Podcast appearances and mentions of simon malls

Welcome to Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, sponsored by Mirakl. In today's Retail Daily Minute:BuyBuy Baby Reunites with Bed Bath & Beyond Parent – Beyond Inc. acquires global rights to BuyBuy Baby for $5M, exploring store reopenings and blockchain-based customer benefits in partnership with Kirkland's and fintech firm tZero.Hologram Ads Coming to Simon Malls – Hologram Media Network partners with Simon Malls to install 3D Proto Luma displays in over 30 locations, with Sony and Paramount using them for immersive movie promotions.King Soopers Workers Vote to Strike – Colorado's Kroger-owned King Soopers supermarket workers authorize a strike over alleged unfair labor practices, echoing past labor disputes and staffing concerns.The Retail Daily Minute has been rocketing up the Feedspot charts, so stay informed with Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, your source for the latest and most important retail insights. Be careful out there!

This week we provide a re-cap of our recent #RetailLoco conference in Atlanta held in partnership with Simon Malls and Nobu Hotels. #retailtech #indoornavigation #locationanalytics @TheLBMA

  PENELOPE ROBIN Penelope Robin, also known internationally on her social media as @thepennyrobin, is a 15-year-old singer-songwriter and performer from Miami, FL. She began singing and acting at age 5 and comes from an artistic family. In 2017, she performed in the Miami Youth Fair and the Locales Festival. Additionally, she was selected as one of the winners of the Phil Collins Little Dreams Foundation and was a finalist in the Young Talent Big Dreams Competition sponsored by The Children's Trust in 2019. She stole the hearts of young Colombian fans when invited to share the stage with acclaimed Colombian singer Karol G as well as Puerto Rican singers Yandel and Cosculluela during the CEG Festival 2017 that took place in Buga, Colombia. During the summer of 2019, she toured the Northeast visiting summer camps, Girl Scouts, Simon Malls, Playland Park, Adventureland, and Jones Beach Festival.

Today we will be discussing how to get brand partnership, when you should start looking for them and how to negotiate them. Our special guest is Alaina Reid she the co- founder of Enjoilux. They created the sort hair runway and partnered with brands such as Simon Malls, Palmers and many more. They have also been featured on Fox 5 Philly --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/therealmrmarcelle/support

Now streaming, a new episode where @JAScartz and I discuss Target’s earning report, Walmart + subscriptions, Amazon's On-line Pharmacy plans, more ideas on what to do with Malls and why Amazon pulled the plug on its in-house drone team.

EP236 - DNVBs w/ Nate Poulin Episode 236 is an interview with Nate Poulin aka @digitallynativ about Digitally Native Verticle Brands (DNVBs).. Upcoming Events Digital Day North America Jason & Scot Keynote September 23 8:40-9:25am CT Channel Advisor Connect – Jason & Scot October 7th Texas A&M Retail Summit Jason October 9th  9:50am CT ShopTalk Meetup – Jason October 20-22 Measuring Ecommerce Success Against Fast-Changing Benchmarks.      Topics Nate Poulin (@digitalnativ) cut his teeth with DNVBs including Bonobos and Outdoor Voices and is currently the Chief Merchant for Monica + Andy. In this episode, we discuss a range of topics around the current state and future of digitally native brands. Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 236 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Monday, September 14th, 2020. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 2 36 being recorded on Monday September 14th 2020 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners today on the show we are going to do a deep dive into one of our favorite topics in retail and e-commerce Brands going direct to help us navigate through this we have a really exciting guest on the show he goes by digitally native without Annie and we’re going to have to get the story on that so digitally Naik negative on Twitter and then outside of the twittersphere he goes by Nate Poulin Nate is based out of Austin and he cut his digitally native vertical brand T that Brands such as bonobos outdoor voices and more he’s also the founder of digitally native Consulting Nate welcome to the show. Nate: [1:21] Hey guys thanks for having me excited. Jason: [1:23] We are excited to chat with you Nate and I know you’ve listened to the show we always like to start things off by kind of getting a little bit of background about how you came to the industry so can you tell us how you found yourself in the, the digitally native Commerce base. Nate: [1:40] Totally so I spent the last 15 years and retailgeek, I started the early part of my career working for startups and this really sort of predated the proper e-commerce era. And worked my way through retailers work for FAO Schwarz and Toys R Us and ultimately landed, about 11 years ago in the brand sphere specifically in apparel so I work for Michael Kors for four years through their IPO and then I was sort of in my late 20s in New York City. [2:10] Andy and the team had bonobos had been at it since 2007 this was 2009 and I decided to join bonobos and really take a stab at this sort of whole building brands on the internet phase I felt like that was a future that and I still feel that way, and so I spent four years of but no of us and also two years at outdoor voices and then most recently a stint at the black tux, and then between some of those students also consulted with a number of direct consumer and digitally native Brands and really. Through that whole journey just got exposed to the business the customer centricity, and you know the opportunity that exists and really quite frankly have just kind of nerd it out, um on the business and it’s something that I’m passionate about both in terms of what you know my day-to-day is, but also you know when I click When I close the books each day I’m still thinking about it so crunching on these issues and still very much sort of part of the community so it’s been a big part of the last I would say decade of my life. Jason: [3:13] That’s awesome we’re eager to dive into a bunch of those topics but I have to tell you I feel like we’ve already been duped I feel like you you started your retail career pre-digital and yet you call yourself digitally native. Nate: [3:26] I know it’s it’s a little bit of a misnomer, and that’s kind of my secret weapon I think that I actually have a pretty rich background in wholesale and Retail and so you know a lot of what I serve published from a Content perspective also folds in some of that perspective but. You know my true love is is e-commerce and direct-to-consumer for sure. Scot: [3:48] I’m excited to learn you get your start and toys and I’ll try not to derail the whole show talking about Star Wars choices Jason knows that I like to do. Nate: [3:56] Well it’s so funny that you mentioned that Jason because I when I first went to New York City I grew up in Maine originally and I made a trip to New York City and one of the stops this was like sort of a 8th grade trip one of the stops was FAO Schwarz, and they were they had built an entire floor of Star Wars toys and Lego because it was I think it was around the time of yes was episode 4. And it was just the coolest thing that I’ve ever seen in my entire life and so I ended up working at FAO because of was my dream job I was like I need to come back here, you know 10 years later 15 years later and work for this brand and his business so I have I do have sort of a Star Wars origin story there. Scot: [4:37] Very cool awesome and me are you a Star Wars fan or you just just like the display. Nate: [4:42] You know what I’m a fan of the original series. I sort of to be honest I stopped I think on episode 5 I haven’t seen the most recent ones but I do have a 5 and a half year old son, and so I feel like we’re going to go back through the entire involve the entire film series and I’m excited about that for him. Scot: [5:03] Awesome yeah we can talk about the right order later in the show Jason just went through this so we have a lot of experience I’ve been Uncle Scott Uncle Star Wars Scott has been trying to help with this whole thing. Jason: [5:16] Yes God has been a big help the only problem is my son now likes got way better than me. Scot: [5:20] All right let’s jump into Brands so. One of the things I wanted to talk about at the top is Jason and I have present about these topics all the time and we’ve kind of because we do it we present together most times we kind of use a common vocabulary that I noticed you and web have kind of a different vocabulary so we were talking about it on Twitter and I honestly forget the Genesis of this but you started this really cool you just kind of started saying well let’s build a little taxonomy so you started this taxonomy project which I have found super helpful and then we a couple other people glommed on and had some interesting insights talk us through that and what kind of inspired. Nate: [6:06] Yeah I mean I’ve actually sort of been in the on the back burner trying to sort of like, organizing notes and really create some sort of knowledge base around direct-to-consumer and it really started with the desire of writing a book but then it quickly dismissed that sort of concept just because, this industry is moving so fast that a book quickly becomes at least in my opinion becomes sort of like an artifact and not a resource. And so I was looking for ways to kind of like. [6:35] Build out this you know whatever note or whatnot and I stumbled upon our own research which I think is actually another one of those Twitter Darlings but it’s really just sort of a networks note-taking tool and I started to build out you know kind of my own knowledge base, and when I pick up on some of these types of conversations whether it be Twitter or sort of back channels or what not. It’s it’s sort of like drives me to like get to the bottom of how would we actually organize this I built another, similar sort of exercise but crowdsourced like a library of you know but what would what would your UTC library and look like. And so each time I go through this I’m gathering information from people who are really much smarter than I am. And trying to like harmonize it into a way that’s actually meaningful and useful. Since I’ve been doing this now for about 90 days and you know I I sort of think about the future and how long and the runway for this industry and I just think, creating that value like incrementally every single day at some point will either be very valuable to me or valuable in general and so that’s sort of the Genesis of that that idea and I’ve also sort of like subscribe. [7:46] The concept of digitally guard digital gardening and you know building a second brain and so I sort of dubbed this thing that I’m creating d2c brain, and it’s you know like I said it’s pretty robust it’s wonderful for me because I you know I’m immersed in this every single day and the way in which we can sort of like harmonize this information is nonlinear it’s networked and so I can add little bits to little parts of this broader network of information each day, and sort of come back to it and reference it so that’s sort of the Genesis of the project and I think the convention I’m just going to continue to do it and hopefully in the case, taxonomy of Brands they had some degree of value to someone out there who’s interested in this kind of stuff outside of just myself which I do find it valuable. Scot: [8:34] Yeah I thought it would be helpful to talk through it and I don’t know who wants a tech I’m happy to take a shot at it or Jason if you want to ornate if you want to so well, anyone want to take a shot at just kind of describing this taxonomy. Nate: [8:50] I don’t have it up on my screen so if you guys have reference to it then I’m happy to let you guys drive. Scot: [8:55] Yeah just you want to or. Jason: [8:58] Sure I’ve memorized it so I’m happy. Scot: [9:01] All right Jason you run out of it. Jason: [9:02] Yeah so the. It’s a taxonomy or a sort of a hierarchy in the the notion is that the highest level. Um in the taxonomy is the primary distribution method so do you own your own distribution do you rely on third parties to distribute your product. Um underneath the own distribution there’s a couple of different models there’s d2c brand so Marky example of that would be like Casper. There’s private label brands that would be like while bupropion from Walgreens, and there’s owned Brands which would be you know an exclusive brand that a retailer owns that’s differentiated and not commodity like the private label so that would be like, cat and Jack are all as well home or something like that. So you’ve got you own the distribution you’re either a deed to see a private label or a known brand and then under D to see there would be a couple of other potential attributes. You could be a vertically integrated brand which I think gets you all the way too. [10:19] You know you you menu design and manufacture your own product that you sell through your own distribution, but this first version of vertical brand is I’ll call it old school vertical brand so it would be like the gaps and Abercrombie and Fitch has and sort of, pre-digital. [10:39] Vertical fully integrated Brands the next category would be the indeed unofficial digital native vertical Brands so I, I think when you wrote the taxonomy use glossy a as a an example I feel like you have to use bonobos since it’s Andy. The the next category was linear brands, and this was sort of audience first. Based Commerce and so I feel like I’ll be totally candid I didn’t completely get this one I think this was a. An argument from will he was using Barstool Sports as an example in. Nate: [11:27] Yeah I think this one was like sort of the intersection between between media and commerce and that sort of. Media brands with a Holter ultimately going to become e-commerce Brands and e-commerce Brands would become media Brands over the course of time and so that. The future sort of looks like that Barstool model where they build like a very light. Passionate and loyal audience and then they just speak for whatever different ways they can monetize that audience audience over time and one of the certainly one of those ways is to sell them physical products. Jason: [12:00] Cool that toy makes sense and it’s better when you explained it right and then a specific subset of the linear brand would be the celebrity brand and like. [12:09] Kylie Jenner Cosmetics would come to mind is that example so then if you jump over to the third party distribution you have, big first big category is your sort of Legacy brand that’s the you know traditional brand that’s manufacturing products that they sell through wholesale that would be like Ralph Lauren, and you’ve got kind of two distinct versions of that you’ve got a brand that was born wholesale and still is wholesale like, Coca-Cola for example and then you have brands that were born wholesale and have made a pretty extreme pivot. 2D to see and I feel like the poster child there is Nike but there are others the Under Armour is like significantly moved to D to C VF Brands which is like North Face and vans has moved significantly to do the C so that’s a, a subset of the. [13:04] Of the sort of hybrid Legacy Brands and then you have these Marketplace native Brands so these are guys that were, born assuming they would use a third-party distribution but the primary third-party distribution they had in mind was a Marketplace like Amazon or Ali Baba, a great example there is an anchor the cables and charging accessory company that’s done so well on Amazon and. So well in terms of my personal wallet share for some reason I have some weird fetish with anchor cables. [13:40] And so if I’m remembering right because obviously I don’t have this in front of me as a reference that I think those those that’s the main taxonomy. Nate: [13:51] Yeah so I think they like the impetus behind this front of taxonomy it really explores the tension between distribution obviously like owned and third-party and the relationship with the customer, so if we think about in the purest sense you’ve got a digitally native vertical brand that’s both producing you know all the way Upstream from a supply chain perspective. All and then delivering you know through their own Channel all the way down stream to the consumer and in my opinion that’s sort of like that that happiest path for, you know bro long-term gross margin creation. Because you own all those sort of like elements and you control the elements of production and distribution and you also own the first party data with your customer. So I think I think of like the industry as swinging towards this model and the what’s hitting us and then what sort of like. [14:44] Taking oxygen out of the bubble where out of the room is you know all of the like all of the costs of doing business with respect to e-commerce. Instead you’ve got you know customer acquisition cost which you guys have talked at length about you’ve got variable cost of fulfillment you’ve got subscription cost of Technology. And you’ve got this sort of like horde of data that you have to sift through to be able to make good decisions where as you know the Legacy brand model was. Produced an overseas move it through a facility out two points of distribution and sell it to the customer and we don’t we’re agnostic to who that customer is that we just want them to walk by our store and come in and purchase something. And so that’s just you know that’s sort of the distance that the industry is traveled. And I think exploring each one of those sort of like elements underneath the distribution channels. [15:35] Starts to give us like a more robust you of like how brands are competing and what the options are that exists because these brands are rational and they’re going to find that oxygen they’re going to find the happy path relative to their business. And so breaking these big pieces down into this this sort of like component parts is so valuable because I think a lot of the. Serve a lot of the tension that’s drawn in a lot of maybe The Angst around you to see or the forecasting around me to see, is the conversation is really guided as though these all of these things are one big, moving object but the reality is there’s a tremendous amount of nuance in each one of these models in each one of these businesses and so to understand them we actually have to get to that level of detail so at least that for me that’s part of that what we’re trying to connect, tease out when we’re talking about this taxonomy and talking about different ways that Brands can grow. Scot: [16:28] Yeah and it’s helpful to have a common vocabulary because Jason I use own brand a lot and then people like you mean private label and we’re like no it’s a little different in that you know this isn’t the Old Roy dog food we’re talking about here these are these are Brands and to themselves like like Echo is a Kendall or like owned Brands right so those are not the same thing as I’m going to knock off some dog food or or you know a can of beans or something like that. Jason: [16:55] Side note for our most advanced Wesner listeners scotches dropped and awesome Legacy Walmart reference right there. That was Sam Walton’s dog. Scot: [17:04] Yeah yeah well Roy cool and then Chase anything else on the taxonomy. Jason: [17:13] No I again I think it’s super useful to think about the structure and it got kind of crowdsourced and there were some good like dialogue about like you know what. What’s the order of Precedence like what what is you know what are more important and should be higher on the on the hierarchy and I thought like that was it was a helpful exercise for my own thinking one thing that did occur to me and I don’t feel like it should change the taxonomy in any way but Justin. To me an interesting observation this is mostly focused on. The primary business model that the these various entities would use to make money. But the I feel like it is true that there are a bunch of. Um primarily third party distribution companies I’ll pick Legacy brands for a second that are. Doing d2c right now but probably not for the purpose of. [18:16] Take governing significant share or making money they’re probably doing it for a test and learn customer intimacy data collection project so I like for example, PepsiCo has launched a few direct-to-consumer sites for like snacks.com and Shop pantry.com. Like I don’t think they’ll ever have meaningful share of the individual bags of Frito-Lay chips on that site they probably launched it as some kind of learning environment and conversely. I would argue Casper has dabbled in some. Retail distribution deals but usually not with the intent of wholesaling their product or having a traditional wholesale relationship but you know more as a marketing vehicle for their D to C so it is. Nate: [19:04] Yeah I would totally agree with that and I think when you had reference glossy a versus bonobos that’s sort of where my mind went was even in the early days of bonobos we went offline you know I think in ten, maybe 2009 so it’s pretty early in the whole d2c Evolution and we went offline with Nordstrom as a partner and that was a really fruitful relationship but I always in terms of classification of these Brands and I totally agree it’s like really a spectrum that moves but I typically Define these Brands by their dominant sales Channel, so they’re dominant sales channel is pure play direct consumer even if they have a wholesale distribution business or you know they’re selling through Affiliates or whatever they’re sort of secondary tertiary model is, I think that that tells us something about the business but doesn’t necessarily mean we have to shift their classification because otherwise there would be a gazillion of these right. Scot: [20:04] Yeah and I like the path to the consumer as the defining Factor because it’s kind of the most interesting part of the discussion right so where you Source your stuff is as you know, it’s it’s a factor but it’s not as important in my mind as your path of the customer. Nate: [20:22] Totally I totally agree I mean I think it’s that conversation that like level of Sir conversation meeting with the customer. The way that you service the demand and what the way you service the customers needs is it is it such a big differentiator and I think in doing that well that the best of the DMV BRD to see brands, have carved out sort of better. You know path for growth than what we’ve seen traditionally because in doing that and doing that well you get to uphold all of the values of your brand and all the tents of your brand, as soon as you turn even if you’re a personal you have a personal brand if you start to turn over elements of your personal brand to somebody else, you’re immediately losing control of that element you know and you can trust someone to do something or or execute something to the highest degree but it’s never really going to quite meet your own standards and I think a lot of ways, and so and I won’t feel as authentic and that is coming from a first party, and so I think that’s also something like hitting on that point of the relationship and path to the customer that’s just become so important in this business. Scot: [21:29] Yeah and then as a software guy I noticed I wasn’t involved in this one but you put together a little bit of a tech stack and you called it DT C 3.0 Tech stack so you know what, what are some of the elements so here we are it’s 2020 and let’s pretend I guess you are starting your own dnvbs modern marketers going to need in that text act that you think about. Nate: [21:57] Totally it’s become sort of acronym soup. Still I’m going to try to not step on that too many times but you know really when building a brand you know whether it’s from 0 to 10 or 10 to 20 or Beyond, I think it’s helpful to like identify and organize around the heart of your business so depending on how you’re going to compete, or go to market you know you’re going to want to set the roots of your text a core the core of your Tech stock around a specific Solution that’s going to be you know able to scale for years and years and it’s going to help you out compete you know the Challengers that are out there and so whether that’s you know typically for young brand that’s either, an Erp system obviously there’s a platform conversation around Shopify or Bigcommerce or if you’re going to build your own there’s a CRM customer resource. Management system and there’s these pieces can be oriented in a number of different ways and also have you know other Tech opportunities to sort of like plug into and so there’s just this almost an unlimited number of configurations that a brand can elect. In 2020 and I think it’s interesting to dig into these different nuances and it’s interesting to understand. [23:22] Um how about brand selects their Tech stack says a lot about how they intend on competing and creating value and orienting their value chain, and so there’s no there’s no right answer and I think it’s another one of those cases that’s just a very nuanced discussion but one that’s changing you know and evolving quickly. Scot: [23:41] Yeah didn’t know bonobos seamlessly weren’t a Magento and I fell over on them is it and I remember that right. Nate: [23:47] That is exactly right so the year before I started I think it was 2010 the bonobos crashed on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and I think that’s a great example, of you know how far we’ve come right like bonobos had two distinct offices so have one office in New York and one office in Palo Alto so there’s an entire tech office that was building proprietary front end technology for bonobos and some other data science projects and then you get an entire organization built around building a retail brand. And you know those were that’s how we sort of like built a Brandon’s in 2007 through 13 and ultimately. Bonobos even their solution Beyond Magento was to build on a spree Commerce. And so in Shopify existed during that timeframe but there was a sort of notion that if you wanted to build an Enterprise scale you know massive brand that ultimately Shopify wasn’t going to be able to scale with those brands, and of course now we look at that and say that was terrible decision and Consul these Brands a lot of money and a lot of time and resources but that’s, that’s the distance that we traveled in terms of Technology one thing I will say you know now that we’ve outsourced all of this technology and where there’s all these plug-and-play Solutions but. [25:07] You’re still spending a lot on technology is their options are great but I think that in the industry there’s they’re sort of like. We need the fog of War a sort of like meeting all of the best pieces to wear into Tech stack but ultimately Brands would probably be better served you know just focusing again on what they need to do to compete uniquely in the world. Jason: [25:28] Yeah so I want to jump in on a couple questions here but before I do one of the things you call that in the text a queue called a PLM and Scott and I were debating a little bit what you meant by that. Nate: [25:43] For at least in my terms that’s product life cycle management. Jason: [25:47] Okay we were both wrong for the record. Nate: [25:49] Everything that had brand develops and creates a designs he sort of would go into the PLM system in that helps link your vendors to your sort of like main staff here at Erp and one inspect the conduit of information and capturing all of that creativity and putting it into a system. I’m curious to know what you guys thought of that. Jason: [26:12] Well Scott assumed you made a typo and meant product information management him because you you have an icon for each thing and it was like three three t-shirts for the the product life cycle cycle management and I was guessing potentially you meant product listing management so I could pin that could send the cake content to multiple. Destinations or marketplaces. Nate: [26:36] No that was the sort of like Upstream orientation there and then I did have the product information management system which I didn’t originally but someone brought it up to me so glad that was added for sure. Jason: [26:47] So It’s funny because you at you you kind of highlighted that hey even though there are a lot of. More accessible plug-and-play pools in all of these categories today you you know you you go out and acquire and Implement a full stack of these things and, there’s a lot of complication there frankly are a lot of potential data silos and integration projects and, and pretty quickly you you rack up pretty high cost of ownership and Technical debt the the, the in the Enterprise world the debate we used to always have was Best in Class versus pre-integrated sweet right and it feels like that’s still playing out for these relatively young companies. I mean do you go out and buy the trendy version of each one of these points Solutions and then you have to hire a technical team to integrate all of them or can you live with the OMS that Shopify gives you or the payment that Shopify gives you or, you know you know there are some other like pretty heavily integrated Stacks like netsuite or something like that. Nate: [28:00] Totally I think it’s like I mentioned it it’s sort of is it’s a decision that’s based on where you where you’re at and where you want to go in terms of the scale of the business but I have been seeing more and more that you know Brands can travel a lot further than they used to on a much lighter Tech stack and a lot of these other elements don’t necessarily need to be integrated in so much further down the line but again it’s it’s such a difficult, needle to thread because. Like we just spent a good amount of time talking about how important the path to the customer is and owning that first party data and being able to synthesize it and owning it in really capturing Rich data throughout you’re the tech stack exist to sort of organize and be a tool to harmonize all of that data and actually operationalize it and you know. When you start to say well we’re not going to do this or not going to do that it’s a conscious decision that you’re not going to have that functionality and someone, another brand or another business may have that may have better visibility into what is happening in their business and that’s just you know challenge that brand brands have to live with, because. Doesn’t matter who you are you’re operating on a salary cap not a salary cap but like a spend cap a budget and you know you have to make those trade-offs and decisions because money runs out before opportunity does. Scot: [29:21] The others are probably a life cycle here where you kind of have you know you’re born and you’re kind of in that yeah that infant kind under 5 million run rate and then you know there’s a certain Tech stack and then you get to 10 to 20 and then you have to add some other stuff and then you know hundred 200 400 there’s there’s a lot more. Part 2 the stack you have to kind of throw in there. Nate: [29:43] Yeah there’s a I think there’s a couple of like critical elements before brand start to like it too heavy weight with technology and what one of those being foundations of data so structured data and making sure you know you have an understanding of how, your data is coming together and then two is really a lot of these companies are so figuring out how they’re going to build their business and figuring out what channels to play in how they’re you know what products to build etcetera and you know as that Journey from adolescence and to score like teenager and adult stage happens you really have to nail down the process of how you operate your business end-to-end and I think. Too often Brands don’t have those two boxes check before they you know start to like invest in some of this heavier weight technology and I think you guys are probably seen it if you try to stand some of those things up on really shoddy data is just, it’s not a successful cocktail that you’re building so it’s definitely one where. The onus should really be on strong foundations before Brands gets you over their heads I would say. Scot: [30:52] Yeah and let me ask the converse so you’ve been at tons of these Brands and and advised a bunch what what’s what do people get wrong is it that they don’t get attribution they’re not, they don’t have Rich enough product data is it customer data is it mobile was wrong where do you where do you find people kind of miss the mark as they’re building these brands. Nate: [31:15] I think the biggest you know evolution in the industry and the biggest opportunity has been linking customer like actual property like order level Transaction what are we actually selling and who are we selling it to you it sounds really simple but in a lot of ways you know at some of these Brands practice has been has been more Silo than it needs to so a lot of what I’ve sort of like worked on is how do we bridge the gap between marketing creative, merchandising supply chain operations like how do we bring that group together operate in a way that you know. Doesn’t levies that this data sort of like operate in silos or accumulate in silos we need to be able to like. Build the view of the entire customer journey and then and the product that supports it so I think that’s sort of been the biggest you know opportunity for direct to Consumer Brands is really tightening that link between marketing and operations / [32:18] Product and I drop on like back in the Michael Kors days when you were in a legacy brand the to Mark the marketing team in the merchandising team we’re on different floors of the building and you know rarely interacted at sort of anything below a leadership level and so it’s really that’s a fundamental swing that we’ve seen in the retail business is that you bring those Bridging the Gap between those two functions. Jason: [32:49] That that totally makes sense I wanted to Pivot off of the tech stack a little bit right. Obviously you’re a good advocate for for sort of digitally native Brands and you’ve worked for a number of them it feels like the, the public narrative on them has shifted a lot lately like it used to be like oh they’re the future they’re the up-and-comers like this is you know the next wave of everything and more recently if you know you’re starting to hear like. Yeah you know maybe that trend has kind of petered out like maybe it’s run its course and so I’m I I don’t know like I have on the mixed feelings but like where do you stand do you feel like. Dnvbs is mostly played out and you know just wasn’t able to achieve scale and and you know was interesting but but not a game-changer or is it still early Innings and there’s a, a significant chance for dnvbs to change the world. Nate: [33:52] I think we’re still very much in the early innings, I think the like I mentioned before I think brands are seeking gross margin and seeking oxygen to continue to grow, and I think there’s from a pure play perspective it’s challenging it’s a challenging environment for digitally native Brands but I do think that, the shift in consumer Behavior towards e-commerce is is loosening some of that and creating some you know competitive advantages for brands that are that are really communicating digitally as their main platform with customers, so I think you know and then you also have technology like Shopify and some other elements that are enabling these businesses to start up with a lot less capital and really like reach a certain level of success, taking less investment so I think we’re still in the early Innings and I also think that there’s going to be continued innovation in the way in which you know Brands reach customers like right now. We’ve got a couple of very congested channels those being Facebook Instagram. In terms of like creating that spark and that you know interest in the awareness of a brand and discovery of a product and I do foresee there’s just by force of like the size of the digital prize I think some of those things are going to become unstuck for a direct to Consumer Brands and then I also think that you know. [35:20] Branding is going to evolve or is evolving creative is evolving, and product will continue to elevate and iterate in physical product I mean and innovate, and I think if we can bring those elements together dnvbs d-des he’s going to have a really great future um in what I love about it is you know everyone’s trying to move to this mom like not everyone but the large share of brands are at least interested or testing like we talked about earlier and so there’s there’s definitely smoke there we just have to figure out the right formula bring it together and bring it together in a way that. Is efficient and allows these Branch to thrive and continue to grow profitably and reach a certain scale. Jason: [36:04] Hmm yeah I could totally see that do you happen to be familiar there’s a construct that Gardner invented called the Gartner hype cycle. Nate: [36:12] I’m not familiar. Jason: [36:13] Yeah so it’s really cool and it’s shocking how many things tend to fit this curve but essentially, what what Gardner hypothesized by mainly around technology Innovations a long time ago was new stuff is always getting invented. And when it’s new it almost always gets overhyped and the like the utility of it. That is Promised wildly exceeds what it could actually deliver. And so gardeners premise was eventually every new trend or technology reaches what they call. Peak of inflated expectations so they draw this curve and it has this initial like huge Spike and at the top of it you’re at the peak of inflated expectations. Part of the reason I like the Gartner hype cycle is because of these funny names so then what happens is. [37:04] The technology you know it becomes apparent the technology isn’t going to deliver. [37:09] The those over those inflated expectations and so the technology starts to drop down the slope and they call this downslope the trough of disillusionment. [37:21] And so you know sent you know so pick anything artificial intelligence right like I would argue it’s probably right at the peak of inflated expectations right now and. Two years from like there was a time when QR codes were super overhyped and everyone’s talking about them and like they’re going to cure cancer, so then QR codes fall into the trough of disillusionment hey they didn’t cure cancer people were totally wrong they were overhyped this is lame, but eventually these products mature and they climb out of the trough of disillusionment into this area that. Gardner and calls the slope of Enlightenment where they eventually achieve this plateau of productivity where they kind of. Deliver commensurate value for what they are and so Gardner pick all these different categories and they map all the trends in this category on the on these hype Cycles, um and when you see some of them like it totally makes sense like you know QR codes got wildly overhype they dropped in the trough of disillusionment guess what’s happening right now like QR codes are you know reasonably productive for a variety of use cases, and that was maybe way too much work to explain it but to me dnvbs like are perfectly following the hype cycle as well like. [38:41] There was. Peak when they were over-promising and they may be starting to drop into a trough of disillusionment but that by no means means that there’s not a plateau of productivity in their future. Nate: [38:53] Yeah I mean I think that’s totally right I think when we look back at some of the brands that maybe have driven some of the like the collective disillusionment and dnvbs one, we’re judging a brand that’s still very young right and we look at a Michael Kors I’ll drop him now and again you know they we went through the IPO and 2011. [39:15] Of course was bankrupt you know in the in the 80s and had this tremendous run of success. And there’s other stories that are out there right as like businesses and types of business models that have gone through you know, gross and contraction etcetera and so we’re one we’re judging the business the opportunity that exists in the NAD, in a very early inning of its development not the terminal point and to you know there’s just a tremendous amount of learning and being on the Leading Edge that has happened over the last, years or so with respect to you how to you know how to do this you know how to build the railroads and infrastructure and all this kind of stuff to access customers to be able to. Grow and scale and I think particularly on that end. On the side of Technology on the side of supply chain on the side of infrastructure we’re still in it on the side of Technology we’re still very very young and those those types of, you know Innovation with that in terms of, picks and shovels Etc is really going to drive electric Menace amount of growth and opportunity for digitally native Brands and on a much more efficient scale so I think that’s absolutely right. Scot: [40:31] Yeah this is a good time to make a big announcement Jason because he’s a big believer in in where we are on the hype cycle he is going to release a mattress and it’s going to be the retail retailgeek dnvbs because we don’t have enough dnvbs companies right Jason. Jason: [40:49] Absolutely and what’s going to be unique about this mattress is actually going to fit in a box and I can ship it right to your house. Scot: [40:55] But what if you don’t like it can you return it. Jason: [40:57] You totally can there’s a no-questions-asked 30-second guarantee money-back guarantee. Scot: [41:03] Awesome you’re innovating again. The I work with a lot of startups and one of the things that comes up a lot is what’s the address bull market of all these Brands going Direct, and I went through this with cello visor where you know the early days people would say well what’s the addressable Market I was like retail and then would laugh at me the so then I had to kind of like show well here’s this magazine called internet retailer and they have the IR 500 then they did the hire 1,000 and there’s a thousand companies and here’s their sales and and you know then we can extrapolate from there this many number of companies Etc have you ever thought like what is the addressable Market of all these these brands that are coming up. Nate: [41:49] Yeah I mean I think. I think emarketer put out a survey or study this year that was suggested that direct to Consumer Brands we’re going to do about 18 billion in Revenue now this was released early in the year so my assumption is that that’s going to get except Blown Away in terms of the the expectations for the industry this year and then we think about as you mentioned total retail for exclude automotive and we exclude restaurants that’s about 3.8 billion, and so direct-to-consumer right now as a penetration to retail is less than half a percent percentage point and. Scot: [42:23] Three point eight trillion. Nate: [42:25] Three point eight trillion science thank you for crafting and so when I think about the opportunity. Over the next ten years I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that we get to 10% direct-to-consumer. And you know I 10% obviously you’re doing for you know 400 billion dollars in Revenue and I think you know the path to get there is everything that I just mentioned around unlocking the efficiencies at scale, and I think the only guard rail that I would meaningfully put against the ultimate growth of direct consumer as share of Market is just the the fundamental economics of selling e-commerce when you include cost of goods sold and you include all of the variable costs of doing business and fulfilling each order you know it gets you squeeze out a lot of the prophet and opportunity, and so I have started this thesis around you know. Average order value and how that impacts the viability of pure play e-commerce obviously the higher you go the respect to average order value the more margin you’re creating even if the rate is lower, and so I think there’s going to be a tension or a ceiling with low aov products metal that will continue to be dominated by that the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world that really have already built a lot of this efficiency that I’m that I’m talking about that’s really inaccessible for, each individual brand as we think about that brand growing in some business. Scot: [43:52] Okay yep so. So how about this thought experiment so so if we were on a whiteboard I draw a big circle that that would be retail and that’s three point eight trillion and then I would draw a circle inside of there and that’s that’s DTC today and I put it inside because everything sold at retail is effectively what we’re calling a brand and I should have said this at the top of show we we Loosely used the word brand to being you know a manufacturer of goods sometimes people get confused like in our Twitter conversation someone’s like well where does Macy’s fit in this and we’re like well that’s that’s a retailer not a Brandon they didn’t kind of get the manufacturer versus retailer kind of differential there maybe hopefully people were falling along with that, do you agree with that and in that bubble inside is going to get bigger and hit some terminal velocity to your point is that kind of how you think about it. Nate: [44:42] Yeah absolutely and that’s totally right I think there’s it’s easy to get tripped up on that terminology but I think that divided between retailer and marketplaces is accurate, and I just think you know at some point when you think about the. Most efficient Avenue for growth for some Brands it’s going to be scaling offline versus continuing to scale online, and that we’ve already seen that right we’ve seen it with Harry’s going to Target and many many others bonobos going to Nordstrom back in the day and so we’ll continue to see that you know just as oxygen air gets a little bit thin as you continue to grow and you find a password that you can find more oxygen and more scale more distribution brands will continue to do that and the question becomes one do we do we still call them direct to Consumer as we talked about but that’s where I see that the ceiling and the cutoff taking place, but I think if you’re if you’re selling over a certain price point let’s just call it $75, from a Navy perspective I do think that there’s a lot of Runway with pure play e-commerce and continuing to scale Brands and it’s good again I do believe just based on where the world is going and where Commerce is going I it should get easier rather than more difficult. You know but that’s sort of where we’re at where I see things many out over time. Jason: [46:06] That and that makes sense side note on the the emarketer stat you you quoted I’m sensitive to this because I’m way over published on the internet. That that emarketer report on d2c will always stand out to me because there’s a paragraph in it about what a failure Peloton is. Nate: [46:27] So to say that. Jason: [46:32] That hasn’t aged particularly well, but I’m curious though to talk about the the complete other end of the brand life cycle for a minute because it’s made the news a lot, there are a bunch of brands that were story Brands you know had huge consumer adoption made made people a ton of money and in recent times. Have like lost customer interest gone bankrupt and in most cases been acquired by Simon Malls and I’m curious if you’re following that Trend and if you think there’s. You know anything interesting like do those brands have a second life with Simon or did Simon reconstitute them and spin them off or is that just you know where where you know former glorious Brands go to die. Nate: [47:19] Totally I I’ve been really like sort of digging in on this particular topic because as you mentioned these are you know these are brands that I grew up with you know part of my sort of Journey and story so just I have like an affinity to these these brands are very curious as to where their final destination will be and so, you basically and I don’t have any you know knowledge other than what I’ve gathered so this is really more of my perspective on it as an outsider but. You’ve got authentic Brands Group which has been working with Simon and most cases and sometimes they’ve been working independently, to roll up these brands in these properties and as you mentioned a lot of them like Aeropostale Nautica Brooks Brothers Forever 21, Sports Illustrated these are Brands like Brooks Brothers was founded in 1818, Sports Illustrated has been around since 1954 so these are brands that are have a richness in terms of you know our culture American culture richness in terms of their history and of origin story, and I think what we’ve seen in kind of ties in with the direct consumer and digitally native movement is that, it takes a long time to build a meaningful brand you know it really is a Brick by Brick process of building that brand so you don’t knock all those bricks down in one day you sure the business can suffer and in some cases they can go through a bankruptcy and come out on the other side but. My view of this is that you know Simon and authentic spring break group are buying these properties for. [48:49] You know seems to some people as like okay you’re just throwing money away but I look at it as in many cases of tremendous value especially if we can gather enough of them you within sort of our brand portfolio. And then you know you’ve got them all order the largest bottle opener in the country operating a hundred eight malls and 67 Outlets. And so you’ve got a distribution Network for all that product and so we just kind of went through the taxonomy of Brands and talked about distribution own versus. Third party and now this isn’t going to be own cuz obviously there’s you know there’s a there’s a relationship here and there’s rent to be paid Etc. [49:24] And when you look at it at a very high level across those businesses their cert vertical izing and rolling up all of these Brands and what they’re seeking I think is. You know if we can move some of these Brands through some of our channels we can collectively you know revive these brands, we can invest in these Brands we can you know generate more revenue and margin off of these Brands and they’re you know they’re fine with I would say I would guess they’re fine with Transit like the, actual volume that the breads are going to do lowering because you know again they have that sort of like networked relationship where they’re really focused around. How do we make these the pieces fit and then you know they’re also acquiring if they bought Sports Illustrated as a mention and so they have the license there and they’ve got a media property to distribute some of these contact some of the content and some of these Brands so I think it’s you know. There’s a lot of talk about malls and being over retailed and over you know square foot and the United States which I don’t disagree with but I do think you know. Sometimes the opportunity swimming in the other direction is easier to get to then you know going the direct consumer path so certainly at the scale that they’re trying to do it it seems like there’s a big opportunity there. Jason: [50:42] Yeah I hope that a number of these brands do earn a second another act I mean I think we’re all desperate for Toys R Us to come back. Nate: [50:50] Absolutely. Jason: [50:51] Seems super strong at the moment one fun irony though I feel like if Simon acquiring a bunch of these Brands is you know in all the antitrust talks and hearings one of the things that always comes up is Amazon is the is playing the game and they’re the referee. And I feel like it’s going to be funny to see the shocked look on a bunch of senators faces when they find out that the Brooks Brothers suit that they’re wearing is also the referee and playing the game at the mall. Nate: [51:20] Absolutely it’s definitely going to be interesting to see how this sort of plays out and it’s you know as someone who’s just you know passionate. Follower of the retail industry and someone who’s been in the industry for a while these are the types of things that are just so interesting to me because it’s really unique set of circumstances in one I don’t think we necessarily seen at this scale before and so, how this plays out I actually think it’s going to have a meaningful you know impact on physical retail and Brands opening stores and malls. So there’s quite a bit at stake for the American Consumer here and for these Brands and Retail in general. Scot: [51:59] Yeah that that’s the kind of brings me to the end game so that you guys have a mall there Jason remember the name of it it’s almost like DTC mom. Jason: [52:07] In Austin yeah. Scot: [52:10] Remain yeah yeah and so we actually went to a show and walk through there and we did a whole episode just kind of walking through. And you know that’s a really cool experience you get these really deep brand experiences but then online you know if I kind of think through the endgame here, it’s a really weird customer experience to do we just go to social media and Google and we search for Brands and find them and then we have. The Casper experience the bonobos experience or do you think at some point there’s an aggregation of these things online that you know makes them have a better, Discovery mechanism unified check out and that kind of thing and you know we’re do you see that going down the road. Nate: [52:55] Yeah I think it’s it’s a really good question when I spent a lot of time sort of trying to unpack. I think the challenge with like a roll-up or a Marketplace of direct to Consumer Brands is we start to mute what makes them great, in a lot of cases which is you know like the origin story, the authentic Mission the purpose you know the energy and the creativity of the brand and the product and so if you start to build a marketplace around that then inherently the marketplace becomes the conversation and not necessarily the uniqueness of the story of a specific brand and so what I would expect. [53:34] Is an inventory on the flip side of that you’ve got, certain the strength in numbers conversation in the economies of scale of actually rolling up some of these Brands if you actually did do that on the certainly on the back end of the operation. And so I would expect we see sort of like, smaller either holding companies or smaller conglomerations or smaller Acquisitions that you create these little PODS of direct to Consumer and digitally native brands that are anchored, around an individual around a customer and they’re sort of a niche their preference that, and I think we’re starting to see some of that already that were brands are starting to, buddy up or even you know move together partner together cross-pollinate Etc, around these particular Lifestyles or preferences I just don’t see like, unless you know I actually was sort of trumpeting that Shopify should do something like this a while ago but that doesn’t seem to be their game I feel like they’re probably the one that could be that become the DTC Mall, but they haven’t shown their cards yet with respect to any intent to do that. Scot: [54:43] Yeah the Jason what do you think. Jason: [54:46] So you’re saying this shop app is not a turnkey de Simo. Nate: [54:51] No it is very good at telling me when my packages are going to arrive though so I appreciate that. Jason: [54:56] Yeah and the answer this year by the way is your weight, is when your bases are going to arrive because it covid ya ya know it I mean who knows how it’s all going to end the. I don’t personally see that being the in-game for Shopify to become that that much I just think it’s Shopify is amazing at a bunch of things and. I just think building D to see traffic is not something that they’ve. Done it all or have any endemic advantage in doing and that’s what you would really like that that’s the hardest thing to get to build a deed to see Bray Mall it’s not the the sellers it’s the consumers. Nate: [55:45] Yep. Jason: [55:47] I don’t know. Scot: [55:48] Yeah as a consumer I want a discovery vehicle because I didn’t know about that italic one until I just kind of saw people talking about it on Twitter. And you know it. It feels like there’s this huge opportunity to be the discovery engine for people interested in this category and right now people just kind of it’s just Word of Mouth you just really or you know a store or something you don’t it’s really hard to discover these things. Nate: [56:13] Yeah there’s a been at there’s been a couple that have popped up I mean very shop I think is trying to make a move into this sort of space of being like a trusted you know source for recommendations and then on the characterize it probably unfairly on the more like Consumer Reports sign of things may be dating myself with that reference but you know you’ve got thing testing which is really been done a great job of digging into DTC Brands and really doing like unboxing and product reviews and all that kind of stuff so those are those are some of the resources that we’re starting to see I think it’s just you know it’s still, the search for breaking up the duopoly or the you know the ownership that Facebook Instagram and Google have over attention and eyeballs you until we get you know meaningful crack in that armor it’s still going to be really difficult to make. Direct-to-consumer discoverable outside of those channels and that’s where I think physical retail and that’s where I think you know wholesale and all those other channels come into play because there’s still a large portion of individuals like lives you know assuming that we get back to some degree of normalcy where we’re doing things and you know in three dimensions we’re doing things in public we’re doing things socially and you know so I think, a lot there’s a lot of tension with how we’re going to make direct consumer more discoverable and get in front of more people. Jason: [57:40] Yeah I got to be honest I am sure something is going to come along to disrupt it like I think it’s less likely to look like a. DDC version of a search engine or a catalog or you know sort of a traditional mall like I you know I don’t think it’s going to I’m not a big fan of like the neighborhood Goods of the world and the, those kind of d2c aggregators or Tim Armstrong’s DDX and all those sorts of things I think it’s going to be something that’s more out-of-the-box right so if I had to bet I have no idea what it’ll be but if I had to BET right now I would be more likely to put money on something like. Live streaming. And maybe it’s tick tock that you know probably not Oracle Tick-Tock but but some future iteration of tick-tock that that’s more likely to disrupt Amazon as the sort of. D2c Discovery vehicle. Nate: [58:34] I will hardly agree there I mean I think if you look at the legacy of QVC and HSN, these are massive businesses that could drive tremendous amount of you know attention and revenue and and you know I think that’s absolutely a place that’s ripe it’s just yeah, how do you get enough. Energy and get enough movement behind it to get onto the platform I think that’s the hardest part is just you know acquiring and building enough of a network effect to make that valuable for consumers. And for brands. Jason: [59:08] Yeah it’s hard to say and even harder to do so I think you’re right but now I think that’s going to be a great place for us to leave it because it’s happen again we’ve used up all our allotted time as always if you enjoyed this episode we sure would appreciate that five star review on Amazon. Scot: [59:27] Nate thanks for joining us we really appreciate this is a great conversation we could have gone another hour but I know people need to go to sleep and stuff if folks want to learn more about your thought leadership you put out there and what not work what are some of the best places for them to find you. Nate: [59:43] Yeah really the only sort of social Channel I have is on Twitter you can follow me at at digitally native with no e on the end and thanks guys I appreciate this has been really fun. Scot: [59:55] Yo I know he just run out of characters. Nate: [59:58] No actually there is a digitally native with an E who has no followers and has never tweeted. And so I’m patiently waiting for Twitter to clean that out and hopefully be able to take over that territory. Scot: [1:00:13] Jack if you’re listening help us out here. Jason: [1:00:16] You say that like there’s a chance he’s not listening. Scot: [1:00:20] Well you know he’s busy could be in Africa are working on Square tonight or something. Jason: [1:00:25] Yeah when I heard he has a couple gigs so good point really enjoyed the conversation thanks very much for the time Nate and until next time happy Commercing.

EP233 - Q2 2020 Retail Earnings and News  US Census Data US Census Retail Data website Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales 2nd Quarter 2020 (PDF) St. Louis Federal Reserve Tool (FRED) Google Public Dataset Tool Retail Earnings Updates Walmart Comp sales up 9.3% E-commerce up 97%. Transactions down 14%, basket up 27% Target SSS up 10.9%, E-Commerce up 195%. 75% e-commerce fulfilled from stores. Home Depot SSS up 25%, e-commerce up 100% (60% BOPIS) Lowes US Comp sales up 35.1%,  E-commerce up 135%  Kohls – net sales decrease (22.9%) TJX – Net sales came in at $6.67b v $9.78 billion YoY ($214M Loss) 2020 Q2 E-Commerce Scoreboard Target 195% (same day 300%) Etsy 147% Lowes 135% HomeDepot 100% Walmart 97% Shopify 97% E-commerce overall (US census): 44.5% Amazon: 41% overall, 44% US, 3PM grew 53% eBay 26% Other News Simon (SPARC) buys Brooks Brothers, (Aéropostale, Forever 21, Lucky Brand) JCP suitors – Amazon and Simon Shipping sur-charges Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 233 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Wednesday, August 19th, 2020. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 233 being recorded on Wednesday August 20th 2020 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners. Today on the show we’re going to take a break from the summer of Blue Chip guest and we are going to catch you up on the news, we did have our hot take on Amazon’s results so that was one of the big news items that we covered about three episodes ago now. And today we had the US Census Bureau they put out their quarterly e-commerce data so that’s exciting and Jason I’m excited to learn from you because this data always is super confusing to me. And in fact there’s been a lot of, you know some people have said online that this data proves that we’re not seeing this 10-year acceleration and oh my God the economy is doing terrible or we’re in a V shape so everyone’s kind of. Able to look at this data and draw wacky conclusions. Well it’s start with a primer I know you kind of have a really good grasp of this data and I just kind of see it scroll by so. Primer asan this or a segment I like to call Jason explains the US Census Data so that even Scott can understand it. Jason: [1:48] Oh God I didn’t realize the bar was that high. Scot: [1:51] It is US Census Data for dummies I’ll go ahead and put that out there and I’m the dumb. Jason: [1:56] All right I accept the challenge. If you can’t understand it for the record the US Census Bureau is probably doing something wrong which could be the case but yeah so to me. This is a really exciting data set and ever it comes out monthly or much of it comes out monthly and I am always eagerly anticipating it. But then right after it comes out I’m always disappointed because everyone on Earth quotes it. And it’s so easy to misunderstand and misquote and people aren’t careful about how they attribute what the reporting that per your point every month you see you like. [2:33] Two people alleging they’re using the same data and coming up with wildly different conclusions so, in a nutshell the US Census Bureau does a monthly survey of retailers and they asked those retailers to report their sales and. [2:52] Legal obligation to comply with a portion of the census and I may have this wrong but I want to say. They’re legally obligated to report their sales on a quarterly basis to the US Census Bureau and then the US Census Bureau. Asks them to report a subset of their sales on a monthly basis which is voluntary. And so basically they use that voluntary data to come out with sort of a monthly hot take and so this is this has higher standard deviation it has a higher likelihood of error. But this is the freshest data and so it comes out about 15 days after the close of a month you get the July data usually on like August 14th so that’s exactly when we got the monthly data this. Month and so that product is called the advanced monthly retail trade report and it’s sometimes called Mart’s which is monthly Advanced retail trade report. Then separately the parse out that quarterly data into monthly data and it’s more accurate but it’s slower so usually the same time they report the advance monthly retail report for say. July they’ll report the monthly report which is more reliable but the freshest data in it is likely to be June so it’s usually like 45 days behind. [4:17] People although if you really cared and if you were talking about like years worth of performance you should totally be looking at the monthly report not the advanced monthly report in our industry. People almost exclusively look at the advanced monthly report because they like that freshness. And then there’s a third product so both of these products the advanced monthly report in the monthly report, break the data down into a bunch of segments so you can see just a parallel or just department stores or just Sporting Goods for example, and one of the segments is called non store sales and the biggest piece of non store sales is e-commerce sales. But there are other things that are in on store sales if there any catalogers with they would be in on store sales that’s what this category was originally for was for people that did mail catalogs auction houses are still in the non store sales. And the way that e-commerce is counted in on store sales is kind kind of imperfect so there’s some definite wiggle room when an omni-channel retailer like like Walmart or even more. [5:31] If Target was perfectly responding to the census survey the e-commerce sales that they collected and fulfilled from the Fulfillment center which is only about 25% of targets e-commerce sales. Would be non store sales and the sales that they fulfilled from a store which would be a 75% of all of their e-commerce would actually look like retail sales and not e-commerce sales. And so. The non-star sales number is a very imperfect surrogate for True what you and I would think of as e-commerce like because we would probably Define it as anybody that paid their money online. [6:08] So that those are those are these monthly data sets there’s the advanced one and there’s the monthly one, and then that the data is broken out into a bunch of things there’s the categories, and the categories are frankly imperfect so for example there’s a category for automotive and automotive parts for a variety of reasons you and I might want to take. Car Sales out of an out of the number but we probably would prefer not to take car parts sales out of the number but we can’t break those two out in their category so people kind of imperfectly mess around with a categories. They also have three versions of the data they have unadjusted data which is the raw monthly data they have what they call seasonally adjusted data where they try to normalize the data for the, the traditional holiday spikes that we have in retailgeek. And so when they with seasonally adjusted data the number that they give for March isn’t the actual number they got for Marge it’s adjusted by some normalization Factor so that it could be compared with December and that same year and then there are some people than adjust the numbers for inflation, so there’s inflation-adjusted numbers so when someone says Hey the US Census Bureau came out with data last month and retail sales were up. Six percent. [7:29] There’s a bunch of things you need to know you need to know is that a seasonally adjusted number that’s up six percent is that a adjusted for inflation number that’s up 6%. Which retail number is it is it. [7:42] The retail trade Class A lot of the retail definitions include restaurants for example or is it retail without restaurants is it retail without Automotive which is another category that they have so you need to know when they say retail what they mean you need to know if it has one of these adjustment factors, and you need to know whether it was the regular monthly data or the advanced monthly data and so for all of that those varieties. Three people will all you know go to the US Census Bureau on Wednesday morning when the data comes out they’ll pull a different number and they’ll quoted and on Twitter you’ll go huh there’s three. Different numbers for the same thing and it’s because none of those three people explained all the details behind which number they chose to. Scot: [8:27] Is the monthly Advanced report does that mean Advanced as in more detail or advanced in years. Jason: [8:33] Sooner it’s a pretty it’s a less accurate pre view of the data will have next month. Scot: [8:40] Right and if they ever revealed what in is like how many businesses are they talking to is this like for and in Tuscaloosa or is this. Jason: [8:48] Yes so for the actual census data that businesses are legally obligated to comply with they do disclose exactly how many, businesses are in that number I don’t know what it is out of the top of my head, the advanced one is more variable from month to month so they generally don’t do that but what they do if you’re a statistician is they have an uncertainty factor that they, show you for each number so you can kind of like you can see when the uncertainty factors are high because they have a smaller sample set that month for example. Scot: [9:23] Is it always the same stores or is it very. Jason: [9:26] No it could like so you know a store again could just like the guy responsible for filling out the survey could just miss a month. Scot: [9:35] Does Jeff Bezos fill out the survey for Amazon. Jason: [9:38] Yeah and that’s a so you could imagine and the US Census people are trying really hard to get they worked really hard and this is a super valuable service that they provide say for free we all pay for it through a tax as, the you can imagine that who feels responsible for filling out this survey. While the impact how they interpret the questions and respond to them right and even though like some of these are like legal requirements. You can imagine that people imperfectly respond and if you’re a small business and you imperfectly respond you can imagine that no one’s going to get around to enforcing that right and then so to make the data more accurate they sometimes. Proactively fill in data when they don’t get data right so if Walmart doesn’t report they might go ask Walmart for the data but if you know Joe’s Star Wars memorabilia doesn’t report they’re obviously not gonna. [10:35] Proactively go get that so they do their best to make it accurate they have very valid mathematical model that they’re pretty transparent about if you’re into that sort of thing but my big plea is. Just. Understand what you’re looking at the advanced look the monthly look there’s another called the quarterly that we’ll talk about in a second understand whether it’s seasonally adjusted for inflation sometimes the inflation adjustment they call the real. Retail sales which is annoying, and then if it’s you’re going to see it in one of two ways it’s either going to be a percent or it’s going to be dollars if it’s dollars it’s the sales they think that happened that month. If it’s a percent it’s that’s the percent change and then the next thing you have to know is are they talking about month-over-month change or year-over-year change right so. We just got the July data in the advanced report. Is that percent from June to July or is that percent from July 2019 to July 20 20 and side note. The month-over-month is almost never useful or relevant in retail. Scot: [11:45] Yeah yeah I gotta look at your. Jason: [11:46] So lots of people report month-over-month I could care lest its really hard to accurately seasonally adjust for a single month. Like you can seasonally adjusted over the course of a year but you could make the numbers really say whatever you want if you start messing around with trying to compare month-over-month and Retail so way more valid number is that. That year-over-year number and it also someone posted an awesome graphic that I’ll try to put in the show notes this is. A version of this comes up in covid right now right and so you know people will publish like month-over-month testing to show or month-over-month negatives to show how well we’re doing. And so someone took a baseball box score and posted it inning over inuk and. [12:29] One team won the game 10 to nothing but in the inning over inning stats it looked like a tie right because they each had one good inning but the, the one good ending for the one team was wildly different than for the other team I’m not explaining that very well but anyway all of this data is free it’s all available on the US Census website I’ll put a link to it in the show notes so you can download it you can read a PDF where they try to analyze it for you and they do a pretty good job, you can download an Excel file if you want all of these slices you’ll have to download a bunch of files they have an API you can exercise if you want to, pull the data yourself and they do even have like a pretty good interactive charting tool so you can kind of. Click the options you want pull a data set and then graph it visually all. [13:17] On the free census.gov website so I’ll put a link to that. There are other tools you can use to pull the data there is a the st. Louis fed has have this really good website that they call Fred and Fred is an acronym for something, but they pull a bunch of public data sources one of which is this US Census Bureau so they have like a free reporting tool that uses that API and it lets you slice and dice the data. I use a commercial tool called ycharts which is you have to pay for it but it lets you slice and dice the data pretty quickly and easily and then Google has a really advanced, data visualization tool and they will the data in the Google which is cool, the one bomber is the Google tool is not real time so if you want to slice and dice it the morning the data comes out. Like it’s probably going to be a week or two before the data makes it to Google and I don’t know why that is it seems like Google should be able to get real-time data from the API. So lots of ways to slice and dice the data the data is super useful I promise I’m going to shut up in just a second and talk about what the data is telling us right now which is super fascinating but there’s one other US Census report that people should know about, so I mentioned that that non-store sales in these monthly products is not a very good surrogate for e-commerce even though a lot of people. We’ll wrongly just call it an e-commerce number and. [14:41] It’s a separate category so they’re showing non-store sales is a different category than department stores is a different category from sporting goods and you may say but Jason, there’s e-commerce sales in sporting goods and department stores and I would say gosh you’re right Scott it would be great if they if they pivoted the data and showed the e-commerce data for each category. And so the good news is about a year ago the US Census Bureau started trying to do that they said in addition to these two monthly reports. On a quarterly basis we’re going to try to more accurately report just e-commerce sales without the auctions and these other things in them and we’re going to try to report it on a. [15:23] E-commerce on a category by category basis and we’re going to try to include, the sales fulfilled from stores and the sales fulfilled from a fulfillment center so we have imperfect data the law doesn’t require people to report everything we need to report that but we’re going to do our best to do this experimental quarterly e-commerce report and so we now have received four of those, quarterly e-commerce reports the most recent one of which came out yesterday, so it’ll be three months before the next one and so in addition to this monthly data we also get this quarterly e-commerce report and, you know somewhat annoyingly you can’t compare the monthly non-store sales number to the quarterly e-commerce number because they’re both a different time period and a different measurement methodology of that make sense. [16:15] So now you know about all the products and you know about some tools you could use to get them right so. Here’s why I’ve been excited about the data it you know it’s one of our best real-time reads on how covid is affecting, the retail economy you’ll recall we did a show a couple months ago, and we had a spirited debate about what shape the recovery would take you were an optimist and said it would be v-shaped and I think I said it would be kind of check mark shaped or swoosh shape, that would dip very bad and then it would take a more gradual time to recover. Scot: [16:49] Five years I think you said 2030. Jason: [16:50] Yeah yeah I’m not sure I put a Time Horizon on it but I said it would not be symmetric, to be honest people have been misusing this monthly data to sort of make both cases and so it’s been so I the the monthly data for June the advanced monthly data for July came out late last week, I pulled it off and tried to do some processing and so by processing what I mean is there are certain categories that we don’t think are. R normally associated with retail so I took automobiles out I took restaurants and bars out which are in a lot of the, the US Census bureau’s definitions of retail they often call it retail and food service for example and it’s not going to shock you but like. [17:38] Automobile sales were one of the most impacted by covid at least for a short period of time and restaurants and bars have been the most impacted by covid for a very long period of time so when you look at the numbers with those in. It looks like covid had a very severe effect on on retail in fact it makes it look like we had the deepest dip we’ve ever had and that it’s lasting a fairly long time because. We still have a big huge dip in restaurants and bars for example but so when I pull all of that out and I just look at what I’m going to call Core retail so us, Commerce is definition of retail – Automotive gas, and restaurants and bars but other but including other food like grocery the numbers are way better than your hearing from a lot of sources and they frankly like. To me demonstrate pretty clearly that retail has had a very v-shaped recovery. Which is annoying because it means that you were right but like most people I’m thrilled that you were right since you were the The Optimist. Scot: [18:49] I’m grinning ear-to-ear I’ve got my Cheshire Cat grin on right now if you can’t see me. Jason: [18:53] Yeah but so on this core number which again is adjacent calculated number it doesn’t the u.s. you can’t just download this, there was only one month where year-over-year sales were negative in April year-over-year sales were down six points, 12% which is the deepest decline since they started recording this so that’s a very deep recession but the month before that, sales were up, 6.75% and the month after that sales were up 3.1 7% and to put things in perspective the historical average over the last 30 years is that the sales tend to be up between three and a half and four percent every month. The year-over-year data on average retail grows at about three and a half or 3.75 percent the month before April the March number was abnormally large number and the main number was back to normal and then June and July have been way above normal they meant eight percent in June and, eight point six percent in July so we had a historic low but it was only for one month, and I said well gosh we talked a lot about the 2008 recession what did that look like. Then Peak was almost exactly the same we were down 6.02 percent so we bear covid barely beat the 2008 recession but for all intensive purposes. We’ll call them the same depth but in 2008 we were negative for 15 straight months. [20:20] Covid unless we have a new a new industry emergence we were only down for one month so this is a wildly. Fast recovery / v-shaped recovery for retail which is. Generally great news we’re going to talk about that through another lens of all these earning reports in a minute like that being said there are clear winners and losers and there are categories that have been absolutely blitzed. By this and and haven’t quickly quickly recovered right and so you know people still aren’t buying gas people you know still aren’t going to bars and restaurants department stores are still down 13% like people haven’t they peaked it down 50% and they’re still at- 13 percent right so there are some clear losers in here but you know when you roll it all up and you kind of create the synthesized core retail number it’s actually a much better story than what I think you’re generally Hearing in the mainstream sort of retail press. Does that surprise you Scott or is that. Scot: [21:25] It doesn’t I has got it predicted I’m excited that the data shows what what it kind of felt like from the the cheap seats. Jason: [21:34] So one last thing then so then this quarterly e-commerce number it came out yesterday and the key thing to take away from that is in Q2 so. April May June of 2020, e-commerce sales as counted by the US Department of Commerce the US Census Bureau was up 44.4% year-over-year so cue to 2019 of Q2 2020. 44.5% so. A historically High increase in e-commerce which should shock no one a bunch of stores were closed and out of convenience a bunch of people. People extra people wanted to flock to e-commerce so it’s not shocking that it’s a huge number. Scot: [22:21] Prior to that we were kind of at a there at like a 12 to 15 kind of like comscore and all those other guys is that is that right. Jason: [22:27] Yeah so close call yeah so generally call it like 15 percent so very healthy quarter for comparison using the same data set at the same time retail was down 3.4% for that quarter. So that’s where the peak of that dip happened and so you know at a time when retail lost ground e-commerce tripled down. And based on the u.s. departments definition of retail which does include things like Automobiles and gas. That the e-commerce sales represented 15.1 percent of all retail so. Dramatically like I think q1 might have been like 12 percent if memory serves so 15% e-commerce penetration is good but a lot of people quickly look at that 15% and say, huh I feel like I’ve seen a McKinsey report that said 36 percent of all retail sales were e-commerce during covid-19. What the heck like why is this number so much you love her and a bunch of contrarians like use this data to say like oh all the people saying that like e-commerce you know got jump-started by 10 years from covid are full of it. You know fifteen percent is kind of a nothing Burger. [23:48] And and so again the devil is in the details it’s it all depends on your definition of retail so we just talked about like gases in that number which there’s very little e-commerce sales for gas there’s a little bit, if you go back to Jason spreadsheet for core retail then about 20 we peaked at about 26 percent of core retail was e-commerce during covid so. [24:12] More healthy and if you use Foresters definition of retail and their data which is what this this popular Mackenzie chart used. Forester has the most digitally friendly definition of retail so they include things like. Pay-per-view video ticket and event sales which I know those are not very much right now but normally they’re you know meaningful number and all the apps purchased from the App Store and you know tickets, video downloads and apps are a hundred percent e-commerce right so, when you add three healthy size categories that are a hundred percent e-commerce it’s going to juice that number right so the, so Jason’s core number of 25 to 26 percent, using that Forester methodology starts to feel like 31 to 35 percent they’re actually all based on the same data it just matters what your including or excluding from your. Your definition of retail and I would highly encourage everyone to remember that these are all wildly imperfect numbers with wildly imperfect methodologies for collecting them so they’re interesting from a directional standpoint but I. I certainly wouldn’t take any of these numbers to the bank which is why in some cases I’m talking about ranges. Scot: [25:28] Cool thanks for a I got in a Twitter battle with someone in that makes sense now. Jason: [25:33] Awesome yeah so we’ll post some of this hopefully that clarifies it a little bit I know it’s kind of hard to follow on a podcast sometimes, but when you understand that it’s super interesting and so my big takeaway man retails doing better than we feared and there is like pretty valid evidence that not like not shocking but e-commerce was the huge star that that you know contributed meaningfully to that, that recovery. Scot: [26:00] Again it’s helpful to kind of so we’ve been talking about earnings and we’re going to cover a bunch here in a minute and it’s kind of. It’s helpful to have this this Baseline so the you know the way I think about it is the. The water level is 44.4% and you’re if you’re above that in your taking share of online and if you’re below that then you’re losing share right so, so it may have felt good to have a 30% growth in your e-commerce business but actually that was not good enough to effectively lost share if you may be in Prior quarters you were losing share but if you were, you know that felt good coming off maybe 15 but you actually if you weren’t north of 44 you actually lost share which is which is interesting. Jason: [26:42] Yeah and even more nefarious there’s a bunch of small specialty retailers that normally grew their e-commerce by like 10% quarter, and this quarter they grew it by 30% and so what they reported is we tripled our e-commerce growth we’re killing it. We went from 10 to 30 percent but prettier point the whole Market went 44 percent so you actually like gate wash are and underperformed the market. But it doesn’t sound like that when you say you tripled your e-commerce growth. Scot: [27:16] Cool let’s jump into so that’s a good macro review let’s jump into some earnings the two big ones are Walmart and Target and I know those are near and dear to your heart so why don’t you walk us through what they reveal. Jason: [27:28] Yeah I will spoiler alert it it was the greatest quarter in the history of Walmart and Target so it was pretty phenomenal so at what. Scot: [27:39] Turns out when the government shuts down your competitors and keeps you open it’s good. Jason: [27:44] Yeah and when they send a bunch of money at all your customers it’s, it’s super helpful so sin all your customers a big check scare the bejesus out of everyone that they’re you know that everything’s going to shut down and they’re not going to be able to buy food next month and then close all your competitors, life can be good and it was so so Revenue at Walmart for the quarter was up 7.6%. Way more importantly so that’s like sort of comp sales was up 7.6% normally you know Walmart’s been performing really well and it’s like 4% or something so so 7.6 is a big number, super interestingly and importantly gross profit was meaningfully up at both so sort of gross profit hit like about 25% for Walmart which was. Like a 63 basis points so that’s like it’s hard to move the profitability number and we’ll talk more about that in a minute, in the u.s. comp sales which is Walmart’s most robust Market come sales were up 9.3% and e-commerce was up 97% so per our test before, the market was up 50 porpoise 4% Walmart’s e-commerce was up 97% and Walmart’s been outperforming the market for. [29:02] I think now like 9 or 10 consecutive quarters and this is obviously by far the biggest number. So so that’s a monster quarter across the board in that profitability is particularly important because. [29:15] Historically and it was certainly too in q1 of this year a bunch of sales transition from the stores to e-commerce and the story on e-commerce was that it was wildly less profitable than stores and so the gross profit goes down when the mix shifts to e-commerce, and gross profit also goes down when the myth shifts to these essential food items that people tended to by the beginning of covid so in cute, to for-profit to go up at the same time the e-commerce went up so much is really indicative of Walmart and others. Being able to operationalize their e-commerce scale and get profitable thing in e-commerce which is something a lot of people speculated they would never be able to do and they kind of demonstrated it, this quarter now part of that is. [30:07] Fewer people bought stuff there were less transactions transactions at Walmart in-store and online were down 14 percent. But basket size was up 27% and so what’s going on there is, when every visit to the store feels like a health risk and could potentially get you sick you want to make as few visits as possible so you consolidate trips you go less often and you buy more stuff. [30:32] And that behavior contributed to all these good results but it also significantly contributed to the profitability if that becomes a permanent Behavior, that’s a very favorable trend for Walmart the, Debbie Downer on Walmart stock after like just reporting and all these were way wildly above expectations the analyst totally missed how good a quarter retail was going to have by the way, so so huge beat huge his numbers of all time at Walmart it’s all green lights except, the Walmart get you know is giving no guidance for the future and they’re saying like we’re really concerned about the near future we don’t know what’s going to happen we’re particularly concerned about Q4, and we feel like a lot of our results were the beneficiary of a lot of government subsidies that have now ended and it’s not clear whether they’re going. To resume or not and so they’re the kind of story here is retail had a v-shaped recovery but Walmart and other retailers are very worried that the consumer has not had a v-shaped recovery, and that could impact Walmart in the form of a very soft holiday and we’re already in the, the very first throws of holiday in this back-to-school period in the early indications are that people are being conservative and not spending and and Walmart talked about the fact that. [31:52] You know when parents aren’t sure if their kids are going back to school in person or not they were much more conservative with their spending so that’s the one Debbie Downer and all this is the sort of concern for the future. Scot: [32:03] Did they opine on back to school or even start reading the tea leaves on holiday. Jason: [32:07] They did so they like said that it’s been a very unusual back to school and that that spending has been slower for back-to-school and they explicitly said that they’re worried about holiday. And they mostly like just joked that they don’t know and can’t predict like an analyst ask them a question, and Doug mcmillon answered like we’re laughing because we’re looking at each other and we were hoping you could tell us what’s going to happen and Q4 because we have no idea. So the you know they’re not giving guidance they don’t know but they are worried that they’d been the beneficiary of a bunch of you know consumers that were artificially bolstered by federal programs, and that that gravy train is potentially not going to continue and so their word what that could mean in terms of tightening of belts of their core consumer and the story Target was pretty similar also, their best quarter ever their Q2 comps were up 24.3% same-store sales were up 10.9%, and their e-commerce crushed it even more e-commerce was up a hundred and ninety-five percent and one thing I always like to remind people about with targets e-commerce and this was more acutely true this time. [33:21] The overwhelming majority of all Targets e-commerce orders get fulfilled from their stores so they do ship from stores they have a system to ship products from every store, they do a lot of curbside pickup via they’re shipped acquisition and they do a lot of home delivery from the stores which is all e-commerce, via ship and so this quarter they said hey 75% of all our e-commerce was fulfilled from the stores, and so just a thing to think about this wildly different between Walmart and Target, Walmart is trying to be an everything store in so you know 40 million items mostly ship from fulfillment centers and from their Marketplace Partners which is increasingly important part of their business, Target is mostly trying to sell the stuff that they have on the shelves in the store and so they’re very different approaches. [34:08] The target approach helps profitability a lot Target was a classic example of they had great sales in q1 but poor profitability and so in Q2 again their profitability was way up, thirty percent for the quarter year over year and there what was particularly fast runner was same day services so ordering stuff online and either picking it up that day or having it delivered that day, so same day services at Target were up two hundred and seventy three percent, which debunks a lot of people that are like customers don’t really want stuff that fast and then one other Jewel that came out of targets earnings was that, a new brand that we’ve talked about a store brand and I frequently talk about Target being one of the best product brand builders in all of retailgeek, they wants a new food brand in September of 2019 called good and gather and they announced that the last quarter it that brand surpassed a billion dollars in sales. [35:05] So that’s phenomenal to be able to launch a new brand and sell a billion dollars in the in the first nine months and I pointed out on Twitter and maybe even started a little Twitter feud. That you know no cpg or D2 C has been able to duplicate that kind of success in that. Spurred all kinds of good dialogue and a couple of sort of personal attacks but it is what it is. Scot: [35:27] Yell at people get really hung up on definitions around these thinks it’s kind of funny. Jason: [35:33] Yeah yeah I mean that like any of these models can be successful in their examples of success at all of them they can also fail like. People look you know looked at my good and gather number and they’re like oh well yeah it’s easy for a retailer like they have all this traffic and all this audience built right in and I’m like yeah but you don’t say that when they’re that the store brand of shoes way underperforms Nike or when, the Best Buy brand of cables doesn’t sell as well as Monster Cables or you know stuff like, Brands beat store brands all the time so it’s not a given that a store can launch a brand, and frankly there’s a bunch of stores out there that are desperately trying to launch Brands and not having any success so I feel like you got to give your props to Target that’s that has a very consistent track record of doing it really well. Scot: [36:18] Yeah and then you know the thing I know you hit on this but I just want to put a kind of fine point on this is, so these guys so so the brick-and-mortar guys that have online that had this weird thing whereas as e-commerce has increased its hurt their profitability. We didn’t see that this time do you have a theory on why that is. Jason: [36:39] Yeah it’s so it’s a combination the the I think there is proof in these numbers that they are able to leverage volume to be more efficient so when they get more orders as these numbers grow, they are being able to be more efficient which improves profitability they also the the. The shift the reduction in transition in the increase in basket size is very favorable to eat to profitability right so you put, you know you ship fewer boxes and put more stuff in each box and e-commerce that’s cheaper like you you pick more items per order and and have fewer you know separate picking sessions. That’s cheaper and then particularly in the case of Target when you’re mostly fulfilling this stuff same day. [37:28] That’s actually cheaper a Target charges money for that so they make money on it, but then be there they’re not paying shipping costs on all this stuff and they’re not paying separate Warehouse cost sent like these are all like items that are sitting on the target shelf and they’re selling the someone the e-commerce but they’re fulfilling it you know much like they would in the store so a combination of all those things I think are helping profitability but my big takeaway from those two retailers is, that there is a future where a very significant portion of their sales are digital and they are able to be profitable there and I actually think that’s bad news, for a bunch of slightly smaller retailers that have not proven they can be able to be profitable because if these guys give a few big players get over the hump and get profitable in the rest of the industry doesn’t, it’s just another differentiator that causes the the rich to get richer and sort of opens up a bigger gap on the competition. Scot: [38:25] Yet it could also. Yesterday you can see these guys going to investors and saying hey we’ve proven we can get this profitable now we’re going to go through a an investment phase and really start to kind of shoot it Amazon they’re so far away they would never get there but you know you could see this emboldening kind of Target and Walmart specifically. To really kind of double down on this and kind of know the model now and take a much bigger swing it catching up with Amazon it’ll be interesting to see if that’s kind of a 2021 theme that we see. Jason: [38:57] For sure and one area where it’s totally clear that’s going to happen is grocery because that is a place where they can catch Amazon right like Amazon’s arguably already behind Walmart and grocery Target, has aspirations and grocery but hasn’t been super strong but that’s an area where like for sure you’ll see them invest because that that is a white space that you know Amazon still struggling to win as well. Scot: [39:19] Did you sew so previously you had kind of suggested that Walmart was kind of making a lot of their bombers numbers by rolling out grocery and more places specifically the curbside pickup, is there any breakdown you’ve seen of was that. Jason: [39:35] They did and it was unhelpful because it was all so awesome so so historically like a lot of e-commerce growth has come from grocery it appears this quarter like the e-commerce gross growth was was distributed much broader across all categories so grocery was up and you know up significantly but general merchandise was also up more significantly and so the the mix had shifted to a more profitable broader basket of, e-commerce sales and even apparel which is like the big dog and all of this like and by dog I mean the worst-performing category even apparel was up at Walmart and Target which was not the case in q1. Scot: [40:20] It’s all of us that have gained our covid-19 pounds needing some sweatpants. Jason: [40:24] Exactly you need sweatpants either way but yeah for sure like a few people are writing the Peloton everyday and need a smaller sweatpants and a bunch of people are enjoying more cheesecake and need bigger sweatpants. Scot: [40:36] Yeah and curbside groceries boom put that cheesecake right in my trunk. Jason: [40:41] Yeah so another category of retail that seems like they’re doing really well and covid is the Home Improvement guys. Scot: [40:48] Yeah yeah let’s so Home Depot also announced their revenue total revenue was up 23% same store sales 25%. And not to be outdone their e-commerce was up a hundred percent and they announced 60 percent buy online pick up in store, so these guys have really gotten some religion around this and and you know you’re seeing really material but this numbers which is interesting. All solos and another macro trend is one of the guests we’ve had on the show calls it hooning were since we’ve all been in our homes here for so long due to covid-19. A lot of people are kind of looking around and saying you know it’s time for me to patch that hole in my wall that I had there for six months in my office and I wasn’t spending time in my office and I’m actually looking at a hole that needs to be patched. So I think that’s part of this cyclical thing in addition to covid is for our because they’re spending so much time at home they’re investing in Home Improvement. So not impaired loans also came out Lowe’s Home Improvement and their their sales were up 35 percent overall and their e-commerce was a hundred thirty five percent. So just some amazing numbers coming out of those retailers as well. Jason: [42:02] Yeah yeah good time to be in those categories and they tend to be both pissed because a lot of their products are harder to ship and so again like Target they tend to mostly sell the store inventory. Scot: [42:11] Yeah that is a feast or famine so that was the feast and what was over on the famine side. Jason: [42:18] So I mentioned apparel right so that’s been the tough category, Cole’s this is interesting right Cole’s had a net sales decrease now they were there non-essential and they were forced to close for for portion of the quarter. So their net sales were down almost 23% 22.9% which was actually better than the analysts estimated right so the analysts were expecting really gloomy Corridor and. Cause cause we lost money but they was less than analysts were expecting and then they came out and said but we’re not even going to tell you what our same-store sales are was because it’s so messed up from covid and all these store closings which that was a big red flag to analysts and their their stock really took a dive and then next to them was TJ Maxx reporting and TJ Maxx is interesting because while all of apparel is struggling. TJ Maxx is one of the retailers that you generally talked about as being better situated because they’re so value-oriented they, you know in theory of consumers are more concerned about the economy and they’re spending less than you know more of their wallet should go to TJ Maxx and in the past they’ve been more resilient to dips in the apparel Market than other retailers. They came in at 6.67 billion for the quarter versus like almost 10 billion last quarter so they they lost two hundred million dollars on the quarter and. [43:46] A couple of interesting things there they said by the way same-store sales are going to drop 10 to 20% next quarter, and one of the things we’ve seen is briefly when the store is reopened we had a big spike and people a bunch of pundits were talking about this that that you know as soon as T.J.Maxx open they filled back up so you know all this is coming back quickly for example and you know I think you shared some viral pictures of it full TJ Maxx they kind of said that like we’ve really seen our traffic Wayne after you know a sorts a short surge after they open and so. I think if the strong apparel retailers are issuing warnings like that and having performance like that it really bodes poorly, for the entire apparel category in the fact that, Target and Walmart we’re kind of up and apparel people are consolidating trips like being a specialty apparel retailer just really sucks right now and the worst thing in the world is to be a specialty apparel retailer in a mall. Scot: [44:45] Yeah the one exception that was Lululemon I don’t have their quarterly numbers handy but you know I think people are kind of like if I’m going to be stuck at home I might as well get me some yoga pants so I know you. Jason: [44:54] They also just happen to have some weird gravity-defying magic juice. Um which yeah more props to them I don’t I don’t remember their numbers off hand but they’re yeah they’re total outlier and you know I had to go to a mall last weekend and get my phone fixed my iPhone I unfortunately drop, and yeah most of the stores are closed stores there were clothes had no one in them and then there’s a line of 20 people waiting to get into the Lululemon and the Apple Store. Scot: [45:21] Are Apple stores aren’t even open set. Jason: [45:22] Ah yeah that would have been a bummer with my broken phone. Scot: [45:26] Yeah he would have had a week cook well this is a so now we’re kind of at this part in the quarterly reporting where we can put together a sort of a leaderboard, so let me start at the bottom here so eBay had a really good showing at 26% prior to that they were they were significantly below e-commerce so e-commerce was at 15% preak Ovid and eBay was kind of one or two points on their GMB growth. I’m so here now again we have this this Watermark of 44 and a half percent so eBay didn’t quite get there but definitely you know surprised a lot of folks with how well they did. And then if we take Amazon I would say Amazon was in line so Amazon grew 41 percent overall but chapter remember a good forty to fifty percent of their business is international if we just look at the u.s. it was 44 percent which. [46:17] To me gives Credence to the US Census number if Amazon was way out of bounds with that because they are such a large part of prestige of e-commerce, it would make you can’t scratch your head and go what was that and then inside of Amazon the third party which I care the most about group 53 percent so, a little bit faster than e-commerce. The walking up that that tree the next one is a big step up so now we have 44 and a half which is kind of the where the tide is. And then effectively double their rate you have Shopify and Walmart tied at 97% e-commerce growth. And then just above that Home Depot at a hundred percent and then we get into the rarefied air so we now have lows at a hundred and thirty-five percent. [47:04] So we’re fat of if we’re at a base of 44 and they did 135 that’s a easily a 3X, and then A step above that is Etsy at 147 and Etsy had this huge win because they have all these makers that make masks so, when masks became mandatory everyone was tired of wearing the boring you know pale blue surgical mask and a lot of people want to statement on their masks or have a themed mask or a branded mask, Star Wars yes or whatnot that really benefitted Etsy so they were up a hundred and forty seven percent, and then at the very tippy top of this leaderboard we have Target at a hundred ninety-five percent overall e-commerce but then if we if we kind of peel out the same day at three hundred percent and I’m sure that’s from a small base but still, it’s really interesting to see how all these things compare. Jason: [47:56] Yeah it’s amazing I mean this you know I I think all of this illustrates that yeah we have had a huge shift to e-commerce I think I think it’s kind of undeniable when you look at these numbers in totality. It’ll be interesting to see how much of it sticks like what revert as people go back to their old habits if they ever do or or are they you know permanently more digital shoppers. Scot: [48:20] One of the things and this my information on this is three or four years old one of the things I would always hear it retailers is that the store people would always say, yeah e-commerce is strategic and important but it’s really only like three stores and we’ve got 3000 you know it’s always compared, you know it’s always a small percent of their overall business do you think this will change that or has have people already kind of gotten over the hump on them. Jason: [48:43] Oh no I think it totally has I’ve talked to a bunch of like, head digital people at retails and they all tell the same funny story that like when they were recruited for their job they were told how important digital was to to the retailer and, how Central and strategic it was and you’re going to be on the CEOs of leadership team and and like the joke was that was the last day you saw the CEO was in the recruiting trip right like you took the job you went there and then per your point you found out. That everybody’s focused on their Core Business and they all looked at e-commerce as the redheaded stepchild and since covid has happened, the CEO has been sitting in all of their offices right like they’re suddenly invited all the meetings like what investments do we need to be making what do we need to do to stay ahead of the competition like the the conversations have gotten much more real at all of these retail stores and. I guess that’s the positive the negative has been you know we talked about historically, that business hasn’t been super profitable and retailers have also been pretty tolerant of that they’ve just been trying to capture growth and not worry about profitability, but now it seems like retailers and Leadership teams are a lot more focused on the profitability of that those sales as well you got to take the good with the bad there. Scot: [49:59] Cool so that’s that’s kind of our quarterly report and a really good look at what covid has done to e-commerce what other news do you want to talk about. Jason: [50:09] Yeah there’s a few things that were interesting to me so, Simon Malls concluded their acquisition of Brooks brother so Brooks Brothers is one of many. Bankrupt retailers and this this entity called spark which is a partnership of authentic Brands and Simon Malls, Bob them out of bankruptcy and they’ve done this a few times before they previously had Boston Aeropostale Forever 21 Lucky Brand earlier this year, and you know it’s always interesting some people are like oh you know are they going to be a good retail operator there competing with other tenants you know which kind of is the the complaint people make against Amazon as well, so ironic that is happening in brick-and-mortar if the independent team couldn’t make Brooks Brothers work how is how a spark going to make them work it’s you know they’re all these different. Perspectives that to me. [51:03] These these Acquisitions seem like they’ve been super safe spark is buying these on fire sale prices so they’re basically paying less for the retailer than the value of the inventory in the retailer stores. So if they are totally unsuccessful at running the brand or getting any value out of the brand they could just liquidate the inventory and be made whole and in Simon’s case they’re protecting a bunch of rent right like they you know wow as long as these retailers are growing concerns. They pay rent assignment if they close, they don’t pay rent and worse that triggers Co tenancy caught Clauses with other tenants that will then want to negotiate and get out of their leases so for a variety of reasons this seems like a pretty safe. Strategy and I think they’ve said they have a bigger pool of money if there are other good Bargains to be had and that leads me to my second news item. One of the big rumors is the next one that they’re they’re contemplating buying is a much larger one it’s JCPenney out of bankruptcy. [52:02] In the the argument would be the same, that would be a much bigger acquisition because there’s just more inventory more Book value but so their spark is rumored to be one of the bidders on JCPenney the other bidder that I’m curious if you have a position on Scott is, there’s been a lot of rumors that Amazon is looking to buy JCPenney stores not to run them but to turn them into many fulfillment centers, in the mall that in the theory is Amazon just needs more space, this is going to be cheap space and there have been a bunch of pundits that have talked about oh this is super smart and Amazon’s for sure going to do this and, turning them all into a mixed-use thing that’s both doing like fulfillment and you know they could have curbside pickup at the mall and all these things like there’s been a lot of talk about. [52:49] That being a potential good fit and so at the moment the two big suitors that are rumored for JCPenney are the Simon spark entity and Amazon and I heard just today that the judge called all the parties in the bankruptcy judge for JCPenney called all the parties in and kind of scolded them and said hey this is taking way too long, you guys are to dug in like you need to come up with a solution here to resolve this quickly. Scot: [53:15] Yeah it on the surface youth can say well that doesn’t make sense you know malls aren’t designed to be fulfillment centers, but here’s what’s happened for the first time ever that’s really interesting is so you have you have three commercial real estate markets you have Office Space, warehouse space and then retail and for forever retail was orders of magnitude above like 3 to 4X, warehouse warehouse was the cheapest and just kind of put some numbers on it, let’s just use ten dollars a square foot a year for warehouse and then 3244 retail then office park depending on the tier of it was class A B or C was kind of in the middle there so maybe like 15 dollars a square foot. [53:59] So for the first time all that has inverted so warehouse space is now more like 20 square foot because supply and demand is kicked in if you remember your economics there is a huge demand for warehouse space now because, you know Walmart and Target all these guys we just talked about growing a hundred percent they have a newfound desire and appetite for a lot of warehouse space, all those merchants on Shopify etcetera, office space obviously is in a huge decline right now and then so a small retail so for the first time those lines have crossed and it’s not inconceivable, that now you could you know Amazon could be looking at you know 25 for existing warehouse and retail space at 15. And that Delta’s enough where you could say you know I could take that JCPenney box and. [54:52] Essentially do some up fit put in my loading docks on one side you know they like these kind of. [54:59] Double sided cross docked kind of things product comes in one side and then goes out estimates on the other side. It’s not inconceivable that the math actually makes sense from a building perspective. Now there’s there’s some Logistics you know so a lot of these things are in heavy traffic centers so that’s going to be hard to have you know 18-wheelers coming in and out and some of that, but those stores were supplied by 18 wheelers and they do have some loading docks they’re gonna need a lot more, so I think it is a thing that Amazon would you know the economics actually make sense but literally six months ago it would make no sense. Jason: [55:35] Yeah I think the economics potential can make sense but I still think it’s overhyped I don’t think it’s going to happen and I should say I’m sure Amazon will end up owning some, former JCPenney’s locations Amazon already owns a couple of malls that’s converted in a fulfillment center so. Could that happen again yes is Amazon buying a ton of space and are they going to go kick the tires on any. Any potential space sure like they have 200 million square feet of space in the US and they’ve already announced building plans for another hundred million so they’re big leasers and for your point. The the price for that retail space is way lower than it used to be but I think the logistics is a bigger problem I think whenever Amazon opens a fulfillment center there’s a huge. Controversy around the negative impact on traffic patterns around at right like in the volume of trucks just like destroys the area and I just I just don’t think apple and Amazon want to be competing, with you know Apple having customers trying to drive to a store and Amazon having, trucks trying to get in and out it just doesn’t make that much sense so I I think Amazon’s really good at kicking the tires on any deal and I’m sure they have had some conversation but I think it’s gone people whipped up into a lather a little bit too much. Scot: [56:48] Yeah and last topic I know we’re tight on time but we’re sitting here in August and we wouldn’t be in the retail world if we didn’t start thinking about holiday, Halloween is right around the corner we got Prime day coming in October with and then the holiday what are you hearing from holidays you parse through all these comments from retailers. Jason: [57:07] Yeah so I unfortunately would have to say that retailers are mostly, pessimistic about this holiday the again desperately want to be wrong and there’s more uncertainty than there’s ever been before and so I think retailers are allowing for the fact that they could be pleasantly surprised. But there is kind of a perfect storm of negative things I think retailers are really concerned that that. We have not seen the bottom yet of the economic circumstance for consumers and so all those Federal programs kind of. You know bolstered a bunch of people you know we still have like way more people unemployed than, traditional like we have three times as many people unemployed as we did in February before this all started and you know a ton of the safety net is going away for all those people so retailers are concerned about their consumers health, or their consumers Financial Health, in some parts of the country there still are huge health concerns that varies wildly from state to state and that is keeping a lot of people away as all of these sales shift to e-commerce, we are running into huge capacity problems with shipping for e-commerce right so we’re the all the e-commerce numbers you just talked about Scott that basically has all the logistics companies in the United States running at holiday levels now, and so if there’s incremental spending for Holiday there just isn’t going to be capacity to deliver it right and so you know what. [58:35] You know suppliers doing a when there’s a constrained Supply and greater demand they increase prices and so the United States Post Office FedEx and UPS have all announced, like the largest surges for holiday they ever have in their making customers sign up for there, allotments of shipping now and they’re not letting particularly smaller retailers that don’t have leverage their not what giving them all the capacity that they ask for so a bunch of retailers are going to be artificially constrained on how much they can ship. And then you know, God forbid something bad happens to the u.s. post office between now and then they’re the biggest facilitator of all that so that’s a big risk and then you know because of health concerns a bunch of the occasions that consumers normally have around holiday. Are not going to happen in the usual way so people are going to go to less parties they’re going to need to dress up for those parties less they’re going to give less gifts they’re not going to go trick-or-treating as much so people are going to buy less costumes, they’re going to give away less candy there are all these ways in which you stack all that up and there’s the potential for a very soft holiday now, there are things that could go well and change that but you know I think I think people are hoping for better but preparing for the worst. Scot: [59:49] Awesome I I love your continued enthusiasm. Jason: [59:53] Yeah I mean and again I want to be as wrong about that as I was the speed of the retail recovery so here’s hoping that I eat more Crow next week. It’s got that’s going to be a great place to leave it because, predictably we’ve used up all our a lot of time as always if we spurred some some topic that you want to explore further please hit us up on Twitter, for sure this would be a good time to jump on iTunes and give us that five star review I know you’ve been you know waiting to do it and this is the perfect show to do it so we sure appreciate it. Scot: [1:00:27] Thanks everybody and… Jason: [1:00:29] Until next time happy commercing!

Big box stores are going bankrupt and Amazon is taking over. We discuss zoning issues and how they apply to your investments. 

Episode 3: Co-founders of Making Waves Marketing, a women owned boutique agencyDidi Martz, who I had the pleasure of working directly with at the BB&T Center, has a heavy background in venue marketing, leveraging live sporting events to drive bodies to concerts and activating brands at live events.Linda Richardson, with heavy retail and telecom marketing experience, spent time with Simon Malls and over 12 years with MetroPCS and T-Mobile growing the brands in Florida and leveraging team relationships to reinforce and create new affinities for wireless needs.

Do you have a lot on your mind and on your heart? Are you having a hard time figuring out how to process it all? In this episode Jordan Sondler shares how visual journaling can help you work through your feelings.    Jordan Sondler is an illustrator living in New York City with her Pomeranian, Ramona Singer. She designs many things, including murals, television sets, 90s nostalgia diaries, and beyond. Jordan has a weakness for gummy candy, growing her plant family, and collecting soul records.    Her clients include The New York Times, Google, Nickelodeon, Simon Malls, Pottery Barn, Ban.do, Starbucks, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Resy, Urban Outfitters, Hallmark, Kotex, Maisonette, Papyrus, Food52, Adult Swim, Barkbox, Harper Collins, Random House, New York Magazine, Le Chocolat Des Francais, ABRAMS Books, Fishs Eddy, Fisher Price, Time Out New York, Artisan Books and more.    TODAY WE WILL LEARN HOW TO Work through your feelings with visual journaling Be more introspective Give therapy a chance See singleness as a chance to grow in self-sufficiency Confront the things you don’t want to confront Just be, just accept, just go through things and deal   FIND JORDAN SONDLER HERE: Jordan Sondler’s Website @jordansondler on Instagram Jordan’s Book: Feel It Out: The Guide to Getting in Touch with Your Goals, Your Relationships, and Yourself Jordan’s Skillshare Class: Visual Journaling: Drawing Your Feelings    FOR MORE OF HIGHLIGHT REAL: Visit JOSEPHINEKIMBERLING.COM/HIGHLIGHT-REAL-PODCAST  for the show notes of each guest Follow @letshighlightreal on Instagram

On today’s Podcast: Mass COVID testing coming to Indiana, Simon Malls are opening this weekend, a GMA reporter goes half-naked on TV, and Jeff Bezos is imitating a Bond Villain Thanks to HCPFCU, Richmond Family YMCA

Samantha Brown is a world-renowned professional and celebrity stylist. She has been working with men and women to refine their personal style for over a decade. Although based in New York, Samantha will travel to meet clients as needed. Her styling credits include Nylon Magazine, Badgley Mischka, Fox, Real Simple, The NY Post, OK!, Closer, Westfield Style, Fort Lauderdale Magazine, Gold Coast Magazine, Minnie Rose, Newsday and many more. Samantha’s other partnerships and collaborations include Vogue, GQ, Glamour Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Folli Follie, Simon Malls, Westfield Malls, Empire Beauty School, Quintessentially Lifestyle, Match.com, Gilt Group, Nikon and Joe McNally Photography. Samantha stays immersed in the fashion industry as the Video Director for B Live, shooting New York Fashion Week shows including Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Narcisco Rodriguez, Oscar de la Renta, Proenza Schouler and many more. Having worked over 1,000 fashion shows throughout the years, Samantha uses her industry knowledge to translate the high fashion trends for her clients every season. Samantha was personally trained and recruited by Stacy London of TLC’s “What Not to Wear”. Samantha’s editorial background inspires her to help her clients create a look that is unique to their lifestyle. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/liana-zavo/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/liana-zavo/support

Bring Your Brilliance With Carla Taylor Radio Show Do you believe emotional intelligence is an important part of communication? Do you want to more confidently connect and share your voice? Are you ready to stretch your comfort zone as you step into your power? In this week's Bring Your Brilliance radio show and podcast, host Carla Taylor will be talking with Emotional Intelligence expert, speaker, and personal friend Sonal Sheth Zawahri. Sonal is known for helping her clients stretch their comfort zones and step into their personal power. People who have stepped into their power are more productive, with increased confidence to share their ideas and unique perspectives, team contributions and new innovations. This episode will inspire you to be more aware of your voice, step into action and experience the benefits of being your best self. As Sonal would say, Have you stretched today? Sonal Sheth Zawahri is an emotional intelligence strategist and motivational coach who has presented to and worked with Fortune 500 companies and organizations such as Eli Lilly, KarAuction, Big Brother Big Sister of Central Indiana, Simon Malls, Northwestern Medicine, and more. As the President and Founder of Tru You, Sonal’s passion is to inspire others to bring their authentic selves and achieve meaningful success in contribution to others, especially leaders and executives. She is a Member of Network of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), Women and Hi Tech and recently was honored as volunteer of the year. She holds a B.S. in Science Education from Miami University, and a M.S. in Science Education from Ohio State University, and is certified in Facilitative Leadership with Interaction Associates.    sonalshethzawahri@gmail.com   https://www.haveyoustretchedtoday.com/   ~ More Bring Your Brilliance ~ Carla Taylor ~ Are you ready to find your voice and bring your message to the world? Do you know you need a personal brand but aren’t sure what it should be? Do you want to create your own “career insurance” by having a personal brand that outlives any role or company? Each week, Personal Branding Evangelist and LinkedIn Strategist Carla Taylor interviews amazing people who are bringing their brilliance and forging their own path. She helps business leaders navigate the unknown by helping them stay relevant and known in their field, be their authentic selves, and love what they do. After supporting thousands of clients in achieving their goals, Carla Taylor realized she needed to “walk the talk” for her own personal brand. She started saying yes to opportunities, making social media connections in real life, and having a lot more fun along the way. www.itstimetobringit.com   bringyourbrilliance.net To get more of Bring Your Brilliance ~ Carla Taylor, be sure to visit the archives page for replays of all her shows here: https://www.inspiredchoicesnetwork.com/podcast/bring-your-brilliance-with-carla-taylor/  

Your phone may power up, but if your service is dead, that could be SIM hacking. Crooks have penetrated operations of the big 4 cell provider to hijack service. Because of the Equifax data breach, criminals know who has money,  target individuals and steal their phone service via phone to usurp 2-factor authentication text codes so they can penetrate financial accounts. The go in a setup wire instructions to send money overseas where it can’t be reclaimed. While financial companies investigate, you’re broke. Get the anti-fraud guarantees and / or written fraud policy info from your financial institutions. Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T have been scrambling to come up with new preventive procedures. Two carriers have gone to no porting meaning you put in place a standing order not to port your number from that carrier. This is another layer to protect your identity, and existing accounts, whereas credit freeze helps prevent fraudulent new accounts.  There’s is a fake grass-roots organization called Free and Fair Market Initiative. The WSJ reports this outfit is principally backed by the Simon Property Group – the big owner of malls around the country, suffering from Amazon taking 6% of retail market share. In addition to Simon, they’re funded by Walmart and  Oracle (a web service competitor). There are plenty of reasons to talk about a company legitimately without sullying their reputation falsely because you’re afraid of the competition. Shame on Simon Malls, Walmart and others, funding an effort to slam Amazon. Two years ago there was a scandal involving Vizio TVs spying on viewers – collecting and selling data to aggregators for ad servers. Piercing people’s privacy, Vizio figured out how to monetize viewing. Update: That problem has gotten worse. The average Americans spends 3.5 hours a day in front of a TV. Since Vizio faced minimal consequences, now other TV makers are up to the same thing including Samsung, TCL and LG.  These makers account for most of the TVs sold in the US. Princeton came up with software to track how this is done. Data houses link up what you watch with your phone,  computer and even purchase activities. Laws designed to protect us are not being enforced. DC’s emersion in senseless partisan battles creates a vacuum that allows for enormous violations of our privacy. Europe’s Right to Be Forgotten gives citizens there the right to shut down data harvesting. When our Congress begins to actually serve the people, we need to have privacy laws in place and enforced that clearly provide protections to the American people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg & Nick of Frequent Miler discuss whether or not the upcoming sale of $1,000 Visa Gift Cards at Simon Malls is a big deal, how that compares to manufactured spending at shopping malls, and why you want to find United 5K flights.

EP171 - DTC brands physical experiences  A discussion of Direct-To-Consumer brands physical retail experiences, recorded live fromThe Domain mall in Austin.  Jason & Scot were in Austin to speak at the annual ChannelAdvisor Connect conference, and took time out to do store visits at The Domain.   Update: In the episode we state that Domain is owned by Simon Properties, which is not accurate.  Domain is actually several developments that are separately operated.  Domain Northside is operated by Northwood Retail, it is phase III of the development of the Domain.    Domain I is operated by Simon Malls.   Most of the tenants we were talking about are Domain Northside, Neiman Marcus is Domain. (5/24/2019) Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 171 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, April 8th, 2019. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this episode is being recorded live from Austin Texas on Monday April 8th 2019 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:41] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scott show listeners, this is the first worst Jason not only are we in the same place together but we’re outside and I know listeners love your trip reports because you are the roving retail trip report. Ninja but we are actually out at a shopping mall in Austin doing a live Jason and Scott show. Jason: [1:03] Yeah this is awesome I feel like we are completely breaking all the usual conventions of podcasting because I am actually, actively shopping with you here at the Domain at Northside in Austin while we’re doing a podcast I’m really excited to find out if this is going to work at all. Scot: [1:21] Yeah yeah so I’m sure their listeners are already hearing some interesting sounds were, kind of sandwich between a bar some construction and a lot of these noisy birds that live in Austin I’m not exactly sure what they are but hopefully that adds to your Ambiance as you’re listening out there. So the how we get here so bad a year ago my wife and I went to Austin on a little trip and we discovered the small area, I have been looking for one of those hot handbags are suitcases I should say called in a way and we were drawn here by the had an Auburn Pop Up and Away so we came out here, and had the digital native brand experience it just really loved the small I think it’s one of my favorite, malls in America if you will so we decided since you and I are here for channel advisor connect that we would do a live remote. Jason: [2:10] Is an awesome idea. So this isn’t one of these outdoor lifestyle mall so we’ve we’ve talked about those before like they tended that tends to be the format. That is thriving more than some of the other formats it has a couple of traditional big anchor tenants like a Neiman Marcus I think the new Big anchor tenant is Nordstrom that might have opened here a couple years ago, as you mentioned most of the digital native brands that that are in a brick-and-mortar business have a, a location here so that’s interesting you can see the the Caspar Warby Parker been of us, Etc all here and Scott what were your sort of initial Impressions the mall you mentioned it’s your favorite Mall why so. Scot: [2:58] Gets a little another background thing this mall is owned and operated by Simon Property Group one of the larger Mall operators, YouTube haven’t come here three or four times now what I was surprised with the day is there’s a lot of clothes stores I wouldn’t say. I would kind of guessed 10% maybe a size 15 my little surprised by that because it does seem to be a pretty hot Mall area, now most of them already have a coming soon so we’ve seen the ones that are close are already kind of being back filled so so that was a little bit of a surprise so I don’t think anyone is immune from all getting would be my first impression. Jason: [3:34] Yeah and I are going to have to burst one of your bubbles not all signage is truthful. So if you’re an operator and a tenant leaves the wallpaper you put over the front of that store says coming soon whether you have a tenant soon as a very flexible definition. Scot: [3:52] Brands so I assumed that they were like. Jason: [3:55] I think that’s actually the way you can tell into this mall feels like it has about a hundred 75 stores and that’s probably a fair estimate that like 15 of them are so seem like they’re vacant and at least half of those deer Point felt like. They had a named tenant moving in and I would argue. In the modern era that’s just the. That’s the sign of a healthy mama like there’s some Concepts people open here that just didn’t work and stuff goes out of business and and stuff opens up we are here on a Monday afternoon in the middle of the workday, and I would say traffic feels adequate like it definitely is not bustling but there’s a significant number. A folks here shopping on a three on a Sunday afternoon or Monday afternoon and as with most of these lifestyle malls it is sort of a mixed-use. Model so there’s a lot of retail here there’s a lot of dining here some of what you know it’s sort of higher in than a food court might be there’s a couple hotels on this property, because we’re here for channel advisor we’re staying at much fancier hotels downtown but there are cool hotels here and there’s some entertainment venues as well so like some of that traffics probably retail but some of it maybe, locals coming for lunch or something. Scot: [5:21] Yara Uber driver live is live in Austin for about 40 years he kind of called it this domain area we’re in the little subsection called Northside he called it the new Main Street of Austin so it is definitely kind of, not only a shopping destination but people are kind of moving here and living that go that the the busiest part of the mall today is definitely the food and and kind of services. Jason: [5:43] Shout out to Velvet tacos that took care of us. Scot: [5:45] Yes delicious. So let’s do some sort reports to the first store we went into his beta and Jason if you have a superpower I haven’t witnessed it before but your superpower is getting store associates, to spill their guts about what’s going on in the store so tell us what you learned about me. Jason: [6:03] Yeah we talked about bananas on the show before one of the founders of FUBU his has been on an episode so just as a reminder for listeners that maybe didn’t hear that this is sort of a. A retailer Services mall or another way to say it would be a physical Marketplace so this is a a store, the brands can buy a shelf slot on and tell their story and so it tends to be, young up-and-coming Brands and novel product that maybe don’t have huge awareness or distribution yet. And or product they require like better demonstration or explanation to be, to be sold and so they they would pay a beta to have a slot in the store data gets a commission on everything they sell and so it is very much is like beta is a Marketplace operator and their individual brand selling their products. [6:55] In the store fun fact this is my second one I’ve been in this week cuz I was in the Santa Monica store in LA or earlier within the last week. So the thesaurus get a lot of traffic one of the pros and cons of beta is it’s a great store for, what I called Discovery like if you don’t know you’re looking for something you walk in your aunt you’re very likely to find something you didn’t know exist that you think is cool and you want to buy. And so for example I think Scott and I both desperately want although I guess I’m guessing neither of us have it used for, one of these Neo digital pins which is a physical pain that you write on paper, and everything you you doodle or right or no to take are stored in the pen you can download them in real time or after the fact as PDF stand iPad. And it just kind of cool thing that you maybe didn’t know existed before you walked in the store. Scot: [7:51] Yeah they have a ton of that D on my first impression this paid I’ve been in the one in in Palo Alto, first of all this felt like a Google take over so almost entire perimeter of the store was taken over by Google home kind of what I would call Little vignettes vignettes they had a device may be some Associated kind of, Google device maybe maybe a phone or something but then also they were trying to walk you through some use cases for how to use the Google home devices so there was a recipe than yet, there was a weather temperature vignette have an ending like a travel kind of a 1000 Rushing look like Google is spending pretty big bucks are there two. The new used for superpower and got the store so she has to say some the top selling things and this particular beta are the key smart system. And Shout out we know some of those hooks are listener so. Jason: [8:42] Sometimes known as the smart key. Scot: [8:45] Bone-conducting headphones are popular, the Neo smartpen and then there’s a lot of really cool musical instrument stuff so jamstik so you could teach yourself how to play guitar, is it my favorite thing was because we’re always have to do this company meetings and you always are shouting out in these Open Spaces had this really cool I’ll do it was $900 call the sound box Co KS, I was just a ginormous Bluetooth speaker that you could either take take to the beaches like a mega Boombox or I would use it for like a PA system at a company meeting. Jason: [9:20] And when you say ginormous you mean 30 lb. Scot: [9:22] Yeah this guy has like a whole system for carrying it and what not but it looked quite robust like you could stand on it or whatever have some sand get on it and it wouldn’t wouldn’t get destroyed. Jason: [9:32] So that again. I think this works great for that kind of thing that you discovered something you didn’t know existed. Point about Google Google’s a perfect example they don’t have a network of their own stores and they have products that you may not know you need unless you see them used or demonstrated you may not understand, some of the Google products and so they need physical brick-and-mortar demonstration Apple solve a problem for their products by opening hundreds of their own stores Google hasn’t done that yet and so it makes sense that they would invest in these, opportunities to create a physical presence the downside of a store like this is you can’t rely on them having any particular product. Before you walk in the door so it’s not a store you walk into with a mission like it’s unlikely you’d go I need new headphones I’m going to go to bed at like. That headphones in particular it’s likely there’s going to be several different kinds of headphones in a beta store. But they may not have the complete breath of Assortment or the brand you’re particularly in. Scot: [10:32] They’re not going to have like a Bose QuietComfort they’re not have some any kind of pedestrian thing that that you would go to like a Best Buy for absolutely. Jason: [10:38] Exactly so it’s interesting that we were talking to the guy, and we’re talkin about some of the other good retailers in the in the mall and he mentioned Peloton and Casper and in his POV was that those guys would do great in a beta store. And that you know that they all have like sort of physical elements that would resonate with a betta customer a we also talked about a way he felt like the away bags would do particularly well in the. In a beta store and I was kind of. Going down on that a little bit I actually don’t think a beta store can offer the immersive experience that a Casper store can offer so I would actually argue when you have the opportunity to have a Casper store in the mall. That’s what you should do is have a Casper store not being beta but if betta is in a mall that Casper isn’t in you can imagine that that. Peter could be a supplemental experience for sort of expanding the footprint for some of these other brands. Scot: [11:40] Yeah yeah I think they could be in or kind of a Thing versus just a you know you have to choose between 1. So I can pay the we went we walked by Peloton they had kind of a class going on in there and, yeah it looks like it looked to be quite busy they had many of their their signature devices that’s on the treadmills that’s their newest widget there’s a lot of Buzz out on Wall Street that this company is going to dummy onesies that goes public as we speaking today lift has filed as done their IPO if someone, this is been a little bit of a rocky start for tpd on what that was is good for the company not so good for the investors that that bought the IPO, I’m and then Pinterest is actually starting the road show today so we’re starting to see this IPO Log Jam clear and a lot of chatter out there about Peloton being one, and a big surprise about Peloton is it’s not really a hardware company it’s a subscription song. Jason: [12:35] Yep exactly so it Center. The hardware is a little bit of the razor in this model and then the the monthly subscription for content is the Razer Blade so you the original product was stationary bike, with a big screen on it and they have a great group gamification model so you take live classes. With other remote participants so you can get a very famous instructor if they were teaching at a spinning studio in New York they’d only be able to accommodate 30 bikes but now this instructor can have to get two thousand people in their class, and you get the instructor on the video screen in front of you you’re competing against all other two thousand people you can see how many watts your making it hard you’re working, against these other two thousand people and that access to. [13:24] The the finite commodity of really good instructors and the in the sort of competitive gamification in the fact that. There’s so many classes that you kind of have you can have a completely flexible schedule. That those set of factors have caused Peloton to do really well and get a really zealous user base a lot of people think that they’ve taken a big chunk out of the the dedicated, spinning businesses like SoulCycle in those guys, so the newest thing for them they were a direct-to-consumer business they only sold the bikes online they did infomercials and so retail is a very new model for them that they’re rapidly opening stores, probably because they captured all those early easy customers online and now to expand the footprint they’re having to have a brick-and-mortar present. Scot: [14:14] Yara are class a mall in Durham has a Peloton pop up so it’s like the slow glass enclosure with two or three in there. The last I heard I think there they’ve crossed over a million subscribers so you know starts to feel when I talk to a lot of people there, like it’s just like going to be almost like the next Netflix there’s nothing. You know the that software you could have imagined it on tons of different devices and this whole in-home exercise area is hot with feces so some companies to kind of keep an eye on if this is interesting to you others mirror and tonal who have all raised substantial Capital to go after this Market they all have different approaches. Jason: [14:51] Yeah yeah and there’s you might expect a lot of sort of me choose even on the original equipment like that the cycling bike and Peloton is expanded now to treadmills, so yeah it’s an interesting hot space and I think I may have mentioned in our seat yet show, there’s a whole Exhibit Hall at CES dedicated to this sort of connected Fitness face and these guys all had a prominent presence there. Scot: [15:14] Cool so then we we wanted around we walked by bonobo Sonora be no need to go in those those are well well treaded for us then we went to the bakery and sampled some some Bakery items and some. Jason: [15:28] The seasonal oatmeal cookie really hit the spot. Scot: [15:30] Yeah 10 minutes of Gone by since a latte so Jason was was he was she. Jason: [15:34] Unless my wife is listening in which case I had the fruit parfait. Scot: [15:38] Yes good job having just that one strawberry then we went into the Casper store and it was my first Casper so I’ve seen their little kind of in Target pop-up before but I never been in a Casper store how about you. Jason: [15:50] I have been in a number of Casper stores in so this is on the smaller value side of Casper stores. So they they do a good job and Merchandising their products so they have their primary product is a mattress that can be a direct home delivery that they they sort of. I want say they invented the product-based they were the first runaway success in the. Foam mattresses that you can press down small enough to UPS them home, and so they have a lot of these these sweeping vignettes these little mini houses with their various mattresses in them, that you can lay down and try and what will get back to the Deep Dives to God did in trying a mattress in a minute that they ought they expand until I bedding and they have a very cool like bedroom lighting system. Scot: [16:39] Oh yeah that’s my favorite. Jason: [16:41] Serta hypnotized asked for about 15 minutes and we were playing with that. What’s different about this Casper store that’s kind of weird this Casper start-stop bigger Casper stores have sort of more of a social media component so they might have had like like. Photography set where you can take a cool Instagram picture of you in a in a Casper vignette and in the Marquis thing that some of the big Casper’s have is this thing called the dreamery. And the dreamer is kind of the wework of nap. So you you make a reservation and you pay to go into this isolated soundproof pod with a Casper mattress and premium bedding and you literally can pay to just have an app for, for half an hour and my understanding is that like you think sell out till like. Team offsites and team building and things and it’s it’s kind of a cutaway they’re monetizing people trying their product which is pretty clever. Scot: [17:38] Michael you should see the associates look on his face when Jason asked if he could take a nap. Jason: [17:43] Side note if you’re going to do at a store visit it’s important to have a super cheesy annoying joke as an icebreaker for everyone so thanks man. Scot: [17:52] Yes you’re really good at that your dad jokes are off the chart. Jason: [17:57] I work hard on I’m so we didn’t mention this in data but I highly encourage our listeners whenever you walk in a beta store and someone comes up and asks you if you need help the first thing you should ask them is when they’re expecting to get out of beta. Scot: [18:08] Yes the guy gave. Jason: [18:10] He almost fell on the ground laughing. Scot: [18:12] Epic Gyros and side eye. Jason: [18:15] The @apple what you like to do is go stand by the laptops and when someone comes up and offers to help you which will no longer have an Apple store by the way but I pathetically if it did what you want to do is go yeah, when did iPod start making computers they love that joke. Scot: [18:32] Uncle Joe in Casper the little vignettes for funny Casper always has his good better best mattress system nice get the names they have like the wave and the This Not That, I’m so you could try those in six or seven will vignettes and then they had to find one that has the, the self lifting feet and head and like it’s got magic fingers so that what that was I I spent quite a bit on time on that one, that was fun and all lights were cool so it’s kind of a lightly but next your bed you can just rotate the light it’s it’s a cordless so it sits on what looks like a what are those kind of chargers the conductive charger, an induction induction charger I’m sitting kind of like turnitin dim series of lights or you just turn it upside down and it turns lights off so that was pretty cool device. Jason: [19:17] Yeah I like the fact that the light seem like they’re Wi-Fi network so literally like it when you say turn you don’t mean to Nob you mean literally spin the lamp itself. An atom’s but if you have you could have 10 lights in your room and they would all of them and you can flip the one lamp upside down and all the lights in your room go off and flipping it won’t come back on. Scot: [19:36] Yet sad much it is a lot of effort compared to talk into Alexa them so I don’t know I don’t know how successful I was exhausted flipping the light two or three times. Not sure not sure I needed that much of work out here today. I think we should talk about briefly is one of our listeners is here in the area super listener I guess we should call him Ted and he was able to secure a demo for us and a tour of Brigham and Borrego has a robot coffee, kind of a experience so imagine if you will a 8 by 5 by 6 7 ft, a little a little Hut with a lot of touchscreens and stuff that has a little robot Barista inside of it, sounds really cool to see I’ve seen it here in the Austin Airport and apparently it’s in other airports like DFW and I guess coming soon to maybe SFO so what did you think about that mr. espresso. Jason: [20:35] For me it’s all the fundamental problem which is called 24/7 availability of expresso, so do you know anything about staff coffee shops that they don’t tend to be staffed at 3 a.m. but with one of these automated systems you you can get a delicious iced latte anytime of the day or night. [20:55] In that sense obviously I love it it’s interesting to me what the ideal use cases for that so this feels like. Something that you’d want to put into a high-traffic public space I do a space that’s open a lot of the time or all the time like a bus terminal or some kind of public transit are the airport, and you would put it in in lieu of a man Espresso Bar so it does it takes up less space than I am and expresso bar and it can make all the different drinks and stuff it does not seem like something you’d add to an existing. Coffee place or something you know I think it’s meant to be sort of a stand-alone mini coffee shop in the moment it’s meant to be indoors which. You can imagine a lot of the 24/7 use cases that would be interesting are, I could potentially be outdoor installations I think we saw their business from model problem for him while we’re there I really think they should be partnering with the Tesla superchargers, and you can actually order your coffee from your car and have your car waiting for you when you arrive to plug in and charge it. Scot: [22:05] Yeah and I think they should be branded a human supercharger I met him at that my song. Jason: [22:12] Nice that could be your eyes breaking joke whenever you you know anyone. Scot: [22:16] All right I’ll tell you something delicious case I thought of and that it is popular is convention centers and I flash back to you and I have been to the NRF Big Show, some ungodly number of years and even though there’s two Starbucks some unbranded espresso place and another place the line is always 2 hours long. I’m sort of the cool features of this is if you download their app you can you can pre-order and the Machine will, you can you can actually schedule when you want your coffee made and then you go it doesn’t just have to make the coffee and spit it out so you go to the it holds it for you for for up to two hours, and then which finally makes sense with iced drinks anyway. And then you go up when you enter either you swipe your card or enter code and it didn’t dispense is the drink so I was thinking you know and those times in RF where we’ve got, 1520 minutes between now be a perfect use case for it because there is so much of the Cyber Monday for coffee demand really far outstrips the supply and the lost opportunities. Jason: [23:17] Yeah and I feel like it’s one of these categories almost every category that gets did we disrupted there’s like the the sort of, traditional players that are like oh my gosh a big part of the espresso experiences talking to the Barista and everyone wants to interact with a human and that’s you know it’s the third place and in this sort of impersonal robot is never going to work, but I would remind people that 20% of all Starbucks orders are now online order and pay and you essentially don’t, ever interact with a human you you order the drink on the phone you walk in you hope that you get easy access to grab your drink and never see a person and walk out and so this kind of automation, you can imagine really being a primary fulfillment vehicle for those kinds of experiences. Scot: [24:01] Yeah one lens you can look through this is the the human in the equation actually adds a lot of cost and then also a lot of variability right so you know the one thing I think you would find from a robot coffee maker is going to be, obviously a more consistent experience and they’ve done a lot around that that’s pretty wild, another cool thing is we’re able to see their Network Operating Center so they could see all the machines was going on and you know she number six is a little low on its cinnamon and this machine is low on this size cup, it’s a really cool demo and wanted to thank the guys for doing that especially shout out to Ted for inviting us on that. Jason: [24:35] Yeah and get any top animated caffeinated today hopefully that will pay off when we give our presentation at Channel advisor later. Scot: [24:42] Yeah I’m just hoping you don’t Peak too early so we got it we got a time this right. Jason: [24:46] I’ll always a challenge so what was the last store we visited before we sat down at the podcast how was your I think your original impetus for coming to the mall the away store. Scot: [24:57] Yeah we we popped into the waste or I tried to convince Jason and I had a robust argument in the middle of store around 2 vs 4 Wheels we will not bore you guys with that that argument, but the staff I have a little problem with my suitcase and those that was actually quite helpful with that and, yeah I love this store it’s a great suitcase it’s pretty cool how they can’t take in a suitcase and put a Lifestyle brand on it, so why the packaging and all is really geared towards people that travel a lot and talks about Adventure and since the last time I was in the store they’ve added a lot of accessories and other little kind of travel do dads and gadgets the, you know when you do travel those things I do to improve your life so I thought it was a great story if you have a chance to visit one of those used to definitely try it out. Jason: [25:44] And I think I’ve mentioned this in a previous tour visit. I have mixed feelings cuz I feel like it’s a way as a great brand new had a lot of success they obviously evangelized you and I think if you hear the founders speak, Del Taco watt about it being a travel Lifestyle brand not a luggage brand right and so. I had a chance to visit their first pop up before they open retail stores and I would have said their pop-up was brilliant I thought I was really well-executed and it perfectly matched, that story about them being a lifestyle travel brand so the store was set up in vignettes and the vignettes pretended to be different aspirational travel destinations so you might have had like, Lake Como in Bellagio Italy and you might have had I don’t I don’t know it just an Bull in turkey or something. Scot: [26:33] Myrtle Beach South Carolina. Jason: [26:34] And then obviously Myrtle Beach South Carolina for the golfers. And yes I did have a vignette of each of those things and it was like yeah you needed a suitcase but what they’re really selling was this aspirational lifestyle of traveling and taking great vacations. I know that Austin has very interesting bird life by the way for those that was not Scott, so I feel like the store did a good job of creating that aspiration and kind of telling that travel story and they were almost selling the destination more than the products, and then when they close this New York pop up and they open their permanent stores, I feel like they’re way more water down it’s a lot more shelves with suitcases on them and it’s a lot more talkin about the, the act of using the features in the benefits of the luggage and less about the lifestyle selling is a lot more subtle and I guess is what I’m saying that to me is mildly disappointing from. Experiential retail price back. Scot: [27:36] FairPoint yeah I did I get it I think they’re struggling with one of the knock knocks on these kind of show Rumi kind of places like, when I talked to your average consumer about bonobos they think it’s really weird you can’t go in there and buy stuff so I think away is trying to kind of say for that that person that does want to walk in and buy something it is a weird experience to say thanks for stopping by to this kiosk and will ship it to you in 3 days, irr what not to so I do think that kind of you know that’s probably why it has that feel to to compare to what you had in the pop-up. Jason: [28:10] Yeah I know and I I certainly am not going to argue against than having inventory in immediate gratification light, yeah in general those are all good things I N D Dunn Mesa a reasonable argument why he doesn’t want it but there’s pros and cons but I will say that sort of highlights my key takeaway from this whole Mall, is is. An increasing percentage of this mall and other good malls are filled by these digitally native vertical brands that are expanding to brick-and-mortar so you know we talked about malagueta and then lots of stores closing, you know it’s a big number right now it’s it’s over 5,000 stores that closed this year which is more than close the last year and there are. Thousands of openings like two or three thousand but not as many as closings and the openings are all these digital native brand so I do feel like that’s the future of the mall are more of these brands that were born online and, are now moving to Brick and Mortar but here’s my one knock on all those experiences. [29:07] They do still feel like isolated brick-and-mortar experiences so none of those cool stores we talked about could you have started shopping online, and resumed that that experience in-store none of them had, digital tools that the salesperson was holding to know which size away bag you looked at online before you came in the store none of the Casper when you know employees knew whether you were a Casper, customer or not already and what kind of relationship you had with Caspar I feel like it’s a lost opportunity, that you know these are a lot of brands that people have discovered online and then they’re exploring further in store and I really feel like the the omni-channel experiences. Continue to be lacking across the board. Scot: [29:52] Yeah yes all the reason I like this mall is you know where I am it’s very vanilla in the Southeast your your malls have, your standard Sears JCPenney Macy’s kind of an and that that’s maybe get a belts as an anchor in there so we don’t get almost any original stores at all so even Apple Stores we got like four of those, I’m too I think Center see about it is it is one of the few places you can go and find these kinds of stores that you just can’t find anywhere else, I’m going on vacation to New York in a couple weeks and I’m going to stop stop by Hudson yards they don’t know whatever you do don’t call them all but they’re, the collection of stores at Hudson yard I’ve heard native New Yorkers don’t like it but I’ve heard that it’s a fun destination because a lot of really unique things there so I look forward to seeing how that compares to this mall. Jason: [30:42] Yeah I’m going to eagerly await your trip report cuz I’m somewhat humiliated that I feel like you’re going to beat me to Hudson yard I I got to visit it before it opened but I haven’t been there since the grand opening. Scot: [30:52] Yeah I feel as Chief strategy retail digital e-commerce officer at Publicis pretty bad that you’ve let a landlubber like me get to get to the store before you so I hope none of your bosses are listening. Jason: [31:05] Well you know it would not be a Jason and Scott show without mocking Jason’s title and that’s probably going to be a great place to leave it because we’ve used up our a lot of time for this very first, Jason and Scott mobile podcast I hope the wisner’s enjoyed it and would love to get some feedback if if, ask schlepping on the podcast gear on our backs and walking through a mall in the blistering heat Scott wearing like a giant flannel jacket. Scot: [31:34] I’m being attacked by bear loud birds. Jason: [31:36] Baibars exactly if that’s the thing to put you over the edge really well to show we sure would appreciate that five star review. Scot: [31:44] Thanks everyone and if you are interested in learning more you could either Google or come visit at next time you’re in Austin this location is called domain Northside that stewards domain Northside and that is by Simon Property Group. Jason: [31:57] And so until next time happy comercing.  

Episode 8 - Life Behind the Keyboard"So I told my wife and son: 'Hey I'm gonna be a blogger!' and they were both scared out of their minds by the idea..."You might think that a full time job writing a travel blog, or perhaps managing a Facebook group dedicated to points and miles, involves all fun and no pain. Besides the illusion that these folks are just swimming in free points and miles, there's a lot that goes into interacting with people from behind a keyboard. One of Richard's very own heroes in the points and miles world, Greg Davis-Kean of Frequent Miler, joins him this week to chat about the real life of those who blog about travel for a living.Today's episode timestamps:1:00 - How Richard was first inspired to start Award Travel 1016:20 - Getting hooked on points and miles9:30 - What led Richard to leave the Navy and start managing a Facebook group16:45 - What does it take to keep blogging year after year22:45 - When you meet an online troll in person29:25 - The newest member of Award Travel Advance35:00 - Geekiest thing Greg has done to earn points and milesToday's GuestGreg Davis-KeanAfter business travel opened his eyes to the perks of frequent travel, Greg turned to online travel forums and blogs to find ways to keep his elite status with less travel. After getting hooked to the world of points and miles, and developing techniques to maximize earnings with every dollar spent, within six months, Frequent Miler was born and he had a new full time career.ResourcesFrequent MilerFrequent Miler InsidersThanks to Our SponsorEarn Instant Gold status when you join Fuel Rewards. Save 5 cents/gallon on every fill-up. Terms and Conditions apply, max 20 gallons per fill-up.

Business Impact on Distracted Driving and #AtlantaKindness on Georgia Business Radio Doug Rieder Chairman / Partner at Sterling Seacrest Partners I specialize in risk management and insurance & surety bond broking for medium to large commercial contractors and real estate developer / managers. Specialties: General Contractors, First Tier Trade Subcontractors, Grading / Utility Contractors and Real Estate Developers Brief Description of Product or Service: Sterling Seacrest Partners is a top-ranked insurance brokerage and consulting firm. The company serves a wide range of clients with complex property/casualty, employee benefit and personal insurance needs. Topics to Discuss: Distracted driving and businesses. Most of the discussion since the new law was passed has centered around what individual drivers can and cannot do with their phone while driving. But it's vital for businesses to have a strong plan for their employees. In our 24-hour workplace, with employees always potentially just a call or text away, every company should have policies in place to make sure their employees are abiding by the law and are safe. Leaders must set the tone for safe driving at their companies. It's not just one tactic. This should be a multi-pronged approach that ingrains safety into your company culture. 1.Talk About It - Make conversations about safe driving a regular part of new employee orientations, quarterly company meetings, more. 2.Training - Safe driving should be a part of the “new employee” training, and should be incorporated into larger training sessions. 3.Enforcement - The culture must be clear about enforcement. Employees must understand that the policy is real or it'll have no value. 4.Walk the Talk - It is important that the company actually live its plan. Web Site / Linkedin / Social Media Links: Linkedin: http://www.sterlingseacrest.com/team/doug-rieder/ Website: www.sterlingseacrest.com Twitter:  https://twitter.com/sterlingseacres LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sterling-seacrest-partners-01390540/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sterlingseacrestpartnersinc YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxkYBp8V_d0 Shayne Walsey President, UrbanEnterprises.com Urban Enterprises is a boutique promotional and event staffing firm that has been serving Atlanta businesses for 35 years. We staff high-end brand ambassadors for our clients events and promotions. Our client list includes larger brands like the AJC, Simon Malls, and Disney on Ice, as well as more local brands like Marlow's Tavern, Willy's, and Bantom & Biddy. While headquartered in Atlanta, we service clients throughout the South East. Our key services include the following: EVENT & PROMOTIONAL STAFFING UrUrban Enterprises offers a full range of staffing programs including full time, part time, seasonal and event staffing. Urban Enterprises provides a turnkey solution for onsite event management including event coordination and event managers. Clients that take advantage of this service include the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, the AmericasMart, and Lenox Square. OFFICE BUILDING DISTRIBUTION Our Promotion Specialists reach the business community by personally distributing your coupons/promotional materials directly into the hands of the business people working in the local trade areas. Using our office database, our ladies go door to door in office buildings delivering your materials to the front lines of the office community. Current clients include Peachtree Center, Willy's Mexican Grill, and Papa John's. COMMUNITY DISTRIBUTION Teams deliver postcards and hang posters in coffee shops, retail, restaurants, community boards, churches, schools, day-care centers and other neighborhood related businesses. This grassroots approach is a cost effective and high yield method to promote events and non-profits. Recent distributions include Ringling Brothers, the Alliance Theatre, and Fernbank.

Join us this week as we welcome the rock band, The House On Cliff. Hailing from Boston, MA., they are high-energy rock band with a passion to bring rock and roll back to the masses. Chad Michael Jervis (Bass/Lead Vocals) and Charles Coleman (Guitar/Vocals) met while studying at Berklee College of Music and the rest was history. Their first EP hits ears November 11th, 2014, a mix of groovable rock tunes produced by the masterful Dan Whittemore, recorded at The Madden Bros Studio in Los Angeles, CA. They will celebrate their debut EP with a release party and concert at the Berklee College of Music’s The Red Room at Café 939 on Saturday, November 15. Although The House On Cliff is a fairly new band (Est. Sept 2013) in the past year they have been on three national tours, the most recent being The ABC's Of Style Mall Tour (Sponsored by Simon Malls and Teen Vogue) performing alongside teen sensation IM5. In addition, they recently opened for Peter Frampton and The Doobie Brothers at the Bank Of New Hampshire Pavilion. Whether it be your first time or hundredth, no matter your age, they want you to know that rock and roll is not just for some, it is for everyone. We will talk to The House On Cliff about their upcoming schedule, get a behind the scenes look at their music, feature their latest songs, and ask them to share their message for the troops. Please be sure to visit them at http://thehouseoncliff.com/ and spread the word. Fans are welcome to call in and speak live with with them during the show (718) 766-4193. If you would like to participate in the live chat during the show, you must sign up on the show site first and then log in during the show. And as always we will give shout outs to our deployed military listeners. Be sure to join us, Sunday 12/7/2014 at 4 PM EST! Our message to the troops....WE do what we do, because YOU do what you do.

Welcome to episode #194. On the show: A compressed, no-frills version of the show today as Rob is remote on Prince Edward Island. Stories about Tinder match-making for dogs; Simon Malls & Mobiquity team up for “smart” malls; The Traces app launch; Shazam releases their Resonate platform; The Ninja Sphere for your connected home; Westpac adds augmented reality to banking; Track Toronto tracks the lyrics of the city; Drop closes a small round; Bing catches gets smarter mobile ad targeting; Timex has a new non-smartphone connected watch.   Full show notes can be found here: http://untether.tv/2014/twilbm-194-live-gentle-island/

Welcome to episode #194. On the show: A compressed, no-frills version of the show today as Rob is remote on Prince Edward Island. Stories about Tinder match-making for dogs; Simon Malls & Mobiquity team up for “smart” malls; The Traces app launch; Shazam releases their Resonate platform; The Ninja Sphere for your connected home; Westpac adds augmented reality to banking; Track Toronto tracks the lyrics of the city; Drop closes a small round; Bing catches gets smarter mobile ad targeting; Timex has a new non-smartphone connected watch.   Full show notes can be found here: http://untether.tv/2014/twilbm-194-live-gentle-island/