Sustainable Global Growth with Katelyn Glass from Fifty Six Advising.
29 May 2021 · 49 min
Podcast episode (recorded May 29, 2021) titled "Sustainable Global Growth with Katelyn Glass from Fifty Six Advising." Hosts Juliana Jackson and Valentin Radu interview Katelyn Glass, founder of 56 Advising, about her career path from retail buying to fractional COO and founding 56 Advising. Main themes: sustainable e‑commerce growth (focus on customer lifetime value, realistic budgets, ROAS reinvestment), common mistakes (over-reliance on ad platforms and vanity metrics), internationalization (localization, taxes, logistics, market-specific channels), and supporting women in e‑commerce through mentorship and networks. Sponsor: VTEX (vtex.com).
Questions this episode answers
May 29, 2021.
56 Advising; Instagram: 56NY.
VTEX (vtex.com).
Chapters
Foreign.
Welcome to E Commerce Growth Stories. This is your hostess with the mostest, Juliana Jackson, aka the CLV lady. And also I am the Chief Evangelist for OmniConvert.
And this is Valentin Radu, CEO of OmniConvert. Thank you for tuning in today for a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories.
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My favorite thing about working from home and for myself is that I could wear a T shirt with like holes in it.
I know, right?
No one can tell me no.
And we are live also right now.
I just like my holy T shirt. Everyone can see.
It's cool. I love, I love. You know what? There's something comfortable about holes in a T shirt or a hoodie. I have a T shirt. I have a hoodie that actually has holes and actually buy things with holes. Like Valentina. I don't know if you remember, I had this hug, horrible yellow hoodie that was dripped everywhere and I was the exact one. I know because I was wearing it in meetings and Valentino was like, oh, it's like, it's cool. You know, it's what it is. So, guys, we started the podcast, as you can see. This is Juliana. I'm here with Valentin and we have a special guest in the building right now. And this is Caitlin Glass. She is the founder and managing partner of 56 advising. So, Caitlin, thank you so much for being here today. Are you doing?
Of course I am doing well. Waiting for the weekend. Almost there.
But doing something to make it a great weekend, right?
I can't. I'm actually flying to la and I apologize for anyone who's in la. I actually hate la, but I am going next week for a wedding and pseudo. When you work for yourself, you're never really on vacation, but kind of a vacation. So we'll see.
Cool, cool, cool. So John, I apologize because I know you're in LA or somewhere in California, so I apologize for that.
Cool.
So Caitlyn, tell us, what is 56 advising? What do you do in E commerce? And actually how did you get into E commerce?
Yeah, I started in E commerce what pretty much my entire career. When I went to university we didn't have digital marketing and website building and whatever it is you crazy kids have. I went to school for marketing. I graduated with the intention of working in the fashion and retail space and that's what I've done for the past 15 years. The bulk of my experience is at a company called Guilt Group where I led the men's buying division for for quite some time. And since then I've done some really interesting projects. I led the digital transformation for a brand called Moscow, which is an optical brand based in New York City but actually distributes all around the world. And I can't wait to talk about that. And then I went to Rowing Blazers as the COO and was there for about a year and a half. And Honestly, I started 56 this year with the intention of consulting for brands who wanted me as a COO but couldn't necessarily afford me full time. Right. So I work for a bunch of different brands in a fractional capacity. Whether it's helping with website and digital transformation or marketing strategy or things as specific as email building and setting email strategies. I sort of run the gamut for everything that I do in the E comm and digital space. I position 56 as an E commerce and digital marketing agency. I do everything.
So Kathleen, this space is not that crowded and I think a lot of companies have a great vision. However, the execution sucks to be, let's say, gentle. But how come you've got into this space and why 56 by the way?
Yeah, I got into this space because I genuinely love it. I love doing something different every day and I always joke to my fiance how I am not going to be able to take the standard three months maternity leave when I get pregnant one day, God willing. Because by the time I come back the entire space is going to change and there's going to be new partners and players and things move really, really fast in this industry. And that is why I've always loved it. That's why I've always sort of geared my career trajectory down the E comm path. 56 well, I didn't really. The way it came about is a very Roundabout way. I'm actually going back to school in the fall for my mba, and I wanted to work for myself this year. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do it, I might as well start a company. So I sat here and kind of was looking around. I have, like, my bookcase in front of me and looking around at different book titles, trying to get some inspiration. Just brain dumping. And very uncreatively. My address is 56 Mott street in Chinatown, New York. And 56 just kind of stuck. So 56 advising. It was. I want to. Now that I'm. Now that I have it, I'm kind of thinking there should be some cooler story. And I wish there was, but really, it's just. It's my address.
But don't go to her house or whoever.
Don't go to my house. It's. It's quite all right. I live on, like, the busiest block in Chinatown, so.
And this week, this weekend, she's gonna be in la. So you.
Oh, yeah. I just gave out my address and I'm not even gonna be here. Don't rob me, people. There's nothing to take. You can take my plans, but that's about it. Nothing else about here.
So, I mean, I hope no one is coming to your house, but I want to know, why a coo? So for me, being a COO is the most unsexiest thing in the world. Valentine's laughing because he knows how much. So I'm like Steve Jobs, right? I use this. This is the second time I'm using this today. But like, I. I know procedures are important. I know I'm learning this for the last period. I feel like this is the lesson that I have to learn this year with the procedures, but God damn it, I hate operations. So how you're doing, like, basically a very unsexy part, but also, also, it's a most important part of a business because it's not only the marketing that grows a business, it's also practically the business itself and, you know, the way the business is str. Make money and the procedures and processes and so on. So how did you go from finishing, you know, graduating a marketing as a marketer to going and doing operation? I think you call this like marketing ops, right? Yeah.
Yeah, I am. It's interesting. If you would have asked me three years ago if I ever wanted to be a CEO, I would have probably laughed in your face. Some of it was the circumstance of the business and what the business needed. I tend. I say this about myself in A very self deprecating sense. But when it comes to creativity and good ideas, I don't have any. I am really, I am really, really good at taking that founder's idea and making it come to life and executing it. But as for having the idea, I mean, think about rowing blazers, right? Rowing blazers started because Jack, who's amazing. Sorry, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, if I'm allowed to curse. Jack came up. Jack was a rower all his life. He literally wrote the book Rowing Blazers and started a brand around rowing culture that transformed into a lifestyle brand. Just that idea I would never be able to come up with. Where he needed my support was helping bring that to life. Whether it be marketing where, whether it be operations and setting up a warehouse and setting up shipping and returns policies and all the little, little pieces that make a business move. That's where he brought me in to really help, help manage the team, help get things from A and B and cross the finish line. That is what I excel at. I am not the business idea person.
You're, you're the perfect fit for this.
That's what I was trying to say.
Very, very unsexy role. My ripped T shirt.
I want to ask you something right now on live, not live television, but I want to ask you something. So how committed are you to your company? Because Valentin right now needs you, wants to hire you. I swear to God, like, listen, you are perfect. You know.
You know, this is what I've been telling people. I'll never say never. I always knew I'd be good at owning my own business. Quite frankly, I didn't realize I'd be this good. And I thought this was going to be something. I'm going back for my MBA in the fall and I thought this was going to be something just to carry me through my mba. And then I'd go and work for some big company, Fortune 500 saying, but I actually love what I'm doing. And I don't think I will ever go back to working for someone. I like being in charge. I like being my own boss. I didn't realize how important the freedom was of having that until this year. So I don't know if I'll ever work for. With all due respect, Valentin, I don't know if I'll ever work for a man again. But I love, I love what I do. I love what I do. But you never know, who knows? I had someone ask me about joining full time and that turned into a board opportunity. So we'll see.
So here's. Here's how to get rejected live without actually asking for someone.
Sorry about it. I'm sorry.
Signed by Juliana Jackson, the one and only.
It's not. It's not as bad as that time when you are. We were. We were having a summit. We were having a live Summit. There were 4,000 people watching, and I was hosting the session and Valentin was talking. So at the end of the session, I was reading the questions that were coming from the audiences. And then at the end of it, I said, valentin, this is my last question. It's the most important one. Am I gonna get a raise? Everyone was.
I like that.
Everyone was like. And I remember people were texting me, what the fuck is wrong with. I was like, I'm a busy person and I need answers. So I don't think it was as bad as that time. I got the raise, though, for everyone. Cool. So I want to ask you something like, let's go back to E Commerce. So there's a lot of ways that sustainability is defined in E Commerce. And based on what you told me so far, I can understand how you see sustainability because it's based on procedures and growing the business while the E commerce world thinks that profitability or sustainability comes from traffic and sales. So what's your opinion and how do you fight those mindsets that are unfortunately poisoning the whole industry?
Yeah, you know, if you talk to five people in E Commerce and ask them the same question, you'll probably get 10 different opinions on this. My opinion. And just to set the stage too, I've never worked at a D2C darling, like a Glossier or an Away or a brand that was heavily VC funded and was able to grow really rapidly. And because of that, a lot of people will come to me and say, hey, I have this idea. I want to grow my brand. Show me how to do it. Well, I understand everyone wants to get the name recognition of an AWAY or anything or away travel or anything like that. It's really hard if you don't have the funds. You can't be expecting to see the list in traffic that they saw. With a budget of $500 a month, it just won't happen. Nine times out of 10, what I have to do is manage expectations of, here's what a realistic budget is. I don't necessarily agree that traffic and sales is the only way to grow your E Commerce brand. There's so many different factors that go into it. There's the brand awareness, there's all of the other different levers that you can pull throughout the way of the world right now is a lot of awareness and acquisition has to come from a paid procedure. And it's not as easy as saying, here's $100, I want to grow this brand as fast as I can. That said, in my past, I've always used the approach of driving really strong roas upfront to then reinvest those dollars. Grow your budgets very organically and naturally. See that sustainable growth rather than just a blip in the wind and then you come down. It's very every. There's not a creative director out there who doesn't want to go viral. Right. It just the, the entire concept of, of viral can't happen. You can't force it to happen.
You can't control it. Yeah.
And it, it. The idea of just getting a bunch of traffic and a bunch of sales really quickly to sustain your E Com brand isn't really realistic. But of course, if you probably ask someone else, they'd tell you, of course it is, and give me all your money. I can show you. I always, I always tell my clients, if I was the best Facebook marketer out there, if I was the best Google, you see people on Instagram or wherever saying they're the best of the best doing all of these things. With all due respect to any of my clients, if I was the best at this, they would not be my client and I would be sitting on a beach somewhere in Bali, never working again. And it's all about sort of pulling different levers constantly and figuring out what works. And what works for one brand doesn't work for another brand.
So can you share with us some mistakes from your experience? I mean, how you've learned? Because it's sure that you have some, some track record about learning from your mistakes, otherwise you wouldn't be here.
Do you want, like mistakes from or.
Just in general, anything that you want to share publicly? Kathleen.
I am not afraid to take risks. And I think anyone who I work with, anyone who is part of my team has to be okay doing that. Part of what I think makes digital and E Comm so innovative is the ability to take risks, try new things, play around with budgets, see what that right complexion is. I actually have found myself very recently trying to grow brands with from nothing. Whereas when I joined rowing blazers, they had a presence, they had some data for me to work with. And one of the things that I've been learning is when you grow a brand from scratch from day one and no one knows you and you have A hundred followers on Instagram. It's a lot different of a mentality and a complexion of tools that you'll use to grow that brand. Then when you start doing millions of dollars and then that changes and then when you hit 10 million, that changes. And I think mistakes I've made in my past, even when I started my own business, I figured, hey, I do this all the time. I throw up Google Ads, I throw up Facebook ads and I see a roas and I see a generation of leads. I thought I could do that for my own business. It doesn't work that way. So I've, I've poured, I don't want to say thousands, but I've poured money into my own business trying to get leads here and there, recognizing that, oh, that's not really the way you have to grow a brand that's geared around services versus a consumer good versus a higher end product. It's not this sounds, anyone probably listening knows this, but it's not a one size fits all for e common digital. And you really want to work with someone who understands that concept and the same tools or complexion of things that they've used in platforms isn't always going to be, it's not always going to be right.
I feel you 100%. And I really see the fact that a lot of this growth concepts and sustainability, you know, I guess methodologies are heavily, heavily commoditized and people are trying to commoditize them, but unfortunately it's not like that. Even with, you know, in what I do, where Valentina's with retention, everyone is trying to standardize it, but a brand's retention is not another brand retention. And I think it's an education problem when it comes to direct to consumer brands because as you say, there's a lot of people on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn that are saying we're the best posting screenshots of their ROIs, of their, I don't know, whatever. And people are like.
21 sales or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And everyone is like, oh my God, you know, like this. And especially if he has an audience or she has an audience, that's it. But the problem is that as an E commerce brand, as a direct to consumer brand, you have to understand that whatever works for you is not going to be what works for someone else. Like exactly as you, you said I, I'm like 100% in alignment with you. You got to work with people that understand the difference between you and other people and don't watch your brand through the lenses of other brands, because otherwise you just. It's a clusterfuck, in my opinion, and everything just unravels badly. So, yeah, I. I'm with you 100%. 100% on that. But, like, tell me, tell me about the brand that you worked with. You don't have to give the name if you don't want to. But, like, can you give us an example? Because there's a lot of entrepreneurs listening with smaller brands. And there's a question I always get, you know, a lot from the mic. How do we decide what's important to get started with? So what do you think that is.
Where someone like me and my company comes in to help you understand what's important for you, your brand and what your values are and what you. What you want out of this. Everyone has not only different goals for their business, but they have different exit strategies for what they want this to be. If it's. They just want a quick sale or they want to sustain this brand for a while. And because of that, part of what I do at 56 is really advocate with platforms and with agency, other agencies and tools on your behalf. Right. So I'll come in and if there's a brand who really wants to focus on the CRM pieces and retaining their customer base or build up a subscription model, I'll take a different approach than if I talk to a brand who listen. We're brand new. We want to get our eyes out in front of everyone. We don't really care about generating a lot of revenue right now. For us, it's more about gaining followers and awareness. That's a whole different set of complex tools. And I sort of see sit. A big part of what I do is during the discovery phase, sit with founders and people on their team and say, what are the goals? What do you really want? When you say you want a bunch of followers on Instagram, what's the why behind that? Why do you want all of that? Why do you want to spend your money getting followers versus spend your money getting orders? And take me through that process.
Yeah, and I think. Go ahead, Valentin. No, it's cool.
I wanted to emphasize here something that I think these vanity metrics, let's say, are coming. Almost all of them are coming from a lack of formal education in this e commerce space. Because this was like a burst. We had a lot of e commerce companies. We even have more of them. And there is not a structured approach, not in terms of the recipes, but in terms of the. These are the fundamentals. Of e commerce. And don't get fooled by the traps of Facebook ads which are training everyone around roas and cpc and ctrs and whatever because that's their terminology. The e commerce terminology should have things regarding the customer acquisition cost, payback period, the customer lifetime value. Those are your terms. And unfortunately a lot of e commerce founders and owners and marketeers are being trapped into this mouse wheel from Facebook and Google and whatever TikTok around putting an equal sign between growth and ad spend. Yeah, and I think that's, that's the, that's the problem. And I think what, what you've emphasized earlier, it's, it's a beautiful way to capture the main issue which we have in this industry besides the fact that everyone is doing okay. But there are some entrepreneurs which are in this freaking e commerce game. They are putting something like two, three, four, five years of their and all their economies into, into a game that they don't understand. And they don't have where to go to understand because the extroverts and the influencers in e commerce, they, they simply play the same songs. I mean, yeah, spend some money, let's do some PPC Facebook ads on and there, there are way too many at this moment.
It's, it's a really interesting. I was actually just having this exact conversation the other day with my fiance. He went to school for finance. The same language he speaks at work is the same language his father spoke when he worked at a bank. The same metrics they use. Do you think people were talking about Digital attribution modeling 15 years ago?
No.
And I think sometimes it's hard for entrepreneurs to recognize that no one is ever going to care about your business like you care. No matter what you do about it. No one will ever care. The closest you'll probably get is your family. But Facebook, Google, these platforms are built to maximize the way they show their value so that you spend more money with them. And the entire idea of attribution modeling and looking at something like Facebook versus Google versus even an email platform. And don't get me wrong, I do use Facebook ads and I manage. I have a whole section of my business that manages. But these entire businesses are built around the idea that they want your money. So they're going to show that they are very valuable for you so that you spend more money. And when you actually look at true e comm metrics, it'll value a platform like Facebook differently. If you're using Google Analytics, Facebook isn't going to show up as valuable than if you're using your source of truth as Facebook. That's just definition of how the, of how capitalism works. Really?
Yeah. The issue here is even if you have an attribution model, if you're looking only at the conversions and not looking at the whole customer lifetime value and the other orders, you're going to be biased as well. And so if you want to go down this route at some point in your endeavor, you might have to pick your. To place your bets. Because it's about analysis paralysis.
One of Exactly. I say that all the time. It's analysis paralysis. One of the most valuable things I did for a company I worked for a few years back. I won't name names, but.
We took.
A look at all of our channels of acquisition. Who is coming from where, how many people, more importantly, we looked at what their average order value was by device and what their lifetime value is. So I knew if I got a customer from mobile who converted through email, they were going to be worth that much more than if I got someone who converted on mobile from Instagram versus someone on desktop from Google. And what they would ultimately be worth in worth in five years. And understanding. I. I truly think there's not enough econ. I don't even think there's enough econ people out there who understand the importance of lifetime value and what. And how that simple tool alone can completely change. You're just looking at that number alone can completely change your strategy.
That's what Valentin has tattooed on his back, that whole center. I know.
I mean, I've dried my mouth saying the same thing you've told since. I don't know, I haven't got enough gray hair.
It's, It's. It is. And it goes back to. There's not. It's so hard because this, this industry exploded so quickly. There's not enough people who truly. And I'm. Listen, I. I think I'm the greatest at what I do because I am really good and I tell it like it is. You'll find people out there who are better than me even, who can speak to this. And I know I'm just so great. But you'll find people better than any of us. And I'm not afraid to say that. I know that I have a lot more to learn in this space, but I know that even people and colleagues I've come across, I'll start talking to them about things like lifetime value. And they look at me like I have six heads, 56 heads. I like that. And they just, they don't get it?
And.
And a part of that is, is just there is no formal education on this. No one. I'm 35, no one my age went to school for this. We didn't know what to look for. We've just taught it on our own.
We know. That's why we did it. Valentina did. This whole CBO academy and everything basically is focused on customer lifetime value. And we're talking about acquisitions and customer journey and retention and absolutely everything, I mean, related to the customer journey, but looked at through the lenses of customer lifetime value. And we have been receiving the same feedback as you said that, you know, like, there was no one to teach us this. We had to, like, you know, break our teeth in it on. On our own. And I agree. I think. I mean, clearly right now, customer lifetime value has become a very sexy topic, because in 2000, this year, like, if you remember when Shopify dropped their, well, what's his name? The future of E Commerce Report, they were the first, I guess, you know, E Commerce, you know, tech giant, whatever, that was actually talking about customer lifetime value. And then everyone started, you know, like, oh, my God, customer lifetime value. And it's super funny to me because I see people talking about it and don't understand the fact that they're talking about it like it's an average, and it's not an average. As you were saying earlier, you have a different lifetime value on mobile if, I don't know, you're coming from Facebook, then on desktop, if you're coming from Instagram. And I don't think people understand the many layers. Like, customer lifetime values on onion. It will make your food good, but it's gonna make you cry the more you. You peel that onion that made me cry before. Mental note to use that. But it is like, it's. You're gonna cry, but it has so many layers, and it's. It's. It's hard to define it. If you look online and Google for formulas, we worked with the professor volunteer. Remember that guy, the Professor? Like, we worked with the professor to make sure it's as accurate as possible, because it's never that accurate. That's the thing. You got to be smart and calculated on all possibilities. And, like, the more you see those possibilities, you figure out, like, there's another possibility for me to calculate it. So it's like. It's crazy. And I just appreciate the fact that you. You mention it mostly because I've been draining my mouth talking about it as. Well, not as long as Valentine, but it's so important to understand this. This metric is just not necessarily only a metric. It's just like a consequence, a result of a great job that you're doing for your customers.
It's really interesting because I think we all talk about it being we all by now everyone understands channels of acquisition and a basic level of attribution modeling. And not enough people too are talking about how your customer lifetime value can vary drastically across the globe. And a customer in New York not only can be different from someone in la, but can be completely different than someone in Tokyo, than in Bulgaria, than in wherever you are in the world. And it's really important to be able to set yourself up to measure these tools rather than just make assumptions. Oh, I have a footwear brand and it's very luxury and it's fashion. So therefore my customer in Italy is going to be great. You have no idea where you can unlock different sort of just customer segments and a greater understanding given just the different cultures and different tax regulations and governmental things and just the way different communities act. And that's one of my favorite things and favorite projects to work on is helping brands understand a global strategy. And a big part of that is spent understanding your baseline pricing in different regions, knowing the way people work. It's not enough to say, oh, I sell something for $99 in the states, let me convert that to yen and sell it. You have to really understand the culture behind it before you do in order to drive that lifetime value.
So have you worked on internationalization projects? Because this is a very interesting topic for me. I actually love this, this topic. I, by the way, for whoever is listening, Swanky agency dropped a great piece of content about e commerce internationalization. 118 pages of everything pest analysis. You guys have to download this. It has seven gigabytes. I know it's big, but it's like everyone from Shopify plus from everywhere really, really love this. I participated in it too, but from a customer experience perspective. I really want to talk to you about this. Just open my, you know, my eyes right now and tell me like, I know like people don't understand internationalization. And it's funny, someone was asking today on LinkedIn, someone that does it was asking who in your company is in charge of taking your business overseas? Is it the CEO? Is it the operation? Is it the sales people? Or is it your marketing? So you know and I, if you listen to this, what are you saying, Caitlyn? Who is the person in charge?
Well, hire me. I'm available. You can get my information from you guys. For all those listening, this is what I am an expert.
That's awesome. I didn't know that.
Yeah, I, I, I love it. It excites me so much and at a, at a very granular detail. I never thought being an E comm I would care about tax law in Brazil or what emerge. I thought emerging markets was like a finance term and I don't need to know that.
No.
There's something so gratifying of having a site that's that I built myself. It will not myself. I had developers, I just took credit for their work. But a site that I put together in New York city for a 100 year old brand that came from Eastern Europe, immigrated to the States, ran this brand. 100 years later we're getting an order from Azerbaijan without spending a cent. But there was something I remember when I saw that order come in and I was just, I was like jumping up and down because I thought it was the coolest thing someone Azerbaijan knew who we were enough to buy something from us. There are so many ways to do it and I find myself educating brands a lot on how easy it can be if you use the right tools, if you go about it in a very strategic way. You also don't need to spend a lot of money marketing to these places. It's funny, everyone's like oh I just want Google to go live in these countries and suddenly I'll be big. But what the majority of people don't recognize is, I mean I'm sure there's international people on this call but they don't use Google like we use Google in South Korea, they don't use Google in Japan. So you need to have a Yahoo strategy, you need to have a Naver strategy, you need to have all of these different platforms. In India it's extremely hard to get a package to your front door. How what carriers and what complexion of people do you need to use to be able to deliver that in Brazil? Anything you ship there costs 50% extra in taxes. So how do you have to set your pricing strategy so as a brand you're not losing money but yet you're still attractive to the customer so that they're not paying $150 for a $50 item. It there's so many different ways to do it and a lot of times people will come to me and say I want to grow my brand in Canada. Okay, that's great. You realize there's more countries in the world besides the US and Canada, right? Like a lot of them speak English too. And it's really easy to launch in them. So why don't we like make that Canada, also the uk, also New Zealand, also Australia and then let's start focusing on Europe and other languages. So yeah, I, I literally can talk about this all day, so stop me whenever you want me to.
No, I love this. Sorry, Valentine, just to wrap up this, I just want to say that if you, if someone by any chance from peteviper.com American brand that have the dopest shades hear this, I want them to hire Caitlyn so they can actually sell to Romania because I'm not paying 500 on your, on your shades, man. I, I've been abandoning hearts on their website for a month just for a 20 and I hate, and I hate discounts. Like I advise brands against discounting and these guys, I've been abandoning their car. I tried to go to the customer support to try to play them to give me a 20 off. It's just too much room, too much money for me in Romania. So that's, it doesn't have to be that hard. Yeah. And it's not that hard. Yeah, it's crazy. I always wanted the pair of shades from them. I love shades and I'm just Valentin, if you hear this. My birthday is coming. But I think you said something.
I'm losing you, Pete.
Viper hire Caitlyn. That's it with viper.com hire Caitlin.
You. A few quick questions for you. The first one is what do you hate the most at ecommerce?
Oh my God.
I can only pick one thing. What do I hate one thing. I hate how there is, I hate the way they're, ah, how do I say this and not upset my entire government? I think there are a lot, I think E Comm in general, it's a classic example of the legislation and laws around E comm and what brands can and can't do and what companies can and can't do is really lagging behind the times. And that's not to offend the US government, although it is on the up and up now. But I hate the fact that there's just no one knows what they're doing.
I also love about it.
I love how fast paced it is. I genuinely love what I do. I love helping brands grow. Like I said, I don't have a great idea to save my life. So I love seeing brands that I can grow and love looking back and saying look how much money we made and, and grew and look at all these great people we hired and opened up new stores and I just love seeing brand growth.
Excellent. So how, how do you see commerce evolving in 2030?
Oh, oh, that's far out. I'm not gonna be the basic one to say.
I'm just laughing for to go. So I'll tell you afterwards.
It's so. It's so far away. Who knows, we could all be robots by then.
We're gonna send discounts on spaceships, rockets with a.
Rockets with a display ad on them.
Please, please buy from me.
I like I'm not going to be the basic person to say sure. APAC in India. There's a lot of explosion there. There's a lot of explosion in Latam. Sure. I think globalization is a trend that's absolutely never going away ever. I also I, I think people are going to be smarter and I think there's going to be more conversations around lifetime value. There's going to be less of this. I open up Instagram and I see 75 different people promising me that they can get me the best ROI on ads. I'd like to hope that there's going to be less of that in E Comm moving forward. I also think the obvious one is a lot of AI stuff. I think there's going to be a lot of innovation around bridging the gap between online and in store experiences. Voice activation type stuff. A lot of AI is what I'm super interested in as well.
Excellent. Last one is from my end at least the last question is what do you think your clients are not getting and only you can help them achieve?
That's a great question.
That is a really great question and I actually have been working on this myself to figure this out. I think nine times out of ten you work with an agency who prides themselves on being an agency. They have figured out the systems, they've figured out the platforms. At the end of the day there's still an agency who's based on scaling and growing and growing their business and being as efficient as possible. And therefore a lot of, a lot of automation comes with efficiency and they might not necessarily take an out of the box approach. Why people will hire me opposed to just working with an agency directly is quite frankly because I've never worked for an agency agency. I've only ever worked for a brand and I get understanding what it's like to advocate on behalf of a brand for an agency and people will hire me or my team or work with my preferred partners and me because of the strategic growth we can provide them beneficial to their brand and not with the end goal of being scalable and efficiency just for an agency's sake.
Yeah. Love it.
Juliana, my. My question for you is. Actually, I don't even know if it's a question, but I know you are. You're an activist for inclusion. So there's a lot of females that want to get into the entrepreneurship part in E commerce. And I want your best, best piece of advice and goal that you can share with the young females trying to enter the e commerce industry and probably overwhelmed. I'm sorry, volunteer by the sausage fest. So tell me what's your most precious.
So a, email me, become my friend. Add me on LinkedIn. Let's talk about this, because I can literally talk about this all day. I think women underestimate how strong of a network there is out there who really wants to help you succeed. I'm not saying I feel like even when my mother was going up and growing up in her career, there weren't a lot of women mentors out there for her to look up to. Same with me right now. I have very few. Few. I do have a couple, but I have very few mentors who have done the same things I've done or been in the same life cycle or life stages as I have. I've joined the chief network here in the States, which is the entire concept of. For women in the C suite, it doesn't necessarily need to be lonely at the top because I will say I was the only female. I was the first and only female on my C suite. C suite. In my company. That's alone pivotal. When I sit there with four or five other white guys and who all came from around the same region in the US and here I am, young, white female. Have a different view of the world. There are a lot of women out there who want to see you succeed and not to give up and to just find them. And literally, I hope in the next year or two, part of what I want to roll out on my end 456 is almost like an incubator women's mentorship program seminar, something around this. So I've been working with some younger girls in my team to help understand, like, hey, in your 20s, what do you want out of old people like me? What do you want us to tell you and how do you want us to get there and how can we make this like a bigger thing and invite your friends and your sisters and cousins and whoever.
I love that.
Yeah, we'll see how that evolves. I've been working on it with my Executive coach. Because I, I want to see it work. I just, just. It's a lot.
Yeah, of course. But I think it's awesome and I think it's needed because there's so many people that are trying to enter the industry, especially females, and there's like some barriers that they need to. You know, it's mostly mindset barriers because it's, it's how the. It's how the industry is built. So, Caitlyn, tell me, how do we find you on social media? Where should we look for you? And, you know, how can people connect with you?
Yeah, I should. I leave my email in the chat?
You can leave it in the chat and I'm gonna add it in the episode notes.
I am. Here's my email.
Cool.
I will add. Give people my LinkedIn and my Instagram is 56NY.
Gonna drop that in the. In the notes.
That is me on LinkedIn. You can follow me. You can follow my business. My Instagram is at 56.
Great.
Thank you so much for being here today. This was fun and refreshing as I. I need it. I told you, I'll be fine. I was tired, but now I'm good again. See, every time I start this podcast, I'm tired because it's so late. And then I'm like, man, I'm good. I'm good.
Is that thing. It's called metabolism, Juliana.
You know, it's not working for me since the pandemic that. Well, volunteer.
A pandemic and a baby.
Yeah.
Double strike.
You know, Tell me that. I cannot believe you have a baby. Someone told me yesterday, Deb, one of my friends, she was like, girl, I forgot you. You had a baby. It's like, I know, right?
I can't. I don't know how you do it.
I don't know either. I, I will. I. When I find out, I promise I'm gonna make a, you know, a system that can be reproduced by other females. I'm gonna productize the whole thing.
Literally.
But I don't know yet how I'm doing it, but I might write a book about it.
It's about documentation. Yeah.
Yeah.
I woke up at like 9:30 today. I have no idea what I would. How I would take care of a child. I give you so much credit.
I don't know what. I have a great husband. I think that's, that's. It's my second one because I have two. So is that crazy? But I give a lot of credit to my husband, so thank you. My husband. I'm not gonna say his name because he's hot and I don't want females to look him up. Cool. Thank you for being here, Caitlyn. This was so fun. Thank you everyone for watching. And if you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
Subscribe.
See you guys next week.
I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me guys.
Bye everyone. Bye.
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