Navigating the Green E-Commerce Boom with Bower Collective's Nick Torday

Imagine a world where plastic waste is eliminated and sustainability is not just an option, but a way of life. How can we contribute to this vision?

Enter Nick Torday, co-founder and CEO of Bower Collective, who joins us to share their remarkable journey to create a more sustainable future. 

London-based and launched in 2020, Bower Collective is a home products retailer focused on natural, effective products with sustainable, reusable packaging. The brand acts as a one-stop shop for planet-friendly goods in home and personal care, and sells high-quality items such as laundry detergent, handsoap, supplements, skincare, bath products and more.

Bower Collective's success in e-commerce, with a compound growth rate of 270% year on year, shows that sustainability and technology go hand in hand.

Nick dives into the heart of subscription-based retail, explaining how Bower Collective's commitment to their mission of reducing plastic waste has resonated deeply with customers. We discuss the complexities of their platform and how they've integrated technology with sustainability. Nick also offers insights into their custom data platform, which enables real-time decision making, further driving e-commerce success.

As the conversation progresses, we explore the importance of sustainable brand growth and profitability in today's dynamic market. Nick shares his thoughts on the changing landscape for consumer brands, the macroeconomic circumstances Bower Collective is trading in, and the positive impact of the brand's stratgey on their underlying EBITDA and contribution margins over the last year. Additionally, we touch on customer retention challenges and the adjustments people are making to prioritize sustainable products and services. Nick's invaluable advice for merchants and entrepreneurs seeking to optimize e-commerce growth and scale is a must-listen for anyone passionate about sustainability and innovation.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

So our product and tech team, over the last 12 to 15 months, have invested in building well, we have invested with them in building out our own custom data platform, which is I mean, i'll go into the tech side of it, but we use a variety of data connectors and APIs to pull out key data which we can then model and visualize and use it in almost real time to drive decision-making across the platform for both acquisition, retention, customer behaviors, user journeys, all that sort of stuff, and that, for me, has been a game changer for the business in terms of what we've learned from it.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Hello, I'm Caroline and welcome to the Lightning 50 E-commerce growth hacking podcast. Today you are speaking to Nick Torday. he's the co-founder and CEO at Bauer Collective. but before we get into the interview, a quick message from our sponsor, Inventory Planner. Are you tired of being buried in excess inventory? Then you need Inventory Planner, the number one demand planning software for e-commerce businesses. Inventory Planner gives you real-time insights to identify slow-moving products and hot sellers at a glance, helping you make informed decisions about your inventory and freeing up crucial cash flow. Right now, listeners of the Lightning 50 podcast can get a free trial of this incredible tool by heading to inventoryplannercom. That's inventory-plannercom, Inventory Planner. never knowingly overbuy or underbuy ever again. And now on to the podcast. Bauer Collective is on a mission to eliminate plastic waste and create a more sustainable world. A multi-award-winning B Corp, Bauer Collective is a digital first sustainable consumer goods brand selling home and personal care products in reusable packaging. Nick, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing today?

Speaker 1: 1:52

Thanks Caroline. Yeah, all good, really well. Thanks very much for having me. How are you?

Speaker 2: 1:56

Yeah, I'm great. Thank you so much for joining us. It's great to have you on the podcast and to learn a little bit more about Bauer Collective, which you co-founded. So tell us a little bit about what you're trying to achieve with this product and this company.

Speaker 1: 2:11

Sure. So the story goes back a few years. So I used to run a tech business and some of my client base was not exclusively but primarily big social and environmental impact organizations, so people like the UN and Greenpeace and WWF, as well as big blue chip corporates. So we did quite a lot of work around sort of environmental impact. We did a campaign, maybe eight years ago now, where we built a big data model of all the plastic waste in the oceans in the world all the marine plastic waste And I have said blew my mind. And so that began a journey for myself and my family to try and recognize this problem and shop more consciously and live more consciously and sustainably.

Speaker 1: 2:58

And on that journey I discovered a number of things One, that the options out there weren't great. Two, that it was a very sort of fragmented ecosystem for consumers. And three, that the customer experience of trying to eliminate waste was also quite clunky and quite frictionful. So around that time I got in touch with an old friend of mine, marcus, my co-founder. Marcus had built a very successful compostable packaging business, bio-packaging business, which he had sold. So he was looking for his next challenge And we came together with this hypothesis of how can we build a really scalable transformational business that directly addresses this problem of plastic waste? So, long story short, we kicked around a whole bunch of different business ideas, and our collective is the business that was born out of that process We launched in January 2020.

Speaker 2: 3:53

So it's refillable home and personal care products. So give me an example of your bestseller, for instance That's right.

Speaker 1: 4:00

So we do multi-categories, so all of the products in your home from. So our bestsellers are our hand washes Lyman, alloverian, grapefruit, geranium hand washes through to dishwasher products, through to laundry, through to surface cleaners and personal care. So last year we launched our own body wash and hair care range as well. So we've now got full kind of liquid household, home and personal care category coverage And those products are delivered to our customers homes in what's called VOWERPAC, which is our unique proprietary reusable packaging system, which is a technology enabled closed loop reusable packaging system. Basically, we ship you packs of product, you dispense those products into your dispensers at home. You then send the empty packs back to us in a prepaid envelope to our refill center. They're put through a quality controlled process and refilled with exactly the same product And each pack has a unique digital ID so we know exactly what batch of product has been in which packet at any given time.

Speaker 2: 5:03

Fantastic. We'll get more onto the technology of that in a moment, but let's speak a bit about how e-commerce has really helped drive your business. Are you fully online? Are you looking to go into stores at some point? But tell me about how e-com has really completely taken off, because I've got here that your compound growth rate is at 270% year on year. Why is that and how has e-com helped?

Speaker 1: 5:29

Yes, so we are currently 100% direct consumer. We are just branching out this year into physical stores, so we're in negotiations with a number of major national retailers and independents at the moment. But, yeah, hida2, our growth has all been online. So, yeah, that's been 100% of the business. I mean, again, my background was running a tech business and we built a number of stores quite big stores for clients, so it was an area that I was familiar with, but I'd never actually created my own brand from scratch, as it were. So that was the really fun challenge for Marks and myself as co-founders was creating a really purpose-led brand with a really clear product proposition to take to customers, and it just like a lot of these things.

Speaker 1: 6:25

I think timing is everything, and we did launch in January 2020, just before lockdown, which was both a sort of blessing and a curse. It was a blessing in as much as, as you know, it was a boom time for e-commerce and direct consumer sales, so we grew unbelievably quickly. But it was a curse because it was an absolute nightmare trying to get anything through in the supply chain when we were a tiny little, you know. Really, we were only about three or four months old and we were struggling to get products to service the huge demand that we were seeing.

Speaker 2: 7:03

I can imagine a time when everyone was washing their hands and needing soap.

Speaker 1: 7:07

Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of hand washing. There was a lot of hand sanitizer sales which people were saying, oh, you're really opportunistic brand. We're like no, no, we were already selling hand sand in refill. That was already part of the product stack before COVID happened. But yeah, it was, it was I mean no, there was a roller coaster really And but yeah, we've, you know we've. We feel like we're in a. Really we've got a great technology platform. We use Shopify and a product called Recharge which drives our subscription, but we've really built our own custom platform on top of those sort of core enterprise technologies. And yeah, it's been, it's been great, great for years for us.

Speaker 2: 7:51

So you worked in the technology side of retail but not necessarily on as a retailer in the past, so you were aware of the business and how and how retailers operated. What was it that you've bought? now you've come over to the to become a retailer yourself, a retailer of goods and a manufacturer. What has the key thing that you've bought over as a technologist that you think has really helped our collective grow?

Speaker 1: 8:16

Well, it sounds probably like a really obvious thing to say, but at my old business, you know, we really at the heart of everything we did was customer centricity.

Speaker 1: 8:26

So we had a very large user centered design team and we had sort of customer centered design principles at the heart of all of our technology work.

Speaker 1: 8:35

And that has been, you know, kind of the biggest thing. That we brought to Bauer right from the early days was sort of a relentless focus on the customer and, you know, continual learning, iterative learning, both on a technology and a product front. So on the technology front we have a tech product, an engineering team that are, you know, constantly doing qualitative and quantitative research with our customers around. How does our subscription platform work, how does our useful product feature, upsell stuff, you know all the usual stuff. There's a continuous learning process on that side. But then also on the physical product side we have a closed community on Facebook of over a thousand customers who we test for our products with prelaunch to validate fragrances and efficacy and all of that stuff. So you know, that sort of culture of being like really dialed into the voice of the customer is very strong in Bauer And I think that was one of the things that came across from previous experience of working in sort of user centered design and technology.

Speaker 2: 9:50

Interesting. It's so important to just have that customer front of mind, constantly referring to what your customer needs. Right, let's talk a little bit about subscription. So this is an area that fascinates me of writing about retail for many, many years. I feel like this is something that kicked off all about maybe seven to 10 years ago. It got really, really popular, where I remember there was even a cheese toasty delivery in the post that you could get, which was just fantastic. Ideas were going. Not all of them survived And you know some of the big guns survived.

Speaker 1: 10:25

You get a cheese toasty every what, every week.

Speaker 2: 10:28

Every week or something in the post, Every day, Every day. I mean, you'd want one every day. surely There were different flavors. I remember I was writing about this. I feel like we've got peak subscription now, yeah, that was peak, that's definitely.

Speaker 2: 10:41

Sadly I don't think these guys are around, but the innovation and the ideas, you know they were really really hotting up a while back and quite a few of them you know not all of them have survived. The strong guys, the food boxes and such have Tell me why subscription was so important to you in such a market. you know that we've seen so much up and down in this market. We've seen so many brands do really well, so many brands fail. Why was it important to you?

Speaker 1: 11:08

I think it's just it's so closely aligned with the purpose of the business, right, the purpose of the business is reuse and refill, which is a repetitive behavior. So the idea with Bower is you buy I'm showing you for your benefit on the camera one of our beautiful Bower dispensers and you've got a dispenser for life And in that goes a product which you get on repeat. So and that's, once you're in that repeat process with us, we give you a customer guarantee that zero plastic waste will come out of your home while you're a customer with Bower collected. So it kind of it's just instinctively it fits the model of what we're doing And also the products that we sell are products that you buy on repeat. You know they're not cheese toasted, they are things like washing up liquid and body wash and laundry liquid, which are products that lend themselves very naturally to a subscription model. So I think it's not like we sort of crowbarred something in there, it's just a business model that naturally underpins our both our purpose and mission, but also our product proposition.

Speaker 2: 12:16

Clearly, you've got 68% of your in month revenue comes from your subscription customers, So they clearly like it from a tech perspective, was there? was there something else that you needed to consider when developing your platform to make subscription really work? And I suppose the whole point about subscription is to be seamless both for you and the customer, correct?

Speaker 1: 12:37

Correct. Yeah, i think where it differs for us is we're probably a more complex business than your standard. So let's take a, like a coffee subscription business, for example, pretty straightforward proposition. You get a bag or a couple of bags of coffee on a cadence that works for you every fortnight or whatever, and there's maybe some variants, skew variants within that in terms of the dark roast or the whatever it, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1: 13:06

With us we're multi categories, so there's quite a lot of complexity to manage there. For instance, you might want to get your toilet roll, your body wash and you're washing up liquid every month, but you might want to get your limescale remover, your toilet cleaner and your sort of your secondary household products for a three-month cadence. So there is a bit more complexity that we have to manage. As a consequence, the out the box enterprise technologies don't really deliver what we need. So we have had to do quite a lot of custom development and feature building to build out that sort of our really intelligent data driven by our subscription platform. So you know that's, i think, a lot of these. You know we use recharge. There are other enterprise subscription platforms are available, but they met some of our requirements, but not all of them, and so we've had to then extend that with our own tech layer, sort of API driven tech layer on top of it to deliver what our customers need.

Speaker 2: 14:10

I see. So, beyond everything we've talked about so far, what do you think has been the biggest factor behind your success in over the last three years?

Speaker 1: 14:19

I honestly think the biggest factor has been a real clarity of our mission and purpose And that is ultimately why people love our collective, because we're solving a problem that they have in their lives.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Deloitte did a survey I think it was the end of 21, beginning of 22, massive global consumer survey and 70% of respondents said that eliminating single use plastic from their lives was their number one priority as a consumer. So this huge shift in consumer recognition of the problem and appetite to solve it we genuinely believe has been the single driving factor behind our success. And you know, maybe that was timing or whatever, but you know it's very, very clear when you shop with Bower that it's all about mission. For instance, when you log into your account, every order you make, we do a calculation of how much plastic waste you're saving and you have a sort of gamified dashboard on your customer account which tells you how much plastic waste you've eliminated and how much carbon you've saved in the time you've been about a customer. So it's a real direct value exchange with the customer about the positive planet impact you're having by shopping with Bower Collective.

Speaker 2: 15:35

And when it comes to sustainability and technology, is that something else that you had to kind of factor into your planning? I feel there's so many companies out there that are sustainable and there's so many areas and there's even just, you know retailers that have been around forever that are trying to become more sustainable. So many companies that I speak to just have this almost rabbit in the headlights. They don't know where to start. If you change one thing here, then something else becomes less sustainable.

Speaker 2: 16:02

Over here, the plastic shopping bags. There's always a good example. You've got cotton tote bags. You use so much water, you get them at every goodie bag and they get handed out everywhere, and I have so many in my home, but I think I'm never going to reuse these enough to make up for the amount of water that's being used, but they are better than plastic All of these junctions in the road that are constantly preventing people from, and companies from, becoming more sustainable. But from a technology perspective, have there been any crossroads there? Well, i want to make sure that this partner we're using is sustainable, or I need to make sure that this data center over here is using less energy. Is that something that you consider as well from a tech perspective?

Speaker 1: 16:46

We do. I'd say it's probably an area we've got to drive into more. Particularly when you're working with enterprise tech platforms, you have limited control over the kind of. But one thing we were a certified Beacore and Beacore take. You know there's a whole part of that certification process which is about auditing your supply chain. So obviously we over index very much on our product supply chain. 85% of our products are manufactured in the UK, so it's a deliberately very low carbon supply chain.

Speaker 1: 17:17

But on the tech side it's a really good question And I think it's so tricky, isn't it? I was saying, you know, we're sort of having conversation with the team the other day about how a lot of consumers boycott Beacore Amazon because they feel Amazon's working practices and ethical working practices are, you know, not don't align with their values. But I think the statistic is that 45% of the internet is on Amazon Web Services. So, as you say, there's a lot of quite complex stuff to pick through there And we have done a sort of, you know, high level carbon audit of our technology stack And I think it was definitely room for improvement. So it is an area that we're focusing on. We're actually just going through our second round carbon certification, carbon neutral certification at the moment, and it is factored into that.

Speaker 2: 18:15

Now auditing is the first place to go right. So you know where to make those changes. So well done for doing that. Tell me a little bit about all these certifications Beacorp especially, you know notoriously difficult to do. I've heard of the, the, the, the big companies doing it all the way through to guys like yourself. How did you find that process And would you recommend other companies were doing the same thing? Or would you be like, no, don't, don't do it, it was so painful.

Speaker 1: 18:40

I'm a big fan, to be honest. I've I've heard there's a lot of chat around V corp. It's legitimacy I think it's legitimacy is is very strong. It's a very, very active, authentic community of businesses. It's really hard, it is rigorous, you know, really rigorous. But, to be honest, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Speaker 1: 19:03

And if, for me, for our business, we decided that You know it, set a really like clear, rigorous framework for us to apply as we, as we grew, so doing it as an early stage I think we certified in November 21 when the business was only whatever, you know, 17 months old or something.

Speaker 1: 19:26

Doing it at that really early stage, super helpful, because then you've got all these frameworks, policies, strategies in place right from the ground up. I think for massive businesses that have had to retrofit it in And I've spoken to a number of them that have fits you know it's hugely complex, but no, i'm a big fan, big advocate for B corp. I think it's a really strong movement. And to add to your other question, there are a lot of other like certifications, kite marks, consortiums. It can be really confusing And particularly when it comes to carbon as well, there's a huge amount of different carbon auditing partners, bodies, consortiums, etc. And I think you've just got to like, fact yourself as a founder or a business owner, speak to other people and make some really clear judgments on what's right for your business and your customers.

Speaker 2: 20:17

Even just choosing the right technology partner to measure your carbon right. I always liken it to to. Everyone pretty much knows what a calorie is. When you see them on menus now you know how much a burger is and whether that's a treat or something healthy. Carbon units of carbon customers aren't quite as familiar with at the moment. So the people out there that measure these car there's a few different platforms out there to measure and some might come up with different amounts. How have you approached that from a tech perspective And do you work with a partner to do that?

Speaker 1: 20:51

We do, we do. We're working with a partner for climate partner, having previously worked with another partner on our first round of carbon auditing. I think for the consumer it's really difficult. So with plastic waste, for instance, it's very relatable because we, we, we contextualize it in like this you know, in you, in one year in your bathroom you'll throw away a bathtub full or 10 bath tubs full. So you try and make it like visual and relatable carbon. That's really really hard to do And I know there are some businesses that are trying different mechanics to try and contextualize carbon to the end consumer. I've not come across many that are sort of really really good at doing that, i have to say. But I think always with all of these things, in terms of communicating it to the consumer, you have to make it really easy to grasp and relatable to their everyday lives. Otherwise they're just going to be like whatever. I don't get it.

Speaker 2: 21:51

Yeah, no, i completely agree, It's still, it's still early days, but it's quite an exciting time, right? So you just definitely, i'm sure, i'm sure you must wake up every day and just think, oh, you know, you're actually making a difference, and all these different technologies and different methods coming down the line and how the business might look in 10 years time will be completely different.

Speaker 1: 22:09

Yes, really exciting. It genuinely. You know you'd expect me to say this, but I honestly love running this business. It's been the most fun I've ever had in my career. It's, you know, it's. We've got a real clear sense of what we're trying to do. There's new opportunities to explore every day in terms of, like you say, these emerging technologies and innovations across our tech platform, innovations across our product and packaging. Yeah, it's a terrifically exciting time And there's a lot, There's a lot of cool stuff going on.

Speaker 1: 22:37

I think, conversely to that, we're also quite dialed into the bigger brands kind of trying to greenwash their way out of it. Yeah, And that's something you know. There's that whole sort of David and Goliath thing of being that tiny brand, like going over and above to deliver, And then you've got I don't know, let's say, one of the big consumer goods brands saying, hey, we're doing refill And actually all they're doing is shipping single use plastic in a different format. So things like that can be. You know, there's a lot of that that goes. Yeah, And it was quite good to see last year the ASA, the Advertising Standards Authority, released a new sort of greenwashing code and are now really holding brands to account when they make unsupportable claims, which is We have an exciting sponsor today PeopleVox, the warehouse management system helping ambitious e-commerce businesses scale.

Speaker 2: 23:30

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Speaker 1: 24:40

It's probably a really boring answer, but it really is genuinely as a combination of all of those facets. And I think what you find in a business is that sometimes you're over indexing on other parts than others. So, for instance, i think we've always been in a very strong technology And probably a year into the business we hired our sort of NPD lead, our new product development lead, which really helped us then really accelerate products quality development and efficacy and fragrance development and all that sort of stuff. So it's almost like you did fits and starts and then we hired our growth lead whatever it was a year into the business who really took control of that side of it? So there's all these different people call it the flywheel, don't they? And it's all the different contributing factors to that.

Speaker 1: 25:31

And I feel now like we've got it. it's all humming, but it takes a while to get there, and then things will change and one part of the business will need more investment and more development. And it's about maintaining that balance, because for all of those things work in harmony, particularly with growth. it's not just about your ad creative. it's about your brand and purpose and proposition in the ad, the ad execution itself, the flow through to the landing page, the landing page design, the CTAs on the landing page, the frictionless nature of your checkout process, the post purchase, ecrm experience, the actual products, delivering the products in a timely way that they look great when they arrive, fulfillment, product design everything has to be absolutely humming for that customer to go. that was awesome and leave you a five star review on Trustpilot or whatever.

Speaker 2: 26:26

So And now it's been three years and obviously you've been focused on growth, as any startup would at the beginning, going forward now. Is it more further growth or are you looking towards profit? What is the most important thing for you now over the next 12 months?

Speaker 1: 26:41

Well, the world has changed dramatically, as you know, in the last, let's say really since the beginning of last year, particularly for consumer brands. consumer tech as a category has become much more challenging. So definitely our focus in the last year ends being we're still growing at a really good rate, but we're really laser focused on our pathway to profitability. We're currently not profitable as a business and that was always part of the plan, but we're definitely accelerating how we think about our underlying sort of unit economics And we've seen sort of unbelievably positive swings in our sort of underlying EBITDA and contribution margins in the last year alone and that trend is continuing. So definitely I would say growth is always it's always on the agenda, but having real clarity around our pathway to profitability is our number one strategy.

Speaker 2: 27:43

I'm guessing as well, it's retaining those customers that you've got, because so many people with subscriptions you know they give it a go. You might even I don't know if you were offered like, oh, let's try this product out, and then, as you say, you know it's not been the easiest year or a couple of years. You know more than that recently. So I'm sure there's a bunch of challenges that we can talk about. But linking back to what you were talking about, subscription, when customers belts tighten, that's the first thing they look at. Right Is those direct debits that are coming out. And if you've got someone that's maybe not as passionate about sustainability or just can't afford to be as passionate about sustainability as others, is that a bit of a worry for you at the moment and a bit of a challenge you're having to overcome.

Speaker 1: 28:23

I think it's always a worry and we're very mindful of the macroeconomic circumstances that we're trading in. It has been. You know it's a sort of astonishingly challenging year in terms of cost of living and inflation and rising food and commodity prices. I have to say our subscriber growth has been really resilient throughout the whole period. We actually commissioned a survey with YouGov last year, maybe September, october time and we completely cold They were not warm bower customers, it was cold audience And we just asked the question how has the cost of living crisis impacted on your decision-making as a consumer, ie, would you still pay a small premium to have, you know, natural, sustainable products and services for your home?

Speaker 1: 29:15

And what we found was really interesting was that a lot of people are dialing back on like entertainment, eating out, going out, in favor of where they're having to make budgetary adjustments in favor of still their home being a sanctuary. So that's not for everyone, obviously, but for those people that free let's say February of last year were making those decisions to shop more consciously and sustainably, a very large proportion of them were still prioritizing that over other areas of the, where they might reduce their household spend. And our you know, our subscribing numbers have been really, really buoyant. Our churn is really low And that's been a combination of, you know, just delivering a great service to our customers, of technology and platform improvements, product improvements. So long may that continue. But yeah, of course it worries any brand out there. Of course that's what you're referring to.

Speaker 2: 30:12

So far, so good. Yeah, that's fantastic. So what do you think has been the biggest mistake either you or the brand has made over the past three years in when you've been launching the business? What's the one thing that you wish you could change or you've learned the most from?

Speaker 1: 30:25

It's a good question. I thought about this before the call. I think the biggest mistake has been as from a business perspective has been a sort of over dependency on agencies. I think we went through a period where, you know, when the team was smaller and we'd raised some investment and we felt we had to go out and bring in some sort of big hitting agencies to help us on our journey. I think that we I sort of regret that. I think we spent too much for too little return And actually, since we've brought most of that activity in-house now, we still do have some great external partners that we really value.

Speaker 1: 31:15

But I think there was a period where we over indexed with sort of much bigger agencies relative to the size of the business that were quite expensive and not really delivering any money. But you know that again like a mistake, i don't know. I mean, you just got to try these things to work out what the best fit is. But looking back on that with the benefit of hindsight, i wish we'd made some different judgment calls there. But you know we learned from those experiences and we delivered even better results afterwards as a con-.

Speaker 2: 31:53

Yeah, the mistake might have been going into a 10-year contract or deal with those, so it's a danger. Exactly, yeah, great learnings there. So how about you talk about spend in terms of ROI? What's been the best spend? perhaps we can like edge into technology here in terms of where you've spent money and you've seen the best ROI back.

Speaker 1: 32:18

I think, probably the bed, the single best technology investment we made was investing in our building our own data platform And, as you know, working in this world of sort of e-commerce and direct consumer business.

Speaker 1: 32:37

if you're just making decisions based on gut instinct, you're not going to survive for very long and in the early days that's all we could do.

Speaker 1: 32:46

We had a very clear sense of our personas, a very clear sense of our customer profile, but a lot of it was just like looking at the very little you know the sort of high level sales data and behavioral data we had and making judgment calls on that.

Speaker 1: 33:03

So our product and tech team, over the last sort of 12 to 15 months, have invested in building what we have invested with them, in building out our own custom data platform, which is, i mean, i would go into the sort of tech side of it, but you know, we use a sort of variety of data connectors and APIs to pull out key data which we can then model and visualize and use it in sort of almost real time to to drive decision making across the platform for both acquisition, retention, customer behaviors, user journeys, all that sort of stuff, and that, for me, has been a game changer for the business in terms of what we've learned from it, the result, the sort of successes we've been able to engender off the back of it.

Speaker 1: 33:46

So, yeah, that, i would say, has been then for any Econ, you know, like just having access to a really and I think there's so many like third party SaaS enterprise data platforms out there, some of which I'm sure are really really good, but for us, fill them our own custom model that answered specifically the questions and the hypotheses that we wanted to address has been a really good impact.

Speaker 2: 34:15

Would you recommend doing that to a company that maybe doesn't have the CEO with the expertise that you do from your background and your technology background? if the person was like really product focused and consumer focused, but maybe didn't have the career that you had, would that have been as easy? could you have hired somebody in to do that, or do you feel that that's really helped with your decision not to go down the third party route?

Speaker 1: 34:42

Yeah, i did. Only actually it's good question. I mean, you know I have to tip my hat to our head of engineering then, because he is he's really, you know, driven this project and taking full ownership of it and you know he's an outstanding technologist. So I think anyone with any background, as long as you understand the principles that you have to make decisions based on, like reliable data, then that's a really important area to focus. And if you know you don't want to build a tech team and you just want to use it out of the box from DMP or some sort of data suite state studio thing that plugs into your store, that's cool. But just have real clarity about what the questions are you want answering and how you're monitoring that, what like healthcare metrics are and what strategic metrics are and how they differ, and you know just really really listen to. You know, have clarity and listen to the data so you know how you go about doing. That is up to you really.

Speaker 2: 35:46

So now the data platform is all bedded in and you're using that day today. What other technologies are you looking to implement for future growth?

Speaker 1: 35:56

Well, he would be remiss of me not to say, because I noticed that the sponsor for this podcast is Inventory Planner and actually we have just recently started using Inventory Planner and that has been, you know, that's seen real sort of optimization, efficiency, improvements on the sort of logistics and upside of things. Another area that we're investing in is all the technology around our reasonable packaging system. So we work with a third-party partner who help us with the software that manages our far packaging and integrating that in back into the web experience. So, for instance, you know, when Caroline sends us her pack of used Vowapax back we it triggers an automated thank you email with some data in it for you. So you immediately get that warm, fussy feeling that you know you're, you know you're part of something bigger.

Speaker 1: 36:54

So you know, but in terms of like the more the sort of digital and data side, i think our platform is in a really, really good place at the moment. So it's more about sort of continuous improvement and the latest feature we're building is a. We already have this sort of onboarding flow where you put in how many rooms you have in your house, how many bathrooms, how many people live in the house, and we then personalize your a subscription package for you. So that's been a really successful feature for us. But it's a bit creaking at the seams, so we're just building the, the second iteration of that, at the moment.

Speaker 2: 37:27

Fantastic. So before I let you go, what we'd love to kind of summarize off the back of this podcast is a couple of top tips for e-commerce growth and scale that you think that other merchants and entrepreneurs that might be listening to this podcast can take away with them some opportunities. So what, what have been the top two or three things that really helped with growth and scale that someone else can take away?

Speaker 1: 37:51

Top two or three things. Well, i'll start with the answer I just gave, which is to just be laser focused on on data. If you're operating in a sort of vacuum of information, you're just you know you're flying blind. So having real clarity about what the questions are you want answering, how you go about answering them and then how you respond to those answers once you've you've got them is, is really important, i think. Secondly, having real clarity about what your, your purpose and proposition is is a brand, so you know how do you differentiate from the competition, what is it, what's your special source that makes you so much more attractive than other opportunities that might be in the market? and then, thirdly, how do you really ensure, like high retention rates of your customer cohorts, that you're delivering a really outstanding service and building long-term, sustainable customer relationships over time?

Speaker 2: 38:51

So what exactly is your focus for the business for the next six months, then, nick?

Speaker 1: 38:58

Next six months. Well, as I mentioned earlier in the interview, we are looking to launch in physical stores, where our customers are often saying they'd love to see us on supermarket shelves. So we're in negotiations with a number of the big national retailers at the moment and, more immediately, we are launching our first ever crowdfund on CrowdCube. So that will be going live very soon, sort of in late May, june. So please do watch out for that and you know we'd love to welcome any listeners to the podcast to be a crowd investor in joining the the journey of our collective How exciting, or all the best, with the, with the crowdfunding, that sounds really exciting.

Speaker 2: 39:41

Thank you so much, nick. I've super enjoyed this chat. It's been. It's hit all of my favorite notes, from sustainability subsets to subscription and tech and everything in between. So really thank you for sharing those tips with our listeners.

Speaker 1: 39:55

Absolutely pleasure. Caroline, thanks very much for having me on.

Speaker 2: 39:58

That was such a brilliant interview. We learned so much about customer centricity. Laser focused on data, as I said, sustainability and subscription. There were some real key takeaways there in terms of the technology to help power future growth for e-commerce businesses. So to our listeners out there, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Make sure you head over to all the usual podcast platforms to listen to the previous episodes of the lightning 50 podcast and don't forget. Right now listeners of the podcast can get a free trial of inventory planner at inventory-plannercom. Inventory planner gives you real-time insights to identify slow-moving products and hot sellers at a glance, helping you make informed decisions about your inventory and freeing up crucial cash flow. Inventory planner never knowingly over buy or under buy ever again.