Suzie Young: There is a big event happening at Shop Talk with Lil Wayne and it's a white party, so that's a bit novel. My kids are so jealous. Yeah, I'm a bit like a drug dealer with the old magnesium, aren't I? I've gotten all my friends and family. We often say Metagenics is like the best kept secret in Australia in a lot of ways or the most like under the radar but well used supplements
[Voiceover]: brand welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that Express delivers
Suzie Young: all you need to know in the
[Voiceover]: fast moving world of online retail.
Suzie Young: Here's your host, Bushy.
Nathan Bush: Welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast for e commerce professionals who never stop learning. We bring you insights from the top e commerce operators, founders and experts across all of Australia to help you drive results and grow your e commerce career. My name is Bushi joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. Now, how would you Deliver a complete B2B and D2C digital transformation on Shopify plus in six months without breaking your business or your team? I am super pumped to be joined today by Susie Young, Director of Digital Marketing at Metagenics Anz based in Brisbane. Metagenics is a natural health powerhouse with over 40 years of history and brands like Metagenics, Inner Health Plus, Ethical Nutrients and Endura under its belt. In just six months, Suzy has led a complete transformation, launching a brand new D2C channel, migrating their legacy B2B platform and rolling out an integrated loyalty program. And she did it all within a global business alongside execs from Amazon and Johnson and Johnson. In this episode, Suzy breaks down how she built the tech stack, how she kept stakeholders align, and how she made the tough calls that kept the transformation on track. Now, before we get into today's episode, don't forget that expressions of interest are now open for retailers to join me on the very first ADD to Cart tour to NRF APAC in Singapore this June. Come with me and a special crew as we explore new ideas and we make some amazing connections in Southeast Asian retail. Head on over to add to cart.com to find out more about the packages that we've put together and to register your interest. A big thanks as always to our partners Shopify and Klaviyo for making this episode and this podcast possible. Now let's dive into how Susie Young and the Metagenics team got such a huge transformation done in just six months.
[Voiceover]: Suzy, welcome to ADD to cart.
Suzie Young: Thank you for having me.
[Voiceover]: It's lovely to be speaking to you on a Friday because we spend a lot of the week together at the moment.
Suzie Young: We have.
[Voiceover]: Nice to be doing a different setting.
Suzie Young: I know it feels a bit weird really, because I just saw you in the office yesterday and now here we are.
[Voiceover]: Here we are. We had a massive day yesterday and we're going to talk all about the transformation that you are leading at Metagenics. But exciting day yesterday where we were able to launch the new loyalty program for Metagenics using Yoppo.
Suzie Young: It's been a really exciting project. I mean, we'll talk about it today, but we launched our D2C channel just back in October last year and wanted to quickly roll out loyalty as well. And so we're using the YOTPO platform and it's been really amazing. And of course, you've been kind of helping us in the business with project managing that side of the project.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, it's been fun. It's been a lot of fun. So nice to have it live. Tell me, is it still standing up this morning? Because I haven't been in there this morning.
Suzie Young: It is.
[Voiceover]: Okay, good.
Suzie Young: Happy to report we're still live.
[Voiceover]: Awesome. Now you're. We've caught you at a busy time because next week you're off to a love Vegas.
Suzie Young: I am. I mean, it's tough, right, but someone's got to do it. I reckon if there's anyone that has to do it, I'm a good candidate.
[Voiceover]: I think you are a martyr for putting your hand up and taking the hit for the team. We talked to Jethro from the Nile around Shop Talk, which is what you're going over for, and he was saying, aussie retailers, you got to come over with us. What was it about Shop Talk that you were like, oh, I've really got to see what's going on over there.
Suzie Young: Yeah, well, I've had my eye on it for a while. This will be my first time to go over. I think it's kind of known, right, as one of the Premier D2C or online retail conferences. I think it's just the scale of the events that you get over in the States, which are quite different to here. And it's been interesting, right, because I'm doing a hosted ticket, which means that I'm doing 8 or 10 of the speed dates with different vendors there. And I've done lots of that in Australia. Like Imedia runs that model. Right. But when you go and you're selecting the vendors to meet with at Shop Talk, there's over 2,000 and. So you're sitting there going, whoa, like, how do I choose who I want to meet with? So I'm really excited to just kind of explore some different platforms that maybe we don't know about here. The sessions look amazing, some of the speakers look really amazing, and of course, I mean, it's in Vegas, so some of the parties are pretty. Pretty awesome.
[Voiceover]: I was wondering how long it would take you to get to that because yesterday you were a little overexcited around one of the parties.
Suzie Young: Yes. There is a big event happening at Shop Talk with Little Wayne and it's a white party, so that's a bit novel. My kids are so jealous. My kids are 10 and 12 and when I told them that, they were just like, no, you've got to take me. But actually, we got our hands on a run sheet of all the parties at Shop Talk and it's unbelievable how much is actually going on. So it's kind of more about choosing where will you go and what we do.
[Voiceover]: Incredible. How many nights are you spending over there?
Suzie Young: I'm spending three nights in Vegas for Shop Talk and it's a three day conference. But whilst I'm over there, I'm also visiting our head office, which is just south of la, near San Clemente in California.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Suzie Young: So I'll spend a couple of days at the head office there, which is really exciting because there's a lot of people there that I deal with really regularly, but I've never met them in person, so I'm really excited about that.
[Voiceover]: Oh, that'll be so good. Three days in Vegas. You are going to fit so much into there.
Suzie Young: I'm not sure how much sleep I'm going to get. But, hey, you live once, right?
[Voiceover]: You roll into Head Office and they'll be like, Suzy, you were like, so much more animated in teams than you are in person.
Suzie Young: Yeah. And we're doing a workshop on the Friday after Shop Talk, so I'm not sure how that's going to go.
[Voiceover]: All right, let's give everyone an overview of Metagenics, because we've known each other for a long time when you're at Signet, but then when you went over to Metagenics, we caught up and you gave me the rundown of who Metagenics is and what you do, and I was blown away by the size, the scale and the history of the company. Yeah, it was kind of this unknown secret to me. Can you share with everyone else who Metagenix is?
Suzie Young: Yeah, sure. So Metagenix is a vitamin supplements and natural healthcare business and we've been around for over 40 years now and originally we were founder led in Brisbane and known as Health World back then and known as healthworld for about 30 years by two guys who I believe were pharmacists and we've been acquired by the Medagenics group and that group is head officed in North America but also has presence across Asia and the EMEA region. So it's a pretty decent sized group. We have four brands in the Anz part of Metagenics and so most people would know us best for our inner health brand which is the probiotics brand and we pioneered Probiotics in Australia some like 40 years ago. I know I grew up seeing infomercials of have you had your inner Health plus today?
[Voiceover]: It was actually one of my first assignments as a media buyer when I was a junior media buyer was to buy like all the programming on TV for the have you had your inner health plus?
Suzie Young: Oh amazing. That's so funny. And people still often think the company or the brand is called Inner Health plus because of that branding. But that's just one skew. There's actually about 40 SKUs across the inner health range. And then we've got another pharmacy brand called Ethical Nutrients which is a full vitamin supplement range, probably more traditionally targeted at women but best known for our magnesium which is called Mega Magnesium. It's the number one magnesium in Australian pharmacy by quite a while, quite a long shot actually. But a beautiful range of products across, you know, immune health, women's health, pain and inflammation, multivitamins, all the kind of things you'd expect.
[Voiceover]: And you got me hooked on that Mega Magnesium before bed.
Suzie Young: Yeah, yeah. I'm a bit like a drug dealer with the old magnesium now I'm one of your dependents. Yeah, that's right, yep. It's an amazing product. If you're not on magnesium you should be taking magnesium, that's the hot tip. And then we have another retail brand called Endura which is a sports supplement range and that is really well known in the like cycling and triathlon industries. It's been around for a while. And then our namesake brand Metagenics, which is the biggest brand in our company and Metagenix up until October has been a brand that you can only access through natural healthcare practitioners through a prescription or a recommendation. And when I say natural healthcare practitioner I mean naturopaths, nutritionists, herbalists, chiropractors, some integrative gps. So those types of modalities and it's quite A large range for a supplemental minerals range. You know, it's got kind of around 200 SKUs and this is a very premium range where it treats really specific conditions and need states and. Yeah, and so it's, that's the big project we've kind of been working on this past year or two years is kind of how do we modernize that part of the business. But yeah, that's a bit about us where it's a pretty amazing company to work at. Great culture, great people across our local and our global business. We're super lucky to have some really experienced global executives. So you know, our global CEO is X Johnson and Johnson Healthcare. As is our CMO and, and our Chief Digital Officer or I think her name is something like Chief Growth and Experience Officer but I think it's easier to say Chief Digital Officer.
[Voiceover]: It's got to have the American title, right?
Suzie Young: Yeah, exactly. She's ex Amazon and she led like big business units in Amazon and I'm really fortunate to have a reporting line through to her. Her name's Kara Truesdale. So it's like a really kind of incredible business and really great opportunity to work with an awesome local team, but also awesome global team.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, I've loved hearing the little nuggets that you bring secondhand to us from Cara around the inside workings of Amazon.
Suzie Young: Yes. Yeah. Because Amazon is like, yeah, it's kind of like Google. It's like that challenge that everyone's trying to figure out that you'll never quite figure out how it all works and it moves so quickly. So to have the inside goss about Amazon is, is great.
[Voiceover]: The Metagenics product and we're going to talk about that a little bit because that is a huge business transformation, not just a digital transformation.
Suzie Young: Yeah.
[Voiceover]: What I didn't realize is that because you do have a 40 year history, most people, if you've seen a naturopath or a natural health practitioner at some point in your life, more than likely you've had it or you've got it on your shelves somewhere in your house. I couldn't believe how widespread it is. And then even as I started talking to people about working with you and the team at Metagenics, people like, oh yeah, I love that product. Like you've got this fan base that is just in love with what you do and the products that you help your patients and customers with. Can you tell us about where the business has been and where it's going from a transformation perspective, especially in regards to what you're doing in digital And E commerce.
Suzie Young: Yeah, sure. So, and it's interesting you say that like we often say Metagenics is like the best kept secret in Australia in a lot of ways, but. Or the most like under the radar but well used supplements brand. Because yeah, I had never heard of the Metagenics brand myself before I worked here. But then I would be at my gym and you know, someone would overhear me talking about, oh, I've used Metagenics pages, I love Carmex, I love this or that. And it's amazing how many people pop up that actually do really know the brand. And so I guess like we have embarked on a big business transformation over the last couple years and at the heart of that transformation is like, I guess our purpose or our mission for our business, which is to help people live happier, healthier lives and to get our products into the hands of consumers. Because we know that our products are amazing. Like if you read the testimonials that our practitioners give us about how they're using these products with their patients, if you take a look at the product reviews that we get online now, it's really extraordinary how we're helping people with their health issues and we want to get that into more and more people's hands. But the challenge there for us is that even though we know from stats and research that Aussies are really engaged with health topics online, like I think it's like 74% of Aussies are using online to research health conditions or look for different natural health products because obviously Dr. Google is a whole thing these days. And you know, social media.
[Voiceover]: Dr. Chatgpt.
Suzie Young: Yeah, that's right, yeah. What we also know though is that only 4% of Australians actually see a natural healthcare practitioner. And we know that because we've invested in significant market research for years on that. And actually it's been flat, which kind of means it's been in decline. Right? Yeah. And there's a number of reasons for that. But I guess when we kind of looked at our future and if we want to really deliver on our purpose, we're like, we need a way to get this into more people's hands. And so the way to do that is to I guess reduce the friction and open that up and allow consumers to purchase our product through a direct to consumer channel. But I guess what we do there is with all of our marketing and our strategy is we're always talking about the benefits of seeing a practitioner. So if you see our marketing often, CTA will be to our Find a practitioner tool on our Website. If you go to our website, you'll see videos about naturopaths talking about, you know, what they do, why they do it, different conditions or ingredients. So we're kind of weaving this message about the natural healthcare practitioner into everything we do. And the reason, like there's a win win for us with that. So we know when patients engage with a natural health care practitioner, they'll get a better health outcome because they'll be on a program where someone's assessing, you know, what they need and the combination of our products together. But we also know then commercially that there is a higher LTV for patients who are seeing a practitioner. So, yeah, that's kind of, I guess, the big picture strategy of what we've been doing. And then I guess the actual like execution of that has meant that we've had to fully upgrade our website, which was a really legacy, clunky, custom, yucky website. That's kind of an issue.
[Voiceover]: You've painted a pretty good picture there.
Suzie Young: Is that clear enough? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of. The business has had significant issues around that platform for a long time, so we've had to upgrade that and then we've also had to launch a DTC channel and everything that comes with that. So, you know, there's just been a few things going on.
[Voiceover]: At MetaGenX, you've had a massive 12 months. Like what you've achieved in that amount of time has been phenomenal. Watching you lead that through with the team, I want to go back just quickly to that point around growing the customer base and that flatline growth. One of the things that's come through as I've been able to speak to some of the teams who are working directly with practitioners and the customer service teams and the education team. Because what I loved was that in the metagenics team you actually have this huge team of natural healthcare practitioners who are called educators.
Suzie Young: Yes.
[Voiceover]: And it's just their job to help keep practitioners up to date with all things natural health.
Suzie Young: The education team, or actually across the whole of Metagenics, we have natural healthcare practitioners. So we have this amazing education team that's been like a real, I guess, USP and strength of the business for many years. We have a clinical support team which is like a naturopath help desk with other naturopaths where they can answer questions and help them with questions they might have on with patients that are in their clinics and different products to take. And then we had lots of healthcare practitioners just through our business, like in our sales team. In our regs team and all around. And yeah, it's a really important part of what we do, the education side of things because, you know, part of our role is helping to educate healthcare practitioners on the latest research that's coming through on different ingredients and products out there and how that can help their patients with different need states that they have.
[Voiceover]: So it's been amazing speaking to all of these teams because yes, we need to grow the customer base, but it's also about serving your patients in the right way and around compliance with scripts, which I never really thought about is like, how do you just make it easy and convenient for people who love the product and they're on a journey. Because a lot of the natural health care journeys aren't like the western medicine. Here's a prescription, it'll be done, it's a longer term play. So you're really feeding into that customer lifetime by allowing them to continue the journey with the naturopath, but not having a reliance, if that makes sense.
Suzie Young: So when we were looking at the direct to consumer channel and also the patients that order on our website online, we were kind of looking at different ways that we could replicate that practitioner experience, but online. And so that's where kind of functionality like subscriptions are important because that helps the patient meet compliance by, you know, taking the product every day over a period of time. Or that's, you know, a big reason why we launched the loyalty program. Again, you know, patients will only see the benefit of the product if they take it over the long period. And I think what happens out there in this industry in general, and I like one of those people who used to be like this is you get in fads with vitamins and supplements and natural health and you think, oh, I'm going to do this now. And you do it for a month and then you don't do it for another few months. But actually most of these products, the benefit comes when you stick to it for two months, three months or longer. And so, you know, providing the consumers and the patients tools online that actually supports our practitioners as well.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's a whole new business model. So when the leadership team, and I'm assuming you knew about this when you signed up for the Metagenics job, but when they came to you and they said, look, we need to really go hard at this DTC channel to make it available for consumers as well as patients directly from a tech stack, where did your head go? Because you said that you were on this custom horrible. You Might have thrown in a couple of other words there piece of technology that had been there for some it was a legacy platform and it was basically a rebuild from scratch. How did you assess what technology you might need to build the foundations of this?
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Suzie Young: yeah, that's an interesting question. It's been quite a journey the last couple of years from a technology perspective because at the same time there has been other projects running globally on different tech stacks, on much bigger kind of headless enterprise level tech stacks. I think in Australia we had a little PTSD from the tech stack that we had, you know. Yeah, it was fully custom front end at one stage before I joined the business they built out internal dev teams like it was just a bit of a mess. And one of the things we did early on was we created design principles for our project. And our project manager, James Hallam, who you know from working at Metagenics, he really helped lead this with us and establish some design principles up front. And they were things like we will seek the best practice functionality in platforms that are leading the way. We will aggressively avoid custom code and use out of the box wherever we can.
[Voiceover]: I always loved hearing that one aggressively avoid aggressively.
Suzie Young: Yes, we'll be informed buyers. So when I say that I mean like we'll do an excellent job at building requirements and understanding what we want so that we're not stuffing, you know, agencies and platforms around in project. You know, we're not a software house, we're a vitamins and supplements business. So that was super clear upfront and I think that was really great foundation for us as we then moved through this process of selecting platform and selecting partner. And I think I had personally been watching Shopify for a while. Shopify without a doubt is the number one choice for D2C. Right. There's no question, you don't even have to think about that. But we do have a B2B side to our E commerce because our practitioners also do buy product for their practice and we sell to retailers as well. So we had complexity in our solution and our requirements that you'd accept expect for a B2B channel around pricing and shipping options and complexity in customer groups. So obviously like the Shopify roadmap for B2B has picked up quite a bit in the last couple of years. And so what we decided to do was run like a proof of concept stage up front. And we approached Shopify first and worked with their technical people and we basically built requirements of all the things we're all worried about, got together with them, workshop that, and they came back. And I think they came back and of our, say, 15 things that we're worried about, maybe there was two that they couldn't solve. And that gave us confidence to kind of move to the next stage, which was a proof of concept with a Shopify agency. And the reason I like this, and this is a great learning for me too, because my last project I just went full rfp. But doing this is great because, you know, in our business, because we're a global business, we have committees we have to get approval from, like project approval committee, we have steering committees, we have, you know, tech committees. It's very different when you go to one of those committees and you're asking for a small amount of money versus a massive amount of money. And that's what I love about the proof of concept stage. So we said, hey, we need to do an eight week deep dive with a partner to just flesh this out because we're pretty confident, but we want to be 100% confident. They gave us the support and backing to do that. We engaged Overdose Digital, who have deep Shopify experience and who I had worked with before, so knew that there was, I guess, a cultural fit and a ways of working that would suit our business. And they kind of prototyped some of these parts of our solution for us. And so once we then got say, you know, I think we got about six weeks into that proof of concept and we had enough confidence that we knew that, that we were on. And we were able to go back to our steering committee and say, okay, here's actually the evidence that this solution is going to work. And then from that point we got into a project, we rolled it out in six months, which still blows me away when I think about that, because that is huge to do both a B2B migration, but also a launch a whole new DTC channel.
[Voiceover]: Oh yeah, from scratch.
Suzie Young: When you know, we've never ever sold direct to consumer before. So it wasn't just an e commerce project. It was a full business project with, you know, what is the external marketing, what is the internal comms, external comms strategy, commercial implications around supply chain and erp. It was pretty big.
Nathan Bush: It was massive.
[Voiceover]: And I love what you said there around the proof of concept because your time saving isn't just in the bill. It's all in those months and those years sometimes of building business cases and getting sign off for that big number.
Suzie Young: That's right, yeah, yeah. And it helped us write the requirements as well. But we had a really good idea of our requirements before we went into that. One of the things that resonated with me up front was Martin, who's the Shopify lead at Overdose. I remember him saying early on, if we get into this proof of concept and there's like, you know, two, three, maybe five things that are a bit custom, we'll be okay. But if we get into this and it becomes 10, 15, 20 things, Shopify is not going to be the platform for you. And I just really appreciated that honesty and openness and I think we were really aligned with that as a team. But also we had those strong design principles. So, you know, we were going into this, we wanted to upgrade quickly. We wanted to launch this channel. We'd had problems in the past and so there were some things we did, you know, sacrifice because you know, the greater good was worth it to get live and it'll come at some point.
[Voiceover]: That has honestly been one of the best things around working with you, Susie, and observing the way that you are able to keep a project on track to hit six months doesn't come without hard decisions like you are able to really put it out there and say, guys, this is actually veering off scope or this is getting into custom territory. But not cut it from a tech perspective because actually the work is from a business perspective to talk to the business units, to go, hey, I know you want to do this, or I know this has been part of our model in the past, but for our future roadmap to keep it simple and to be able to move quickly in the future, we need to change the way the business works. Was that challenging for you?
Suzie Young: Yeah, it was. But I'd say something that really helped me through that process was that before, before we got into the tech project or even during the tech project, we were doing a lot of external comms to our practitioner business because we were significantly changing our go to market strategy and I was a part of that comms. So I was doing presentations to some of those VIP groups and talking about what the new web experience would be like and how it would all work for the patients and got to network and meet the customers and really understand their pain points and what they liked and didn't like about what we were doing. And also through that time, kind of spending more time with our national sales manager, our head of sales, you know, our regional CEO, and really understanding more deeply the dynamics that exist in this industry. Because I guess, like I only started two years ago, so, you know, like, I just don't have the legacy or the history that a lot of them have. And because I was doing that at the time, it was very helpful because I felt like empowered and I felt like I knew the right decisions to make. And I think that's really important. Right. In a project team. Sometimes you can kind of observe project teams where there's so many people involved, but not one person can actually make a call. And I think that that's like a real key to success. And I very fortunate that I did have the support and the backing from my peers and from my managers who were like, yep, do what you need to do. And we did. We made some hard calls. Like we would be in meetings sometimes, deep into the project and we'd be talking about some technical part of the solution and you'd catch yourself going, hang on, we're going way too deep here. Like, let's pull it back a few layers. We agreed we weren't going to customize this section. Let's like, you know, someone has to keep everyone on track. Right?
[Voiceover]: Yeah. So going back to Martin's point, which I love, around look, if we can customize 3, 4, 5 maybe pieces, but beyond that, we're on the wrong platform. Where did you have to customize?
Suzie Young: Yeah, so we have this really great solution for our practitioners, which is like an affiliate program for their patients. So basically they can connect their patients and invite their patients to come and order from our website. And they're still linked to them. Right. So it's almost like a virtual dispensary for them. And so that's obviously not out of the box functionality that exists.
[Voiceover]: Not normal B2B.
Suzie Young: No, but that was a really important part of the solution. And there was a little bit of customization around the MY account area for our customers because we have all different customer types. But there has been. We knew we were doing customization there because we knew we were a little early for Shopify's account extensibility launch, which happened just over Christmas. And so we've always had, in our roadmap, we'll launch with this kind of B solution and then we'll quickly fast follow and kind of tidy that area up. And we're working on that right now. But other than that, we kind of just found ways to fit into existing functionality. And actually, when we started digging into things, topics like pricing, our pricing model actually fits really beautifully into Shopify and the way that that works. There were great kind of apps for handling shipping rules and yeah, like, we're just so happy to be on that platform because it just takes so much of the complexity and stress and hassle out of the solution, both in the project, but also ongoing for the team.
[Voiceover]: Oh, exactly. And we're seeing that today. Right. Is that the team can get in there and make the changes. Even yesterday, when we're going live with loyalty, we had one issue because as you mentioned there, you've launched and you are one of the first in Australia on Shopify plus who are using new customer accounts. So if you haven't come across that, that basically means that in the customer section on Shopify that you can add your own widgets and you can customize what the account section looks like. Whereas previously you couldn't change that, just like you couldn't change the checkout maybe a year or two ago. Yes, but you're one of the first that has that, which can come with complexities, with integrations if they're not ready for new customer accounts. But even yesterday when we went live, there was something we needed and your team was able to spin it up, and this is a digital team, not necessarily a technical team. Spin up some modules to be able to improve that customer journey straight away without having to do any development or involve other teams, which was pretty cool.
Suzie Young: Yeah, that was really cool. I love my team. They're so awesome. And I love how, you know, we've. I've got a couple of Shopify gurus in my team, as you know, with Reece and Candace and even Natasha, like, is new to the platform over the last year, but has gotten to know it really well. And those guys just under pressure, were troubleshooting and just found a solution, didn't they? Found a way forward. It was really cool.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And then to close out that part
[Voiceover]: of the conversation, what does the rest of the tech stack from a digital perspective look like for you?
Suzie Young: Yeah, so we selected Yotpo as a pretty important platform because you can do a few things in yotpo and it has both the native integration with Shopify but then the integration of the modules with each other. So we're using their customer reviews, their product subscriptions and now their loyalty. So that's been really great. Like it's always great when you install a Shopify native integration app, right? Because you just think having come from like Magento on my last project and like the effort that it takes just to put something like customer reviews in or subscriptions and integrate that with checkout. But it's kind of literally like you're consistent configuring instead of actually, you know, implementing. Then we use Dot Digital for our marketing automation and CDP for our kind of consumer and patient customers. Dot Digital is actually a global platform for us. We use it in some of our Europe branches and that's an important part of why we chose that platform too, is because it does integrate well with a range of platforms where, you know, at the moment we're the only ones on Shopify and so some of our other Europe divisions are on Magento or on commerce Tools and cursing you at night. Yeah, that's right. Watch this space.
[Voiceover]: I sense you've got a Europe trip
Nathan Bush: coming up after Vegas.
Suzie Young: That would be nice, wouldn't it? In summer would be great.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that's right.
Suzie Young: So yeah, we're using Dot Digital really for the email and the SMS and some kind of forms and landing pages and things like that. And then we're also using just newly Tolstoy as a video platform, which, wow, that's a really cool platform. We've really only just launched that and we've got a lot of test and learn and roll out to do there. But that's going to be really key in our strategy because we really want to, as I was saying before, put the natural healthcare practitioner up front and so we can do that through video and we can merchandise that around all different parts of our site. They'd be the main three at the moment. And I think that then there's a bunch of other little apps as you end up having in the Shopify world for more micro solutions. I think one of the things we're now looking at in phase two is assessing that kind of whole search merch and personalization space. We left that out of our original project purposely just because we had a lot to do in six months. We probably didn't understand the requirements well enough, but we're kind of looking at that Space.
[Voiceover]: Now, I think that was a smart strategy. Right, because you also needed to understand how new customers are going to use this site because you couldn't implement something like a search and merch based on the requirements and the patterns in the old website. Because you need to observe how the new customer is going to use the site.
Suzie Young: Yeah, that's so true. And also, I think, like, you can totally overload your team in a project with new tech. I feel like we did that at Signet where we onboarded everything all at once, but actually when you go live, you don't have time to fully roll those out. So it ends up kind of being, oh, three months, six months, eight months later that you're really making the most of them because you've kind of everything's changed overnight and the team needs a bit of time just to get used to that.
Nathan Bush: And you might not be able to
[Voiceover]: give away too much, but what can you tell us because you went live with the new Shopify plus website and the DTC transformation. Was it in October?
Suzie Young: October, yes. Yes.
[Voiceover]: What kind of results are you seeing in terms of customer response to be able to buy direct?
Suzie Young: Yeah, we're seeing incredible results. Obviously can't share the exact numbers, but we're well ahead of our forecast for revenue, which is so great to see
[Voiceover]: because I remember you putting those forecast numbers together. There was a little bit of sweat going on there.
Suzie Young: Sweating over those forecasts. Really wants. But I think, like, there's a lesson in there too, right? Like, I think we did really good due diligence in that whole process of forecasting. And it wasn't just the sales number. It was like a pretty detailed forecast around, like, acquisition. But also what's our AOV going to be and what data points do we have to kind of test that and good benchmarks for that. What's our, like, LTV curve going to look like or our retention curve and like, where do we need it to be? So we kind of had a low, mid high forecast of what would happen. And it has definitely sat more in the high part of the forecast, which is really great to see. But that now helps us go back and kind of make sure we're hitting the right numbers and the right lead and lag measures and does that then
[Voiceover]: from a future roadmap perspective, has given the business confidence to continue the strategy, obviously, but also to empower you and your team to keep moving at pace.
Suzie Young: Yeah, one of the really great things about this business is that they want to move really quickly on everything. That can also Be really tough, right? Yeah, it's kind of like I'd say this project and Metagenix is kind of like a startup inside a global business. So you've got the funding and the support and the approval to use really good tech and resource, but you're like you're a startup, you're doing everything from scratch.
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[Voiceover]: and start selling worldwide.
Suzie Young: I think I'm really, really lucky to have had this opportunity. It's kind of rare that you get that opportunity in well established brands these days.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. So working with you and observing you throughout the transformation, I've only been involved in bits and pieces of struck me how well that you've managed just transformation generally. Like there's never been, there's obviously a lot of late nights, tight deadlines, but to me there was never panic or frustration. I've seen frustration creep into a lot of transformation, especially when you're dealing with multiple stakeholders in a business. You were so on the outside, calm and communicating really clearly and making sure your team was looked after. That were my observations. From your perspective, having done transformation in a few businesses now, what is the key to being a successful leader during digital transformation?
Suzie Young: Yeah, I mean it's funny that you say that Nathan, because I remember when you started working with us, which was back in, I think it was like, was it July or August last year?
[Voiceover]: Something like that.
Suzie Young: And I was in the real like hairy part of this project. I remember thinking, oh gosh, she's not going to see me at my best to hear that I looked calm and collected on the outside. But I think that for me, when I look at my career over the last like, say even like 10 to 15 years, there's been a transformation thread and it's not always been E commerce. You know, before E Commerce I was deep in CRM world and before that maybe marketing, automation or even erp. But there's a common thread to every project and there's some things that like I just deeply believe in and like one of them is I'm such a project management person and super fortunate to have a PMO department in this business. So I get to work with amazing project managers. That's usually been something I've had to wear the hat off in prior roles, but I'm trained in project management so I love agile. I'm a trained Scrum master and product owner. Deeply understand the whole framework and I think like it's so important to the success of any project and I know there's lots of different frameworks out there and stuff and it can be harder when you're in a smaller business to kind of, because you don't necessarily have the skill set and stuff internally, but it's so invaluable to do. And if there's people out there even earlier in their career that haven't been exposed to say, an agile project management framework, it would be such a great investment. And then I think the other thing is, I guess change management and just having that as a stream or a part of your project, you've got to look at change management from an internal perspective, but also from an external customer perspective. You know, it's got to be a well thought out plan and strategy and because when you get deep into those projects where you are very stressed, if you've thought of that stuff then like it's so helpful. And so I think like those two things are kind of so critical to the success of any project.
Nathan Bush: I think, I think if I could
[Voiceover]: add one from an external perspective that I noticed about you and you mentioned it earlier, is about you've got this ability too that even though you do have the skills in project management, you have the skills in CRM, you've done the marketing side, you've built a website before, you've done everything that your team's doing and what you're asking of them, you kept your eyes out of the weeds and you trusted your team and you brought in people when you didn't have the skills. And to me that was really important as a leader because especially in digital it's so easy for us who have come through the ranks and are now in leadership positions to go, oh, this is going wrong, or I have a gap here, maybe I just got to roll up my sleeves and do it myself. And you did a really good job of avoiding that so that you can keep the train on the tracks.
Suzie Young: Yeah, and that's hard, right? Because particularly in E commerce, like part of what I love about E Commerce is I'm just so curious and interested in everything and I love going deep on stuff. You know when I hear my team doing appointments with different search merch platforms at the moment and like I can't get to them all and I'm like, oh, I feel jealousy. But then I'm like I don't need to go to them all anymore. So it is really hard. But I think, yeah, like a big part of transformation is making sure that you have the right structure and the right skill set in your team and in your organization. Organization and going external if you need to. Like that's exactly why I engaged you. Like I needed support and help through that time. That's exactly why on the project management side we actually had a contractor project manager because we knew we needed a project manager who had deep experience in technology, e commerce commercial projects, whereas our project managers were a little less commercial, you know. So I think setting up the team for success and making sure you have the right skill set, but I think that the project management methodology in Agile in itself then enables you to empower your team. Right. It's like the whole premise of Agile is that people are collaborating over a very visible project Kanban board and so it kind of takes the need to get detailed and micromanage out of the process.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, makes total sense. All right, so next 12 months, Suzie, let's assume that you make it back from Vegas in one piece.
Suzie Young: It's yet to be seen all mental
[Voiceover]: cognitive abilities still working. What does the next 12 months hold for you and the MetaGenics team?
Suzie Young: The next 12 months is another really busy 12 months because we did really treat our first part of the project as MVP because we knew we had to do it very quickly. So we are already live into the second phase of our project. Obviously we talked about we've just launched Loyalty yesterday. We have a lot of functionality being rolled out over the next few months. That's all kind of conversion related functionality at the front end for our consumers and patients. But we also have a significant amount of functionality we're rolling out for our practitioner customers and more on the B2B side behind a login and a few other media projects which are probably under wraps for now. But stay tuned. There's a few things happening down the track. So yeah, we will be very busy again this year.
[Voiceover]: The startup that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Suzie Young: Yeah, that's right.
[Voiceover]: Faster and faster.
Suzie Young: Yeah, I love it.
[Voiceover]: All right, so if people want to get in touch with you, Susie, apart from search and merch vendors because they're already shortlisted. So too late for that. What's the best way for people to connect with you?
Suzie Young: The best way is through LinkedIn and please reach out. I love connecting and benchmarking and meeting other e commerce professionals.
[Voiceover]: Awesome. Suzy, have the best time in Vegas. I'm so jealous. Not so much from the Lil Wayne perspective, but from the amazing experiences and lesson learnings that you're going to have over there.
Nathan Bush: And thank you.
[Voiceover]: Thank you so much for sharing everything that you and the team are doing at Metagenics. It's a really, really great example of transformation at scale, but using some of the E Commerce principles that everyone's doing to kind of make it streamlined and scalable.
Suzie Young: Thank you so much for having me. I have been an add to Cart OG listener from the start, so it is a real thrill to be here. So thank you.
Nathan Bush: Honestly, watching Suzy lead this transformation has been one of the most impressive projects that I've seen up close. From dealing with legacy tech to launching a brand new DTC channel inside of a global business, it was digital transformation at serious pace. And I think some of Suzy's lessons there is critical. Whether you are leading a global transformation or whether you are just trying to make changes within a smaller business, a lot of it, as we heard from Susie, comes down to change management and people not so much on tech. Now, if you want to get hooked on magnesium like I did, Suzy has a special treat from the team at Metagenics for our listeners. Use the code add to cart at checkout. That's add to cart all one word for 10% off your next order. That's@metagenics.com no minimum. Spend one time only. Enjoy. All right, here are my top three takeaways from that episode. Number one, with big digital transformation projects like this, you need to set the guardrails early. Suzy kicked things off with clear design principles and stuck to them. The principle around aggressively avoiding custom code wasn't just a motto, it was a rule that was agreed to by all parties and it was stuck to to help avoid scope creep and keep decisions off aligned. Also, as per the design principles, having a proof of concept with Shopify and Overdose made internal approval smoother and saved months of risk. So get those guardrails set up early. Number two, build for B2B and D2C. Metagenics didn't treat these as separate channels. It was one experience where the site supported both patients, practitioners and new customers. And with features like a affiliate style, links, subscriptions and loyalty, it was so important that it all worked together that there wasn't three sites disguised as one. Even as metagenics went down the D2C model, it was so important that they retained their practitioner relationship with education content and support. So design one experience, not separate experiences. And number three, team structure matters. Susie empowered her team to own the platform. When loyalty launched and something broke, her team fixed it fast. No devs needed. Agile tools like Jira and Trello kept everyone moving, and bringing in external experts meant Susie could focus on strategy, not firefighting. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a mate or leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Every review really helps. A big thanks again to our partners Shopify and Klaviyo for making this episode possible. Thanks for joining us today on Add to Cart to listen to all our e commerce conversations now in the hundreds. You can head over to addtocart.com there. You can also join up to our free private Slack community to share e commerce ideas, tips and questions with other listeners. You can also subscribe to the Add to Cart weekly newsletter and browse some of the video highlights from our chats. There is a lot there that's add to cart.com au and if I can ask you one thing before you go. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague who could benefit or leave us a review. It really makes a difference. Thanks again for listening. And until next time, keep those customers adding to cartoon.
