Podcasts about modiface

When Snapchat first tapped into the power of augmented reality circa 2015, no one understood how impactful it would be to the social media platform and the beauty industry. Snapchat's “Lens” feature was introduced in 2015. This feature, powered by augmented reality technology, allows users to change how they and the world around them look. But it wasn't until at least 2017 that the beauty industry started to catch up through independent providers like Modiface, which was later acquired by L'Oréal Group in 2018. To help further Snapchat's relationship with the beauty and fashion industries and promote its AR strategy, Snapchat hired Rajni Jacques, head of fashion and beauty partnerships at Snapchat, to lead the charge. Jacques joined the social media platform in April 2021 from her previous role as fashion director at Teen Vogue and Allure. Jacques has been in the editorial world for the last two decades, holding positions at InStyle, Glamour, Nylon, The Fader, Vibe and Honey.  Jacques sat down with Liz Flora, Glossy's West Coast correspondent and host of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, to chat about all things augmented reality, Gen Z and the ways both play into beauty. 

This is TRL Insights Blog, first published on the Mar .22nd 2021 in TRL Insights at www.t-renaissance.com Summary: Discover some latest innovations of beauty tech in China after MODIFACE, launched by brands groups like L'Oréal upon Lancôme and Vichy, etc.

The best way to chart a path forward is to understand the state of the industry and the possible changes that could occur in the near future. In business, that means keeping an eye on all of the trends in your industry, analyzing data collected by yourself or others, and letting the insights be your guide. One of the most popular places to find insights is through industry reports put together by large organizations that have access to billions of data points, which can be graphed out and analyzed on a deeper level. The Shopping Index is one of those reports. It is put out quarterly by Salesforce and it contains information about consumer behavior, shopping activity across numerous platforms, and a look into how different industries are performing. In one of the most recent Shopping Index reports, Salesforce collected information from more than one billion global shoppers in order to paint an accurate picture of what the world of ecommerce looks like. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we break down some of the key findings in the  report with the two people who helped put it together, Caila Schwartz and Ann Marie Aviles. Caila is the Senior Manager of Strategy and Insights, Retail and Consumer Goods at Salesforce and Ann Marie is the Senior Associate of Industry Strategy & Insights at Salesforce. So what’s ahead for the holiday season? How much of the consumer behavior adopted during the pandemic will stick around? And why do people stay loyal to a brand? Find out on this episode.Main Takeaways:Invest in the Basics, Not the New Shiny Object: Even if you have the coolest new technology and a unique website experience, if your customer gets to the point of purchase and sees you don’t have inventory or that delivery will take weeks, that customer is lost. Make sure you have the basics covered before you start bringing anything extra to your site. Come In, Stay Awhile: Past data has proven that when consumers adopt new digital behaviors, they tend to stick with that behavior. As every holiday season passes, and more people shop online, those customers are maintaining that online behavior long-term. Each holiday season can be viewed as a stepping stone in digital growth. The holiday season can create a new normal if you have a strategy to meet demand and then retain the consumer.Move to Mobile: In recent years, and especially during the pandemic, there has been a significant shift toward mobile and social shopping. As the number one driver of orders, mobile experiences should be a top priority for any business owner in the future.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie Postles:Welcome, welcome to our very first roundtable style episode. This is Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder of mission.org and your host of Up Next in Commerce. Today, we are chatting with Caila Schwartz and Ann Marie Aviles. Ladies, welcome to the show.Caila Schwartz:Thank you.Ann Marie:Thanks for having us.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, I'm excited. It should be interesting having a three person call, like I said, it's the first one. So we'll see where it goes. It'll be fun. So, Caila, can you first introduce yourself? Tell me a little bit about you and your role?Caila Schwartz:Yeah, so I'm Caila Schwartz. I've been with Salesforce for six years now. I am on the Industry Strategy and Insights team focusing on retail and consumer goods. And I am responsible for several initiatives throughout the year that our team puts out into market, which include our quarterly shopping index, as well as all of our holiday reporting. So really utilizing real shopping data to understand the consumer and help put together some insights that can help our customers make some strategic decisions.Stephanie Postles:Amazing. And Ann Marie, what about you? Tell me a little bit about your role?Ann Marie:Yeah, happy to. So I'm also on Caila's team, but I have a slightly different focus. So I've been at Salesforce for just about a year and a half now by the way of Forrester research. So my background is definitely in research. And so I'd like to think of the shopping index as a fine line and I provide the cheese and the consumer perspective on what their priorities are, how their habits are changing through a lot of in depth research work.Stephanie Postles:Amazing. So that's a good place to start, then I really want to dive deep into the shopping index. So maybe Ann Marie, if you want to start there telling me a little bit about how long is the shopping index been around? What is it? And how can a customer or any shop owner use the shopping index to further their business?Ann Marie:Sure. So for this one, I think Caila, since she actually created the shopping index would be the perfect person to describe its origin story.Stephanie Postles:Perfect, Caila, take it away.Caila Schwartz:Thank you, Ann Marie. Well, I can't claim the genius behind it because it was actually created by someone much smarter than myself, a several, several years ago. I would say about maybe its seven years ago. So we've been publishing, like I said, the shopping index quarterly for the past ... I want to say six or seven years. So it's one of our longest running assets. I inherited it about four years ago. And it came out of a project or initiative to understand the consumer. And back in the day we were from the Demandware. So I worked for Demandware, before I got acquired by Salesforce, and we had access to all of this data from our platform.Caila Schwartz:And internally, we started asking questions about how we could potentially use this data to help give insights to our customers on consumer behavior. And the shopping index was born. So it's really become the bedrock piece of content that helps us start to ask questions that then lead to a lot of these other great pieces of content and research that we do. So like I said, it's our longest running asset. But as far as how consumers or customers are using it, it really is a benchmarking tool. And it's meant to be like a sounding board.Caila Schwartz:How are you performing against your peers? Is there opportunity for improvement? And using it as a way to uncover some of those questions for customers, about their business, and areas that they can focus on?Stephanie Postles:[inaudible 00:04:51]. That's a good point to go through what are some of the really key metrics that people find the most value in and maybe we can talk through maybe what Q2 look like. What are some of the things that people really rely on?Caila Schwartz:That's a great question. I think it really depends on the individual business and what their unique challenges are. I know that right now, everyone's experiencing some really big searches in digital activity on their websites. So the biggest question that we have right now is, is this normal? Am I doing well, compared to my competitors? Am I not doing as well? So, bringing it back to those core metrics around traffic growth, spend growth, conversion rates. So really bringing it back to the basics almost, of understanding and getting really a basic understanding of performance compared to the market.Stephanie Postles:Yes, this report sounds awesome. I'm looking through it right now, it looks like it's in a really cool Tableau dashboard, which is really fun, and easy to digest. Some of the things that I'm looking at now are when it comes to computer and mobile growth, it seems like ... now it seems obvious, but a lot of people have shifted to mobile, but then maybe the cart abandonment piece has not increased as much, maybe if you can talk a little bit about that. I'm trying to think if I'm a shop owner, and right now all my traffic has been on desktop, and now it's shifted in to mobile, but then I'm not able to convert the customers as well. What are you seeing behind that data to maybe help with that piece?Caila Schwartz:Yeah. In an example like that, where we can break it down by device and say, "Hey, we're seeing a lot of traffic coming from mobile, but it's not converting as well." Mobile traffic is up, traffic overall is up. The conversion is far down, or looking at your add To cart rate or your cart abandonment rate to see, are consumers getting to that cart? And are they finishing that checkout process? So, trying to identify those points of friction within the shopping journey, using this data, and so if we see that there's a high level of cart abandonments, or checkout abandonment, that would lead me to believe that there's something about that checkout experience that isn't ideal. And we see that, especially on mobile.Caila Schwartz:The mobile shopping experience, at least the checkout experience it's come a long way in recent years, but the whole tapping in all of your little form fields on your mobile device is really cumbersome. And so, thinking about ways to flatten that funnel through mobile wallets, whether it's through Pay Pal, or Apple Pay, or Google pay. So those are some of the ways that a shop owner could utilize that data to see, okay, where are the points of friction within that shopping journey? And mobile is the number one driver of traffic and orders. And we've seen over the past several years mobile really accelerate as the number one device for consumers.Caila Schwartz:So as a business owner, if you're thinking about what device to prioritize, creating a great mobile experience is going to be the top of your priority list. But what's interesting about 2020 is that even though we're still seeing this massive shift to mobile, which we still are, computers have actually had a resurgence. And it really highlights the need to have a great experience across all of your touchpoints. So even if you're focusing on mobile, you have to think about providing a great experience, no matter where the consumer chooses to engage with you. And I think that's something that is really easy to forget, because sometimes you can get so hyper focused on one particular device or channel or tactic, and it really is about the big picture.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, I completely agree. I can also see some of these ... like you said, these are things that you can benchmark your business against, and it would give me peace of mind anyways, if I could say, "What is the average?" And it's nice that on your [inaudible] report, you have it, or you can select it by vertical. So I was just looking at a footwear vertical because we've had Puma and Little Burgundy shoes on and being able to see what is the average order value and the discount rate that other people are offering and the cart abandonment like, "Oh, okay, maybe 80 something percent is actually has always been normal, so what can I do to become better than that?" Or if I'm worse than that, at least I know what the average is. So it seems like you could not only give peace of mind, but then also see areas where a shop owner could improve, which is great.Caila Schwartz:Exactly. Remember, these are just averages so and there's people that are doing better, there's people that are doing worse. So where do you stand amongst that? And then where are those opportunities for improvement?Stephanie Postles:Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the social traffic data you guys collect? Because I'm looking at that now, and it shows the social traffic share increasing by mobile. And I think I know what that means, but maybe detail that a bit so I can see what the opportunity is, by that share increasing?Caila Schwartz:Yeah. So our social data that we collect is coming from the social referral data. So data from a social platform, whether it's Instagram, or Facebook, or Pinterest, any channel that's directing traffic to an ecommerce website, as a referral. It's also paid in organic. So we're collecting that visit data and we're looking at it through the lens of, okay, is this social referral from a mobile device, is it from a computer? And then we look at it overall. And then the percentages within that chart are looking at the share of traffic, against all other sources of traffic. So if it says, 10% of mobile traffic, or 10% social share for mobile devices, that means that 10% of all mobile traffic came from a social referral channel.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, that makes sense. We've actually heard that theme, quite a bit from many previous guests, where they're talking about the social shopping experience and how they're relying on influencers, and how, of course, there's a lot of platforms Instagram, TikTok that people are looking at right now. But that seems like if a shop is not playing there or a brand is not there, you should probably be there, because it's rising.Caila Schwartz:Oh, totally. And Ann Marie can really go into more detail on this, but in our snapshot series, research, we did some research on just the different types of pieces of content that consumers are engaged with, and I know social was right up there. Ann Marie, can you elaborate on what you guys found from that?Ann Marie:Totally. Yeah, happy to. So you're totally right. Social is the talk of the town right now. Typically, we see social referred traffic hit around 9-10% around the holidays, which is when you see all of those peak online numbers. But now that's just the usual during quarantine times when everybody's IRL lives have been pushed online. And through the snapshot research series that we did, where we surveyed thousands of consumers every two weeks to see how their shopping habits were changing, how their emotional states were changing over time. And we found that since the onset of the pandemic, 63% of US millennials, said they had made a purchase over social media.Ann Marie:So it's really turning into ... we like to call it the mall of the 21st century because social media platforms are where you can congregate with your friends, you can chat and you can discover new artists and new products. So as you called out before, we're seeing Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all definitely cash in with awesome new features, which just continues fueling the fire. The easier it is to sign up for a product drop, or learn about a new makeup line, the more consumers flock to it, and then the more innovation these companies provide on the back end. So it really is exciting.Stephanie Postles:That's great. Are there any new channels that you guys saw popping up that maybe others wouldn't be aware of right now?Ann Marie:So one big trend that we're seeing, explode over in Asia was shoppable videos. So during the pandemic, I love this example because it was so wild to me. Rural farmers started live streaming their different produce because they no longer had access to things like farmers markets. And I believe the stat now is on ... In Taobao, we have over 50,000 rural farmers that will sell their different fruits and vegetables and produce to an online audience that will just see the video and immediately click tap and make the purchase. We even saw that Shanghai did their fashion week, all online where you could stream models coming down the runway, and immediately say, I definitely want that dress or those shoes and make the purchase in real time.Stephanie Postles:That's great. What platform was that, where you can actually click and make [inaudible 00:15:25]? Because I still feel like there's a bit of friction on some of the social platforms that I use anyways, that it's not always very easy to buy, I'm even thinking about Instagram, I follow a bunch of influencers, and they talked about the outfits but then you have to go to a different app to maybe find it, and then it opens up again in a different browser. And it's like, oh, my gosh, I don't even remember what I was looking for. So is there a different app? Maybe [inaudible] they're using it makes it more frictionless.Ann Marie:Totally. Yeah. So in China, it's all about Taobao. But in the US, we're starting to see tech companies make investments there. So Snapchat is now launching a bunch of shoppable like video series, where they will announce new product drops, and you can buy it in app. I know, Google has something in the works called Shoploop. And a couple other tech companies are starting to release new programs so that in the US or in Canada, we'll be able to have a more seamless experience. Because you're totally right. It feels like a webpage hopscotch where you just want to learn more about one product, and then you get rerouted, four different times, definitely not optimal.Stephanie Postles:And it's out of stock. Lop off.Ann Marie:Yeah. Don't get me started.Stephanie Postles:So with all these new tech investments that are being made, and a lot the larger players are investing in this area, is there anything that a brand can do to start preparing for this, either with their tech stack, or just making sure that they're ready when Google comes out with their new technology that can maybe be implemented? What should a brand be doing right now to prepare for this?Ann Marie:Totally. So I think one getting a sense of your audience and what they want. It's a very basic statement, but maybe you don't need to be the earliest adopter on this technology if your consumers aren't streaming as much videos. But I would say the most important thing is just one, you alluded to it earlier, but making sure you have a really solid set of ideas about what products you actually have, inventory and fulfillment, if this huge journey is just going to end up in an out of stock. That's a really bad experience. So I would say that before launching into shoppable videos, make sure you have a handle on the basics. And that's a huge issue we're seeing with fulfillment period, where stores are having a hard time getting a sense of where their inventory even is. Is it locked in a warehouse? Is that in a store, do they have it available? So I would say, step one, just make sure you have a solid order management system, a good handle on where your inventory is, and how you can access it before moving further down the road.Stephanie Postles:So if your inventory is a mess right now, and you're still like, this company is like, "Oh, man, I don't even know what to do, my retail store closed down." And like you mentioned, it's probably in a warehouse somewhere, but how much do I have? Our team hasn't been able to go there in a while. How would you recommend them starting from scratch right now to start building a good inventory system where they can tap into that, know what they have and not have out of stock issues that I have actually been seeing a ton recently?Caila Schwartz:That is a great question. I think it really first starts with a great order management system. And being able to share information across multiple systems. So thinking about data integration, and not having any data siloed of any one system and then implementing processes and procedures to make sure that you have the stock available in your stores, and then you have your emergency stock set up so that you're not servicing inventory visibility on the website that isn't truly there. When we think about the holiday season, inventory is a huge player because ... and a huge topic of conversation because fulfillment is going to be such a challenge, last mile delivery is going to be such a challenge. There's such a huge shift to digital. There's a huge shift in B2C parcel delivery right now.Caila Schwartz:The system is overloaded. So how does a brand or retailer get packages to consumers when they don't even know if they can rely on traditional parcel delivery? So thinking about moving inventory closest to the source of demand. And that's really all about utilizing your data, understanding where that demand lies, and getting it there and in order to facilitate shipping from store or fulfilling from store, and all of those things, or utilizing some of these newer tactics like crowdsourcing, Uber and Lyft, to deliver packages. So it really comes down to having a really great system, forecasting your demand, and not just forecasting your demand or forecasting where your demand is going to be, and making sure you put your inventory there. And making sure that all of your systems are able to communicate with each other so that you can have a really well rounded view of your customer, your organization and what steps you need.Caila Schwartz:You can then use that information to understand what necessary steps you need to do to get your business to where it needs to be in terms of inventory management.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, I love that. It seems like there's definitely a lot of room for companies to look at their back end processes. I know we were we had a previous guest on the show that was talking about every order that comes in it has the rules behind the scene that say, "Okay, you're calling or you're buying from California, so pull from the warehouse in San Francisco. Or you're in Maryland pull from the D.C. one." And I had all that setup in the back end, but they had just recently implemented that. And it hadn't been something they had before. I'm like, "Wow, that's really smart. Why doesn't every company have that?" Because why would you ship something across the country if you could pull from a store or a warehouses that's right near that customer?Caila Schwartz:Exactly.Stephanie Postles:The other thing I was looking at right now was the average order value. And I was surprised to see on average that it had decreased in Q2 2020. And I guess I was a little bit surprised by that. Because I hear everyone's moving online, and people were buying a lot of new things that maybe they hadn't bought before, whether it's around toys and home improvement. There's a lot of new needs have sprung up when everyone's at home right now. So can you walk me through a bit about why the average order value went down in Q2?Caila Schwartz:Yeah, I think that what we saw in Q2, we saw massive growth in digital spend. So 71% year over year growth in actual spend. So people were buying more, or buying more online. What's interesting about AOV, its average order value per order. What we saw, at least in terms of consumer behavior in Q2 was a shift to ... Yes, there was the essential purchasing, which happened in March. But in Q2, we saw a shift towards non essential purchasing. And so there was this cup for purchases.Stephanie Postles:That was on me.Caila Schwartz:Yeah.Stephanie Postles:I want a new make up, I don't know why. I don't go anywhere, but I want it now.Caila Schwartz:Exactly. So, I probably have a package coming every day from Amazon, like "Oh, look at this cool new contraption. Let's try it out."Stephanie Postles:[inaudible] the dopamine now, we can't go in and see people and have fun conversations. So we just want a new package every day.Caila Schwartz:Exactly. So I think that what we saw this decrease in average order value is really a function of people just placing a quick hit order, a satisfying psychological needs to ... just seeing like, your Amazon guy or your UPS deliverer show up was like, "So exciting."Stephanie Postles:Yeah. Hi, friends, how you doing?Caila Schwartz:Exactly. So I think there is a component of that. And so I think when people are ordering more frequently, or average order value tends to be lower. Also, what we do know is that average order value on phones tends to be lower. And so we saw significant increase in mobile orders, like I said before, makes up the majority of orders by device, when we look at it compared to computers and tablets. So consumers are likely not doing a big shopping list on their phones, they're watching TV and scrolling their social feeds and buying. So I think that was a function of that type of behavior. And that's why [inaudible] probably dipped a little bit in Q2.Stephanie Postles:Got it.Ann Marie:But I will say that we might expect this to change too because the reality is very similar to you both where I'll have a different package coming in every day. But that's incredibly expensive for retailers, if you think about all those shipping costs, and then layer on the fact that a lot of logistics companies are ramping up their prices for the holiday season. So I think increasingly we're going to see retailers implement more bundling, or just higher minimums, to make it worth all of those shipping fees. So we're watching their numbers closely to see, of course for the holiday season next quarter and the quarter after that, how the average order value does evolve over time.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, that's really interesting thinking about a lot of people right now do want things, even if they're smaller and are starting to get used to that two day shipping and free shipping, I know at least myself want to go somewhere. And it's like, pretty high order value to get free shipping, and like, sometimes I'll just like give up and go look somewhere else. So it seems like there's an interesting balancing act between making sure that you're running a business in a profitable way, and that you're figuring out how to ship things and not just shipping these little one off things here and there, but then also not scaring away your customer to where they come in and they're like, "Whoa, $75 minimum before free shipping." I don't know, that's too much.Stephanie Postles:Another thing I wanted to, anyway, maybe you can touch on a bit more is the snapshot series you were mentioning. You talked about how you were getting a read on consumers every two weeks, but I didn't hear too many details around what you were actually seeing now versus maybe even a couple months ago or last year, like what are the biggest changes that you've seen among consumer buying behavior and sentiment?Ann Marie:Sure, yeah. I think some of the biggest jumps were, So a couple of things we were tracking was adoption of new shopping habits. And so it's no surprise to hear that curbside pickup or buy online pick up in store rocketed up in popularity alongside contact, plus payments. But it was really great to see numbers to those statements. So in the initial weeks of the pandemic, we saw curbside pickup grow, I think it was close to 38% in popularity as entirely new categories of shoppers, I'm thinking my older parents were trying these new means of getting the essentials home. But another really cool thing that we tracked and we saw evolve over the course of the pandemic itself too, which is priorities. So one of the questions we were asking and tracking was when it comes to loyalty or how you choose which brands and retailers to purchase from, what are some of the most important factors?Ann Marie:And early on when we're hearing a lot about core years and unrest with certain brands and their shipping practices, and health concerns, one of the top priorities and be more loyal to a brand was how they were treating their employees. And over time, we saw that shift to a more, I would call it inventory focus and also accessibility focus, meaning that the number one reason to shop with a certain brand at the end of the day was, do they have everything I need in one place? Because those out of stock notifications were definitely driving everyone crazy.Stephanie Postles:So when you said how they were treating employees, what do you mean by that? Because when I walk into the store, I probably wouldn't know or when I'm looking at a e commerce shop, I don't think I would really know how they're treating their employees. Like I wouldn't have the nitty gritty. So what do you think people are looking for when they're looking for that metric to stay loyal to a brand?Ann Marie:Sure, yeah. So for that, it was employee health and wellness. So are they ensuring that people are wearing masks? Are the hours reasonable? It's not something that you would necessarily see [inaudible] aside from the mask when walking into a store, but there are a ton of news reports and of course, I won't name names here, but there are a lot of news reports about disgruntled employees having to work overtime or not having the same health benefits during the crisis and yet having extremely public facing roles if you think about in-store associates at a grocery store or a pharmacy. And so that was something that rubbed consumers the wrong way and did impact some purchasing habits. But over time really, that number one reason to be loyal to a new brand or website was about of course price, but really number one was availability and in stock.Stephanie Postles:Earlier you mentioned these new customers that are coming online and had been coming online the past couple months. How are you guys thinking about retaining those customers? Are they going to be here after the pandemic is over? Will these new shoppers still be wanting contactless delivery and being able to pick up curbside? Is this going to stay or do you think quite a few of them are going to revert back to their old habits?Caila Schwartz:Yeah, I can take this one on. We know from our research and looking at our data that whenever we see big spikes in digital adoption, which is historically typically seen in the holiday shopping season, but more specifically CyberWeek, we see huge rates of digital adoption during this weeks. And what we know is that when consumers adopt new digital behaviors, they tend to stick around. So every holiday season, we see a huge surge in that new digital shoppers. And at the end of every season, we see what we call a new digital baseline. So it's like a weird set of stairs, where digital spend, digital traffic is pretty flat for most of the year. And then during CyberWeek, it spikes way up. And then it starts to fall towards the end of the season. And then once we hit January 1, it spikes back down. But it never goes back down to the level that it was before CyberWeek.Caila Schwartz:So we see it's like a stepping stone or set of stairs. It just keeps creeping up after every CyberWeek. So what this tells us is that consumers are adopting behavior that they might not have otherwise adopted, if they had not been enticed to shop online. And they're shopping online because there's a lot of great deals online, there's a lot of incentives online, there's a reason to know no longer ... not say no longer, but people aren't lining up outside of their local stores at 5 am on Black Friday anymore. It's becoming less and less of a thing, because people can shop from anywhere all throughout CyberWeek and get great deals from the comfort of their homes.Caila Schwartz:And so what we know from that is that when consumers adopt new digital habits, they don't typically just go away. And yes, people will want to go back to the store, but the conveniences of curbside, especially for buying groceries and other types of goods are really going to ... I don't think we're going backwards, we saw buy online pick up in store search to really take hold last year and that was a non pandemic year. So I think that what's happening in 2020, none of this is going away and it's going to continue to ... it's not going to accelerate at the same pace, but people are still going to retain these behaviors that they've learned.Stephanie Postles:I think that's a really interesting point too when it comes to thinking about if a brand is starting to see that there may be having higher profitability when it comes to maybe mobile orders, or they're just seeing higher conversions or something, maybe giving the consumer an even bigger reason to shop a certain way so that they can retain them in the long term. Because it seems like once you get them there, then you've captured them on that platform. And if you have a platform that you prefer them to order on or a certain way to order, it seems like they might want to incentivize them to do that, even if it is having a slightly higher sale price or something to bring them there, so then they can have that customer longer term where they want them, if that makes sense.Caila Schwartz:Exactly. It's all about the entire customer journey too. It's not even just about that purchase, it's about thinking, how do you engage that consumer and provide them with great content? And that was something that we really saw come out of the pandemic through those Instagram Live sessions. You could take a class of the loo lemon superstar, like athlete, and do that live on your phone. How cool is that?Caila Schwartz:We saw these really great pieces of engagement that came out of it. And then not only that, but thinking about how you service that customer after the sale, and making sure that you're offering many different types of ways to resolve problems, whether it's through a self service type of a knowledge base, or live chat or bots to really like ... bots might seem impersonal but sometimes people just want to know like, where's my order? How do I return? And it's things that you can really offload easily so that you can focus on giving a really great personalized experience to some of your more challenging cases and so really thinking about retaining the customer after the sales, just thinking about the entire journey, recognizing that it's not linear, there's a lot of different paths and twists and turns that that shopper is taking, and continuing to be there for that customer and embedding yourself where they are.Stephanie Postles:Love that. Ann Marie, what were you going to hop in and say?Ann Marie:Just to wrap up the last statement in terms of, are people going back to normal? The reality is that, at least in the United States, plenty of states are re-opening. And we're seeing in the shopping index that instead of, there's this huge climb of hockey stick growth in terms of digital orders, but it's not going back to normal. It's not bell shaped at all. It's exactly as Caila described that leveling off in that step shape. And one question that we had asked earlier on in the pandemic is, do you think you'll go back to buying in person after all of this is over? And we found that at 60% of consumers said that they were likely to continue buying essential goods online [inaudible] subsided. So there's definitely a significant amount of stickiness there.Stephanie Postles:That's great. Were there any surprises in the data or anything maybe? I don't know if you guys ask long form questions or get answers in that format, but anything surprising, or funny or interesting, that you weren't expecting?Caila Schwartz:Ah, that's a good one. Ann Marie, do you have anything that surprised you?Ann Marie:It's funny how none of these trends are brand new, right? Like Caila mentioned, buy online pick up in store has been around, so has contactless purchases and buying online. It's really just the sheer acceleration of all of these habits that was mind blowing to actually see in the numbers. So our data set contains the clicks and taps of over a billion shoppers. And we saw that data set increased by 40%. So we saw 40% net new online shoppers since the pandemic. And so well, yes. We know that people obviously are doing more shopping online as their quarantine, it was really wild to quantify it in that way.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, that's great. Yeah, very interesting to see. So, I want you guys to predict the future now. So what are you thinking Q3 results are going to look like?Caila Schwartz:Well, we're digging into Q3 right now as we speak. So we just ended Q3 yesterday. So I don't have any updates to share yet. But looking at the data, initially, a few weeks ago, and seeing where we were, we're still we still see a massive acceleration to digital. And we saw huge, huge growth in Q2, we're seeing a little bit of a leveling off in Q3. I think it's a function of people just not shopping as much for back to school this year, because a lot of kids are home, and also waiting on a heavy promotion filled fall and winter.Caila Schwartz:The growth is still very significant, much greater than we typically see in Q3. And so while I don't know final numbers, I think we're going to see a lot of the trends that we saw in Q2 continue to shift into Q3.Stephanie Postles:That would be good to see. Ann Marie, anything to add?Ann Marie:One trend that I'm excited to continue tracking frankly for next quarter is just this embrace of social. So, not only are consumers really flocking to buy new products, signing up for product drops, but the flat platform forums themselves. And brands themselves are doing such cool things on different social media platforms. The other day, I saw Marc Jacobs was launching a new product, and they had this huge Zoom party and you could walk into different Zoom Rooms.Ann Marie:And one of them, you could get your portrait done over Zoom video. Yeah. And so they had a lot of great user generated content, because people were tweeting about their portraits and Charlotte Tilbury, which is a makeup brand, they're doing these free 10 minute makeup tutorials that you can have either over FaceTime, or they can just stream it as well to learn how to bedazzle your eye just because eye makeup is where it's at now that half of our faces are covered with masks. So, the creativity is something that I'm just amped to see especially as we gear up for the holiday.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, that's a really good reminder to figure out how to stand out like that, because there are a lot of creative things you can do, you just have to think differently about the platforms that you can utilize. So, that's really fun thinking about the Zoom Rooms. I also think it's interesting thing about how you can maybe leverage influencers and incentivize them to sell for you through these platforms. So like you're mentioning with the makeup videos, how can you have maybe people that you can tap into to do maybe one on one quick tutorials to people so they walk away with an experience that they're like, "wow, that was memorable. And I'm going to talk about it right afterwards," to get that UPC content.Ann Marie:Absolutely, yep. Influencers are a huge plan. We're seeing a lot of video views coming in from influencers more so than brands themselves. So it's definitely a powerful tool to rely on. A trusted advocate for your brand to draw people to your content.Stephanie Postles:Yeah, completely agree.Stephanie Postles:All right. Cool. I will jump into the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce commerce cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you both a question, and you have a minute or less to answer. But I should probably just give you 30 seconds or less to answer since there's two of you. Are you ready?Caila Schwartz:Yes. I hope so.Stephanie Postles:All right. Caila, I'll start with you. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Caila Schwartz:Oh, I'm going to say that fulfillment. Fulfillment, last mile will have the biggest impact on ecommerce.Stephanie Postles:All right, Ann Marie.Ann Marie:You know what? I was going to have the same answer. So definitely fulfillment and also continually improving that checkout flow make it as easy as possible to get shoppers from their daydream product to having it at home.Stephanie Postles:Yep, completely agree. All right, what's up next on your reading list? Ann Marie first.Ann Marie:Oh man, for commerce or in general?Stephanie Postles:In general.Ann Marie:Oh my goodness. So, I just started a new book called On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, which is the story of an immigrant moving to the US. And it's like a journey of self discovery. And it's really beautiful. So highly recommend.Stephanie Postles:I like that. That sounds good. I have to check it out. Caila, how about you?Caila Schwartz:I have two children. So my reading list these days consists of children's books.Stephanie Postles:[inaudible] there.Caila Schwartz:Pete The Cat is up next tonight.Stephanie Postles:I like it.Caila Schwartz:Oh, yeah. We're all booked with the cat.Stephanie Postles:I'll have to check that out. [inaudible] all about Max and Ruby over here. So I'm trying something new to get away from that.Caila Schwartz:Kitty Cat, it's like straight out of the 1970s. They use a lot of like, it's groovy.Stephanie Postles:Oh my God.Caila Schwartz:So, my four year old is running around saying, "It's groovy."Stephanie Postles:I like that. Bring it back.Caila Schwartz:Yeah.Stephanie Postles:[inaudible] turns back. That's good. What about commerce news? What kind of things do you all pay attention to stay on top of the trends other than internal research?Caila Schwartz:I'll go first. Say definitely there's a lot of commerce experts on Twitter. I love just scrolling through Twitter and seeing what the sentiment is and what people are talking about. It really gets a good pulse check on that to see what other industry leaders are thinking about. And I'm a data nerd, so I love reading through like e-marketer and statistics and seeing what the latest results are.Stephanie Postles:Great, Ann Marie.Ann Marie:Yeah, I would say, Twitter is a great curated view of what's hot. I love following Michelle Grant, Jason Goldberg, Brendon Witcher. But in addition to that, I do stay on top of a lot of the data, but I have a definite favorite newsletter and that's Retail Brew. It comes out a couple times a week, it's incredibly well written, really thought out, and it's not necessarily about being the first to report on a trend but they go really deep. So, it's a really great explanation to what's going on and why.Stephanie Postles:I like that. Yeah, a lot of people are ready to do newsjocky type of newsletters, and I like the ones that actually go deep on topic where I walk away and learn something from it.Ann Marie:Same. Absolutely.Stephanie Postles:What's Up next on your Netflix queue? Ann Marie first.Ann Marie:I would say I haven't been Netflixing. I've been trying to get away from the screens as much as possible.Stephanie Postles:That's good. That can be an answer. That's good. Caila, what about you?Caila Schwartz:Great question. So I recently heard of this on the radio this morning, actually, after dropping my kids off at daycare. There's this true crime series. I think it's called The Family Next Door.Stephanie Postles:Yeah.Caila Schwartz:Yeah, I heard it was really interesting and creepy. I'm going to try and convince my husband to watch that later.Stephanie Postles:What is your favorite ecommerce tool that you see people using or that you may be tested out a bit that you think is really impactful?Caila Schwartz:You want to go first Ann Marie?Ann Marie:Sure. Yeah, I would say I have a lot of fun with the AR like makeup try ons. I think they've come a long way. So big fan of L'Oreal's ModiFace. And also just Apple Pay. It sounds really nice. It could be able to just scan my finger and then just have everything be checked out and done with instead of filling out 100 different fields and messing up my zip code has made my life as a shopper much better.Stephanie Postles:That frictionless experience, just like you said, super important.Ann Marie:You have it.Stephanie Postles:What about you, Caila?Caila Schwartz:Yeah, I'm a big Apple Pay lover, because I do most of my shopping on my phone. So I love just being able to double tap and be on my merry way. And I have to go find my credit card hidden somewhere under the couches. But for me, I love them. So I am a terrible decorator. And so I get all my ideas from Instagram. So I love being able to use the searchable images. So you can search the image and they'll make recommendations. Wayfair has an app that does this. It'll pick out recommendations from your catalog based on the image that you put into the search box, and so I think that's so cool, because I've been able to find a lot of things that like, oh, where do you source this? How do you find this? Who carries this? So I think that's a really cool feature that I am totally loving these days.Stephanie Postles:I love that. Alright, and the last one, if we were to have a Caila and Anne Marie podcast, what would you both want to talk about? What would the show be about and who was your first guest be? This is where you have to collaborate a bit.Ann Marie:Oh, wow. Oh, boy, Caila should it be the highs and the lows of social media or what are you thinking? We have a lot of conversations about this.Stephanie Postles:Oh, it sounds like there's already one brewing behind then.Ann Marie:Always up to something.Caila Schwartz:I know, right? Yeah. We've definitely had a few rounds of the impact of social, positive and negative.Stephanie Postles:That would be a good one. And who would your guest be for that?Caila Schwartz:If we could have anybody?Stephanie Postles:Anyone.Caila Schwartz:Oh, man. Well, you could just go right to the top and get Mark Zuckerberg and ...Stephanie Postles:There you go. Yeah, why not? We'll get him on.Ann Marie:Let's do it.Caila Schwartz:Yeah c'mon.Stephanie Postles:I'm on the new show. I like it. That's a good one. Okay. But Ann Marie, this has been a very fun roundtable. Thank you for being my first guest to try this out with me. Where can people find out more about the shopping index and your work and the two of you?Caila Schwartz:Yeah, well, we are both on Twitter, where we publish all of our content. My handle is Caila Schwartz. I also launched an Instagram page. We're publishing all of this content as well. It's called Data_Candy, Data underscore Candy so you can follow along with me there. Ann Marie, what about you?Ann Marie:Sure. Twitter's a great place to find me @AviAnnMarie. So, A-V-I-A-N-N-M-A-R-I-E. And also check out Salesforce's blog, Caila and I are always writing up the what it means behind all of the data on the shopping index. So you could do a quick Google search for Caila Schwartz or Ann Marie Aviles at Salesforce blog to see the latest in commerce trends.Stephanie Postles:Love that. Thanks so much for joining.

As businesses are opening focused on a new normal, they are having to embrace innovation more than ever. In this week's Location Weekly, we discuss L’Oreal’s ModiFace working with Amazon for virtual cosmetics testing, Panasonic Lighting and Pointr teaming-up, BurgerKing gamifying lockdown Whoppers in Brazil and Facebook buying Mapillary. So, tune in to your favourite platform, watch/listen to the new podcast and let us know what you think!

What are the opportunities that exist in the men's cosmetics market, including some popular men's beauty products, and how are Gen-Z attitudes changing towards it?80s icons such as Boy George and Prince normalized the use of men's beauty products and opened the doors to what we're seeing today.  Now the  likes of Harry Styles and Jaden Smith are also seen frequently wearing makeup and supporting the use of beauty products. However, education in this area is still lacking in order to obtain wider adoption.In our latest episode, Ed Healy, Commercial Director at L'Oreal, discusses the shift in attitudes as he sees  a new digital and gender-neutral future for beauty. With over 10 years of experience in sales and marketing, Ed has worked with a range of companies, including luxury brands within L'Oreal UK, startups and iconic beauty giants.All opinions discussed on the podcast belong to Ed and does not represent those of L'Oreal.Sign up to our weekly Insider Briefing to get the latest industry news and exclusive market analysis here. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to unEDITED! Get in touch at unedited@edited.com if there's someone you think would be a great guest for our show too.

Berkly Foster is the creative director at ModiFace, a technology company recently acquired by L’Oréal Group that focuses on augmented reality and artificial intelligence technologies. For close to a decade she has been at the forefront of the beauty tech industry, leading the design of AR and AI innovations for industry-leading beauty brands. Her work has been recognized by the Clio Awards and featured by Apple. She is an expert UX/UI and has a passion for the convergence of design, beauty, and technology. We spoke to her about what kind of brands could benefit from AR technology, challenges in AR adoption, and what’s on the horizon for the beauty space. Like what you see? Subscribe to our newsletter and podcast. Here are highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity. L’Oreal’s goal for augmented reality “I think my goal is to just make things as seamless as possible. I can't give away all my secrets, but we're on the right track to making beauty more accessible and personalized for everyone. One of L'Oreal's sayings is “beauty for all,” and that really ties into what we're trying to do [with AR].” The beauty community’s receptiveness to AR “Beauty is inherently a very visual thing. Consumers have always been able to try a product on, see it in a mirror, and get those results. AR feels like a very natural next step for visualizing product results in a virtual mirror anytime, anywhere.” Subscribe to our newsletter and podcast for more compelling insights.

A Modiface, empresa especializada em realidade aumentada e em inteligência artificial da L'Oréal, vai permitir testar virtualmente batons na Amazon, nos EUA e no Japão. A experiência inclui produtos de todas as marcas de maquilhagem do universo L’Oréal e também de outras marcas. Saiba mais sobre inovação e nova economia em supertoast.pt.

  Jen, Annie and Lauren are joined by Renae Regehr of Free To Be Talks to discuss how to support our middle school kids in developing media literacy and better body image. Teaching kids to navigate social media and the messages about their bodies is so important. Learn what to say when you don’t know what to say and enjoy this stimulating conversation. What you’ll hear in this episode: How Free To Be Talks was born Which age groups responded best to the curriculum Embodied media literacy: what does it mean? Head knowledge vs lived experiences The blind spots we have about the impact of media messaging Helping our kids cultivate self-compassion Do you really need to have all the answers as a parent? Being vulnerable with our kids in an age appropriate way Role modelling for our kids Appearance-based compliments and the need to balance them Being mindful of the language we use to describe our children’s bodies Body acceptance: accepting our own bodies and those of our kids The subtext of unattainable beauty ideals Equipping our kids to separate their value as people from their social media metrics Finding validation from within Being mindful of how much of our identity is rooted in our appearance Healing body image issues in context, with the help of others Body diversity on social media, feeling seen and represented Maintaining perspective about the importance of our appearances Being judicious about how much mental energy we devote to our appearance   Resources: Free To Be Talks Hillary McBride podcast mothers daughters body image Sisters podcast Learn more about Balance365 Life here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Android so you never miss a new episode! Visit us on Facebook| Follow us on Instagram| Check us out on Pinterest Join our free Facebook group with over 40k women just like you! Did you enjoy the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play! It helps us get in front of new listeners so we can keep making great content. Discount code: Free2bbalanced Transcript Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life radio, a podcast that delivers honest conversations about food, fitness, weight, and wellness. I'm your host Annie Brees along with Jennifer Campbell and Lauren Koski. We are personal trainers, nutritionists and founders of Balance365. Together we coach thousands of women each day and are on a mission to help them feel healthy, happy, and confident in their bodies on their own terms. Join us here every week as we discuss hot topics pertaining to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing with amazing guests. Enjoy. Annie: Welcome to Balance365 Life radio. This is your host Annie Brees and today we are talking about middle schoolers and media. Media is reaching our youth younger and younger by the day. In fact, the average kid spends eight hours a day consuming media and it's one of the primary reasons as to why 40% of six to 12 year olds don't like who they are because of how they look. Negative body image, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders are on the rise, but thankfully women like Renae Regehr are taking action against that. Renae founded Free To Be Talks, a nonprofit organization that promotes positive body image which gives tools to youth, parents and educators to help them filter through media and develop their individual strengths. Through her MA of Counseling Psychology, Renae developed and tested a research based curriculum inside Free To Be and to date over 2,500 boys and girls have gone through the program. Renae is a registered clinical counselor and also contributing blogger for the Huffington Post and her work has been featured in Time, Darling, Good Men Project, Everyday Feminism and many more. On today's episode, Renae, Jen and I discuss three important points in helping middle school age children develop positive body image and if you listen to the very end, Renae shares a really special gift and opportunity with our listeners. I know you're going to love this episode. Enjoy Annie: Ladies, we have a full house today. Again, we have a special guest. Renee, welcome. How are you? Renae:  I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. Annie: I am so excited to have you here because Jen has just raved about everything that you're doing. Can you tell, how did you and Jen meet? Renae: We met, I believe, through mutual connections. Jen: Yeah. Through Hillary Mcbride who we've had on our podcast twice. And Hillary, I expressed to Hillary that I, you know, I do all this work and we have this worldwide audience, but I still feel my ultimate vision for my life is that I'm actually making an impact in my community where my children are growing up. And she said, "You have to meet Renae. She runs a nonprofit called Free To Be Talks. So I started following you on Instagram and then as soon, the next time you offered a training, I signed up. Renae: Yes. And there's been some changes since then and I can't wait to talk about them. Annie:  Renae, you are a registered clinical counselor. How did you get into this Free To Be Talks, like, how did that come about? Renae:  Oh, I feel like it's been like my life work, really. But when I was going through my master's, I developed a curriculum for a group class that I was running. And at the time I had a friend that was in the school system in my hometown and she said, you know, I want to run this program. And I said, "Okay, well I've developed this rudimentary curriculum, why don't we run this body image program together?" And so these grades six and seven girls volunteered on their lunch hour to be a part of this group. And it was so eye opening because not only did the same struggles that I had gone through when I was a teen, those things were coming up again for the girls but I would say there even more pressures that the girls were facing with the rise of social media and just different factors that were impacting them. Renae:  And so I went to my research supervisor at the time and I said, "This is what I'm doing. I'm running the program. Can I create this for my master's thesis?" And he said, "Well, if there's a problem in the literature, then yeah, go for it." So I said, "Okay, challenge accepted. And I dove deep into the research literature and I wanted to know, like, what had been done, what still needed to be done, what was helpful, what wasn't maybe so helpful. And then from there I emerged and with this new vision of okay, this is what's been helpful, this is what we need to do. And really from that, a couple of things. One was that we needed to move more from a pathology perspective. So not just focusing on what are problems with body image, but what do we do now that we know what these problems are like, what the "So what?" to this problem here? Renae: Where do we go from? And really utilizing them like a strengths perspective so we can deconstruct something but then we need to be able to build it back up again. And then the second thing with that is we need to include boys in this conversation and although boys have been included in this conversation, more so in the last five to 10 years, I would say, historically and previously body image has primarily been thought of as a girls issue. And so from that I approached my supervisor and I said, "Hey, this is what I found. There is definitely a need in healthy body image programs. And so I started to create Free To Be, and I actually ran with grade tens as my first group and did the analyses with them. And although the research showed that it was effective, just my clinical intuition and when I was running the program, it felt like I was doing a lot more intervention with the kids. Renae:  And even though they were receptive and you know, we had good conversations, we then ran it with grade six and sevens. And that was really where we hit the sweet spot because these issues were becoming so relevant to them. Their bodies were starting to change, their bodies were on their mind a lot more and they were really engaging with the material. And so from there it started to just take off and I realized, you know, I can't just keep this to myself. And that always had been my vision that I wanted to expand it beyond me. Years ago I actually had a blog and it was called Bigger Than My Voice because I wanted it to be bigger than me. And so from there after, as I was developing free to be, I realized I can make this bigger than me and I've had so many incredible women come around that have either identified with my story or have had kids that have impacted or they've had body image struggles when they were younger and they wanted to take it, run with it and teach the curriculum around North America now. So it's kind of like the short version of everything. Annie:  I love it because- Jen: I had my own goosebump moment. It's amazing. Like I would say grade six is when I started becoming aware of my body. Like everything happened a lot for me in grade six. It was like all of a sudden boys became very, like, a thing in my life and my body started changing and a lot of, and even other girls, their bodies were changing at a more rapid rate than mine. And I was like, "What's wrong with my body?" And you just, yeah, it's grade six was, yeah, a big year for me, personally. Renae:  Yeah. Grade six, grade six, grade seven. And because girls, you know, we develop earlier than boys, you know, there's a wide range of like when we're developing and our bodies are just so much more on our minds then. And so it makes sense that to be able to be armed with tools about, you know, what's going on around us, how is this impacting us? Could be, is so helpful to be like, "I'm not weird. I'm normal, this is normal. This is normal. What we're all going through." Jen: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing, Renae, is why I was so excited to find you is because we work with women and I like, I love working with them. I'm sure many of them are listening. I love working with them, but sometimes I start to feel like, "Oh," like I just, I feel like we're on the reactive side of, you know, building communities and treating, you know, this issue where I want it to be on the preventative. And I also wanted to be involved on the preventative side because I don't want to keep raising generations of women that just need treatment, right. Lauren:  Yeah. And I'll add to that too, like, because we work with women, we have them coming to us say, "Okay, how can I prevent this for my child? What can I do to be that preventative role model for them?" Renae:  And there's so much that parents can do. That is something that I've, that I always, when I went on, whenever we run the Free To Be program, there is a pamphlet that we hand out in the beginning and we always stress to teachers, to parents, to whoever's running the program, hand these out because these conversations that we are starting at school are so much more impactful if they can be continued at home and deepened at home and expanded at home because that's where so much learning occurs. Annie:  Absolutely. And something that I think we hear often in our community too is that women want to have these conversations or parents are obviously, we work pretty exclusively with women. They want to have these conversations with their girlfriends, with their kids, but they're so worried about if they're saying the right thing or not that they just don't say anything at all. Like, you know, "Okay, my daughter comes home and is asking about calories or someone called her fat or you know, she's being bullied or she's being picked on or she wants to lose weight or she wants to get a fitbit. I mean it's just these daily conversations that they're almost like, I'm so worried I'm going to say the wrong thing and they're gonna like permanently feel that type of way forever and ever. So it's really great to have you on here because I actually, I said, "Can you just give us the main talking points and kind of do's and don'ts about how we can help promote positive body image for middle schoolers?" Which is like your jam, right? Renae: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And even when you sent me that request in that talk, I was like, well, you know, we could just talk about it and where it goes because we literally could talk about this for hours and hours and hours. Annie: Absolutely. Renae: But that can just be overwhelming. So- Annie:  Yes. So you came back with three, which I appreciate. These are the three, like the, really, I'm guessing kind of the big rocks that you feel are really important. If you want a place to start, these would be three good areas to spend some effort or give some attention to, yeah? Renae: Yes. And even the way I structured those three, they are, we could talk about them in depth for a lot, a long time. And so do you want to go through them one by one? Or do you want me to sort of list them off? Annie: Yeah, well here, the first one that you listed off was develop embodied media literacy. Not just head knowledge, but experiences that help them know and experienced their bodies as good and powerful. Can you tell me what that means? Renae:  Okay. This has become a big one for me recently because I cannot tell you enough. I go do these talks. I do these presentations in addition to running Free To Be, and I will talk to kids or I'll talk to teenagers and they're so smart. They are very smart, they're savvy, they know what's going on. And so we'll talk about Photoshop, we'll talk about appearance pressures, we'll talk about things that are impacting about social media, how it can be used as a tool for good or as a tool that can, you know, be a portal into isolation or anxiety or this comparison trap that you get stuck in and they can be so articulate and their responses and yet then they'll tell me, "Yeah, this can really impact some people, but it doesn't impact me." Renae:  And that's just not how our brains work. What we are exposed to is going to impact us. Like, my brain isn't locked in some special fortress where I'm not impacted by the messages and ideas around me. And, so they can be critical of these messages or ideas and and yet they embody them at the same time. It was, I was struck so much by this realization a couple of months ago when I was chatting with a particular group of girls and this girl was telling me about all of these things, and here she was with fake eyelashes and embodying all the appearance ideals and on her phone on Instagram scrolling through things. And it's not that wanting to invest in your appearance or following beauty trends is bad or wrong or anything like that. It's the fact that there's this disconnect that we think that things impact other people but not us. Jen: 100% we see this all the time. I know exactly what you, they like, they know but they can't embody. There is just a total and I have been there so I get it like it's- Renae:  Yes and I get it because there's so many factors that are involved in creating our body image that go into our body image. And so I really started to stress this embodied media literacy because it's not just head knowledge. We can have head knowledge until we are blue in the face with, like, understanding something. But if we don't experience our bodies as good, as agents of power, as a place to connect with others, as something that is powerful, then a lot of the message is lost because our minds and our bodies are so connected and we need to be able to experience our bodies as good. Renae:  And so in presentations I never just talk and so much of Free to Be isn't just talking. It's experiencing your body as something that is good and moreover we're so much in relationship with others. So we need others. We need to have that experience where others experience us and we feel experienced. We receive the experience of being seen as good enough for who we are. And so there's so many things that we can do to get that embodied media literacy. But that's that embodied piece. And then the media literacy media literacy piece is really just helping them critically digest and understand like what is going on in the media around us and not just the media, like in our friends and in our family. Because all of these fears are so important because we ended up internalizing these messages ourselves and they become our narrative and the way we live our life. And so it's not just the media literacy, the critical digestion, it's also the embodiment piece that we need those two together so much.   Jen: So would you say, Hillary McBride talked about this in her first podcast with us because Hillary McBride experienced an eating disorder and actually she ended up in inpatient care and she talked about how she said her mom would tell her to eat her lunch at school, but she would come home and her mom's lunch would be uneaten in the fridge. And is that kind of what you're saying? Like it has to, we have to embody this message. Renae: Yes. I'm just trying to think about the best way to say this because it's, we can tell our kids that they are, you know, they're beautiful, they're wonderful til like tell it to the moon and back. We can say that to them over and over and over again. But if they don't see us also embodying the message, if they see us, you know, talking disparagingly to ourselves. If they see us, cook a delicious meal and then we serve them this wonderful food and then we're off in the corner just eating her salad and like restricting ourselves in what we're eating. Those, they're developing an inconsistent message about what they're about, messages about food, about their bodies. But they're learning also simultaneously that some things are good, some things are bad. And our parents model that behavior to us from such a young age. You know that from the comments that we make about, you know, "Oh, you're so beautiful," to what we eat, to how our clothes fit and we don't, I've got to stop right there for a second. We can, like, we can talk about each one those specifically- Jen: For ever and ever and ever and ever. Renae: Exactly but there is, our parents are so influential in how, in embodying and delivering this message and living and living this message. Yeah. Jen: Brene Brown talks about this quite a bit. She has a book called imperfect parenting that it is the only parenting book I will ever recommend to anybody. But she talks about what do you, you know, it is far more impactful to be self compassionate than to tell your kids they should be self compassionate. Renae:  Yes, because that outer voice becomes their voice. Jen: Absolutely. Renae: When they are, when you mess up as a parent and when I mess up as a parent because oh my goodness, I do mess up and I make mistakes or even simple things like I'm driving and I take the wrong turn, instead of being like, "Oh my goodness, I'm such an idiot" being like "Ah! Mistakes happen" and, or I mess up at home or I mess up doing something else. And you know, being able to repair and model that repairing and being able to model being disappointed, even with the actions that I've made. And doing that in a healthy way isn't a sign of weakness. I think it's a sign of being able to model a way of being because our emotions are, we all have emotions and they're fundamental to the way we live and experience life. Renae: And so if I can give my children the gift of, you know, this is how, these are healthy ways that you can experience sadness or anger or like those tough emotions that don't feel comfortable, then we are, I think that's a big gift to be able to give them. Jen: Totally. Renae: And so many body image issues, are tied to insecurities, feeling anxious, feeling not enough, feeling embarrassed, feeling shame. And nobody likes sitting with those. They're not, they're uncomfortable. And so learning to be able to sit with those as parents and model that, oh, it's such a gift and it's hard. Oh it's so hard. Jen: It's so hard. And I also, I was talking with one of our Balance365ers about this last week. She struggles with caring for herself, you know, being self caring and self compassionate. And I think that it's important to understand that, well, not understand, but just to note, it might not feel natural for us, especially if we were raised by somebody who was, you know, very hard on herself or hard on us. And I think that was pretty typical that our parents came from a place of shaming, right, to discipline. And Brene Brown talks in her book about how if you're a parent who, you know, didn't shame your kids, it's like you would be shamed for not shaming them. So it was just so that's how everybody parented. And so now we have this, these generations of people who really struggle with shame and there's an element that comes in as far as being self compassionate and self loving and more, having a positive body image things, a dialogue, I guess I should say. Jen:  There's such a thing as faking it til you make it right. Like, it might not feel natural, but, it's like, I just feel so strongly on the days when I just, I don't want to be self compassionate. I feel responsibility to be self compassionate for my children because I know they're watching and I never want them to question it or it to feel unnatural. I don't want them to struggle with the same things I did. And so I just sometimes don't have the energy to be kind to myself. It's just, it's in my nature to be really hard on myself. And I think, but I always have the energy for my kids and I just, I, yeah. So even when embodiment doesn't feel natural for me I feel like I feel this sense that I have to, you know, I have to for my children. And so yeah, I think a lot of people wait to take action on them. We hear this all the time in a self love sense, but they're waiting to be kind to themselves because they're waiting to learn to love themselves, but- Renae: They need feel that right. before they act on it, right, yeah, Jen: Right. But it comes from actions of self care. Renae: And it's the same thing that you would, we would tell a client that's struggling with depression. You don't wait to go for a walk. You don't wait to feel better til you go for a walk. You go for a walk and then you'll feel better. And it's the same thing with these acts of self compassion and it does feel foreign and we can validate that even in ourselves and be like, "Yeah, this feels really weird and uncomfortable but I'm still going to try it and I'm going to do it anyways because I know it's the right thing to do even if it is uncomfortable." And even as parents, you know, we want to be, we want to have shoulders that are big enough for our kids to know that, you know, they can come to us with their big emotions and our shoulders are big enough to handle and to help them to support them. Renae: So I think there's, you know, I like what you're articulating that with our kids we want to be able to model that and you know, being aware of who is the adult and who's the child. And yet at the same time being vulnerable to model what it's like to be disappointed or to be uncomfortable with yourself. I think that, I think that it's a tension that we have to, we have to grapple with and we have to, we may not always get that right perfectly, but it's something that there's no one way or the other way that we can go in order to have a healthy relationship, we need to be able to say, "Okay, you know, this is a hard day for me. I'm having a hard day. I don't have a lot of patience right now. And then whether we tell them the details, whether that's age appropriate or not is something else to consider that we need to be mindful of, you know, depending how old they are because we don't want to put them in a parental role. But at the same time, you know, if they're older than we, even when they're younger telling them, you know, "Mommy's having a hard day or I'm having a hard day. But I'm a big girl." My daughter's two. Jen: I'm a big girl. Renae: I'm a big girl and I can handle it. But just, you know, teaching that, that it's okay that even as adults we have hard days too. Annie: Yeah. Jen: Yeah. Annie:  I think that's beautiful. It's not, so what I hear you saying Renae is that it's not that you need to, like, be perfect all the time. It's that, like, there's power in expressing, like, "Hey, I'm struggling too or this is hard for me or this is difficult or I'm overwhelmed or I'm angry about this, but this is how I'm going to handle it or this is what I'm going to do about it, or this is my choice." And I think that's great because you know, I think there is pressure to feel like, especially when it comes in terms of body image, like I said at the beginning to say all the right things all the right time and like, to have all the answers and it's like, maybe you don't know, you know, like I don't, I don't know. How do you feel about that? What do you think? Jen:  Yeah, what do you think? Annie:  -can be a great answer. Just have a discussion. Like you don't have to like have this perfect like Brene Brown answer, Renae: Or even "Let's go find the answer together." Jen: Yeah. Annie: Yeah. Renae: Right. And, that being committed to finding an answer and to finding a solution, wanting to do that together in a way that's healthy and productive not only teaches that, you know, you don't have to have all the answers, but also how to problem solve and how to, find some answers and then to be, to, to be stuck is, we all get stuck sometimes and it sucks being stuck, stuck, stuck. And, and as a parent, you know, we really want to be able to provide that roadmap. Something that has been so helpful to me, even just not even as a therapist but as like a because I have three children and they're all very different in my son's eight months old. I have two year old daughter and an eight year old son and I have this idea of, you know, how I want my kids to be and I don't want them to struggle and I don't want them to have big problems in their life, like any parent. Renae: And yet then sometimes when I parent, I think of myself as a construction worker who, like, takes a two by four and I'm hammering together this house that I am creating. But that's totally not the way parenting works. Parenting is more like tending to a garden and it's a plot of land that has its own type of soil. Each soil is a bit different. Even when you move down the road, you know, slugs get in, there's different types of, there's amount of rain, like you have to tend to the garden and be attentive to the garden, but at the same time, the garden's going to grow the way the garden is going to grow. There's so many things that are out of your control as the gardener and as a parent. And so learning to work with that, it also, I think that can be so freeing as well too because we can have such good intentions and we can be, we can be so invested in our kids, but there is, like, there's so many things that, just our kids' genetics, the experiences that our kids are having in school, there's so many factors that are involved in developing their body image and just even developing who they are that we can't put all the weight solely on us as parents, as directing the course of, like, this is the way they're going to be because well, A, it's going to fail because they have free will and they're going to do it and they're going to, and they're going to do things that we don't like sometimes. Renae:  But they're also going to have their own minds and learning to cultivate that in the sense of thinking of ourselves as gardeners. To me, it's such a freeing way of thinking, freeing but also a huge element of responsibilities still in parenting and you know, realizing we don't have to be perfect parents but we have to be attentive and attuned and that's so much more, I think, gracious comes to my mind. Like we can be gracious with ourselves and we can even start that self compassion talk with ourselves too. Because sometimes our kids do things that we just, we just don't like. And it's, it's, we can, yeah, we can learn to be still present and attuned and still tend to the garden of our children. Jen: I think too, when you put, you know, when you have, you're trying to will your child to be a certain way and bringing it back to body image, what we have talked about in a previous podcast is sometimes the biggest hurdle for mothers and fathers as far as letting go and doing the things that we kind of know need to be done to help your child develop a healthy relationship with food comes down to accepting your child's body for what it is sometimes, you know, and that can be really a big hurdle for men and women and they come, you know, men, we all come with our own experiences. So for a woman who grew up being teased about her weight on the playground and that that becomes a wound and that wound goes festering her whole life. And then she has a daughter and starts from a very young age trying to control her daughter's food intake because she's so afraid of her daughter being fat and having that same experience that is such a hard thing to deal with. Jen:  But ultimately you have to, you know, our own body acceptance is one thing. But as a parent you have to accept your child's body as well for what it is. And it can just, it can be so tempting and some people just do it unconsciously trying to kind of control their child's body size. But ultimately I don't think you're doing your child any favors, you know, by trying to, will them into a certain body size so they don't get teased. You need to work on developing that resiliency at home and that positive body image and- Renae:  and a lot of that comes down to language as well, too. And learning to talk about our bodies in a way of like what is your body capable of doing and exercise is so important. Not even, like there's so many health benefits that you are all aware of for exercise from, you know, depression and anxiety and just in addition to just bodily health benefits and you know, for mental health benefits as well too. And but reframing exercise and reframing moving our bodies in a way not to reduce our shape or to change our weight, but rather to promote health because then we're moving from a place of not lack. We don't, we want to move to a place of fullness and not where we're changing our bodies to become smaller, to become, to reduce in size but rather to become more fully alive and more fully who we are. Renae:  And I think a lot of that even, so that's one thing that we can do just when we come to exercise. But then the other thing with exercise, because it is so important, and I also, I have parents talked to me about this as well, is that, you know, do things together and make it fun and make it a time of like bonding and where you're experiencing your body in new ways together. And I mean, and it doesn't have to be something like going for a hike or going for a swim, you can do some simple things like dancing or my kids are really little so even like wrestling. Jen:  Right. Renae:  Lots of things that we can do where we can, like, move our bodies in just, like, daily ways that are fun and active. Right? Jen:  Right. Yeah. Annie:  It looks a lot more like play, you know, than, which I think trips a lot of people up, a lot of parents up when they think about, you know, getting active as a family. It's like I don't, when we get asked to have a family, it's not like we're doing an aerobics youtube class, we're, like, we're running and we're playing, we're jumping, we're, you know- Renae:  Playing hockey, climbing trees. Like there's lots that you can do and it's about lifestyle, though. It's learning to experience your body in a way as like a lifestyle that is a vessel to adventure and voyage in the world. Annie:  Yeah. Kind of on that same note, you were on the tip of the iceberg there, Renae is, your second point is to be mindful of your language by cultivating all of who they are and you know that we focus on what we value. So we need to value and grow all parts of our kids, which I don't know where you are exactly where you were headed but what comes to mind is my dad has the best of intentions, but all the time "What a pretty girl, what a pretty-" like to my daughter, "What a strong boy. What a handsome boy." It's just all very appearance space. And there's definitely, you know, the stereotypical little boy, little girl comments that he always gives. And I'm like, "But we're more than that." Is that, is that what you meant? Renae:  Exactly. And it makes sense that, you know, in first impressions that we do focus on appearance because we necessarily know somebody and we can see the outward physical experience of who they are. So we, you know, it's easy to make why we would focus on that, but especially little girls from such a young age and even a little boys, you know, they're so cute or they're so adorable. If that's what we hear growing up time and time again, that is what we are going to value. You know, you think about the news, the news broadcasts, what's valuable, like, what's going on in the world, right? And so you hear it on every single news station and if every single news station is for our kids is highlighting their appearance, it's beautiful, it's wonderful, that's what they need to focus on. Renae: That's what the is going to become at the forefront of their attention and what they're going to need to invest in, what they're gonna need to pay attention to. And so I really become so mindful even more now having kids and especially like my friend's kids or kids that I meet just focusing on just finding anything that I can compliment that focuses on the intention of cultivating their entire personhood. So if my kids are playing Lego, "Oh my goodness, that's so creative in what you've made that took a lot of hard work" or "Wow, you're so, you're so smart in how you figured out this problem" and really trying to help them expand their awareness about all the things that they are capable of doing and to help them just expand their awareness but then just place value on that and speak into that into their life to know this is good. Renae:  There's so many qualities about you that are so good as well. And that can be hard to do in the beginning. Especially when you see somebody that you know, just meeting your friends' little daughter that you've just met for the first time or just haven't seen her in a long time and she's wearing a really cute dress that she got a really cute haircut and you're like, "Oh you're so cute." And I don't think it's bad. And I really don't think it's bad to say, "Oh, you're adorable." But I would say, like, for every one comment that you give that is appearance-focused, try to find a five to seven comments that are not appearance focused because we live in a highly appearance-focused culture from just the fact that we live on our screens so often. And so it's natural that our attention goes to that. Renae:  So being able to cultivate all those other qualities, that's kind of where I'm going with being mindful of our language because again, that external voice that we hear, we internalize that voice. I was just talking to my debt to my husband yesterday about language growing up and about our bodies and experiencing our bodies. And I said, when I was younger my dad always used to pat me on the back really firm, and then say "solid as a horse." I loved horses and it was such a compliment to me because it meant I was strong and I was capable and I, and that and that always stuck with me. And so there's fun ways that you can do that as well. But yeah, that's just something that kind of like stood up for me and these voices become our voices as we get older. Renae:  I grew up, we covered this in one of our podcasts where Annie interviewed me and my sister and, we grew up with very different body types and so, Annie interviewed us on our experience of this and I grew up with people commenting on my body my whole life, like how thin I was, and I just, it was always there, which really speaks more to the women around me, what was going through their heads, right, than anything to do with me. But I would say that contributed greatly to how I ended up developing my values as a woman, right, of what was important. And so I agree with you. I don't think there's anything wrong with commenting on someone's appearance or complimenting their experience, you know, but in context, like I love how you said, just really think about it in context of the world we live in. Like there's nothing wrong with telling a little girl she's pretty, or for me to tell Annie she looks beautiful today, but when you, yeah, when you put it in context of the world we live in, that's all we're acknowledging about women. And now we have a society full of women who are, you know, they're making themselves sick, trying to pursue appearance ideals that just aren't even healthy, right. Renae: And it makes sense though, why we are pursuing this because it's so much more than our appearance. So we live in this world where we have these images of these idealized beauty standards where women are, tend to be thin. You know, they have flawless skin, they have this, there's so many factors that are unattainable and that continues to shift, you know, depending on kind of what decade that we are in, but there's still ideals of the case. So this is what a woman looks like right now that, you know, she's considered the beauty standard, but it's not just that, it's this beauty standard. It's the subtext to that. It's this pairing of a beautiful ideal now, like an impossible ideal thanks to, you know, Facetune, Modiface or Perfect365 or any one of those apps or just Photoshop in general. So you have this impossible beauty ideal. But then you also have this, this pairing with love, acceptance, opportunities, mattering. All of these, these images are so closely tied to these deeper fundamental qualities that we all want as humans. We all want to matter. Jen: Yes. Success. Lovable. Connection. Renae:  Exactly. And so we're automatically lured in when we see an image like this or we see, we see something that, you know, even on social media, there's a reason that those numbers are there. Like Instagram didn't, or Snapchat didn't make these platforms and think, I wonder if someone's going to use these platforms. It was like, of course not. They know there's a reason why these likes these views, these metrics are there. Because we conflate that with value and we, equate that to mattering to being seen and we all want to be seen. Like that's, as humans, we're wired to be in connection with each other and so we need to acknowledge that it's complex and it makes sense why some of us, why a lot of us, why we strive to have this beauty ideal, but that's where it goes back to that media literacy and teaching kids about the subtext, about the deeper messages, about the deeper ideas of what's actually being depicted, about what actually is being shown here so that we can help them not only critically digest it but then invite experiences into their lives that are going to allow them to live a holistic life where they're not only thinking about their appearance or they're not only thinking about their, you know, their account following on whatever social media platform they're using because it's, it's a complicated issue and we need to, but they're smart and they can grapple with it from a young age and so we need to equip them from a young age because they're using these platforms from such a young age. Annie:  Which I think is a great segue into your third point, Renae, that you encourage parents to be mindful of how many reminders kids have of their appearance and clothing mirrors, cameras social media and how that shapes our value system. And I actually had that experience just the other day. I was thinking, like, I was just having a rough body image day, which, as it happens- Renae: It does happen, yeah. Annie:  And it was just like, it just seemed like I wanted to capture these photos, or these selfies with my kids, but like, I just couldn't, like, it was just there. It was just right in front of my face all the time. Like every time I opened up Instagram it was like, you know, do an insta story, but I didn't want to be in the photo, but I wanted the photo and it was just like, you know, and then, and even how seeing other people's appearance reminded me of my own as well. Renae:  Yes. Annie: Like it had nothing to do with it, but it was like, I mean, I used to do this, I used to struggle a lot with this when I really, really struggled with body image, probably about five, 10 years ago. It was really hard for me to see other beautiful women because it was just a reminder of all the ways I was feeling. I couldn't just separate the two. I couldn't just admire her attributes or features or traits or whatever, or even see her for more than just a physical thing. I just really struggled to get beyond that and it was somehow I made it into a reflection of all the ways I was lacking. And I would imagine that young girls and boys are dealing with that just as much, if not more with the rise of social media. Renae:  Yeah. And I think just to even springboard off what you're saying there, something that isn't necessarily the most popular opinion, but I think it's something that we do need to acknowledge and grapple with is that beauty is,, there are objective standards of kind of like what is a beautiful person? And I mean it's hourglass shape for women. It's hourglass shape, it's clear skin, it's like bright hair, it's white eyes. These are kind of universal standards of what a beautiful person is. And there's been a big push within the body positivity community and I think has been really well intentioned. But at the same time it's actually been perpetuating this obsession and this focus on our bodies because not people are not going to, like I said, it's been, not everybody is, you know, drop dead beautiful. They're just not. Because if we're all beautiful, then we're actually all average. Beauty is above average. Renae: And the problem with that though is that with hearing that is thinking that "Well, then I'm of lesser value." And that's not at all what I'm saying, and I'm not even talking about inner beauty, we all have inner beauty and because inner beauty is defined by a wide, wide range of like of attributes and characteristics and it's way more important. But this obsession with, you know, liking our bodies for everything that they are, you know, liking all our cellulite, liking every wrinkle, every stray hair, every whatever it is that perpetuates this value system where our focus stays on our bodies. And when we are scrolling on social media, unless you are following like dogs and panda bears or kitty cats, you're being focused on the body, that's just inevitably what's going on. And, so even as like for me as a body image researcher, I have to be so mindful of that. Jen:  And then even like living in Vancouver, I don't live in Vancouver but that's the closest big city that is where I live, Vancouver is world renowned for its architecture on glass, for example. And when what happens when you walk past a glass, like, a mirror, you see your reflection, you, like, check yourself out a little bit. That's just, it's natural. You don't want to feel, you don't need to feel bad about that. But what we do. But then again, it's just that it's that energy that goes back to our appearance. And I think something that we really, really have to be mindful of is that we have a finite amount of mental energy. We have an absolute finite amount of mental energy. And if that is being devoted to our appearance, whether that is good or bad, that is energy that is going elsewhere that cannot be focused on cultivating all aspects of who we are. And so I've really started to take that to heart in my own life. And even just the way even I manage Free To Be and I manage the social media and I manage just the experiences that I invite into my life because it impacts us. It just does. Jen:  The other thing is that we have this as one of our questions in our Balance365 Self Love Journal. So if you take who you are and break it down into a pie chart and if you are kind and funny and a really good friend, a very supportive partner, you know, if you just break it down and if each of those takes up 10% of who you are, who you are, who you consider yourself to be, and appearance is in there, because appearance is part of who we are. If that is 10% of who you are, then when you wake up in the morning with a huge zit or whatever, it doesn't destroy you. It's just a little bit of who you are and you can still function and move along. Or maybe you aren't considered the standard of beauty in our society, but it's just a little piece of who you are, your appearance. Jen:  But the problem is I feel like we have a society of women who were taught that their appearance is 80% of who they are. Renae:  Oh yeah. Jen: And so when they wake up in the morning with a zit, it just, it destroys them or whatever else is bothering them about their appearance. It destroys them and they can barely function in life because their body image is just so, so negative. Or if you have a bad body image day and knowing that your appearance is just a part of who you are, it can allow you to have a bad body image but still function where some people can't get out of bed in the morning when they're having a bad body image day and so really looking at all of who you are, which comes back to what were, you know you had said we need to start teaching our kids and complimenting them for the whole person that they are. Because when we are just complimenting on appearance or just talking about appearance or just scrolling social media and looking at other people's appearances we're starting to build this idea that women are their appearance and then it's just so, so, so then it just becomes, then of course if your parents are 75% of who you are, then 75% of your mental energy is going to go into trying to improve your appearance. But women are just, they are just so much more. Renae: We're so much more than that and yet we're that, that focus on it from such a young age goes to our appearances. So it makes sense that it's so hard to break out of those, like, corseted ideals that we, that we bind ourselves to because that is how we're reinforced and we can't be naive, like, we are, we are rewarded when, when we ascribe or when we try to follow them and let me qualify that, some of us are rewarded and, but we have to be very aware that, that, that power that we get from that that's super short lived. Because it's not true power if, you know, it's going to expire when you're 30 or when your appearance is going to change or if something happens to you. Like that's, we need to, we need to be grounded and centred for deeper things. But it makes sense why we would feel that way and yet we can also work towards then living life differently as well too. Annie:  I've found too, unapologetically, about going to therapy, but one of the things I'm learning is that like my true power comes from within. Like, it's not, I don't get my power from compliments or praise or affirmation or validation from, I don't, I don't get to like outsource my power. And I've tried that for many, many years. Like if they like me then I like me. If they think I'm pretty, then I'm pretty. If they like my work then it's valuable and that feels good in the short term. But it's ultimately not sustain. Like it doesn't fulfill me. And so turning inward, like, do I like me? Who am I? What do I value has been like way more worth my energy than like trying to look a certain way or do a certain thing so other people like me. Renae:  And at the same time, that's like, that's hard to do to put, like, our own beliefs and to put that under a microscope because that can be super uncomfortable to kind of shift away from the thinking that we have had because it does feel good. And then when you think about social media, just going to say one more thing about social media here, you then we are rewarded with those short term signals of those likes, thumbs up and all those things and those things do feel good. You do get, you know the dopamine, a neurotransmitter like dopamine, you get a little rushed and that feels good, but the problem is then we, that's what we ended up seeking more and more and more of that, those short term, the short term validations. And we don't end up doing that deeper work of like, who am I? Renae:  What do I stand for? What do I like? And at the same time living in that tension about acknowledging that our body image concerns don't develop in a vacuum. They develop in context with other people. And so it's going to be so important that we realize that our healing is also going to develop in context with other people where we're going to have to have experiences where people teach us that we are enough, that we are good just the way we are, that we don't have to change, that we aren't too much or too little of something. That healing also is going to have to occur in relationship because we are, we are so wired for relationship. And so it's a, although we want to have, you know, that internal locus of control, we also are dependent on others to be able to have that and also to be seen. Renae:  Cause we need to be seen, we need to matter. And that all happens in context with others. And so it's, I think sometimes I get frustrated when I walk on, when I scroll on social media and I see all these self love inspo quotes and it's, we're shortchanging ourselves because developing these issues didn't develop in isolation. And so healing these concerns isn't also gonna occur in isolation. I just don't, I think that you can find healing through groups on social media, but I'm always so wary of the system, you know, again, because we are rewarded for these likes and these comments and it pulls us and it's so, so powerful. So being able to have conversations like we're having right now where I can see your faces and I can see your expressions. I can see the way you're moving. It's so much more telling than, you know, just liking a post that you put online and it's way more healing and even embodying to be able to do this. And it takes, it's more holistic. It's part of, like, a whole personhood. And again, that goes back to the healing of who we are. Jen:  I wonder what your opinion is on, like, a lot body acceptance slash self love bloggers, influencers, whatever you want to call them. They post photos of themselves, their bodies, you know, in bikini or underwear and supposedly exposing these flaws, right? These "flaws." And people love it and I've heard there's larger organizations like Beauty Redefined talking about how, look if we're trying to acknowledge women as a whole person, we have to move past this constant, you know, barrage of women's bodies. Like if, you know, if you want to love the whole person then we have to look at the whole person. We just can't keep seeing women in bikinis or their underwear showing stretch marks and, I understand what they're saying, but I have to say that personally when I saw that shift start on social media, this is before we founded this company and everything, that was extremely healing for me to see other women's bodies that looked like mine. Like I remember the first time feeling like wanting to sob. Like there's other people out there that look like me. Renae:  Yes, absolutely and I do struggle with this because it's something that it's very, it's very healing to be, when you see yourself represented, you see, you see that as valuable. I think it is important that we do have a wide range of bodies that are out there. And my body has changed drastically after giving birth and being able to see other women's bodies out there, see stretch marks, see saggy boobs, see different things is normalizing and it and that speaks to that deeper issue of wanting to connect and be seen. Right? And we can feel shame when we carry these fears in isolation and we think that we're the only ones and there's just healing by feeling known. And so I think with those photos and that, those, this wider representation of bodies shown is helping a lot of us being known, be accepted. And that in and of itself is healing. And yet at the same time, I also hold the same viewpoint that we do need to move past. We do need to move past just focusing on women's bodies. But they're both incredibly important steps, I think you could say. Or just things that we need to acknowledge intentions that we need to work with. We just can't, we can't dismiss the one and say that it's not healing. Jen:  It's almost like a phase, you know, I had a phase where I was following any woman I could find who was showing her body because I just, I knew I wanted more and more and more of it because it was just so validating for me. Like I just, I felt a release. I felt this just, "Oh my gosh. There's other people out there that look like me" and, but now I feel like I'm in a different phase where I've sort of like, "Okay, yes, there are many other bodies that look like mine and bodies come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and I don't need that in my life as much anymore." Now it's like there's like a phase, I think. Like I feel like I'm on phase two at this point where I- Annie: I personally feel like, cause I feel the same, Jen, but I still post those photos because from time to time, because I do acknowledge that, like, I can acknowledge, like, I know that there's bodies come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but I also know that there's still so many women like you and me and Lauren, you know, five years ago that needed that photo. Jen:  Right. And I see it, I see when you do post pictures of your stomach, Annie, I see when when your stomach is visible in a post, you know, women appreciate it so much. They see this woman who is happy, who is powerful, who loves her body, and has, you know, positive body image and also, is unashamed of these parts of her body that our society- Annie: My humanness. Jen:  Humanness has told us is wrong. It's something that should be hidden. Something we should be trying to fix, something we should be deeply ashamed of. And so I still see it. I still see it because there's always new mothers coming. You know, sometimes we get disconnected almost from what a new mom experiences. And I look back and think, my goodness, the change in me from when I had my first 10 years ago to now like, I mean I thought my body was ruined. I thought I was an abomination after I had my first baby and I can't and I have to, I have to constantly remind myself that there are women who are feeling like that every single day because it's, you know, things have shifted for me. But I think we live in a world where there's more talk of body image today than there ever has been. Like 10 years ago, I feel like it wasn't even an option to love your postpartum body. It wasn't. Where now it's an option, but we still have to make women aware of it. Renae: I think that the tricky line or the line that we want to be aware of, especially from when I think about the research standpoint behind this is the objectification. So when I think sometimes of when I scroll through social media and I see photos of someone posing in a very objectifying pose and then they have this like liberating quote underneath, if you took away the quote and you just were to see the image for what it was, it can reinforce women as being objectified. And again, that's something that, and because we have limited mental energy when we are, when we objectify ourselves, we can internalize that voice. And we then we view our bodies as objects to be consumed, as objects that are, like, viewing pleasure for somebody else. And again, it's so subtle that because we just, we are inundated with diet culture. Renae: We're inundated where women are still seeing so often, in an objectified sense. And so it's something that I just, I really am very mindful of with myself, with even like, even just the research and what I encourage people to do as well too, thinking about, you know, like I do think it's so good to post to how photos of diverse ranges of bodies, but there's a big difference between posting a body that is, you know, having fun or happy or like doing something versus a body and like, and then let's say, you know, I've got stretch marks or I'm, or I've got the, you know, my body's changing. I want to be able to show this is what a body can look like. And this is an aging body and this is a good, and I'm still having fun and I'm having, and this is great, but there's a difference between posting a photo like that versus spending, you know, a long time like A, photoshopping my photo, taking a hundred selfies and then wanting to post only the right photo and then doing it in a way that's, like, very objectifying. Renae: I think we really have to think about like our intentions behind why we are posting those photos. And again, that's not like the most popular opinion to hold. But then when you again, when you look at the research and when you look at how much time and energy we invest into our bodies, I think it's just, we only, we only get one life to live. And I think that's like the driving force behind why I'm so passionate about this message is we get one life to live. And when, I was just at a funeral on the weekend and prior to the funeral I had felt like I had nothing to wear. And then when I was in, when I was sitting in my chair and I was listening in the church to what was being said. And it was, she was an absolutely amazing lady. Renae:  I was like, it would just, it just puts everything into perspective for me again about my goodness, I get one life to live. I want to live my life. I don't want to worry about these additional pressures that I invite into my life. And so tying that all back to the initial conversation about like, about the images that we're seeing out there, I think it's healing. We just need to be mindful of how much energy we're investing into it. Cause when you're dying, we're not going to think, "Oh, I wish I posted more photos of, you know, of my body doing this." And yet at the same time we want to be like, I feel comfortable because I did see women in their bodies, right? So- Jen: Yeah. Right. That's a perfect response. Annie: I want to be mindful of our listeners times here. And I know I have, I'm looking at the outline and I have questions that I still wanted to ask you. So what I would love to do is invite you back next month. How's that sound? Renae:  Great. Annie: Like we said at the beginning, we could talk about this forever and ever. But before we pop off, I know that you have a special gift for our listeners. Do you want to tell them about that? Renae:  Yes, I would if I, for anybody that's listening, if you would like to be trained in Free to Be our research based curriculum, it helps, it's for youth in grades five, six, seven and eight. It helps develop media literacy, cultivate their individual and their group strengths. It really helps with developing gratitude and just a whole, it's a six session program and I want to be able to offer any listener that's out there 30% off the curriculum so you can use the discount code. I believe it's FreeToBeBalanced and I don't know if you're going to link to that in the show notes or anything like that. And so that we can take this conversation outside of, you know, this wonderful podcast and you can actually start to have these conversations with your kids and you can even potentially have your, if you're a teacher you can be trained to run it in your school. And so that we can continue to spread this impact wider because I do just think that there's such a powerful shift that's happening now with the conversations that we are happening and people are wanting and especially kids, they want to have these conversations. And so you are welcome to use a discount code FreeToBeBalanced and to get 30% off the curriculum. Annie:  That's so awesome. Thank you so much. Jen:  Yeah! Annie: So excited. We're changing the world. Renae: Yes we are. Annie:  Okay. Well thank you so much for joining us. We have to come. I want you to come back because I know Jen in particular to had a great question about addressing all of these topics with boys and if there's any differences that we need to be mindful of in our approach and our discussion and our topics. And, because you do work with boys and girls, which I think is really great that this, your program is not just for females. So, we'd love to have you back. We'll set up a time and continue this talk. Okay? Renae: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Jen: Thanks Renae. Bye. Annie:  This episode is brought to you by the Balance365 program. If you're ready to say goodbye to quick fixes and false promises and yes to building healthy habits and a life you're 100% in love with, then checkout Balance365.co to learn more.

Cosmetics company L'Oréal has partnered with Facebook to boost online sales using virtual makeup testing technology. L'Oréal recently acquired ModiFace, a firm specializing in augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), to help create a makeup testing program on Facebook. The program shows L'Oréal products as interactive ads that allow users to virtually try on makeup while using the Facebook camera. According to L'Oréal chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet, virtual makeup tests helped the company increase its sales. For the first half of 2018, L'Oréal reported a total revenue of 13.39 billion euros with a 6.6% sales growth. The report showed that the company flourished in e-commerce, which represented 9.5% of the total sales. Rochet said that social media, in particular, greatly propels the company's online sales. L'Oréal's CEO hopes that the good sales figures can give the company the confidence to be at the forefront of the cosmetics industry this year. Apart from the virtual makeup testing program, L'Oréal also launched a conversational commerce initiative, a form of advertising that uses messaging apps to help shoppers. In 2017, the company released an AI chatbot called the Beauty Gifter on Facebook Messenger with the aim of making gift giving easy. The giver simply has to let the receiver answer questions. Based on the answers, the AI processes the receiver's preferences and then recommends gifts from L'Oréal's products. This initiative to personalize advertising is a move that L'Oréal is leveraging on in the digital media age.

Jennifer Tidy received her MBA from University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business. Jennifer was the second employee of Modiface, the leading provider of Augmented Reality technology for the beauty industry. Over nine years, she has helped grow the company and currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Partnerships.Jennifer talks about being acquired as a startup, advancements in mobile camera technology, and the intersection of beauty and augmented reality. Stay up to date with Witty through our website, LinkedIn or email us at podcastwitty@gmail.com. Support the show (http://wittypod.com)

Ready for a reality check? This week’s episode of Brandstorm features XR Futurist Alan Smithson. Alan talks about the differences between Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and Extended (XR), what they can do, what you will need to participate, and how it is changing how companies market brands. Alan Smithson Alan is an XR futurist, inventor, author of DJ Prophets, mentor for Techstars, and CEO of MetaVRse, North America’s largest VR and AR consultancy. More than 20 years ago, Alan started his interest in technology while working as a DJ. The convergence of his love for music and technology led him to invent the Emulator, the world’s first, multi-touch application for Windows that let musicians create music using a giant, see-through touch screen. Alan began working with huge brands and musicians like Lincoln Park, Infected Mushroom and Armin Van Buuren. In 2014, Alan saw VR for the first time and realized this was the start of everything, in his mind. He learned everything he could about 360 videos, AR apps and VR training. He invented the first VR Photo Booth and is currently working with the Museum of the Future, in Dubai, and the Ontario Science Center to develop the XR Learning Center. MetaVRse North America’s largest Virtual and Augmented Reality consultancy, the mission of Alan’s company is to inspire and educate the next generation of young entrepreneurs to think and act in a way that is socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. With that in mind, MetaVRse is working on two initiatives, XR for Education and the XR Learning Center. Reality 101 What is the difference between VR, AR, MR and XR? Alan says virtual reality is when you put on headsets and it transports you to a whole other destination or world. The technology takes over your hearing and vision senses and immerses you into where you are. Augmented Reality is when you can take your phone and hold it over something and you can see data overlaid on it. Google Maps is a good example of AR. Mixed Reality takes elements from both VR and AR. Extended Reality covers all of the immersive technologies and puts them under one umbrella. Is Immersive Technology for Real? Alan believes we are in the third phase of adopting these technologies. The first was making sure the technology works. The second was when marketers started using the technology to create gimmickry the drew attention to their brands. Now in the third, or utilitarian phase, we are just scratching the surface of what immersive technology can do. For example, IKEA has an application called “Place” that lets you place their furniture in your home in real sizes, so you can see how everything fits. Cases like this will allow consumers to make better purchasing decisions and help brands to better connect with consumers. Alan says we are currently seeing a shift to 3-D everything. Facebook recently announced 3-D assets that let you turn your shoes, sunglasses or other products into 3-D. Snap Chat has millions of viewers under the age of 30, and is pushing the limits of what you can do with mobile phones. AR/VR Uses In the next three to five years, Alan believes there will be a significant uptick in using VR in marketing and sales, as well as training. He also sees great potential in mobile-based AR. By the end of 2018, more than 1.6 billion mobile devices will by AR-enabled. Alan thinks this is an untapped market. While the U.S. has been slow to adopt, China has invested trillions of dollars in mobile e-commerce. Amazon and Wal-Mart are also making great strides in mobile e-commerce. Alan has coined the term “v-commerce,” intersecting VR with AR in e-commerce for retailers. AR and VR Costs Creating an AR or VR experience doesn’t have to be expensive. 360 videos are relatively cheap. Car companies are using what is called “3 Degrees of Freedom” to allow the customer to look left, right, up and down and see what it’s like to be in their car. Not enough of an immersive experience, there is now “6 Degrees of Freedom,” where customers can move left, right, up and down to feel more of what it is like to drive the car. From something as simple as placing a camera in the car while you are driving, the cost can be as little as $10,000 to $100,000. Creating a full-on motion-simulated experience can be anywhere from $500,000 to several million dollars. In AR, companies are spending anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 to do things like bringing a label to life. A company in Australia, makes a wine called 19 Criminals. Each of the 19 people on the bottle have committed a crime and if you hold your phone over the label, their stories are told. AR/VR Devices A VR experience can be as simple as having a computer or phone to pan around 360 videos. The next step up is Google Cardboard, which costs about $10 - $20. It is a cardboard box with a pair of lenses that you put your phone in and use the phone’s onboard technology. For mobile phone-based VR, there a what is called a Google Daydream. Alan says it’s just a nicer cardboard box made of material. The next step up in investment are VR headsets like the Focus, Pico Neo and Oculus Go. With the Vibe, Oculus Rift and PlayStation headsets, you can actually move around in a VR space. The various headsets run anywhere from $100 to several thousand dollars. When will XR become Commonplace? Apple is very quietly working on XR technology with its Apple Glasses, but Alan feels it will be some time before the company can create glasses that are small and comfortable enough to wear for extended periods of time, possibly five to seven years. In the meantime, both Apple and Google have released its developer’s kits, putting all of the technology in an AR-enabled mobile phone to help developers begin to think in 3-D and eventually create this technology. AI or Artificial Intelligence AI is a broad term for computer vision and machine learning, which is vital to Mixed Reality, or MR. Headsets with 3-D scanners collect point cloud data and convert the data into 3-D objects. It maps the world around you in real time. AI needs to be able to distinguish a cat from a dog, or a car, or a person. Once AI can do that, there will be no delineation between AR, VR, 5G, MR, IOT, or Quantum Computing. Everything will just be computing. L’oreal recently purchased technology from Modiface that uses AR-enabled phones to map a customer’s face in real time and allow an individual try on makeup. The company has seen a 60 percent increase in mobile shopping, just another example of the potential in v-commerce, according to Alan. AR/VR Education and Expertise Unfortunately, schools lag way behind in teaching XR technology to marketing students. Alan knows of no other university that does so. It’s one of the main reasons Alan and his company are working on XR for Education and developing the XR Learning Center. As a consultancy, MetaVRse is always looking for the best and brightest in this field. If you have an idea and don’t know how to execute it, Alan's team can help you find someone who can. Or, Alan recommends that you reach out to a local chapter of the AR/VR Association, to help find experts in your market. Contact: Email: alan@metavrse.com (Y) to make public Website: http://metavrse.com/ Social Media: @MetaVRse #MetaVRse  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alansmithson/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/metavrse Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metavrse 

Eric Ducournau est le PDG du groupe Pierre Fabre Dermo-Cosmétiques et par conséquent, sa vision de la transformation du business model à l’ère digitale est nécessairement intéressante. Cette partie du groupe Pierre Fabre représente 1,4 milliards d’Euros de Chiffre d’Affaires (dont 70% à l’international) avec des marques comme Avène, Klorane, Galénic, Ducray ou encore René Furturer par exemple. Ce que j'ai toujours apprécié chez Eric Ducournau, c'est sa proximité, sa compréhension des challenges sans "digital washing" mais aussi son suivi très opérationnel mais je vous laisse en juger bien sur. La transformation digitale est d'abord culturelle A l’heure ou L’Oréal annonce une acquisition majeure (Modiface) autour de la réalité augmentée et de l'intelligence artificielle, Eric Ducournau du groupe Pierre Fabre mise surtout sur l’humain, les racines de l'entreprise et l'innovation pour le service au clients. Les 2 groupes étant difficilement comparables néanmoins que ce soit par la taille ou par la philosophie. Comme le rappelle Eric Ducournau, au sein du groupe Pierre Fabre, on écoute beaucoup les 8 000 collaborateurs, d’autant plus que chaque marché est très différent l’un de l’autre. On y reçoit également beaucoup les partenaires (pharmaciens, médecins…) qu’ils écoutent également avec attention afin de mieux comprendre les besoins du terrain. La revendication du groupe est d’être beaucoup plus terrien, c'est sans doute pour cela que la marque possède son siège en province car cela donne une culture particulière au groupe. Finalement, dans ce monde hyper communicant, la différence de Pierre Fabre se veut d’être plus authentique. Afin de décloisonner, fluidifier les échanges et de générer plus de collaboration, ils ont également modifié l’espace de travail en s’inspirant largement des espace de « co-working ». Ainsi les collaborateurs peuvent accéder au wifi à l'extérieur mais aussi sur des espaces collaboratifs afin de permettre aux collaborateur de ne pas rester derrière leur bureau toute la journée. Selon Eric Ducournau, cela peut vraiment créer de la valeur ajoutée pour le groupe. Ils ont également décloisonner entre les pays pour s’assurer que les pays puissent apprendre les uns des autres et en particulier de ceux qui sont en avance dans leur digitalisation. Le business model à l’ère digitale Pierre Fabre est avant tout un industriel mais ce qui change fondamentalement aujourd’hui, c’est le fait de s’intéresser de manière beaucoup plus précise au consommateur. Finalement les groupes industriels sont passés d'un modèle B2B2C à B2C sans vraiment l’avoir cherché. La question essentielle pour Eric Ducournau est donc bien d’intégrer les retours des consommateurs dans la création de valeur de chacune des marques. Selon Eric Ducounau, il faut remettre en cause la hiérarchie de la création de valeurs et remettre tout le monde en capacité de créer de la valeur. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de modifier le mode de fonctionnement mais de lâcher prise sur nos habitudes anciennes qui ne fonctionnent plus aujourd’hui. Les marques doivent se mettre en position de risque pour gagner le challenge de la révolution liée à la transformation digitale. D'ailleurs, pour lui, il faut nécessairement décentraliser pour réussir à relever ce challenge. Après une période de mondialisation et de concentration des pouvoirs au siège, les marchés doivent reprendre du pouvoir pour être plus proche des consommateurs. L’essentiel n’est plus vraiment la distribution mais plutôt d’être très en relation avec les attentes des consommateurs. C'est toujours passionnant de parler de business model et de la vision de l'intégration du digital dans un groupe établi depuis des décénies. Eric Ducournau nous prouve qu'on peut être établi et garder sa vélocité, que remettre en question l'ordre établi est évidemment essentiel pour réussir. Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.

your hosts Carmel, Lynn, Marie-Claude and Marc (Video of show at bottom) ListenEN_Interview_2-20180323-WIE20 Experts have long said that a great deal can be learned about you from your online activities and information on such social media as Facebook. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for what he called a “major breach of trust” but professor wonders where he was two years ago. (Steven Senne/AP Photo/file) A Canadian whistleblower said that the personal information of 50 million Facebook users was manipulated by a company called Cambridge Analytica to sway the U.S. election that made Donald Trump president. Canada’s privacy commissioner and the Canadian government want to know if the data of Canadians was mined in the same way. Use of such information in such non-intended ways is being called the "weaponisation of information'. Lynn spoke with Professor Megan Boler,  a professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. * The federal Liberal government in Canada has introduced proposals for new laws on gun ownership, called Bill C-71 The federal Liberal government has introduced a Bill which tightens laws on gun ownership and use. Gun control lobbyists say it doesn't go far enough, gun owner advocates say it will do nothing to curb gangs and gun violence and create more hurdles for law-abiding owners. PHOTO: Sean Kilpatrick-Canadian Press The law is already causing backlash from both gun control lobbyists, and gun-owner advocates. Gun control lobbyists say it doesn't go nearly far enough to control gun use and the types of guns available for sale,while gun owning advocates say they are among the most law abiding in society, and the new laws merely hurt their activities while doing nothing to curb gangs and gun violence. Marc speaks with Tony Bernardo, Executive director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, who says the laws does nothing against crime. * The giant Paris-based cosmetics multinational, L'Oreal, has recently purchased a Toronto company called Modiface. ModiFace augmenting reality to help clients make choices. (image supplied) The Toronto high tech company creates augmented reality technology and L'Oreal will integrate the company into their own Digital Services Factory. Carmel spoke with Parham Aarabi, a professor in the Engineering department at the University of Toronto and co-founder and CEO of Modiface.  Images of the week window.jQuery || document.write('

Carmel Kilkenny speaks with Parham Aarabi, co-founder and CEO of ModiFace.

This week on the Electric Runway podcast, Amanda Cosco’s conversation with Parham Aarabi, Founder and CEO of ModiFace, a skin analysis and facial visualization company aiming to change the way we see ourselves. The ModiFace mirror, which made waves at CES this year, allows users to virtually try on new looks via photo-realistic colour rendering technology. The proximity-based user interface means you can see yourself in real-time as you would look in different shades and styles. Endless palette possibilities are available at the bat of your eyes or a pucker of your lips. On February 3rd, beauty retailer Sephora will announce their virtual artist app powered by ModiFace. The app will connect consumers to lipsticks they love—and ultimately products for purchase. ModiFace estimates the partnership will increase sales by 31%, which is no small feet in the five-hundred billion dollar beauty business. Music by : soundcloud.com/jeff-kaaleInstagram : www.instagram.com/jeffkaale/

Clip Case#99　佐藤ケイジュ(フォトグラファー)、「MakersCLIP」テック・パワー株式会社　ModiFace ヴァーチャルメイクオーバーツール