Kelly Slessor: We shop in moments and we shop in a real thought process. We have like little conversations. I talk to it about me and who I am and what's important. It's easy to say be better, do better, but if you don't arm them with the skills to be able to do that, it's bloody hard.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush catches up with Australian e commerce commerce leaders to get all the insights, tips and lessons to keep you at the top of the e commerce game and of course, keep your customers adding to Cart. Here's your host, Pushy.
Nathan Bush: Hello, everyone. Now, I've been running in the same circles and been secretly stalking, I mean, following today's guest for years. I've always admired her continued look towards the future of retail and her passion for bringing others along on the journey with her, especially those who might not have the opportunities that others have. Of course, I am talking about Kelly Slessor, digital coach and founder of the E Commerce Tribe. You might also know Kelly as the founder of the personalized shopping app ShopU, which we get into today. She has helped hundreds of companies including Westfield, Woolworths and Big W develop and grow their digital channels and was chair of this year's Online Retailer Conference and Expo. Today, Kelly shares her thoughts on diversity and inclusion through the lens of technology. She talks about why she's all about natural language when it comes to shopping and we go deep on AI and all the AI tools out there, especially around chat, GPT and how you can use it with personality and make it
Nathan Bush: work harder for you.
Nathan Bush: So thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Paclio, here's our conversation with Kelly Slessor, digital coach from the E Commerce Tribe.
Nathan Bush: Kelly, welcome to ADD to cart.
Kelly Slessor: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm so honored to be here.
Nathan Bush: So good to have you here. You've been, we've been talking. Well, we haven't been talking about this. We've actually got a list and Add to Cart of all the people I would love to have on Add to Cart. And you've been on the list for a long time and I only got to meet you at Online Retailer like last week.
Kelly Slessor: I know, I know. Same here. Like, people talk about you all the time. I've obviously listened to your podcast and people talk about you all the time and I'm like, I cannot believe it's taken so long to connect.
Nathan Bush: I know, I know. And you were Chairing at online retailer. So you had, you know, the prize position or the, or the pressure position of holding the conference together. How did that go for you?
Kelly Slessor: Oh, it was awesome. You know, it was actually really different this year because for me, normally I to these things and I speak and you know, the pressure when you're speaking is you focus in on what you're going to say. You're really nervous about getting out there and saying the right thing and everyone getting value and then as soon as it's done, you just want to lie in a little ball and curl up somewhere and so you don't actually get to hear other people speaking. So actually facilitating and chairing it, I got to just sit and listen and ask questions and be present and it was just such a, it was a different experience for me and I really, really enjoyed it and I was able to soak up a lot of knowledge and just get to know a few people that I haven't really been able to connect with because of distance and all of that stuff. That was great. I loved it.
Nathan Bush: Anything catch your eye?
Kelly Slessor: There were a few things. You know, I love John Wild talking about Pet Circle, talking about lifetime value for customers. I think we're not focusing on that enough at the moment and I think that's the nature of the beast. You know, we pay for click, we get the sale and then we move on to the next. So I loved his, his kind of focus and energy around that. His wow moments for customers was genius. I just went, ah, just that, you know, he was talking about the fact that they basically did a portrait for a customer whose pet died. They paid a vet bill for a customer who's just creating those wow moments for customers. It just, it feels your soul. It makes you enjoy what you do a lot more.
Nathan Bush: So I didn't mean to say wow. It just came out. But it's a wow moment.
Kelly Slessor: It was a wow moment. It was definitely. He talked about customer service being a. Rather than it being a function or a conflict resolution, it being a place where you collect data on your customers. Which again, being a data geek, I loved. So he was great. Carney Estee Lauder was awesome. She gave some really good insights around TikTok and the growth they're seeing there. The standout for me was someone who was right at the end called Matthias, who was from, and I say this wrong sunken blimp who has created some amazing augmented reality experiences in retail. And he was just fascinating. A 24 year old who's just finished his masters in architectural design. Who is just looking at E commerce from a completely different lens. It was just mind blowing for a geek innovation technologist like me. It was the stuff that you go, that's a learning curve right there.
Nathan Bush: Makes me sick.
Kelly Slessor: Someone, like, really does. It really does. If only I was 24 again. Awesome.
Nathan Bush: That's. That's great. And I noticed that there was a big change up even in the vendors that were present from even last year, it seemed a bit different. Less kind of express delivery, less payment solutions. It was more packaging, I felt. But yeah, it was great. It felt different again.
Kelly Slessor: It did, it did. I think there was a different energy this year to last year. I think there's a change coming through and you could see that in the people that were there and the stands and the energy that went into the stands alone was really exciting this year. Rather than it just feeling like a bit of a conference.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, absolutely. Now, the conference wasn't without talk of AI and we're going to talk a lot about AI today. I know it's a passionate area of yours. It was interesting doing a little bit of research before our conversation and I found an article from 2018 around ShopU, which we're going to hear a little bit more about. But they said in the article in 2018 that you are riding the waves of the artificial intelligence boom. Now, that was five years ago. Does it feel like it's the slowest moving boom the history of booms?
Kelly Slessor: Interestingly, no. So actually when I. When you mentioned that, I went back and had a look at some of my archives and actually Shop you was started. The concept was started in 2015 16, so it was kind of eight years ago that we started looking at it. Actually, what's happened is it's been a slow burn, but now the acceleration has started and we can just see that happening. So if I think back to when we developed Shop U, we had to go through and pretty much hand code things like everything was done on Excel spreadsheets and then feeding that data into something that could then analyze it and then we'd export it and then we'd import it. And, you know, there was a lot of that now that the game has changed completely, Completely. So I think it feels like it's been a long time coming. I feel like I've been talking about this stuff for a very long time. But then I think back to mobile, because my career started in mobile, so I was talking about mobile for probably 10 years before it actually became a thing for everyone. And talking about mobile apps and developing them for five years before it became a thing. So and then when it became a thing, it went like that. So I think we've had this slow burn, but now, now it's on, which is exciting.
Nathan Bush: It is exciting. What you were saying there about building it through Excel spreadsheets, I saw that you said that what you built the two years back then would probably take you two months with today's tools.
Kelly Slessor: Totally, totally. So one of the things we looked at, so it was a personalized shopping assistant and it was aimed at female shoppers to help them with their buying journey and decision making process. And one of the things we looked at was how women shop. So for instance, what parts of their body don't they like the most? So we had to do. Or how would they refer to themselves? Would they refer to themselves as tall and plus size or curvy? So all of these words and nuances in shopping for fashion we had to kind of look at. So what we did back then was like we used Google surveys to do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of surveys and got thousands of data, bits of data. We also use the app store to look at all the shopping apps and get the data from that. Then we had to collate it and analyze it and work out what the keywords were. Now that process alone took about four weeks. Just for things around body issue. I went into ChatGPT today and I asked it to wait based on what women say are their biggest body issues, to give us a weighting on what they were. Within 10 seconds, I had a full list of the same list that we would have had.
Nathan Bush: So it aligned to what you had.
Kelly Slessor: Yeah, yeah. So you can just see the time difference in getting that data and being able to then use that in a platform.
Nathan Bush: Ready to go back and flip burgers for a living?
Nathan Bush: Nah, me neither.
Nathan Bush: But one of the most surprising results that came out of Shopify's recent global survey was that despite the cost of living pressures on customers, 2/3 of customers are still open to splurging on themselves at least monthly. The most common splurge?
Nathan Bush: Takeaway food.
Nathan Bush: But even if you aren't in the grease game, it is promising. Because no matter how price orientated the market is, customers will find find opportunities to treat themselves. You've just got to find the right moment to wave the smell of that juicy burger under their noses. Something to think about as you're planning 2023 to view more resources to help with your 2023 planning and see how Shopify can take your e commerce business to the next level. Visit shopify.com a today.
Nathan Bush: So what was the original idea behind ShopU?
Kelly Slessor: Probably comes from my other love, which is diversity and inclusivity. So as a black female in fashion who wasn't a size 6 and still isn't, I keep saying I'm working towards it. I'm never going to get there, let's be honest. But I'm not size six, I'm not blonde. One of the things, and they always say don't build products for yourself, but I totally did. One of the things that I really struggled with was finding products and outfits and things that were suited to me. And because I wasn't represented in fashion, I wasn't represented. And I found that with a lot of my friends and women in general that their body shapes weren't being represented, that they're, you know, things like they didn't like their arms and all of that stuff that wasn't being reflected when they went to a magazine. It was a lot of size six blonde, white females. And so I came up with this idea that could we produce something that actually responds to you as a, on a personal level that actually shows you pictures of people that look like you, shows you pictures of people that have your body shape and wearing the clothes that you could potentially wear based on brands that you've shot with before? That's where it started. Then I got my geek on and started to realize that there are all these different nuances in the way people shop. And then I realized that actually things like we don't shop for a red dress, we shop for a dress for a party, for a birthday, for a 40 year old. We shop in moments and we shop in a real thought process. And when we think about buying something, it's a natural language process. It's not a I want a size 12 red dress, it's I want a red dress to wear to my best friend's 50th birthday party at the weekend and we're going on a boat and it's got to be age appropriate, you know, whatever that might be. And so when I got into that mode and started looking at natural language models, I was really fascinated by could we create a process where I could literally text you? Because SMS was, was, was growing phenomenally at the time where I could text you and say, nathan, find me a dress for my 50th birthday party at the weekend. And you would know me based on my style, my preferences and the brands I'd shop with before and could present something back to me that was more likely to appeal to me. And we saw conversion rates between 7% when we did it in on app, up to 25% when we use the app and physical as well.
Nathan Bush: Wow.
Kelly Slessor: So the conversion rate was off the charts.
Nathan Bush: And was that matching automated? There was no human element to it at all.
Kelly Slessor: Automated, wow. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: How did you get brands involved? Like did you need extra data from brands to be able to serve those queries?
Kelly Slessor: And that was part of the challenge is that, you know, the brands product feeds at the time, I mean we think we have problems with product feeds now, but at the time they weren't optimized at all. So we would get, you know, the beautiful brands coming through with they might have a silver contextual pair of jeans and we're like what silver contextual even means? It's gray jeans. And that's what people. So we had to then optimize the feeds using different tools and basically enrich it with other data to be able to do that again. Which is why now it's much easier because you can use AI to do that data enrichment.
Nathan Bush: Gotcha. And is ShopU still going down the same path today?
Kelly Slessor: No. So things changed when Covid hit. We worked with a couple of shopping centers and we're launching a platform, a marketplace with the shopping centers to be able to do that. And unfortunately Covid hit and it stalled development and it we funding stalled and you know, there was that, that big kind of process of trying to work out what we do next and be able to get the funding. So actually in the process of selling
Nathan Bush: the platform, who's the ideal buyer?
Kelly Slessor: I'm talking to a couple. There's actually one that's not in the fashion space at all, which is a really interesting one because it can be, the algorithms can be applied to anyone. But definitely, you know, it was built for fashion, it was built for inclusivity. It makes sense as a, as a fashion platform.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. And obviously it's given you so many skills and lessons along the way that you're applying in what you're doing today. Tell me, how do you describe. Because you do so many things at the moment, how do you describe what you do today?
Kelly Slessor: So I'm still a technologist at heart. I teach people how to grow their e commerce stores. So I've taken all of those lessons and all of those learnings from building out not only my own platform to building out. We had about 120 brands on the Shop Hu platform. Not only building out the retailers platforms as well, but also building out my own and working with over A thousand retailers during COVID to help them understand how to grow a good, sustainable e commerce brand.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. And what I love about your content, especially on LinkedIn, is how much you share around AI and how retailers can use AI. Are you genuinely seeing that retailers are interested in implementing AI changes into their business or is it more of a I just want to learn what's out there?
Kelly Slessor: I think it's a mix of both, actually. I think I do believe I ran an AI course a few about two months ago now, probably about a month ago. And we have brands like Lego, you know, Brand alliance, we had some phenomenal brands on there and we have one person band. So it, it filled my soul with joy in that. You know, it was obvious that there is an appetite to learn and everyone knows how critical this is going to be to their businesses going forward. I don't think people are implementing it on a daily basis yet and I think that's because they don't quite understand how to. So I think there's a lot of strategy out there and theory out there around AI and you can use it for this and this. But the practical applications I think is where a lot of businesses are missing out at the moment.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And that's why I love speaking to people like yourself. We had Tim from Ambit on a couple of weeks ago, who's been in the AI space since 2016, obviously been in the trenches before it was the next big thing. So it's great that you've got that foundational knowledge to help retailers understand where the gold is and where you can, where the fluff is. Basically. If you're teaching retailers how to adopt AI technology, I could imagine that your brain just must tick in all the opportunities across the whole spectre of retail. How do you bring that back to a focused area? Where do you see the biggest opportunities or the biggest impact for retailers when it comes to AI?
Kelly Slessor: So I think one of the biggest issues, and you say my brain ticks, my brain explodes. It's 3am Thought processes where I wake up going, oh my goodness. So I think the easiest wins for retailers right now is to use it from a time reduction point of view. And the places that I see them spending the most time is in content production. So content production, written content, optimizing for SEO. It's those areas that I find that they spend a lot of time in or don't spend enough time in and therefore don't reap the rewards. There's a lot of retailers spending a lot of money on ads at the moment. But yet their own organic traffic isn't working for them because they're not driving natural traffic to their site. So where I'm seeing the wins in AI is actually applying it in each of those areas. So for instance, on my course that I teach, one of the areas we look at is things like product descriptions and optimizing your product descriptions for conversions. AI is a great tool using ChatGPT to optimize your product descriptions and make sure it talks to your customers problems. It captures all the features and benefits, but it talks to things like, you know, value and quality and uses triggers for the customer so that the customer, you know, I read Shopify report last week, which was awesome. And they talk about, you know, the second most important thing that customers are looking for is quality. As retailers we don't talk enough or reinforce that the notion or the, you know, the products are of quality. So using it for things like product descriptions to just really bring out those features and benefits in a way that aligns with customer. Using it for optimizing your content for SEO is another area and then using it to produce digital marketing plans and social media plans. I think the hardest thing is I find that a lot of social media plans are very reactive. It's like a bit of content here, put a product out here, we've got a product launch here and they're not planned out. And so using ChatGPT to plan out your content and have a bank of content ready to go, it's just a game changer.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I love that, I love that. I actually this morning for our accelerator course, we had Shopify give our students a demo of the platform because it's meant to be, you know, a basic beginner and they went into creating a product and I haven't been in the, in the platform for a while, not hands on every day, but they went in to create a new product, upload image, all that kind of stuff, went to write a description. Instead of writing description, click the little magic button and it just populated for them within the platform. And I was like, oh my God. All the hours, all the days, all the months that I spent writing product descriptions, trying to make them interesting and all of a sudden you've got this thing here now. It's just phenomenal. And this is just the start, right?
Kelly Slessor: Absolutely. And I would say in terms of my work around working on e commerce stores, it's reduced my time to production, don't tell anyone this by about 50%. So I am doing double the work that I was doing prior to having Chat GPT.
Nathan Bush: Amazing.
Kelly Slessor: I'm not getting any more sleep though. But anyway,
Nathan Bush: charging the same hourly rate. In terms of incorporating AI technology for retailers, are you seeing that the biggest wins are just basically using platforms out there that are incorporating AI technology or retailers actually creating their own versions of AI technology? Does that make sense in terms of actually much development at all?
Kelly Slessor: Yeah. So the biggest wins right now are in incorporating the existing platforms out there. I think. I almost think it's a bit too early to start building out big AI platforms because things are changing so quickly. The language models are changing and there's lots of competing models out there. And I think if you were to build something now, there's the potential in six months time it could be redundant. So I'm a big, a big believer in taking plugins and using them for the time being as we start to map this journey out and work out what next looks like.
Nathan Bush: And you mentioned ChatGPT as one of your go to's. Do you have any other go to's or plugins that you highly recommend retailers use?
Kelly Slessor: So I use ChatGPT. I use Bard as well. Bard, I use more for kind of up to date information because it does scrape the web. So I use that for kind of timely stats, information on customer voice reviews and things like that. I also use Phrase, which I love. I use that for SEO and that's an awesome tool. Now Chat GPT and Bard do some elements of SEO, but phrases like it's on steroids. Okay. So I will create content in Chat GPT and then I will transfer it over to phrase to optimize it.
Nathan Bush: And so phrase takes your written content and then just optimizes for the keywords that you're after.
Kelly Slessor: Yeah, but it looks across all of the competition and sees who else is ranking for those particular keywords so that then I can pitch myself against them and look at what I need to do to get my ranking. High Fire.
Nathan Bush: That's interesting.
Kelly Slessor: It's my secret weapon. That is not secret anymore. There you go. The other one I really like is Dopa's clip. Yeah. So what Opus Clip does is you can upload a video and it will cut it into 15 second segments or 20 second segments or 90 second segments, but it will tell you based on your voice, based on kind of camera angle, based on color, all of that stuff. It will tell you how engaging and viral that content is likely to be. And then it will basically give you the number one clip out of, you know, an hour's worth of content and then the number Two clip based on virality, which is awesome.
Nathan Bush: That's insane. I literally this week opened up Riverside, which is what we're recording in right now. Popular podcast recording platform. But they just released a new feature and it is taking all your recordings. So we record for about an hour, takes about all your recordings, and then actually gives you clips. So it spits out eight clips, gives them titles. They go, here's eight clips that you can add to YouTube or social. Straight away, I'm like, oh, my God, I was doing all this manually.
Kelly Slessor: I know, it's gold. It's such a game changer. So Opus does the same thing, but then it ranks you based on how viral that clip is and makes, you know, brings those clips to the top and it gives you the caption and it gives you the. It does the narration over the top of it and it gives you. I think it gives you hashtags as well.
Nathan Bush: Amazing, yeah. With this moving so quick and you being on not only, you know, leading from a consulting perspective, but actually teaching how to use AI in business. How do you stay on top of it? How do you stay ahead of the curve?
Kelly Slessor: So I'm a stalker. So what I do, I infiltrate groups. So I've always been very good. I don't know how I've done it, but I've always been very good. Like, I've got my SEO gurus group. So that's a Slack Channel, the SEO pub that I'm on, where, you know, you've got the top SEO people in the world just chatting about what they're doing and coding and SEO. And it's. It's a complete geek group, but it's the best group ever. Very supportive and there are no dumb questions. So that's one of my groups. I've got an AI group that I'm part of as well, where people are doing. The developers in there, there's data people in there, there's data scientists. So a whole bunch of geeks in there as well, that are constantly chatting about. So that's how I do it. I just infiltrate, stalk, get into these groups and then I sit and I watch and I listen and I listen to news all the time, endlessly.
Nathan Bush: Curious.
Kelly Slessor: Hey, I think you have to be to be a technologist. You have to be, have to be, have to be.
Nathan Bush: In terms of diversity, I know you're very passionate about diversity. Have you got any concerns around where AI is heading and some of the information that it is serving up around diversity?
Kelly Slessor: Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's so many scary things about AI. And I think you can go down a very dark rabbit hole with that stuff. We've got to hope that the regulations and the governance around it comes into play before we move to the point that people are predicting where diversity and inclusivity are concerned. The challenge we have is it's using the information off of the web. So if we think about something, you know, as prominent as gender diversity and we look at, you know, if I were to ask ChatGPT now or mid Journey, for instance, and I've done this a few times just to test it out, give me an image of a CEO, you can probably guess what images I get of CEOs, and they don't look like me, they don't look like other women, they look a certain way. So one of the challenges is we are using biased data to feed AI, which means we are creating even more bias. And the information we have on the Internet, the kind of, I suppose the mass information that we have is that sits here at the bottom of the triangle, as someone was talking about the other day, sits at the bottom of the triangle. It's very biased information. And so we're using that to now predict the things, to now build things out. And we're going to keep getting that unless we change some of the information and some of the, I suppose, parameters around it to take into account other things.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, and that's the question, isn't it? Is that if we're building the future and AI is generally considered the future based on a layer or a foundation of false information, how do we get that back in the can? Like, has the horse bolted already?
Kelly Slessor: No, I don't think so. And I think it's, it is a front of mind topic for a lot of the big technology players. So I think there will be some measures put in place. But I think as retailers, as individuals, one thing we can be doing is being conscious of the stuff that we're feeding it and asking it to take the bias out of it. So, for instance, let's say you want to do a product description for a particular product. Let's say it's a child's toy. Now, historically, we would talk to females or we would talk to the mum. So there are ways in which you can prompt ChatGPT to make that language a bit more neutral. So it appeals to both the dad and the mum who are both buying toys for their children. Little things like that that we can just think about as we're using these tools to take, take some bias out of it ourselves.
Nathan Bush: So as Users, it's our responsibility to go in and make sure what we're asking for it doesn't incorporate our biases and amplify what's already built into it. And hopefully over time that changes what's being served up.
Kelly Slessor: Absolutely. And one of the things that I. My CHAT GPT course that I teach is actually building your brand ambassador. So you build your brand ambassador that can mimic the voice of your brand. That can. Because the danger with AI as well is we all become very gray, bland and vanilla and we all sound the same. That's the other danger. So creating brand ambassadors or a brand voice that understands your customer, understands who you are, understands the way in which your. Your brand language is really, really critical in that brand voice. You can also instruct it to take into consideration underrepresented groups, to take into consideration minorities. So making sure that anytime you ask your brand ambassador or your brand voice for anything, it's already got this information in it and it's going, okay, I'm going to look around the millions of bits of data around minority, underrepresented groups, or, you know, people that don't necessarily appear on my website, and I'm going to think about how we make this inclusive for them as well.
Nathan Bush: I love that. That's such a good tip. When you're talking about building a brand voice, are you Talking about training ChatGPT in your brand voice?
Kelly Slessor: Totally, yeah. I think it's the most important thing we can do as retailers today. Okay.
Nathan Bush: And what would be your tips on how to do that? If someone's like, I've used ChatGPT a little bit to ask it some odd questions here and there, but I've never given it a personality. How do you actually do that?
Kelly Slessor: It's feeding information. So it depends how big your brand is. You know, it's hard when you've got millions of people that work for you as well, just as it is for you to kind of present one brand voice to the world when you've got lots of. But it's feeding it, your information about your brand. So information about who you are, information about why you started, information about what you're passionate about. You know, my brand voice has got diversity, inclusivity, technology, AI, personalization. So I talk about all of that. To chat. We have like little conversations. I talk to it about. About me and who I am and what's important so that when I ask it questions, it already knows that information and can present that back to me in my voice as opposed to, you know, the standard pulled from the Internet voice.
Nathan Bush: Nice. And have you got it to a point now where most of the time when it comes back with you go
Kelly Slessor: yeah, I'd say that it's better than me.
Nathan Bush: Is this even Kelly I'm speaking to?
Kelly Slessor: Oh no. Exactly.
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Nathan Bush: I really love and I think it's fun for retailers to explore all the opportunities that will become available via AI from regulation or even a competition perspective. What are some of the defensive measures that you think retailers need to take with AI? Because it's not all going to be about expansion and growth. Because if we're all thinking expansion and growth that means we're going to be cutting into each other's lunch. Can we use AI to be more defensive as well?
Kelly Slessor: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's actually ways in which you can use AI for helping you make good product decisions going forward. And you know, but also I think from one, one of the areas that I think is is going to be really interesting is around that SEO piece. So at the moment you search on Google for a pair of shoes and you've got your shopping ads at the top, you've got your sponsored links and then you've got your, you know, your websites that are doing well with their SEO, that are ranking at the top. That's all going to change. So defensively what we should be doing now is working out how that's going to change, what's going to change and then how we can protect ourselves going forward. So if I think about how it's going to change, I go into Bard now and I go natural language. I want to pick going back to my shop few days, it hurts my soul eight years ago. But anyway I go natural language. I want a pair of shoes. I'm wearing them to the football at the weekend. They need to be comfortable. I, I Write in that. So if I'm doing all of those things in tools like Bard, the results are very different in Bard to the results in Google. So I think the things we can do defensively are really just educate ourselves. I think that's what it is at the moment is educating yourself and working out and trying to predict where your brand may appear or may not appear because of the impact of AI and then working at how you get it there.
Nathan Bush: And I love what you were saying about search and it kind of brings the thought around, well, what will search look like in one year's time, three years time? Do you think we need to start creating content on our sites that isn't necessarily for search engines but for the robots? I know search engines are a type of robot, but more the AI, you know, in terms of just trying to get the click through to our websites, it's actually how do we give the information within other channels rather than using it as a click through to our site?
Kelly Slessor: Absolutely. I think what we've got to do is, is be testing out Bard now, especially Bard. That's the one that just from a search perspective, because of Google and the connection there, I think we've got to be testing out Bard. So brands should be going into Bard and writing in, you know, whatever it is their brand search is being found for now because the results are so different and you're not getting links anymore, as in going through to a website, you just getting straight to a product. I find it fascinating. How is that going to affect the affiliate world? Yeah, because no longer am I going through to an affiliate website to then see a product, to then potentially buy products just right there. So I think we're going to see a lot of change in the next six to 12 months. I have a few predictions around that. But I think essentially it is like you said, working out what content is being presented now in the language models and then working out how you create content for the robot.
Nathan Bush: I could imagine you must have, and I know you're still, you know, working through shopU, but you must have a hundred new business ideas based on all the research and the experimentation you're doing.
Kelly Slessor: All the time. All the time. There's a couple of things in the, in the back end that I've got to get through some of this stuff over here before we even look at. But, but one is around diverse and inclusive tech and just being able to look at websites and analyze very, very quickly, analyze whether they are diverse and inclusive because there's a lot of brands out there. At the moment that will have a picture that represents something on the front of their webpage. But then when you scratch behind the surface, it's not about calling it out, it's about giving them some things that they can do to make sure that their representation is right and they are being diverse and inclusive on their website. So that's one of them. The other one goes back to, you know, fashion and personalization.
Nathan Bush: Okay, okay. On the diversity and inclusion, are there any brands out there that you think genuinely do it well, especially if they're in Australia?
Kelly Slessor: There's loads of brands that do it really well from a website perspective. But is that reflected internally? That's always my question. Yeah, there's loads of brands, very inclusive. I think Kirsten from DesignRx, I think she does a fabulous job of inclusivity on her site and that size inclusivity, you know, everything. I think Google's new platform, which is all about actually showing clothes on people from diverse backgrounds and diverse body shapes, I think is an absolute game changer.
Nathan Bush: Kirsten's obviously done an amazing job. Picked up the award for industry person of the year, which is season, absolute legends. No great examples. Thanks. I want to ask you about the digital fishing project. I recently been following your movements on this and I think it's just such a fantastic initiative. Can you tell us about the digital fishing project?
Kelly Slessor: Yeah, so as you. As I mentioned, I run e commerce courses. So it's a six week program and then ongoing. I support businesses on their e commerce growth journey and that's kind of split into 6, 6 modules. Everything from your Shopify platform or your, your platform doesn't have to be Shopify, but that's my platform of choice to your email marketing flows and funnels and, and all of that stuff. And during COVID that just went gangbusters because everyone, especially physical retail, which is my background or working with physical retailers, we're trying to make that move online. So that went crazy. At the same time a lot happened in for instance Aboriginal communities where Aboriginal communities who had been used to selling products at markets, for instance, you know, tourism being one of, in certain communities in certain areas, tourism being one of their main trades. At the same time these communities were really suffering because they weren't able to sell their products and a lot of them weren't online. And even the technology came connections in some of those remote communities is pretty bad. So as this is kind of going off over here with retailers trying to get online, I started getting asked to kind of help a couple of businesses over Here as well. And then what I did was I went, okay, why don't you just come through my course pro bono so I'll put you through my course free of charge. And then that started to grow and I work with an organization called the First Nation Innovators. I worked with Make It Happen and I ran a number of online courses for Aboriginal communities all over Australia to try and get them online. And then last year Make It Happen HQ approached me, which is an Innovate, an Aboriginal innovation, innovation organization based out in Broome, and said, look, can you come to a community and run a couple of two day workshop for us? And I was like, absolutely, absolutely. So jumped on a plane within like three weeks I think it was, and spent two days sat in a room with community and just teaching them how and just watching someone who is not technology understand SEO and go, I'm ranking for Aboriginal fishing shirts.
Nathan Bush: That's cool.
Kelly Slessor: This is Joy. This is Joy. So I've since gone on to work on a project in the US with Brooklyn Field Properties, which is a big shopping center, one of the biggest shopping centers in the US for founders of color. And the passion for me comes from growing up in a. You know, I was brought up by my dad. We were in a predominantly white community, we were only black kids in school and we were taught that we always had to be better, we always had to work harder to be better. And I met on that journey of launching the course and working with community, I met a lot of people that just didn't have, weren't fortunate enough to have some of the education that I'd had or to have some of the support that I had. I was lucky. My dad was a technologist as well in his spare time, so he taught me, but some of them didn't have that. And it's easy to say be better, do better, but if you don't arm them with the skills to be able to do that, it's bloody hard. And there's so much information out there in this digital space that it's hard to know what to do. So I kind of went, oh, I feel like I found my purpose. I feel like I found my mission in life. Education is key to me. So I love working on educating retailers on all things E commerce and technology. But to be able to do it with founders that have some generational trauma and have some, you know, and don't have necessarily the connections that we have here in Sydney, don't necessarily have the education and to be able to give back, that's where the digital fishing project started.
Nathan Bush: I love it. That's so good. And congratulations on doing that.
Kelly Slessor: Thank you.
Nathan Bush: Such an amazing achievement. How do you make it sustainable? So you mentioned some of the biggest barriers there for indigenous and remote communities being around education, opportunity, even things like Internet access. How do you obviously, you know, deliver so much impact in those six weeks of training? What's your vision for then? Making it sustainable so that we can help the next generations coming through and even keep the momentum going.
Kelly Slessor: Yeah. So there's a couple of things there, and I love that you say, Nathan, sustainability sustainable, because a lot of initiatives I see by organizations are like one off and that isn't sustainable. And what it does is it creates this kind of groundswell and then you leave someone without any support and they end up. And it's happened to me in the investment rounds that I've been through where gender is a big topic of opportunity. So we're going to talk about gender and we're going to elevate someone because they're a female. And then all of a sudden you step back and you go, we'll leave you to sink or swim now. And you're like, oh, God, I have no idea what I'm doing anyway. So sustainable is a really important thing. So there's a couple of things that I'm working on at the moment. One is to work with the larger retailers to get ongoing funding for these businesses to help support them with training and education. And the second piece is to work with technology providers to again get them to a point where they're sustainable and self sustaining. So that then, because one of the big challenges is getting the upfront funding to be able to buy, you know, pay for all these tools. And we know they all add up. You know, you've got your platforms, your plugins, your email marketing, all of that. And there were a few that came to the party last year, like Klaviyo, like Zoom, that came to the party and supported the initiative. This year it's going to go bigger. And next year I'm hoping we have some real solid partnerships that look at a five year plan as opposed to, let's just test this out. Like, if I look at Brookfield property in the us, I think they've put something like I'm going to quote 25 million into a five year plan for helping businesses of color. And that's the sort of thing we need to do to create sustainable outcomes.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. So we're in, in. We want to get into the headspace of programs that are Always existing rather than campaigns.
Kelly Slessor: Yeah, totally.
Nathan Bush: You mentioned, right at the start, and I'd love to loop back to it, is that you mentioned that you started Shop U because you didn't feel like you were represented in fashion down the track. That was obviously, we're almost eight years, nine years down the track. Do you feel that's changed at all?
Kelly Slessor: Getting better. It's definitely getting better. It's not where it needs to be, but it's definitely getting better. I think if I pick the top 10 retailers in Australia and the department stores. No, absolutely not. But I think if I pick the top 10 retailers in Australia and looked across their channels, I would say probably two out of 10 of them have a degree of representation or a better degree of representation than they did 10 years ago.
Nathan Bush: Yep. Okay. Still got a long way to go.
Kelly Slessor: We do.
Nathan Bush: Kelly, you've mentioned so much and my mind is just racing thinking about all the things that you've shared with us today. I just want to get in and play with some of those tools and have a look at all the projects that you're doing. What's your focus for the next 12 months? What are you out to achieve?
Kelly Slessor: So grow the E Commerce coaching program and the minority underrepresented groups, the digital fishing project. They're my two key focus areas. So we're launching in the US hopefully in September, October. I hate putting dates on things because then I'm, I'm under pressure, but I've got September in the calendar, so. Launching in the US in September. No, I didn't. You're right. You're right. Thank you. And anyway, you can always go back and edit this bit anyway, can't you?
Nathan Bush: Absolutely. We'll just use AI to get your voice and just put a different month in there. And then if we've got listeners listening to this, whether you are someone who wants to take your course and your coaching or whether you might be a retailer who wants to jump on board the digital fishing project and support it and go into partnership with you to help indigenous and remote communities. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
Kelly Slessor: Email me, jump on my website, text me kellyslesser.com we're going for a rebrand at the moment. So that's, that's about to. We're about to launch the new brand, which is awesome and I'm super excited about. So that will be the E Commerce tribe, which goes back to heritage and things like that. So that's, it's a lovely brand refresh that we're doing. Or brand relaunch. But yeah, email LinkedIn I'm always on pretty easy to get hold of.
Nathan Bush: Awesome Kelly, thank you so much for joining us on Add to Cartoon. We've been everywhere. We've been everywhere from diversity and inclusion through to entrepreneurship and into AI. So we've covered a lot of ground. But thank you so much for everything you've shared.
Kelly Slessor: Thanks for having me. It's been awesome.
Nathan Bush: I think you can see why Kelly's such a great coach, teacher and mentor, right? I feel very lucky to have spent an hour with her and cover the range of topics that we did. Here are my top three takeaways. Number one train ChatGPT in your voice whether you're using ChatGPT personally for your brand or for your business and you should be take the time to train it up in your own tone. It will remember this and save you lots of time down the track with copy that is more you. I don't think ChatGPT is going away anytime soon, so it will be time well spent. Number two new AI AI tools for retailers beyond ChatGPT. Kelly mentioned a bunch of AI tools to go and play with that you might be able to incorporate in your retail processes. Kelly mentioned Google's Bard for a more up to date alternative to chat GPT phrase spelled F R A S E to help write SEO friendly AI content and opus Clipus clip for sure short video creation. It definitely got me going down some rabbit holes there. Number three Continual upskilling programs. Lastly, and not AI related, Kelly opened our eyes to the need for digital education programs for remote and disadvantaged communities. I thought her point around continuity and commitment was really important. If you're in the position to support the upskilling of disadvantaged communities, reach out to Kelly, but make sure it's approached as a partnership, not a one off campaign. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday. We will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to extend explore your next E Commerce opportunity, come and visit us at E Suite. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com where you can download the free E Commerce Salary guide and sign up to our weekly e Commerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to cart.
