"Good Conflict," and the Lost Art of the "Kate Girl" with Chris Bousquet

Welcome to the Struggle Bus of VSpot Show. I am Vinny O Brien, your host for today. Today with me, coming live from New York, is Chris Busquets. Did I pronounce your name right, Chris?

Close enough. Busquets.

Busquets.

Yeah.

Tell me, French.

French.

And all the things we've talked about that hasn't come up?

Not yet. No.

Wow. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me. I said at the start, my name is Vinny O Brien, or as my friends like to call me, hey you in the bushes. Chris and I got the pleasure of meeting last year in Dublin, and we have stayed in touch for quite some time since then. And he works with Litmus 7. Chris will tell us a little bit about that, but I want to hear more about the person, as is our goal on the Struggle Bus. It's always to talk about empathy, creating shared meaning for us all. Chris, how am I doing so far?

Phenomenal.

Um, happy New Year to you as well.

Happy Christmas, happy Hanukkah, all of the holiday, whatever the period, happy sales, whatever you're having yourself.

Uh, we find ourselves here in the midst of NRF and before we get in, we are talking about the power of conversation and some of the things we try to do on this show is talk about the human sides of stories and there was something that you demonstrated last year in Dublin. I think I've said this to you since. That really stood out for me, and it's the starting point to our conversation. It's about empathy. I'm going to use the word boldly. I don't really go down that road too much, but where does that come from within you? It's a very, it was a very human quality because at the time there's Irish brands presenting to big American buyers and nobody was really contributing, but you decided, fuck it, I'm gonna, I gotta jump right in and I'm gonna offer some feedback. And it really started the conversation. I think without you it wouldn't have happened. So where does that come from?

That is— I was wondering what the question would be to lead this one off, and that is, that is definitely a deep one. There is a multitude of factors. Who I am as a person, who I am as a professional, okay, um, feeds into that. Uh, and the benefit of, of gratitude and generosity expressed to me as I was coming up, I try to pass along.

Okay.

Um, when I was a young one just coming up, I I come from a very small family, um, quite a bit of loss in the family. Okay. Uh, various family members going too soon.

Oh wow.

Not to put this on a down note right at the top. They fucked.

It shakes us.

I think through loss, empathy materializes and becomes part of who you are.

Okay.

Um, and then as I spent my younger years coming up and seeking almost not to replace, but to fill the space where those connections left a hole. I found myself engaging with folks and being curious of them and trying to build relationships in order to kind of bridge places where, you know, I felt like the bridge fell apart, right? Trying to rebuild that bridge. Okay. And then I was very fortunate to come across older— I don't want to say older generations, but, you know, almost older sibling types to to me, right? Um, who would take their time to pass on lessons to me that I felt like I was obligated to pass on to the next that come up after me. And to pull all that together as I go into the trip to Ireland, not really knowing many of the folks that I would come into contact with, I tried to lead with curiosity to build new relationships. Because the way that it was framed to me, that trip was about benefit of experience that I've had and passing on some of the experience, intel, knowledge that I've gained in my young career.

I didn't see those. You're walking with a piss-up in Dublin.

Right? To the folks that were trying to break into our market, right? Trying to grow their businesses and trying to build those relationships. And as we were talking about, and I'll call it the green room conversation, though we hit record, One of the things that I'm very passionate about is understanding not just who someone is, but where they're trying to go and how can I put the right folks in the same car for that road trip, for it to be a successful and enjoyable road trip.

There's quite a lot in there. The loss thing is interesting. It's one of those things that shapes us, but translating that into a work sense then, It must be quite tiring to constantly be in that frame of mind where you're curious and helpful and trying to impart knowledge because we're in the business of sales all the time and never so evident as when you're at NRF. But actually relationship building takes time and it's an investment and we don't really have time.

Yeah.

How do you reconcile that?

So I'm gonna say that I'm actually gonna offer you a counter to the premise on the question. Okay. I don't think it's exhausting.

Okay.

And the reason it's not exhausting is because I am a self-proclaimed introvert with some extrovert quality, right? Um, when I have a reason to speak, yeah, I can turn on and I can go, right? You drop me in a room where you tell me the purpose of me being in the room is to coach or to help or to fix a problem. I turn on and I go. If you drop me in a room full of people and I have no idea what I'm doing and it's completely white camp, blank canvas, you might find me sitting at the corner of the bar and waiting for opportunity, right? So you can see the difference in how I might frame how I approach. The reason I say that it's not exhausting is because having that manner about me means that it's not about quantity of how many people I'm talking to. It's about the quality and depth of the people I do talk to.

When you think about commerce or e-commerce or whatever we're calling it today, you and I have been in it quite a while, like let's say two decades, which is a lifeline for some people. What do we need to do differently to make it better for the generation that are coming through? Hmm.

That's a, that's a great question. I think it's a question that a lot of folks are trying to find the answer to. I don't know that I have a perfect answer for you today, but what I do find is successful amongst brands, not just in e-commerce, but commerce overall, is participation in the culture of their customers and their ability to be auth— I think the word authentic is used very broadly now. I don't want to penalize folks for using it, but it's almost cheaply used.

Mm-hmm.

Um, to have a, a real authentic voice in the community is to participate in that community. So if you are a, uh, retailer in children's clothing, if you're a retailer in, uh, women's handbags, if you're a retailer in mid-modern furniture, right? You've gotten the legs under you selling a product that has been well received. After that product has been well received, and you start to identify who your consumer is, the identification of your consumer is not just about the age range and the geolocation, but it is more about what is their aspiration, who are, like, try to get to know them as a person, not as a cohort or a group. I think a lot of folks are caught up in cohort analysis to figure out affinities and what message works best for who? I think a lot of that organically surfaces when you are one of them, right? Or your brand person or your, your head of marketing is one of them, right? So if you are selling a product array, and I'm gonna lean on my experience and, uh, forgive me for the name drop, one of the individuals who may not realize the impact that she's had on me, but Mary Beach, uh, was the head of marketing for Kate Spade a number of years ago. She's since moved on a couple of organizations, um, but her ability to transform the customer for Kate Spade and Company into what I knew, uh, familiarly to as the cake girl, to understand that she would spend a paycheck on a lamp, she would eat cake for breakfast, right? She aspired to travel the world.

Okay.

Young 20-somethings, go-getter, right?

How come this isn't in the Facebook attribution lists there? How are you gonna, how are you gonna do your targeting?

Right? But those are the details of really knowing your customer, but not just knowing them as a 20 to 25 or 20 to 30-year-old, you know, a certain income level, you know, lives in inner urban center or inner city, but truly knowing what, what gets them up in the morning, what they're passionate about, what they're excited about, and then feeding your messaging into that. I think it's an art form, but it might at this point almost be a lost art form.

I definitely think it's lost. One of your colleagues, Finn, speaks quite passionately about the need for recognition over surveillance.

And let's give the full name so we know who we're talking about.

Dave Finnegan, great hair, wears a kilt. And I asked somebody when he went to the Vendor and Partnership Awards on Friday night, was he wearing any underwear? It's not yet been confirmed. So if anybody can lend some insight as to whether or not Finn was wearing underwear under his kilt, please do let us know. One of the things that's weird in that customer planning process, because we have to use all the horrible language around it, is we forget the human aspect. You walk around the floor in NRF and everything is about AI and removal of friction. I think there's room for friction still in the customer journey. Like, at least I, me personally, when I think about putting myself in the customer's shoes, I like the idea of friction because it gives me a chance to be myself sometimes or to pause and have breath. I don't need everything to be one-click checkout. What are those friction points you see that consumers still need and want and crave? Because you're in the billing side, so it is actually at the removal of all of this, but where are those points where you go, do we really need to do this? Is it right for the customer?

So the way I'm going to answer this may be in a roundabout fashion. One of the things I realized working, and I think you pick up from fashion retail, one, fashion retail, there is no faster paced version of commerce. The overnights alone can completely change direction for where the business is going.

Yeah.

Just based on how a new arrival Performant lands, yeah. Right, and lands. But I think the lessons that you can pick up from that are actually quite wonderful and insightful. Working specifically in operations and having to do site reliability before site reliability was a thing, and firsthand seeing the demand of traffic hit a site or hit a store in the in-store systems. When you have a product, friction doesn't matter. Right, when that product is in demand and it hits, that customer will go through site failures. They will stick around for the queues that people used to do. If, um, if the add to cart button didn't work on the first click, they'll struggle-click that 20 times to get that product. Like, I feel like friction will actually almost tell you if your product is truly in demand. Yeah, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't work to smooth out the process for folks, it just doesn't matter of convenience. Because for me, that's what e-commerce is. E-commerce is a mechanism of convenience to buy when I feel like buying it and having it arrive when I want it to arrive. That's, that's what we're after today.

So kind of combining two questions then, have we designed the way we think about commerce wrong for the last 20 years? I mean, I say that in the backdrop of a conversion rate that's been about 2.5% in the US for 15 years. It's now 3%. That's a good day for people.

Yeah.

The bad days are pretty awful. And you go home with your head in your hands and you're going, how do I change it tomorrow? And there's no easy answer because there's only a certain number of levers you can pull. How do we grasp that concept and say we need to do things differently? Could we be at NRF in 5 years and there's a brand new way of thinking about it? Or Have we saturated the market with this awful version of commerce?

I think we're in a cycle. I think it's always going to be there. I think this idea of saturation and the group following the pioneer, right, or following the innovator, that's always going to be a factor. I think 2% conversion is just going to be a standard of the general business cycle. And I think for those who truly answer the question of how are you connecting to your consumer? I think those are the folks when you chase that question and you can find your answer for it, which is not going to be cookie cutter, you know, even between, you know, within the sector, it won't be cookie cutter across sectors, won't be cookie cutter. But when you understand, and I, you know, I'll tie it to the earlier point of when your head of marketing or your head of brand is a participant in that culture.

Yeah.

I think the answer starts to manifest itself. I think those folks will, will see 3 to 5% conversion rate. The times are changing, but I feel like they're, they need to change back a little bit. I think we're going headstrong into, we're in our, what, third or fourth year of AI, but is the really the third wave of AI.

Yeah.

Right. You know, we, we had our, our personalization moment. We had our chatbot moment right now. We're in the agentic moment, right? And the milestones for AI are picking up and everyone's technically minded about how to create our efficiencies in building storefront. Essentially what we're doing is we're focused on building a better building. Mm-hmm. But you could have the perfect building, the best floor map, you could have the shelves exactly where you want it.

Mm-hmm.

But if you're not asking and answering the question of how are you connecting to your consumer?

Yeah.

You're not going to get anybody in the door.

Is it a factor of the relationships we build? And what I mean by that is when we go to conferences or we meet with our customers, we try and help them solve the problem that they're having as a business. We don't necessarily go down the customer route.

Yeah.

So by design, there should be more conflict between an agency and the branded dealer mix. Is that?

Good conflict, right? And I want to be clear on that because I think folks hear the word conflict and especially in an era right now where I think across topics, folks are really rooted in their camps and the idea of having a disagreement is almost offensive. And I think that hinders our ability to have progress, real progress, true progress with each other.

Yeah.

Um, and I lean on a couple folks. That, you know, I've benefited from that have exemplified this. And, you know, first one, Ed Foy and his wife Jennifer, who founded eFashion Solutions, I think back '06, '07, or like way back, right? Um, husband and wife team who watching them interact with each other, good conflict, right?

Okay.

Um, watching Ed in a room discuss with the greater team And it didn't matter what your title was. If you were just an engineer on that team, he wanted to hear your perspective. Coming up to later in my career, another individual I'll put out there is Joseph Baldini. He's probably shocked to hear me say his name.

Okay.

Because he and I have had conflict, good, bad, and otherwise throughout the tenure of our careers, right? And I used to love going to war with him in a room with a whiteboard and markers.

Wow.

And I mean, we would really, have it out, you know, over an idea. But what would come of that would be the bad possible solution you could, you could want for, right?

When is the last time you called Joseph?

Uh, it's probably been, uh, 2020. Wow. Um, and the reason for that is mainly because I felt like it was time for me to strike out on my own and not lean back on a support system that I knew was there. I needed to do this journey and kind of prove— it's kind of like leaving home.

It's a self-awareness thing as well though, I think.

Absolutely.

And sometimes we forget that we're responsible for our own destiny.

And then just to round it out, because I love things in threes.

Go for it.

I think in the relationships matter aspect of the theme here, Thomas, everyone who loves him calls him TJ Aubrey. Literally the tagline with him and Eric Dodier was relationships matter. And I think that that absolutely drove it home of when you're in business together, it really is about the relationship and the respect you have for each other to discuss great ideas and challenge each other respectfully, collaboratively, like friends would do. And I think that's, that's why right now I feel like my career is about being on a phenomenal road trip. You know, having great folks in the car with you.

Uh-huh.

And you may disagree about the radio.

Yeah.

You may disagree about the next stop, right?

You've gotta.

But you're all in the car together. And no matter what, you realize we're all in this together. Are going down the road towards that destination.

It's a, it's a great point to bring things back around. I'm looking at the clock here and we're hitting on 19 minutes. I try to keep this to 18 to 25 minutes is always my goal.

Told you it would be hard.

It's, it's, it's next to impossible, but we're going to try and keep it to that. So with that in mind, like to not to summarize your career, but you're someone who's grounded in the way that you grew up and translate that into all different parts of your life. And my interactions with you have always been that human first, and I'd hate to be your client because I'd probably want to be your friend, so I can't create that friction. But the question I get to at this point for everyone, and I can tell you this, if your career was a song right now, what would it be? Uh, long pause.

That's a, that's a, that is a hard one. Um, I'll tell you the first one that comes to mind is Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. And gather no moss. And I think that that is a great— I think that that sums up the conversation quite well, right? The idea of you can't stay stagnant, you can't stand in one place, you have to keep moving, you have to keep evolving. I think by doing so, you're continuously building your experience that not only you can benefit from, but sometimes there are things that happen that you don't know why they're happening until you realize the benefit of experiences for somebody else. And for your ability to identify with what they're going through and help coach them through it.

And that doesn't necessarily mean giving someone all the answers. It sometimes means just giving them the space to experience something. That was the second last question. You've described agency life really well in that last sentence as well, without describing agency life. But my final question to you today is, what's agency life look like, or SI life, for the year ahead? What would you be saying to those people who are now going, well, with AI here, We go from billable months to billable hours to billable minutes to that should be free. And I think, and you can correct me here or not, is we need to rebuild the value prop as to what an agency is or the knowledge pool that they bring. How do you view it?

So I was looking at this and there's two things that I kind of put out there. One, it does feel like there's a bit of a changing of the guard. Some of the great leaders that we've had for our agencies. Are now moving into the board position era of their careers. Okay. So I think that there is a new generation of leaders that are coming up.

Can I ask, is that B-O-A-R-D or B-O-R-E-D? Because I know a few in the Ladder Cap and—

Well, I think it depends on who's speaking for that session. Got it. But it is the B-O-A-R-D section. And I think that there are some young hungry leaders that are stepping up and stepping into positions and they're ready to go.

Can you name check anyone we should be following?

I would say follow Archive. I think they're, I've seen a collective of what I would call those leaders who are moving on get behind Archive Digital.

Amazing. Where are they based out of?

I don't know where Helen is based out of.

Okay.

That is it. That is a question even for me.

We'll figure that out.

Agency life is so rooted in remote now. Yeah. And we don't have the same thing that the retailers are having where there's a demand to pull them in 2, 3 days a week. So like when people ask me where I'm headquartered, I go to New Jersey, even though Litmus7 is built and headquartered in India, in Kochi. I think that's the other thing that we're seeing too move into the space is international players are starting to come in stateside and starting— there's a wealth of benefit of experience that's happening there as well.

Yeah, you just need to walk around the floor and see the international component is way bigger than the local, I think. It's incredible. Yeah.

And I think that that it really is, it speaks volumes to the upstart in the international, uh, uh, I don't want to say consolidation, but it does feel like we've gone from a series of US-led innovators to bringing commerce to where it is. And the rest of the world is now here with us lockstep and trying to participate.

It's interesting. I'd love to come back to this conversation in a few months, but one of the things I've realized in my studies of commerce here versus at home is we've tried to apply a US version of commerce to Irish retail and it doesn't work. We're too small a nation. We don't have the unit economics to ever make it work. And I did something similar in South Africa. So I'd love to pick this up with you in 12 months, maybe grab another beer, sit down and talk about the struggle bus part 2. But Chris, thank you so much for taking time out.

It's been a pleasure.

Always really, really enjoyed it. And you'll join us again soon, I hope.

Absolutely. Thank you, Vinny.

See you in Dobosh.