Latest / SHeCOMMERCE / Episode 17: Rachel Tipograph on Motherhood, M&A and the Myth of Omnichannel

Transcript

Episode 17: Rachel Tipograph on Motherhood, M&A and the Myth of Omnichannel · SHeCOMMERCE

• 0:08
  Speaker 4: Welcome back to SheCommerce, where power women and real talk collide in the CPG world.
• 0:13
  Speaker 4: And we got a hot one for you today.
• 0:16
  Speaker 4: Our guest has built one of the most influential commerce intelligence platforms, as well as redefine what omni channel actually means.
• 0:27
  Speaker 4: And she has been at the center of it all from her founder days to company acquisition to motherhood to the future of three-shelf commerce.
• 0:39
  Speaker 4: We'll leave it there, but any guesses?
• 0:41
  Speaker 4: I know you know.
• 0:42
  Speaker 4: You're not allowed to guess.
• 0:43
  Speaker 4: Hey, did you like my interpretive dance?
• 0:46
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 0:47
  Speaker 4: I do.
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: I do.
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: I really do.
• 0:49
  Speaker 4: You're so talented, it's just it's like a layer.
• 0:52
  Speaker 4: You just keep exposing these talents to the world.
• 0:55
  Speaker 4: I'm an onion, Christina.
• 0:56
  Speaker 4: What can I say?
• 0:57
  Speaker 4: I see where we are.
• 0:59
  Speaker 4: True story.
• 1:00
  Speaker 4: Well, let's let's talk about Mother's Day.
• 1:01
  Speaker 4: I know you don't celebrate the same day as us because you guys are special over there in the UK.
• 1:07
  Speaker 4: But here for most of the world, Mother's Day was yesterday.
• 1:10
  Speaker 4: So happy Mother's Day to all of our hardworking mamas out there.
• 1:14
  Speaker 4: And do we want to maybe take a second to talk about Mother's Day marketing and how that's officially entered its chaotic error?
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Honestly, I am here for it because for years brands gave us the same tired formula.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Soft music, beige sweaters.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, come on.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Mama don't wear beige, mom's silent.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Mama don't play.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Mom's silently making pancakes.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Also, I don't make pancakes.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: My kids now make the pancakes, you know what I'm saying?
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: While everyone else, while everybody around the table ignores them.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: I mean, what is that?
• 1:51
  Speaker 4: No, right?
• 1:52
  Speaker 4: It's like motherhood was always presented as this sanitized narrative, this saintly woman, this hallmark version of what womanhood should be.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: And honey, we do not fit that mold because actual motherhood is like, I cried my car, I ordered Uber Eats twice, and threatened to throw everyone's iPads out the window.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying?
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Literally did that the other day.
• 2:18
  Speaker 4: Exactly.
• 2:18
  Speaker 4: We know brands are are finally starting, starting to not fully, but starting to realize that women want authenticity, this perfection, this image of perfection.
• 2:30
  Speaker 4: You know, we we want, we can see right through that BS.
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: So that brings us then to Matthew McConaughey's tequila brand.
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: Because what did we just watch with his mother?
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: What is he?
• 2:44
  Speaker 4: He calls her Mamac.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: I am obsessed.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Obsessed.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: His mother fully stole that campaign.
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah, forget Matthew.
• 2:53
  Speaker 4: Like he wasn't even in it.
• 2:54
  Speaker 4: He was, you know, the supporting actor.
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: She's the main actress.
• 2:58
  Speaker 4: And Mamac is definitely the brand now.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: Take that back.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Never utter those words again.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: We never forget Matthew McConaughey.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Christina.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: Never.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, he's just on my hall pass list.
• 3:12
  Speaker 4: I'll just admit that.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Same.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Same.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: Matthew McConaughey is a little bit more than a little bit.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: If you're listening, listening, where you're on our list.
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: Call me first.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: But the woman casually saying she invited her husband to his own wedding.
• 3:33
  Speaker 4: And then a band the beast on camera.
• 3:37
  Speaker 4: And and saying he literally died.
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: Like literally died making love to her.
• 3:43
  Speaker 4: Almost choked on my coffee.
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: Oh my god.
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: That lady's sister.
• 3:46
  Speaker 4: We didn't have her on the podcast.
• 3:48
  Speaker 4: My Mac, if you're listening, come on.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: Please, please.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: That is the way to go.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: I've decided.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: That's that's how I want to go at a hundred.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: That is icon behavior.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 4:04
  Speaker 4: But from a marketing standpoint, I think it's actually really clever because tequila advertising is, I mean, let's face it, it's oversaturated right now.
• 4:14
  Speaker 4: There's so many celebrity alcohol brands.
• 4:16
  Speaker 4: It's it's everywhere.
• 4:17
  Speaker 4: Everyone's, you know, uh building their own brand.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, literally, you and I should, right?
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: Should.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: And instead of trying to position themselves as aspirational luxury, my Matthew and Ma Mac, which everybody does, they leaned into personality and family lore, which is wonderful.
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: And they made motherhood feel fun, feel real, flirty, unfiltered, you know, things that we've all experienced.
• 4:45
  Speaker 4: And you don't expect, I don't know how old Ma Mac is, she looks amazing, but an older woman of a certain age to be talking about the beast and wanting to expose that in his at his funeral for everybody to admire.
• 5:00
  Speaker 4: I mean, come on.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: And also, can we please normalize older women being allowed to be funny and sexual and outrageous in advertising, please?
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, women, usually over 60, disappear from culture completely unless they're selling pharmaceuticals or looking after the grandchildren.
• 5:19
  Speaker 4: What is that?
• 5:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 5:20
  Speaker 4: Or selling de pens, undergarments, all that.
• 5:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 5:24
  Speaker 4: I think this we talk about representation and female representation will continue to press that issue, but it's also age representation for women.
• 5:35
  Speaker 4: It's wildly behind, and we have that like narrow age window where they want to talk to us, and then we we pretty much disappear.
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: Meanwhile, a Mac comes in like I contain multitudes and tequila.
• 5:49
  Speaker 4: All right, all right, all right.
• 5:51
  Speaker 4: All right, all right.
• 5:52
  Speaker 4: There you go.
• 5:54
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 5:54
  Speaker 4: Well, then on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Olay went with emotional nostalgia, kind of core equity.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Mom, you were right, is honestly genius, and something I I hope my my my daughter is listening to.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: Because every daughter eventually has that moment.
• 6:15
  Speaker 4: I think mine was with sunscreen.
• 6:17
  Speaker 4: For sure.
• 6:17
  Speaker 4: Sunspot.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: Mine was with moisturizing.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: Oh, interesting.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: My mother was screaming about neck cream in 97 and I thought she was insane.
• 6:31
  Speaker 4: And now look at us.
• 6:32
  Speaker 4: All the expensive serums, the sunscreen that just has to be the right um U U What is that word?
• 6:41
  Speaker 4: UV light lighting, right?
• 6:43
  Speaker 4: The UV lighting.
• 6:44
  Speaker 4: UV light.
• 6:44
  Speaker 4: That's right.
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: That's right.
• 6:46
  Speaker 4: Collagen powders.
• 6:48
  Speaker 4: I mean, we've we've basically become our mothers in that regard.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: So you know, we're actually 250 years old, but look at us, we look so fresh and young.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: I know.
• 6:57
  Speaker 4: Best looking dinosaurs around.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: Literally becoming the woman you rolled your eyes at is a such a universal female experience.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: It is.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Welcome to womanhood.
• 7:11
  Speaker 4: But strategically, Leia is definitely tapping into something that's really powerful here.
• 7:16
  Speaker 4: And I think that is the core equity of the brand, that inherited trust.
• 7:20
  Speaker 4: An inherited trust, not just in the brand, but it's in that, you know, mother-daughter relationship.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: Because beauty is inherently one of those categories where brand loyalty is actually generational.
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: Your mom used to use it, maybe your grandmother used it in this case, and suddenly that brand equity becomes emotional and not just transactional.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: Prove it as well.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: Completely.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, I still have I it still brings a smile to my face.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: I still think, you know, happy thoughts every time I walk past yardly powder because that was my grandmother.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: I can my grandmother always smelled like yardly powder.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: And it's it's such an emotional thing.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: And the influencer strategy was so smart because they didn't overproduce it.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: The campaign feels socially native, you know?
• 8:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and they they brought in TikTok shop bundles for Mother's Day.
• 8:20
  Speaker 4: I think that's definitely the commerce side of She Commerce right there, right?
• 8:24
  Speaker 4: Smart, intelligent, very much authentic, you know, not limiting themselves to a brand first narrative, but really tapping into the emotion and then serving up a solution.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: Bring in all the hearts, all the nostalgia, all the emotion, boom, converted to dollar signs.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: There's your conversion strategy.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Love it.
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: And let's be honest, the best campaigns today aren't just culturally relevant, like relevant.
• 8:52
  Speaker 4: They're shoppable.
• 8:54
  Speaker 4: We say this all the time.
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: It needs to be in the moment, insights to action, shoppable media.
• 9:01
  Speaker 4: That's where every at.
• 9:02
  Speaker 4: And that's also something we're gonna be talking to our guests about.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: That's true.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: But going back to the two campaigns, um, what I love about both of them is that they stop treating mothers like one-dimensional caregivers.
• 9:16
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 9:16
  Speaker 4: One is saying, hey, moms can be hilarious, they can be these complicated humans with a story like they've lived a life.
• 9:24
  Speaker 4: The other says moms pass down wisdom, truths, identity, rituals.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: Both feel emotionally true in completely different ways.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: Which I think is is the lesson for brands right now.
• 9:37
  Speaker 4: Like, stop marketing to women like we are one archetype.
• 9:41
  Speaker 4: Not one size fits all.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: Completely.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: Women can smell fake empowerment branding from a mile away.
• 9:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 9:48
  Speaker 4: Give us that specificity, give us that humor, the truth, you know, personalize it, speak to those inner truths, those human truths, and give us a group chat version of motherhood.
• 10:02
  Speaker 4: Like that's the type of unfolded we want.
• 10:05
  Speaker 4: Also, tequila.
• 10:06
  Speaker 4: Yes, throw in the tequila.
• 10:08
  Speaker 4: Always tequila.
• 10:09
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 10:09
  Speaker 4: Well, let's uh talk about some of our spill of tea and people.
• 10:14
  Speaker 4: And we are very proud to celebrate a board appointment of a member, Diana Ring Krog, to the board of FSG.
• 10:22
  Speaker 4: FSG, for those that don't know, is a US-based nonprofit social impact consultancy with a global reputation for thought leadership and innovation in philanthropy, philanthropy, pioneering concepts such as collective impact and shared value while working hands-on with organizations to drive meaningful systems change.
• 10:42
  Speaker 4: And Diana brings over a decade of global senior leadership experience from the LEGO Group and the Lego Foundation, where she has led very high impact strategies and organizational transformation, as well as cross-sector partnerships on a global scale.
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: Her work is something we want to celebrate as it is reflects a deep commitment to advancing social impact and rethinking how organizations can use their influence for good to create lasting sustainable change.
• 11:10
  Speaker 4: And again, her disappointment is a powerful example of the kind of leadership this world needs in boardrooms today.
• 11:17
  Speaker 4: Globally minded, purpose-driven female leaders that are grounded in execution.
• 11:22
  Speaker 4: We've talked about this with women on boards, and we need to celebrate every time there is another strong female leader placed on a board.
• 11:32
  Speaker 4: So at the boardroom, they uh celebrated her.
• 11:35
  Speaker 4: Actually, let's cut that part.
• 11:36
  Speaker 4: I don't want to say that.
• 11:37
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: So let's just let's just stop it there.
• 11:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 11:41
  unknown: Okay.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: And I would like to add a little whoop whoop to for Stephanie Perry, who has been appointed UKI managing director at Jellyfish.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: Can I just say how much, Christina, I am loving these appointments that we get to share every week because it's just warms my heart.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: God, I sounded really British there, didn't I?
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: It warms my heart.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: It does.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: It warms my heart.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Warms my heart.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: That that we get to say something new about people, about women in leadership positions every single week.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: But but there's always a but.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: I'm waiting for the time when we have so many, way too many, to highlight through speaking through it.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: And instead, it's gotta be an end-of-scene credits rule.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: I'm waiting for that for that.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: Love that.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: It's coming.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: It's coming.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Fingers crossed.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: Alrighty.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: With all of those shenanigans behind us, let's look at who we have as our guest today.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Today's guest is the kind of leader who doesn't just predict where commerce is going.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: She helps shape it.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: Rachel was an eBay power user at 13, became Gap's youngest ever global director of digital and social media, then walked away from the corporate fast track to become the founder and CEO of Micmac, now part of SPINS, the global e-commerce and enablement platform.
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: Let me put my teeth back in there.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: Enablement platform, trusted by some of the world's biggest brands to turn attention into actual sales.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: She's been named one of the most influential women in commerce and advertising for good reason.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: Rachel brings a rare combination of boardroom brilliance, founder grit, and sharp as hell marketing instincts, all with a style that's refreshingly candid and unapologetically bold.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: As you can see with her podcast that she shares with Sarah Hofstetter, Brave Commerce.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: She's built, scaled, and led through massive shifts in retail, media, and consumer behavior while staying fiercely focused on what actually matters.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: Results.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: So today, we're talking leadership, innovation, the future of commerce, and what it really takes to build power in rooms that weren't always designed for women to win in.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: Rachel, welcome to SheCommerce.
• 14:04
  Speaker: Thank you for that intro.
• 14:06
  Speaker: If AI wrote that, thank you, AI.
• 14:08
  Speaker: If you guys wrote it, thank you to you.
• 14:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 14:14
  Speaker 4: Well, thank you for being here.
• 14:16
  Speaker 4: And you know, we we want to start with the last year.
• 14:21
  Speaker 4: Um, just a casual year, right?
• 14:22
  Speaker 4: And yeah, new baby.
• 14:24
  Speaker 4: This is acquisition.
• 14:25
  Speaker 4: I mean, talk about overachieving.
• 14:27
  Speaker 4: So in it was just Mother's Day, you know, and you recently had a baby.
• 14:59
  Speaker 4: Congratulations.
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: How has that potentially shifted your perspective on work-life balance or imbalance in most cases, and what actually matters most as a leader?
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: Big first question.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Um I you guys know this.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: Motherhood changes your entire worldview and your own sense of self.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: And I'm only eight and a half months into it, so I can't imagine what the rest of the lifetime will bring.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: But I think the the most immediate thing that I recognized is the value of time and how you approach time entirely differently once you have a child.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: And that every minute is a moment to maximize because you don't know when you're gonna get the next minute.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: I and I don't know if this is the case right for all parents.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: We all have different family structures, but for me, something that I realized is that work is easier than taking care of a child.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Taking care of a child is way harder than one's career or running a company.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Amen.
• 16:01
  Speaker: True story.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Um, and then the the last thing is um, you know, I have a an unbelievably supportive wife.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: We we joke with each other who is mom one and mom two.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: I think she's mom one.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: She thinks I'm mom one, but uh I feel very grateful to have um a partner who is in it with me every day.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: And for, you know, any single parent out there, like I'm just in awe of you.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: I literally don't know how you do it.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: So you are the true heroes.
• 16:28
  Speaker 4: No, Jackie and I talk about that all the time.
• 16:31
  Speaker 4: How that partner is so critical to enable, you know, being able to do both, be a mother and be present and enjoy those moments, but also have a career.
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: And yes, for those that do it without a partner, God bless, because barely getting by with a good partner.
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: So can't even imagine.
• 16:51
  Speaker 4: Uh and you know, how has motherhood maybe changed your like decision-making speed or your tolerance for kind of just noise in the system versus like true signals?
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: So I think I've built a career on making pretty fast decisions.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: So I honestly don't want myself to make any faster than I already do.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: But what I definitely have less bandwidth for, and I think it's for the better, is the bullshit.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Um, and you know, that that can come in lots of different forms, but like, you know, toxic behaviors, whether it's at your company or a client or a partner, people not taking accountability, inefficiencies, just like there's no time to have a meeting about a meeting, like brass attacks, what the hell are we here for?
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: And who owns the decision?
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: So I would say, like, I've cut through maybe things that I was a little bit more patient for because I had more time in my hands, and now I don't.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: So I gotta get to the heart of things um a lot faster.
• 17:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, like you said, every minute counts.
• 17:58
  Speaker 4: So you're not gonna waste it.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: I get it.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: I love that.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: And and I think more of us should take that no bullshit approach.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: I think we acquiesce too much sometimes.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Well, listen, it's um it's an acquired taste.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: I know we'll we'll get to this, but um, in the course of having a baby, I was also acquired.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: So while I remain CEO of Mic Mac, which is now a business unit in a larger company, there is now a larger company and company culture around me.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: And so it's one thing to be the leader on the top and have like a no bullshit rule.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: But once you're operating within a larger company and there's more personalities and there's different ways of doing things, like I think that's where the rub comes.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Um, because you also want to be um a good coworker, like a welcomed coworker.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: And so you have to be careful with how you go about your sort of no bullshit uh mentality within, I think, a larger work environment.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: So this segues neatly, Rachel, into my question.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: And that's your founder story, the building of Micmac.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: Can you take us back to what problem you saw that needed fixing, that others missed, you know, the in the early days, what almost broke the business?
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: And what made you think, damn, this is gonna be big?
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: So before I built Micmac, I ran Global Digital and Social Media Gap.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: The the years were 2011 to 2014.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: So for everyone who was around then, just like imagine what the internet looked like from 2011 to 2014.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: So it was the uh early rise of visual social media.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: So Snap just came to market, Instagram stories just launched, and it was also sort of this era of all of these darling direct-to-consumer brands coming to market off the backbone of Shopify.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: So it's like the aways, the Glossiers, the Albert sneakers, like it's it's that time period on the internet.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: And so here I am at Gap, a brand that was founded in 1969 that is really one of America's oldest direct-to-consumer brands.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: And uh, they brought me on because they had 10 years of declining sales and they lost touch with being culturally relevant.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: And so I had this amazing opportunity to try to build the brand back up, which now gap is on top.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: So, like, so awesome to like watch that that rise back into culture.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: But at the time, that wasn't the story.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: And the conversation that I would have in boardrooms at Gap that no one liked was whether you like it or not, we are available for sale on Amazon.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: So here was this brand that was so rooted in its direct-to-consumer infrastructure.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: And I was this descending voice.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: And the reason why is that I'm in the business of going where consumers are.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: And in my seat in the years, you know, 2011 and 12 at Gap, I was seeing a change in where consumers were searching for Gap.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: So they weren't just searching in Google, they started to also search in Amazon.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: And gap was available as a third-party black market seller in Amazon.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: But the consumer doesn't give a crap.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: While this was happening, I was watching our cost per customer acquisition rise in Facebook.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: Because our competition wasn't just J.Crew or UniClo, it was anyone who could launch a Shopify site and buy Facebook ads.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: So here we are, and the world is changing.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: There's now infinite competition and there's also infinite distribution channels.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: That gap was very stuck in the way that they started the business, which made a lot of sense in 1969 and less sense in the year 2011.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: So my thesis was one day all of these darling direct uh direct to consumer brands are gonna have to end up on the shelves of Amazon, Target, Walmart because they're gonna need reach and qualified shoppers.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: And when They do that, they will be no different than the Procter and Gambles or the Mondelezes of the world.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: And when that happens, their entire marketing playbook, which is their secret sauce, which is capturing first-party data and chasing them around the internet to get them to buy more, will no longer work because Amazon owns that data, Target owns that data, Walmart owns that data.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: And so I so strongly believed in this thesis that I believed that there was a software opportunity to essentially allow brands to act like direct-to-consumer.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: So I'm doing air quotes for everyone who's listening, while still driving sales at their biggest retail partners, meaning own as much of the customer journey as possible while still giving that sale to an environment like Amazon Target Walmart.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: That's another way of saying in the years like 2011 and 12, I had the vision for what now the industry describes as like off-site retail media before retail media was even a word, right?
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: Like I didn't describe it that way.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: And so I had this mentor that I went to get a cup of coffee with.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: This is now January of 2014.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: And I feel it's important to tell this story here because it's it's kind of a strange story and it identifies our role as women.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Uh I walked into his office and he said, You're pregnant.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: And I go, No, I'm not.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: By the way, I was 27.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: And he's like, You're pregnant.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: And I go, I am definitely not pregnant.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: Like, I'm a lesbian.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: I would need to do a lot of work to become pregnant.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: So I would surely know.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: And he then pauses and he goes, if you don't start a company today, by the time that you want to, you will have already had a child.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: And my essentially, my appetite for risk will have changed.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: So it's kind of a crazy, semi, like not politically correct thing that he said to me, but it literally caused me to quit my job at Gap the next day.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Because I recognize the essence of what he was saying, which is Rachel, you have no responsibility right now other than to yourself.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: That's not always going to be the story of your life.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: Like, go take this risk.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: And so I quit my job and I then took my vision for the future of media and commerce and the network that I had sort of amassed while I was at Gap.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: And I went from wealthy person to wealthy person trying to raise money.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Um, you know, some of those were VC funds, et cetera.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: And um, you know, the first few years I was really cobbling things together because I don't fit the exact pedigree.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: Now I do because I sold my company, but when I started, I do not fit the exact pedigree of someone that you write big checks to.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: So here I am, you know, the year's 2014, solo female founder.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: I did not go to an Ivy League school.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: I'm an unproven entrepreneur.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: And so I had to beg, borrow, and steal to get people to get behind me.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: And then fast forward, you know, this magical thing happened of Mic Mac being acquired in January.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: And those people who took a bet on me in uh 2014, 2015, they all 10x their money.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: So um, yeah, I can like look back now and and say that.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: Oh my god, incredible story.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: And such grit, such grit, such, such, such resilience.
• 25:30
  Speaker 4: And that conviction to know that you had something there and to bet on yourself and just like that, quit your job and pivot your focus to building that vision.
• 25:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it takes it takes courage.
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: And even without having kids or those responsibilities, or like you said, your your risk level at that point was higher, it still takes a lot of courage.
• 25:55
  Speaker 4: You know, that that's a big change.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: You know, on that, yeah, on that front, um, I did when I was making this decision very quickly, as you saw, I literally did a very quick mental exercise.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: What's the worst thing that happens?
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: And I played it out.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: And I go, okay, the worst thing that happens is I go, I raise some money, or I don't, and I like spend two years, I said I gave myself two years.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: I'm like two years of my life trying to make this happen.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: And then I I literally is like, okay, so I lose two years of like career trajectory, but for all of this experience that, you know, no degree or job could buy you.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: And then I had the confidence, going back to your point, that I had the ability to get another job.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: And I I think it's like, if people can just do that quick mental exercise, what's the worst thing that can happen to you?
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: And then if you're willing to accept that worst case scenario and time box it, then go freaking do the thing.
• 26:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 26:51
  Speaker 4: We actually are gonna be releasing an episode with a guest uh this week.
• 26:55
  Speaker 4: We recorded last week, and she speaks a lot about what you just talked about, which is a calculated risk and having some of those guardrails because that makes it feel safer, right?
• 27:05
  Speaker 4: You're you know, you're like you said, your time.
• 27:08
  Speaker 4: I'm gonna give it this long.
• 27:09
  Speaker 4: Feel like I have a plan, may not know where that plan is going, but could could turn out a number of different ways, but at least it gives you that sense of control over it a little bit.
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: Was there anything in those early days that you remember that you got wrong at first about commerce?
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: Like maybe you were you're so focused on the vision you had that you you may have m missed something or overlooked it.
• 27:34
  Speaker 4: So absolutely.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: And to this day I still get things wrong.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: I think you have to take risks, right, to figure out the future.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: But I yeah, so there's a part of the story that I now completely skip over because it's irrelevant, but because of what you asked, I'll I'll share it.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: So going back to the time period.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: So 2014, if you were in New York or San Francisco in 2014 and you were trying to raise money from like venture capitalists, this was the era of iPhone apps.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Every VC was like writing checks to iPhone apps.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: So, what did I do?
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: I was like, I need money.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: So I'm gonna take my idea, but I'm gonna shove it into an iPhone app because that's how you raise money.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: So the first version of Micmac had a lot of the principles that I was trying to get at, but it was not a B2B enterprise software company.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: It was a consumer iPhone app.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: And the the truth is, it was TikTok shopping before TikTok.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: So we had an iPhone app called Micmac.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: Everything I sold was below $100.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: That's where the name comes from.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: I was selling Knickknacks.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: And I hired New York City-based comedians to make short form product demo videos.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: So like I called them mini merchals, so super short, shoppable infomercials that then had the ad cart buttons that you guys all know for me today, but this was all shoved in an iPhone app.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: And anyone who had the app always comes up to me today and goes, Rachel, you were TikTok before TikTok.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: And I go, I know.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: And like sometimes, sometimes you just need market timing on your side.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: But anyway, what you know, one of my superpowers is sales.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: And so I was able to get all these big brands to sell on my app.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: So one of those big brands was L'Oreal.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: And after L'Oreal was selling on my app, he said, Rachel, this magical universe that you've created for yourself, we want to white label this.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: And then GE Lighting said the same thing to me.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: And Bo's headphones and speakers said the same thing to me, and Polaroid and Kate Spade.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: It was like all these random brands I was selling.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: And then you're like, wait a second.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: The biggest brands in the world are essentially saying, we want to license the infrastructure that you created for yourself because what you're solving is an attribution challenge, which was again the whole reason why I quit Gap.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: So two years into my iPhone app, I pivoted to an enterprise software company and I kept the name Mic Mac because I was obsessed with the name.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: But the name really came from the iPhone app.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: So there's lots of lots of stories like that.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: You know, the thing about working in commerce and media is that it changes on a dime.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: And so, in order to succeed in this environment, you have to be able to pivot constantly.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: That's the only way to survive and then ultimately thrive.
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: So I want to maybe pivot a little bit.
• 30:27
  Speaker 4: So now you've founded the company, you've tried you've pivoted it into an enterprise software operation, you're building a team.
• 30:35
  Speaker 4: You know, Mic Mac has been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies, best place to work, you know, top startup, et cetera.
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: But I also want to call, like, let's call BS on some of the fluff.
• 30:47
  Speaker 4: Like, how do you actually build this engaging, high performance culture at scale?
• 30:51
  Speaker 4: I think so many companies have these accolades, and you know, sometimes they're maybe on the surface, don't look as good when you dig deeper.
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: But how do you build that?
• 31:02
  Speaker 4: Like what's something, something companies say they value, but they don't always operationalize?
• 31:08
  Speaker 4: How have you been able to operationalize those things, like the culture, the flexibility, the diversity and inclusion, all that?
• 31:16
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: Um, I mean, some of it was intentional and some of it was unintentional, which is, I think, the beauty of company building.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: The first thing is, uh, I know like I really look at this all from a different perspective now that we've been acquired.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: It is an amazing motive motivator and unifier of people to grant your employees equity in your company.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: When you grant employees equity, they are owners, they are shareholders in the company.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: And that structurally is like one of the most important things.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: And it's interesting, you know, investors, money people, like, you know, we all know they get greedy.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: But there's some like interesting things that are now happening, which weren't happening when I started my company in the ecosystem.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: But like some companies today now only give equity to people that are VP and above.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: And I think that's a terrible idea.
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: I gave equity to literally every single full-time employee.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Um, so that's that's number one.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: Number two, you know, I started the company pre-pandemic.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: So I share that because the whole company, up until the pandemic, was based in New York City.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: And um someone gave me a tip when I was starting early in the company.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: And they said, Rachel, if your first 10 employees reflect all the colors of the rainbow, your company will reflect all the color the colors of the rainbow.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: And the notion was like if you are super intentional when the company is small to have a diverse workforce, that will pay off in dividends because how do most people recruit talent?
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: Referrals from employees.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: So I wouldn't say like I had a hard and fast rule, but I was very intentional in the like early employees, like first 50 employees at Mi'kmaq, to build as diverse of a workforce as possible.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: And I also think it helps the fact that I'm a woman, that I'm a gay woman, right?
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: Like you attract certain types of people.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: And then the the last two parts I would say, and this is where you know, you said, where do you call bullshit?
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: It it all kind of comes from the top.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: Like I have done some very unnatural things that all take time, like your own time every calendar year that I do one-on-one with all the employees.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: So you have you have 365 days.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: You can find 15 minutes, depending on your employee work sort, but if you're in the few hundreds like me, you actually can pull this off to do 15 minutes over the course of the year with every single employee.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: I can't even tell you what that means to employees, and they tell me how freaking unusual it is.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: But I know my employees' spouse's names or their kids, or where they went on a summer travel, you know, or did they play high school sports?
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: Like this is how you get to know people on a human level.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: And that shit really matters.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: And then the last part is creating feedback systems.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: And I'm not saying you have to take all employees' feedback, but there's some kernel of truth that is represented in feedback.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: And if you can demonstrate to your employees that you are receiving the feedback, you are hearing it, and you are using some of it to better the company, it will pay off in spades.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: And I'll tell you a different example, but I'm on a board of a restaurant group in the US.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: It's called First Watch.
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: I love it.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: We have it by me.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, great.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: Thank you for coming.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: And so they have this thing called U-Tour, Y-O-U.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: And so, you know, I have a few hundred employees.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: There, this is a restaurant of 650 locations.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: They have like 30,000 employees between corporate and restaurants.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: It's called the U-Tour.
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: And the senior leadership literally goes from like region to region across all the restaurants to hear the feedback.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: And this is a publicly traded company.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: And the CEO has said, like, other CEOs come up to me and they're like, because this that workforce is voted like number one workforce in the US, like every year.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: And he's like, How do you do it?
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: And he goes, the U-Tour.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: And then he says that the CEOs get really excited about it and then they never follow through.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: Because they don't make the time to do it.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: So, in a nutshell, if you want to be a people-first culture, the leadership team must lead by example and actually invest in people with their own time.
• 35:48
  Speaker 4: I think that it is simple as that.
• 35:49
  Speaker 4: I hope there's a lot of organizations listening to this because there's so much truth in what you shared.
• 35:55
  Speaker 4: And I think we say it all the time.
• 35:57
  Speaker 4: You want to feel like you are valued and you're not just a number.
• 36:02
  Speaker 4: And I think the you tour, you doing the one-on-ones, you giving equity to everyone, regardless of level or time in the organization, those are the little things that are actually big things and that count and make people feel like, wow, this company cares about me.
• 36:18
  Speaker 4: And I'm going to reciprocate that and work hard and not just take any offer to leave them and jump ship.
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: Um, and I think the part about senior leadership, like tapping into those working levels, like what is happening on the ground, because sometimes they're very removed from that.
• 36:35
  Speaker 4: And we say all the time, like, you know, walk a day in the life in their shoes, whether that's your employees, your consumers, your customers, it is so important to have that perspective.
• 36:45
  Speaker 4: And very few take the time uh to prioritize that.
• 36:50
  Speaker 4: So it's great lessons.
• 36:52
  Speaker 4: Thank you for sharing that.
• 36:53
  Speaker 4: What is one leadership behavior that you'd say kills culture faster than leaders realize?
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: I am a very, very big believer that compensation plans drive 85% of employees' behaviors.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: And that's another way of saying I don't think leaders spend enough time thinking about comp rewards and recognition.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: Like they're just like, oh, that's an HR thing.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: It's like, no, no, no, no.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: This is a organizational principle that every leader needs to participate in to ensure that we are designing the right compensation benefits and rewards to motivate employees to go achieve the things we need them to do.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: And I think if you don't do that, that's like the stuff that really prevents people from either going after the things you need them to do or they're not motivated.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: And I'm not saying money motivates all behaviors, but like, I mean, if you are working at a for-profit company, money actually plays a very large part in motivation.
• 38:00
  Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: Of course.
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: And I it also helps with retention, right?
• 38:04
  Speaker 4: Because and you're not jumping ship for anything that even if the cop may be a little bit better, it becomes more than that.
• 38:12
  Speaker 4: It's that recognition rewards.
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: Like there's different ways to compensate people.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: I'll I'll I'll do one more because like that was like more organizational.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: But the other one I would say is any behaviors that create an environment of fear.
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: So, like, you know, especially in today's workplace, we're doing a lot of things virtually, a lot of things written through environments like Slack or Teams or email, text.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: And I just I constantly am pushing people to pick up the phone.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: Like, really, things are delivered better when they can hear your voice.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: Because if anyone is afraid to communicate with you, another person, like business is done.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: Business is based on communication, and we have to create an environment where people are comfortable communicating.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: So um this is this is a great segue into the acquisition, you know, MiC Mac and Spins.
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: January 2026, huge, huge pivotal moment.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: What for you made spins the right partner?
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: And what kind of changes and what doesn't post-acquisition?
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: Uh so first of all, people are unfamiliar with spins, it's a data business headquartered in Chicago.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: They do similar things to like a circana or a Nielsen IQ, but a different part of the market.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: So their bread and butter is really specialty national, natural grocery.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: So if you're a brand that's available in environments like Sprouts or Whole Foods, you definitely are working with spins.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: Um, but that's another way of saying spins was built 30 years ago and they have proprietary access to retail data, retail data that you could not get your hands on in today's environment.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: And so what does McMac do?
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: Well, we are really the marriage of media data and retailer data.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: So I've always been envious of the access that spins has to retailer data.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: That's one thing.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: The next point is Spins um actually owned an asset that was semi-competitive to Mi'cmac.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: So it was a company called Destiny, and Mi'kmaq was taking away all of its customers.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: And so the CEOs of Spins, this guy Jay, who's my boss now, uh, said, Well, why don't I just go buy the leading horse to prevent them from taking away all of our customers?
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: So, you know, he plays to win.
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: Love it.
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: And so that's really how the conversation began.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: And the reason why I kept listening is because I know the value that this proprietary retail data will bring to our customers.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: It was data that I always wanted.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: So good for our customers, good for the product, um, good for the market ecosystem.
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: And then for spins, like I really believe in what they're trying to do in today's world, which is if you think about what AI has done and will continue to do, AI has completely lowered the barrier to entry to build software.
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: Like if we all remember, getting a computer science degree was something you know that we all were encouraged to do.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: Like when my parents were kids, it was about being a doctor and lawyer.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: And now, literally, a computer science degree is irrelevant in a world of cloud code, cursor, lovable, you know, you name it.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: And so, where is value going to come from in the ecosystem?
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: Access to the proprietary data, because AI only works through that.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: And then building really unique applications on top of that proprietary data, whether it's in the form of software or professional services.
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: I believe that's the home run recipe.
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: And I could see the opportunity that MiCMAC would have at spins.
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: And if you know, you're paying attention to everything I'm saying, I'm like, I'm very honed in with the time.
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: Like the time in today's market is different than when I started my company 12 years ago.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: And you have to just be hyper aware of how markets change and be ahead of those moves in order to again survive and thrive.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: Um, and then the last part of this is I'm a big believer in the universe.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: And so I met Jay, the CEO for breakfast, six weeks after my son was born.
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: And 91 days later, we closed the acquisition.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: So it was insane.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: And I just also felt the universe was telling me, like, Rachel, this is the perfect time for you to sell your company and, you know, in some ways be able to spend time with your son.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: And, you know, it's just, it's different, you know, now that I've I've sold the company.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: So yeah, those were the reasons.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: And yeah, it sounds so much, Rachel, like you have your finger on the pulse, the Zeitgist of the moment when it comes to commerce and media.
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: It's that's that is that is also a superpower of yours.
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: But let's pivot to let's pivot to spins and you know how they talk about physical, digital, and agentic shelves, you know, the three-shelf reality.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: What does that actually mean in practice?
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: And how should brands rethink investment across these shelves?
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: So, you know, I'm probably stating the obvious in a lot of things, but it's it's just good to level set.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: Physical, like you're walking into a brick and mortar environment.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: Digital, in this example here, it would be, you know, anything on site, Amazon.com, target.com, Walmart.com, your Shopify site.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: And now also the off-site world that we live in.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: So think, you know, TikTok shop, Instagram, where you can check out with Sephora, the trade desk where you could buy against Walmart Connect audiences, right?
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: Like that's all blurred.
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: And then now you have this new space, which is the agentic space, which at this moment in time, and it's super early days in the ecosystem, but it's it's disrupting discovery.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: So to give you guys just an idea.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: Um, in terms of Mi'kmaq data, since January of 2025, so you know, almost 18 months of data, we have seen an X increase in referral traffic from environments like ChatGPT and Claude to our customers' websites.
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: I say that, yeah.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: I say that while over the last few quarters, we have watched in our Mi'kmaq traffic.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: So our Micmac traffic represents like $3 billion of global ad spend.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: So it's enormous.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: Like that's more ad revenue than Reddit or Instacart.
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: So we're seeing Google search start to decline.
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: So search is being disrupted.
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: Consumer discovery is being disrupted.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: It's not about native checkout.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: I have a lot of thoughts on native checkout, but it's about being a highly qualified channel to send strong referral traffic to those retail environments.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: And now I'm just talking about the LLM search.
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: I'm not even talking about what's happening, you know, Amazon Rufus, Walmart Sparky, right?
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: Those are actual now search and conversion tools because that's happening within the retailer ecosystem.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: So spins has launched an agentic part of their business, which is leveraging a lot of assets they've already had in their essentially legacy established business, as well as with Micmac.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: So the way that they talk about their business is spins intelligence.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: That's the core business.
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: That's the essentially like market share point of sale data, very similar to like a Nielsen or Circana.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: Journey is the business unit that I run.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: So I'm now running Micmac and Destiny, my competitor.
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: So that's all about, you know, shoppable media, customer journeys, you name it.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: And then Foundry is the new agentic part of their business, which is about essentially helping your products be found in these new agentic environments.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: And, you know, for a brand manufacturer, on top of supply chain and revenue growth management, you have to literally think about all the things that I just said every single time.
• 45:54
  Speaker 4: Would you say, like real talk, are most brands structurally set up to win in this three-shelf world, or are they like not even close?
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: So I think it depends on the organization.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: In the last five years, I would say Legacy CPG has made major concerted efforts around Omnichannel in terms of how to like service Walmart online and offline, you know, Target online and offline.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: So I'd say there's been a lot of heavy work there.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: Are they objectively maximizing every dollar in that environment?
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: No, because as we know, retailers are now also advertising channels.
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of like mixing of church and church and state.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: I think in the agentic ecosystem, what's hard for, you know, just first talking about legacy CPG brands is in order to do anything in AI, you need structured data.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: And that is like the first major mess that these major organizations need to clean up because they don't even have data in one holistic part of their business.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: Like sometimes I talk to my customers and they have five different CRMs and three different data lakes, and it's like it's a mess.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: So that is the place where organizational capital needs to be invested in immediately if it hasn't already.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 47:10
  Speaker 4: Agreed.
• 47:10
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: Well, let's continue with this commerce reality check.
• 47:14
  Speaker 4: I think that's the biggest gap.
• 47:16
  Speaker 4: That's clear.
• 47:16
  Speaker 4: And you need that first before they're adding in, you know, a superpowered engine on top of that.
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: What do your best enterprise clients understand that others are still missing?
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: And what is feels like more table stakes now versus what feels advanced to most?
• 47:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: Um so whenever I think of large organizations, I always tell people to look at L'Oreal and Procter and Gamble.
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: And the reason why, going back to your people first question, these are two organizations that I've worked with now for the last 12 years of my life that I can tell you they invest in their people.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: They are constantly upskilling their people in major ways.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: Like executives, this was one of the first ways I worked with Procter and Gamble in 2017.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: They flew me to Cincinnati to teach some of their most senior executives how to literally log into Facebook Business Manager and buy Facebook ads.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: Because what they understand is that if we are expected to invest millions and millions of dollars in these platforms, we better learn the basics on how to use them, like at the most senior level of the company.
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: So I bring up those two companies because they've made major investments in their data infrastructure.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: They've made continue investments in their people.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: And then they recognize that the KPIs, the organizational design, maybe even the investment levels that they were executing the last 10 years no longer make sense.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: And they are like rebuilding and reimagining their organizations, but they're going really fast.
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: And the last thing about these organizations, which I think just checks the box on everything that I just said, is if I think about the last 12 years of Mi'kmaq, there have been ups and downs in the economy.
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: And there will continue to be ups and downs in the economy.
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Those companies never stopped investing in marketing.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: I think the most short-sighted thing that these companies do is when times get tough and they need to meet Wall Street's numbers, the first place they look to cut budget is marketing and working media.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: And the moment you do that, you are just opening the door for your competition to go take market share from you.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: I think it's the dumbest thing you could possibly do.
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 49:38
  Speaker 4: So I guess and that's a big place where they create that friction for themselves.
• 49:45
  Speaker 4: We're also seeing some of that being created by the silos within the organization.
• 49:49
  Speaker 4: Like it's all connected now.
• 49:51
  Speaker 4: So where do you, in your opinion, see like large CPGs creating that friction between sales, marketing, commerce, retail media, and any advice there?
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm gonna say something that like I don't know, could be controversial in some places, but I think that sales and marketing has to be led by one person in today's environment.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: And I know it's two different skill sets, but like, you know, you find someone who's well experienced and can surround themselves with others.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I believe in that like chief growth officer role that owns sales and marketing because if the retailers are your lifeline and they're your distribution and your advertising channels, you just gotta approach it in one unified way.
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: So that that's my my big thing.
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I I 100% agree.
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: And where I've seen that work in some of the places that I've worked at before, it's it's a beautiful thing.
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: There is such alignment and cohesion and growth is is uh is predicted and predictable.
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: I absolutely agree with that.
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: So tell me, Rachel, on the on the uh on the organizational friction on friction side of things, what's the one internal behavior or or mindset that kind of slows everything down?
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: I I once got this advice from a mentor, which was never hire someone that has pointer fingers.
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: So literally, when I'm interviewing people, I am listening to their narrative.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: And if they are placing blame, and remember, I never have worked with this person before.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: They're interviewing at my company and all these other people, and they're not pointing their finger first at themselves.
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: I don't move them forward in my interview process.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: I think that is the most toxic work behavior.
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: I want to hire people who are highly accountable.
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: And before they ever bring something to me, they have done everything in their power first to try to solve this.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: And I'm constantly with my own leadership team.
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: I'm like, have you talked to this person?
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: Have you talked to this person?
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: No.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, go talk to them and then come back to me.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: If the two of you or three of you still couldn't have solved this.
• 51:57
  Speaker 4: I always say, bring me solutions, not problems.
• 51:59
  Speaker 4: I want you to start thinking through it, and then we can get there together, right?
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: Or at least, at least the beginnings of an idea.
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: Don't just come and say, Ma, bring me the super glue.
• 52:10
  Speaker 4: One of those parallels to motherhood.
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: So if we look, Rachel, at the future of e-commerce as Mi'cmac expands into broader omnichannel and agent e-commerce with Foundry, as you were talking about, what capabilities become most strategic next?
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: So the speed of execution will be unbelievable.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: Like we as humans are rarely going to be involved in everyday execution.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: We will put our execution powers against really like the management of the agents that are taking actions on our behalf.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: Someone once said this visual to me recently that I thought was amazing.
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: Picture Deloitte and Accenture with only senior operating partners who then are managing thousands of agents.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: It's mind blowing.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: We're talking about organizations that are 50,000 people.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: Now, I don't know what that means for the next generation of talent, but like that's a pretty wild thing.
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: And think about how that actually could become attainable.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: So, oh yeah, yeah.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: So, one is like everyone needs to have the technical prowess in AI.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: Like, I am pushing every single person in my company, like every person.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: And I am like, you need to answer this question.
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: Tell me why AI is not going to disrupt your job in the next two years.
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: I'm doing this to myself.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: The talent that will prosper in the years to come are the ones that know how to harness AI.
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: So one is your technical prowess.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: And I tell my team, prototype any idea you have, even in your personal life.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: Go into cloud code, go into lovable, like freaking get into the tools.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: Number one.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: Number two, and I still believe this, and it, you know, it's gonna depend on what sector you're working in, but I love working with big companies.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: I just, I just do.
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: And at big companies, I still believe humans are going to be the buyers of solutions, which is another way of saying relationships matter more than ever.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: And your ability to succeed is gonna be also predicated on human relationships, right?
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: That's not going away and that's gonna be held at even more of a premium.
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: Um, those would be my two big things is like your technical prowess with AI and human relationships.
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: Rachel, I I I have to say, this is something that I had a conversation with a friend on literally a couple of days ago when we had a long weekend.
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: And you, as someone who I admire and a and a leader and a visionary in the in this field, saying almost verbatim what I have said to her in terms of relationships and human interaction, knowing how to people and knowing how to AI is what is gonna take you forward, and that's what people need to focus on.
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: I I have to say, I just love that you have literally just said exactly what I have been talking about.
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 54:59
  Speaker: You feel validated?
• 55:00
  Speaker: Yeah, you should.
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: I feel validated when I hear other people say it.
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, I listen, I have a eight and a half month son, and literally I'm like, doesn't matter where we send him to school.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: School's literally irrelevant.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: About we need to raise a good human.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: And like how he socializes with others is the most important thing that we need to focus on.
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: Because like, how is school going to prepare anyone for this new world?
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: We don't even know what the new world is.
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: School can't prepare you for the world of yesterday.
• 55:31
  Speaker 2: Forget about right now, forget about tomorrow, right?
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: I mean, they're they are struggling to keep up.
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
• 55:38
  Speaker 4: Absolutely.
• 55:38
  Speaker 4: I always another piece of advice is to take your job and scope out what are all the responsibilities that are part of that job today, and then say, out of those, what are the ones that AI can do now or will be able to do soon?
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: And the ones that you're left with, again, if that's more than 50% of your job, that is a that's a red flag, right?
• 56:00
  Speaker 4: Like you need to think about how to then reinvent, lean in, like you said, get comfortable.
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: Or if there are parts that are still, you know, the parts that cannot be replaced, that's where you really need to lean in and make your mark and focus.
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 56:14
  Speaker 4: Well, you seem to be really great at reading the tea leaves and knowing when to act and when you have something there.
• 56:23
  Speaker 4: So we want to understand maybe from your perspective, from media to shelf, what breaks in that model next?
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: Ooh.
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: I think attribution will continue to be a challenge just because, and this will get solved.
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: But if you talk to anyone who's done the Chat GPT beta ads, it's a hefty price tag and you don't get any analytics back.
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: So, you know, we're we're all building the plane while we fly it, but I think attribution, as more channels exist, gets more fragmented with maybe less early infrastructure that will create problems.
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: I think the retailers will continue to be a frenemy.
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: Um, you know, Amazon is, for example, going back and forth on whether they want to play nice with these other LLMs.
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: This week's news makes it seem like they do, but if you read news a month ago, they didn't.
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: So I think a lot of the dynamics that we're used to are just going to be brought into these new environments.
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: So it's the same problem, but like different lipstick on the pick type thing.
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 57:22
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 57:22
  Speaker 4: Well, you are a host of a podcast, Brave Commerce.
• 57:26
  Speaker 4: I'm sure you hear a lot of themes that keep coming up again and again.
• 57:30
  Speaker 4: Unified growth.
• 57:31
  Speaker 4: We've talked about that here.
• 57:32
  Speaker 4: The shared KPIs, we've talked about that between sales and marketing coming together, incrementality, attribution.
• 57:39
  Speaker 4: Why is connecting national dollars to local demand still so hard?
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: Usually because the organization is not structured to make it easy, because those are often separate teams, separate budgets, separate data pools.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: And then also, in some ways, think about it, the platforms and the retailers aren't incentivized to make it easier because they get to double dip in those budgets.
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: So, like, that's why this problem hasn't been solved yet.
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: It's solvable, but people don't want to necessarily solve it.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: It's a good point.
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: Just sorry, just to be mindful of time.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: I do have to wrap up.
• 58:12
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 58:12
  Speaker 4: Want to go to rapid fire then?
• 58:14
  Speaker 4: We just have our rapid fire and that's it.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: All righty.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: So for our rapid fire fire session or section, Rachel, what's your power song before a big moment?
• 58:24
  Speaker: This is the day by the the.
• 58:26
  Speaker: I don't know that one.
• 58:27
  Speaker: I can't sing it.
• 58:27
  Speaker: You'll you'll know it.
• 58:28
  Speaker: It wasn't an MMS commercial like in the 90s.
• 58:31
  Speaker: You'll know it.
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: Just don't don't don't tell her because she will sing it.
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: And I'm gonna go to my next question quickly so she doesn't.
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: Spicy margarita from the future.
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: And what about the biggest myth about women in tech that you're ready to call BS on?
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: You don't need to be an engineer or have a computer science degree to be the founder or leader of a software company.
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: And with that, I'm gonna hand over to Christina for the pledge.
• 59:02
  Speaker 4: Well, Rachel, thank you for being with us today.
• 59:04
  Speaker 4: There's so much that we've learned about you and your journey, and my gosh, so much for you to be proud of, as well as entering motherhood.
• 59:12
  Speaker 4: That is a huge accomplishment as well, and probably the most rewarding one to date.
• 59:17
  Speaker 4: And that's saying a lot because you've accomplished quite a lot.
• 59:20
  Speaker 4: With every episode we do a She Commerce, we're building this growing network of female leaders and advocates.
• 59:25
  Speaker 4: So, Rachel, will you take the pledge to pay it forward, amplify women's voices as you you have been doing, and help continue to shape the future of commerce?
• 59:34
  Speaker 4: I pledge to do so.
• 59:35
  Speaker 4: Amazing.
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: And that just leaves me to say old brands, here's women on Sisterhood.