Special Season: Inside Summit 2024 The Future of DTC ft. Nik Sharma, Coterie, De Soi, and TYB

Hi everyone, so excited to sit down today to get started on our INSIDE Summit miniseries.

We're so excited to have had our first ever all-day conference event just last week in New York City with over 120 innovators and founders in In the room where it happens. If you want to hear more about our vision behind Inside Summit and some of our learnings of hosting our largest scaled event yet, listen to our opening episode of this miniseries. But what you can expect next is a recap of the conversations that we had in the room from the actual guests themselves. You can expect our opening fireside with KJ Sidbury, the partner over consumer investments at GV, our next-gen GenAI panel, which was curated by the GenAI Collective, our Future of Platforms panel, which was moderated by the associate editor at Forbes, and two more. Claudia, you want to fill our listeners in?

Yeah, absolutely. The future of direct-to-consumer with some incredible brand founders, operators, and agency partners. And then we ended the day with a recap episode, um, our fireside chat with Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch, a previous podcast guest. So without further ado, Let's open the door. So great seeing everyone today. Honored to be moderating this last panel of the day, the future of D2C. I'm sure you have tried a lot of the incredible products that we have at the D2C market right behind you. If not, definitely after this panel, hopefully you'll be inspired to do so. Really thrilled to be talking to some rock stars here with very different perspectives on consumer brands, building, scaling them. And so without further ado, I'm going to intro our panelists. Nick, welcome. Nick Sharma is widely known as the D2C guy, a Forbes 30 Under 30 member, Adweek's Young and Influential, and a resource that brands and investors turn to for growth. Truly, the best brands work with Nick. Nick is the founder and CEO of Sharma Brands, where clients include Feastables, Jolie, Milk Bar, Everlane, and more. Outside of Charmer Brands, Nick writes a newsletter to 50,000 investors, founders, and marketers, and is also the co-host of another podcast, Limited Supply. So you guys should also check that out. Scout is the CEO of Dissoir. Definitely try Dissoir in the brand market behind you if you have not already, a line of sparkling non-alcoholic aperitifs co-founded by Katy Perry and Morgan McLaughlin. Scout's professional journey spans over 7 years in management consulting at McKinsey and venture capital at M13. But also in 2020, Scout was the co-founder of— how do you pronounce it? Do?

Dough?

Dough, which is a better-for-you cookie dough brand. So welcome, Scout. On Scout's left, we have Marissa, who is an accomplished digital product leader with over 13 years of e-commerce and omnichannel experience. She's currently the head of digital product at— in e-commerce at Cotterie, which is the best diaper in the world, an incredibly scaling, quickly brand. And she has spent her career helping well-known brands and businesses transform their digital enterprises, including Moda Operandi, Pernod Ricard, Drunk Elephant, and Target. So welcome, Marissa. And last but not least, we have Brianna, who is COO of TYB, a community rewards platform with customers like Glossier. I think that's a new announcement for today.

Yeah, it's hot off the press.

Congratulations. Urban Outfitters, JuneShine, and Rare Beauty. Prior to TYB, she helped scale Skillz, the first pay-to-earn gaming platform to go public, and was an executive at Walmart and Gap. She's also an LP in two early-stage funds. So welcome everyone.

Cool.

So today we're going to be talking about the future of D2C e-commerce, what trends we're seeing, and because there are also a lot of brand founders here, some tactics practical advice. But before we kind of get into those themes, I'd love each of you to kind of just like talk a little bit about your journey to where you are today. Nick, let's start with you. Tell me a little bit more about Sharma Brands.

Absolutely. So first of all, thank you for having me here. New York is one of the few places where everybody looks amazing at these events. Outside of New York, nobody knows anything about style and fashion.

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

Well, LA is the closest.

San Francisco.

San Francisco.

Oh, San Francisco.

Two SF reps here.

Yeah, SF, yeah. No, so excited to be here. Sharma Brands is basically a— think of it as a mix between a performance agency or a growth agency and a McKinsey. I like to say that we come up with a lot of strategy work for our clients, but we also do all the homework. We have a full in-house team. We only work with about 15 or 16 clients at a time. A lot of companies are either pre-launch companies like Ajoli or Feastables or Lemme, or we're about to launch some new brands. We'll do everything from their go-to-market, their website, their media, their content, emails, everything. And then we work with brands in a middle stage, which are, you know, the Hexclads of the world or the Everlanes, and then the larger stage, which is the Taco Bells, Diageos, etc. And I don't know, basically the way it started was I used to work on the brand side and drove a lot of growth. That was my job. And basically we just productized that and we do that for clients. So clients come to us, we look at growth a little bit more holistically than just running ads. And we have the teams to support building the strategy for that and then doing all the execution there. And yeah, and then alongside that, a lot of times if we're launching brands, whether it's Lemmy or Jolie or Feastables, we'll also get to invest alongside these brands or in these brands.

Brands in the room, definitely hit up Nick if you're looking to take your brand to the next level. Now on the brand side, we have Scout. Scout, tell us a little bit about how you transitioned from Doe to becoming CEO of De Soie, working with Katy Perry and Morgan McLaughlin.

Of course. So I met Katy— is this working? OK. I met Katy and Morgan in early 2021. A little bit of background on Morgan, she's a master distiller, so she's been in the beverage alcohol space for really over 10 years. And she saw this white space within the non-alc market. I think early on there were a lot of non-alc spirit proxies, uh, like Liar's and Seedlip that were doing well in bars and restaurants, but people really weren't seeing the role that they wanted to play as mixologists at home. And then meanwhile, um, you know, in the non-alc beer world, and especially even today, you look at Athletic Brewing and other brands were really starting to take off. And so when I met them, they had been working on Dissoir for 18 months. There was a brand, there was a product, there was liquid, there was packaging. I obviously love the zero-to-one stages. That's what I was doing before. And myself, I'm like, like a lot of people here, I'm sure during COVID we're drinking more and had this moment where I step back and realize that it just wasn't really aligning to my lifestyle. And so I started looking into the category a little bit kind of at the same time, and I just saw these crazy tailwinds behind it and things that even now, like, are even more extreme. I think it's something like 50% of millennials are drinking less, 60% of Gen Z are drinking less, and I just immediately saw that there was this opportunity to come on board, obviously like quarterback, get the brand to market. Um, and we launched 2.5 years ago and have a new flavor in the market. So it's been a really fun 2.5 years building.

Congratulations. Um, well, a little bit now onto the operator side of things. Marissa, you have a lot of experience in luxury fashion and now you are building luxury diapers. Tell us a little bit about the journey to Coterie and, um, why e-com digital product?

So it's a very good question. I definitely did not start out as a luxury person. I actually started out as an investment banker, like most people out of college at that time. I went to business school, knew that I wanted to do something different that wasn't just finance. I then drank the Kool-Aid and became a strategy management consultant, as one does straight out of business school. But I think that those two sort of skill sets around sort of financial literacy, attention to detail, and then just like large-scale project management really primed me for what was next. And funny enough, I'm a lucky person. My mentor from consulting, he brought me into a startup and he's like, hey, you're going to be my digital product, uh, head of digital product. And I'm like, I have no idea what that is. And so he was like, you can do project management, you can figure out the tech. And in truth, that's really what I did. And so from that moment forward, I knew that that was the right fit for me. It was very hands-on, it was very operational, but you're also able to almost as a product manager in that point running product teams, you're able to speak a language, right? You're almost like a translator. You speak dev, you speak CEO, you speak marketer, and you're able to really put that into practice through what I love, which are e-commerce websites. Never really thought the Moda job was very sort of close to my heart. I'm like, who doesn't wanna work with beautiful garments and very well-known brands. And what's funny is moving into other luxury products, I'm not a parent and I hawk diapers all day. I could talk about sizing and blowouts and all the parental terminology that you could want. And it's funny because you actually feel an enormous empathy towards the customers that you're serving, whereas in my role behind the scenes, the tech looks the exact same. And so it's about that experience. So it's been a lot of fun.

Excited to dive a little bit deeper into just the trends in the market and what you're focusing on in terms of digital strategy. But Brianna, I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into how you partnered with Ty Haney, the former founder of Outdoor Voices, to now be on the other side of the table building tech for brands with TYB.

Yes. First of all, I want to shout out to all my recovering management consultants out there. And then also, I identify as a former in-the-room guest podcast host. We didn't have that in the intro. So congratulations.

Oh my gosh.

It's so exciting.

We got to like send the link to your episode. It is a must-listen.

Absolutely. I think there's a trapeze, for those of you that like Easter eggs, in the episode. I'm excited to be here. TYB, really simply, we're a gamified community rewards platform. And we enable consumer brands to own the channel with their fans. And directly engage and most importantly reward them for taking really valuable actions to grow the brand. As you know, my background's in gaming and consumer. The first startup I built was a gamified rewards platform, literally for game developers to build. And you guys, gaming has engagement figured out. It's progression, so you take steps and you ascend levels. It's status. You earn status for taking that progression. And then most importantly, I think what gaming's figured out is it's social. You can have conversations. And we all do it, right, in our days. We have status. We see other people's status. And then we take engagement or actions based on seeing that social proof. We simply enable brands to connect their community to each other so they can talk and they can see each other's status as they become the ultimate fan. Of that brand. Ty obviously building Outdoor Voices, big fan. Community was their moat. They were able to take that community, that Team OV, they were 4 times more valuable. And so we simply enable brands to have that community and then make it measurable.

Well, now that our audience has gotten to know a little bit more about all of you and all of the incredible things that you're doing, let's dive into where D2C is going. Let's start with Scout. What have been some of the biggest thematic priorities for your teams when it comes to digital strategy, given that DSWA is primarily D2C?

Yeah, I think to set the stage, DSWA launched online in January of 2022. We didn't have our first retail partners until really that summer. Madison McIlwain: So when I think about beverage, other than COVID, for the most part, people are really discovering new products and buying products in stores. And it makes sense to me, right? It's, you think about like, okay, I'm gonna spend $70 for a product I've never tried before, or I can buy a can for $4, right, in Target. And so in the earliest days, you know, we did so much of our community building, our, you know, customer acquisition online, and then More and more as both the brand has grown into retail and I'd say the category has grown into retail as well, we've thought about this channel differently. So where we are today is really thinking about a loyalty driver, kind of a fundamental place as we build distribution where customers can come online and find a Suave. We're not available in their area yet. We have over half of our monthly online revenue coming from subscribers, so All things D2C, you really gotta be thinking about what's that lifetime value. And so it's a way for us to really justify the economics of that channel. And then I think we do a lot in terms of both the digital inroads that we've built to be able to help support other sales channels. So for instance, like, okay, we're on sale for Prime Day right now. I sent an email out to our customer list telling them about that sale. Like it's a really a full flywheel. Omnichannel brand, if you will. And there are really cool, you know, I'd say like tech options these days when you think about couponing, right, and being able to do stuff off of the shelf. When you think about running paid ads even to get people into store during critical launch moments, even being able to survey customers when they buy your products in store. And so I really think about the interplay between those two channels. And I think the hardest part I would say operating an omnichannel business is just as the CEO, where do you give love, right, resources, team, et cetera, and how do I make sure that I'm thinking about them within the context of revenue and bottom line driving channels?

There's just so many meaty things to tackle from discovery to acquisition to retention. Marissa, at Coterie, what do you see as some of the big thematic strategies?

So Coterie, is 90% subscription. And the idea is that our motto is we want to make parents' lives easier. And so it's a subscription business. Send diapers to my door when I ask for it in the right size whenever I need it. And it's interesting, Scout, hearing sort of your, your take on the, the interplay between in-store versus online. For us being 90%, for us the in-store experience is the oh crap moment essentially where you run out or you didn't manage your subscription properly. But the idea is that you always come back to us. And so from a digital strategy perspective, it's how do we build that moat? How do we build the best-in-class customer experience for parents who are like, it's diapers, send it to me, I'm good, I know what I'm doing. But in reality, when do you need it? How often? What size? Do you realize that perhaps your kid is starting to grow and you need to size up? Maybe you're ready for another product. And making that as seamless as possible is really important. And what we've done probably for the last 4 years that Coterie has been around is essentially do exactly what a customer has asked of us. Ship now, delay, right? And just listen to what they're telling us. And what my vision is very much, how do we talk back? How do we help proactively recommend a next size up? How do we let someone know Hey, guess what? You're actually consuming diapers a little bit faster than you might realize. You're shipping now every month. Should we change your frequency? And being that sort of diaper concierge or that person to help you when in reality you have a kid in one hand and your cell phone in the other. Like, we're there to really help make that decision even easier. And so as part of the tech roadmap that we're building, it's that two-way conversation. How do we make sure that we have not only the right tech architecture, the right systems, the right platforms. Thank you, Priv. Claudia's incredible subscription platform, which we work with all day, every day. So it's the right tools and the right technologies. And then it's building on top of them, knowing that you don't have a house of cards. And so we're really in that moment where we have a solid architecture, and it's how do we create a really unique experience for something that you wouldn't normally think of as elevated luxury, high touch?

Actually, really funny because I realized I didn't even tell you this, but our team was subscribing to Cotterie Diapers just to experience your subscription.

Yes.

Yeah.

So best in class.

Did you use our SMS program?

Yes.

Amazing. I want to get your thoughts on it.

I think the past couple of years, what tech you use as a brand has become really at the forefront of the conversation in terms of, scaling and growing. And so Nick, you work with so many brands not only that are launching but are also scaling. What are some unique challenges you're seeing with your clients in 2024 that might not have really been the case a couple of years ago?

Honestly, I think the, the biggest challenge is brands like don't know how to build brand. They know how to source a product and throw a label on it and sell it with ads, but majority of companies that are— consider themselves brands, they don't actually have brands. They're just product businesses. And so for us, um, a big challenge has been just making sure that the brands we're working with understand what it means to be a brand. You got to put out content. You have to cater to your customer. You have to be listening to your customer. You have to launch products that your customers are asking for. It doesn't just mean you, um, come out with a beauty line because you're a celebrity and you're known for your red lipstick, and you launch this makeup brand, and all of a sudden you make a couple of Instagram posts and it just dies. Or you come out with a beverage brand, and you know, an NBA player is associated with it, and they make a couple of posts, and then their contractual obligations are up, and now you just hope for sales to come in. It just never works like that. So the brands that we've really enjoyed working with are the ones that really understand you have to be out there, you have to be creating content, you have to be engaging with the community, you have to be— helping facilitate to build a community. You have to be launching new products. You have to do things that just cater to them. Yeah, I always think of brand as like the pavement of the road, and then everything you do from a growth standpoint is the car that drives on top. And so I think of that— I don't know if you guys have— I'm sure you've seen the movie Cars when Lightning McQueen is like pulling that road thing behind him and he does it bad the first time. It's like a very bumpy road to drive on, and it's not— you can't really grow a brand if you don't have if you have the brand underneath it. You can only really run advertising if you have a high-quality brand. Or another way to think about it is you put an image in Microsoft Word and you stretch it from the corner. The more you stretch it, the blurrier it gets. But the higher quality the image is that gets there in the first place, the more you can continue to stretch that. And so I think of that quality of the image as the brand, and then you stretching it as trying to run growth. But yeah, brand. I mean, even, even if you're launching in channels that are not ads, you're trying to launch on TikTok Shop and leverage the affiliate program around it. No affiliate wants to get involved in your brand if you don't have a cool brand or you don't have something that people want to be a part of in the first place. So I think building brand and building awareness in a smart way is probably the biggest challenge for a lot of these companies. Um, once they get to a certain state, then I think it also shifts into some of the stuff you were talking about around their tech stack and how well they're set up to continue for growth. Or sometimes it's even having the wrong people in the right roles.

I think brand and community, like the people that are buying the brand, are so much like two sides of the same coin. There is an easy experience when you're shopping in brick and mortar around, oh, this is the brand, these are the people, this is what the community is. But it's a bit harder when you're selling direct to consumer. Brianna, with TYB, I'm curious, how do you see community as a growth lever and how does community influence brand?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the headline is the personal relationship, uh, on the brand side of things. The growth playbook for the last 10 years is based on this linear funnel that just isn't that way anymore. Um, brands are or excuse me, consumers are discovering brands from their friends. The best analogy I like to use is that we've basically been putting lemonade stands out front of our houses as brands, um, and we hire tech companies to help us move, you know, the merchandise around, or we change the copy on the sign, maybe we lower our pricing. Everybody's at the park, they're not coming to your house, they're not coming to your lemonade stand. And so with TYB, what we do is we help you essentially create that social space, so that personal relationship. We help you put your brand's widgets across your own channels, which again, headline isn't just your website, so that they can participate in challenges. There's single-player challenges, there are multiplayer challenges as a community and a group. They get rewarded. We spend a ton of time— you mentioned two sides of coins— on the user experience. How do they want to engage? How do they want to know you as a brand and build that personal relationship? And last week we did a survey across our users asking why they love to use TYB and be on the app. And of course, access to free product, discounts, exclusive events were top of the list. But guess what the number one thing is that they said that they liked? It was the relationship they had with the brand. And some of them said literally the names of the moderators from the brands that they talked to, that they've completed challenges with. So that's the next level here is building on what Nick said. Brand, brand also has to have a personality and an emotional connection. And why not use your people to do that?

Marissa, with Coterie being a diaper business, I mean, you're catering and selling to people that are at a very interesting life milestone where like raising a baby, putting diapers on the baby. It truly takes a village sometimes. So maybe can you talk to us about how you think about community in crafting the digital experience? How do the two interface?

It's a really good question because parenting in and of itself is its own community. You don't really know what it's like until you're suddenly born into being a parent. And that's something that we really try to tap into, which is I think first and foremost around sort of crafting a voice and building sort of this brand, it's empathy and understanding how we can help. And I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity for what Coterie as a brand can do around like building parent communities. You know, I think when you think of what does a community mean, it's a lot of times like, like Brianna just said about meeting in real life or partnering with somebody else who is like minded. And Coterie does a very good job of bringing these sort of like-minded individuals together. And I think the Coterie brand is very much about high-quality products with sort of a mind of the people around you, the world around you, as well as just an elevated experience. And so we've done a few in-person events, which I'm laughing because we did a lemonade stand. We did a lemonade stand. It was an analogy, not literal, but it But it wasn't a park and we did bring the folks to us. But a lemonade stand, music in Brooklyn, bring your kids. We did a pool party, right? And it's a way to connect in real life. But I think the real key from— and of course, there's the way that you engage on social. How do you talk to your customers? How do you solicit feedback? We once had a post around just what do you wish that we would do? What can we do for you? And we actually got incredible feedback around products they wish we could offer, things we could upgrade, more IRL events. And we've actually taken a lot of those to heart. But when I think about the digital experience and the community that we've built, it's really how do we talk to our customers one-on-one? Because really, who they're interacting with is us. And we do user interviews. We listen to our CX calls. We understand what kinds of requests are coming in, even with our SMS this program, you can tell us exactly what you want, and then there's a voice behind it. It's not, you know, just a one-way street. And that's sort of what I was getting at before around how do we create that two-way conversation so you're not just screaming into the void. And I think that even that sort of perspective alone can create better community, even if you're not side by side with the other coterie parents 100% of the time.

Yeah, and just to add on to that, I think growth marketers have looked at knowing your customer by a cohort model. Like, oh, they made their first purchase in March of '22 and my LTV is 4 months. So therefore, it does not compute. We love to say activate locally, amplify digitally. And my favorite story, is anyone a customer of Topicals? They're the fastest growing brand in Sephora. They're really rad. Olamide is the founder there. They had their community with TYB. They started with us in November '22. They found out through our challenge surveys that 5% of their community were actually licensed estheticians. And you talk about building a brand, right, for credibility. They're very much about skincare, right? You take care of your skin so it's healthy. And they were able to create a segment and an experience on TYB for the licensed estheticians. They had an event last week about like the origins of acne. If anyone's interested, you can join the community and learn. And then they amplified that digitally, right? So they sent challenges, and they're able to reward them based on how they personally want to identify with the brand based on their career and their identity, not how the brand wants to identify with the consumer, which is take, take, take, buy, buy, buy. So I love that. That's absolutely what I'm seeing too.

The person behind the digital experience and product. Nick, you mentioned celebrity brands, and Scout, you're working with Katie on De Soie. I'm curious, Nick, maybe can you tell us where you think things break down in terms of what makes an unsuccessful celebrity brand? And maybe Scout, I would love to hear your take on how Katie and De Soie stay authentic and build community around their customer base. So Nick, over to you.

Yeah, so for us, I mean, I feel like the things I've come to realize from a pattern standpoint where celebrity brands fail, which now I'm thinking of all the counterexamples, so this could be totally wrong. This just comes from my POV. But celebrities who don't— who aren't genuinely in it, they're, you know, a part of this cool project. They think of it as like a 15-minute cool project. But they're not in it for when the sales dip and then, you know, they need to get involved and get strategic. Celebrities who come in typically just through agencies but have no self-desire to be a part of it is kind of in the same bucket. Celebrities who don't create content is another huge one. Like, if they don't understand how to create content, whether that is they're not comfortable getting into a photo shoot or they don't have the ability to get into a photo shoot or they're just not comfortable pulling their phone out and recording something and throwing it up. Like, I think Shay Mitchell is a phenomenal example of one who does create really good content. We work with the Skinny Confidential, same thing, always creating content. And also it's got to be a product that clearly aligns back to why does this person create this. We've worked with celebrity partners where it's like, this makes no sense as to why you're doing this. Either a cash grab or an Excel sheet business, and it's probably not gonna work. And 9 times out of 10, they don't end up working. But I think a lot of it comes down to like alignment, content, and, um, you know, how into it are they as a celebrity. And a lot of times, like, I have a friend who is a huge YouTuber. He is involved in 3 brands, one of which he's personally really excited about, and that one is clearly taking off the most because because that's where he wants to actually spend most of his time. The other two he has contractual obligations for, but they're not going to really take off.

Totally. Scout?

Yeah, I would agree. I think from the authenticity point, I think it's table stakes for it to be something that they had a genuine need, desire, problem to fill. And I think what I've seen— this kind of ties into, I think, a lot of thematically what we're talking about around community. But when we launched, I mean, Katie has over 200 million followers on Instagram. It's a massive audience and it's a mass audience. And most brands don't start with that kind of mass audience. And so in a lot of ways, I've seen this as very much a full flywheel, right? So the opportunities from day one of speaking to Katie's audience building our Duval audience, which sometimes are Katie's fans, sometimes they're not, right? And we have people who drink Duval all the time that don't even know that Katie's behind the brand. And so I really think about it behind the scenes, in front of the scenes. So whether it's a great example of like organic content creation, Katie just released a single, put Trey Rosé in one of our flavors in the music video. We didn't even know about it until after it was shot. And so it's something that she's thinking about, how do I integrate this into my moments, my beats, not just how do I help amplify their moments and their beats, but both have to be there. And so I would just say it's like, okay, cool, we have a wellness audience. Katie and Gwyneth Paltrow are friends, so she was on the Goop podcast last January. We launched in Sprouts. Katie was filming content for us to post on her socials and hers. And our socials when that went live. So really thinking about how you can touch every single channel, but also still be authentically speaking to her people, right? And, and the DSWA people until those concentric circles really overlap.

Totally.

That's like really insightful around building that authenticity in a tactical way. So thank you for sharing those examples. Before we hand the mic over to audience questions, um, we have a lot of builders in the room today, and so I'd love for all of you to give a brand that you are currently obsessed with and also a piece of advice that you wish you had known a few years ago when starting your brand or starting your agency, or maybe when you're working with bus— businesses, whether it be around, you know, distribution or launching on subscription. So maybe we'll go this way.

Oh, me first? Okay, so I think my piece of advice is do not get ripped off. There are so many people who will rip you off if you're a brand, and I'm very happy to be your bullshit detector. You can email me n@sharma.com. I will be your bullshit detector. Um, sorry, what was the other part?

Another, like, a brand product that you love?

Brand, okay. Dessoir, of course. Coterie, of course. TYB, 3 amazing companies. Another one that I like a lot just because of their strategy is Strawberry Milk Mob. I don't know if anybody's heard of them. Bikini brand based off of TikTok. Honestly, a lot of the TikTok brands are really interesting to me because they do such a good job building their brand without even trying to build their brand at all. It's just by creating content. And I think that's generally the piece that most of the other companies that have product businesses and ads businesses don't have is that content and that brand piece. So, see, I'll stop there.

This is boring, but I think so practical because I was talking about it with friends earlier, but get a trusted lawyer. I think that's something I've seen small mistakes, big mistakes, but legal counsel mess up. And I think having somebody who can be really be a business partner when you need them to be is really important. Oh, I did it out of order maybe. Anyways, product brand, product brand. This is more on the tech side, but something I've been obsessed with is this company called Locker and it's like Pinterest but shopping and it's just so much better than having a million bookmarks on your desktop in terms of, you know, things you're shopping for weddings, for summer outfits, whatever it is. So I'm obsessed with Locker.

Uh, I guess so. My piece of advice, while I'm not a founder, I think the biggest— one of the biggest learnings that I've taken from Coterie is you can't retrofit market fit. And, you know, for us, kids— people are having babies, you know, people are becoming parents every day, and diapers are a need. And so we didn't make it up. And so what we were doing is following the need and understanding What's— and we are a what's the problem to solve business. But I think it's really important rather than coming up with an idea and then you're forcing it down someone's throat to say, who is the person that would consume this? And I think a brand that I really like, and I think it's from sort of a tech perspective as well, I love AG1, Athletic Greens. Essentially, they started out, they pivoted a little bit. We look at their site a lot. They have one product and yet their entire website is a full experience. You do onboarding, you tell them what you need, they create a bespoke sort of package for you. But at the end of the day, it's one product. And I think their ability to tell a story and keep you engaged around one product is really impressive. So thank you.

Cool.

It's easy for me to say that we get to work with a lot of celebrity brands as well, or people with audiences. So it's easy for me to pick like Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty or Scarlett Johansson's The Outset. And I think the structure— I've noted, I've learned a lot as well. I love what you said in terms of what works. My favorite brand is, uh, Roycan Instinct. They're a dog food brand right now. And the reason I highlight them is because they get the same community participation As Scarlett and Selena, we're on a first name basis. And literally she has, I think, 500 people in her community on TYB and she gets all of her content. So her— and she spends her entire content budget on community and she's able to, to get the growth from that. And so I'm here to say that dogs are celebrities too. So it just— you have to have that emotional connection. But I love the brand. I love the community. There's actually a book club live right now if you want to go join it. They read mystery thrillers as part of this Dog Fair community, and it's like legit. My biggest advice is play Texas Hold'em. Does anyone play poker? Yeah. Jenny Jost, who's a woman I really admire, she's a self-made billionaire, casual, building hedge funds, and she started this really great movement for women to play more poker. It's called Inside Poker. You can download download the app. I'm not an affiliate, I'm just like super, super into this. Um, what I've learned in my advice is, um, you know when you're playing Texas Hold'em and you have like a pair or two of a kind or two-face and you know you should go more in and you know you should invest? That's my biggest lesson I've learned building two companies now is know when you have something to put growth and money on. And I think that smart investors look for that, and I certainly do as an investor in founders. Do they know the hand relative to the market and the scale? And do they know when to put, if I'm an investor, my money behind that to go and grow?

Thank you for the recs and just the really helpful tactical advice. I'd love to turn it over to the audience to open things up for any audience questions. Madison McIlwain will assist with the mic handoff.

OK, so this is a quick question. I know we talked a lot about celebrities as co-founders, but what's your take on the pipeline of celebrities as investors to the creative director position of brands? Because it seems like that was happening a lot, but curious to see if there's any value in that or what your POV is on it.

Madison McIlwain: I mean, I'm pretty biased here, I would say. I think what my experience, and of one working with Katie on Dissoir, is the fact that she's been involved from the very beginning and it's her baby. So the name, the colors, the flavor, right? Like every piece of that DNA, the same way all the founders in the room here, you guys feel like what you're building is your baby. Katie has that attachment to it. And so I think from that perspective, the strongest place to be coming from is somebody who really gets to be in the weeds building the brand that way. Um, there are a lot of creative ways to bring in talent. And so from that perspective, tactically speaking, maybe it's a great way to get extra eyeballs, build brand awareness without spending a lot of money on it because you're using leveraging equity to do that instead. But I, I'd be surprised if that's as powerful as having somebody in from the very beginning.

Yeah, I just want to build on that to what Scout said, is it matters how the deal is structured. So we've done, we've structured a lot of SaaS deals with brands that are co-founded by celebrities, and I love that they have a full brand team behind them. That they speak the D2C e-com language. I'm gonna have to be careful here. I spend a lot of time in LA. Nick thought I lived in LA. So I do spend a lot of time in LA and talking to some of the agencies. And I prefer to stay away from doing those deal structures because I think they're predicated more on a media buy, which is more of a broadcast a creative director can come in versus brand building, which is really about margin and distribution. And those deals are structured very differently. So that's what I'd look for.

Other questions?

Thank you all for the insights. They were awesome. So I had a question for you, Bree, specifically about the experience you told us about going all in. I'm looking at the poker cards.

You play?

So how do you— yeah, I mean, I lose. I lose, but I like to play.

Hey, we all lose, but we win too.

It'll come one day.

But how do you balance intuition versus actually cold hard facts on like, this is going somewhere?

Oh yeah, I think sometimes we think about intuition as this ephemeral— how do I say the word? Ephemeral, thank you— thing that is just out there. For me, my experience with intuition is something that I've built. It's something that I've learned to listen to and understand the difference. So, I think it's a skill. It's something that comes with experience and something that you hone, that word. So for me, like when I'm playing poker, and especially if I'm playing against a bot, right? I know who my opponent is, I'm thinking about what they're doing. I know that they're gonna have limits in terms of how they're gonna come back on the deal. So if I— let's say I don't have a pair or I don't have two of a kind, then my intuition tells me that if I go up higher than what the bot's gonna respond, then the bot's gonna fold and I'm gonna win. So it's a game of chess that you get good at playing and you get really good at learning what that voice sounds like inside of you and listening to it. That's my experience. I love it, we should play. Which apps are you on? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Create environments where there's asymmetric information that I can make moves and take advantage of. Absolutely. But I think when a good game of poker is played, it's very much a win-win for everybody. And you want people that walk away from your poker table to wanna come back and play with you again. So it's, it, that, that's what's most important, I think. Yeah. I love it. We should talk later. I also wanna invite you to my table.

Sorry.

I also wouldn't underestimate the power of just asking questions, right? Being curious. Don't be afraid to dig into something that you're interested in. And interest will always be met, most of the time, with sort of a reciprocal sort of give. And so I think a lot of times, at least for me, I was afraid to ask questions because there were things that were expected to just be known. You never know what you'll get as a result of just asking more questions.

Awesome. Well, I think that's all the time we have for today's conversation. So give a round of applause to our incredible panelists. Awesome. Follow them, try their products, go chat. Thank you so much, everyone. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you, Claudia.

Thank you, Claudia.