Jennifer Peters
[I want] my site to look like this. I want it to do this. Okay, that's great. But does that convert people? Or do you just like the way it looks? I mean, I think there's so much bias there, well, there's beautiful photography. Well, that's great. But do customers care about that? Is that what makes them buy or not buy? You really need to understand the data and the behavior and then kind of come alongside with the creative.
Chase Clymer
You could argue Amazon is an ugly website, but boy does it sell stuff.
Jennifer Peters
Absolutely. And it is easy to shop.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show Jennifer Peters. She is the Director of Direct-to-Consumer, MarTech, and Digital Compliance at Olly, a Unilever brand. Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Jennifer Peters
Hi, thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
I am excited to chat. First and foremost, for folks that are living under a rock, what are the products you guys are bringing to market over there at Olly?
Jennifer Peters
Well, I usually tell people because there are a lot of Ollies out there. There's an Ollie dog food. There's some kind of other store. There's a lot. So you're not sure who Ollie is. If you've ever walked into Target and turned right we're always on that first end cap. So we were known for our gummy vitamins. They're delightful, tasty, and fun. We've got the square like the QB square packaging, which is kind of a noticeable standout on the shelf.
But we're known for our gummies and we do make more formats than just gummies. But our gummies are super delightful, wonderful. I think the other interesting thing about our approach is that we generally approach things by like, we're trying to help you with this thing. We're trying to help you with sleep. So it's called sleep. We're trying to help you with beauty. So it's called beauty. Rather than the very traditional approach of vitamin D, vitamin C, So...
Chase Clymer
Yeah. What does that thing do for me? I don't know.
Jennifer Peters
Yeah. We're here to solve your problem. So you don't have to worry about doing the research yourself. We'll solve it for you.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, where does your story start with Olly?
Jennifer Peters
So I've been in Olly almost 5 years. And it's awesome. It's such a great place to work. It's such a fun company. It's always great to sell things that people love. Before I was at Olly, I was at an agency. I'm a Shopify developer. So I built Shopify stores for different brands. And before that, I did a couple other different things.
Probably the most notable, I was a director of e-commerce and marketing at a pretty big church supply company in Nashville. So I can sell anything. You ever need to know things about clergy robes, hit me up. I'm your girl.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Jennifer Peters
But yeah, I came to Olly right out of an agency. It was just, the agency works tough. It just felt like [the] “ah” moment of just people who are all trying to do the same thing and excited about it.
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As someone that is always still in the agency world, is the grass greener? I'm sure there are other people out there that are working at agencies or they're working at a brand and they think that the grass is greener, right? So what would you... If you were talking to someone about that, what did you learn or realize in making those transitions?
Jennifer Peters
That's such a great question. I think people go to agencies for different reasons. And there are different reasons that people stay in agencies. Things that are great about agencies. You get to work on a lot of different brands. You get to see a lot of problems. You get to see a lot of cool new things that you can solve.
Every brand you work with is different and unique and has their own set of challenges. So it's constantly, like, mentally challenging all the time, which I think is awesome. And I actually love that about the agencies.
I do think that agencies a lot of times cannot be great places to work. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure if like one big client leaves, then that means something bad. So I think there's a little bit more of a tie to the day-to-day business. If your day-to-day business is not good, your experience cannot be good. If it is good, it can be good.
So I don't want to speak for all agencies, but I ultimately just loved the work and I loved the brands that I was working with. It just wasn't a great environment to work in. And I think there's so much to be said about technology and using technology and being on the forefront, especially at an agency, to help your brands be the first ones to be adopting these new technologies and optimizing their investments and all of these things.
But if your leadership is in a space where they don't really want to do that, then it can be really frustrating because you're stuck in the middle between the direction your agency is going and the direction your brands would like to go. And that's why I decided I was ready to go to work at a brand that I knew I would love.
But the downside to that is that working on one brand can get boring sometimes. And if you're really stimulated by that constant challenge, and let's say constantly things flying at you, then it can get a little boring. So I actually still freelance and still build stores and still work with smaller brands. And I feel like it keeps my brain fresh.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Jennifer Peters
Because when you're only solving one set of problems, suddenly you're very limited in the experience that you're gathering too as a professional. Being able to see more things, I feel [it] keeps me sharp.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. That's one of the main selling points, I think, of partnering with the agency on certain projects is like, at least us, we're seeing over 10x the amount of issues, problems, etc. Because we're working with like a dozen brands at a time. Right? So it's like we're just seeing so much cool stuff.
Jennifer Peters
Exactly.
Chase Clymer
And we're learning. And it's even because we're just, we're so paired down in the Shopify ecosystem. It's like, we know exactly what app solves the problem and which ones don't. And just having that knowledge is useless outside of this little world that we're in.
Jennifer Peters
It is. It is. But you can take those things then and apply them across brands. And that's really exciting too. When you see a solution and you're like, man, it's really working for this brand. Rolling it out across the brands, builds your credibility with your other brands too. It's like the people who know, the experts in the field that know relationships with the different app creators. And you want to be that for all your clients, for sure.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, going back to you and joining Olly, right? So obviously, you had mentioned that you had a huge partnership with Target.
Jennifer Peters
Mm-hmm.
Chase Clymer
And you come in as the director of direct consumer. How big of a piece of the pie was D2C when you got there? What problems were you hired to help solve?
Jennifer Peters
That's great. Well, I started towards the tail end of COVID. And anyone who did D2C during COVID knows there's like a whole, there are a whole set of problems. And there was also such high urgency on being able to provide D2C services for every brand. And I think it just magnified the need for D2C, but it also magnified the stress and strain on the supply chain. So, I mean, every brand during COVID had some sort of supply chain nightmare to deal with.
When I came to Olly, we were kind of just on the tail end of that. And it was in that phase of COVID where a lot of DTC brands, I think, thought it was just going to stay that way. They thought, this is it. This is the world now. This is going to be this chunk of our business. When in reality, there was a shift back to people just wanting to be in stores and have products in their hand. I think we did a great job balancing that.
But we also we're in a lot of them so it's a little easier for us. I mean, we think of all of our channels as having completely different functions. And the problems I came in to solve, or guess I'd say the business I came in to grow, was really around building tight relationships with your most loyal customers, gathering first-party data, creating experiences that other channels can't create. Amazon is awesome, but you're never going to get a one-to-one relationship with your customer on Amazon.
Chase Clymer
It is an Amazon customer.
Jennifer Peters
Right. Exactly. You're never going to know who they are. And in D2C, you can really know your customer and you can really understand what drives them. You can learn a lot about the way they consume your product, the way they shop. And all those learnings are applicable across all channels. So for us, we really think of D2C, while it's not a big chunk of revenue, it's a piece, but it's not a big piece. We think of it as a way, it's like the most forward-facing relationship piece of the customer relationship.
We can make you a personalized experience. We can send you samples. We can send surprise and delight with your third subscription, your sixth subscription. And nobody else is going to be able to do those things. So we really have tried to invest in the places where there are things we can do that no one else can do channel-wise.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's amazing. And you were 100 % correct. All the learnings right now, recently at the agency, we've been getting really nerdy with customer insights and UX, all that. You can take all that stuff that you have learned through customer surveys or user testing, etc. All that stuff in the language that your customer is using, now you can use it in packaging, you can use it in ads, you can use it in pitching in stores. It's like our customers are saying this about our product and this is why you need it in the store.
Jennifer Peters
Absolutely. That's so true. It's our ground zero of where we learn everything about our customers, what they like, what they don't like. For an experience, a shopping experience and also a product experience.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview.
Now you also are in charge of MarTech. What does that mean for the company?
Jennifer Peters
Well, it's my favorite. Probably my favorite part of the job. Basically, I get to go around and look at cool new technology and buy it and administrate it. So that's really fun. I think it's a huge fun part of my job. In the Ecommerce space, of course, almost everything is MarTech or at least feels like MarTech. But there have been some really cool things that I've seen out in the world that I know can serve functions in other departments at Olly.
Which is great. I am in a unique role in that I only work cross-functionally at Olly. So I get to know every department's needs. I get to understand what pain points exist in accounting as it relates to reporting and financial reconciliation of D2C. So very in tune with a lot of the things that are going on.
But my favorite thing, like the thing I live for, and it's really hard to pitch this to anyone before a conference when they're like, what are you shopping for? And you're like, I don't know. But here's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a solution to a problem that I myself have not been able to fully define yet.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Jennifer Peters
And when you see that, that is the best feeling in the world. When you're just like, Oh my god, you identified this entire problem and built a solution to it. This is the best day ever. And maybe it only happens once or twice a year. But now when it happens, it's the best.
Chase Clymer
All right. Now before I ask this next question, I'm going to preface this to all the listeners out there. Without a strategy, tools are useless. With that disclaimer out there, what are some things that have excited you recently? Like apps that you guys are loving, things that you've been implementing at Olly.
Jennifer Peters
My favorite thing that we've done probably in the last year, and we've been working with them for about a year, is very, very smart and programmatic direct mail. And everything that is old is new again. Live stream shopping on TikTok is the same thing as QVC, right? You're just showing a product, you're talking about it. But direct mail is back in a way that is super exciting to me right now.
We work with Letter Labs and they have a direct Shopify integration that you can almost build anything you can build an email, you can build indirect mail. Like all the event tracking, all of the triggers that exist in Shopify can be directly applied to different kinds of campaigns. You can do an evergreen kind of welcome campaign, you can do an abandoned car. Anything you can do digitally, you can do in print.
The fun thing is that the law, the laws, I also do compliance. The restrictions around what you can send, direct mail, there are none. There are almost none, literally none. You know, whereas when you are in the digital space, there's so much consent management opting in and kind of all of those things you have to work around. But I do think direct mail just gives you a wider audience to message.
The other piece is it's super personalized. So when somebody gets us, we use the letter labs, kind [of] like their big feature is that everything they do looks handwritten and it absolutely looks handwritten. Like I had 10 things, 10 individual mailings and I stacked them, put them all next to each other and each one of them looked totally different, like handwriting. It was crazy. But I think it feels, it feels really personal.
When we first started selling on SMS and you got a message that said like, “Hey, Chase, you have 2000 loyalty points to spend. Wouldn't you like to come shop?” Like it feels very personal, but now everybody does that. So it feels less personal. People know that they can do that. But when you get a, when you get a letter, you get a postcard, you get a card, it feels really different.
Gen Z does not have the negative connotations of getting things in the mail that I think older people do. Like they never got bills in the mail. They never got bad news in the mail. Whereas I'm 46, I've seen a lot of bad things come in through the mail. So it's not that fun for me. But I do think the Gen Z audience is really into it. It feels really delightful for them. And that's a cornerstone of our brand anyway, is the delight. So for us, it's been so fun to experiment with.
And I think one of the great things about Letter Labs too is that you don't have to do a minimum order quantity of 10,000 just to get your foot in the door. You could test 200 if you wanted to. An audience of 200. So it's been really fun to experiment with and just kind of figure out what works, figure out how it also can blend into our email and SMS strategy. And we can optimize around the way people most prefer to receive information, you know, what drives them to engage or convert.
But that it's weird, because again, like everything old is new again, but direct mail right now is probably my favorite tool. It's my favorite new tool.
Chase Clymer
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Yeah, it's something that we've been slowly experimenting with at the agency. We want to be really good at the things that we're good at. But sometimes we get bored and we drift a little bit into marketing at times, even though we really just want to be core to UX, strategic design. We just want to build cool Shopify sites and integrate all the junk.
But sometimes it's like, well, I also want to send direct mail campaign. This sounds fun. So we break our own rules with our retainer clients. And it's fine. It's long term. We'll learn together. But the cool thing about direct mail, especially now as it's getting, it's mature. But now that it's integrating with digital and in Shopify, there's a bunch of solutions. But some of them now they're even getting into prospecting, which is nuts.
Jennifer Peters
Yes. It's wild. We've done mostly retention. But the prospecting elements and especially how it can integrate with campaigns that are already running and paid, it's crazy. It's fun.
Chase Clymer
Basically, you can send direct mail to people that aren't your customers that never signed up. Getting that data in various ways. And some of the companies even help you do that. But it's like a wild way to get new customers.
Jennifer Peters
It is. It seems to work. It's working for us. I don't know if it's for every brand, but it's working really well for us. And it's really fun. I'm really enjoying it.
Chase Clymer
And then now, lastly, the third part of your title, digital compliance. What does that entail?
Jennifer Peters
It entails saying no a lot to other people in the organization. I don't do the science piece of compliance. We have a regulatory team and a QA team that manages kind of like claims because we're in the supplement space. So we're very highly regulated. And we have a science team that handles that part. So I don't have to do that, which is awesome.
I really am kind of, for the most part, like the data privacy police. And how we handle it, how we gather it, how we store it, what we're doing with it. That's probably the bulk of that. It's really around how you handle and manage customer data. What your obligation is to the customer in terms of protecting that and following their consents that they've given you across the board. A lot of consent management there too.
Things are changing constantly in the legal space. There are new laws around one-click opt-outs for subscriptions and...
Chase Clymer
Texas just made some weird SMS law.
Jennifer Peters
Texas SMS law. I just was reading that yesterday and was like, okay, I'm not even sure what this means yet. But okay. But yeah, there are a lot of things like that. And it's interesting too, because it is really evolving a lot and quickly. And it is always state by state, which is super frustrating. And you kind of just have to default to whatever the strictest standards are. We have a pretty low risk tolerance. I don't like to take chances and I would never ever, ever take a chance on anything customer data related.
So we're very, very conservative in terms of what we do and how we manage things. But it's interesting because it is constantly changing. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer. I work really closely with our legal team, which they're wonderful. And they help a lot, kind of like identifying those things, come up with solutions that can be applied broadly. But Unilever, that's one of the great benefits of being part of Unilever.
They've got a lot of brands. If there's an issue that kind of impacts all brands, you know that they're working on a solution and you can kind of rely on that. It does feel like the Wild West sometimes.
Chase Clymer
It's funny. We were currently talking with a potential client and one of their wishlist items was accessibility and legal compliance. And I just redlined it and went, absolutely not taking that risk on. That is not my problem.
Jennifer Peters
It's a lot. That's a lot. I do ADA accessibility too. And that is tough. And man, it's a lot to be responsible for another brand. Yeah. If it's your own brand, it doesn't feel as dramatic. But take that on as an agency, that's tough.
Chase Clymer
Well, it's also because it's not, you can't own it and be fully in control of it with a thousand hands touching a website. Just for example, with ADA, one, it's not a binary yes or no answer. But one thing I can tell you that is wrong is when someone uploads an image without alt text, right?
Jennifer Peters
Right. That's easy.
Chase Clymer
But if my team didn't do that and someone else on your team did, then we are taking responsibility for it. You know what it means? So it's like, there's just so much that's outside of your control.
Jennifer Peters
I feel like you're describing many people's lives right there. It's like I go, I build this whole site for you that's ADA accessible. And now you've got a marketing manager just uploading images, no alt text. I feel like that happens every single day.
Chase Clymer
Oh my god. It is our nightmare sometimes to release these beautiful projects into the wild and then look at them three months later. And we're like, what did you do?
Jennifer Peters
Oh my gosh. I've had a lot of freelance clients like that where I go and I look and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I am never going to take responsibility for anything that's happened here. It's a lot.
Chase Clymer
All right, Jen, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Jennifer Peters
One of the things I feel I hear a lot... And I feel we're at the end of this headless theme world where people are like, “I'm going to be headless.” I think it's really, I think there's a reason why Shopify is at the top of their game. And that is because of the relationships they've built with other providers.
I think everybody's talking about GEO right now. Everybody's like, how are you going to get into ChatGPT? How are we going to sell there? And the nice thing about Shopify is like, they already have that relationship. They've had that relationship for years. They've already been working on that. I think that Shopify has these features that no one else can touch.
And you need to lean into those and take those and you don't need to customize them. Somebody, a developer that I know, always asks the question, “Why do you think your business is so special that you need a custom version of that and makes everyone on the team kind of like authenticate that?”
But the reality is e-commerce businesses, no matter what you're selling a lot of it's the same. It's the same functionalities. And so I guess the lesson there would be, you need to really understand why you think you're more special than an out of the box functionality that comes from Shopify. Like do you really need a cart that's different from their checkout because they have the best checkout in the business.
What do they know that you don't know? And so I guess Mike, it's a cautionary tale of using the features that Shopify brings to the table. Don't try to do it yourself unless there is a very, very good reason for that.
Chase Clymer
First of all, I appreciate you so much for saying that because I'm usually the one beating that. And so once upon a time, I think it might have been at a Shopify event. I watched, I want to say it was Lucas from Barrel, New York. They have since I think merged with another agency. A very, very smart gentleman gave a talk about Headless.
And he basically said, “Unless you can prove to me you absolutely need it, I would never recommend it.” And then he even took a step further to being like, “And even at that part, like does the entire site actually need to be headless or this custom? Or does it just need to be a certain piece of it? And we could build something that's a little bit more of a hybrid approach.”
Because just build versus buy, right? Unless your moat of your business is some sort of technology SaaS solution, you should absolutely be using off the shelf, out of the box components, the infrastructure of the ecommerce element. Because your product is not your website. Your product is your product. It's your vitamins. It's your t-shirt. It's the shoes. It's the glasses. That's your product. That's where you should be spending energy on getting creative in custom.
Jennifer Peters
Those are the controllables for you. Yes. Yeah. 100%. I totally agree with you there.
Chase Clymer
And I see it. So now as an old econvert, I won't let startups do custom stuff. It's like, that's great. You guys raised a million dollars for this idea. I'm not letting you build a custom website. Here's what we're gonna do.
Jennifer Peters
I think that's the way... And I think that is the long term vision that somebody has to have. It's great to have flashy cool stuff. And be like, “I want my site to look like this. I want it to do this. Okay, that's great.” But does that convert people? Or do you just like the way it looks? I think there's so much bias there around like, well, there's beautiful photography.
That's great. But do customers care about that? Is that what makes them buy or not buy? You really need to understand the data and the behavior and then come alongside with the creative.
Chase Clymer
You could argue Amazon is an ugly website, but boy does it sell stuff.
Jennifer Peters
Absolutely. And it is easy to shop. Oh boy, is it easy to [shop]. Even discoverability, which I don't know how many skews they have. I can't even imagine. But when they still have that discoverability that they can bring to the table, that is functionality.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I'm sure that we could just talk all day. But unfortunately, we can't. Now, Jennifer, before we go, obviously, wants to shout out the products. And obviously, you can search for a solution on the website. So where should I go to check these things out?
Jennifer Peters
Well, you can go to Olly.com. You can go to Amazon. You can go to pretty much any retailer. Target, Walmart, Drug, Grocery. Yeah, we're pretty much everywhere at this point.Yeah. You can find us. You can always find us on olly.com. We have the entire product, the whole selection of products on olly.com. Whereas at Walmart, you probably see 8 to 10.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Chase Clymer
Thanks so much for having me.
