Intro 0:00

Music. Welcome to another episode of Ecom Experiences, a podcast for ecommerce marketing leaders who want to grow and scale their brands faster. Join us as we interview some of the smartest brand founders and marketing leaders in the industry. Explore the lessons they learned, discover the keys to their success, discuss what excites them most about the future.

Samir Balwani 0:28

Hi, it's Samir Balwani here, host of Ecom Experiences where we talk to brand founders and marketing leaders about their experience as growing brands. This episode is brought to you by QRY. QRY is a paid media agency that helps brands balance brand awareness and performance marketing to drive predictable and profitable growth, to learn more about how we can help you visit. Weareqry.com. I'm really excited about our guest today. I have Celia Mulderrig, the VP of Ecommerce at NakedCashmere. She has so much to talk about. They've done so much really cool stuff. I can't wait to dig into it. Thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, happy to do it amazing. So let's, let's start with the basics. Tell us about NakedCashmere. Tell us about you and what your role is.

Celia Mulderrig 1:10

Yeah. So I'm VP of Ecommerce at NakedCashmere. My team oversees customer acquisition and retention, so performance, marketing, email, web development, merchandising, and I've been with the brand for coming up on two years now. Congratulations.

Samir Balwani 1:28

That's awesome. And for those that don't know what is NakedCashmere, what do you guys sell?

Celia Mulderrig 1:35

Well, unsurprisingly, we sell cashmere. We hit the lead in the name, right? So we are sort of boutique luxury premium category in the apparel space. So we work with our directly with our producers, and who make the yarn for cashmere and then also produce it. And we were from Santa Monica, so born and bred in California, and we've been around for Since 2016 producing ethically sourced, sustainable cashmere, essentially, so which I am wearing some now, Gunner up the brand. So we've got, basically, this is one of our knits that is awesome. We were just talking about weather, and it, like I said, in California, gets quite chilly in the morning and evening, and then heats up during the day. So I've got a lot of sweaters to cover me for that.

Samir Balwani 2:34

Yeah, I feel like that. That's a perfect, perfect match, for sure. So I love that your role covers so much, right? That you get a you get this, like, amazing view of everything. So what is your favorite part about the role, especially when there is so much that's going on? Yeah,

Celia Mulderrig 2:50

I mean, I think in ecommerce, what I love about it is that it is always changing. So the thing that's popping off this year, you know, might not work next year. Like my background before this, I was working for another women's wear brand, and before that, for Tough Mudder, which was a cool participation event. So very different consumer target. But there was one year in like 2017 where any video that we put online got a million views when Facebook was promoting that, and then the next year, it just disappeared. So I feel like in our space, you've always got to be testing and trying something new, and some of those things will work and some won't, but you won't ever be able to sort of scale and capitalize if you're not doing a lot of little skunkwork tests to see what's going to pop off next. So in my role, love that we do that, that we're able to, you know, manage all of our channels that are consistently working and optimizing them, and then do these little like tests for things to see what could be next.

Samir Balwani 3:52

Yeah, it's so funny. You say that because that reminds me of, like when performance Max was launched for like, six months to a year, when no one was using it. It was awesome, and now the competition is kind of caught on, and you're like, alright, well, what's next? Where are we? Where are we looking to? And I love that. I think that makes such a it makes it interesting. It's never a stale day, right? And

Celia Mulderrig 4:14

I think for, like, for a smaller size brand, you can do that without having to get 8 million different stakeholders to sign off, and you know, you have to protect the brand equity, but you also have a little bit more freedom, because, yeah, yeah, to just try stuff and see, see if there's something that could work.

Samir Balwani 4:31

Yeah, yeah. I think that's awesome. So knowing that you have this amazing purview of everything that you're looking at, what are the challenges that you're dealing with right now? Like, where are you guys at, and what are you looking at for the future?

Celia Mulderrig 4:43

Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's kind of two main challenges. One is that any sort of startup, you're always constantly evaluating what, where you should be shifting resource and, like, what can you lean on and like, what, what should you be working. On when there's so many things that you could be working on. So that is always a challenge. I think the second piece is just what's happening in the marketplace coming out of COVID, which is four years ago now, which seems crazy.

Samir Balwani 5:13

It doesn't feel like four years ago.

Celia Mulderrig 5:16

I feel like we just had it but, or it just, it just started, but, but, yeah, so that So really trying to understand, like, where is the consumer, and how do you really balance that, that branding message versus promotions, and what is the consumer expecting in terms of promotions and what is happening in the marketplace? Like, where does Black Friday start now? Is one of the sort of questions that I think we're 120 days out from, like, technical Black Friday, but I was looking at it yesterday, um, but still, what does that mean? Like, are we starting in October now? Like it? When? When is it? And how can you adjust to get the best outfit, I think. And really, I think, try to avoid going that promotional route, and really make sure people understand, particularly in a premium product space, like the value that is, that is in the product and that and why they should buy from you, versus versus another brand, is always a top of mind.

Samir Balwani 6:22

You hit on, like, two really important things that I think a lot of brands aren't spending a lot of time thinking about. And one is so one is just that balance between sales, messaging and branding and and, and, I mean, honestly, not to plug three, but this is literally the reason why we exist, is because I think a lot of brands don't do a good job of balancing those two either they are, like, all in on performance, and they've got, you know, strong ROAS and and that becomes like the KPI that they hold their head up on. But then revenue, kind of just like, pitter patters along, and there's no actual, like, true revenue growth. But then you have others that lean in so hard on brand awareness, and they kind of just let all these people fall through the through the gaps, and they aren't capturing everybody in the right way or and so I love that you guys are thinking about that. What are the, what are the metrics that you look at then, like, how do you actually measure that, and how which, I'm sure you get that pushback of, like, why is our Keck higher? Like, why can't we make our CAC like, $5 like, I don't understand. It's just like, how do you then go back to a leadership team that doesn't really understand always that nuance and kind of explain it.

Celia Mulderrig 7:37

That's a really good question. I mean, I think the, I think we work with a performance marketing agency, and we very much partner with them to try and explain that message. Why do you need to invest in brand awareness when you're not going to see it in the same week or month necessarily? It's a long term investment. And so one, making sure everyone's aligned around the strategy and aligned around the metrics is really important, and that there's buy in, and that people understand like the money you spend today may not appear tomorrow, but two months from now, if we can't, then wonder where, why we can't like, it's, it's less. I mean, I think the other thing too is, like, we're very seasonal business, so we really look at the phasing and when are we because for us, it doesn't make sense to spend a ton of awareness in July, when we actually don't have that many products to sell, right? But making sure that we're now we're ramping up for those key moments. So I think one, working to define the metrics that the business is looking at, and has bought into two, making sure that it aligns with our business model. So we're not just

Samir Balwani 9:01

spending, right? Like, spending, yeah, which is honestly, honestly the issue with like me, are numbers right? Like, when people look at total ROAs, that is kind of, if you just look at that one metric, you can end up in a situation where you're just spending. You need to spend and Brain Awareness in January, because there will be some baseline revenue that the business gets the awareness isn't actually really helping in that moment. So it doesn't make sense too, yeah,

Celia Mulderrig 9:25

and then I think I mean just a constant check in on it. So in the past, what we've done is we've broken out the metrics and said, like we are not going to judge our awareness around like it's not part of our total Roz we're going to have like these for this. And then we want traffic here, and we want conversion here, and like, all of that ladders up into how we acquire customers. And then we, I think, making sure everybody knows that, like, not every channel is going to deliver the same value. But it doesn't mean you can only. To spend money at the bottom because right. And I think multi multi channel attribution tools or multi level modeling, some of that can really help with it. But I think for leadership, it's important to set the framework and the understanding that here's how you need to look at it, and then these are the metrics that we're going to evaluate for each of these. And this is ultimately what it levels up to. So when we talk about CAC, like, it breaks into all these different places, so bring

Samir Balwani 10:32

them along for the journey, right? Like, bring them along in the in the framework building, so that way they they're kind of bought in on it, and you're not trying to sell it later.

Celia Mulderrig 10:41

Yeah. And I would say the key is really to work with your finance team. So really, in all of the businesses I've worked in, we used to do we do it now too. We bring finance into our monthly retros and so that they can see, we bring them into the strategy planning sessions, and then the retros to see, like, here's where it went. These are the trends that we're seeing. This is where the money's going, and this is why it's going there, so that it's not then a surprise of like, it comes to budgeting, and they're like, why are we spending this money on on this? And I've had this too, like, I've had a finance person come up and be like, Oh, I get PR because we stopped, we, I never saw the value in PR, like, and then suddenly, like, we saw all these other channels go down, and, you know, nobody's talking about us anymore. Like, I get why we invested there, but I did not before. And so that's that was, that was, I don't want to say, like, great moment, but

Samir Balwani 11:46

I mean, that's awesome. Like, that is the hardest channel to prove out. So, oh, hard, yes, yeah. So

Celia Mulderrig 11:53

I think so. So that's the kind of thing that I think always just starting with. Like, there's leadership, but then there's like your counterparts, and I think working really closely with finance has always been a key one for me, because ultimately, if they're bought in, then it makes it a lot easier to to get sign off on things. And

Samir Balwani 12:18

yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I think that that that actually is probably one of the biggest gaps most marketers make, is that, like they think finance sits out in this, like world by itself and and by forcing I think I was taking a note. I think that that is, like a brilliant solution, of, like, making sure that they are part of the strap planning, making sure that they aren't they have clear understanding of because not only does it force you to translate everything into finance, which means that you automatically tick and tied to the bottom line, no one can ever be like, Hey, how is marketing help helping grow the business as well? Like finance was part of the conversations. Like they're they're bought in, right? So I think that that's awesome. And then too, the more that you know we talk about it on the marketing side, like marketers need to learn what P and L marketing need to understand what like margin is, and contribution margin, and all this, and all the financial understandings of like cash flow and what that means by bringing finance into the meetings, you're also putting some ownership on finance to understand marketing, right? Like it doesn't need to just be marketing learning finance, but finance should have to learn marketing as well, and that that's what makes everybody better. So I love that as a solution, and I think that that is really smart. The second thing you said earlier on was black private, and I know you guys, I'm sure we, we have a tradition at the agency. We do July 5 is the first day of q4 planning. And so it's literally you finish, you know, July 4 holiday, and we are into holiday like actual executional plans and finalizing all of that, which I'm sure you guys are knee deep in as well. This year is an election year, so how are you guys thinking about the interactions between that and black credit? Because I know this is like, we have our perspective on things and like, obviously it's very brand dependent. How long you want to be on sale, what your sales schedule will look like, what your inventory levels are. These are all the things that make black friday so complicated that everybody on the outside right, like you talk to your friends, like, Oh yeah, you just do, like, 50% off, and you go, and you're like, No, that's not it's not really straightforward like that. And there's so much that goes into it. So how are you guys planning and how are you guys thinking about it? Yeah, so we,

Celia Mulderrig 14:43

I mean, we started thinking about it last year. Part of it was because 2020, was just such a roller coaster. And I remember seeing CPMs, and I was looking recently, and sometimes I know they went up. By like, 90% and then if you ask not to throw anyone at the bus, but when you ask meta now, they, like, won't commit to a number of what costs will increase to. So, so I'd started thinking about this last year, and what we ended up doing was shifting some of our strategy to focus on firing customers in the beginning part of the year, which was not our traditional model, because we, again, are very seasonal, so we do a ton of business in the back half, like once the weather turned, like sweaters so, so looking at that like double hit of the you know, it's time of year. Promotions last year were all over the place, and they started earlier than we'd ever expected, and and it was a very promotional marketplace, and so what we did was we really put a focus on on acquisition at the beginning part of the year and going heavier our customers. And that required working with our merchandising team to make sure that we had seasonally appropriate products. So we brought out a line of cotton cashmere, which is like lighter weight, and had done really well for us. So we had, like these lead indicators that it could work similarly. Linen did really well for us last year. So we like emphasize that. So we we made sure that we had something to sell that then lined up with our with our promotional plan, and we leaned in aggressively in March, April, and saw really strong success acquiring customers, which then helps give us a bit of a buff people that, you know, we can go into. We don't have to start acquiring them right as things are ramping up for the election, so that was part of the strategy. Like starting really early and thinking about the year holistically and what's coming up, and then shifting things around to try and mitigate some of that risk, then going into Black Friday, I think, like, we are still evaluating some of our strategy and like talking to all of our different vendors and trying to get indications of what is going to happen, maybe leaning on direct mail more than we have in the past, or things that are leaning into acquisition or sorry, leaning into retention, and making sure that we've got strong messages and we're doing more segmenting and trying to be relevant in speaking to customers. I think that's the other piece is, yeah, just realizing we're CDP, so we're trying to be more targeted and make sure that when we're speaking to our customers, where even on the branding piece, we're giving them relevant information, versus just relying on promotions to try and reactivate them. And then we've got some things that we've talked about, like maybe gifting, like sending something like, you know, top customers just before, just to get, get them to think of us and like, thank them for being such great customers to keep us top of mind going into that holiday season. And then hopefully, hopefully, you know, if people need a respite from all the election and are like, looking to for something comforting and soft to like, hopefully they just want to drape themselves in cashmere. And we've got a guy,

Samir Balwani 18:21

Oh, listen, I think there's gonna be so much just like, make me feel good about the world at like, spend that's gonna happen just because, like, post election. So, you know, I think it's really so a few things that I think are really smart in the strategy that you're kind of outlined, the gifting ahead of holiday is brilliant. And the reason why I think it's so interesting is I think a lot of people forget that Black Friday Cyber Monday is a huge conquesting period too. It is when people are most open to switching or trying new brands, because price gets taken out of the equation, right? It's on sale. You're like, Hey, I've been thinking about this product. So you're doing one or two things. It's like, I've got this product that I've been looking at, and I just can't justify buying it for myself. I've saved it in my cart for six months now, and I'm like, You know what? I'm gonna pull it, pull it, and we're gonna go or it's, Hey, I I've been looking at this product type, and there's like, three or four brands, and I'm going to choose one of them, right? And so really leaning in on, like, core customer base, making sure that they don't lose it, you know, lose them during that period is really valuable. The second thing is on targeting CPMs are going to go through career, right? Like, at least, I would say at least 70% like, we're going to see at least 70% increases in CPMs, and the areas that you probably will see at the most are social, but I think CTV also so CTV is getting a ton of political ads coming into it. It's where the largest percentage increase in political ad spend is going. And so you know that those CPMs are going to increase if. Those CPMs increase, the only thing you as an advertiser can do is click through rate and conversion rate, right? Like those are the only two metrics then that you have, and so targeting allows you to really increase both. And so that's where hyper segmentation is going to become important. Usually you don't hyper segment because CPMs go up when you hyper segment, but when CPMs are already going up 70% what's another 5% what's another 10% in the grand scheme of things, right? So as long as your click through rate and conversion rate are increasing at a commiserate rate against your CPMs, you can help make it make sense. And so hopefully, you know, people that are managing campaigns are really thinking about that and planning ahead and here's what we do for some of our clients. What we'll do is we'll look at July 4 sale. So we'll look at Memorial Day Sale, July 4 sale and Labor Day sale, and help model out. Okay, well, we when we did a 30% discount, this was the increase in click through rate and conversion rate when we did a 40% discount. This is what happened. So if you're going to do a 50% maybe you'll see this, but maybe it doesn't make sense to do a 50% because it's not really helping you offset your increases in cost. So it can kind of help be thoughtful around that planning. So I love that you guys are deep in Black Friday Cyber Monday planning, because it is, it is key, yeah,

Celia Mulderrig 21:19

and I will say I used to refer British retailer, and they would start planning in January, like their holiday planning. So I always feel like we're late, but then in comparison to that, but yeah, like, maybe we're on time. Yeah, it really just depends

Samir Balwani 21:34

on when you're merchandising, right? Because, like, we have clients of ours that will merchandise a year in advance, so then it's like, great. You know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is pretty much like, we've got the structure in place now. It's like tactical executionary plans, but like, the majority of it is done, or you did your photo shoot, like eight months in advance. We already, okay, cool, you already started thinking about it. But I'd say, if you haven't, we're taping this in August, you have not started planning. Please. Start planning. Yeah, please. Well, especially because so so let's, let's play hypothetical scenario out in in a non election year, you would almost always recommend a November 1 start of some kind of promotion at this point now, right? Like we've gotten to a point where it's not Black Friday, it's not cyber week anymore. Now it's just November month, right? So if you're going to start a promotion, you had to have already started prospecting by October 1, which meant that you had creative and concepting done by mid August if you want production around things. So yeah, if you haven't started now would be the time

Celia Mulderrig 22:44

stop watching medicine. Go. Start. Please, please. So, you know, we

Samir Balwani 22:46

talked about some of the challenges, some of where you guys, what are you guys most excited about? Like, what? What is ahead for NakedCashmere that you're like, Man, I can't wait to start doing this stuff. Yeah, I

Celia Mulderrig 22:59

mean, I think there's a couple of things. So one we've already started is live streaming. So we are doing a live shopping event on Instagram, and we're trialing Tiktok. So I think, like I talked about, like, really wanting to try these things and see how they're working and optimize them is something that, like, that excites me, because I'm like, okay, great. We're, you know, we're not just optimizing the things that we know. We're like, exploring into the things that we do. So I love that, because it does give us a way to actually speak to some of those branding moments, or speak to some of the product and brand that in a longer form format. And what we've seen is customers will ask questions. They'll be like, can you put on that skirt? Or, like, what is the sizing on this? Like, it's a direct that's cool, where they're like, Oh, I love how this fits. Like, it's just, it's really nice to have that direct channel with customers. And we can then take that content, and we can do cut downs of it and use it on our organic social but then we're hoping to leverage some of that in paid again, trying to trying to lean into the authenticity, which can be challenging for luxury, because it's, it's, you want to have that fine balance between being, you know, premium lifestyle, but also a lot of the platforms are rewarding authenticity versus, like a very produced, perfect view of things. So, so I love that. I love that we are trying it. And our team, our creative team, has been great on like, let's try this. Let's bring this person in, like, let's put this. So, so I love that. The other thing that I'm really excited about we are testing with our CDP this combination of AI and personalization, and we're really lucky because we have an in house. We have an in house customer service team, so we actually have a phone number, which for you know, most friends like. It's not real anymore, but, but our customers love it. They love that they can call and talk to a person, and that team's in our office. So we are using our CDP, and for we're testing a couple of different segments, but it writes an email. It pulls from what they've like, the products that they've purchased, and then predicts what other products, and it writes all the emails, and then the customer service person, like, looks through, approves it and sends it. And so, oh, that's super cool. It's really cool because I love the I love AI taking the grunt work out of like, building that. But then there's a human connection where an actual human is is reaching out and and people can respond. And some of the segments we're looking at is one to two time purchasers, or people who live near our store but have never purchased in our store. So yeah, really, just trying some of some of these tactics when it's a bit slower time for our customer service team and they've got some bandwidth. And, yeah, we're seeing if we can turn that into a revenue generation center rather than a cost center.

Samir Balwani 26:08

Yeah, that's that's pretty amazing, because customer people never look at customer service as a revenue generator. So to be able to turn it around would be pretty phenomenal.

Celia Mulderrig 26:19

Yeah, and I think, like they're they know the product, they know how to answer questions quickly. And I think, I think customers really want a person that they can ask questions to, um and get a quick answer. So I think, like we're trialing that, and that makes me excited, because anything that brings us closer to the customer and hopefully providing what feels like a more premium experience, I think is, is great, but, like, how can we use these things to facilitate that for them, so that they can do that rather than it being a really laborious process of, you know, writing,

Samir Balwani 26:56

then it doesn't happen, right? Like, it's so yeah,

Celia Mulderrig 27:03

I love that. I mean, I feel like those are applications of AI that are really helpful, where you're like, let's take this, this process, and speed it up, but add a human element at the end of it, which is allowing humans to connect and hopefully allow us to serve our customers better, ultimately. So that's what I'm excited about.

Samir Balwani 27:23

That's so exciting. That is really cool. That's me. So I know we're coming up on time, so I'm gonna ask you my last question. So as we, you know, we talked, we had a lot of conversations. I am forever impressed by your ability to manage so many things and and I, you know, it's really one of the very first things that you said about why you like your role, and you said it's about shifting resources. And I actually don't think a lot of marketers realize how valuable and important that is, right? Because it's, I joke about it with my team, where I'm like, even on the pay media side, it's all resource allocation. It's where are you send, spending your time and your money to get the best out of it. And so my question for you is, as you look at a new marketing leader, as you look at someone coming into their role for the first time, what advice would you give them on how to actually manage their resources and what what they should be doing from that perspective?

Celia Mulderrig 28:22

Yeah, that's a great question. I I would say, I think the thing is, like looking at all the things on your list and thinking about, what is the value that this thing I'm doing brings to the business? So I think it was a Cal Newport book I read years ago, and it was really talking about, like, the value you bring is not in doing the task over and over and over again. The value you bring is like, automating that task so you could focus on something else that's revenue generating. And that hit home for me, because I'm like, Okay, well, we do so many things, and especially in early in your career, you're doing a lot of like, routine things over and over again. And if you can find a way to do those things faster or better, you're adding true value to the business, because you are now freeing up additional capacity to find something else. And so I think, yeah, I think that when you're early in your career, well, a couple things. One, I think work for big company because you can see every different role. You build good business habits. You can see all the special like, basically how all the different teams have specialized and go and learn from them, like, go talk to people who work on different teams, and try and learn what they're doing. And that'll give you a really nice broad view of where you can go. And then within your function, I think, think about like, are you making money? Are you saving money? Like, what is your role? And how can. You help add value to that role by either reducing some of the time spent on things or finding new opportunity that hasn't existed before, and bring ideas and and, yeah, and then ultimately, I think just like be curious about your job and your co workers, jobs and and what your business does, and I think that's that'll set you up for other opportunities and go forward.

Samir Balwani 30:32

So I love that. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. That's perfect. Thank you so much for joining us today. I, as you can tell, I love having this conversation with you. If someone wants to find you online, where can people go to learn more about you?

Celia Mulderrig 30:46

Yeah. LinkedIn, so I think it's just Celia Mulderrig at whatever. LinkedIn, Celia Mulderrig, so yeah, people want to reach out. I mean, I think I, I love talking about ecommerce. I think we mentioned we have an ecommerce group for sort of VPs and directors that we meet. So if you are a VP or director in ecommerce or marketing, please reach out. And we'd love to have you. And if you are earlier in your career and you have questions, reach out and happy to answer them. And whatever the type of questions you have, feel free. I love it.

Samir Balwani 31:19

I'll include all that in the show notes. So if people are trying to find the group, you can check out the show notes, and you'll be able to see it there too. But thank you so much for joining us. It was such a pleasure. Yeah,

Celia Mulderrig 31:29

it was great. Thank you.

Outro 31:38

Thanks for joining us. If you liked it, remember to subscribe, so you'll be notified of new episodes, and if you know someone who would enjoy this show, don't forget to share and leave a review. It all helps us impact more brands. If you're looking to improve your paid media, go to weareqry.com and schedule a consultation. We're always happy to chat. See you for the next one you

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