Latest / Talk Commerce / Retail Innovation Takes Center Stage at eTail Palm Springs with Isaac Morey
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:00.14) Welcome to Talk Commerce, I'm Isaac Mori. Today's episode is a compilation of conversations that we recorded at eTale Palm Springs. eTale is a unique show with a uniquely storied history in the world of e-com. It's been around since before Google was the dominant search engine and it's still bringing together a smart and unique crowd of e-commerce leaders today. Let's dive right into today's compilation episode. Yeah, I'm Katherine Hayden. I'm the chief marketing officer at Cape Farms. which is a medical nutrition company that makes plant-based organic nutrition shakes and formulas really for ages one to 101. Great, and Catherine, you're gonna be on a panel here at eTale Palm Springs. Could you share a little bit about what you'll be talking about there? I am. I was sharing a little bit earlier, I'm on a panel with like total brand crushes with Panagonia and Sur La Tab. The theme that we're talking about is authenticity and transparency at retail and what it takes to deliver on that, not just from a brand perspective, but from a real strategic importance. I'll be sharing Kate Farm's origin story and just how we approach authenticity and looking forward to it. Very cool. Could you give us the 30 second origin story? Yeah. Yeah. So K Farms was founded by parents, Richard and Michelle, and really saving their daughter Katie's life. So Kate is real. She was born with cerebral palsy. At five years of age, she weighed 16 pounds, which is just profoundly malnutrition. And she wasn't tolerating any of the products on the market. So she was too fed. So they took matters out of desperation into their own hands. They created the first formulation Brent Peterson (01:46.528) with a dietitian, vegan chef, and those principles still sort of hold true today. And Kate is now turning 20 this summer and doing amazing. Since then, Kate Farms has grown and helped over 650,000 people. So we have started in the medical channel, and now we are expanding into retail as well as e-commerce. Anything that's especially exciting this year that you want to share? think the biggest excitement this year is broader awareness. So we built out a brand team last year that has really defined the role of the brand, the values of the brand, how we express that. And now we're going to be putting that into place this year with our first brand campaign. We're investing on Amazon in a lot more of upper funnel. So DSP. prime video to let people know about Kate Farms. We also are launching an additional flavor on one of our newest and best performing products, High Protein Nutrition Shake, and that will be at retail this summer. And how's the experience been at eTale? And has there been any key takeaways that you'll be remembering and implementing back in the office? This is my first eTale. And this is actually my second podcast. The first was like 15 minutes ago. So thank you guys for having me. I would say the biggest takeaway for me, there's great learnings across AI and work that's happening across channels. It has actually been the ability to connect with really great people. solving problems for their business, helping others, and you can't manufacture that. And so actually being here in person has really stood out to me. And I think the piece that I've learned and taken away is in today's world, the importance of authenticity and transparency at retail. Consumers are becoming much more discerning, knowing who you are and recognizing audiences that you're building for. Brent Peterson (03:48.502) and saying no, this is not who we are also supports authenticity. So excited to chat more later today on that. Cool. Well, as we wrap up, do you want to give us the shameless plug for Kate Farms? Shameless plug. Kate Farms is organic, plant-based, nutrition, shakes and formulas, ages one to end of life. We're available in the medical channel, but we've also expanded to Amazon. retail with Walmart distribution and new retailers later this year. It is absolutely delicious. So I encourage you guys to try it. And maybe the last thing to think about is there are, you think about the U.S., six out of 10 Americans have a chronic health condition. And that's where Kate Farms is really helping support those folks. What's the buzz at E-Tail here in Palm Springs? Well, I'm probably not the first person to say it, but obviously AI is quite the hot topic and particularly where brands are in terms of the adoption curve. There's a lot of hype out there and I think that one of the things that we're hearing is that a lot of these brands are really having a hard time going from all of the different solutions that are out there and all the possibilities into actually putting those in action in the real world. Yeah. And do you have any advice for how companies can kind of narrow that down and choose what's actually worth pursuing? Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with where you're experiencing pain, where you're experiencing an opportunity for either cost savings or improvement or there might be friction. That's really what got us to start Brandfuel. And I think also there's a lot of partners out there that are either in the agency space or in the consulting space. They're starting to specialize in some of these solutions and some this digital transformation. I think those are good places to start to learn a little bit more. But I think the other thing is it seems to be changing every single day and just following it, following thought leaders like yourself or sharing other people and their experiences, it's evolving. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the role that brand fuel can play. What's the elevator pitch? What are you guys all about? Yeah. Brent Peterson (06:14.21) The biggest thing in the world of AI is like any shopper can go to any LLM anywhere in the world and ask a question about any product. And if there's anything that is guaranteed, it's the LLM is not going to say, I don't know. It's going to give an answer. And so it's incumbent upon anyone who's selling a product online to make sure that they are building the appropriate infrastructure to make sure that they're getting the right answers and the right knowledge about their product out in the world. So whether it's selling in multiple languages or selling on multiple channels or even providing really rich depth of content that chat GPTs and the Clauds of the world, the Geminis of the world can use when a consumer asks a question. We are building a product data platform that allows these organizations to capture all of the digital assets that they have that are knowledgeable about the product, whether it's product images, product videos. PDFs, training materials. We bring all that together in one place to make sure that these brands can actually disseminate the story about these products in a way where they maintain the editorial control, they make sure that their brand is well represented, but get the right information in front of the consumers as opposed to having it locked away behind a firewall and allowing AI to just make stuff up because they're not providing the answers. Great. And as we see all these big changes What would you say is the biggest mistake that brands are making nowadays when it comes to getting that stuff out there? Well, I would just say bearing your head probably and saying, this is not real yet. This is not ready for me yet. I think this is going to be one of those things that before you know it, it's out there and a lot of the competition is using it. So I think it's, and the fact that it is too hard or too complex to sort of figure out, right? So I think if you seek it, there are some really interesting and burgeoning new solution providers, new digital agencies that are wrapping their heads around things like GEO and AEO and like agentic commerce. Brent Peterson (08:31.682) A lot of thought leaders that are blogging about it, that are podcasting about it. And so it's out there and it's happening now. And it's really not as much of a barrier to entry to get in and to try and to really kind of help you operate and unlock some of this opportunity. Great. Last question for each of you. I'll give you a chance to answer. Final words or hot takes? Not totally a hot take guy. I think the hottest take that I would give you is that if you're not thinking now about what your organization needs to look like in 2027, you're going to get blown away because the pace of the innovation is accelerating and it's the organizations that are saying now what does the AI enabled organization look like next year that are going to be successful and if you wait until the market is ready for this, you're going to be too late. So you've got to get going on this now. You can't wait until it's too late. I would just say the other hot take, you know, being a part of eTail now and in eTail events many years gone by, I'm really excited to see just sort of a lot of renewed energy around innovation. And that's top to bottom from, you know, new companies, new brands, new retailers. and new solution providers and technology providers that are out there. It's really exciting to see somebody who's sort of been in this space a long time to see this kind of fresh state and fresh attitude. My name is Ian Patterson and I'm one of the co-founders at Remark. Remark is we provide AI personalization on brand sites by pairing shoppers with a real human or AI shopping assistant. And what's super unique about think the e-com space right now is that there's a huge amount of conversational data. Think about shoppers talking to their GPTs and their Geminis and telling those bots everything about their life, right? And what makes me excited is like how do we give that type of experience on a brand's website? So if a shopper tells you, hey, this is my size, this is my budget, I'm buying this for my partner or my fiance, how do we take that data and then use it? Brent Peterson (10:53.614) when a shopper comes back to chat with us, or how do we use it in an email campaign or an SMS campaign and let the shopper know, hey, we hear you, we've heard you in these past conversations. How do we make the experience virtual for you as well? Why do brands choose Remark? Yeah, so there are a few things. So one, we see there are a ton of these, let's call it like GPT type wrappers, right? A simple tweak and throw on your site, you ingest a few different pieces of content. And then, the expectations that'll work magically. That's not how it works, right? Like AI, you know, it takes a lot of time investment and there's a learning curve. And so what we do for partners is we acknowledge like, hey, hey Ecom Director, you have a lot on your plate. We will build the agent for you end to end and you'll get to test it and tweak it and we'll go live with a small part of your traffic. And as it improves, it scales, then we'll go live with your full amount of traffic. off the bat. take the sort of agency type of approach where we build the whole component for our brands. That's number one. Number two, it's how do we utilize the data that we're getting from conversations. Right now, think about all the different emails shoppers are sending or chats they're having. That data isn't being used, it's cast aside. All the times you call a brand, they're not doing anything with that data. That to us is a massive gap. A shopper will unload their entire buying preferences into a chat and our views utilize that. If you're a food brand and a shopper tells you, hey I'm vegan, don't show them the beef jerky. Or if a shopper tells you, hey I'm an XL, don't show them all the size small clothes you have. Or they don't like green, don't show them the green lec-crusse pot. And what gets us excited is taking the sort of approach that candidly Big Tech is taking. TikTok feed, your Instagram feed, where it gives you a very unique set of content. How do we make a website like that? To us, that's the future. It's like, ecom's over here, VicTech's over here. We gotta close that gap. Any hot takes or final words as we wrap up? I'll just say we're curious on if the website that we know today will even exist in a few years. We're seeing more and more shoppers trying to complete their entire journey in chat or in other ecosystems. a lot of brands are like, how do we build out a better, better website? I that's important. Brent Peterson (13:17.998) but also think about, if I'm an e-commerce director, what does buying from my brand look like without a website? Hey there, Isaac Mori here again. If you've listened this far, there is a good chance that e-commerce and retail innovation are topics that you care about. If so, then we should get in touch. We're going to be at e-tail Boston this August. So if you're attending, I'd love to meet you in person, potentially even feature a conversation with you on Talk Commerce. Don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn and send me a message if you're going and let's talk. My name is Sebastian Flum. I work at furniture.com. We're building the one place to shop for furniture from different retailers. us a little bit more about that. How does furniture.com work? So for most people, furniture shopping is really tedious. They don't have a specific brand in mind. They're spending tens of hours researching online, having 20 tabs open, having spreadsheets and slides. And so that process to find the perfect piece of furniture or multiple pieces of furniture. We're simplifying that all in one place. We bring together retailers across the country. We have their product on our platform and you can search, discover, organize and then ultimately also check out. So in a way we're building an agentic checkout so the checkout lives with the retailer. The retailer processes the transaction, handles everything post purchase. but we bring that all together in one place. Gotcha. Tell me about the agentic experience from the consumer side. How does it look for me as a buyer? What's unique for us for the agentic experience is that we do a multi-retailer agentic checkout. So if you're on Jadgbt or Perplexity and you use Buy with Pro, it's typically a single product that you found. For us, the agentic piece is that we launched our agent. that helps you navigate that furniture buying process. You still have a traditional kind of cart as a way to have multiple items together, but those items may be from multiple retailers. And so then if you're ready to check out, our agent will establish a session in the background with these multiple retailers to place the order, and that could be one order is from Modway, one order is from Cathy Quo. You pick the delivery, furniture's tricky because it has oftentimes different delivery windows. Brent Peterson (15:40.91) You may have the tax and so we do that in parallel live across multiple retailers. Gotcha. Cool. And from the retailer side, are the big attractions? Mostly, I think it's for them a new audience, right? So we have retailers like Bloomingdale's that maybe you wouldn't think of for furniture shopping and we attract an audience that is what we call non-brand. They don't know yet that they want the Bloomingdale sofa or the West Elm sofa. they're earlier in their journey. And so we're able to drive up to 40, 50 % of net new users that have not visited the retailer in the past and then ultimately purchase with them. Cool. Any new features that you're especially excited to share? Yeah, mean, two things we launched last week. One is our agent where you can have a two-way conversations to help you explore furniture, Dottie, that launched last week. And then we just brought kind of in-feed content. that is inspirational, has a perspective on trends, and it's all shoppable as well that we launched. And then I think exciting maybe for your audience is we completely restarted in August with a new code base, a new team for end-to-end agent development. So we're thinking a lot about how we empower our engineers, not just our engineers, our designers, our product people, our merchandising team to all as a team continue developing. the platform much much more rapidly than we were able to do before. I'm Ron Tarter the CEO and founder of MoneyPay. We're a merchant acquiring network that's built on stable coins which allows retailers to accept digital dollars or stable coins in their existing checkout flow for much lower cost than typical card payments. Awesome. So we're here at Etail Palm Springs. What are you hearing from the customers and merchants that you're talking to here on the floor? Yeah, I mean, from speaking with the retailers and merchants in particular, I think a lot of merchants are facing challenges keeping their margins, kind of keeping their margins tight, dealing with the volatility and tariffs and other kind of operating expenses. And merchants pay a lot of attention to their whole value chain and making sure that the margins are really tight. Brent Peterson (18:04.204) sort of maximizing their returns on their investment, on their inventory turnover. But what I've been talking about with merchants is a lot of merchants just sort of accept the cost of accepting payments as kind of a fixed cost that's not negotiable. And the world is changing in that respect. There's a lot of disruption happening in payments and fintech, especially with Congress and the United States. recently passing the Genius Act, that was a few months ago, and that's a piece of legislation that regulates the use of stable coins specifically for payments, for everyday retail payments. And what MoneyPay does is it enables merchants to accept stable coins without any kind of complexity around crypto. All that is abstracted through the MoneyPay system and fits in with the existing checkout flow that merchants already have and that consumers are used to, you know, the process that they're used to going through to make a payment. And the benefit for merchants is instead of paying 3 or 4 % in card fees, you can accept stable coins for literally basis points, you know, less than 1%. And the merchant gets their fiat immediately. They don't have to wait T plus 3. So it saves them on the processing fees and also, you know, helps with working capital and liquidity. And in times of uncertainty and disruption, like cash is king. Like having having quick liquidity is really important. So we've had a great reception, lot of a lot of positive feedback. And it's our first time at the ETEL conference and for sure we'll be back next year. Excellent. Any exciting new initiatives or features that you're launching here in 2026 you want to share with the world? Yeah, well, I mean, we actually launched MoneyPay yesterday. This business has been around for a number of years, but MoneyPay is a new product. And we're going to be rolling out features iteratively over the next few months. One feature that we're going to be rolling out is actually providing our merchants with a direct deposit account right in the MoneyPay platform through our partner bank. They'll also have a debit card. So they'll have a real bank account attached to their MoneyPay platform and a debit card that they can use to pay all their bills. So that's an exciting development coming up. Cool. And as we wrap up, do you have any final words or hot takes to share? Yeah. Brent Peterson (20:29.218) Yeah, think, you know, be prepared for disruption. Knowing that disruption is around the corner is half the battle and, you know, being kind of resolute on what your objectives are and being able to adapt along the way. So I think that's important for all businesses, not just retailers in uncertain times. Awesome. Well, thank you, Ron. Appreciate your time. That concludes today's coverage of eTail Palm Springs. A big thank you to all our guests and to the eTail team for hosting another outstanding event and continuing to build one of the best communities in e-commerce. For more conversations like these, subscribe to Talk Commerce. We will see you in the next episode and we'd love to see you at the next eTail Boston too.