Goodbye Outdoor Voices

Written By Tim Richardson

Welcome to the bi monthly Your Basket Is Empty newsletter, Issue #42

We paused last week’s newsletter to recalibrate the cadence. Kind of like when a Tube stops at a station for a little longer than normal to regulate the service. Don’t fear. The doors are now closed and we are moving.

What are we going to be talking about today?

Pulse, Shoptalk, IRX, fringe events, pre-fringe events, pre-fringe event drinks, pre pre-fringe event breakfasts. I think we can agree events season is upon us. I spoke at three events last week and I thought it would be useful to share with you what I gleaned.

But before we get into it, I’m stoked to announce Lucy Reid has officially joined Your Basket Is Empty as a co-founder.

Lucy is hands down the most talented and impressive technical solutions wizard I've ever met. She is also an incredibly lovely person and somebody I genuinely enjoy spending time with.

Her inclusion in our team will 1000x our ability to help our clients think and act more strategically.

Your pals, Lucy & Tim

Vervaunt’s Pulse Event

My thoughts on Pulse…

Vervaunt’s ability to pull a crowd is unrivalled. Their Pulse event is the who’s who of commerce. So from a networking perspective, it’s great. Although a little tribal. Tech partners are often circling brands like sharks. Brands are catching up with other brands. And agencies are always a little more timid and sit somewhere in the middle.

To the above point about brands, I talked to a bunch of people to get their perspective on why they attend events. Most suggested it was a function of knowing the organisers, speakers/topics and wanting to see what other brands are doing. The last point surprised me. I assumed that a lot of peer-peer conversations happened in private Whatsapp groups and Slack channels. This is true, but I get the sense that IRL connection is also part of the equation and hence why events like Pulse are so popular with brand-folk.

As for the panel I hosted. I got to discuss brand and performance marketing in 2024 with Lilian (COO at Wolf&Badger), Stef (Chief Digital Officer at Represent) and Sarah (COO at Astrid&Miyu). This is what I learned:

  • I think we did well to dispel the myth that brand marketing is hard to measure. What’s more, I think we also explored how powerful brand marketing is when done right - especially in the case of a brand like Represent where brand is everything.

  • We also laid out the argument for why brand is potentially a better investment than performance in 2024. Performance has arguably become a much harder playing field due to rising CACs/3rd party data and platform changes.

  • I think my final question summed it up. I asked the guys what they would do with a £20,000 budget. Spend it on performance or brand? They all said brand.

Craft + Work

The other event I spoke at was Keir’s Craft + Work seminar. It’s a day-long event of agency peeps and tech partners. My talk focussed on the agency landscape. I broke it down into three parts; past, present and future. My summary is as follows:

  • 2016 - 2021 was a moment in time within the commerce world I don’t think we’ll experience anytime soon. Why? It was a D2C wave powered by Shopify and cheap Meta ads paid for by funding in a zero-interest rate environment. Additionally, the Magento 2 upgrade created an opportunity for Shopify to penetrate the traditional non-pure play D2C market. This created an insane 5-7 yr window for brands and the service industry around them.

  • This all culminated with a 1:100yr event (COVID) that accelerated eComm beyond all traditional measures which resulted in a bunch of M&A activity, especially in the agency landscape.

  • There is a huge amount of luck and timing when it comes to selling a business. If the We Make Websites deal had dragged on 6 months longer, I think it would have been a very different story.

  • I’m bullish on B2B. There are opportunities for B2B2C legacy brands to develop D2C channels. Equally, B2C2B digital brands building B2B channels as they’ve exhausted their D2C ceiling both in terms of penetration and their ad model.

  • I think platforms are probably going to continue to bifurcate into two camps (1) low and no code and (2) custom (headless). Shopify is a good example. What one can do in the platform compared to 3 years ago is quite remarkable.

  • Headless and composable is still a hot topic. I really really rate platforms like Centra and I think it’s interesting what Shopify is doing with Hydrogen and Oxygen. But I think this type of development needs a rebrand.

  • I’m not convinced that Ai will be able to design a commerce website as Ai can’t replace good taste. That comes from a human. And I do wonder if an Ai bubble is forming. It will only take one big dog company (e.g Unilever) to announce that Ai isn’t having the efficiency impact they predicted to cause a shift in sentiment/domino effect that will ripple through the Ai landscape. Tbh, it probably needs that right now.

Customer Obsession

The final event I spoke at was Sourcerie’s Unfiltered breakfast panel. The topic was customer obsession and Kristen hosted a panel of Morgan (CEO at Tala) and me. Morgan was 100% the main event. Her journey and insights were super interesting. Some of my highlights were:

  • How they balance the Tala brand and that of the founder, Grace Beverly - who is in her own right a brand. This creates a customer expectation of aspiration and humility which in turn drives their content and introduces a need for ‘human-ness’. I think this is hard for non creator led brands to replicate.

  • Building connections with customers is art and science. On the science front, speed is key. And ones ability to aggregate data (insert something like Sourcerie) enables them to make quicker decisions. The art is covered by my first point.

  • Tala know their customer. Which is a function of running a good business but also the gravitational pull the brand has in attracting talent. Most of the Tala team are Tala customers. Which is very similar to Represent. The big question here is how does one scale this? I’m not sure it’s possible. I think brands grow, get big and get bought - and then new brands grow.

  • I was impressed with their ability to avoid silos. This seemed to be a function of good communication process (e.g. Slack rules), efficient surfacing of customer feedback and cross-functional team meetings.

  • Customer expectation setting is hard. Beyond the first point, customers are expecting more and more. And in a modern brand, one needs to balance so many areas (sustainability, diversity etc etc). But ultimately listening to them gives one the best chance of understanding what they really care about. And this customer understanding can be accelerated by working with excellent branding peeps like Sonder & Tell.

What Else Is Clucking?

Playlist

To celebrate Lucy joining, she has compiled a list of her favourite bangers.

Want to know what it’s like to work with the A-team?

Tim Richardson
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