Nathan Bush: Happy Holidays. I hope you're enjoying this episode of Add to Cart on a beach or somewhere really relaxing after a big 2022. We're taking a break at Add to Cart so we're bringing you some extra checkout episodes that haven't gone to air yet. We'll be back with our feature episodes from Monday 16th January and the very first episode we have lined up is an absolute star of the industry. We can't wait to bring it to you. Until then, enjoy the downtime and we'll see you in the new. Welcome to the Checkout.
[Voiceover]: We catch up with previous Add to
Nathan Bush: Cart guests and ask them five quick
[Voiceover]: questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features Bettina McLeod, founder and CEO of Triad Home, a digital platform allowing brands to offer their customers a way to touch, feel and of course, try on products from the comfort of their own lounge room. With a background in buying and selling e commerce businesses, Bettina realized that much loved quality brands were missing out on sales because their customers hadn't been able to get their hands, quite literally their hands on their products. By developing the tech to support this process, Bettina and the team at Tryathome have seen average order value increases of up to 88% for brands such as her own Siren Swimwear. Tina, welcome to the Checkout. Five quick questions for you. We've heard all about Try at home and the amazing things that you're doing there. Want to get to know you a little bit more. So five questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
[Voiceover]: A house. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Before COVID I have to confess, I was definitely not a online super shopper. I dabble occasionally, but not a lot. And then I got Covid really badly, actually, just after I met you at Retail Global. I think half of.
Nathan Bush: I think half of. Yeah, most of us got it.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I got it severely. I ended up in hospital two or three times and I had 10 days at home where I couldn't do anything and they specifically didn't want me to work either. And I'm not a TV watcher. So I was sitting there in my bed absolutely bored out of my brain and flicking through Facebook seeing what my. What the rest of the world were doing. All my friends and the ads would pop up for beautiful products and brands and I started shopping and I started buying clothes and I started buying boots and lipsticks and the girls who were laughing at me. I even bought sticky things to hang posters on the wall. It was like crazy. And all of a sudden I went, whoa, hang on a minute. I've got to stop buying random stuff. I really should buy something intentionally. And the next day I put an offer in on a unit and a house.
Nathan Bush: Wow. Dangerous.
[Voiceover]: When bored, you are home and, you know, I couldn't go to an opening, so I just went, hey, can I put an offer in? Anyway, I ended up buying a house.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. And were you as happy when you saw the house is what you saw online?
[Voiceover]: Yes, that's the one. I'm renovating into a beautiful palm Spring style house. So it's going to be very cool.
Nathan Bush: Start of the dream.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Good. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
[Voiceover]: There are lots of beautiful retailers out there. I'm really in love with some of these, what I call my beautiful fashion products. But one in particular that I'm really in love with at the moment is called Bonnie and kind, which she makes these bags. They're kind of only about, I don't know, 20 centimeters wide. They're a little bag and they're actually a nappy bag. Now, you would know by my age I do not have a baby. But these bags are fantastic. When you take out the change mat and all the bab stuff that I wouldn't use, they have these compartments in them. And I wear my glasses for my computer, my glasses to see people, my glasses to drive. They are fantastic. They've got all these pockets in them that I can add all my glasses and my keys, my lipstick, all of that type of stuff. So, yeah, I'm really in love with these beautiful leather bags that she makes and beautiful gold zips and all this.
Nathan Bush: Have you told them about your alternate use?
[Voiceover]: Yes, I've told her, can you please change your branding so that you kind of specifically make them for people like me who are blind and need to carry around free pairs of glasses.
Nathan Bush: There you go. Best mentoring ever. All right, number three, which e commerce practice do you wish was?
[Voiceover]: History Definitely pop up codes at the beginning of entering a website. It's kind of a little bit like it's equivalent to me walking into the shop and the salesperson saying, can I help you? And you just like, run a mile. They pay thousands of dollars for these beautiful campaign imagery. I want to see the images. I want to fall in love with the brand first. I want to get to know your product. I want to get to know the feeling behind your brand. And all of a sudden you're yelling at me, saying, you want my email, like for 10%, 10% off. What? I don't even know what. What I want to buy or what your product's like.
Nathan Bush: So I skipped a few bases there.
[Voiceover]: Right? Yeah, Just get rid of the pop ups at the beginning, please.
Nathan Bush: I like it. Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
[Voiceover]: Well, I get all my team to listen to add to Cart. Because seriously, all of your interviews are very insightful to what we develop here and what the people you interview talk about. So, yeah, definitely that. But I was thinking about this. What was the defining book that I read that really shifted my e comm business? So not necessarily from a tech perspective, but it ended up creating my tech business actually out of this book. So I read the book called Rework by Jason Freed and he's the CEO of Basecamp and he explains how to be able to do business better, faster and easier. And I basically took my online brand and I cut out four of the five channels that I had to market and halved my turnover overnight and just focused on this one channel and automating everything, which ended up creating the Triumph platform. But that changed my life because it gave me that time. I was able to then travel the world and be able to run my business from anywhere. And it just gave me the freedom that I was after. So, yeah, I love that book. He just has some great thinking around how to automate and process, you know, things differently.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I was literally just looking up on my bookshelf because sitting up above me and I'm like, I need to go back and read that book now after hearing your story.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Nathan Bush: All right, last question I have for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is in the
[Voiceover]: hands of the consumers. If you trust them with your products, they will reward your brand. Absolutely.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I heard all about that.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Let the customers touch, try, feel your products and charge them later. Let them experience it first. Yeah, love it.
Nathan Bush: I love your customer first mentality and how that's led what you've built at triadhome. So very exciting times coming up. Bettina, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
[Voiceover]: Thanks, Nathan.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Bettina, jump back into episode two, 230, where Bettina shares why she believes customers don't want refunds, they just want service. She also shares how her team developed an influencer feature and how Try at Home is gearing up to send everyone's favourite Aussie brands to lounge rooms all over the world. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
