Nathan Bush: E Suite's 10 Week E Commerce accelerator is now open for enrollment. Our very first accelerator earlier this year was a huge success with 54 graduates who are now putting their skills to use to further their E commerce careers. Over 10 weeks, I personally will take you through the fundamentals of E commerce from strategy to marketing, tech, finance, supply chain and more. We've made this course 100% remote and flexible to fit around your busy life with recorded live classes, an active community, over 20 cheat sheets and more than 600 pages of e commerce content. But the best part is you get to meet and connect with some of the best and brightest up and comers in E commerce in Australia. Enrollments are now open and class kicks off on Tuesday, 8-25-23. So whether you want to enroll as an individual or sneaky in persuade your boss to enrol the whole team. Head on over to esweettalent.com au forward/accelerator to enroll online today. I hope to see you in there.
[Voiceover]: I don't think that you have to be serious to be taken seriously. I describe it like you're building the plane while you're flying it so you know you've got your upfront driving moving forward and you're running around, you know, with bubblegum and string holding everything together as you're moving forward. If you can think of it and you've got great engineers, you can build it and that is just so inspiring. 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 from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course keep your customers Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to ADD to cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at E Commerce talent agency E Suite. Now, luxury and sustainability are not terms that often go hand in hand, but my guest today is the perfect mix between the two. Beth Clancy left LVMH and the corporate world of luxury behind to become the GM of Aerobe, a technology startup connecting consumers and brands to the commerce market in just one simple little click. With Aerobe, customers get to create a circular economy wardrobe to which they can add beautiful pieces and then rent, recycle or resell them in in the future with ease. It's pretty cool. All your fashion assets in one place and the ability to give them another life and make a little bit of
Nathan Bush: money along the way.
Nathan Bush: Leading Retailers like the iconic Oryton and PE Nation are already partnering with Aerob to drive an average basket uplift of 30% for brands and retailers. But I don't have to sell it. We've got Beth here to tell the story and there's so much in this chat. Beth shares the cultural whiplash that she experienced when she jumped on board Aerodynamic at the startup stage. She also talks about bringing your whole and unserious self to work and why that's important and how having an identical twin was the key to her career gear change. So, thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Paclio, here's our conversation with Beth Glancy, GM of Anz at Aerobe.
Nathan Bush: Beth, thank you for joining us on Add to Cart.
[Voiceover]: Thanks, Nathan. I'm so happy to be here.
Nathan Bush: I'll be so happy to be here because we had about 20 reschedules to be here on both our behalfs.
[Voiceover]: But we're here. Yeah, we're here. We got here. We got here. Divine Intervention wanted us to do it this week.
Nathan Bush: So you guys sound crazy busy at the moment. How's your world right now?
[Voiceover]: Gosh. Okay. For the listeners, this is my first foray into a startup, so I've had some cultural whiplash. For sure. The speed is intense, but it just has the most incredible energy working for a startup in this high growth phase. But yeah, Aerobe is going, you know, for those of you that may have heard about Aerobe or a startup in E commerce and we're in this real zeitgeist moment because consumers are demanding this space and we work in circularity, so it's bonkers.
Nathan Bush: I can already tell you're going to be amazing to talk with because you've said so many things in there. I've got like three or four questions already. But before we get into that, let's set the scene for those people who don't know about Aerobe. I'm not sure how you don't, but let's set the scene of who Aerobe is and what you guys do.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, so fundamentally Aerobe is here to power the future of sustainable fashion. And the way we do that is really simply we connect consumers and brands to the E commerce market in one click. So that's our kind of elevator pitch, what that means for brands and retailers because I'm sure people are like, okay, that's very, very high detail. We have a technology offering where we partner with merchants. So be that brands or retailers, where we have a widget that goes onto their site, where we invite their Customers to add items to a digital wardrobe. So we call it the circular wardrobe. But think of it as like a digital wardrobe where you connect a digital ID to each product that a customer buys and then from there, once that item has that digital ID attached to it, they have the ability to rent, recycle or resell in one click onto the Aero Marketplace.
Nathan Bush: That's very cool. Can we talk through it from a customer's perspective? As in what a customer might see and how they'd experience Aerog?
[Voiceover]: Yeah, so if you are shopping on one of our partner websites, so let's take Oriton or P Nation or the Iconic as an example.
Nathan Bush: Just a couple of small clients.
[Voiceover]: Just a couple of kind of. Yeah, relatively unknown clients. Exactly. Very, very lucky. And had some incredibly supportive partners which we can talk about later. If you're a customer shopping long, you will be on the product page and you might be looking to buy a jacket for two or three hundred dollars. On that product page you will see what we call the airwave widget. And there, what we do is we, there's a widget that has a toggle. So it allows you to toggle that item on. So add it to airwave if you like. And we show the customer at the point of purchase in that primary space, the estimated resale value. And so what that does is, is it does two things. One, it gets the customer thinking about, which is really unique, thinking about the fact that this garment or this piece of clothing is an investment and that it could go on to have another life or extend the life of that product. So at the moment today customers are really left thinking about that way off the fact of purchase and it's really an afterthought. And from there you might not have cared for that garment as much. You know, you might have cut off the tag, you might have done a number of other things that maybe would make that item not so attractive in the resale market. So by showing that to the customer up front, they're starting to think about this item as an investment and a quality piece.
Nathan Bush: And this is before they've added to cart.
[Voiceover]: They see that this is before they've added to cart. Yeah, on the product page when they're thinking about the purchase. So it sits just above the add to bag and we help conversion and average basket. So and the second thing, and what gets our merchants really excited is that because we show the estimated resale value, what we know to be true now is that we lower the, what we call the total cost of ownership in the customer's mind. So similarly to how a promotion works to drive conversion, we don't discount the product, but we're showing to the customer. Okay, so this product's 300, but the estimated resale value is 150 or 200. So actually this is only going to cost me a hundred dollars. And that is the magic moment for Aero. And that's where customers get really excited and where merchants really see the e commerce enablement factors. So average basket conversion and some really other juicy metrics go up accordingly.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. And do you have to be signed up as an aerobe account from a customer perspective in order to be able to see that or it just goes to everyone?
[Voiceover]: It goes to everyone. And so the widget, if it's sits on one of our brand partner sites, it will appear on a product page and we pull that. So our pricing algorithm scrapes our own marketplace as well as other marketplaces, and it looks at things like brand material, the category, so a dress versus a shoe versus you know, a jacket. And that algorithm then presents back that resale value item in, in real time to the customer. So it helps her or him or they understand the value of that item. And then from there, once they've added it to Eric, assuming that they do want to, you know, think about maybe potentially reselling it, there's no commitment, there's no fees. It's just, it's kind of like what we say, just future, you will thank you. You know, it's kind of like you might not want to do it now, but trust me, later you'll thank yourself for doing it.
Nathan Bush: I need that in all areas of my life, not just what I buy.
[Voiceover]: Future you will thank you. Here, here and here, and then from there. So a customer checks out as per normal. And then on the order confirmation page, a customer will be prompted to one either view their Aero account if they've already an existing member and perhaps have already used it on another site or on that site earlier, or you will then be prompted to create an account of which then all the information is pulled in and saved. Right.
Nathan Bush: And I guess from a customer's perspective too, there's that other aspect of it in being able to see your wardrobe all in one place too, like the value of your wardrobe too.
[Voiceover]: It's incredible. So your circular wardrobe, which, you know, I now have a lot of items in there, obviously I'm working for Aero by, you know, I'm drinking the Kool Aid, I am absolutely attached to my circular wardrobe.
Nathan Bush: You're making the koolaid that's what you're doing.
[Voiceover]: I'm drinking. And exactly at the same time, it's so powerful because your circular wardrobe is a digital representation of everything you've purchased. And hot off the press scoop for you, Nathan, we are launching with the Iconic in a week and a half, the ability to add all of your historical orders to Aerobe. So anything you've ever purchased from the Iconic in the last seven years, if it's over a certain price threshold, because we've done some kind of scientific analysis around how old the item will be and what we think the value will be, you'll be able to instantly add the back catalog of your digital wardrobe for the last seven years to Aerospin one.
Nathan Bush: Amazing.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, really, really, really cool.
Nathan Bush: Foreign. I'm not sure I want to endorse
Nathan Bush: this one, but here goes.
Nathan Bush: COVID 19 sparked a huge demand for homewares.
Nathan Bush: Very aware of this, but it's not a user experience that is easy to get right. Sarah, my wife, seems to have no trouble.
Nathan Bush: That's why Crate and Barrel Singapore replatformed over to Shopify plus with Shopify Pop
Nathan Bush: to deliver a seamless customer experience.
Nathan Bush: They upgraded to enable virtual consultations, real time inventory and ERP integration. The result for Crate and Barrel, a 350% increase in loyalty signups and an experience ready for expansion through Southeast Asia. But seriously, let's just keep this one on the lowdown. Hey, to read more of Crate and Barrel Singapore's story and see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com.
Nathan Bush: And so if I've got my wardrobe there and I've got a few things there and I'm like okay, time for a bit of a clean out. What's the process there to list and sell some of my items.
[Voiceover]: So when you add the item to your circular wardrobe when you're on the merchant partner, so the retailer or the brand, it's one click to add from there. Once you have all of your digital items in your wardrobe and what we can show the customers the value of all of the items. So you might have three or four thousand dollars worth of items in your in your circular wardrobe. We'll also show you any money that you've made so you start to get a sense of that this is really an asset and you've got liquid items in here. And then the third thing we show is the environmental impacts that you've made by either renting, recycling or reselling an item. So it's this one place where all of this information is housed. Once you're in that digital wardrobe, if you decide that you want to resell something, you can with one click decide to do that. And same process for rental, recycle. If the item is like new or hardly worn, you can just scoot through deciding the retail price which we will recommend. And it's about two clicks. If the item is very loved or worn, we ask the user then prompt just a couple more photos of this scuff marks or any signs of wear because we want the whole process to be really transparent. So consumers want to know exactly what they're getting because one of the big insights with the pre loved market is the lack of, I guess, control over the environment. And there's also, there's always that element of am I going to be protected? Is the product actually going to be representative of what arrived in my mailbox? So we really encourage the customers, the sellers in particular, to give as much information. But so if it is loved or largely worn, then it's another two clicks, add a photo and you're up and live in less than about two minutes on the Aero Marketplace.
Nathan Bush: And do you have any statistics on the success rate of selling items in the marketplace?
[Voiceover]: Yeah. So it's very varied depending on the category. It's like anything, it's particularly in fashion. So if you think about occasion wear. So if you are going to buy a dress or an item that is in season, you know it's been born to a wedding, you've Instagrammed the heck out of it, everyone's seen it. And this is, this is a really typical behavior. That customer then goes every weekend. For me it's every. I know, I see, I see the dresses you wear every week, Nathan and I see, I see them come in my feed and so we see those items move pretty quickly actually within about 10 days from purchase to born to soldiers. And a really interesting insight for particularly if you're a retailer or a brand listening. We see this behavior where a customer will buy something, add it to Aero, wear it, love it, resell it and then at the point where we resell it and we can track where that customer goes straight after Aero, we see them go right back to their primary place of purchase to buy again. So it is driving this real circularity. So there's two really distinct customers. There's the customer who is a high expectation customer who loves to shop in the primary retail space and they really enjoy that experience. They like buying new things and they're actually happy to buy the full price. They're really important because they drive the Supply and we need supply. So they're the, they're. If you were, you know, our merchant or a brand partner or our retail partner, they typically are your most loyal customers and we just help the merchant or the retailer get that customer back faster. So we drive a 2x frequency. Typically over 90 days we see an airwave customer return is twice as likely to return to one of our retail partners over a non airwave customer just because she's liquidating that product. And then you've got the customer who is buying in the marketplace, she's younger or he or they tend to be a bit younger around the 25 mark. They're actually more motivated by the sustainability, circularity angle. They love the price. They can access beautiful products that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise been able to attain. And what we help our brand partners do as a real secondary is because that customer is very motivated by price because they're not typically, you know, they're younger, they haven't fully exercised their full kind of economic ability yet. We help them understand that actually they do have the ability to buy in the primary retail space full price because they can now really easily resell it as well. So we've got this model where we're converting those buyers into sellers at a pretty rapid rate actually. So it's this, we've got, it's probably the truest sense of a flywheel that's ever existed.
Nathan Bush: And what strikes me is that there are so many parts to this model. Right? So you've got the upfront, you need that marketplace of having retailers listed on the side, the marketplace for you. You've got customers buying, selling, you've got people all over the place in this model. What's the hardest part of running this circular economy model for you?
[Voiceover]: Okay, so fundamentally we have two different businesses. So we have our B2B business. We are fundamentally a technology provider. Our founder is from a technology background. That's what motivates her, that's what she's incredibly good at. And that's why we've got this incredible world first technology, which is this one click technology. And what was quite revolutionary, which actually everyone told her at the beginning that it would kind of never work because retailers and brands didn't like the e commerce market, which is true, they typically don't because it's a black hole and their product turns up in a really substandard way. But what Hannah, now founder, has done is actually solved all of those problems. So we allow them to control the market. All of their primary imagery moves across. So now all of a sudden their brand is positioned in a really beautiful positive way and, and we give them insights so it's not this black hole anymore and we can help them monetize it as well because we drive all of these awesome e commerce metrics but yet we've got this business to business component of our business. How many times can you say business in one sentence? And then we have our consumer business which is our peer to peer marketplace and they intrinsically linked because what is going to make our marketplace win and be better and differentiated from any other peer to peer marketplace that exists today is because we can unlock supply and we can unlock really meaningful supply in a much shorter time frame than others can just purely because of the one click technology. And then the second kind of geekier component to this is that because the data we take is incredibly structured because we take it all from the merchant. It means that once you come over to the marketplace the shopping experience can be very, very sophisticated and can feel and start to feel and show up like a primary shopping experience. Because one of the challenges with peer to peer marketplaces today is that people list a dress as black dress and that's all the information that that marketplace then knows. So it's really hard to then make product recommendations and have really unique personalized shopping experiences when the data is not there. So that is a really, really large component of what our platform, how it will evolve over time and how it'll become a pretty powerful, I guess, defensibility for us.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's really interesting the technology and the data play which isn't obvious from the outside. I'm assuming it's all custom built.
[Voiceover]: It is, yeah. Okay, it is.
Nathan Bush: And is that your primary defense against other circular economy competitors that might be popping up?
[Voiceover]: Yeah, I think it's an interesting space. It's really crowded and like any market that's booming, you know, we know the resale market is growing 10 times faster than in the primary market. I mean we've all read the stats, right? We know that Gen Z care, they're going to act with their wallet. We've done quite a bit of research and we know that 80% of Gen Z customers consider the resale value of an item when they're purchasing it. And yet Gen Z today represent relatively small amount of the consumer power. But we know over the next five years they're going to come increasingly significant. And so everyone understands that. Everyone's trying to take a slice of this piece of. And circularity is, it's an interesting term because I think it's somewhat misunderstood. It's certainly misunderstood from a consumer point of view. We know that consumers actually don't really understand what it means at all. Whereas industry, you know, through going on deep sustainability journeys, understand that this is one really big part of what you can do to be a sustainable brand. Obviously there's production and then we manage. We're at the completely other end of the scale in end of life. But what we, you know, we have first mover advantage and I think that's really, that's really important when you're the first. And we deeply understand this space and it was something that our founder worked on for a couple of years. But I think one of the, our biggest defensibilities will be that our founder is from a technology background and actually she's built a technology company. We're not a. Whilst our peer to peer marketplace is fundamentally about fashion and you know, we are about solving for circularity in fashion today, that's one vertical. Whereas our global aspirations over, you know, the next 10, 15 years is much bigger than that. It's really about our highest mission is to power the circular economy through technology. And that is not necessarily fashion alone. It will be multi vertical across kind of many, many iterations. But really, which is what's so exciting about working for a technology company which is new to me, having worked in traditional retail, is that if you can think of it and you've got great engineers, you can build it. And that is just so inspiring.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. And I thought it was interesting at the start where you touched on the craziness or cultural whiplash of being in a startup. Doesn't feel from the outside and obviously it feels a lot different on the inside from the outside it looks well established, you've got some great growth, you've got some global footprints already happening. Tell us about where you're at at the moment with the expansion of Aero.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, you know, I worked for LVMH for eight years and so you don't get much more structured than that and well known. And so the cultural whiplash comes from. I describe it like you're building the plane while you're flying it. So you know, you've got, you're up front driving, moving forward and then you're running around, you know, with bubblegum and string holding everything together as you're moving forward. And it's this constant, constant duality of sprinting towards your goals and continuing to build the foundations as you go. I think one of the biggest learnings for me so far, six months in is just being okay with the imperfect. So when you run. I ran Sephora for many years, having worked at LVMH, actually, perfection is actually built into LVMH's values. So. So that is what good looks like. And so it's taken me a little bit of, you know, that muscle memory had to deactivate to be like, it's okay, that perfect is not what we're going for. We're going for growth. You know, it's like progress over perfection. That really. That attitude of failing, fast failing forward. One of our values is lfg, which is, I'm assuming I can swear on this podcast you can beat me out if you can't, which is let's fucking go. So I love it. And it's just. It appears everywhere on our slack channels. Lfg. Lfg. And it just is the spirit of, you know, what we are and what we do, and it's just. It's our truest value because it's what we embody in terms of. We just. Especially from the beginning, we got told no a lot. And it was. We just powered through. We just continued to kind of recreate this industry, which, at the end of the day, we've been working with some, you know, a lot of traditional brands, and it's been as much as an education for them to understand, you know, you've got to take them on a journey. And there's always a spectrum of brands. There are the brands who are really innovative and want to jump on straight away. And you've got those leaders like Erica from the iconic. Two minutes into the conversation with Hannah and she was like, we are going to redefine the next 15 years of E commerce with you. Like, she saw it straight away. And then, you know, you have more traditional brands on the other end who are a little bit more considered, and you have to take them on the journey of what it means. And yes, we're going to show the resale value on the product page. And no, we don't think it does devalue your brand, and we think it does the opposite. It shows how high the resale value of these items are. But just changing some of those mindsets has been part of our task as well.
Nathan Bush: I can imagine there's a difficult communication piece there where you've got this mission to grow circular economy and save the planet, but at the same time, you've got to go into retailers and go, this will actually help you sell more as well.
[Voiceover]: Yep.
Nathan Bush: How do you balance that. And what's the typical pitch that you give to retailers? You've already mentioned some great stats. How do you pitch it?
[Voiceover]: Yeah, you know, it's balancing the commerciality of what we do and the intention of circularity and sustainability is something that Aerop has had to really finesse because at the end of the day, most sustainability options today cost businesses money. And one of the biggest challenges for fashion brands in particular and retailers to get into doing anything meaningful in sustainability is the usually it's either the undertaking, the size of what has to be done if you were going to potentially start your own e commerce operation. Huge. Another business kind of vertical with slim margins already and small teams, or if it's in production, it's a really arduous, long process. So we know that it's incredibly. There are a lot of barriers and it not always the most commercially viable. And on the other hand, with Aero, we're saying we believe that fashion should thrive. We believe in the seasonality of fashion. We're not, we're not utopian in our belief system that people will only buy five things and be happy with them for two years. And yes, we want people to be more considered in what they purchase. So a big part of our proposition is we don't want to necessarily slow your sales down. We want consumers to trade up into higher value, better made, better quality items that wear well, launder well and can be resold. So that high expectation customer that we spoke about, because at the end of the day we're dealing with a customer who still continues to want to buy in the primary retail space, we want to serve her. And what we want to do with her is make the reselling process easy. If we can remove all of the friction, then they will be more inclined to enter into circularity. And the biggest insight today that the reason why people don't is because it's just too hard. And if you think about the current options in resale that you have available as a customer, the listing process hasn't really been reinvented since eBay launched 25 years ago. It's still the same where the customer has to go on, take the photos literally filled by field, fill out all the information. So we sold for that. We allow this customer now to be really actively circular when she would never have done so otherwise. And then we have this other customer who only wants to buy secondhand. And so we're just feeding the supply to her. And so you can see that we've kind of joined. They were two semicircles let's call them. And we've joined them together. The pitch for brands and retailers is that we give them access to the circular economy in one click because we start to go a little bit geeky. We have pre integrations with Shopify, Big Commerce and Magento and soon to be Salesforce, which literally means you download the app and you're pretty much ready to go. We do some formatting, we do some mapping. You call it dresses, we call it dresses, you call it blouses, we call it shirts, whatever it might be in the background. And you can be up and running with us in three days. No setup costs, no fees, and you're literally entered into the circular economy with an amazing customer offering by the end of the week.
Nathan Bush: Wow. And so do the retailers pay at all at any point in the process?
[Voiceover]: So it's completely free to become a circular partner and to get the widget on site from there, when your customers start using it. We take a small transaction clip at the point of purchase when an item is added to Aerobe. So if you have 100 transactions in a day and 10 are added to Aerobe, those 10 will incur a small percentage fee. And the reason why we do that is what, first and foremost we offer the end to end circular offering. So we cover all the customer service, all the risk, the insurance, we have an escrow payment system to ensure that any rgbaji between sellers and buyers, it's all managed. We have a warehouse where we take back all disputes, etc. We manage all the recycling and obviously the technology that powers the whole system. And secondary to that, we drive this on average 35% uplift, on average basket across all of our merchants. And it can be, depending on your price elasticity and the category that you play in, it can be as high as 55%. So if you're a multi brand retailer and you have really vast merchandise, you can have an average basket uplift up to 55, but on average we see about 30, 35.
Nathan Bush: That's big. And do you, apart from those benefits, do retailers get any access to the data that you hold around customers, as in your customer shops with you, but they're also most likely to shop with you, these people, or buy this.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. So a little bit of the magic sauce is part of the pitch of Aerobe and what you mentioned before is that we've got this business to business model, we've got this consumer model, like the elevator pitch turns into not an elevator pitch. Right. It's like, it's like how much time do you have? But the benefits to the merchants are so layered. You know, first and foremost it's entry to circular economy. And then there are, and depending what you're motivated by, there are all of these secondary benefits like the elevation of your brand in the secondary space. You know designer brands love that because all of a sudden their brand is being represented in the truest sense of who they are. Because we take all the primary imagery. The second one is around data and insights. So two main buckets, you get all of your impact reporting. So any action that happens through the widget will give you full access to CO2 emissions, water saved, kilos of textile diverted from landfill. And then the second to that, which is I think even more exciting to the merchants is so we give them all of the E commerce enablement metrics that we help with on sites. Average basket frequency conversion and abandoned car. So we give access to that every month. And then secondary to that we show them what's happening on the marketplace. So the products they're selling, the price they're selling for the demographic of the customer, what else they're buying, who else they like. And then the kind of last hurrah is we have marketing programs where we it's in Arab's best interest that we don't own the customer solely. We want that customer to go back to the primary retail space because she's driving supply. So then we have marketing campaigns to drive our very active buyers and sellers on the marketplace back to the primary purchase, back to the primary brand's website to keep driving supply. And I think that gets them really excited.
Nathan Bush: It's a lot, isn't it?
[Voiceover]: It's a lot. Yeah. I'm literally like we do a pitch in half an hour and look, most of the time I get it out but it's like I can talk fast and sometimes I go at a two and a half speed to get through it.
Nathan Bush: You've refreshed your website. The new range is about to drop. You've never had more customer service options.
Nathan Bush: Hey, but take a look over there.
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Nathan Bush: What inspired you to come over and be the GM of Aerobe? Like you said, you've got an amazing retail career with some of the best brands around the planet. What was it that Hannah said to you? To go, that's my next mission.
[Voiceover]: There were a few things, but I. I'd been at LVMH for 8 years and I had run Sephora through Covid, so, you know, no easy task. But for the last. I think for probably the last two to three years, my interest in what I was doing, I really gravitated towards the technology and innovation side within the business, which in a business like Sephora is, you know, really at the forefront. But I felt really engaged and really motivated and alive on those projects. But ultimately, when you work in retail, your bread and butter is your stores and, you know, it's the physical footprint and it's the. The energy and the experience that you can have in that physical space is what makes you different, particularly when you're a brand like Sephora. And so I started to reflect on what was getting me excited and what the space that I wanted to be in coupled with the fact that, that I'm an identical twin. And she is the chief of staff at Atlassian and has worked in tech for a long time. And I'd always seen the culture and the lack of boundaries that they place on themselves. By being a technology company and watching that from the sideline and then realizing that I had this kind of real gravitational pull towards it within the environment that I'd worked in, really made me start to think about a different career path. And I'd gone on that journey and I'd started to talk to people and I put some feelers out there. But it's interesting, when you're 40 and you're at a certain level, at a GM level, you want to cut across into a technology company and you don't have any experience in technology. That was an interesting conversation to have. So tell me about your experience with product and engineering teams. None, but I. But I'm a fast learner and so I'd gone on a bit of this journey and I was actually very serendipitous. I'd reached out to a colleague who I knew from afterpay. She's very senior at afterpage. I'd seen she'd invested in another business and I was interested to see if I could personally invest and I reached out to her to have a chat. And she said to me, I can actually do one better for you. Have you heard of Aero? And I said, I have. I just saw them launch with the Iconic. And she said, I am an investor and an advisor and they're looking for someone just like you. Would you go and talk to Hannah, the founder? And in my head I'm thinking, I'm never going to go to a startup. You know, know thyself. I was like, I can't even do invoices. I haven't done any invoice for like 10 years. Literally. That's what I said to her. And I said, but, you know, like, never say no, right? Never say no. So let the door swing open. Took the phone call with Hannah, took it in the car on the way to work, because I thought, you know, I'll be polite, take the call, but I'm never going to take it, never going to join a startup. And within 10 minutes of her talking to me about the product, I was like, where do I sign? It was the belief in what she had built. And then as I scratched the surface to what she'd built with, you know, a really, really small team around her, what she was able to achieve, you know, signing the Iconic as pretty much one of the first brands in Australia, I was like, okay, well, obviously they've seen something in Hannah as a founder. Everyone talks about the. What they see in her as a founder. Incredibly tenacious, the most driven person, you know, I've ever met. And, yeah, she's just literally doesn't say, doesn't take no for an answer. And that's really inspiring to be around, you know, just that unwavering faith in what we're doing. So that's really, really powerful and breeds a lot into the culture. And, yeah, from there we just had a series of. A series of conversations. And, yeah, literally the rest is history. We made up the job. We were like, the job didn't exist. It's not like she particularly wanted a gm. And I've got this, like, I'm the GM of Australia and New Zealand and I'm global head of partnerships, and I also look after marketing and customer experience. I do. You know, it's a startup. Like, you wear a hundred hats, right? And she was like, you know, what do you want the title to be? And I said, to be honest, I don't really care. Like, what are we? And she said, look, well, I'm going over the States. Why don't we call it a GM Australia? You can then make sure that this is successful here as our founding market and I can focus on, on the States in Europe. And I was like, okay, done, let's go.
Nathan Bush: Lfg.
[Voiceover]: Yes, Nathan. See, it's catchy. Lfg.
Nathan Bush: Speaking of lfg, in your first six months now, has there been a moment where you have been uncomfortable coming from that background that you talked about and having to have that moment of. Yep. It's not perfect, but this is what we've got to do for growth. LFG it.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Every day, like honestly every day I think uncomfortable moments, you know, the whole process of leaving the comfort of being a senior executive in one of the biggest, most well known luxury organizations in the world to go to an unknown startup. If I could replay some of the conversations I had with some people at LVMH when I told them that I was leaving, you'd probably have a good giggle. But I mean that was just. Although I think they just thought I was mad. You know, you can die at lvmh. The thing is, is once you get to kind of that, that GM level, you'll just move around to all of the brands, you know, and that's just what you can do and, and that's amazing if you want to do that. But I was just wanting more. I wanted, you know, and they are all very different, but it's same, same difference, you know, steeped in clientele and luxury and the more you go up, the more you'll, you'll move into those kind of luxury brands which was even more moving away from the technology into the retail store because luxury is all about that in store experience and less about the technology piece. So yeah, every day uncomfortable. I think the hardest thing for me has been operating in the chaos and knowing how much it's the balance between we need some structure and I'm good at that. And I've worked in really structured organizations and I know what good structure looks like. But then too much structure slows the business down. And so just trying to find that balance and flexing where I think we need it, but then not wanting to kind of slow, dampen the LFG spirit. Right. But I laugh at what I can. I'll tell you one, tell you one example. We organized a customer wine night where we wanted people to come and meet us to interact with a new prototype of a feature that we just launched. And so we were like, okay, will email our customer database and we'll hold it in Sydney and it'll be great. And on Tuesday, you know, we'll have 30 people turn up and it'll be great. And so obviously we email the database and two people come back. And, you know, more people came back than that. But the two people who could be available on the night, on the Tuesday night in Sydney for what we wanted, there was two people. And so it's just, you know, from there, what we, you know, you basically just call upon friends and friends and friends, and you just walk down to the office next door and knock on the door and ask if anyone wants to come up and be part of our wine and cheese night. And, you know, just this sense of. It's almost like, what would you do if you just needed to pull some people into a bar to ask them some questions? You'd probably bring some friends, you'd offer a little $15 gift voucher, you'd knock on the office next door, you'd probably ask the people at the bar if they were interested. But I was coming from a no. It needs to be structured. We need to have this customer and it all needs to be very above the line. And. And so just this like. And everyone else around me who'd worked in startups their whole life, they're like, it's fine, we'll just. I'll just go get some people from my old work. And so just that kind of just scrappy, go with it. No rules. And it's like a muscle that you have to deactivate. Like really, really just. It's that you've got a default mode. And I really consciously have to show up in a different way.
Nathan Bush: And, like, it probably goes both ways, right? Is that they get a lot of benefit from your structure, bring some of that structure in. It's just, where does the balance lie? Especially when you're talking to engineering teams that are really good at what they're doing, they're building a custom product which would be of all sorts of depth and complexity that you may never, ever know. How much control do you come in and just hand over?
[Voiceover]: It's just this constant kind of, we'll figure it out, you know. And one of the things that I like the most, actually, is that unlike instruction organizations where, you know, you're in a department and you're doing your thing, and then you hand something over to someone else and they do their thing. And then, you know, it's so common to work in silos when you get into big organizations. One of the biggest challenges corporate organizations have is, you know, how do we better work as teams? And maybe we shouldn't have functions. Maybe we should have cross functional heads and all that jazz, blah, blah, blah. We've all, you know, heard about it. The thing that comes with when you work at a startup is that you don't have that. Everyone's doing everything. Like it's so flat and. But what's amazing about that is your, you know, my own personal learning journey and learning curve has been exponential because you're in the engineering meeting trying to figure out something that one of your merchants want and you're in there talking to them about it because there's no one else. There's no one else for me to brief to them, for them to brief someone else, which is what happened in my old job. You know, four people down. You'd eventually get to the people doing the work. You're in there, and then, you know, you're pitching to a merchant. We could be down meeting with one of Australia's designer brands in Melbourne. The next day you're on a phone call with the engineers. Then you're trying to work on your values and then you're working on people policies and you're hiring and you're like, you're, you know, you're doing all of it and then you're writing a press release. Like, it's incredibly high, low work. But it comes with this energy that has really ignited kind of fire within me.
Nathan Bush: So this is why I wanted you on the podcast, to give you the moment of that low work so that you can go back and do the high work.
[Voiceover]: Trust me, this is high work. I'm loving this compared to kind of data entry or invoices. So for everyone that I have learned how to do invoices and I'm now, you know, they're easy. They're easy.
Nathan Bush: Done.
[Voiceover]: Thank you. Thank you. Personal development. I'll put it on my review of which we don't do, because I was
Nathan Bush: about to say, I know it's early days.
Nathan Bush: Do you think you could ever go
Nathan Bush: back to corporate life now?
[Voiceover]: It would be really hard because the thing that I loved about my old world being corporate, yes, that was the people leadership component, because that's all I did. So I just very, very deliberate. People leadership and mentoring and coaching was a really, really big part of my job. And I do miss that because at Aero, it's much flatter. Yeah, of course there's natural leadership, right. That just. I can't help myself. Just who I kind of who I am and what I default to. But largely that really structured leadership component I don't have anymore. But. So I missed that. But the thing that you realize, which I guess is probably a bit of a necessary evil, but when you get into bigger, structured, more corporate organizations, you spend a lot of time doing business with yourselves. And if I think about the majority of work that I did at my time at LVMH and, you know, even David Jones and those bigger organizations, it's all like. It's a lot of internal ness. Not a word. But, you know, you're really. The best way I can describe it is yet doing business with yourself. And at Aero, there's none of that because everyone's just available on slack and phone and you're figuring stuff out on the fly. And so everything's really outward. Everything you're doing is like maximum output to drive the business forward. There doesn't seem to be a lot of unproductive time. And I think if I went back, having now been in this space, I'd be sitting around being like, wow, we are moving at a turtle's pace. It would feel slow. It would feel really slow.
Nathan Bush: The leadership point that you made was really interesting because I totally get the corporate version of leadership, but do you think it's just a different version of leadership that you're showing and that you're kind of in with the team you're on, the tools? It's just a different type of leadership rather than more structured leadership. We'll do performance reviews, we'll do all that sort of stuff.
Nathan Bush: But can you be more of an
Nathan Bush: authentic leader in a startup situation?
[Voiceover]: I don't think it's either or. I think what's different is you leave from the front at a startup because you are. You're in there doing it alongside them. I think a comparison I bring is probably just the balance of time that I spent doing the leadership stuff versus doing the doing. Because at Aerobot, it's like a lot of doing, right? But absolutely the leadership, it's authentic because it's not premeditated in any way. It's just how you're showing up every day. And someone said to me the other day, wow, Beth, you really do. I actually knew this person before I hired them at Airwave, and I knew them before as a friend. And he said to me, wow, Beth, you really bring your whole self to work. Like, you are the best I knew personally is exactly the Beth at work. And what I would say is in an air rope is like full permission, you know, when you're in a startup, there is no politics. There's no turning up to be a different version. There's no Showing up to manage up to do this to this boss or.
Nathan Bush: And you probably couldn't hide it if you wanted to.
[Voiceover]: I couldn't. And, you know, I tell this story at David Jones was really serious culture. It was very traditional. It was very. I would say it was quite stiff and it was very serious. And I'm. I don't think that you have to be serious to be taken seriously. And I'm the opposite of that. You know, I think that we should be fun and laugh and, you know, we're not saving lives, but we can still get shit done. And I really struggle in that environment. And I remember when I first started, I literally used to walk into the office and be like, okay, I'm going to be more serious today. Like, I'm gonna show up in a more serious way. Because I looked around and that was all I saw. And it's like, this is that classic narrative that we have now that if you can't see it, you can't be it. Right. Which is the whole diversity, the whole philosophy of diversity is based on that. If you can't see it, how can you be it? And at David Jones, I just didn't see myself in any of the leaders, like, because they were all so serious. And I just really realized that that wasn't for me. And then really interestingly, I did a complete backflip because my next job after that was Benefit Cosmetics. I don't know if you know much about Benefit Cosmetics, Nathan. I can see that you've got wonderful eyebrows. So I'm assuming you've been to the. Been to the brow, Been to the brow bar. The whole culture of Benefit Cosmetics is fun. It's their, you know, the slogan is laughter is the best cosmetic. So it was the. I couldn't have had more of an opposite culture where I wore a wig at least one day a week at Benefit because we were always doing something ridiculous. And that was when I realized that I was like, oh, okay, I can be who I am, which is this big, vivacious, like, fun filled character, but still be taken seriously and still be a leader. And that was a really, really important lesson for me because up until that point, I hadn't seen myself at a leadership table before. And so I didn't think that I was wired to be that because I didn't think I was serious enough. And then you realize actually that the authenticity of what you bring is a really big draw card for, you know, the appeal of people like me.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Oh, what you've said then resonated with Me so much. Obviously, I've come from a corporate background as well. At one point in my career and it took me a long time to unwire. Some things were great. There was a lot of structure and a lot of models in there that helped. But the whole model is to try and turn you into a type of. And I call it a manager rather than a leader in those organizations, they want you to manage one way. So it took me a lot of unwiring and I think a lot of people listening to this will be hearing this and will really help them bring their whole self to work. I love that expression. I think it's one of the best compliments you can get if someone says you're bringing your whole self to work.
[Voiceover]: Agree, agree. It's nice to see that they see that in you. And it's like, it's so funny. You get wired having to work this in a certain environment to. When Hanan, my founder, will message me and say, hey, can we chat? And my instant reaction is, shit, something's happened. Because in my old world, if your boss messaged you out of the blue and said we need to chat, it was bad. You know, something could happen. And I still six months in, which happens like every day, five times a day. And I'm only just starting to unwind. This kind of knee jerk reaction, this like Pavlov's dog's response to this message, which is just. It's so interesting how we get. Yeah, we get trained to operate in a certain way.
Nathan Bush: Absolutely. Beth, we could do a whole nother episode on leadership. Your story, the circular Economy. I feel like we haven't even talked about sustainability and some of your pledges around saving a million garments from landfill. But what you've shared today has been brilliant and I think has opened our eyes to what the circular economy can be, what leadership can be, how we've combined the two. God knows how we did that. But thank you so much for bringing your whole self to the podcast today and sharing with our audience. Really love it.
[Voiceover]: Oh, thank you so much, Nathan. When I said to you I was chatty and I'm unstructured, I think I've just proven. I've just proven that. Not even sure if I answered any questions. Happy to come back and do a volume two of Beth's dissertation. But yeah, I loved it. Loved it. And I'm so glad we eventually landed it. We did.
Nathan Bush: Well, this is. See, this is what happens when we're both on the tools trying to organize diaries and all that.
[Voiceover]: Exactly, exactly.
Nathan Bush: So you've given us the scoop, the iconic scoop for what's coming up. And by the time we go to air, that should be in play. Being able to backdate your iconic wardrobe. What else is coming up for yourself and hero?
[Voiceover]: Look, the focus at the moment is international expansion. So the US and Europe, at the end of the day, we're in fashion and circularity and the heartbeat of the industry is in the States typically or in Europe. So we're really aggressively working with merchants, retailers, brands in particularly in the US at the moment, to create that network of partners. Because as you know, kind of what's going to make us different. And so we're nothing without those partners. And then the next big one off the rank that's probably pretty exciting will be in store integration. So at the end of the day, 80% of all purchases still happen in store. So we, you know, if we want to make, if we want to actually have meaningful impact in circularity, then we need to be able to be capturing all of the purchases that happen in this fashion space. And so that's a pretty big one.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. Beth, if we've got retailers listening to this and saying, I'd love to be involved, or even people with a massive wardrobe going, how do I start getting involved in helping the circular economy? What's the best place to get in touch?
[Voiceover]: You can go to the website and fill out a form and it'll come to me. Otherwise you can just email. Otherwise, you know what, just email me@bethairobe.com very, very easy. But as a consumer, what I would. Any consumers listening, I would say the best place to start is when you buy something from one of our partner sites. You know, like the iconic have half of the female population shopping with them. So next time you jump on the iconic, add something to airwave, create an account. Because the thing is with circularity in this space is that we just have to start. So we've all been on this journey. No one is perfect. This space is riddled with the Jesus complex, which is you stick your head out and say you're doing one thing. And you're so fearful of now being criticized for everything that you're not doing. That is not what we're about. It's about just starving progress over perfection. And that is up to. That's down to individuals as well. Just sell one thing, buy one pre loved thing and that impact globally would halve the global, would halve the CO2 emissions coming out of fashion. So you really, really do have the power to make Huge change just in yourself.
Nathan Bush: Beth, thank you so much for joining
Nathan Bush: us on ADD to cart. Really appreciate you taking your time.
[Voiceover]: Thank you so much. Nathan. Loved it.
Nathan Bush: It's funny that was the first time that I actually got to meet Ben Beth when we were doing that conversation but I saw her again at online retail and she was going up an escalator and I was going down the stairs and we had this weird moment where she yelled out and everyone was like what the hell's going on? But it was so good to see Beth. I love what she is doing with the team at Air Rope. I think it's really important and it's actually really smart technology and great way for retailers to get on board. All right, three lessons that I've taken from that chat. Number one Digital ID for product. There was a bit of a throwaway line in there, but Beth's reference to digital ID for a product opens up so many possibilities. Now most businesses have been obsessed with digital IDs for customers to track lifetime value and return customers. But what if we did it with product lifetime value as well? With the emergence of blockchain and an increased focus on sustainability, expect to see more digital product IDs increase in importance. Number two couldn't get away with not saying this. Let's go. I love this value from the Aerobe team, but it doesn't come without its challenges. As Beth mentioned, she comes from a very process driven and a well resourced background with some of the leading global brands and then she's come into this LFG mentality. So there is a really important, important balance to get right. But E commerce? It's just too fast not to LFG3 take the call. You never know. I love the story of how Aerog founder Hanan got Beth on board. Leading a startup was definitely not in Beth's plans, but after her polite chat with Hannon, it became clear the match was perfect. And I think that's a great lesson to never shut yourself off from opportunities or unexpected connections. Sometimes things just work out. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to addtocart.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 explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and visit us at East 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 cartoon.
