Chase Clymer
It's not me versus, as like, consultant versus, you know, brand. It's what the North Star is your customer. What is the best for them? And this is probably the best for them. So how do we give them the best experience? And then when the shift happens, it becomes a lot less contentious and a lot less, you know, weird. It's just like, yeah, you're right. Let's figure out how we give our customers the best experience. Because if that is what you do, everything else will follow and it'll just be better for everybody.
Giulia Miotti
It's really all about making every step of the journey the most seamless and luxurious and beautiful for a customer, and wherever they end up buying doesn't really matter, you know.
Chase Clymer
Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today. Honest Ecommerce is proudly produced by Electric Eye, a Shopify Plus partner helping ecommerce brands sell more with strategic design and development. Visit electriceye.io for more information.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today I'm welcoming to the show a senior Ecommerce experience and performance manager at Bang & Olufsen. They're a Danish luxury audio brand where Scandinavian design meets high fidelity sound. Giulia has over a decade of experience in this industry, international experience at brands like Adidas, Escada, and Bang & Olufsen. She's built her career at the intersection of digital innovation and brand storytelling.
Giulia, welcome to the show.
Giulia Miotti
Hello, hello, happy to be here.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I'm very excited to chat. This is a long time coming, thousands of miles. We met at Shop Talk in Barcelona, and then there was a tornado in my neighborhood that got rid of my power when we were supposed to originally do this. But now we're here, now we're doing it. I'm so excited to chat.
Giulia Miotti
Yes, me too, and I'm in Copenhagen now, so still pretty far.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely, absolutely. So for those that are unaware of Bang & Olufsen, can you just quickly talk about, I guess, the types of products they're bringing to the market currently, but maybe a bit about the history of the brand.
Giulia Miotti
Yeah, the brand is actually a hundred years old, a hundred and one soon, so it's been around forever. It's been founded in a very little village in the north of Denmark, which has a very difficult name to pronounce for anyone who's not Danish, so I'm not even gonna attempt to do that.
They started by making batteries and radios, and then kind of expanded their range around TVs, and lately we've been doing more wearables as well, like headphones and small speakers that you can carry around. There's a long history around record players as well, and there is a famous CD player, for example, like this kind of tower with five CDs that has been featured in some iconic movies. And even in The Devil Wears Prada, we are mentioned for our telephone, actually. So it's a pretty iconic brand that cares a lot about design and craftsmanship, but at the same time is bringing technology and sound and vision always to an incredible level of quality. One of our missions is really to make sure that when you experience music with our product, it is reproduced as the artist first intended. So it's a very pure experience of listening to your favorite music, and that's why I love using the product actually every day. So, yeah.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Any audiophiles out there, anyone that likes listening to records, it is a brand that comes up often in those circles. It's a great, fantastic brand. Now, you mentioned 101 years old this year, and on this show we're talking about selling things online a lot of the times, you know, Honest Ecommerce. So what was the game plan before you joined the team? How were they approaching ecommerce, and then what shifted as you joined the team and started to dive in and tackle some of these problems for them?
Giulia Miotti
Yes, I actually joined right in the moment when the whole company went through a big digital transformation. I'm gonna use this word, I'm sorry.
Chase Clymer
My favorite word.
Giulia Miotti
I saw your expression when I was mentioning it, and I was like, yes, that happened. They used to have a very kind of scattered experience online. There was a site that was basically a digital showroom for those big products, like the big TVs and speakers and installations, and then there was an Ecommerce side for the smaller wearables and portable speakers. They were two different brands, but the equity was kind of lost, the brand identity and value was diluted.
The team at the time decided, okay, we need to revolutionize this. We are lagging behind. We need to bring everything under the Bang & Olufsen brand and create a full new digital experience that is up to standard. And that's exactly the moment when I joined. It was a very small team, we were like six people, or five, something like that. There was this kind of almost founder-startup vibe in the digital team. We were very few people, international, coming from all over the world with different experiences and parts of life. And we were kind of given a bit of a carte blanche, like, okay, go build. This is the mission. We need to have a new Ecommerce setup. It needs to be under one brand, it needs to be luxurious and immersive, but still make a lot of money. And that was the mission, and we worked really hard on it. It was really this kind of, okay, let's just make our own rules, let's just make it happen. And to have this type of opportunity, I think, inside such an established and heritage brand, was a really fun challenge.
For the first couple of years, that was really, okay, let's figure out things as we're doing them, so to speak. And then we started to get a bigger team, we started to get more revenue, we started to have a more stable setup, and that's when we kind of moved into something that is a bit more of an established Ecommerce business, so to speak. And that's when we also started to understand that yes, for us, Ecommerce is definitely a growth opportunity, but at the same time it's also a very important consideration channel for a new customer, for acquiring new clients. I think we have recent data that confirms that 68% of new clients have their first interaction with the brand on our ecom site. And whether they purchase there, they go to a store, they go to a third-party retailer, whatever it is, the ecom site is the place where they experience the brand for the first time.
So we have this important double duty of making sure that we are very efficient and easy to use, easy to navigate, our Ecommerce site, but that it also tells the history that the brand has, and all the craftsmanship, all the attention to detail, and the features that our very precious products have. But at the same time it's also a vehicle that can guide you into the next step of your consideration journey, the purchase journey, that might bring you to a different place. It might bring you to a store to have the full kind of live experience of what it is to listen to music through our products.
Chase Clymer
What is the next big idea that could change your business? A pricing change, a new bundling strategy, adding subscriptions, tweaking your shipping offer? Most brands make these decisions based on gut feel. They roll out the change, hope for the best, and have no real idea if it helped or hurt their business. Intelligems fixes that. It is an AI-powered testing platform that brings CRO-level clarity to the decisions that actually move the needle. Not just button colors and headlines, but the big stuff: pricing, offers, shipping, new apps, even major site changes.
Brands like Ridge, Jones Road, and True Classics are using Intelligems to test their most important decisions and see exactly how each one of those impacts profit before they commit. Momofuku used it to test promotional offers ahead of Black Friday and found the version that increased profit by about 28%. Mott & Bow ran structured pricing tests that drove roughly 30% more incremental profit. We use it at Electric Eye with almost every client we work with. And now Intelligems has a free AI-powered audit that gives you three specific ideas you can test on your store today. No commitment, no credit card, just three opportunities worth exploring. Head to intelligems.io/audit and get your free audit in just a few minutes. That's intelligems.io/audit.
Intelligems.io/audit. They were going through this digital transformation, you were joining the team — how long did it take? I mean, how long did it go from having these two disparate, separate experiences to having a rebuilt, singular experience, to where you've joined the modern age of brands where you're selling online? What did that timeline look like? Not to where you guys thought you were doing great at it, but just to where you got to phase one of "we can now sell online and we have a singular experience." How long was that roadmap?
Giulia Miotti
I mean, I guess in total it took almost a couple of years, I would say. It was, yes, okay, we have a website, we can sell products, but then, how do we structure our SEO — back in the days it was just SEO, right? How do we structure our data? How do we also change people's minds inside the company first on, yeah, you know, what is our role? Before, it was just, okay, we can just push a very small amount of communication and product on this website, and the rest, the store will take care of it. How do we kind of insert ourselves in the communication journey, in the purchase journey, in the consideration journey of our customers, and make sure that we strike that balance between yes, we are here to sell, but also we are here to support the retail network? And that was a process, I would say, that is probably still going on.
Because having the technical setup up and running, that's not the most complicated thing — there are a lot of companies that can help you do that pretty efficiently. Sometimes the most difficult part is really changing the way you work with other teams — the way that a lot of people who have been working in this company for a really long time, or who own a store in whatever countries around the world, felt that they were kind of the owner of the brand in that specific place. And suddenly they see that there is someone else in the game, right? And it might look like a competitor because it's really efficient at selling products to customers all around the world, and how do we balance that? How do we come to terms with that? And, yeah, also how the marketing channels started working differently, and how do we build a CRM, how do we build that whole customer relationship, now that there is this new player that can do a lot of things pretty efficiently, you know?
The better we were becoming at doing ecommerce and presenting the stories of the brand and getting new customers into the brand, getting more sign-ups, getting more revenue, that started to actually become a bit of a point of discussion. It's like, so what's next? What are they gonna do, you know? So that's something we're still working through, I would say.
Chase Clymer
Most brands outgrow their legacy choices long before they switch. Bad platform decisions do not fail all at once. They fail slowly, then suddenly. First it is one workaround, then another tool, then another integration that is duct-taped on top, and eventually your team is spending more time managing the stack than actually marketing to customers. Eventually, rebuilding is less painful than staying — usually when it starts to show up on the P&L.
That's when scaling brands simplify and standardize on Klaviyo. Klaviyo is the AI-first B2C CRM. It combines your customer data, email, SMS, analytics, and customer experience tools into one platform, so you're not stitching together five different systems just to understand what your customers are doing. Your database updates in real time, your segments update automatically, your flows, campaigns, and personalization all run off the same source of truth.
And that shift is why many brands are moving to Klaviyo. Brands like Dollar Shave Club have reduced total CRM stack costs by over 30% after consolidating onto Klaviyo. Multi-brand operators like Mark Fisher have migrated multiple brands and drastically reduced the time required to execute CRM marketing. And brands using email and SMS together inside Klaviyo are seeing massive ROI compared to running channels in separate platforms. The big unlock is simplicity and scale at the same time.
Klaviyo is built for marketers, not for engineers. It is built for online businesses just like yours, and it is built for where ecommerce is going, not where it was five years ago. If you're running email and SMS across multiple tools, or you're on a legacy platform and thinking about your next phase of growth, it's probably time to look at Klaviyo. Go to klaviyo.com/honest and see why hundreds of thousands of brands have already made the switch. That's klaviyo.com/honest. K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash H-O-N-E-S-T.
I can only imagine, even with brands with even, you know, a fifth of the tenure and history of what you have there, there's just so many legacy systems and processes, or jobs even, that exist to solve a specific thing, that thinking about it now, with how technology works, it's like this can be a lot more streamlined and a lot more simple. And just because it's simpler, more streamlined, maybe arguably more profitable or better efficiency, the human element in that always gets a little — there's a lot of friction there. And this isn't the first conversation I've ever had around this, either on the podcast or through our consultancy. I can think of one from last week with a more modern brand with a franchise model, where the friction is not because they don't know the change is right, it's how to get everyone to basically not be mad about it. And so those are the problems you have to solve for. It isn't a computer problem anymore. Shopify and all the other solutions out there have really made this stuff as easy as possible for some of the more straightforward things, but it's getting that buy-in from the rest of the team, and change — people are scared of change at times.
Giulia Miotti
Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. For example, we just started doing small pilots with our own stores. So we have a big franchise business, but then we have a small group of stores that are actually owned directly by Bang & Olufsen, and with them we started working on this pilot on appointment booking. So basically, you go online, you select a product — we don't sell some of these really big products that need specific installation and things like that, for example, if you wanna buy a TV — and what we were offering before was just, yeah, you can send an email to a store and see what happens. But of course that is kind of a broken experience. We never had data on, okay, what happens after.
So we started partnering with a French company that provides this service for appointment booking. So directly from the Ecommerce site, you can select the store you want to go to and select your time slot, the service you're looking for — it could be consultancy for installation or a product demonstration, it could be service or repair or something like that. And then you easily book your appointment, everything is confirmed online. And when the day comes that you, as a customer, have booked your slot, you just go into the store and everything is ready and set up for you, and it's just easy, frictionless, a beautiful, luxurious experience that a lot of luxury brands offer for their ateliers or things like that.
Even doing something like that, that is finally bringing this omnichannel journey — this dream that we've always had — to life, it's really taking a lot of time and kind of convincing and training, and making sure that in the store they adopt this new way of working, that it's not just someone coming in, or you call this customer that you've known for a long time — this is a new way to communicate with our customer, to build those relationships and those experiences.
And now we've seen that the stores that really adopted this new way of working into their daily life, they're loving it, right? Their sales have improved every time that you get someone into one of our most beautiful kinds of stores, in the beautiful locations of whatever, Mayfair or Soho in New York or things like that. A customer that really experiences those products, it's an easier customer to convince to not buy one, but maybe two or three and install them in your whole house. And really the stores that have adopted this, they've seen really positive results. They love using the tool. They use it to communicate with customers, to ask them if they have some special request, like, would you like to listen to a special song or watch a special movie or something like that? It's just making the experience so much more interactive and exciting, both for the customer but also for the store, because they can prepare and they know how to actually activate the experience.
But yeah, even this, that seems like — of course it needs to be like that, right? It's such an easy solution — it took really a long time to make sure that it was understood by the whole team, like the retail team, even IT, to get them to support the structure of it, CRM to get involved. These are customers that we need to involve and make part of our customer base, and building those relationships, that client setup after that — it's yeah, it's been great, and you can see really positive results, but in order to get there it was a long process. And still, we need to expand it to the rest of the retail network, all those franchise businesses that are even more reluctant, often, to collaborate with HQ. So yeah, it's gonna be an interesting challenge for the year, I think.
Chase Clymer
You have prepped all year, and all that hard work is paying off. Your store is converting, the ads are working, and this is shaping up to be your best holiday season. But your 3PL can't keep up. Orders are backing up, customers are asking where their stuff is, the reviews are starting to turn. All that hard work, all that momentum, undone by a fulfillment partner that can't scale with you. This is a nightmare scenario, and it happens to brands every holiday season.
Enter eFulfillment Service. eFulfillment Service is the 3PL that scales with you. They are family-owned, they've been in business for over 25 years, and they're built specifically for growing direct-to-consumer brands. There are no setup fees, no minimums, and no long-term contracts. You only pay for what you use. If you're scared your 3PL can't keep up this holiday season, now is the time to reach out to eFulfillment Service. Go to efulfillmentservice.com/honest and get up to eight weeks of account fees completely waived. That's efulfillmentservice.com/honest. E-F-U-L-F-I-L-L-M-E-N-T-S-E-R-V-I-C-E dot com slash H-O-N-E-S-T.
For the ones that have it — I mean, I'm sure you guys have all the data now because it's trackable, and you can show what this is doing, not only to improve the customer experience, but the other KPIs that potentially franchisees might care a little bit more about. So they might get a little bit more interested in hearing that stuff sooner rather than later. But again, it all goes back to the North Star, and this is what I always find myself — I'm not negotiating, I guess, but just talking about bigger process changes with brands that have been doing things a certain way, and I'm like, hey, it's not me versus you as consultant versus, you know, brand. It's like what the North Star is your customer, what is the best for them? And this is probably the best for them. So how do we give them the best experience? And then when that shift happens, it becomes a lot less contentious and a lot less, you know, weird. It's just like, yeah, you're right, let's figure out how do we give our customer the best experience, because if that is what you do, everything else will follow and it'll just be better for everybody.
Giulia Miotti
Yeah, absolutely. And it's really our biggest mission, as far as the website is concerned, to make sure that every different intent and every different customer need is met at the right time with the right communication. And if they wanna keep their journey online and go until checkout and post-purchase, get their products, get this beautiful gift box in their home, open it up and have this wow moment with something they bought online — or if it's about making sure that we take them on the right journey to get in touch with the store that is nearest to them, then great. It's really all about making every step of the journey the most seamless and luxurious and beautiful for a customer, and wherever they end up buying doesn't really matter, you know.
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.
A quick pivot, because this I found interesting as we were researching this show — with a brand that's got a hundred years of history, there is so much information out there about you. And obviously the buzzwords at the conference where we met, even AI is so big, AEO, agentic, blah blah blah blah blah, right? How are you guys dealing with large language models and optimizing for AI for a brand with so much information out there about yourself?
Giulia Miotti
Yeah, that's the topic. That's the one we're all talking about, that is taking a lot of our time. And it's interesting — we started this AI search journey, I'm gonna say "journey" again, that's another buzzword, I know, I know, what can I do, it is what it is.
In the last few months, what we're tracking now is looking pretty promising, when, of course, we focus on our niche and the personas and the customers that we know are searching for us. So when we look at that — mentions, citations, whatever it is, sentiment — very positive, we're seeing really good results. But I think where it gets harder is when we're talking about these intangible things. Of course, what we sell are physical products, but our main core product is actually sound, which is really hard to quantify, especially digitally. And so everything around that, whether it's about the craftsmanship, the details, the taste, about design and beauty — these are very ephemeral topics that AI doesn't, per se, probably grab onto, right?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. AI has no taste.
Giulia Miotti
Not yet, not yet, I don't know, no, I doubt it. But so that's something that worries us a bit, right? Because it's not really about whether we show up or not, but it's kind of how those answers get flattened when they do. If you use an AI overview and it's like, "best sound speaker under a hundred dollars," whatever — this is hard for us, that's not probably the place where we're gonna shine. It's kind of this idea of AI flattening everything down to just very specific criteria.
So we're monitoring, we're looking at it, and of course we know that things keep evolving, keep changing, and we're trying to find out, of course, how do we make sure that from a technical point of view, all our data and all our content is structured correctly, so that at least it gets a chance to be found and read by LLMs. So we've been working a lot in the last few months on our schemas, our headings, our content structure, on adding more Q&As, this type of FAQ content into our pages, so that we cover our bases, so to speak, for this type of content.
But at the same time, we looked at the fact that, okay, all the search that used to be based on keywords is now kind of shifting away from that, and often the placement that we couldn't reach because we didn't have the purchasing power that some other brands have, to get a position in the right place — maybe we can find a way to actually insert ourselves into different types of conversations that customers are having with AI. I think there's some interesting opportunity there, because a traditional search kept us a little bit boxed into our categories — best speaker, best luxury speaker, ANC headphones, and things like that. But now that AI is responding to more broader human questions — these are prompts I've seen where we were mentioned lately — which are kind of like, "what can I buy for my dad who is turning 60 and loves music and design?" Or, "I'm renovating my house, how do I make my living room or my interior design more intentional?" And things like that, or, "what are the essential things I should buy if I want to look cool at the airport?" or something like that.
So these are all new opportunities where our brand can be mentioned or can be part of the conversation in AI, even if it's not completely related to a specific category of product that we sell, but it's completely aligned with the values and the intrinsic DNA of our brand and our product. So I think that's what's kind of exciting me about all the new possibilities that AI offers us — to kind of, especially for a niche brand like ours that never used to have the money to break through some of the ceilings, it could be really a way to reach new audiences that are kind of outside of our usual bubble, and exploring new ways of coming into new clients' consideration in a different way.
So it's really something that will require a lot of focus and really identifying what are these areas where we can make a difference, and really work together with all our different departments, especially marketing, PR, social media, working with creators and experts and expert reviewers and things like that, to make sure that we are present in a very consistent way when it comes to addressing these specific topics that we weren't considering before, because we were very focused on "best luxury speakers," so to speak. So that is kind of what is really exciting, and it can create some fun opportunities, I think, for us in the future.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely, and it's so interesting, and you're not the first person I've heard say this — that a lot of this opportunity that people are seeing within AI search, for example, the conversations people are having with these LLMs, are very similar to long-tail keywords within the SEO landscape, you know, from ten or twenty years ago. And I guess just during this conversation, it just made me realize that nothing's really new anymore. It's like, alright, well, the strategies that worked to hit these long-tail SEO keywords are probably just gonna crush it for people that are trying to hit these things within, you know, AEO. There's just so many parallels between optimizing for SEO versus optimizing for AEO. So it's gonna be fun to watch how this all plays out.
Giulia Miotti
Yes, absolutely. And I mean, whenever I talk to people who are really experts in that area, it's like, of course, if you have a strong SEO setup that you've been working on all these years, there's a lot of chances that you're gonna do well in AEO as well. So I think there is definitely — hopefully what we've been working on these last few years on the SEO side is gonna be a good foundation for how we expand in terms of topics and opportunities outside of the usual bubble. And I think it's gonna be interesting to also work with our marketing and PR team, in finding new ways and new kinds of spaces where we can surface this information — things that we have maybe left a little behind because it's "not cool" for a luxury brand to be on YouTube or whatever, we just need to be on Instagram and TikTok and whatever the hell.
But what about working more with trustworthy, really strong creators on YouTube who talk about audio products, who talk about lifestyle products and things like that? How can we find new opportunities, new channels that can help support the narrative around the brand, and maintain that freshness that, of course, LLMs love as well, but at the same time really consistent and hopefully a positive sentiment, always.
Chase Clymer
Giulia, I have to be respectful of your time. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show today and sharing all those amazing insights. If anyone wants to find you online, or learn more about the brand, where should they go? What should they do?
Giulia Miotti
Well, bang-olufsen.com. You can find us everywhere. We ship — if you wanna get our products and experience them in real life, we ship mostly all over the world, so I would say in the northern hemisphere at least. And yes, you can find me on LinkedIn, my name is Giulia Miotti, and I think that's all. But that was really fun.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Giulia, thank you so much.
Giulia Miotti
Thanks for having me.
