If You Smell Like a Wookiee, Your Margins Better Work

Welcome to another episode of The Ostrich Report with me, Vinny O Brien, and my co-host Hendrik Lauter. Hendrik, hope you got some shorts on. It's pretty warm where you are.

Uh, dude, shorts? I need a sea, I need waves, I need an island. I just, I need cool. I need, I need to be cool. I'm, I'm frying over here. Hello Vinny, it's nice to see you. Can't you see we have a guest?

I, I know, I was just going to say on our guest Jamie, who we both know and have spoken to before, uh, can feel your pain, Jamie. Jamie Roller, thank you so much for joining us from Dr. Squatch. It's your first trip to The Ostrich Report, welcome aboard.

Thank you guys, excited to chat today.

Yeah, the, the Ostrich Report, for those who haven't listened, it's the marketplace podcast you didn't know you need and probably still questioning why you're listening. But there you go. Myself and Hendrik break down marketplace news from around the world and have amazing guests, people like Jamie, to help us understand the world that we operate in. But Jamie, maybe you could set the scene for us, tell us a little bit about Dr. Squatch, your role in there, and what kind of a team that you have, just to give us a sense of the, the, the size and scale of it.

Thanks, Vinny. Yes, I head up the marketplace team at Dr. Squatch. I've been there for about 4 years, just seen ourselves through quite a few phases of growth at this point. Primarily my focus is on Amazon, but also oversee our retail.com, 1P platforms. Yeah.

And marketplace sometimes is a dirty word, yet you wear this like a badge of honor, which I love about you. You take great pride in being a marketplace operator. Can you tell me a little bit or tell people at home just a little bit about what a month in the life of an operator looks like.

I'm glad it comes across that way because I don't think I always feel like I'm taking pride in it.

A badge of honor can sometimes be like fallen heroes and like we all do. Yeah, that's what it feels like.

Easy, easy, uh, Vinny, we spoke about this earlier. This is a friendly podcast. It's a friendly podcast. Thanks for letting me. Jamie, yes, Jamie, please tell us more.

Yeah. So, I mean, running a marketplace business, if it's a 3P marketplace business, is super dynamic. You kind of really, you basically running a P&L within a business end to end. You have kind of, my, my role is responsible for everything from like deciding what we're going to sell to getting the inventory into Amazon to marketing it, well, merchandising it and then marketing it and putting media behind it. And so it's quite a dynamic role. It's very fun. Every day is kind of different. I mean, Really, like, my months change, you know, as the year goes by. Right now we're in peak season, and we're also doing 2026 budgeting and planning. So this always ends up being the craziest time of year. But really, I mean, it's more like what is a week in my life. Very kind of split between doing, you know, deep dives on performance and like hands-in operations. And then a big part of my role is also the strategy work. Like, you know, where are we going next? How are we going to meet our goals in the long term? What's coming up on the roadmap?

A key differentiator, and I know maybe we get into some of the successes you've had in a little bit of time, but you've mentioned P&L ownership. I think that's one big differentiator. But can you maybe enlighten me? Do you think you can be a strategic owner of a marketplace business, particularly Amazon, if you haven't been in the weeds for quite some time?

No, I mean, I don't think you can. In fact, like that was kind of my journey. I started my career as a management strategy consultant and it took me, I moved into an operator role and it took me a few years to actually understand like what a purchase order actually is. And you know, you know, like what the, what the KPIs are to drive, to drive revenue. So I 100% think you need to, you need to get your hands in the weeds just because you need to understand, like if we're promising to grow 25% year over year, what does that actually entail? Because there's a whole business running behind it. It's not just about like the numbers and the strategy.

It's—

that was the biggest change that I think I had from when I was pure consultant to being an operator.

And you jumped into an incredibly challenging product set as well. I mean, maybe tell us a little bit about the product and the brand and just so that people get this maybe kind of visceral feel for Dr. Squatch.

I mean, in some ways it was challenging, but in some ways, you know, Dr. Squatch is a super fun brand. So we're, over a decade old at this point. We were founded in California. Um, we make, we basically make better-for-you skincare and personal care for men. So we started our business, you know, making natural soaps in kind of innovative and fun scents, and then have since grown out our product lines to encompass like deodorants and haircare and cologne. Um, but really our focus is on, on kind of giving better-for-you products for men and doing it with a fun, um, twist. So we do a lot of partnerships with some, you know, names that everyone recognizes— Star Wars, we've done partnerships with Sydney Sweeney. And, you know, I think what really sets us apart is our sense, like, we just have, in my opinion, the best smelling soaps in the business and the best smelling deodorants. So it's in some ways, it's tough because, you know, you're playing in like a very commoditized field, you're up against the big names, like who, you know, everyone buys them, and we're a little bit irreverent, and that's kind of set us apart there. So it's for sure fun.

So what's interesting to me, what you've just said, Jamie, is that you're a female managing a male brand. And I'm being sincere when I say this, generally it's the other way around. It's males running businesses in female categories. What is— what was the biggest learning that you had to make in like the first year of being at Dr. Squat? That you had to like make to think like, wow.

You know, I, it's funny that you mentioned that because I've been asked that before. And for me, it never really was a, um, I didn't really have to make any mental shifts. I think, you know, the beauty of selling consumer products is that like you buy them yourself, whether you're, whether you're selling to men or women, like it's, you know what, you know why, you know why you buy soap, you know what you're looking for when you buy soap. I think, I mean, of course, like when you, when you sell it, when you enter a new brand, there's a lot of, um, uh, you need to get into the weeds and understand like who is the customer and, you know, what are, what are they looking for? And I think it helps that a lot of, like when I joined, we were, we had a lot of guys working at the company. And so they were able to kind of give me a firsthand perspective of like how they see the brand. But I mean, it's, it's, it's, It's actually pretty easy because I buy soap myself, so I kind of know what I'm looking for there.

Okay, and I ask out of interest because I worked with Unilever on a D2C project. It's got, it's 12 years ago now, but it was trying to get the business to operationally set up to break down a pallet to be able to sell individual units on Amazon. And at the time we were selling Axe deodorant and the delivery cost of the best we could get for an individual unit was about $15. How has that cost structure, or has it changed dramatically? And I ask in the context of, you think of soap and, and, and, um, personal care products, and they don't have a huge price point. So you had operational learnings to go with the brand, and, and how much did that operational need shape the brand, or was it the brand was already there and within that there was these offerings that you started to put together that made sense for different channels of business.

Yeah. I think it's probably worth just defining like for people listening, the difference between a 1P and a 3P brand on Amazon. So a lot of the big consumer goods companies run their businesses as 1P, first party, which means that they sell to Amazon on a wholesale basis, like they would to any big retailer. And Amazon is then in control of the prices.. And they essentially like their remit finishes when they sell the product. Whereas when you're a 3P, third-party seller brand on Amazon, which is what we are and always have been, you send the product to Amazon, you maintain ownership of the product, but you are responsible for the fulfillment costs to your customers. And Amazon charges you a referral fee and that can add up pretty quickly, which is what you're referring to. It's, it's, depending on the category and the price point, it can be a very expensive model, but the benefit is that you retain ownership. I think if I think back to the market at large 4 years ago, when I joined Squatch, you know, it, I mean, the Amazon P&L was an interesting P&L because the margins aren't great. You're, you're giving 30% to Amazon. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's difficult to motivate at times. I think what You know what the difference has been over, I think, you know, my time at Squatch and I've seen the same with a lot of consumer brands is just balancing up maybe tighter margins on an Amazon channel with the huge addressable market that you can tap into. So it, you know, it becomes a balancing act between like, what is our profitability on a unit basis or, you know, contribution margin for the P&L as a whole versus like What total contribution profit could we get if we just like really leverage this channel? And that's, I think, a conversation that everyone's having at this, at this point.

And, and this might sound like a, a dumb question, but can you achieve the economic requirements on a non-unit basis? Like if, if it's not there in a single unit, can you look within bundles or different ways to structure the, the, the product sale to make those economics marry up?

Yes, 100%. That's a great point. Um, so fulfillment costs are set on a unit basis at Amazon, and there's, you know, it's based on dimensional sizes. So you can imagine if you're selling like one single bar of soap, you have to pay, I don't know, $2.50 fulfillment fees. Like, that's expensive. If you then bundle it and you're in the, you know, you might be a weight class up, but essentially it's, you're spending less per child unit. That is something that we've done at Squatch was heavily lean into larger bundles to offset the fulfillment costs.

Yeah, and it's something that strikes me as being one of those differentiators. And when I look back to that time at Unilever, we weren't able to achieve even that operational setup to have multiple units put together. I worked after that with Tassimo working on the sale of coffee pod bundles, and we were able over kind of a 3-month period to ascertain what was the optimum bundle size that we could sell for people, and that became like the economic lever that we could pull all the time. But kind of going back before that, if you take your previous roles and let's say Takealot, you know, managing multiple SKUs, you must have a very innate commerciality. Would that be— we haven't talked about this before in previous discussions, but you must have very strong commercial skills, Seth.

I hope so. I mean, when I joined Takealot, I was Actually on the other side. So I essentially ran the retail P&L for Takealot, i.e., like 1P. I would buy, I would, I was a buyer really. I would buy in inventory. And I think you have to be very commercial when you're doing that. I think, you know, I wasn't necessarily an old school buyer, like a lot of my peers at the time, but I had to learn to like negotiate and think through like, you know, how do we, yeah. Like how do you roll up everything to the P&L? It was a challenging role. I think I, at one point when I was managing the beauty department at Takealot, I was responsible for 50,000 products, buying in 50,000 products. So it's, yeah, you absolutely have to be like, you absolutely have to have a commercial mindset. And I think also like have fundamental understandings of economics and like be able to build a strong model. Cause you can't do that, a role like that without those skills.

And if you want to then couple that and say, well, the piece that a lot of D2C brands focus on is on, we want to be customer-focused and we get all this feedback and there's this great feedback loop. I don't believe they are. I think they believe in that world, but they don't operate in that feedback loop cycle. When you're in the Amazon feedback loop cycle, how are you able to measure and gain customer insights when it's not as open a marketplace for that sort of data sharing? Or how do you generate that sense of economic or customer demand for product?

Yeah, I mean, I think of course it's challenging with Amazon. They give you very limited data on who your customer is. They share very limited things. There are some workarounds, you know, like within the Amazon ecosystem where you can find tools that will calculate your customer LTV, but you just don't have the same insight that we could get from our D2C customers. I think it's been a bit of an art and a science. Like we've leveraged survey tools at points to get more of the like anecdotal data and then kind of triangulating what we see on the D2C side with what we see on Amazon and making some inferences there. And I think, yeah, one of the most important things for us has been the surveys that we run to customers and we run those on a very broad base. It always ends up being a sample of a sample, but it's better than nothing. I would say it's one of the big challenges of running an Amazon business is you just don't get the data that you'd like.

I think the challenge that you've just communicated is, I think, the challenge that brands don't want to admit to. The challenge is, if you think about it, if I'm selling Jamie's roller hardware store, roller balls, and I'm doing it on a wholesale level. I don't know who my customer is. I don't know what the purchasing habit is. The challenge for me that I see, and I wanted to ask you about this, how much time do you spend inside dashboards and inside data analytics to ensure that things are happening as planned?

Like, I mean, it depends on the day, but like I would say on average it's about 20 to 30% of my time. I mean, like really the first thing I do every morning is I go into Amazon Seller Central and I look at the sales we did yesterday. So it's like, you know, it's still a very hands-on role, still very like clicking around in Amazon. And then, you know, we've managed over the years to build out some more advanced analytics internally at Squatch. And so I do spend a lot of time like digging into the numbers, One of the important things for us these days, as with everyone else in e-commerce, is the question of incrementality. So a lot of what I've been doing lately is building analyses that try to show the incrementality levels at our various media spends. So yeah, there's a fair amount of data analysis.

You mean you're not looking at cannibalization? You talk about incrementality most of the time.

That was the hot— That was the hot word like 2 years ago. I think everyone's moved on from that. I feel like 2 years ago everyone was very worried about Amazon cannibalizing their D2C business. And this is something I saw like across all verticals. These days, I, the conversation has really changed. So cannibalization is an issue, but we think about it more in terms of like you know, we launch new products, so they're cannibalizing existing product lines versus like, is Amazon cannibalizing other channels?

And that's— go ahead, Hendrika.

But that's a very important, that's a very important point that Jamie's just very quietly just moved into the conversation. Because if you think about it, one of the biggest truths that nobody wants to admit to in the D2C space is that in order to scale from 100 to 500 or whatever number you want to use, you need wholesale. And cannibalization is a, is a large word, but I, I just think that what Vinny kind of excluded in saying is that the, the D2C hype cycle has essentially gotten quieted because of the fact that there is no scale. And if you are managing a large CPG brand like you, uh, Jamie, you're at the end of the day responsible for Let's be honest, it's 90 days of results. You're not, you're not being held hostage for a day. For the record, I'm glad that you spend your first moment of being awake in the morning with a cup of coffee with an analytics dashboard. I don't feel alone anymore, Vinny. That's, that's a big deal. But the point is, on a more serious note, is that the changing of cannibalization to incremental mentality is the the conversation we've had in previous episodes of the Ostrich Report where we say if you are a business, a brand, you need to be on the marketplace, a place where this is the eyeballs. And I think Jamie has very quietly, very intelligently dropped a huge breadcrumb here that brands need a shift in mind. This is not about eating us. This is about ensuring that we don't get eaten, if that makes sense.

Yeah, well, I think brands are becoming more and more aware that the customer journey is not linear anymore. Customers don't find you on one channel, like see your Meta ad, go to one channel, like go to retail and check out. I mean, some customers do, but like you kind of, what you're trying to do is create this ecosystem where You know, maybe, maybe you drop a limited edition on D2C and a customer wants to buy that, but then, you know, they go into a retail store and they, they top up there, you know, or they shop for you on Marketplace. And so it's like, what you really want to do is drive loyalty across like channel agnostic. It's not, it's also because it's not straightforward. It's not a straightforward thing to do, but I think that's where I see the conversation shifting is more like, how do we just drive customer loyalty regardless of channel?

Yeah, and it feels like a good opportunity to jump out of the weeds because we've been in there for quite a while. And that whole conversation piece I think is really interesting because it feels like we're still trying to get brand— we're still trying to convince operators that they need to be on marketplaces, um, despite the, the, the huge scale that they have. And I think it's a reluctance to accept certain things, like, you know, there's not the same level of insights available on Amazon for sure. But those kind of insights are kind of held hostage in other platforms as well. Unless you can do something or have an analytics team or a BI team that can extract information and present it to you, you're not able to make decisions. And I heard this really interesting quote, it stuck with me recently. And it's not that we need better insights, we need better decisions. And the way I think about it is almost in the inverse of what you said, Jamie. It's like if I'm operating a marketplace, I'm trying to find out from my data, not just on the sales side, but strategically. And maybe you can tell us about how you view the strategy into the coming year or so. How do I understand, can I take my existing product and develop a line for my marketplace channel? And we rarely invert that discussion to say, well, actually Amazon is a competitive space. And if I'm afraid of it with my existing lines, can I not just use that information to say, well, actually there's something I can do slightly different here, but still serve a channel with this enormous traffic I have a hot take on this.

Um, hello, hello.

I don't, I'm not very bullish on Amazon exclusive product lines. Um, I, I think maybe in 2020, like when there was a lot of white space on Amazon and you had all these small brands that were spinning up and like finding the, the niches that you could, you know, like there were many people who'd made businesses out of like many businesses out of this. And I think that the landscape's just changed. Amazon is a very clogged space. And unless you have a good reason to launch something that's gonna play well at the top of shelf, like why, why would you do it? And also like, then why would you do an exclusive for Amazon? Like customers aren't, it's very hard to market to customer. You know, Amazon is just a shelf. Like it's not, you don't have the ability to really tell a story to some degree. You don't have the ability to really tell a story. So it's, to me, it's not convincing to say like, this is an Amazon exclusive and we're only gonna do this for Amazon. If it was so good, why wouldn't you sell it in all of your channels?

So to answer that, what you have just said, and this is quite revealing, is you've just spoken about management consultants because management consultants, this was the line. And I'm not trying to be funny here.

It's just, we got a deck for this, Hendrik. Can we go get a deck and we'll pull it up?

I'll build you a deck.

It's my favorite thing to do.

But in all seriousness, the thing is this, if you've had the privilege to sit in a conversation with Jamie folks, This is the thing that makes her very unique, is that she has these insights that's based on feel and data. And when she has a hard take, it's generally not a hard take, it's a mild take, because there's reasons behind it. And, and for me, it's important to say this because I think the biggest challenge that we have in the marketplace sector is that we don't have operators talking to us about next year. I'm talking to you about the next month. I'm talking to you about the next quarter. I'm not talking to you about what happens in 2027 because, oh, holy, holy hell, I need to get through 4 lines of reporting and 3 lines of management meetings, blahdy blah blahdy blah. So I just wanted to say here that I find it refreshing that an operator has the guts to have an opinion but then to be able to back it up. Because I don't see that often. I see lots of LinkedIn posts, I see lots of podcast episodes. Yes, if you are still listening, we're doing a good job. The point is just, this is— the world has changed. And Jamie's point about it being more competitive, unless you are actually spending time on Amazon, nobody would know that it's basically become a huge battle for attention and eyeballs. I know I'm stating the obvious. Jamie, don't— you don't— you wouldn't know it, but Vinny sometimes calls me Captain Obvious. But the point is, is that— can we just move slowly to— I have a question for you that I've been wanting to ask since we started.

But just wait there. Are we saying we've categorically downgraded the hot take to a mild take? I mean, I'm happy with that.

If we feel like it's a mild take, that would make me a lot happier.

So unnecessary. Hendrik, carry on with your question.

No, it's, it's just I, I don't want, I don't want some person from Business Insider to come do an AI aggregation and then basically say, head of e-commerce for Dr. Squash says— no, no, no, calm down everybody, relax. But, but just calm down. So, so the point is, Vinny, we try to be friendly. I'll reiterate again, this is a friendly podcast. Why are you trying to be so difficult tonight? The point is, is what is keeping you up at night for the next 18 months? I want to know what's going on in your mind for the next 18 months. What's keeping you up?

I think 25% of it is AI and how it's gonna shape, how it's gonna shape things. I mean, maybe it's less like 20%, but I, it's, it's very top of mind for me, but I, I think we're still in such early days realistically. Like a lot of people are just at this point throwing around buzzwords and like anecdotes and it's not, not super helpful. So it's something that I think a lot about, but you know, it, it's still very much feeling it out. I think most, most of what keeps me up at night is just growth strategy and media, media strategy and how, how to think about that. And Amazon, that is a space that I'm sure you guys have spoken about this, has just evolved a lot over the last few years. And it's, I mean, not only has it become more competitive, like Amazon just increasing their ad inventory and putting more and more pressure on you to spend in more upper funnel channels, which could be another hot take. But it's also like, you know, people are getting smart. Some brands are getting smarter with how they're doing it. And some brands are doing it the same old way. And it's like a bit of a war of the factions. So keeps me up at night deciding how we're gonna, how we're gonna continue growing.

So I have a hot take. I have a hot take. Please, here's the hot take.

Do it.

The hot take is, is that these AI agents is gonna be gonna better long-standing brands that have more money than able to spend. Um, Jamie, when you have time, listen to the interview that Vinny O Brien and I did with Max Sinclair from Azoma. He's made the argument to me that if you're a large CPG that has millions of dollars, you're able to get access to the right tools. I think the— this AI agentic thing is going to reverse the small being so nimble, and it's actually going to essentially inverse what we are seeing, where because you have— are small and you don't have access to like trucks full of cash, you're going to struggle. Because let's be honest, what is this? AI is just another way to extract money from brands.

I, I don't know if I agree with you, Hendrik. I, um, I mean, firstly, like, those big brands are so bureaucratic, like, that having a pro— like, having— and, and, and on top of that, LLMs reward recency. And so, you know, brands who like, I don't know, say have copy that's been updated 2 years ago, like, and to change that is like a whole change in their processes. Like, I don't, I mean, they are potentially on a back foot. I'm not saying they are, but I've certainly like anecdotally, like if you, if you look, I mean, you get pretty strange results if you do some shopping-related queries in ChatGPT today. Like in some cases, the big brands pop up and other, in other cases it's like, Brands you would never think should be surfacing and they're getting a lot of relevancy. So I don't know. I also think that is yet to be determined.

But it's interesting though, in the context of the recency piece, because people are now willing to invest time in AEO or whatever they want to call it now, but they have done nothing for 15 years.

Thank you.

Look, there's so many acronyms now. I don't even care what I call it anymore. That's how I feel about it. But there's this idea of arbitrage right now, and it's like when Amazon first came out. When I think about LLMs and it goes to your idea of incrementality, Jamie, that there's going to be people who will have success stories shouting from the rooftops for the next few months, and they're going to be the ones we hear loads about. But it won't be the failed legacy businesses who've invested time and effort in putting teams in place or the service providers who've now made it possible for you to update inventory in real time and all these silly little things that we take for granted that have existed for a long time, it still has quite some way to play out. And the other point is around the advertising that's going to sit within the LLMs. And there was a point made as well by Max in that discussion where he said that we don't have the patience to view more ads in another channel anymore, we as consumers. And it's one thing we do really poorly, I think, in our industry is we don't think as consumers. We think as industry thought leaders or people who are in our jobs, and, and we, we tend to think the best of, of what's available to us, which I, I kind of think is a dangerous place to be. There was something else you said though that I'd like to just focus on for a bit, and again, I'm just conscious of your time as well, but the idea of the shelf just being a shelf. And I think it gives a really interesting insight into how maybe you think about that world, how do you then gather information from other shelves the business is in? Or how do you distribute information as a team to make sure there's something useful being surfaced about your channel of business that other people can make decisions on?

Well, I think the one cool thing about Amazon— well, there's, there's many cool things about Amazon versus, you know, anywhere else you could sell, but the, the, you, you have, you have a, like, huge untapped pool of data. Well, if you can tap into this huge pool of data about like, where are you ranking by keyword and what is your share on this subcategory versus peers and how does it change over time? And you, you firstly, you can't do the same for D2C. I mean, you, you, you just can't. And in retail, the data's firstly a lot less granular. Secondly, a lot less, like a lot, you know, not, not as real time and you can't make such real-time decisions. So like, On Amazon, the games that people are playing is really like, how do we, for this one keyword that we want to rank for, like how do we best spend so that we become the number one ranked brand? So when a customer searches for it, like we're their number one choice. Like that is like the game that you play and you can have a lot of fun playing around with. Like, I don't know if I answered your question, but this is what came to mind to me. Like have a lot of fun playing around with like, What are the keywords that our customers are searching for and how do we make sure we win those keywords? That's kind of the game.

But Vinny, just for a minute before you jump in, what Jamie has just said is what once again we don't want to admit to, and that is that all these channels have challenges and trying to get a 360 picture, it sounds really nice in presentations and PDFs and all those things. Jamie, I'm not having a shot at you, just by the way, this is a sector problem. Um, is that every channel has its challenges, but at the end of the day, Amazon does enough to ensure that it keeps being the Pied Piper for brands because you're able to make decisions based on the data that they give you. Try and ask a large brand like Dr. Squatch how they make decisions about what happens in a retailer. I'm not going to mention any retailer names because I It's not my business. But the point is, is that I believe what this conversation today highlights to me is that when you are a brand, it's hard to ensure that you can create an ecosystem where there's multiple touchpoints. It sounds good in principle, but it's hard, hard, hard work.

There's also something really insane in what you said. You mentioned Amazon and fun in the same sentence, Jamie, and Definitely at first.

I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't at least a little fun. Like, let's be honest, like, it has to be.

But I think that can only come from an inherent understanding of what you do, so you don't fear the day you walk into it. I think people who kind of go into the role sometimes, they go in almost nervous every morning because they don't know what they're facing into. They don't know how to deal with it, and they don't know what levers to pull. So I think they inherently just come in and go, oh shit, what am I gonna do? What am I going to do today? And you certainly don't fall into that bucket. And the other part of the question I muddled through, which I'd love to just pick your brain on for a few minutes, is how do you distribute the information so the business can do something with it? And what kind of a forum do you have to set? And you've talked to me before about culture. And look, you're an incredibly credible person. And I think if you were saying, look, we're having a meeting about this, but How's that created in Squatch and how do other people receive that information?

That's a, I mean, that's a huge question that I don't even know I can answer. I think, you know, just to give some kudos to the team, the team at Squatch is one of the smartest teams I've ever worked with. And fortunately, like, you know, it comes down to culture where everyone is very interested in what everyone else is doing and understands how things work and are, you know, you know, all very analytical and creative people. And it's, it's a very, very rare thing to be able to work with a team like that. I mean, tactically in terms of like disseminating information, you know, we, I think we, we try to do a mix of like, I don't know if this answers the question very tactically, but like standardized regular reporting. So, you know, whether it's like a monthly update or a weekly update, so that everyone is kind of aware of this because in some, in most brands, the Amazon and marketplace team sits a little bit siloed to other teams. I think this happens in like almost all brands because that brand kind of operates on its own. And so, you know, one of the cool things that we've done over the last few years is like get better integration between my team and the rest of the teams. And some of that is like just regular data sharing. I think it's also, I mean, we also have a fabulous data team and my own team is fabulous. And so we do a lot of like, I mean, like regular reporting and digging into the numbers and setting up dashboards. So there's an element of like just keeping the lights running and having my team like have the best information they can. And there's an element of like rolling it up to a more strategic level so that the rest of the teams know what we're doing too. And we can show then what comes next.

You're helping me with my whole culture beats strategy mindset at the minute. But I think it's so important right now. It's the idea of wanting to win on any given day. I think it's hugely important, but also for a team to feel like they're heard, I think is important. And for those who don't know, you work with a distributed team, right? And they're on different time zones and the challenges are not just around information sharing. It's this whole other subculture. So I think when you say your team is fabulous, you've got to accept some little bit of credit for all of this.

I don't know if I would accept credit, but I mean, no, you know, it's like, I think part of the reason that what makes my job so fun is like, it's a challenge, but we have just such good people. And so that makes it fun coming in every day. And I think, It's hard to claim credit for anything good we've done, even just specifically on the Amazon channel, because I just feel like our leadership team, we also have a really good leadership team. And I think that has made my job like 100% easier.

Okay. Well, look, we're getting close to closing this up. You're in peak season. I don't know the peak maybe affects you as much, but you've got lots of interesting campaigns.

It absolutely does.

It does.

Yes, gifting like Star Wars soap, you can imagine a lot of people want to do that.

I need to get my C-3PO and R2-D2, uh, scent on. What about you, Hendrik? If you were going to pick a Star Wars scent, who would it be?

Um, Chewbacca, because I have a funny accent.

Everybody loves the Wookiee, everybody does. So Jamie, look, we, we better let you get back to the day job or get it started. What are your thoughts going into early 2026? Where's your focus going to be?

I think, I mean, again, like it comes back to team, like building my team and getting us operating efficiently, like, and at a high level, the better the team is operating, better things will run. So that's the biggest thing for me this year.

Hendrik, before we go, do you have any closing notes, any comments? You've downgraded hot takes and mild takes. You have, um, tried to put our guests in some uncomfortable positions and you've decried the deck. What else would you like to add in before we close up?

So, uh, what Jamie's conversation today highlighted to me is something that Vinny and I have spoken about on it often, and I think if you're a brand, do yourself a favor and get people who have been on the other side of the table. Having the knowledge of understanding how marketplaces work not from being a brand, but being from the operator side of the platform is a big deal, number one. Number two, I think Jamie's being very kind when she says that it's, it's all the other people. Let me just get this straight out here, folks. This woman sits in the middle of the world dealing with a bazillion time zones and a whole lot of stress. The, the remaining factor for me about this conversation is about is the 3-letter word that starts with an F. It's fun. I can see Jamie has a ton of fun. It's, it's the fact that she wants to go to work. I never said— I never thought I'd say those words today, but here I am. The point for me remains is that marketplaces should be a big deal, and you should be having interdepartmental communication and all of those things. I'll be honest, and I'm gonna get absolutely shellacked for what I'm gonna say, but I do not care. Until I meet Jamie in person, I did not know a thing about Dr. Squash. It's horrific. Now I actually know a lot about it, and I'm amazed at the fact that this business that is based from California is literally building in right in front of us something that is really unique, and they're just doing it. There's no, there's no lots of PR, there's not a lot of TechCrunch articles, Yes, they have folks speaking at conferences. Yes, they have folks going to podcasts. But this is the kind of stuff that people that love marketplaces, these are the types of people that you want in your circle, in your network, in your LinkedIn network, in your AI network, whatever, because this is real stuff. Vinny, I think Jamie knocked it out the park, to be honest.

Next time, give us the short version, Hendrik. That'll be fine. Jamie, as ever, you make our day better. You enlighten us. And I love that you disagreed with stuff as well. I think this is the first time in a podcast someone has disagreed with something. So I'm grateful for me. Grateful to you for your time as ever. And look, hope you guys get together for coffee again soon, get to hang out, and don't burn up in the heat. I know it's summer there, so spare a thought for me here in Ireland wearing shorts, still hopeful for a non-windy, non-rainy day. But, uh, thanks for taking time out with us today.

Thanks, guys, this was great.

Yeah, I loved having you. Till the next time, we'll see you again. Thanks from Hendrik and myself.