How to Shape Your Business Ops for the 21st Century with Eric Best from SoundCommerce

Kristen: 

Hey Eric, welcome to Playing for Keeps. Super excited to have you on. How are you doing today?

Eric Best:

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here.

Kristen: 

Yeah. Can you start off by telling us a little bit more about yourself and SoundCommerce?

Eric Best:

Sure. Well, I'm Eric Best. I'm the founder and CEO here at SoundCommerce. Bit of a serial entrepreneur. I spent most of my career in retail, eCom, digital marketing, cloud software. So SoundCommerce is actually my sixth startup. And the team here came together from a shared history at Amazon and various leadership roles. Running consumer brands, Brooks Running, [inaudible] in Southern California as well as digital agencies and tech companies. And our mission and vision, we're looking to build a data platform for consumer direct manufacturers and retailers. And the idea is to enable real time and predictive decisioning around the things that impact customer experience and build brand value. So think of inventory by location, order routing, optimization, merchandising offers. And there's all sorts of other examples we can talk about.

Kristen:

Yeah. I was lucky enough that you showed me a little bit of the back end of SoundCommerce, and it is one of the most amazing platforms I have ever seen, especially from a retention customer experience nerd standpoint. I remember when we were going over it, I just kept being like, "Wow, I need this."

Eric Best: 

I love that. Yeah.

Kristen: 

It's such a powerful tool. And you and I have kind of talked about this before. You mention that there's a lot of leadership in SoundCommerce from Amazon. So there's actually a lot of kind of understanding about Amazon and the power of Amazon, and why Amazon impacted eCommerce so strongly. From your perspective, what was it about Amazon that really has shifted eCommerce as a whole?

Eric Best:

Yeah, well I think it goes without saying Amazon is an amazing company. They have been investing in infrastructure now for 26 years. It's kind of amazing. 1994 is when the company was founded. And I think they've really sort of transcended eCommerce and even retail. I mean, they're clearly doing things that are transforming human experience.

Eric Best: 

So you look at the way that Uber has changed transportation or the way that ghost kitchens are emerging and are about to transform the restaurant industry. The thing about Amazon that we've internalized is that they've never focused on marketing or customer acquisition as the thing. It's always been this idea of customer ecstasy or shopper ecstasy driven by data and operations. So like relative to most brands, Amazon spends almost nothing on marketing. They don't have to, they have next day Prime, they have sortation centers, and they have Prime Video. But they also own an operate fleets of planes and trucks that provide this massive competitive advantage.

Kristen: 

Yeah. It's something I've talked about it before. It's really this focus on operations versus marketing. And what made Amazon the Goliath that it's become is that they kind of went against the playbook and they said, "Yeah, we could invest and become this very lifestyle brand type thing. Or we could invest in operations where nobody's invested yet, and create a system that," I mean, Amazon shopping is unlike any other kind of shopping.

Kristen:

As DTC fans, we can kind of pish posh at it. We can say how much we don't like it. There's a lot of practices that they do that aren't great. But you really can't deny the power that is Amazon and that you can go and find something that you want for the lowest price and get it in two days. It's a pretty powerful thing that's actually the way I see it completely shifted the way we shop and then the way we expect things from brands. Amazon's put a lot of pressure on eCommerce as a whole to kind of keep up with the pace a little bit.

Eric Best: 

That's for sure. Yeah. Over the weekend, I had a project that I started at home and I needed a drill bit. So I ordered it this morning before I left for work. Apparently it's already arrived. Case in point.

Kristen:

Yeah. So this lesson for DTC brands coming out now, really what do they pull from this? Because there's obviously a lot of conversation and there's a lot of importance on marketing and brand, and having your brand story. I just saw it right before this call. Just today, the company brainless is shutting down. And there's a really strong thing here that it proves that marketing and brand story and having that brand ethos is very powerful. So really what is the balance between operational and marketing, where modern DTC brands can actually kind of win on both fronts? Is that even possible?

Eric Best:

Yeah, I definitely think it is. I mean, a couple of thoughts on that. One, this isn't about competing against Amazon per se. It's more about following their lead when it comes to having discipline around things like operations and an understanding of the customer and their needs and their value potential.

Eric Best: 

It's been really fascinating to follow the Casper IPO conversation. Increasingly, all these industry pundits and insiders are talking about this reckoning that's coming. And I guess I have to agree with that. You can only spend your way to growth for so long before you have to dig in and have a better understanding of retention, repeat engagement, customer lifetime value, LTV over CAC equation. And understand at what point and to what degree you're going to actually turn a profit and be a sustainable brand.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And this brings us to a topic that you and I have talked about before, and I'm excited to cover. And that's this idea that the product has become almost secondary to the brand narrative and the customer experience. And customer experience is where this all ties in together. This operational conversation, but also the marketing conversation is that it really all comes down to the experience your customer has with your brand from both an operational and a marketing standpoint. Why is the customer experience honestly, do you believe it's more important than anything else right now? And if so, why?

Eric Best: 

Yeah, I would say that. So first of all, I totally agree with that. I think that there are certain things that are still table stakes. They always have been and I think they always will be. The brand narrative, why you exist as a brand, product quality, product differentiation. And then today especially, kind of how the business model supports the mission. So you think about subscription businesses, which I know are top of mind for you guys. And models like fashion drops that have very specific kind of operational requirements, operational needs.

Eric Best: 

I think the big change here is the customer experience really is the predominant differentiator for brands. And the opportunity as we've seen with leaders in the space, like say Stitch Fix is that you can be evidence-based and ideally predictive in terms of how you decision and how you run the business.

Eric Best: 

So at SoundCommerce, we think about things like product assortment. Am I meeting my customer's demand with the right supply? And really mundane concerns like supply chain lead times and inventory staging of product in the right places. There's this massive drive in the industry now. You see all this venture capital funding going into logistics and fulfillment companies. And I think it's this realization that what we talked about earlier with Amazon kind of leading the charge with operations is now becoming more broadly understood.

Eric Best: 

So there's a lot that we could talk about in terms of aligning merchandising promotions with the right customers and value and profit metrics, improving the doorstep experience. And then if you're an omni channel retailer, we're serving a growing number of consumer brands that operate hundreds of retail storefronts and thinking about the interplay of how stores can provide a competitive advantage for what was once a pure play eCommerce brand. Those are exciting conversations.

Kristen: 

Yeah, and the thing I love so much about SoundCommerce and the way you guys even look at things and then the way your tool helps is this idea of everything from operations to the logo or the colors you choose all really do play into the customer experience. And things just as simple as how your business is set up does impact the customer experience. This, it's really cool, and your tool works to really give insight into that kind of holistic experience of your company. Not just this is one piece of it. This is one piece of it. But trying to bridge all these things together so that brand owners can actually understand how every piece of the business at work is actually playing into the customer experience and customer retention in the long run.

Eric Best: 

Yeah, that's right. We talked briefly earlier about this idea that brands tend to kind of overinvest or over index on marketing. And I spent some time a couple of years ago in the technology space known as CDP, customer data platform. And one of the realizations I had as I spent time in that domain is that there's so much investment and capability in the MarTech world, in the marketing side of the business. But oftentimes, the work kind of stops or the conversation ends at the point of conversion in the shopping cart or at the cash register. And as we've discussed, there's this opportunity for operations to be that core driver of customer experience. We think there's a huge market opportunity for brands to lean in and start thinking about what happens after a checkout.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And that's, obviously hosting a podcast about retention. You've just said the thing that is my favorite ever is brands starting to look past the point of conversion. And that it's not just everything you're doing to get a flat sale, it's now is everything you're doing to help you get multiple sales from said person.

Kristen:

And this is leading into another question I had. Most DTC brands really tend to kind of optimize their marketing to revenue. That's kind of the measurement of success there. But you and I have talked about this and we both agree that there's actually a lot more that you can market towards. So can you kind of expand on this idea of marketing towards something different than just flat revenue?

Eric Best: 

Yeah. To sort of unwind everything that I've said so far, inevitably SoundCommerce is being pulled, we're being dragged into the marketing domain. And that makes a lot of sense just given the number of dollars, the amount of spend that is controlled by the CMO and the importance ultimately of acquiring the right customers.

Eric Best: 

So we actually have a series of blog posts right now that kind of walk through this, you could call it a maturity model or kind of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs as you move from revenue based marketing optimization into things that I think are ultimately more powerful in the long run for a brand.

Eric Best: 

But it starts first with understanding the gross margin return on your advertising budget. And that requires an understanding of the products that are converting in the shopping cart or in the store. Right? And there's some really interesting things that go along with customer analysis, and we can talk about this more in a bit. But customer analysis in terms of purchasing behavior and how the purchase of one particular product skew might drive future repeat engagement around higher margin products and things like that. But in order to get to that level of analysis, you really need to understand the profitability profile of the products that are converting in the cart. And oftentimes, the biggest challenge there is the quality of the data in the retailer's catalog itself. So you can see the orders, you can see the order items. But to get to cost of goods sold and gross margin analysis, you have to have a high quality catalog. And there are some interesting players in the market space that address this particular problem very well. You have kind of the traditional ERP providers like NetSuite that manage the product catalog, but then there are purpose-built SAS tools providers like Salsify that are trying to solve this problem.

Eric Best: 

I'll just finish the thought by saying once you have your cost of goods sold and gross margin intact, then the problem becomes sort of exponentially more complex. Because the two biggest cost drivers for direct to consumer businesses beyond product cost are variable marketing on the one hand, and the cost to pick, pack, and ultimately ship and deliver to the customer doorstep on the other. So in order to get to the point where you can actually measure contribution margin ROI on your marketing dollars, you have to be able to measure that marketing spend at the order level. And also the fulfillment and delivery cost at the order level.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And I like how you really branch that out into two big things to focus on. This idea of not just like your return on spend on advertising, but also your return on spend on everything. Like supply chain and fulfillment, and how you're packing and shipping those boxes. I feel like this is something that can start to feel really big and chaotic in someone's head. Thinking of this as an entirely put together system versus kind of how it's been, which feels a little bit like things are siloed. There's the operational side of things. You've got your customer success team, your marketing team. What we're talking about is a lot more cohesiveness between all the different parts of a moving business. So if someone's listening to this and they're getting a little bit overwhelmed with this idea, where would you suggest they start in trying to understand this a little more and applying it to their business?

Eric Best: 

Yeah, we've talked about three sources of variable costs, right? One is the products themselves, and that's generally pretty manageable. And then when it comes to marketing and delivery, these are pretty mature domain spaces. I would say on the marketing side, there are valuable technology vendors like funnel.io and Supermetrics that make it pretty easy to collect advertising spend and incorporate that into a tool like Google Analytics where it becomes easier to apply an attribution model and understand where spend is actually leading to conversions, right, to revenue and profit.

Eric Best:  

On the other side of the business, when you're talking about variable fulfillment costs, there's a very mature domain space that's characterized by companies like ShipStation, and Shippo, and EasyPost. These are called ship manifest tools. And they generally rate shop across carriers like UPS and FedEx to find the lowest price to fulfill a particular shipment. And in doing so, they collect and track the actual cost of shipping to the customer doorstep. So by doing so, they're making it easier for a brand to measure those costs.

Eric Best: 

But I guess I've got one additional thought on that, which is where all of this information comes together today. There's really a few different options in terms of how brands get a handle on all of this data and the insights. On the one hand, there's this kind of a collection of data warehouse and data integration tools that are out there. And I'm thinking of technology vendors like Snowflake or integration tools like let's say MuleSoft. And then of course you have your BI and analytics providers like Tableau and Looker.

Eric Best: 

One approach for brands to take is to hire an integrator or a consultant or build an internal IT team, and go and build this data capability themselves. The other option of course is something like SoundCommerce where you have a prebuilt data model and prebuilt connections to all of the typical sources of information. Think Shopify, Google Analytics, Zendesk, NetSuite and so on. And we're trying to cut down on the time and cost that brands incur coming to these insights and this data capability.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And that's what's so cool about SoundCommerce. To me is seeing when we were in the back and you were showing me, seeing how it pulls data from all these different places. You can ultimately kind of see a customer journey from the very beginning to the very end, and then back around again. And be able to really see how all of your money is going into these different sections and how the experience of a customer and every aspect of your business is connecting. Is something that's almost unheard of and now is kind of this new thing that's coming out. And it's so exciting for brands trying to really hone in on retention. Because like we talked about earlier, the customer experience is the biggest driver of retention. You can have a fantastic product that does amazing things. But if the shopping experience, and the buying experience, and the post-purchase experience is kind of meh, then it doesn't really matter how good your product is because that experience is what people are really kind of buying now. So the ability to see things from a data standpoint, giving data to this customer experience kind of idea is so exciting and new because it unlocks a bunch of new decisions you can make. Do you have any examples of how this kind of new clean data has helped a brand really make a strategic decision that impacted retention?

Eric Best: 

Yeah, for sure. So I'll give you a specific example. I just thought I'd respond quickly to your comments, and describe kind of the three things that we decided were most important when we set out to build this software platform. And I think we talked about all of these already today, but it's a good summary.

Eric Best: 

First and foremost, we said we need to understand the value of given customer, right? So [inaudible] CLV because that's going to help us understand the impact of an operational exception, let's say like an inventory stockout or a late delivery arriving past the delivery promise that we made on the product detail page or in the shopping cart. And in fact, that real time operational state awareness, this idea of knowing where the trains are running on time and where things are late or broken is the second kind of major component.

Eric Best: 

And the last piece is understanding the unit economics or profitability of the order. And what that helps inform is what you can afford to do to fix the problem for the impacted customer. So if you know the value of the customer, you know whether the trains are running on time or where things have broken or where exceptions are occurring. You know how much profit you have to work with to fix the problem. It feels like you have all of the information at your fingertips to be able to make a very informed decision. And if you can do that in real time, that's exciting. If you can use machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict where those problems are going to occur tomorrow or next week and get ahead of them, that's even more powerful.

Eric Best: 

So among our customers, we have a subscription coffee company that is less than four years old. They did 80 million in revenue last year and they're on their way to at least 100 million, probably another growth year this year. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Digitally native brand. And you think about a category like coffee. They have an incredible marketing engine that allows them to kind of reach target customers in their demographic. But we've been helping them instrument operations to build this incredible customer experience that you and I have been talking about.

Eric Best: 

So the first thing that we did is we were able to measure and contrast the value of an active coffee club member at just under $500 or so. With the relative value of a nonmember, a non subscription customer, which could be more like 60 to $70.

Eric Best: 

So those coffee club members are worth 6 to 700% more than the non club shoppers. And based on that single data point, we challenged our customer and they challenged us to think about how we would change operations to bias toward those high value coffee club members. And today, when you look at the 3PL warehouses that drive fulfillment of these coffee club orders, every time a fulfillment wave happens, which happens I think today, every hour or so. The active coffee club member orders get pushed to the front of the fulfillment queue. So if there's a risk of a stockout or if there's a risk of missing the UPS cut off, the pickup from the warehouse, the distribution center. They're minimizing the impact that that might have on their highest value members. And basically pushing that risk to kind of their lowest value customers. So it's a pretty good example of how the type of decisioning that has been applied traditionally to marketing is now being applied to physical company operations.

Kristen: 

Oh, I love that story so much. For a couple of things. One, I obviously love subscription brands. And I'm constantly trying to convince brands to add a subscription. So you just anecdotally gave me a little bit of power to prove that subscriptions and memberships really do work and drive higher value customers.

Kristen: 

And then also just on the other side, the fact that you're able to take that data and not just say, "Okay, we can mark it more heavily this subscription program and do it that way." But also you're evolving the entire business model so that it's serving your best fitting and most loyal customers above all else. And that's just going to create more of those relationships kind of naturally. Not to mention you are just putting your money where it's going to give you the biggest kind of return in profitability.

Eric Best: 

Yeah, all that is true. I've got one more for you, which is kind of cool. And it speaks to the importance of this real time data capability. So this same coffee company monitors their active coffee club members. And as you know, there's a variety of different ways that you can see voluntary or involuntary cancellation. Sometimes a credit card doesn't process. Sometimes a customer comes in and explicitly quits a program. So the SoundCommerce platform monitors for these events. And when we see them occurring, the key here is that we are able to package up the most recent picture of the customer profile. So the number of orders they've placed, the cumulative value of those orders, whether or not they were subscription or non-subscription. And then a bunch of other details that might be useful to a customer service rep. Things like the digital marketing channel through which that shopper was first acquired.

Eric Best: 

So when these cancellation events occur, we package up that customer record and we push the record directly into HubSpot, which happens to be this company's CRM platform. And that a message that we push triggers an autodialer win-back back phone call on the part of the customer service team so that as the shopper, as the end customer is clicking the cancellation button on the web form, their phone is ringing and it's a customer service rep asking them if there's something that the brand can do to retain their membership status. And they actually have a very prescriptive survey questionnaire that they go through with the customer. And because the CSR, the customer service rep has information about the value of that customer. They can also be very custom and personalized in terms of the retention offer that they choose to present.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I love that. And just thinking about if I was a customer service rep and I got one of these. And just something as simple as knowing, "Okay, this customer has actually skipped their order every two months for the last year. And it seems like they just have an issue of always having too much," or little things like that. You can start to bring that into the conversation instead of the conversation being really trying to keep the customer on a coffee subscription. It's more like, "Okay, you love our coffee. Let's try to find a better delivery schedule that will work for you." It gives you such a better chance to save people because you kind of know the journey they've been through. It's gotten them where they are to canceling, whether it's passively or voluntarily. And just giving the customer service reps a chance to make that really personalized outreach is huge. I love that. And that real-time access to data is something that not a lot of brands have. And you can clearly see that kind of example how quickly you can respond to something when your data is this fresh and coming in this clean and quickly for you.

Eric Best: 

Yeah, it brings up one other point. We often, well it's a confusing landscape, right? Especially for someone that is not steeped in the technology. And it is often easy to confuse the BI and analytics, the business intelligence and analytics providers like Tableau and Domo with data platform providers like SoundCommerce. But the distinction that I call out is it's one thing to see this information in the form of a dashboard or a report that you might get in your email inbox every morning. But it's another to be able to automate data workflows and decisions in a way that impact the customer. Again, in real time.

Eric Best: 

So the things that we're excited about in terms of our own product roadmap involve things like the ability to set a service level or SLA for a particular event. Let's go back to our example of a late delivery. And then to be able to trigger actions that occur when those SLAs are broken or exceptions are observed. So this goes way beyond the idea that you're reporting on business metrics in a dashboard, and actually becomes kind of the plumbing or glue that that runs the company.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And that example that you just gave is actually something that just happened to me. And I sent this email to my community and I was like, "Look at what a great email this was." It was actually from Chewy. And our dogs [crosstalk] great brand. Their dog food delivery was delayed by two days or something because we had a massive snow storm here in Colorado. And it was the same day that my husband looked at me and he was like, "Shouldn't we have gotten our dog food? Because I think we're just about out." And I was like, "Oh yeah," and I pulled up my phone and I was going to go to the Chewy site. But I went to my email first and I had an email right there from Chewy that said, "Hey sorry, your package is delayed. It'll be there in this many days." And just that complete automated getting in front of the issue before I was upset. Then I just went, "Oh well, okay. We need two more days of dog food. Let me just run to the store and get a small bag to hold us over."

Kristen: 

If I hadn't have gotten that email, it would have left a sour taste in my mouth because I would have been like, "They don't respect that my dogs need food," and it was late and they didn't say anything about it. Just that simple act of being a little bit ahead of it made me not mind at all that I had to go to the pet food place and buy dog food, that I haven't had to do that in years. It was just kind of like oh well it happens. It's snowing. I get it. And just being able to proactively get in front of those things is so huge.

Eric Best: 

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You're anticipating your customers' needs in advance. There's one interesting thought about this that we haven't talked about, and that's really the upside opportunity for these brands. Oftentimes when we start a conversation with a prospective customer, we really start by contrasting. We don't have to name names here. But very high value, I mean like corporate enterprise value market cap brands with those that might fall into more of a traditional wholesale model. The difference in how the market values these brands is profound.

Eric Best: 

On the one hand, you have these digitally native brands that know the customer, they serve the customer well. And they have this data capability to anticipate customer needs. You'll see examples in the market where companies like that are being valued at five to 10, to even 12 or 14 times revenue. And you contrast that with the value of their traditional counterparts. Companies that are still primarily selling through the retailer channel. And it might be a single digit multiple on cash flow or EBITDA. You're talking about somewhere between 10 to 20 times the value for these digitally native brands versus their wholesale counterpart.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And that really does just come down to being able to own that customer journey unlike you would in a traditional kind of wholesaler. A good example of this I'm thinking of is Vera Bradley just bought not too long ago, but out Pura Vida. And it's interesting because Vera Bradley kind of is this a little bit more of a legacy brand. But they bought this digitally native brand because of the power of the community that Pura Vida had built, and the customer data that they had, and all of this information that they had on their customers that Vera Bradley otherwise wouldn't have had access to. And that really is the power of having a digitally native brand is that we actually do these insights into customer behavior from point zero to whatever. And that is so powerful. And now I think brands are starting to truly understand that they can actually harness that to find that exponential growth that you're really looking for.

Eric Best: 

Yeah. In the past, brands have sort of described their eCommerce operation as the nose of the dog. I guess going back to your Chewy anecdote a few minutes ago. But I think really when you are a truly consumer direct, entire business has the ability to kind of have that real time and predictive insight into what the customer wants next. So you can instrument the entire business way.

Eric Best: 

I was reading some critique of Macy's last week. Earnings came out. They announced that they were closing stores and laying off I think 2,000 employees. And the general critique is that the strategic roadmap, the strategic plan that the executive management team had laid out looked and sounded very similar to one that had been presented eight to 10 years ago. And the biggest difference between sort of the constructs of that strategic plan and what you see from these digitally native brands is the speed at which decisions are made.

Kristen: 

Yes.

Eric Best: 

And you can sort of kind of almost walk down how different the playbook is today. Versus kind of traditional retail. It's not just that your end customer is the end shopper, not the retail buyer. But there's all these other considerations. The ability to leverage an omni channel footprint. This concept of making decisions around product assortment, and inventory depth, and demand in a real time way rather than on a seasonal spring, summer, autumn, winter type cadence. And then everything about the company being sort of customer driven rather than product design driven. So it's sort of demand as the pull rather than supply as the push in terms of how business decisions get made.

Kristen: 

Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up too because we had an episode earlier in the season with Corinne Watson from BigCommerce, and we talked about sustainability in eCommerce and how it's becoming a big thing. And something she talked a lot about was that digitally native brands have this leg up on wholesalers, especially on something like this because a digitally native brand could take their entire business and turn it sustainable in a pretty quick manner because you're able to be so flexible and so quick to make changes in your business because you have full control over it.

Kristen: 

Versus her example was if you want to get ahead of a company like Target, if you have a competitor with Target, Target's not going to be able to go full sustainable. Even getting them to a break even point is going to take years of work for them. So it really is this unique opportunity and unique advantage of digitally native brands beyond just knowing your customer throughout the whole journey. But also you have the ability to make these quick decisions and react in real time to what your customers want. Like you said, using the customer demand as your driver of decisions versus making a decision and then trying to create a demand for it.

Eric Best: 

I would agree with all of that. I think in some ways this kind of brings us full circle. The data capability that we've talked about so far and this decisioning approach, just the speed and granularity with which brands are driving the business today. It is not a replacement or alternative to kind of that authentic brand narrative. Having been through the startup process before and kind of viewing SoundCommerce as a blank slate with boundless potential, if I may. This time, we're especially focused as a team on kind of a bigger vision for the company. And one of the key kind of cultural and I guess I could call it corporate value that's driving our behavior at SoundCommerce is the belief that emerging brands can really be disruptive and change [inaudible] through their social impact. So that might be a sustainability mission.

Eric Best: 

There's a company here in Seattle in the Fremont neighborhood where we're based called MiiR water bottles. And they have this very explicit mission that they're going to take profits from the sale of their products and use those profit dollars to drive access to clean water for underserved global populations. So the entire brand is built around this construct that they're bringing water to people that would not otherwise have access. And you can be very cynical about that. Or you can kind of get behind these brands and believe that the mission that drives them is real and authentic.

Eric Best: 

Just one other final thought there maybe on that topic is it cuts both ways, right? I'm reminded of this recent story of Amazon knocking off the Allbirds sneaker. And that's kind of a perfect example of how things go wrong when the financial lens is the only lens that the brand applies, in this case Amazon. But I thought that Allbirds' response was just so awesome. It's like, "Hey Jeff and Amazon team. It's one thing to knock off the design of our sneaker, but it's another to actually make it sustainably from the wool sourced from the farms that we use and build a quality product that's going to have a different environmental impact."

Kristen: 

Yeah. I loved it. We'll make sure to link up to that article that they posted, that Allbirds posted kind of in response to that. Because I loved it too, because I obviously am someone who really cares and I'm always fighting for brands that have really strong values and mission. And I think this is a huge driver of customer attention is having these strong stances. It's a differentiator. Like you said, it's a way to be disruptive in a space is to do something wildly different than everybody else is doing it. And that's really what's so exciting. And the way that Allbirds responded was basically saying, "You guys can copy our product all you want, but you can't copy Allbirds. You can't recreate who Allbirds is unless you want to do the entire commitment they did."

Kristen: 

One, that just gives a brand so much backbone to be able to stand on to say, "I get that you're Amazon and you're this massive competitor, but we know our value and we know what we do. And you can't copy it. And if you want to try, have fun because we'll see how it goes." I think it's like you said, it's just so exciting for emerging brands to be able to come out and even as a small brand, really stake your claim to a niche area. Whether it's a value, whether it's a social play. Being able to just hold down the fort on something that you do is so exciting for the space. In my opinion, it's going to create a lot of really interesting brands coming out. So just to wrap up with a quick question. Sorry. You can go ahead.

Eric Best: 

I was just going to respond and say that along those lines, as we're talking about the difference between an Allbirds and an Amazon. There's no doubt that Amazon provides incredible utility and convenience to consumers. Right? But a theme that we're excited about here that we haven't talked about yet together is the idea that there are networks of independent service providers that are coming together to create an infrastructure that starts to look a lot like Amazon at scale. And I'm talking about kind of this category 4PL fulfillment centers or distribution centers. There's a company here in Seattle called FLEXE with an E on the end. They compete in a market space alongside of companies like Darkstore and others where you're able to basically view a network of warehouses, independent warehouses together as a single network. And move inventory around, stage it closer to the customer doorstep, reduce your holding costs, reduce your shipping costs. And basically act and think more like Amazon does by leveraging these independent networks [inaudible].

Kristen: 

Yeah. It's such an exciting thing to be able to start kind of acting in this nimble way that Amazon does on the operation side, but then still have the advantages that we're talking about with the strong branding and the strong values that you can back it all up. So to kind of wrap up, because we talked a lot about SoundCommerce and everything you guys are kind of building. Is there something that you are most excited for, for the SoundCommerce team in product in this upcoming year or two?

Eric Best: 

Well this is really our breakout year. We raised capital last from some really exciting partners in Silicon Valley. Defy VC led our seed round in June. So we have capital. We've been building the software actually since before SoundCommerce was founded as a company. My partners and I were coding starting around September of 2017. So we're coming up on almost three years of investment in this technology capability. So what we're really excited about this year is just bringing SoundCommerce out into the market. I think we're a relatively unknown service provider. We're building bridges in terms of partnerships like this one. And really working to prove our value through real world engagements with brands like lucky brand in the apparel space, and Mejuri Jewelry out of Toronto. So this'll be a scaling year for us to engage more customers and begin to bring our value proposition to a broader market.

Kristen: 

Yeah. Exciting. And we're for sure going to be watching and rooting for you guys along the way. Because as I said, this platform is incredible in terms of customer retention. Just I think it made my day for a whole day. I went back to our team and I was like, "SoundCommerce is amazing."

Eric Best: 

I appreciate that. Yeah, I know there's a lot of thought and hard work that's gone into this so far. I was going to quickly mention, we're going to be at eTail coming up on February 24th in Palm Springs. And we'll be hosting a booth there. And then again in March we're going to be at Shoptalk in Las Vegas and looking forward to meeting partners and prospects, and reconnecting with some of our existing customers there as well.

Kristen: 

Yeah. Awesome. So before I let you go, if people want to follow up with you, other than kind of conferences and in person things you guys are doing this year, where can people find you and talk to you more about SoundCommerce?

Eric Best: 

Yeah, absolutely. Well, of course we're on all the primary social media channels. You can find SoundCommerce on LinkedIn. I do a lot of kind of content about leadership there. We're on the web at soundcommerce.com. I'd encourage folks to take a look at our blog and some of the content that we publish there. A lot of best practices that are less promotional about our platform and really trying to focus on delivering value and advice to brand operators. And then if you want to reach us directly, email is grow grow G-R-O-W at soundcommerce.com. And we have a new 800 number. It's 888-41SOUND.

Kristen: 

Nice.

Eric Best: 

People can give us a call.

Kristen: 

Now you need to come up with a jingle that you can sing [inaudible].

Eric Best: 

I'll get it for you. I'll jingle it right now. Ready? We can do 888-41SOUND. Boom.

Kristen: 

Perfect.

Eric Best:

Did you like it?

Kristen: 

I love it. That's great.

Kristen: 

There we go. Done and done. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Eric. This was such a good conversation. Such an interesting topic that is not talked about nearly enough. So I'm excited to follow you guys this year. I will keep the listeners updated with everything you guys are doing and wish you luck in your breakout year.

Eric Best: 

Thanks Kristen. Really appreciate the opportunity to be here.