Aaron MagnessPeople coming up in marketing, they try to be good at everything. And while interesting, I think it's important to be an expert at something and then grow from there.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Full Glass Wine Company, the brand acquisition and management firm focused on acquiring and operating direct-to-consumer wine companies, Aaron Magness. Welcome to the show.
Aaron Magness
Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And first, we got to shout out e-Tail Palm Springs. That's where we met. Everyone goes to conferences. They're awesome.
Aaron Magness
I mean, always focusing on being present and focused on your network, I think is always a big deal in career planning.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Alright. So Aaron, quickly, what is Full Glass Wine Company all about? What are you doing over there? What are some of the brands that you're operating? What I've heard of any of them?
Aaron Magness
Yeah, definitely. So Full Glass Wine, as you mentioned, we own and operate a number of direct-to-consumer wine brands. From Winc, Wine Insiders, Splash, Scout & Cellar, Wine Access, just some of your favorite brands that are out there selling wine directly to consumers. And really trying to find these amazing brands, give them the love they need to help them grow. And that's how we're bringing them to market.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, take me back in time. Where did your career in Ecommerce kick off?
Aaron Magness
Career in Ecommerce? I mean, that's 100 years ago. Pre-ecommerce. But it's actually a good time. Yesterday was my son's middle school career day. So we talked a bit about this. So actually, it's kind of crazy. So I went to the University of Wisconsin. And I moved to San Francisco for a job with Bloomberg in August 2001. September 11 happened and that incoming class was canceled. We weren't supposed to start till October 2001. So here I was in San Francisco, the dot-com bubble had just burst.
Everyone was looking for jobs, unemployment was rampant. So I ended up, you know, pretty much knocking on every bar I could find and seeing if I can get a job. And then I really lucked out through that, met someone who had a contact at Williams-Sonoma, Inc. and I ended up getting an opportunity to get a job there where at the time was brand new. But the focus was building out the business to business channel within Williams Films, Inc. So it's actually this really startup environment to get off the ground and really push forward. That's really where I got my real focus. Just get it done, figure it out. And then really that mindset around entrepreneurialism and startups is great.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And obviously, you had a couple gigs between now and then? Any highlights in your journey to getting to this SVP level?
Aaron Magness
Yeah. I've been super lucky to work with some amazing brands over the years. Iconic brands. Afterwards, I went and joined Zappos, where we were just breaking every rule in the book when it came to Ecommerce. And from there, you really learn how to move as quickly as possible. If the rule's not written then go ahead and write your own. Or if it is already written, think is there a better way to do it and really put the focus around customer, customer experience. And I worked with some of the most amazing people in that time. We ended up getting acquired by Amazon and I stayed there for a little bit, a little over a year and then continued to really form that be like, the drive, the smaller company that you can make an impact right away and really be able to build out the future of the business.
So I really started focusing on startups from there on out. Moved to Canada for a great opportunity with a brand, as we were going through a rebrand and expansion and focus. Got to work with more amazing people, one of the top entrepreneurs and Roger Hardy and all of Canada. And then just focused on smaller and smaller, earlier and earlier stages, series B, series A, and just continued to find ways to drive impact.
And I think from each of those, you know, the key takeaway is take the chance, find the opportunity. It was a big move to move my young family to Canada as an example, but it's a really great and interesting opportunity. A very big opportunity to come back and focus on series A, series B with a young family, right? But take the chance, you know, figure out how you can have an impact and continue to grow.
And then just through the ways, most recently I was at BISSELL, an amazing direct-to-consumer and a better-for-you mail subscription service. And that really got me excited about how to think about consumers in a subscription business. So when the opportunity for Full Glass came along, I definitely jumped at it. I get to work with a couple of amazing entrepreneurs between Luis Amoroso and Neha Kumar.
And thinking about, we have all these brands, and in the wine industry, in the wine category, we have the ability to talk to all the different segments along the way, whether you're young, just starting out in wine consumption all the way to, I'm retired and I'm looking to have my everyday drinking wine and everything in between. So the exciting opportunity to really put a vision across all of these and see how you can stand them each individually up most effectively has been just really amazing. I mean, almost coming up in a year. It's been amazing.
Chase Clymer
I mean, it also sounds like you kind of have landed at almost the dream job for you because all of these sub-brands are in and of themselves small businesses where you can have a huge impact. But overall, it is a large company with a lot of moving pieces to where your senior level expertise can A, be afforded and B, be put to good use.
Aaron Magness
Yeah, no, definitely. And I think that's the key component. And we're a startup ourselves. Really founded in 2023.
late and you know, we've been acquiring these brands over the course of the last year. so it's really about, know, do we have the best team possible to set up? Do we have experts that can rally, understand the startup mentality, right? Like again, when you know, you're trying to bring back systems together, it's not smooth sailing, right? So you have to be able to dig in, think quickly on your feet and everyday matters, you know, so how do you make sure you're setting up your teams for success? And give them the resources they need to be successful.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And something that I find myself saying sometimes when I'm just talking about the agency, maybe even talking to prospects, it's just like, we're learning 12 to 18 times faster than you are because that's how many businesses we're interacting with at a time.
Aaron Magness
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
I would assume on your end, you learn something from company A and then you go B through Z. Let's take a look at this and see if it works.
Aaron Magness
And that's exactly it. And I think the important part of each of these brands though is I think, you know, often as people can think, and how do peanut butter spread this across everything? I think the real opportunity is understanding what's the nugget of insight. And then how do I actually individualize that for each of these individual brands? And I'll give an example. We have an amazing brand Wink. There are subscription wine services that many of you may know.
And from there, you can't just take what Wink is doing from the subscription side and we don't want to make every other brand all about subscription. But what we can do is take what's interesting, what's working, what's special about the subscription mindset and then figure out how that works for this specific customer segment at, you know, Wine Insiders, for example. And Splash is more focused on instead of a wine subscription service.
It's everyday, all the car purchases, transactional purchases, but there's also a membership that you get special offers, special discounts, things like that. So it really gives us the freedom to think broadly and understand that each of these brands have their own special offerings and unique selling propositions and reasons to believe. And yeah, how do you take that nugget and then give it its own oxygen to be able to be successful?
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
A lot of interviews on this podcast, the majority of them have been with founders, right? But I've learned just through my career and doing this, and not everyone's gonna be a founder, but they still do want their career to be in Ecommerce. And they want to level that up. So I love that I'm starting to talk to more entrepreneurs like yourself, that are more just found their way in these other businesses. If I wanted to follow in your footsteps, what advice would you have to younger Aaron about like, hey, these are the things to do?
Aaron Magness
Yeah, I think there's a few things that it's important for all of us, right? And particularly, and I'll suggest particularly coming up in marketing. One, I think you have to be more curious than everyone else, right? You have to really drive on looking to understand and not just for the customer aspect. But how does the business work? What are unit economics, order economics? How does the data flow? Like you really have to, I think that's an area where marketing has changed over the years.
Used to be about, how do I build this brand with the beautiful video and have the right billboard and all that? And while all that is important, I think now marketing is more about the entire suite of experiences. Everything from someone comes to the site. Yes, what did they click on, but what is the post purchase experience? It's much more all encompassing. So being curious about each of those aspects is important.
You have to really probably be an expert in something. I think unfortunately there's a particular problem with, you know, people coming up in marketing, they try to be good at everything. And while interesting, I think it's important to be an expert at something and then grow from there, right? Because if you're an expert at something, you really know how to tease apart all the different aspects and peel all the layers of the onion. And then you can take that mindset to all the different other channels that you're in. So I think that that's a key component and really get excited about the data.
You know, I think that is something where as marketers, we are paid to make bets. Like that's what we do, right? And sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but they should all come from strong points of view, which are very data driven. And I think, you know, that's another shift used to be able to have strong opinions and then opinions would win out. But now it's more about having a strong point of view that is backed up by data. So I think those are probably the key components.
And then, you know, talk to as many people as possible. Be open minded that you don't know everything, right? Like, let's be super clear. So how do you take insights from your team? How do you take insights from your peers? And how do you continue to try to learn about what's going on in the category? And for me, that's an area that's been really helpful, whether it's in my own personal investing or advising, because it forces me to think across categories, across divisions, across departments. So you're constantly challenging yourself to be fresh. So I think to sum up those three, there's probably a solid three things to really be focused on.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. It's just your role now. What does a Senior Vice President of Marketing do? Why is someone like that hired? Is the founders or the C-suite looking to solve this problem by putting a key person in that position?
Aaron Magness
Yeah. I think it sort of goes back to your first point of view, like head of marketing, you know, really what you're looking to do is take learnings from the entire portfolio and then make sure you have the right teams in place and empower your teams to make the right decisions as quickly as possible, right? Give them enough leeway and guidance on big picture goals and then understand how they all work together across the portfolio. So I think that is a key component in a portfolio type structure like we have.
It's not just, okay, you're coming from the iron throne and here's what we do and here's what we don't do. I think it's more about setting vision, helping people understand how each of these pieces of the puzzle work together to tell a big, broader story.
And then, yeah, just really working with amazing people and giving them the clarity and guidance to make smart decisions across the entire organization and whether that's within how we think about Ecomm specifically or growth or life cycle CRM, or each of our individual brands. There are all these different pieces of the puzzle that hopefully what I'm doing is helping people see what the end goal is to be so they know where the pieces actually go.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And you mentioned that you've been there just over a year. Any wins worth mentioning that you've experienced along the way?
Aaron Magness
You know, I think we've had some great wins and I think in any business and yet it's been just under a year. It's been in any great business. You're hopefully better than you are. You're better today than you were six months ago and hopefully in six months you're going to be a lot better than you are today, right? But I'll say we've had some pretty solid breakthroughs that come down to traditional clarity around how we think about marketing and go to market.
You know, do we have clear calls to actions or reasons to believe? If I'm seeing an ad, when I come to the site, am I having a similar experience or an expected experience to improve the conversion rate? Are we bringing in great customers? You know, I think if you go back to, you know, all marketers in, you know, early 2020s and pandemic, we were super fortunate. We can be pretty lazy, right? Just go spend some money. Everyone out in the wild has free money.
And, you know, interest rates are zero, so they can just go about spending it. I think right now there's a big focus on, like I said, order economics. Do we have the right order margin structure to give us permission to actually lean into growth? So that's been a big opportunity. And then, yeah, just really focusing on bringing in great customers instead of all customers. And I think that's been allowing us to drive real growth on both top line and bottom line, but additionally, really improve retention across each of our portfolio companies. And that is where you grow successful businesses along the way. Bringing in great customers, giving them a great experience, and then that drives them to come back and stick with you.
Chase Clymer
I think that's the super fun thing about your portfolio brands. It leans so well into things that I think make a good business. It's consumable. It is subscription-friendly out the wazoo. And it leads to a better. Like you said, a better customer because you don't want a customer that's a one-time purchaser forever. And you don't want a customer that's only buying on discount. You want someone that will buy whenever because they believe in the product and they like the product.
Aaron Magness
And to go even a step further, it is so risky to have a one-and-done customer in our category because shipping bottles of wine is expensive as hell.
Chase Clymer
And risky. Yeah. You got some UPS guy that's dropping it.
Aaron Magness
So I think that's also a key point. And then one thing where I think we're pretty fortunate and again, from Luis Neja's vision of where the opportunity is, we know everyone isn't buying 100% of their wine from any one of our brands.
So we have the opportunity on the back end from a data perspective to start to understand how this person is consuming what their motivations are. And then we can then figure out, are they buying from the best brand for them? Or can we give them a better experience, which will then be rewarded with more retention from one of our other brands, right? So I think that's also a really interesting opportunity that we have that other players in the space may not have because they're very focused on that specific brand.
As I think we both know, once you turn out of a brand, it's actually hard to get them to come back into that brand. So if you can actually introduce them to someone else, which provides a great experience and a great opportunity for them at a great value, you actually have the ability to really stretch that lifetime value for that customer.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing, Aaron. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think could resonate with our audience today?
Aaron Magness
Well, I guess it really depends on who the focus of the audience is. What I assume, to your point, you talked to primarily founders, senior leaders. A lot of your audience is probably looking like, okay, how do I ascend in my career to get there? And I think that's just an area we did touch on in a bit. But right now there's a lot of AI in everything that people are saying, oh, I could just create an agent that works with me and I'm going to be a superstar and not have to worry about it. I think one thing, and I think Microsoft just came out with a study that showed that people's cognitive abilities, they feel they're actually decreasing the more they rely on AI.
So I guess where I'm going with that is as marketers, again, we have to know and appreciate the customer and the business efforts and the market dynamics directly and personally, and we can't rely on a tool or a service to sort of run that for us.
So for us, it's making sure you maintain and ensure the knowledge and then use these other tools. To accelerate your efforts, make them faster, make them easier, but you can't outsource the knowledge, right? So I think that is a key component that I think very quickly we're seeing a lot of people sort of jump all the way to the side and just rely on everything from an AI perspective without putting the thought and intelligence into the resourcing of the information.
So I would just encourage people, yes, embrace the future, embrace tech, embrace data, but also you have to internally understand and appreciate the business.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, you still have to level up your own skills.
Aaron Magness
That's right.
Chase Clymer
I mean, well, just for it just with any effort of anything in life, if shit in is shit out, if you're not trying to get a better result, you won't get a better result. And if you just take a step back, and I forget who told me this, and I believe it was on the podcast, someone mentioned this a few episodes ago. Just statistically, a large language model is based upon all the junk on the internet.
Aaron Magness
There's a lot of junk.
Chase Clymer
And it's just going to be the average.
Aaron Magness
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
And AI can only give you an average thing. So if you don't help it and put some more special sauce on top of that with your own perspective, your own knowledge, your own strategy, you're not going to be better than anyone else.
Aaron Magness
Well, and having a true appreciation of obviously, yes, average, but often not right. I was talking to someone recently and they were using AI to do some analysis, a smart approach, but then the outcome, doesn't matter what the metric was, but is 8%. And so they went forward with that.
Chase Clymer
They just hallucinate.
Aaron Magness
If they thought about the business and understood, for these metrics, 8% makes no sense. You know what I mean? Like they didn't take that extra second. And I think that is so important again. And I think that's where tomorrow's leaders are really going to lean in, they're gonna have full appreciation of the knowledge and understanding. And then they'll utilize these tools to be faster, smarter, know, move more quickly. But they're not, you know, they're not going to rely on that as opposed to their own experiences.
Chase Clymer
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's so funny, like with us I won't let AI give me numbers when we're building out case studies or anything like that, just because it just makes stuff up. And I'm like, where'd you get this number from? Right.
Aaron Magness
Right. So anyway, I think that that's a key component, like embracing technology. And it was hard going back to remember when programmatic first was becoming a thing. And then all of your ads are showing up to all sorts of people in all weird places. So then we have to learn, we have to adapt.
Fortunately in the marketing world, we are often at the forefront of what technology is providing and the capabilities that are bringing to market. I like to embrace it.
Let's make sure we understand it and understand where the upsides and potential downsides are.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Now, Aaron, you talked about all the amazing brands that you guys have under your umbrella. Any specific ones you want to shout out to the listeners for them to go check out and maybe potentially buy some products?
Aaron Magness
Yeah. Not to go through a laundry list, but I think the beauty of what we offer again is someone for everyone. And if you think of it, you know, I'm just getting into wine consumption, I'm super busy, time-starved, I want fun, exciting wines that I can't find anywhere else, Wink is perfect. If you know a bit about wine and you look for a broader selection, you know, that you wanna be able to pick and choose from, Wine Insiders is great. If you're for clean, zero sugar, you know, all this, you know, organic approaches to wine, Scout & Cellar is wonderful.
If you're looking for amazing, hard to find wines that you know about, you can only know, they're not available in the market anymore. We're able to secure 50 cases. You know, wine access is great. And then lastly, if you're looking for a party, a big event, and you need a case of wine at a great value, Splash is wonderful.
So I think the reason I'm trying to, you know, not necessarily pitch each one is to show we've intentionally made sure that each brand stands for something different. So you do have the ability to talk to different customer segments and introduce them to great values across the entire portfolio.
Chase Clymer
We can talk for 15 minutes just about the choices to have such a niche audience to specific brands.
Aaron Magness
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
But we are running out of time. Where do we find you on the internet, if people want to get a hold of you?
Aaron Magness
Primarily, I backed off a few of the other social platforms, but LinkedIn is a good spot. You can find me there. And like I said, I often help other startups and other marketers. So if you want to reach out via LinkedIn or my website, AaronJMagness.com.
Chase Clymer
Awesome, Aaron. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Aaron Magness
All right. Take care. Thank you.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
You can subscribe to the newsletter at https://honestecommerce.com/ to get each episode delivered right to your inbox.
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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!
