2PM - No. 704: A New Leader

DTC Brands / The Globe and Mail: After a year of explosive sales growth at e-commerce company Knix Wear Inc., founder and chief executive officer Joanna Griffiths decided last fall that it was time to raise money to fund the next phase of expansion. The Toronto-based company was riding a pandemic-fuelled surge in online shopping, and she expected demand from investors would be strong.

Rather than bend over backwards to convince skeptical investors she was fully committed to her business despite her pregnancy, Griffiths made a values-driven power move. She decided to automatically rule out any investors who referenced her pregnancy as a potential concern from the bidding process, no matter how much money they were going to pony up. New York private equity firm TZP Group led the $53 million round.

The effect was small, according to The Globe and Mail, which reported that a short list of investors were dropped as a result of Griffiths’ decision. But the move signifies the importance of treating women, and mothers, as leaders of no lesser value than men. Further than that, Griffiths’ outlook proposes a striking shift in perception when it comes to fundraising. For DTC brands, venture capital has been both growth fuel and ball-and-chain. Knix underscored the importance of finding the right fit in investor partnership on both sides of the equation.She grew the company to a profitable $100m+ in annual revenue and efficiently. She accomplished this extraordinary feat without an excessive early raise.  Money comes with strings attached. Healthy brands will only tie themselves to partners that see their vision in the most complete sense. 

Founder and CEO Joanna Griffiths  in a quote to 2PM: 

The key to building efficiently is simple: the answers are in the comments. Every day, all day, your customers and prospective customers are telling you what they want - from your product, your marketing and your customer experience. It’s easy to overthink things but ultimately businesses exist to serve their customers and community. If you want to scale you have to listen, implement, and repeat all with the sole purpose to be better for your customers tomorrow than you are today. You have to read the comments.

How Shein surpassed Amazon as the most downloaded

eCommerce / Modern Retail: Chan attributes this success to a mix of both strong app features as well as products that meet new “consumer needs.” On the app development side of things, Chan explains the retailer has consistently updated its app with new features like adding videos on its product pages, more sorting features on its flash sales, and category pages split into trends versus clothing categories.

Macy's and Victoria's Secret owner are abandoning the dying American mall

Retail Real Estate / Business Insider: The company is opening five new locations away from sprawling malls, including Market by Macy's, its trendy concept store. Meanwhile, it has been closing unprofitable mall-based stores and investing in only the "best malls" as part of its three-year "Polaris" turnaround plan to cut costs and boost growth.

Editor's Note: surprise, surprise. Re-read "The Lying Mall Owner"

The mall of today is in peril. The top 10% of Class A malls are in position to survive, thrive even. These are the developments that can tolerate lower foot traffic. Why? Average order value (AOV) is higher in these locations and volume matters much less than it does in lower Class A and Class B/C malls.

Sponsored: When the team at Snow reached out to sponsor a 2PM letter, I may have hesitated. Then I thought of all of the changes that many of us began making as we exited the pandemic lifestyle of sweats, remote work, snacks, too much coffee, and too many virtual conferences. Who wouldn't want brighter teeth heading into a summer of in-person meetings and industry events? The ad for the whitening kit sold me before we even published it.

👉🏽 Try Snow. 

How publishers are re-positioning branded content to compete

Brand / The Drum: A number of platforms have launched their own in-house agencies and consultancy services. These new players use many of the same selling points as the in-house consultancies – they know their audience better than anyone, and are adept at creating content that lands most effectively.

The secret psychology of sneaker colors

Consumer Psychology / New York Times: Athletic shoe companies are increasingly becoming fluent aficionados of that old art: color theory. The links between color and emotion have been studied for centuries, from Carl Jung’s color coding of personality traits to focus groups evaluating the ways in which candy colors can affect perceptions of flavor.

Fundamentals of modern loyalty

Sociology / The Sociology of Business: Membership represents a shift from buying goods in the hopes that others will admire them and you (conspicuous consumption) to investing in oneself: access, belonging, taste, experience, privacy, knowledge, self-actualization. In the modern aspiration economy, consumers are fans, influencers, hobbyists, environmentalists, and collectors. The best membership strategies, which trade on social and cultural capital, are designed for them.

Peloton to build its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Ohio

DNVB / CNBC: After vetting a number of locations, it selected a 200-acre site in Troy Township in Wood County, Ohio, to construct more than 1 million square feet of manufacturing, office and amenities space, the company said.

TikTok, the fastest way on earth to become a food star

Social Media / New York Times: Many Gen Z stars on FoodTok, as some call the food community on the app, wonder why anyone would pay their dues at a grueling restaurant job when they could be building their own brand online. Others are leaving the restaurant business to pursue full-time careers as content creators. And several are monetizing through TikTok’s creator fund, which pays content creators based on how many views their videos get, and through advertising deals and sponsorships.

75% of Target's digital orders were fulfilled from its stores in Q1

Logistics / Digital Commerce 360: Target’s brick-and-mortar locations remain crucial to its digital growth. The retailer fulfilled 95% of all sales (in stores and online) from its physical stores. More telling is that 75% of online orders were either picked up in store, curbside or shipped from a store.

Can Apple change ads?

Consumer Data / Benedict Evans: Apple has built up its own ad system on the iPhone, which records, tracks and targets users and serves them ads, but does this on the device itself rather than on the cloud, and only its own apps and services. Apple tracks lots of different aspects of your behaviour and uses that data to put you into anonymised interest-based cohorts and serve you ads that are targeted to your interests, in the App Store, Stocks and News apps.

The increasing complexity of product returns

Logistics / Practical eCommerce: According to U.S. Department of Commerce estimates, total eCommerce sales for 2020 were $788 billion, an increase of 32.4 percent from 2019. But the number of eCommerce packages that were returned in the U.S. in 2020 jumped 70 percent from 2019, according to Narvar, a logistics platform provider for retailers, representing approximately $102 billion worth of merchandise.

There is irony in the word “Eadem.” When I first heard the Latin term while on a trip abroad, it was used in reverence in the context of the 16th century British monarchy. Known to refer to equanimity and stability, the word signifies a perpetual sameness or precedence. A little digging revealed that it was the motto of Anne Boleyn, Cambridge’s Trinity College, and the HMS Queen Elizabeth. The word presents a sort of monolith. It’s also now an autantonym, a word which one meaning is the reverse of the other. A new brand named Eadem will rewrite how we view sameness. Launched this week by two women of color, Marie Kouadio Amouzame and Alice Lin Glover, Eadem is backed by a Glossier grant and Sephora’s 2021 program.

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