and Category Leadership roles.  Andrea is a recognized expert on Amazon, who has written a number of helpful articles about Amazon on linkedin: Amazon's New End Game is Likely Third Party Sellers. What Retail Brands Should Do About it Why Your Brand Should Sell Hybrid (1P + 2P + 3P) on Amazon - Demystifying the Hybrid Selling Model Hype Why Your Brand Should Care About Amazon’s Item-Level Economics (i.e, CRaP) We spoke with Andrea about her background and experiences at Amazon, the digital grocery market and Amazon's efforts in the segment, and the best practices and common pitfalls in working with Amazon. Andrea will be one of the speakers at "Amazon & Me" an all day workshop on Tuesday June 6th at IRCE, hosted by Scot Wingo. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 83 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday May 11, 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. New beta feature - Amazon Automated Transcription of the show: Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 82 being recorded on Wednesday May 10th 2017 I am your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I know Scot Wingo. Scot & Andrea: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome Jason Scott show lister's let me first apologize it is peak, pollen season here in sunny Raleigh North Carolina and my allergies is amitab attacked me and I have a sore throat so I apologize for the the lowness of my voice however I will be doing some Darth Vader quotes later so it will come in handy, Jason before we dive in it's been about a week and a half before we chatted any road trips you want a report on. Jason: [1:08] I do have a couple of days or so very sorry to hear you're feeling under the weather it's sort of Harkens me back to our famous shop talk shows where I didn't have much of a voice. [1:19] And our live listeners are totally on it that I've got a bunch of my text messages since I just did the intro in this is actually episode 83 so I want to apologize. For the falls. Boss intro a minute ago but thank you to all those folks that are listening in the show Live this week I was I got to do a trade show in town in Chicago in my hometown which is a rare treat for me. Mwb research does a show every year for the B2B in this week I'll be to be online so I. I just got to go do a presentation there yesterday and talk to some folks about B2B e-commerce which is her that interesting contrast to the the retail stuff that we talked about. Scot & Andrea: [2:02] Yeah did you get a lot of questions about Amazon business that's whatever you ask me. Jason: [2:06] Not as many as I would hope I would take it as a better sign of people were a little more concerned in that space about Amazon business, perhaps a parallel the sum of things we'll talk about today. There's some really Advanced B2B e-commerce companies but the general level is pretty digitally immature and so, you know you tend to be talking to people in that industry that you were talking to retailers about maybe four or five years ago, and I have a theory that that a lot of the cpg space are also somewhat digitally immature and a rapidly trying to catch up and so we we we make it to hit upon that in today's episode. Scot & Andrea: [2:45] Coolest part of your talk to call the audience to Julie immature. Jason: [2:48] The love I do talk about the digital maturity curve and I let them judge for themselves where where they're on but my talk. Is ironic cuz I I was mainly talking. To stakeholders they were really interested in watching B2B initiatives inside e-commerce initiatives inside their company about how to get c-suite buyin and since I've been kicked out of some easy sweets I thought maybe that was. And ironic choice for me. Scot & Andrea: [3:16] Old Town ironic if your c-suite the immature. Jason: [3:19] Exactly I've been in a lot of sweets just for a brief period of time. Scot & Andrea: [3:22] You're mature getting kicked out of six weeks. Jason: [3:25] Exactly how I'm high on the kick after blow on the maturity curve. [3:31] Just got one of my favorite thing, the show is you know from time to time we get some nice listeners that right in and say nice things about the show and had told her to reorder top and something and I always enjoy that, but I thought you liked this week I may have gotten my favorite piece of fan mail. Scot & Andrea: [3:49] Go to zip front and what they say. Jason: [3:51] Yeah so it is from a listener and Marie who runs the e-commerce site called dog quality.com and she's a regular listener and. Had a recent occasion to go to our website where the show notes are and. There there's an about me tab there with a picture of me and my dog MacGyver and so Emery who obviously is in the dog industry so I'm a guy her and wrote MacGyver a piece of fan mail. Scot & Andrea: [4:17] What are you going to read it first. Jason: [4:19] Well I won't read the whole letter as she's right kind of currently Doug quality focuses on. Elder dog quality of life in and products that the older dog specifically need and she was nice enough to say that in the Guyver looked like a spring chicken and probably didn't need any of her products, but she is she certainly offered hook MacGyver up should should the need ever arise and I was laughing because she doesn't know this but the MacGyver is a frequent guest on the show MacGyver is Jenner sitting on my lap for the show and so he was, very pleased to find out that he finally got some of the recognition that he he well deserved. Scot & Andrea: [4:56] GoFundMe you wear at shoptalk it sounded like he was he was doing your part. Jason: [5:00] Actually he is a man of few words but he's much more insightful than I am and I don't know this but I think you have a couple dogs that have at least made a cameo appearance on the show as well don't you. Scot & Andrea: [5:13] Yes sometimes in my podcast recording studio here which is also my home office ad my 10 year old Border Collie kit sits on the floor and that we have A1 year old, Cavalier named Lulu and she usually sits on my lap but tonight they are elsewhere hanging out with the kids. Jason: [5:31] Nice. Scot & Andrea: [5:33] We'll just before the podcast goes to the dogs we have an exciting guest for listeners tonight. As you listeners are well aware I'm a little bit obsessed with all things Amazon and every time I talk to tonight's guest I learned a ton about that what makes Amazon tick, and really spent a decade and Amazon from 05 to 15 and now runs a consulting firm called Andrea Kaley consulting or she helps Brands and sellers with their Amazon strategies as well as other e-commerce growth in it, I'm hosting a workshop that internet retailer Conference & exhibition which is commonly abbreviated IRC. And Angie is one of our speakers talking about Advanced strategies for Brands and wanted to go she ate with Amazon and you're welcome to the show thanks for having me. Cool and so we got Central covered with Jason in Chicago on East in assume you're in Seattle in 7 days. How's the weather is it is it typical Seattle are you guys getting your sunny days. Know where we got a little bit of fun but you know it's still we still have to get to the Fourth of July before summer really starts here cool so um. We really want to jump into it so one background statement before we jump in. Sometimes be a few back for listeners will jump right into Sonny's topics and I neglect to cover some of the basic so tonight when you use phrases like one p3p hybrid, we see one PSP specifically in the Amazon context that usually that someone has a wholesale relationship or a first-party relationship with Amazon third-party usually refers to more of a Marketplace kind of relationship. [7:07] Are the hybrid is a lot water brands now that exploring kind of a dual approach so a wholesale Ana Marketplace approach just wanted to let her listeners kind of have that that little glossary there at the top of the show before we do it. And I'll turn it over to Jason who is dying to kick off. Jason: [7:24] Thanks, let me highlight for a listeners that are not driving weather listening to podcast that the whole one p3p hybrid thing also makes for an excellent drinking game. [7:39] So it's winter before we we get into that and III. [7:43] One p3p question for you where I think there may be some Andrea Scott controversy early I hope there is but before we go there. Maybe we can start with a little bit of background about you and sort of you can walk us through how you got into this industry and what some of your experiences. Scot & Andrea: [8:02] The absolutely so I said you know probably the majority of my career at Amazon that was there for 10 years from 2005 to 2015 and I was on I worked in the retail group for the entire time, I'm in different roles as actually started as one of the founding original buyers for the amazon.com grocery category and you kind of, migrated my way to the company and number of different roles, including divisional manager for the baby category and working on getting the Amazon, baby registry can I prevent in and then good good order with customers as well as a leading category teams for Amazon Fresh, and, Rawhide most recently before I left and for the longest actually for a little over three years was a category leader for a hard-line soft lines. And consumables for Amazon Canada where and we watch consumables and softlines on while I was there I also ran the prime program and Canada and Italy Avon with it with the transportation team, in addition I've worked on the, crab process for Canada help develop that and get that thing running up there if that some of the term that everyone is familiar with that's Amazon's term for can't realize any profit. [9:32] Which is through their way of identifying items that are unprofitable for them. And I left Amazon two years ago to start my own Consulting practice where I work now with Brands a lot of them that I worked with while I was at Amazon, you know to help them achieve their goals on Amazon whatever those might be gross profit you know I saw him planning. Etc and in the category leadership relate Amazon if you're not familiar with that sort of structure at Allegan General Manager and you're responsible for all of, a buyer vendor management planning in the stock management marketing product management sometimes the technology teams as well so that's a little bit about that rule the last years I have been working. And Consulting can I have them working directly with Brands doing some speaking and doing some writing. And a man actually really partner with Melissa Burdick the kind of team up for Consulting practice and so that's, that's kind of what I've what I've been up to. Jason: [10:41] Questions about that you went from being the evil buyer to helping Bray. [10:51] Kind of like going from the federal government to becoming a lobbyist is there a man. Scot & Andrea: [10:54] You know it feels like there should be, the Empire is not but I mean I really feel like for the most part the work that I do is really Amazon's best interest I mean when it's actually one of the reasons I wanted to start my order form I mean in the early days of the Amazon Vendor Manager spent a lot of time with her and I spend time with my brand I'll be in them figure out how to grow how to use the platform head understand it to be successful and kind of coaching them and teaching, and you as Amazon, skilled and crew become more automated and that's my role grew and I took on my two teams I just found that I was sending you know very little time talking with brands, an Amazon in Genoa spending very little time kind of in that teaching capacity, and so you know that was kind of one of the reasons that I wanted to do this, I think would just like a small amount of Education about the Amazon platform, no Brands can see some really amazing success by applying some really basic principles and it's not hard you know it's it's I think it can be pretty straightforward once you understand how Amazon is different from other retailers. Quarter certain types of Brands you properly work with her show cpg seems to be a real house kind of area for you or your little bit all of them. You know I've been all over the map where's and small and end in any number of different categories but I will say that this species tend to have kind of the biggest challenges on Amazon pretty early because they were you know they're they're off and doing a pretty sizable businesses. [12:34] In addition to I'm just having a lot of products that are really difficult for Amazon to ship profitably so I think they kind of think they they have the most challenges, I'm as it relates to Krista voorhis with the with the, a platformer a business model where products are shipped directly to customers often in the single units but I've but I work with all kinds of brands. Across all categories. Jason: [12:59] Nice and you mentioned um baby for a while and if I have the time line right the Quincy acquisition happened right in the middle of your tenure. Scot & Andrea: [13:08] Right in the millimeter exactly and it's funny because I remember when they first got on our radar and we were and we were really thinking about like they're getting some really great friends on the site and how are they doing that and I remember thinking like we should go for this we should do we should go get them, we should call them but I'm and it's it's really interesting but I mean you know you know how all acquisitions go it's pretty it's pretty hush-hush internal lake cinemas that stuff happening. Jason: [13:37] Yeah but so did you literally go from hating them and they were an amethyst to like becoming a partner. Scot & Andrea: [13:45] You know I had moved on to another category by the time we actually started integrated integrating with them but you know I was there I was definitely there for the acquisition piece and you know they were doing. Three steps hi I'm just doing a really nice job pretty Leanne diapers.com, Beano getting new customers and as we all know that time when the consumer becomes a parent is just such a pivotal point in terms of brand loyalty and brand switching is really high at that point and they were really they were seeing a lot of success with some of their marketing tactics, in an option that consumer as well as you know getting a lot of kind of more perceived higher-end baby Brands to to partner with them. Jason: [14:31] Nice and I don't know we've talked about this on the show and I will surely understand if you don't want to share an opinion but you know there's been a little controversy is his Wizards probably do know. Scot & Andrea: [14:42] Fish. Jason: [14:43] They spend down Quincy Quincy this year and there's at least one of our friends in the media Jason Delray that that. So it has this hypothesis that it literally was out of spite for markquart who's who's competing with them Amazon it at Walmart and I'll just pay for the. I personally don't believe I don't know what the real logic was behind spinning a down I can imagine there's a story that we don't know but I have a hard time. [15:14] You know potentially several hundred people are getting laid off space. Out of some competitive spy on the part of of Jeff. Scot & Andrea: [15:23] Yeah I read Jason's article about that. Yeah I read that article that I mean I think that's possible and obviously I don't know I don't work there anymore but I, email Amazon just serve god with a needed out of that relationship, and there wasn't a lot of sense in keeping up separate websites me over the years Amazon had tried to spin out other web sites and it's just really challenging it's really challenging to drive traffic to a new site I mean as hell with the endless launch and then take down they got so mad it is so much traffic through going to their native site so kind of continuing to some, pour it into additional websites just seems really. Really tough and I'm not really sure why that would be a great strategy for them and you know if you think about like they sort of got what they needed that of that Arrangement they were able to you know take out app, who is Fab a fast-growing and competitor that was getting a lot of traction you know this is going back like 10 years ago. And then them from sort of like, becoming you know a real material competitor and then in addition to that you know they were able you know to integrate some of that inventory or those Brands under their own site no maybe some of the brands or harder for them to. Dino to acquire so I still feel like they got what they needed and it's really expensive. Having a Second Sight means possible there was some slight there it is truly when you look at that whole it's Story I mean it's like a soap opera. [16:58] Terms of the level of drama. I mean it's just fascinating but I think Amazon is a company with more Integrity than. You know that one that might you know I have all that and you know I just have a lot of people suffer. Jason: [17:18] No I think the URL consolidation makes a lot of sense and there are just good business reasons for. Amazon ultimately to go there at the one I I guess ironic thing is they thought they were making an acquisition to take out a competitor and all that money that used in the acquisition ultimately was used to create a new competitor so I guess. Scot & Andrea: [17:37] Flatbush feel like soap opera or irony I'm not really sure that's why I need that's the real twist in it. Jason: [17:46] The irony of me is that I use the word irony wrong all the time. [17:52] So changing topics you mention the crap program in Canada and we we talked about a crap a little bit on one of the other shows. But maybe you're in a good position to confirm or deny. The rumor is that that was started as an internal term that was not intended to be. Scot & Andrea: [18:13] Yeah. Exactly what I read in one of my articles he was not intended to be public-facing it all it was a term that was developed by the finance team like I'm very clearly recall this and I don't know I can't imagine they share this room just funny, and you know I remember seeing in the fruit one of the first meetings where the finance team brought us this program and the program itself makes sense you look at stuff is unprofitable and figure out how to get it more profitable, I put the acronym Chris is really terrible and I member we all kind of looked at each other like this or go it's like really and you know I don't think it was ever meant to be other two vendors but now it's out there and now it's like an industry term. Jason: [19:01] It's it's really awkward cuz they a category that's particularly vulnerable to crap is of course toilet paper in so when you're, to a cpg manufacturer that's talking about their total, trapped out it's really on the potty humor goes goes downhill really fast. Scot & Andrea: [19:19] Yeah and I mean I don't think that I don't think the procedure of that was lost on them right I mean diapers and toilet paper or two of the kind of like really on really difficult items to ship, take us to Harris profitably and so I'm pretty sure that was so, Davidson strategy around the name but the funny part is like by the time I left we were just tossing it around in meetings and like it was the term has lost all of its like conversations, and I think it's funny now and I talked with Brands and I and I talked about crab and, really quiet like Amazon came up with it hasn't explained it so disgusting. Jason: [20:02] So the shocking part to me is not that any of that happened the shocking part to me is when you move to Canada that you didn't find a nicer friendlier term for Canada because it's Canada just say is nicer. Scot & Andrea: [20:10] You know that's a really good point like at that point it didn't even occur to me that when we started the program in Canada we could have called it something else but you know it's too late now. Jason: [20:25] So one one last topic before I let Scot get a word in edgewise, at the beginning the show you talked about or Scott introduced the concept of one p and 3p and we talked a lot about 1p and 3p. And when a 3p seller is using FBA as their distribution strategy. Scot and the show generally talked about them being a 3p seller that uses NFPA and I've noticed in some of your writing that you call. FBA sellers to pee so I'm just curious if you and Scott and have our are aligned on that vernacular or of or. Scot & Andrea: [21:05] I mean I think I think I think it's 3 PS1 of encompassing both Merchant sold as well as, social Diana son so you know where Amazon a store in the inventory shipping on your behalf they are still there that's to pay the sizzle by Amazon program, mn3 can include that but I usually it's referring to Merchants that ship out of their own warehouses. Jason: [21:29] Got it so what do you call a vendor for field FBA. Scot & Andrea: [21:34] I would call that she pee. Jason: [21:36] Gotta and Scott are you are you okay with that. Scot & Andrea: [21:40] I try to keep it simpler so I think that would maybe confuse people, chicken official Amazon me cancers that just no actually never heard these turns until I left. And they're sort of what a lot of my clients used to describe the different business models and with some of the folks in this kind of like ancillary Amazon industry send you so that's it those are the ones I've adopted but you know there's a really simple version is one piece retail, is Amazon buying product from Brands and reselling it and then 3p is where, the brand or the other retailers uses Amazon's platformer services. Who is one thing I wanted to jump into before we get to nerdy on e-commerce side is is on your bio you are part of the Amazon or raise our program of study that a lot as a internet I'm kind of obsessed with Amazon's culture in and how they, such a large company she needs Innovative and doesn't seem to have a lot of bureaucracy and it seems like the bar razor program is kind of, last couple years decided as a really kind of key contributor that four letters that aren't following that is close to as I am maybe give us a quick background a bar razor and, tell us about your experience being in that program. Yeah absolutely I'm in if you really interested in Amazon's culture and how they say Innovative actually you love my next article I got one coming out another week that's just the really just phones and on that specific topic. [23:13] I would love that actually if I could really use some other program, and I think this is some Polish so I don't think there's anything like confidential here but it's essentially her Amazon where there's a set of interviewers that are meant to, teach other interviewers how to interview so this is like so the more experienced said of interviewers go through specific training to teach others had a interview and then you know you need to have. I need to have someone in this from this program at least you did when I was there on every interview Loop scissors or busy, and you know that the idea is not that that's like the tough interview or whatever I think that's been written before actually not true it's it's the person that facilitates the conversation and really drive out all of the insights from the interview from all of the people who interviewed the candidate, and really make sure that you're having a cohesive discussion and that you're applying kind of them. Does cats a consistent set of principles to hiring decisions across the company and so it's not your consistency, and for maintaining the culture not true, being like a really particularly tough interviewer although probably some of them are really tough interviewers so I was in that program most of my time there I mean cuz I was, I know I started there you know kind of it before they started some of their real significant growth. [24:50] And I got into it early and I think by the time I left I have done almost a thousand interviews and you know, mayilada hires connect during that time. Cool so you're in the interview and then you also delete a post interview kind of debrief is that I would have her. Exactly exactly any ideas just really for consistency and for us I think the same is true in any organization where you've got some time so it's on interview Loops it University experience or. [25:23] I'm in after struggling a little more to apply some of the principles, you know the leadership principles are still learning the leadership principles and so is their kind of someone in the room that's got some experience with that and can help guide the conversation. Clannad articles I've read say it, cuz of this book number one usually by razor is in a different apartment and so you would be the Barbies are for like engineering or something and some other person would bar raise for fire, a person like that I mean it's like I couldn't I couldn't facilitate a conversation about someone who's going to, be on my team you know you want certain external perspective but I think that's just a general in your dream practice Amazon anyway regardless of whether it's a bar raise or not it's just a lot of perspectives on a Candida think the weirdest interview I've ever participated in was for it was, like a mad scientist like an economist, I remember prepping for That interview and just thinking like what am I going to ask him if I did try to get this person some Economist questions I would be hard-pressed to judge the quality of the answer and I remember though it's sitting in the defense I didn't know anything about the contents of this person's work but it was room market like the process of, determining if they work a candidate was like, damn I mean was really it really didn't change so do you have a go to question like why are manhole covers round how do you do the mountains. [27:01] You know I think one of my favorite ones someone who asked I heard someone else asked in an interview as part of our thing is like you to train people you Shadow and you, we go along and someone it's something that like your job is to lunch the houseplants categor live houseplants category on Amazon like what we did see how would you approach this, is this at lunch or something and I remember just thinking like, that's a tough one it's just kind of shocking anyway. Jason: [27:30] I think that's where you go to selling seeds. Scot & Andrea: [27:33] Exactly exactly. Jason: [27:37] A in it it occurs to me that like in addition that Consulting with brands on how to do a Amazon you could also do interview Consulting for a candidates have you helped anyone interview since you up. Scot & Andrea: [27:49] I'm in a little bit here and there I can do some projects on it and I had a Consulting project recently where there was a component of it where they were looking for some some guidance in their organizational structure, and had it had a sort of resource this business and what skill sets and things like that are critical to a little bit but you know the core of it has been, if people don't want people just tend to want to talk to me about her half and one piece EP 3 p and headed to go see it with Amazon Amino seem to be a bit, the topics that are the biggest draw. Jason: [28:28] I asked questions I always like to ask XM is zonians I've never work for Amazon but. I have great admiration for the company in the caliber of former employees I've met all the reading I do it frankly comes off as a totally unappealing place to work. [28:50] Talk to ex amazonians that sort of Concur and I talked to ones that wildly disagree and so I guess I'm just curious. Scot & Andrea: [28:57] Most of the ones that don't agree probably still work there no I thought it was an amazing, inspiring place to work I mean I have. I just had a really incredible experience there I feel really fortunate to have worked with the high-quality caliber of people that I was but I interacted with you know I wasn't working with more and more on Clans and other organizations and just realizing how remarkable that was, I want a time I mean I feel like I had some pretty nice career trajectory there that you might not see it, another types of organizations I mean I thought it was an amazing place I think you know when you think about like that, I'm bossy Channel article of it was like, it was right when I was leaving that that article was published about how terrible it is to work at the corporate headquarters and the people cry at their desks and you know that article everything except probably some of that I feel like some of the past employee like the people who'd been fired sort of testimonials sounded off like they didn't sound consistent with the company that I knew, the rest of the day that was like pretty true I mean if I'm really hurt it's really hard hard to make history and you work you working with some of the smartest people, I think around but the article was just really um. And it will be amazing there any Amazon. [30:28] Top 5 Business Schools all those people we have a choice we have to work there and they have lots of options there for a reason and it's because it's super inspiring and you can be Innovative and build your own business, you should hire a nanny is taking a lot of responsibility, I'm here if you have an idea and it's a good one and you can put together a good business case for it it still even though it's a big company now it's still the type of place where you can, you can see that through and so I mean I think it's I think it's an incredible place or I didn't see it it's a it's a. It's like running a marathon you know you can't do it has to look at has to stop at some point I think it's hard to it would be hard to work there your whole life. There's no free snacks. Jason: [31:19] Bananas free banana. Scot & Andrea: [31:20] There's no reason I give you the Sheep pens you know just don't know books are like that you know the $0.50 ones there's no there's no curse reality leadership principles you can use PowerPoint Jason I make a living on power, Point sucks really dense white papers, I think I think I got some of the best writing training. Bear in just being a headache ran the most about and data into like the shortest way if you possible. Jason: [31:58] Yeah so that brings up one of my biggest garage with X amazonians I'm I'm always super excited when I hired one because I'm thinking like I'm going to get these really insightful well-written long-form deliverables. And then I keep getting these crappy power points from them. Scot & Andrea: [32:14] They're just so excited he's her. Jason: [32:15] Exact exact. Scot & Andrea: [32:16] That's just for so many years and now all I can I cancel team does a star play for almost everything I'm one of those people I totally am. Jason: [32:26] Yeah so that was a little bit disappointing for me I have to be honest. You don't want of the categories that I am super interested in at the moment it's been a lot of time and is grocery in and you use us and gray. Experience in the impression Amazon might my premise is in North America. [32:48] Wholesale e-commerce like the battles basically already already been one right like you don't frequent frequent statement in my practices you're not going to Amazon Amazon and so you're looking for Winchester or you know. Little place around the edges but like you nor anyone else is necessary going to just build. 400 million skier general merchandise catalog in and capture majority market share from Amazon but I do believe that grocery is a huge category potentially larger than general merchandise. Did just now is coming into play for for digital Commerce City. [33:30] We deliver that in so I do feel like it's a white space and I think we're seeing sort of Walmart Amazon and you know to a lesser extent the. The pure plays in Kroger and stuff all all battling it out is that it are you following that category at all still in. Scot & Andrea: [33:48] Oh absolutely absolutely both Serta professionally and also personally my husband has a firm idea quickly build, Play click and collect software so I follow it. Religiously and he mentioned the consumables categories are there in Norma semi dwarf, the other general merchandise categories but I think the beauty of them for e-commerce is that they uh they drive frequency in traffic, and you know I think once, once Amazon in one Southern retailers can I caught on to this they realized how important it is to make this work online because you know when you think about it like you only buy coffee maker like every couple of years I need a picture in TV is like those don't those types of products, don't drive frequency and visit people like every week, so you know these categories I mean this forever or the trip drivers and they called them truck drivers. They got people in the store we sell them for their stuff I mean the same model those two Outta mind, you got customers traffic through the consumable categories and then in a while they're there hopefully they buy other things. Jason: [35:04] Yeah until 8 and I was here in Seattle so you get to see a lot of the first iteration of concepts of I assume you've walked by the ghost or if you haven't snuck in with an old age anything in. [35:18] Don't get in trouble on the show don't get in trouble on the show. Scot & Andrea: [35:21] And we also because we can never even rolled out, wake me to tell Gram here for a while where I think that was only in like two or three markets we're in this I think this is the precursor to Prime now where, or they would deliver your stuff and like a bag on your porch with no over boxing or anything, I mean I'm sure it was really expensive to get all the stuff that was pretty cool and you can sign up for like a tote day was like a regular schedule day so we get all kinds of Pilots here which is kind of funny to see experimentation with Amazon so yeah I've been by the ghost or I haven't gone in, and I think it's really I think it's. One of the more remarkable technology that Amazon has Philip Justin just walk out technology. Jason: [36:12] #JY. Scot & Andrea: [36:14] Is she literally just walked out of the store was actually sounds kind of awful if I'm shopping with my kids but I'm sure Amazon for your at the above. Jason: [36:23] As we pointed out early on when they want that concept that they're claiming it's his big new revolutionary thing and myself and one of my peers we're using that technology in high school so. [36:34] Not sure it's quite as impressive if you got a chance to go by the the fresh pickup location yet. Scot & Andrea: [36:43] No I haven't but that's the second lunch of those in Seattle we had another pilot years ago to pick up points so CA, I'm seeing the model and I know where the spot is in fact I was thinking maybe next week I don't think it's up and running yet but I was going to go do a drive by and just check it out to pick up stations in Seattle I mean like it it looks like I'm driving through it looks like a drive-in burger joint with like all the ankle parking, pretty is pretty cool and then another just bring it all out and put it in your in your car but I mean this figuring out pickup, I mean it's super expensive to ship dog food to customers dog food to Prime customer and you're totally upside down economics, and you know in order to be competitive and figure out how to make money in the space you have to figure out how to get people to come to you and sell them a bunch of stuff at once. Jason: [37:41] Yeah for sure and it I do think that's going to be the dominant model for grocery like I think you know it and you use only strings this with. Fresh but like you know most of the Amazon Goods get delivered on a route and you can bundle a bunch of deliveries and I can be really efficient but when you deliver fresh in the person has to be home to receive it because they have to put it in the refrigerator, settling you're not doing routes accepting in a few really high Denso occasions you're doing individual deliveries and that, that's super expensive in for most of the country the economics just don't work and so it seems like saving all that shopping time and having that pick up. I it was my. That's going to be the the mainstream digital grocery experience and I have literally nothing. Thousands of consumer interviews where they just talk about it being life-changing when they start using that that feature from whomever they use it from. Scot & Andrea: [38:35] Witches, which is really funny because like this isn't a new feature like I used to when I was a kid we used to call the grocery store and we tell him what we wanted and we drive by and pick it up there's not a new model, scale is probably a new model I mean I just grew up in a small town but I think what's really interesting is the whole evolution of this thing like I remember going to trade shows and like 2006 going to like that candy and confectionery and. And talking with Brands and saying, sell on Amazon and they were like that's crazy like why would you sell food on Amazon and then there was like they all signed up. NN and now it's like a race It Was a Race for a long time you know who would get there first two and half capture all the market share who can work most strategically with Amazon and other in Walmart and can whomever else and then everyone knows everyone knows grocery had a great day, now it's like it's kale and now he's calories are in a small anymore for these retailers and now they're just like a. I'm probably suck and so how do you figure out how to make it work and that's I mean that's where I think a lot of experimentation comes into play through a lot of these players it was trying models to see what might work, you know in Seattle we have fresh we have Prime now we have pickup points we have a, Amazon go store anything for a different model for the Amazons experimenting with an S with Amazon and then you're seeing really the rise of cook and cut which I totally agree with you I think I can collect is the next, that's the next thing because I'm already fatiguing I mean I've been shopping for my groceries online since you lunch freshman 2007 here and I'm sitting at the pricing you know it's just it's just cheaper like you just it is because the economics are different and they don't have to ship it to me and another driver. [40:21] And I'm sure Amazon's figured out you know how to make all that stuff work, and the reality is it's just worse than even the prime now and even instacart and I were to costco.com and safeway.com you like all the different models and even has to offer higher prices on some of it in store specials online and so I mean as a consumer and fatiguing, of the pricing I'm Slicker she's just as much like and it's tempting to go back to the store and horrible so I see. Jason: [40:53] Scot would be horrified if you did that. Scot & Andrea: [40:55] You're so right for the next model, and I believe it's click and collect and I believe in you profitable and I believe whatever groceries get on board with this the fastest are the ones that are going to, you know they really going to kill all the share. Jason: [41:11] Yeah I think that Title Wave is is coming it's going to be fun to watch you're certainly right it's not a new model there used to be this thing in the world called the milkman. Scot & Andrea: [41:20] Totally we actually the mailbox I mean we know when delivered anything to it but it still existed in her house. Jason: [41:27] Yeah absolutely so at the end of the day do you think there's a chance that someone other than Amazon wins that space so I could you foresee a Walmart or a Kroger someone else. Scot & Andrea: [41:40] Will depend on how fast we can both I mean that's really what it comes down to it's not a complicated model you ordered online you know you pick it out your stores and you know you let customers come pick it up we've got it here at Fred Meyer local in Seattle, I'm so it's not I don't think it's a challenging model that I think a lot of these larger groceries or kind of, I don't want to say freaking out but their head of flummoxed by the concept of like setting up a retailer website what does that mean how do you up so customers how you do it right how do you let Brandon getting on it because you're basically recreating like an Amazon, .com grocery store online and let you know that feels really overwhelming, and so I don't think they're moving real fast and I think it's just going to be like humuhumu fast but I do think it will be hard to compete with Amazon's Automation and personalization as it relates to marketing. They're just they're just so good at it and so far you don't haven't seen any other retailers that have even touched it and that's either really where you get like that, if you're able to drive customers to larger basket sizes online and help them discover products and be productive about like when they're about to run out of things and that kind of thing. It's funny I said the big fan of this show Silicon Valley and that this is not a spoiler but in last week's episode they, the two the characters went to the grocery store and they were the only non tasker's in the grocery store there's like 80 people in the grocery store. Jason: [43:11] That is a great point like I the one you're at your hair percent right about the price fatigue the one loophole is it can be really cheap to deliver groceries to your home when you get a venture capitalist to pay the delivery fee. Scot & Andrea: [43:22] For Google. Jason: [43:25] I feel like at the moment there's this the short window of opportunity I encourage everyone to use all that good Andreessen Horowitz money to deliver their groceries. Scot & Andrea: [43:37] I'm just change topics little bit so then your Consulting gig you can spend a lot of time with Brands you talked about the things they want to talk about which is crap and pricing going to go see a Ting one piece of p3p. What are some of the pitfalls you see them falling into an ear do they they come to you and they say oh my gosh I've got, does problem with her your what are some of the pitfalls that you wish things would have oil for they come to. What are the three things like people they were staying for a bit but a consistent being that I'm seeing is that a lot of them in the CPC space are only thinking like one or two years ahead and it's kind of a reactive model, a reaction way of thinking to Amazon's kind of, anyways have a crap program but I think they're getting a little stricter about it and kind of the last one to two years and so a lot of his friends are going items crapped out, they're trying to keep up with like how to, how to leverage Amazon's new marketing platforms and they're just really focused on the here and now and not I don't think thinking too much about where's the where's this thing go into yours me Amazon's never going to make money shipping dog food and cat litter across the United States alike what is the future of this look like and I don't think a lot of them are spending. Enough time thinking about that because this is when you want to plant your seeds for that so you know if it's the next big model is me nice I might. My opinion is on Amazon they're really going to figure out the pantry program I mean the way to economically ship products to customers. You know that that is secreted that is. [45:07] Freshly unprofitable in a direct-to-customer at least should be model is to put in a box of the whole bunch of other stuff so it perfectly fits and charge the customer like a nominal fee that they're not going to really. And I worry too much about and then ship them a whole bunch of stuff at once and that's basically what the pantry program is and that program seems to be doing pretty well for them. Iskra. Really fast cording to some of the brands that I work with that are participating in it so I mean I think you thinking about like where the future is and Pantry still kinda challenging it's hard to hear item set up an assault like an automated thing yet, and so in thinking about like where where is the next gen of this thing going, because I mean in the writing on the wall is it like Amazon is not going to keep seeing all these products to lose money in this in the consumable space or they're just going to get really refined assortment. And so programs like Pantry Paramus Lake you know Prime now or the pickup points or whatever those are the Amazon ones but then like what we're talking about click and collect like. I think that you know expanding their, nearest Thinking Outside those kind of the current challenges you're having with your Amazon retail businesses is critical and the brands that are doing that are the ones they're going to be set up for Success because they planted seeds and cut it started that smell, this is nursing one side so let's step outside consumables and take out a category that's like maybe more mature like up. [46:39] Electronics repair or something the one that I keep hearing is when the Randall say when I think 5 or 10 years down the line. Amazon tonight exclusive retailer and that scares me because it's a race to zero so that's why a lot of brands are on the doubt that's that's one of the reasons you did they have map pricing in controlling the 3p Marketplace, do you think that's that you know you're obviously have drunk a little bit of Amazon Kool-Aid over the last 10 years but no. Is that what we're going to be facing his is this kind of you know it brings have a logical argument to not be on Amazon because they're kind of feeding their own destruction. But I don't think I mean it would be difficult to not be on the phone because of the opportunity that presents to Branzino just from League of Revenue prospective, and sometimes from profit perspective too but I think it's I don't think it's a wise choice, anti depends on a lot of factors but it's not a wise choice to like think of Amazon is your exclusive e-commerce player me the brands that I see that have healthier businesses. With Amazon are ones that sell to multiple e-commerce players and are investing in other ones not investing like investors but you know investing time and energy into getting their business up and running and marketing and things like that on some of the other players and so that's where, I think that some of your business model is feeling more Diversified but if you thinking that you're going to be exclusive on Amazon I mean they change the game there every 6 months, and you know it only takes kind of like one change that's in congress with your business model to be out. [48:17] And here maybe that's private label or meet you maybe they want your private label of your product or maybe they either come to you with terms like negotiation terms that are unacceptable to you or that you can't you can't actually if you can accommodate, can I still run a business and if they're your only Taylor you're kind of in a really tough spot, yeah I don't think they're setting up Amazon to be exclusive I think they see Amazon becoming a de-facto exclusive because when they look at the online players, Amazon so much bigger than everyone else to. That it's hard to build that diversity that you're talking about that that's not what they worry about that kind of say my brain is priced wrong is right now so maybe there is a strategy right now. I don't help Amazon be the the 800-pound gorilla well and I think that's where it's important, that's what's important to look on Amazon at some of your third party Partners I need your address with Amazon you've presumably all are presumably also selling to other people that are reselling on Amazon it is important to look at their ass and selling across multiple platforms, Samsung, and so you know they're giving you any not might be still small but they're giving you some distribution also they're also giving you an alternative if you don't want to sell directly to Amazon anymore but you still and have a presence there and have a good brand experience and help you have sales, Anthem anything that's kind of like a another diversification strategy you look so, so is private label it was kind of jump into that a little bit what are you tell Brands when they say hey I'm really concerned that you know Amazon just opened up a private label in my category. [49:50] How do you explain that I mean I think they should be concerned but it's not. Eminem retailer tender copying top selling products it's not too similar differences you know how they're able to manipulate the digital shelf to be able to savor products. Over others, and you know we don't have any like confirmation that they're doing that but it sure seems like they are when you look at the site and I know you're searching for backpacks and you know the one that looks just like the other one, private label comes up before it in the search results really totally it's something really scared about for sure but if you're also kind of going back to the concept of diversification if you've been, yeah totally. If your business is so driven by one or two skews you know you're a right candidate for it for Amazon taking on serve a private label. Copy had approached and so you know figure out how to grow other sections of your business so that you're not completely dependent on laptops Q, because Amazon Michael private label it I think it's probably a good idea and it you know I've seen them give like favoring some of the marketing and and obviously all the marketing is free for them so there, those are going to be really high origin ID on this but they look like they're just going after pretty much every category now which means I mean that makes sense for them to do. Jason: [51:26] I think you may have inadvertently given this the secret sauce away earlier I just get into the live plants category. Scot & Andrea: [51:33] Really difficult for Amazon to copy must be because they kept asking it as an interview question and they never launched it so there you go. Jason: [51:41] Exactly which is odd because I feel like that's one of the first categories than invented cologne. Scot & Andrea: [51:46] Actually I think that I actually might be irony I'm not sure. Jason: [51:52] Yes Neil thank you for that. [51:57] So I know you're going to be at IRC in a couple weeks and I understand it right that topic is tips for negotiating with Amazon can you totally ruin the irce panel. Giving our listener some of the high-level pitfalls and tips. Scot & Andrea: [52:14] Yeah yeah. Blue am so I mean the presentations really just going to talk about it I think it's another one of those areas where a little bit of Education will really help Brands be successful in their negotiations and the biggest. And the bastard of a feeling or pitfalls that I saw when I was out in the sun because she with friends is just friends not preparing for the negotiation not coming with with data me with questions you know not being prepared, I'm not really thinking through, the Amazons perspective and being kind of blindsided by some of the ass and granite Amazon desert huge so it makes sense to be helpless by the numbers, and so I will talk a little bit about that in the presentation will talk about how to prepare, you know what information to request from Amazon if you have an opportunity to do so I mean I think, an important thing is he knows the lot of times, especially some of the mid-tier the smaller hands are not actually negotiate with a live person and so how do you navigate that right like you probably negotiate with a robot doesn't look like a robot in the email comes to you but looks like a. Can a person that it's you know it's definitely an automated it's going automated process so we'll talk about how to. How to prepare am had to actually execute and then you know what kind of go through some of the typical ass from Amazon and and talk about like when he's made me sense for you like. [53:47] Who who who doesn't make sense for it to think about like the cross. Program or when would it make sense for you to invest in some of the, the larger marketing programs or or Crap allow answer you know we'll kind of talk a little bit about that. One of the things you introduce me to his this house get this wrong but like driving the car really fast with your. Foot on the gas your hands off the wheel tell tell us more about that Provisions growing quickly and scaling and it's really critical more and more automated. And so you know I'm seeing with my clients and also one of the forums like the Lincoln Group and things like that that a lot of brands are just really at the end. At the receiving end of more automation than ever before and they're hearing from their buyers you know how critical it is that they continue automated and you know not Place manual. Borders and let the system do its thing can have their hands off the wheel that's the hands off the wheel concept so you know and that's definitely you always been kind of a push it Amazon but I feel like it's getting, my friends are seeing more of it and I'm in recent here. An interest Amazon's interesting automation when you negotiate with the with that machine doesn't sound like Alexa. I mean if you get on the phone you're talking to a real person. Jason: [55:20] For now for now. Scot & Andrea: [55:21] I'm sorry Jason we're going to cut your crap allowance. Jason: [55:26] Here's the tip you're not talking to a real person when it's Sign May Day that's always. Scot & Andrea: [55:31] Chicken area. Jason: [55:34] Come on you guys don't get Amazon Fire jokes. Scot & Andrea: [55:36] No I guess I totally get it. Jason: [55:40] Scot snoody the lack of systems we have to go somewhere for him although annoyingly Scott's car can drive really fast with a hands off the wheel which I'm a little jealous. Scot & Andrea: [55:51] Do you have a self-driving car have a tablet doesn't have that that future though I got I was too early in the doctor its equivalent of having an iPhone 1 right now. Jason: [56:04] You can still drive really fast with your hands off the wheel once. Scot & Andrea: [56:07] Yeah just let me know. Jason: [56:11] Exactly and any big mistakes you see people making in negotiations. Scot & Andrea: [56:18] Yeah I mean I think this one is just giving like a specially for the platform or have experience I have significant growth and so it's like one of the first time actually talking to someone like a live person they just give too much away in the first year, that you know they don't hold back enough funding for themselves, Cindy has Amazon ever use an annual negotiation process that you every year and they're going to want more and you know you don't want to give it all away, in the in there for a couple years of Amazon you've got a kind of pre the reserves at or or just kind of the other it's just kind of, signing up for the most you can possibly do for that year from a from a Amazon funding perspective and that doesn't give you any kind of slush fund for the stuff they're going to come to you with. Fourth root beer like participation in certain marketing programs that you know they didn't know about the weekend because you know they're. A plan a little bit more in a three to six months in advance or are you know price-matching error or some chargeback store. I don't want to be in a position all year we're all of those little things are extraordinary painful cuz you already gave them like the most you could give them that you're so I always recommend a can of creating a reserved sign for yourself, you know don't like some leftover money is there be no room in your budget to pay for some of the things throughout the year. Jason: [57:43] That Prime days only two months away don't don't touch. Scot & Andrea: [57:49] So I never been a Brandon or works for me but I meant it would be really weird because there's probably this old school believing believe that you reformulation ships and I know I've been a bit more couple times and. You just see the brand raps just kind of going through there and you know it's almost like the airports Gear Drive for them there's a whole infrastructure and there's this whole, pilgrimage to Walmart meet that guy try to build a relationship drugs drinks the Dan Draper Martini lunch and all that stuff and then you probably do all that then you try to. If I go try to beats when Amazon that I won't meet with you unless you're like. Super Dee duper Top Gear brand so then now you're kind of talking to this AI machine and these brands that kind of holiday how they feel. Yeah yeah especially some of the larger more established ones that are really accustomed to working with brick-and-mortar there they believe that they will be able to see crater 6s on Amazon to forming a relationship with their buyers, and I will tell you like the last thing those buyers wanted to do it for him, bladder relationships because it's extremely time-consuming it doesn't help them execute on their initiatives might get them like that anymore Co-op, they can also get that by sending out like a hundred automated emails and so you know I still remember kind of, the concept of like Thursday Amazon buying team they're in their jeans and occasionally flip flops, I'm at the brand comes to visit and they're all wearing their suits and they want to do a line review and like that concept it's just totally lost. [59:30] Play baby and they're not going to make it they're not going to make selection choices they're going to list everything on the side so it doesn't. The best interest to learn a whole lot about the products and which ones are different from one another. So yeah I mean I definitely see a lot of her and still trying to formulation ships but I'm also seeing a lot of emerges getting like Savvy about that, he has already had a couple of turnovers and their Vendor Manager and they're realizing that like actually the best thing they can do is educate them so. About the, Phat Farm and how it works because of no sex that's really understand how the form works that I work with it and keep keep up with the changes to it I think it you know, the Amazon I think just there was a Jeff quote once and he said we're not in the business of selling things were in the business of helping people buy things and they just, Amazon believes they are a platform for selling things they don't believe they're retailer wish I think kind of speaks to you know why they don't think the relationship development super important. That's an important Point Jason spends more time with the offline guys than I do but up but I'm always. Stricken by there's the still believe there's still this belief and I'm a computer engineering guy but there's just believe that there's this Merchant King, Merchant Prince water be called Jason and you know they can predict what people are going to do and they go and they buy that hot thing in the ghetto, the create fashion themselves and that I'm console surprised how much that still exists and I think you know this this Amazon model of. [1:01:02] Why should she choose like put everything up and let the customer he just seems so obvious to me. But it really is so counter to hell all these other companies are built that that. It's the step to get even closer to that existential dilemma than they are right now which is hard to believe but just console amazing to me in the retail world that that no one else really gets that. Universal some elements of that and that's really like in my opinion when I was a fire that was like the most exciting thing about being a buyer what if you find the next big thing, like what is it what if you're the one that brought it on the side and I'm ever going to trade shows in finding like weird and scary products reticulate like the Expos and, Ambien like maybe this is like the new coconut water like we don't know what is going to be so I think there's still some elements of that but I mean definitely a lot less than than traditional retailers, stop and come from a line review I guess. Jason: [1:01:59] Well it has happened again we've used up our allotted hour Andrea thank you very much for us spending time in the educating all of us and especially for educating Scot. Scot & Andrea: [1:02:13] But thank you for having me on the show and it was really great to be here. Yeah right I said at the top of you everytime I talk to you I learned a hundred things I think I have checks at least that many boxes that is good take me awhile to counter but we're in that that neighborhood, it is reminder to listener see if you enjoyed Andrews view on Amazon brand strategy and then and other topics she's one of the speakers at internet retailer conference in exhibitions Amazon and me Workshop, which is right around the corner it'll be June 6th in Chicago, and Andrea is folks want to follow you your writing online you mentioned you got some articles coming out where's the best place that can find is that a Twitter handle or a, that chatter where where do you hang out online I am mostly on LinkedIn so you can find me on LinkedIn and it's Andrea Leigh Leigh. [1:03:05] Possible thanks again really appreciate it. Jason: [1:03:07] Yeah and we'll make sure to get that in the show now so until next time happy commercing.

EP078 - Amazon News 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. In Episode 78, we catch up on a lot of the new Amazon news including: Amazon Bookstore opens in Chicago (very near Jason's home) A number of analyst raise their guidance on Amazon stock, which is now almost double Walmart's market cap Amazon hosting a summit to help brands sell direct Amazon Private Label update Amazon Go store delayed Amazon gets NFL Thursday night football Amazon hiring work from home customer service people New Product - Amazon Connect, AWS cloud SaaS callcenter application New Product - Amazon Chime, AWS cloud SaaS video conferencing application  Amazon Opening 1m sq-ft FC facility in VA Amazon acquired Souq.com - middle east marketplace - Dubai, Abu Dabi, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain  Amazon shuts down Quidsi Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 79 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday April 6, 2017. New beta feature - Amazon Automated Transcription of the show: Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 78 being recorded on Thursday April 6th 2017 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and hey Jason Scot show listeners Jason was looking at our logs out on iTunes and we've been so busy interviewing retail luminaries that we you and I have a report on since early March so I have a ton to catch people up on. Jason: [0:56] That I told you I'm super excited and I'm equally excited to be talking to you with my full voice. Scot: [1:05] Yeah yeah it's good to have normal Jason back and put froggy Jason kind of into the, into the catalog there on time hopefully listeners went to put off by it I hear that Mr lister's listen to a set 2X anyway so you were still at Chipmunks on I'm sure it's fine. [1:22] Just kick off you I have been quite the world traveler I haven't done anything since shop talks up and kind of boring but tells about you any interesting World travels through portal. Jason: [1:33] I have been on the road quite a bit since shop talk mostly customer visits but I did get to do an event I like to do every year in New York City. Did may not be super for me or do a lot of our listeners so it's called the path to purchase Institute and they put on this annual show called The Shopper marketing Summit and it has stork Lee is not been a very digital Summit it's a long time event, targeted at Shopper marketers that focus on on marketing inside of brick-and-mortar retailers in what was in. Scot: [2:06] Circulars or like a circular makers work. Jason: [2:10] Other. There's a little bit of that it yeah but it's a it's a lot more like product displays like temporary point-of-purchase materials like promotions and in-store promotions products samples. I'm all all the sort of the traditional tools are retail or would use to promote products and more so Brands than retail or so the show is really focused on. Like what it what is the best tactics for Mondelez are Procter & Gamble to use to help their their product get disproportionate attention on the Shelf. [2:49] Yes I would I just found interesting is you know that, how much digital had permeated the conversation there so they were first they asked me to speak so we actually did, I was on my co-workers from this we did for our workshop on digital disruption and talking about all the ways that the. The we filled the whole discipline a shopper marketing has been fun and I disrupted by by digital and then you don't evolve impact of purchase, but they were a lot of other another you like speakers from Kimberly-Clark talking about digital merchandising and then frankly a lot more presentations that you would have extradition Alee expected to see at Academy show your now starting to see if some of these traditional shows in their ways to go though. If you like the sessions that were most popular with the audience where we would probably be pretty rudimentary touch are average listener but it is interesting that these traditional disciplines are now you know really starting to focus on our space. Scot: [3:52] Digital is eating World As We predicted. Jason: [3:55] It is indeed in while I was there are our friends at Amazon open the new book store 2 blocks from my house. [4:21] As I said Amazon open their Chicago bookstore and I presume because Jeff is such a loyal listener that he carefully selected a location only a few blocks from my house. Scot: [4:32] Tell Sam to you've been just to refresh listeners in case they shame on them missed the episode when last you were travelling Amazon book stores you went to the Seattle and right. Jason: [4:43] Yeah yeah we've been in Seattle want a couple times now but I was there. Scot: [4:47] The New York. Jason: [4:48] Recently didn't I don't think the New York one is open yet. Scot: [4:52] I think that one Telus about Chicago and I'll do some research. Jason: [5:00] Yes I have been the two personally I've been in the Seattle won in the San Diego one which are very similar and they have evolved over the times I visited them until then, looking at Chicago Chicago is a little different than the last two in a couple of regards the most notable difference is that it has a coffee shop at. So he has an expresso bar they're serving Stumptown Coffee which is a favorite. Coffee brewer from my old Hometown to Portland Oregon. [5:31] Omen none of the other Amazon site been to have a cafe or any food I'm so so you know. That was certainly an interesting evolution. [5:43] Also had a few new categories in it so one of the things that I hadn't seen before is there was a popular kitchen accessories Gondola in the store. [5:57] And that is a little interesting like traditionally another merchandise books in the store physical books and. Quick refresher for pubs that will talk to you before then listen to some the other shows it's not. [6:11] Designed a traditional bookstore would be design right see a couple thousand square feet you want to get as many books as you can into that that's 2000 square feet so normally most of the books are. Merchandise down their spine and only a few promotional books are merchandise facing you this Amazon store has very few books in it because all the books on merchandise facing you so that it's a much more attractive presentation the print. Paper price tags next to every book in that price tag. Orwell fact tag has the reviews from Amazon on its what has the star rating in in a couple select customer reviews reviews play an important part in merchandise in the store and no actually have gondolas. For merchandising books by rating like these are all books that are rated over 4.8 stars who are the top rated books for the city of Chicago things like that that you know it's a real clever social merchandising, pricing is really weird any stores they charge list price if you're not an Amazon Prime member. I'm in if you are an Amazon Prime member you get the online price, but because as we all know the online price changes so often they don't print the online price in the store so you literally have to use the Amazon app on your phone to scan the fact tags, to see what the current prices of the book you're going to buy or use one of the scanners that they have built into the store. Scot: [7:34] Cool so you were right I was wrong I think this is a Jason and Scot first the that have not opened the first location in your cat's Columbus Circle and its opening in the spring so I think they have like. William another month here and then the second one they announce is going to be across from Empire State Building so they announced to open none in New York but opening one soon. So Columbus Circle will be first and empire state will be second tell me more about the the kitchen section of the store. Jason: [8:04] Yep so as I was saying like you know you have that kind of book presentation and then the book of all the Amazon stores is really that Amazon branded. Electronics rights of the stores really about Kindle and Echo and you know I would call it a consumer electronics store dressed as a bookstore. And so on certain they're happy to sell books in that store but it really feels like the job of the stores to educate customers about the the candles and The Echoes In The Fire tablets. [8:34] And so the center of the store is around that they have their sort of equivalent of a Genius Bar where you can get Live help they do you know scheduled live demos and tutorials a lot of those kinds of things and so you know traditionally. Those are the two kinds of things that are in the store that Electronics including accessories and third-party products that work in the. In the Amazon Alexa echo system in the inbox inside this Chicago store with the first story I have seen that had other, hard Goods in addition to Amazon products and the books and so they would have had a gondola that's like best selling kitchen appliances on Amazon and it's showing things like. Immersion blender smoothie machines KitchenAid mixers think things like that and so they would really like. The bed you know 10 of the best selling products in another category and put them in the front of the store. Scot: [9:31] Did you see I'm a some tweets that and I visited the Amazon store and December of 62, been a while Minnesota and the baby with the tweets of Sean a lot more of the Amazon basic showing up in the store did you see evidence of some of the private label stuff kind of creeping. Jason: [9:50] Yes in categories that are related to electronics right so that they get a lot of the Amazon basic bike cables and batteries are our merchandise but they're really merchandise as accessories for. The fire tablets and things like that. There's not a display that's like I sorted based on being Amazon basics for sample there just interspersed on the on the displays where they would be most appropriate. Scot: [10:16] Yeah we're going to talk about a little bit later but they've got enough private label and apparel I wonder in those New York stories if we can't magically see a little infection section open up and be kind of nurse in to see how that progresses. Jason: [10:27] Yeah it it's only well-liked into Italy the stores they design so far are lacking some amenities you'd normally expect in a Apparel Store like dressing rooms and things like that but like. Could easily be retrofitted or or more to your point like the next door could easily Adam. Scot: [10:43] Anything else from from the roof. Jason: [10:46] Nope I think given all the other exciting stuff we have to talk about that it should probably cover it on the Jason trip reports for this week. Scot: [10:55] Cooper Center in the Amazon new section I wanted to go back to shop talk and that was kind of late March. They had Amazon had two speakers at shoptalk this year which is interesting bit been notoriously shy about going to conferences but, they were pretty bold today had Stephanie Landry in this was her second year at shot talk and she talked about prime now I didn't really get much knew from that other than that continues the area where they are aggressively expanding, I'm in one of the things I like two references you know they sent really once they decided to put. Pedal to the metal on Prime now they opened up in 4245 markets in the span of two two and a half years so a lot of people, talk about these experiments are doing in the coffin so it's just an experiment but I always caution people that, Amazon decides this out of the experiment they can scale it really quickly so it was good reminder, program and what they can do and you're one of the guy thats decided to build a consumer-oriented business one of the most interesting quotes from that was it when someone looks good. Question from the audience about, the profitability of it and she said well it Amazon know we really focus on the customer first and then we can we saw for profit II, and that in the cooler that was the interesting part and she said, it's much harder to sell the customer problem then a customer experience problem kind of meeting you this whatever they're building isn't lighting customers versus a profit problem. [12:31] That's really kind of an interesting talks about putting the customer first but Amazon really really does it and, the donut since day one when they could afford to now they obviously have the luxury of being able to do that but you know they really don't care about the probability this thing they want to really don't know that customer experience and then they'll kind of get there on the profit side and that's how it started when Prime launch never thought they were crazy and it could never, make any money and I. [12:58] When I heard from Amazon and sit there is a lot of controversy as a launch that the basis was really into it and a lot of people could you do the math on Prime you can kind of say. Our best people aren't going to pay for shipping and are worse people are going to get free shipping and there's no way this economic make sense but I think they didn't those people didn't count on was. It was such a delightful program for customers their volume when up connects and then it going to match Pace herself so it was kind of interesting it was, but I like that one comment. The second speaker was the first to stop talking it's Peter Pharisee and Peter for a while and he works for Sebastian gunningham and runs the marketplace part of, Amazon and the surprise from me is when I've seen him speak at our conferences and and I think it's been an internet retailer wants it's usually about the other sellers on the marketplace. Did this talk at shoptalk was 100% about brands, talking it essentially the whole thing was targeted to Brands how they're an important constituent Amazon and then he talked about, for reasons why they should saw on the platform they're all pretty obvious no shipping we have the scale we're friendly DeBrands these kinds of things it was a real surprise because I've never seen Amazon talk that way about Brandon Sac to know if. If one of the questions I get a lot is what does Amazon have any chinks in their armor that kind of thing. And the relationship with brands has been strained and you know some some Brands I talked about it in my panel where you know a lot of Brands we talk to you. [14:31] Go with the nuclear option I call it where they essentially say look we're going to yank our stuff Nike is kind of most famous or they've decided not to work with Amazon and a 1st or 3rd party relationship and they prohibit people from selling any authorized resellers from Sun their stuff on Amazon, so so I think Amazon realizes that's a challenge and they kind of had a softer messaged for Brands than I've ever heard. [14:52] Did you a catch either this. Jason: [14:55] Yeah I got both of them and I would totally agree with you on the Amazon Prime now you know both how fast they were able to scale that and 18 months getting to them when they have to us but also you know the shocking thing is, it was like a hundred and eleven days from the first meeting where they discussed doing one hour delivery opening that first. 1 hour delivery concept ride in so that that level of agility is super impressive and terrifying. And I just like to quote someone was asking when she describes Amazon Prime now the think the picture of when has in their mind is that's the service you use to deliver the cold medicine when you're sick because you physically can't go out of the house, and you need to quickly, and she was pointing out that those kind of emergencies are are part of the service but that the overwhelming majority of the service is not for those things that need to be delivered in an hour but rather for things that consumers just wanted an hour and so it's it's less about. You know it only gets used as a necessity and more than it's a delightful customer experience that people appreciate I also. So that you know that sort of reminded me of another Super recent Jeff Bezos Square where he was talking about how they had lots of great Innovations over the years that they loved inventions that Amazon loved. Consumers didn't really care about and he is talking about the fact that like I can assure you that no no invention that consumers don't adopt has ever been disruptive in so just sort of. [16:27] Focusing on the fact that like the hardest part of this whole equation is is figuring out an experience that that's magic to Consumers and that they want to do. Scot: [16:36] Yeah you just reminded me to that I think some breaking news Stephanie put out there is that occasionally if possible on Echo orders they will if it's in pruritus that and Delight customers by delivering it in an hour, did you did you catch that Amazon. Jason: [16:54] I think you're exactly right I think she said that like if if you order from from Echo and it's available in Prime now they'll deliver in an hour that sort of surprise and Delight you. Scot: [17:06] Cool and then another thing that's been really interesting is so so since October unrelated but what happens is that kind of screwed into the corner of Wall Street and kind of, you know that check their channels and they update their models and, right towards the end of March and early April everyone started doing that and several analysts came out and said you know we we actually think Amazon underpriced here and a, the time Amazon was out about a hundred $800 the stock price and some analysts came out and, for that I follow are there kind of called what's the axe on Wall Street which is kind of the leading analysts they really but that price Target up to over $1,000 so one went to, 1025 and even kind of sad you know we think. The Amazon probably will be the first trillion-dollar market cap stock so then a couple other in-laws followed suit and then the stock took off and as of this recording it's about $900 so that's. Pretty big run from 800 to 900 what is that, yeah I'm about 15% and yeah when you're dealing with a company decides a Amazon that that is a material change so Amazon is worth about twice the market cap of. Not now market cap for one thing and revenues are different you know Walmart has more Revenue than Amazon all these kinds of things we're just talking about the what Wall Street thinks the two companies are valued at, I'm in if you do those notes so that's a good headline right now to lead our company thousand 25 on the stock in the stock reacts but. [18:43] I make a habit of reading these things and it is pretty nice thing you know they talk about different colors that that Amazon has now the one that it's been pretty crazy about is the cloud computing Amazon web services. That it continues grow faster than people have thought and be more profitable the prime business with Amazon is having to disclose more about prime than they ever have and in their annual report, they gave some new disclosures that essentially let people back into that there's between you can get a range it's not exactly have to kind of make some assumptions, between 50 and 70 million Prime users so it's kind of putting it about 65 million Prime users show, that's bigger than some people thought it's smaller than others but it puts a real number there with people are pretty excited about and then the other thing that the new disclosures did is a. Put some boundaries on the ad business I just kind of two parts to the Amazon advertising business there's. [19:39] ICBC peace and that's broken out in their financials one way and then there's a banner key switch is broken out another way up and it's a pretty material business it's it's you know it. [19:50] Any projected growth forward it'll be the number three as business behind Facebook and Google next year so it's already bigger than Twitter. For example show. People get pretty excited by that now scale wise it's in the single-digit billions and Facebook and Google or in the very high double-digit billions so it's going to take a long time to catch them and I don't know if it ever will be I think. It was pretty excited by that because it's also extremely high margin business along with AWS season. [20:23] In kind of another color. Is it that's interesting is and yeah we talked about it here on the Jason Scot show first is this kind of Alexa and when Wall Street talks with Alexa their kind of wrapping a lot in their there. [20:36] Not only talking about the personal assistant but all the things behind it the semantic engine the machine learning the all all the natural language processing in those kinds of things, and what about analyst Mark mahaney he's kind of said that. 10 billion dollar business in when you report it is not just the sales of Alexa devices but all the ancillary things around the same time Amazon also announced Alexa for the iPhone which is. [21:03] To boxing I want to talk about I'm just talk is. You know that Wall Street is also waking up to the fact that at the same time where these analysts upgraded Amazon they downgraded Google which I thought was interesting and I specifically in the Google Beyond grade called out and said, we believe the Goodwills on a crash course with Amazon and decided the study of United Site a lot that shows that products arches really switch from Googled Amazon but they also talked about that business and they did make a pretty compelling argument that a, you know in a world where Amazon news whatever the buying that ad. Business could be more valuable than Google for Google has some search intent but Amazon has a product intense that was kind of interesting take and you and I have talked about early on. Is it go to this voice is just your voice, so we're going to call it kind of world Amazon monetizes by selling stuff and Google they announce recently too then. Montage by ads and there now putting ads into you know some of the different things you do on the Google home assistant which is pretty cheesy to be honest with you show. [22:07] Really interesting. Example of of Amazon having someone's back against the wall in a funny way and no Google trying desperately like let's forget the customer experience through some ads right in here when you ask. Does the home assistance for the weather kind of thing it's this really really terrible so I thought show, I know we have some Wall Street folks listening but I thought it was really interesting to hear a lot of what we talked about really summarize really well as it's kind of you know the pillars behind this this upgrade, and then when you we look at that the result of that Amazon is now worth a Walmart at Target a Costco BestBuy and CBS all together so that's another kind of interesting thing the other result of that. Is that Jeff Bezos rocketed up the Forbes 500 list two number two jumped over Warren Buffett and a second only to Bill Gates so. To put that in perspective and haven't seen when do this this is a Jason Scot exclusive show, Bill G is at 84 billion and Bezos is now at 76 billion as of recording this so I did the math and if they Amazon stock gets over a thousand, assuming that there's no big change and let me a Bill Gates is doing then he will be the richest person so there you go. Jason: [23:29] That is crazy I asked you for the Jason Scot show and I'm I believe that those two guys live like a mile apart so that's a pretty affluent square mile in Seattle. Scot: [23:41] Yeah yeah on if they like check each other's mail in their gun and stuff. Jason: [23:46] If they are I would hope that people that do that. Scot: [23:48] Yeah you never know hey Bill could you check my did you watch the dog one at a time. Jason: [23:56] Exactly I think Jeff would have a robotic dog. There's a bunch of other Amazon stuff going on as well as one that. Got a lot of attention in my world is there some leaked invites the Amazon has invited a bunch of the, the brands and protect the consumer packaged Goods Brands to West Summit at Amazon where Amazon wants to talk to them about getting more serious and selling direct and give them some advice about what they need to do to, successfully sell Direct. Scot: [24:38] What's what's the buzzer you heard any some scoop on that whole thing. Jason: [24:42] Yeah well so the. The sort of clickbait headlines then because you know Amazon wants to partner with Procter & Gamble to bypass the Walmart and Kroger and all those those things and well. I think that's certainly true, I actually think that Amazon is is less worried about like stealing those customers from Amazon or from from the traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and Amazon some more interested in, setting those those Brands up to be more successful on Amazon in the digital era so I think this this is a lot more about. Kid convincing and controlling these companies to change their product configurations to be more e-commerce friendly so, think about the bundling sizes think about how they package their products you know in a lot of other product categories Amazon very successfully was able to get manufacturers to change how they package their goods to make them more, consumer-friendly on Amazon so they had this whole frustration free packaging program for example and, consumer consumer packaged goods are predominately designed to Market to customers on a store shelf and so their package really isn't very friendly too. A shipping in that Amazon cardboard box and I think Amazon interested in convincing them to fix that. Scot: [26:11] Yeah yeah yeah and then no Jason Del Rey who's been on the show had some interesting kind of reaction from the brands that felt like. Another too caught up in this Amazon vs Walmart war and everyone wants lower prices so that's certainly not a not a pleasant place to be what would you advise to brands that are kind of. I'm sure you guys get a lot question about this one how do you tell folks to avoid that. Jason: [26:36] Yeah well I mean to twofold I got I do think of you a brand that that's in that space that you you do want to be on Amazon at this point right. Like more than half the growth in that category over the next three years is coming from digital and Amazon is today more than 50%, of that that digital pie so pretty expensive mistake to, not be where all that customer demand is on the Amazon platform obviously we did we did show a couple weeks ago with Melissa talking about the a lot of the fundamentals of being a. On the Amazon platform and Jason does article really sort of. Emphasize one of the points from that show right and that's that there's this this really real negative cycle at the moment where. [27:30] You sell products on Amazon and so you don't party yourself to dream with Amazon is that that you'll give Amazon the best pricing and you won't sell it less than them and they have all these algorithms that watch your price and react to them, so so did when you give a different bundle to Costco and Costco selling a case of Campbell's Soup and the price per ounce in that case is very low. Amazon sees that and drip drop the price on quantity one of that that can of soup to that super low price and then they're selling a super low and then Walmart emergence kick in, and start beating you up for selling the product much lower on Amazon then you're offering the quantity one price to Walmart, so that the challenge at the moment is. Is that you when you think about these products of you really think about reconfiguring the products for. E-commerce you probably want to think about more than packaging like you you probably want to create. Different skews that are different enough that they don't trigger that that's where the pricing cycle. [28:42] And so that potentially even means like you know different formulations are different flavors or or you don't. [28:50] Different sized squares of Swiffer on Amazon than the squares at Swiffer that you buy. In Walmart so that those aren't the same skew and they don't they don't get caught in that pricing cycle. Scot: [29:03] Any definitely wanna make sure your Warehouse bundle isn't comfortable feeling so good that stuff. Jason: [29:09] Exactly and I do it in the long run that's just not sustainable like that you know the both Amazon and Walmart or someone. Benefiting from that at the moment and then warm in the margins just aren't there for the manufacturers to get squeezed between those two guys and so you know either. The manufacturers will have to find some other way to survive by selling direct without those guys and those guys are both launch private labels and you know I think we're seeing the Collision Course between these product manufacturers in these in these products resellers. Scot: [29:43] Another Hot Topic kind of in this vein is Amazon truly ramping up private label as we talked about at the top of the show so suppose folks are familiar with Amazon basic switches things like HDMI cables and whatnot, another Washington lest I follow has done a lot of research and it's fascinating start some usually the trademark, the bowels of the trademark database and Amazon this is hard because Amazon uses a lot of shell corporations. [30:13] Misdirection let's just very legal misdirection to try to hide what they're doing so these folks kind of trying to get down and they know that. This agent to really works and Amazon and there's ways they can get back into it then they searched on Amazon and they kind of, figure out that if these things they find our exclusive on Amazon to prime or or there's a certain you can kind of tell how the age of the pages are written the. It's actually private label so they've identified a good kind of. [30:42] 15 to 20 private labels that a lot of people don't know about one we talked about on the show is Amazon elements um and you know. We we talked about that but the area where there's the most growth is in apparel so there's things like. All of moon is a woman's Bohemian inspired casual clothing it was hurting both of these are prime exclusive which means that if you're not on Prime you you see them but you can't buy them and there's a lot of worry, and the way the way I seen it now is. So Amazon has you have the name brand so let's see all pick on one I don't know a good Bohemian brand but let's say dress shoes show. Men's dress shoes so they'll have. Cole Haan or someone like that and that'll be the name brand and let's say that's like $125 then we'll be a Chinese kind of just no no straight from the manufacturer and it will have a brand but it's brand you ever heard of, I'm in it is clearly in a clearly a Chinese brand so it'll be Brand X and it'll be. $30 Lynnwood Amazon will do as that's a big Golf Mill kind of split the middle so somewhere in that 60 to $70 is were there and check their private label. And it will it will have a much more kind of now it feels Amazon it feels like it's backed up by Amazon Prime exclusive, doesn't exactly say Amazon all the time so like to have one Franklin and Tremont some kind of sounds like was at Johnson and Murphy so that Franklin and treatment which is men's dress shoes and that that will be in that 60 to $80 great show. [32:18] And asked me to hell, why how do they decide where to do this and what I've heard from folks is its data driven so they can actually know their database gotten smart enough where it will go identify, and balances between supply and demand so they'll see there's demand in men's dress shoes for an $80 shoe and they will go. Godin work with manufacturers and create what they think is a missing by looking at the data and put it out there so that's really you know. [32:49] Everyone in cpg in grocery stores does private label but I think the way Amazon is doing it is is pretty unique by for a couple reasons the way the way they're laying it in with the Chinese manufacturers going directly to Prime and those kinds of things. Jason: [33:03] Yeah and I think what's interesting is even you talk to release a few people and they they have you know they want to talk about Amazon private label strategy and I like to point out no no no no. Private label strategy it's a label strategy. [33:19] That way you know a lot of the traditional private label it's about like in all the same feature set at an alternate a price point. And you know a lot of these products like their they're targeting alternative price points not necessarily lower by the way in and they're they're optimizing features for that price point so you know these are. These are not just knock-off products of a national brand and Mini cases. And so you know and many of them they're putting marketing behind trying to build the brand and the most notable today of course this is Alexis is a total credible, billionaire brand that that Amazon has built and so. I wouldn't necessarily say there a great brand Building Company yet but they're getting consistently better and they're iterating and so I don't rule out the day that that's some of these apparel brands. You know how are legitimate brands on their own that that stand out and have customers that are interested in buying them. [34:22] I think I'm pretty interesting one you mentioned. [34:27] Amazon elements day I just got an email they have launched a vitamin D products so this is entering the nutrition space which is. Another space that I think. Their data has shown then there's an opportunity and right now it's an exclusive invite only products you have to apply to buy it which I did and I just got accepted and one of the novel features. Is it that they have sort of the Amazon Firefly x-ray technology built into their product packaging in so I haven't received the bottle yet but like when you ain't Amazon app. With your camera at these new bottles you get a ton of supplemental information about the product so it sort of. Enhanced virtual packaging for a for these products. Scot: [35:20] Yeah that's kind of a page out of the on this Playbook right but they. It's hard to put that all in a little vitamin bottles eyemagine that's kind of part of it is bye bye running out of real estate they can and it can be dynamic too I guess if they can. Jason: [35:35] Yeah and change it all the time and again it goes back to this in the old world where you printed the label on the package and that was your marketing and then that label lived on a Walmart show, that you know there was one approach but in this new world where it's coming in a cardboard box that that packaging plays a different role right like it's it's not the zero the first Moment of Truth for you anymore it's a post ownership experience that's most important on that bottle and so you know it's pretty interesting that Amazon is is obviously the first move there but I think a lot of what they do talk to the cpg companies about in their Summit, is a sort of moving in that direction. Scot: [36:16] And then the big news since shop talk I'll let you jump into that one. Jason: [36:22] Yep so we've been talking about this for a little while that that Amazon had another store concept it was under construction and they unveiled it last week. And it is called Amazon Fresh pick up. [36:35] Inside this is a extension of Amazon Fresh do you build a cart of products in in your app. [36:44] On Amazon Fresh and instead of having them delivered to your home. They are available at this Amazon fresh pickup location and you drive through what amounts to sort of a drive-through stall. [36:57] I'm at this location and someone comes out and puts the groceries that you ordered in the trunk of your car so you never have to get out of your car. You don't have to perfectly synchronized being home when the Amazon Fresh guy comes to your house so that you can get the milk and put in the refrigerator you go and pick it up from Amazon when you want. But it is a lot more convenient than having to shop and bag for all your groceries yourself. So we we talked in this show a lot that buy online pickup in-store is probably going to be the dominant model for digital Grocery and you know that that's one area where the traditional grocery stores have a big advantage over Amazon because they have a bunch of stores. Amazon doesn't I think what we're seeing here is Amazon's first generation answer to that problem. [37:43] I'm delayed open a store and the most notable thing I think we expected all of that we were curious whether you be able to walk in the store and buy anything which at the moment you can. But the big sword of fire across the customer experience is that they are implying a 15-minute guarantee. So 15 minutes after you quick check out on your mobile app your groceries can be ready to put in your trunk and so what that means is. You're just leaving your friend's house from dinner and you realize you need some stuff for breakfast in the morning, you know you can order it and likely swing by that the Amazon Fresh pick up location on your way home or you can remember at the end of soccer practice that you need some stuff. Order it on the soccer field and pick it up on your way home none of the other grocery pick-up have anything like a 15-minute guarantee like most of them don't have a guarantee, some of the best service levels are you have your groceries ready in an hour and much more typical is will have your groceries ready in like 4 or 5 hours and so. You know once again this is kind of like you know the industry shipped everything in one to two weeks and Amazon comes out and says will ship everything in 2 days. You know they're saying will do buy online pickup in-store but we'll do it in 15 minutes. Scot: [39:00] Yes the grocery I had like 3 questions for you so the first one of watch the video like 50 times the, it seems like it's very shoppable the store do you feel like actually go in and Shop or will it be restricted to just pick up area. Jason: [39:16] So I expected before they announced it that there would be some limited use cases of going into the storm shopping but might take from the video in the folks I've talked to is than this first generation that's not the intent that the that the inter the store is exclusively for, the merchandisers to do product picking and take the product out to your store, car so there is no get out of your car experience in the store at the moment is my understanding. Scot: [39:45] Looks like there's this kind of bank it's almost like a Sonic drive-thru where there's like, these Banks of places drive-through rights instead of this linear model that my grocery stores to have you going to parallel model and it looks like there's two 15 Lanes but that's interesting, that makes the scheduling kind of thing make more sense right because you get this window you go up there and that your understanding and. Jason: [40:13] Yeah are you want to serve customers and parallel Nazi really red so, the more of those pick up Windows like they're not windows but if you know you saw that the more of those Lanes you have the more simultaneous customers you can serve, oh I would suspect that there's not a fixed number of those lines I would suspect that that the number of lanes they offer is going to totally depend on the. The footprint of the site they have for the store and and you know that. Demand density in that in that go I would say that a bunch of the other grocery guys that have gotten serious about grocery pickup, do something similar so you go to the market where Walmart is doing grocery pick-up you will see like a big Bank of drive-thru stalls, that frankly was very similar to the the Amazon model but the big difference at the moment would be that that 15-minute guarantee. Scot: [41:08] Got it and then so no one else is close to that because my frustration is our local Harris Teeter offers it and, you know what you go through you carefully pick all your groceries and then it says oh I'm sorry this is like Friday and I'm getting my weekend groceries in it'll say we're sorry there's no slots open for the weekend your kids your Tuesday hot. Jason: [41:29] Yes so you've hit on a super sore subject most of the grocery pick-up have like two flies right like the window is too long so you you didn't. Do a big advance planning thing and you want to pick that up pretty soon after you ordered any Mini cases and so in very few of the grocery stores have a guarantee they have service levels they shoot for right like so. The shoot for that hour but they don't guarantee that our, I mean that's a problem but then the bigger usability problem that you just highlighted it is almost all of them won't tell you what the pickup window is until after you build the list and check out and so you don't find out that they can't meet your needs and till after you've invested a bunch of work with him which really, frustrated customers and makes customers mad. Scot: [42:16] How does Sohail how does Amazon get around that by just kind of saying I feel like the grocery store must they must want to know how much is in the car to know how much time so Amazon something. Jason: [42:29] Yeah I mean my assumption and it again it's not. 4 slice of the video implies that they can do it in 15 minutes it does not explicitly say they have a guarantee. And so at the moment it's for employees only somewhere to go store so we haven't actually gonna try it or even yet talk to someone that's been through it all I'll be back out in Seattle in a couple weeks an alternate logo, go stock the site and see what I can work but. If it's a true 15-minute guarantee then you know that puts all the onus on Amazon and it takes all the burden off of the customer right like you don't. You don't need to worry about if you know you're never going to get have to wait longer than 15 minutes so you just you just jump in order the stuff to do it. But we'll have to see to your point like if you can't know your pick up time until after you build your list then that really limits that utility. Scot: [43:26] Yeah so who do you think the main company is going to step up and kind of this are using people just aren't worried about it cuz he's just an experiment. Jason: [43:35] No I so I think the two people that are most worried about it have already been countering it before they want to store right like so I think I mean. That Walmart sells the most groceries of anyone in the country and they have. [43:52] Probably three or four hundred of these pickups tours and you know they do have quite a few that dedicated pickup locations, similar to the store that aren't even Walmart store and you know frankly if I showed you a picture of it and took the branding off you'd be hard-pressed to tell the Walmart pickup store apart from this Amazon Fresh pick up store so so you don't Walmart is certainly doing the play from their side, Kroger has now rolled out pick up in store to 400 stores Kroger's the largest. [44:23] Actual grocery retailer in the US and for Tampa Bay on your Harris Teeter Teeter is what is one of their brands. I think they were actually the first ones to do pick up I think they did pick up before trigger bottom but the. Both of those companies understand that that's going to this is going to be a huge use case they have to get it right in there both investing a lot of money along with Amazon you don't I think. Before Amazon watches store they wouldn't you know you would have said hey hear the things where Amazon has a huge advantage and and we have some huge advantages to we have 4000 stores are we have 2000 stores we have much bigger parking lots in all all of these sorts of things, you know I think the big the big fear here is. The Amazon recognizes the pickup is a significant opportunity in their opening a couple stores and. You going back to RR Prime now conversation. If these stores work well for Amazon and they they demonstrate customer demand that this is delightful experience for customers and frankly like I've seen a lot of evidence that customers really do like grocery pickup. [45:33] I think they could scale those store super quick right like I think they could either buy a retail and convert all that the that retail footprint into these pickup stores. Or you I think like they did with Amazon Prime now they could easily open $2,000 things in 12 months of if they decided that the market supported. Scot: [45:55] Yeah speaking of Amazon go there was some news there what's up what's going on with you. Jason: [46:00] Yep so you know they watched it last year in 2016 and it was for employees only and just supercoat reminder this is, the convenience store will you grab the items in you you walked out of the store and you don't have to check out or pay or do anything and artificial intelligence in the cameras in the store. Figure out what you took with you and charge you for it so it's just walk out technology hashtag jwalk. [46:24] So that was supposed to be for employees only last year and was supposed to open to the public early this year and as of now it's still hasn't opened and there is a lot of internal rumors that it's not going to open to the public for a while and the reason is, but they are struggling to support some of the edge cases and one of the biggest cases they're struggling as support, is apparently when they get more than about 20 people in that store the time they lose the capacity to accurately track all those people and their purchases. And so like you have a few people in that store and that the technology seems to work very well and you know again I can neither confirm or deny that I have myself been in the store and tried it and it worked quite well. But it's easy to imagine that that there's not an unlimited capacity to track people and so you know. Scaling could be one of the problem then so you know that the rumor is hey this is super interesting technology but it may be further away from. Being totally commercialized because they need to sell some of these these ads cases in this capability problems. Scot: [47:30] To get some computer problem or you think that 20 people the chances of being able to date they can't tell them apart if you think it's more. Jason: [47:38] I think it's both of those things I got like the number of people is just one of the edge cases they talk about other education as wife. I got it takes off his jacket when he's in the store or guy puts on a hat when he's in the store. And you know all of all of those things can be hard like as I pointed out in the fact this is kind of a mock store it's only three gondolas there's no blind spots in the store you're not allowed to use the restroom in the store you know how all these other things. I'm inside you don't from day one I looked at this and said hey this is totally cool technology. But I don't think we're going to see a fleet of these stores competing with 7-Eleven in the near term because it. [48:16] Even if you nail the experience in this little prototype with the three walls of Prada. [48:22] You're still a long way from being able to do it in a 7-Eleven and you're much for the way from doing it in a 200,000 square-foot Walmart store. So it's cool technology is you think we might see parts of that technology before we ever see the whole store so one thing is. Does cameras take perfect inventory and every retailer struggles to know what their inventory is every retail loses a ton of money because they have out of, they have soup in the back of the store in the store room but they're out of stuff on the shelf and customers are shopping for soup, and it takes 6 hours for a quick to notice that they're out of soup and they have to go get more and bring it out but with this technology you know exactly what your inventory is so it makes it better for buy online pickup in-store it makes it better for, showing your inventory to people that are pre shopping and don't want to drive to the store until they know you have it in stock and it makes it better for all these out of stocks and all these sort of other use cases so I think was on commercial that piece of the technology before they completely. Commercial ice JJ Watt. Scot: [49:25] Cool I'm picturing all these Amazon guys watching the security tapes and they're like who is this guy taking off his jacket look at this hat and like to juggling apples and I have a feeling that guy looks a lot like our very own retailgeek. Jason: [49:39] You you you do you don't even have to pick her if you go to the store in the far corner of the store like this the stores all windows and so you can actually see the back room with all the guys dressed in Orange, they're watching tablets and frankly that's that's exactly what they're doing they're helping, teach the machine the edge cases so it's not like they're the computer can follow you in there and it and they're replacing the computer with humans but what happens is when the machine gets it wrong a human. Audited and tells the computer what's right so the computer can get it right next time in and you you could watch those guys work if you stand in that corner. Scot: [50:17] Call Lisa friend told you. Jason: [50:21] You can see that from outside the store so. Scot: [50:23] Okay good. Jason: [50:27] Couple other little things I know we were burning on time but Amazon was pretty interesting new influencer program so that they've always had an affiliate program, where you know you can you can blog about stuff or put stuff on your social network and put a link in it and you'll get a commission on the sales on Amazon. And you know if anything they're tightening up that affiliate program and I think you know if you months ago that they will wear their commissions on a lot of stuff but they Now launch this bespoke influencer program which is targeted at. High-volume influencers and it gives them custom vanity urls, I think it rewards than more generously for sales and it's just it's an interesting invite-only program and the reason I say it's interesting is. The news influencers are really becoming the new product marketing vehicle so like in the old world what you generate product for demand for a product is you buy Super Bowl ad are you run a TV ad and you, you reached 30 million people in one shot now the way you generate demand for a product is, you know through these micro influencers in and finding the woman that that talks about the particular makeup style, that suits your product and getting her to blog about your product and put links in it and Amazon appears to really recognize that Trend in is building better tools to support that trend. Scot: [51:51] Yeah we've we've talked about them and if folks had a chance to listen to the coast program for example we talked about kind of the death of the the merchant King of the merchant Prince and forget all we got, and I. [52:03] Merchant Prince so this is this is you read about these influencers replacing and it's kind of Amazon saying yeah this is this is a thing. Jason: [52:13] Yep yep so that's interesting Amazon did the first drone delivery in the US last month so I thought that Mars space conference the Jeff Bezos was that, date they do it hurt some sunscreen and then I thought the first time they got FAA approval to do a commercial delivery in the US I think one that got a bunch of bugs this week is, did they stole the NFL deal from Twitter. Scot: [52:38] Yeah so the scoop there is last year Twitter bought the streaming rights for the Thursday night games I think there's four or five of these games the kind of itsfunneh, they didn't play out but there's notoriously that the running joke is the Thursday night games and up being like. The worst games out there because it's usually like the worst two teams in the league kind of think so. Jason: [53:02] I know you're talking about my team is on every Thursday night away. Scot: [53:05] Yes the Chargers and the I don't know all the Cleveland Browns. Jason: [53:13] Cleveland Browns we play the LA Chargers play the Cleveland Browns every Thursday. Scot: [53:17] Will guess what and now it's going to be on Amazon Prime and the Twitter deal never made sense to me and there was there some interesting scuttlebutt that you know to Twitter paid 10 million. And when they pay that a lot of news folks reported that folks are scratching your head, they knew any of the other people that been on this would be like Google with YouTube Amazon bit on that last year imagine with Facebook is now in the running for these things that you have a bit more and there was scratching your head why did Windows, Twitter didn't do much with it and now Amazon has won it this year and they're paying 50 million so 5x with Twitter page, obviously that's a lot of money and you know the people are kind of saying we'll why would they do that. And what's interesting is if you think about Amazon prime number one that Amazon has already announced it's going to be prime exclusive content. They have a lot of data on this so you know they've done another number of programs that driving program his name I can't remember you pray noticed. [54:19] And you know they've picked it up for these things and it brings in enough subscribers that have more than paid for itself so to do the math of this if you kind of think of, hundred dollars for Prime which is where Prime is right now you really only need about 50,000 new Prime members to come in and justify that $59 price tag, those are big numbers but when you have 65 million Prime people get another 50k actually isn't that. [54:45] Doesn't seem like that hurdle and I would imagine there's if you're an NFL fan you're sitting on the fence and, this is as you get access to your games and you get free shipping and all the other things that come along with prime so I imagine it'll actually be pretty lucrative for them and and possible so that's kind of a call I guess. The other thing I saw just quickly Amazon is really hurting a lot of customer service folks they announce they're going to hire 30,000 customer service reps, and they're doing a lot of customer service reps working from home, this is interesting we're hiring a customer service rep at my company spiffy actually interview the lady that had done this before, show you what Amazon does this they essentially they train you that give you an online training program on how to be a good front line customer service, person and then they just have some basic requirements for you to do this at home usually its high-speed internet desktop, or laptop that's higher end and then you need to get a mic with a headphone and a mic cept they actually tell you the ones that they recommend, and then, they actually will turn you on you know you you've been kind of run this program you check in and you're getting a customer service calls and then you log out and you get paid on kind of an hourly and ratings and and performance bases 3 inputs I found that fascinating and kind of funny, right after I talk to this lady Amazon announced that they were productize in this so anyone can use this functioning functionality now it's part of AWS. [56:20] And it's that this call center that lives in the cloud and it's called Amazon connect, and then before that they took another internal to over they have there and videoconferencing Build-Off AWS called Amazon Prime so Amazon is now kind of putting out these things and then release him to AWS which is which is itself. [56:41] A TBI system it is really kind of small Lego blocks to couldn't do anything with unless your developer and now they're actually kind of releasing these pretty robust applications on top of AWS, another quick one is the announcer opening yet another for Film It Center this was a million square feet in Virginia. And finally they made what's one of their bigger Acquisitions in a while and it's this Marketplace from the Middle East called so I think I'm saying that right Sou. Tube.com that started in the UAE and then, Calibre where it has like lots of countries in the Middle East that a cover so it covers Dubai Abu Dhabi Egypt Saudi Arabia Kuwait and Bahrain, there's it's rumored that this was a $659 acquisition of the company had raised, money at kind of north of a billion so she could have a bit of a Down Round but I think a good outcome for those folks there is some other really big Marketplace that's launching out of Saudi Arabia that has in a billions of dollars of investment, think it's this is kind of Amazon playing a little bit of defense and suit kind of thing on this is a good time to find a safe. Courtney storm I looked can't find the DMV for that but the Middle East is it your 50 million people, lots of opportunity there so so but interesting play on Amazon Amazon news day. [58:05] They also shut down I'm sure you saw this some Curious we think they should down Quincy.com the whole not just good you.com but the diapers and all the subs, things are weird news about this so they they shut it down because it wasn't profitable and but then several people, Channel each to the press that well we just had Amazon zigzag here at the annual kickoff which I imagine would be like, January I'm saying that you know where this path to profitability and we've had a profit month so a lot of people scratching their heads and so people reading the tea leaves there that this is some kind of a, Bezos messed around with Mark Lori who's over the founder of jet that's not Walmart not really sure I buy that but any thoughts from you on that. Jason: [58:51] Yeah I know I have the same thought as you I got I just don't think that. Did Jeff Bezos is going to screw around with a bunch of people's Alive's just to play a game and Mark Laurie right and you know there are people that are losing their jobs at Quincy. And I think there has to be a sound or business reason that they're moving away from it and I've heard the same rumors you that they haven't been profitable but that there, Basie profitability in 2017 so that that makes you scratch your head why they closed it and the ones out that occurs to me is. Did the Dave they vacillated back and forth on this idea of having all these separate URLs and. Distributor sort of Distributing there traffic across all those other URLs versus aggregating it all in the. Amazon property and I do think it's possible that in the early days they felt like Amazon wasn't a credible source for some of these these specific product niches and so having a dedicated. URL on a dedicated site made sense in there you know where moms that would want to join the. The diapers.com program that wouldn't want to be Amazon moms and you know that back then there was the SEO advantages to having diapers in the URL and all these sorts of things and I think I think of Donna way I think. I think. The Amazon bran is much bigger and stronger today and I just think Amazon may have decided that makes more sense to aggregate all the Shoppers on the Amazon platform and have him get access to all. [1:00:24] 400 million products and then it's just it's just not worth continuing to work hard to get quizzy to profitability when the core platform is going so well. Scot: [1:00:34] Yeah and I'm not sure they Consolidated the back in like some of the other things like they definitely have Zappos but I've never heard that they - Consolidated that I think it was still running out of a warehouse New Jersey and stuff so. Jason: [1:00:45] No I need all the employees for sure where New Jersey so I don't I don't I'm not certain about the tech. But I think that's true and the other thing I would just went out as I think all the employees that Mark Lord knows the web from Quincy he took from them long ago and they were to check which was also it would New Jersey show. Scot: [1:01:01] And they're all at Walmart now. Jason: [1:01:02] Yeah it just doesn't make sense that that that that Jeff is doing that for out of any malice for Mark. Scot: [1:01:09] Couple that was a heck of a lot Amazon news they've been busy busy little guys up there in Seattle any non Amazon news you want to hit here at the bottom of show. Jason: [1:01:19] Given time I think just a couple of things there continues to be that this mall again and talk like this, this is shaping up to be a really rough time to be in retail so, there are lots of early indicators that q1 sales for retail just going to be horrible across the board and that's really scary and we're just seeing announcement after announcement about you know retail orders that are. Taking these austerity measures and cutting stores and things like that and so you know, Payless's bankruptcy announcement you you add up all the announced clothes stores and it's over 2,500 stores that already been announced to close this year and we're only in April, last year the major retailers closed 1600 store so where. We're way ahead of last year's store closing and I'm sure we haven't seen the last of that I have a feeling after all the q1 earning reports that we're going to see a lot more negative news before it starts to turn around. Scot: [1:02:26] Yeah couple quick ones from me on the marketplace at so eBay was also shop talking that they had their see you again and when again I had, the head of advertising on my panel and you don't it's going to see eBay is not out of swinging pretty hard he made some political statements there was really excited about but they in the world e-commerce their big announcement was, and then but no you know I think the shop talk trucks I have done a really good job of getting people to announce things at the show that that's kind of. Makes it extra special worth going to so they announced at the show, two things essentially that you don't number one they have a new program where they're going to guarantee 3 day delivery on about 20 million items on eBay and they had a program called Fast and free, I was kind of like a loose kind of promised United it wasn't like. Primate you stuff in two days I was kind of this thing kinda gets to you usually on three days we think it will. Jason: [1:03:26] I get to you faster than other stuff. Scot: [1:03:28] Yes me that you kind of fast this is like, it into a launch and hasn't launched yet but you know at least the verbage from the executives is we're going to guarantee 3 day delivery on 29 items.. So that's good you know it's not 2 days but also you don't have to do it so it's free 3-day show, so that's interesting and then use the rest of his time to really talk a lot about machine learning and you're talking about how. If you were seller and you wanted to sell a widget you could take a picture that widget in the email recognize it and kind of say, hey Jason are you selling this podcast microphone and it looks like a roadie 200 and and no do you want to is that right and you want to spend list it for some pretty interesting things you know they're around morning and he pretty much said. You're not going to do machine learning now you're going to be if actually dead and three years when this is kind of the table Stakes so I agree with that, yeah he talked to some skeptical kind of long-term eBay kind of folks and you know the the Starkey kind of answer to that as well you know you go to eBay and search for something you can't find it why don't they put the machine on that part of the site so, yeah that that it is honeybaked continues to cut under invest in that part of the shopping experience so, they had some of the dishes they haven't really known as best I can tell taken root yet but they are working on it but it does feel like, some of the stuff they're doing is nibbling at the edges if you, if I'm what you're looking for so I'm a huge fan so I thought they came out swinging in an aggressive I just I just worry that they really need to prove that customer experience it Scot several iterations. [1:05:08] Not only Amazon but you know how many channel in and all the other players out, the last thing is so Amazon is been investing at this is kind of a backdoor more Amazon news I guess, I've been Amazon really know that they don't break out the numbers but, from all the data that's available like from comscore and things it seems like they're really true that market up there Bill, tennis centers of invested billions of dollars there they were to start up there that they were unicorns mean that over a billion dollar valuation Snapdeal and Flipkart, not news lot of rumors that those two guys are considering merging two kind of have a viable alternative Amazon so it's pretty interesting in in in of the only Market that Amazon is lost in his chinaware Alibaba, had a bit of a head start and Amazon couldn't you know it's a good country for Amazon but it's the one area where they're like number two or I could argue number 3 or 4 actually behind, attention JD show. [1:06:07] Amazon didn't like that and I think they've decided they're going to win an Indian this is a really ended Good indication that they they are. Even though there's some bureaucratic things where they can't do first party there they can only do third-party but they've they've launched FBA so it's a weird country it's it's, spa and third party but no first party but that model seems to be work

Kalara ruminates on the role that Ahrun Vadras has played in her life and the kindness he has done her. But is it just an act, or will he betray her too? The Merchant Prince has plans, none of which are anything Kalara would have ever anticipated.

As a young slave, Kalara learned the price of comfort and trust. Now, a whole new part of her life begins under the ownership of the eccentric Ahrun Vadras, a Merchant Prince of Nexus. What secrets is he hiding in his library that a young, rebellious mind can't resist?

Edmond Rostand's hit play Cyrano de Bergerac met an unexpected obstacle in 1898 -- a Chicago real estate developer who claimed that it plagiarized his own play. In this week's podcast we'll review the strange controversy and the surprising outcome of the lawsuit that followed. We'll also hear an update on the German author who popularized an American West that he had never seen and puzzle over a Civil War private who refuses to fight. Sources for our feature on Cyrano de Bergerac and The Merchant Prince of Cornville: "Gross-Rostand Controversy," in George Childs Kohn, New Encyclopedia of American Scandal, 2001. Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, 1897. Samuel Eberly Gross, The Merchant Prince of Cornville, 1896. Jay Pridmore, "Recalling 'Merchant Prince' of the 1880s," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 28, 1992. "Chronicle and Comment," The Bookman, November 1910. The Critic, February 1899, p. 116. "Samuel Gross's Cyrano," New York Times, June 1, 1902. "Rostand Indignant," The Pittsburgh Press, June 1, 1902. "Rostand's Champion," The Carroll Herald, June 4, 1902. "'Cyrano de Bergerac' a Plagiarism," Boston Evening Transcript, May 21, 1902. "The Law and the Nose," Pittsburgh Press, Sept. 10, 1902. "Dollar Is Spent," The Milwaukee Journal, Sept. 17, 1902. Listener mail: Wikipedia, Hadschi Halef Omar (retrieved July 8, 2015). Dschinghis Khan's disco song "Hadschi Halef Omar" is here. Translated lyrics are here. Listener Krisztián Vida sent links to some pages and a video on "American Indians" in Central Europe. Wikipedia, Emilio Salgari (retrieved July 8, 2015). This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Jackie Speir. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for listening!

We’re joined for Episode 51 by Margaret Staples, backend programmer extraordinaire on Brunelleschi: Age of Architects. She shares her experiences doing indie game dev, traveling to the Strangeloop conference, and meeting geeks celebs. We also talk about serial killers and Ed’s new job (obviously). This is our first episode released in stereo. The file size is larger, but man does it sound better. If you have any issues with playback, let us know. Big thanks to our new sponsor Offload.io!! It’s a great resurce for finding and sharing contracting work. Do these things! Check out our sponsors: Offload.io, Roave and WonderNetwork Follow us on Twitter here. Rate us on iTunes here Listen Download now (MP3, 53.9MB, 1:15:42) Links and Notes Margaret Staples' blog Margaret on Twitter Brunelleschi: Age of Architects Project backing page Merchant Prince Trade Wars Wizardry Strangeloop Strange Love Rich Hickey/Clojure Ed Gein Beyond The Mat Speakers page at TrueNorthPHP Ed’s new job

We’re pleased to announce episode 17 of our “Life After Trek” podcast, featuring Armin Shimerman. We've been looking forward to talking to Armin since we launched Life After Trek. He was a fantastic interview and a true class act. In this episode we talk in great detail about Armin's start in Hollywood, the stage, and dive deep into his past, present, and future work. For those of you who haven't heard, Armin is also an author. Penning not only a Deep Space Nine novel about his loveable Ferengi alter ego (The 34th Rule, available in ebook & paperback), but also a science fiction series called "The Merchant Prince" (available here). Armin is also working on a new film called the The Sublime and Beautiful, which we talked about last year, and is set to start filming this month. Also look for Armin in Melbourne Australia, June 30th through July 1st, at the OZ Comic Con as well as Creation Entertainment's Star Trek Convention Las Vegas August 9th through the 12th. If you're an Aussie Trek fan, be sure to make the trip to Melbourne. Not only will Armin be a guest, but Patrick Stewart, Life After Trek alumni Jeffrey Combs, and Daniel Stewart will be in attendance. We would like to thank Armin for setting aside time to chat with us. Like I said before, he was an absolute pleasure and we know that you fans out there are really going to enjoy this episode.