The buying experience is becoming more and more of a puzzle that comes together differently for every consumer. How they discover something might be different from how they purchase something and how they purchase it might be different from how it gets fulfilled. You can find something in a store, buy it online, and have it delivered via an app. Every part of the process is being uncoupled, and brand leaders have to build for that reality. Every touchpoint, every experience, every interaction has to be optimized. For Michal Geller, the President of eCommerce & Digital at Newell Brands, this is even more difficult because Newell’s portfolio of brands is massive, and well known — we’re talking about Sharpie, Crock Pot, Food Saver, Elmer’s Glue, Graco, and the list goes on. With so many brands, and so many potential touchpoints and opportunities for cross promotion, how are Michal and his team approaching this challenge? On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Michal and I talked about the ways that Newell is experimenting, using data, and taking advantage of new opportunities in order to bring the ecommerce experience — and every other aspect of the business — to the next level. Enjoy this episode.
Main Takeaways:
- Data Dump: Every company has massive amounts of data, but the key is using data better. You have to experiment — even if you think the experiment is obvious — and then take the data from those experiments to guide your strategy. Putting focus on experiments as a way to find better returns will yield better results that throwing money at marketing with no data to back it up.
- Ecomm’s Magic Bullet: The best thing about ecommerce is that it is data rich and that gives companies the ability to move faster than traditional brick and mortar retailers. With the real-time data, even if ecommerce represents a minority of sales, it should inform the majority of the business decisions.
- Independent Customers: Part of the rise of ecommerce has been the rise of a more independent consumer, who has more choice and authority over purchase decisions. Brands have to cater to this kind of consumer and create buying experiences and touchpoints that are consistently excellent. It is only through exceptional service and experiences that brands will win consumers in the future.
For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
Key Quotes:
“I’d say that the way [Newell] grew into the ecommerce post was very much… brute force. It was through dollars and people, etc. It wasn’t necessarily through technology or data, etc. I thought there was a real opportunity to come in and take this amazing asset of the brands, the amazing asset of the ecommerce work that they had done, both in Amazon and other pure plays, but also in the D2C space. I was shocked to hear how significant the D2C business was here, and that there was so much opportunity. That was all very exciting because it felt like real opportunity to similarly transform, grow, do some really interesting things on the back of these phenomenal brands.”
“There are two things to really look at all the time, and consumer number one, and the second thing is to make sure you’ve got is data. Making sure that the data that you have to run the business is accessible, usable, digestible, available.”
“Change is tough and change in a big organization is tough, and especially, in an organization like ours which is by design a matrix organization. It’s hard to come into a new company and pound your fists and say, “This is the way it has to be done.” The approach that I’ve been taking and encouraging the team to take has been one of experimenting. Basically, come up with hypothesis, something to be done differently, and then instead of trying to convince somebody to do it, that’s the way we have to do it, just say, “Hey, can we test it for a month, two months, three months?” And see if we can try it a different way, and worst case, we revert. It’s like it’s pretty low risk decision, there’s not a large commitment and it’s just a way to learn.”
“If you think about like the ultimate consumer, the mom, you think about, let’s say, a mom is buying a infant car seat, that tells us a lot about her. If you think at our breadth of products, that mom likely is going to need kitchen tools for her kitchen, pots, pans, Ball jars, Food saver, vacuum ceiling, lots of things. If she has older kids, she might need some school supplies, Elmer’s or Paper Made or things like that. There’s so many of things we know about her just from that one purchase or just one piece of data that we probably can cross-sell. That’s a massive opportunity for us. We have just scratched the surface in terms of opportunity there.”
“If you’re on a Walmart or Target or an Amazon and there’s tens or hundreds of millions of sessions going on in there, and there are 10 or hundreds of millions of products on there, how do you get people, how do you get consumers to see your products? By trying to attract them with a variety of brands that we think target them, the likelihood of consumers coming in through that to a store within a store of our ecosystem, of our ecosystem brands is probably a way to be very efficient with marketing spend. It’s probably a very good consumer experience and it makes a choice, the selection a little easier.”
“The great thing about ecommerce is that whatever channel you’re in, it’s incredibly data rich. Also, the feedback loops are very quick. In a traditional brick and mortar world, where you’re shipping product to a retail outlet, they’re putting on the shelf, it sits on the shelf for however long and then it gets bought, the data, it takes a long time but there’s a long lag there. In the world of ecommerce, we’re getting real-time information on what’s happening with price, what’s happening with the consumer, what’s happening with supply, what’s happening with out of stocks, all these different things. The data is so rich. We’re still [at a place where] a minority of the business is ecommerce sales, but the data is so rich that it should be able to impact and inform the majority of the business that it still has a brick and mortar base. That’s where I think we have a lot of opportunity to hopefully move faster and make decisions faster than we ever have in history.”
“Consumers are interacting with us in all these different channels, independent of where they shop. By the way, independent of where they shop might also be different from how they get it fulfilled. A lot of this is becoming super decoupled, and so you have to think about the person who walks into a physical store, a Walmart, a Target, a Costco, wherever, the way that they got to that physical sale in that particular case may have been through a lot of digital assets. They may have been going to our D2C site to get product descriptions or check out colors or look at reviews or whatever. Or it could be the opposite, they may be going into the store to touch something, and then by either directly through us or through another retail outlet. The consumer is becoming omnivorous in terms of way that they’re consuming the data and learning about our products and interacting with us, and so we need to figure out how to continue to be everywhere that they are.”
Bio
Michal “Mike” Geller is President of eCommerce & Digital at Newell Brands and co-chair of our Omni-Channel Council. In Mike’s role, he leads the teams responsible for Amazon and International eCommerce, Marketing Operations, Direct to Consumer and Digital Technology and Consumer CareLines, among other functions.
Prior to Newell, Mike was SVP, Global eCommerce at PepsiCo where he led a team responsible for growing sales of PepsiCo products across eCommerce retailers such as Amazon and Walmart.
Prior to PepsiCo, Mike also spent almost 10 years at Amazon in a variety of business, technology and marketing roles including a leadership role on one of Amazon’s Mom-Focused sites, building Amazon’s digital coupon business and leading Amazon’s Gift Card business.
Before joining Amazon, Mike was in leadership positions in several technology-based companies, including two that he founded.
Mike received his BA in Computer Science from Harvard and his MBA from Stanford.
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Transcript:
Stephanie:
Hey there, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I’m your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission. Today on the show I’m super excited, we have Michal Galler who currently serves as a President of eCommerce and Digital at Newell Brands. Michal, welcome to the show.
Michal:
Hi, good morning.
Stephanie:
Thanks for coming on. So everyone always knows I like to start with a little bit of background before we dive into your current work, and you have a really impressive one. You’ve gone from Amazon to Quidsi to Pepsi, and now Newell, and I was hoping you can highlight your journey a bit so people get to know you.
Michal:
Sure. Yeah, I consider myself a tech guy from the beginning. I studied computer science, I was always a geeky kid, and after college basically committed to myself I would never work for a company. I would only be an entrepreneur. And was able to start, luckily, two companies out of college and then out of business school. But then fell into the corporate world accidentally and ended up going through a series of smaller companies and then ended up, as you said, at Amazon for a long time. I had like almost 20 years of just really technology heavy background, and then six-ish years ago, a friend of mine joined PepsiCo to lead their e-commerce group and needed some help there. It was a big shift to go to a place that was a non-tech DNA company but I had a great run there, and that was really interesting.
Michal:
When this opportunity at Newell came out, came up to do the same thing there to help elevate some of the digital and e-commerce functions and that was a really interesting thing. I’d say going back to my original promise to myself, what I realized was it wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to work for anybody else, it was more that I just wanted to be inventing and doing new things and creating change. That’s the common theme throughout all these different roles has been either creating something, fixing something, building something, transforming something. That’s the stuff that’s really been most exciting for me.
Stephanie:
Yeah, that’s awesome. What were the first two companies that you built out of college? Because, to me, I’m already impressed just by that, I’m like, “That’s goals right there.”
Michal:
Right out of college, I started a very early screaming media technology company.
Stephanie:
What year was that?
Michal:
It was ’95, so a long time ago.
Stephanie:
Early to the game.
Michal:
Yeah, and actually, what the interesting part is, at that time, we were building technology to stream high resolution images and 3D images of products for online catalogs. It was before e-commerce was even a word, it was online catalogs. So we were doing these things for very early websites, which for those of you who have any tenure here like we were trying to figure out how to get high resolution images over 14.4 modems, so really, really slow. But this is before broadband, before high speed internet, so that was a really interesting thing. But that actually was the beginning of my “e-commerce journey” was looking at content from an e-commerce perspective and trying to figure out how to improve that so that consumers can get a similar experience offline as online. That was I did that for a few years. We built a company, but luckily sold the company and then I went to business school. Then after-
Stephanie:
Who did you sell it to?
Michal:
Actually, I sold it to John Sculley. John Sculley is-
Stephanie:
Okay, just a small name. No big deal. What?
Michal:
Yeah, so actually the really funny story about that was John Sculley, who just, for those who don’t know, was President of PepsiCo and then was CEO of Apple for a long time, and then he became an investor at some point and he ended up buying this company that we started, and the story went from there. But when he bought the company, he was telling us all these stories about his life at PepsiCo and I was like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, I’ll never work for a company like that.” And 20 years later, I ended up at PepsiCo, which was a funny also turnaround story.
Stephanie:
Okay, and so then you’re in business school and you start another company afterwards?
Michal:
I started another company. Unfortunately, I graduated business school exactly the wrong time just as the dot com bubble was bursting. I was still pigheaded about trying to start a company. I ended up realizing very quickly that there was no way to raise money in that environment, so a partner and I we decided to bootstrap a company or tried to bootstrap a company. I was living in LA at the time, and we realized that there was an opportunity for high speed internet access in multimillion dollar homes. They were too far to get, for a bunch of reasons, to get internet access and we found an ability to do satellite, two-way satellite, internet access. We ended up building this company.
Michal:
To bootstrap it, we got access to license to sell this two-way satellite system back in, this is like 2000, 2001. We did that for a while, which gave me access to a lot of really amazing homes, and candidly, celebrity homes was really interesting. But I effectively became the cable guy because we were just installing these things. Did that for a while. We were able to make like a nice small business out of it, but nothing that was a hockey stick. Then at some point we decided to shift, and like I said, that’s when I got my first real job.
Stephanie:
Your first real job, wow. It seems like you’ve been very ahead on a lot of things that are people are still trying to figure out even to today. You were just doing it a long time ago. Do you ever feel that way where you’re like, “That was my idea,” or, “I had that idea 10 years ago.”
Michal:
Yes, that does come up. But I think that’s a lot of people in the technology space who are thinking about new ideas, like you have a thousand ideas, 10 of them at some point are going to come to fruition and you can always say, “I thought of that.” But, yes, I do feel that once in a while but I don’t think I’m unique in that sense.
Stephanie:
What drew you to Newell Brands? What was the opportunity that you spotted there?
Michal:
Well, what’s interesting about Newell Brands is some very old tenure long lasting company with a lot of established, phenomenal brands. There are no other companies like it that’s got a… Well, in the space of, let’s say, durables, semi-durables, not consumables, there really isn’t anyone else that’s got the breadth of brands and the size and the scale that Newell Brands has. Newell Brands had a tumultuous history up and down over the past bunch of years. When I was reached out to about the role, it was, basically, it was told to me, which is true, that the company was in a bit of a turnaround. Basically, most of the management is new within two-ish years, two and a half years, something like that. At the time, it was around two years.
Michal:
The company was in the process of doing a turnaround and they were already like well out of the way of the biggest risk of the turnaround. But there was still a lot of stuff to do to really take the company that was candidly on the precipice however many years ago, and into one that really had a lot of growth. I looked at it and said, “There’s a lot of assets here. The brands are phenomenal, there’s a real opportunity for scale, and it feels like there’s a lot of low hanging fruit.” So that was interesting. It helped that I didn’t have to move, so that was also got me to take the phone call. But then once I understood again the… The other thing I’ll say about Newell Brands, which was interesting, is to the credit of the previous regime, they had invested very early in e-commerce.
Michal:
Actually, I was shocked to learn how big the e-commerce business was and how much it had grown over the past bunch of years and how, in some ways, was well prepared they were for the next round of innovation in the next round of transformation. I’d say that the way they grew into the e-commerce post was very much, and again I don’t mean this in a negative way, but it was brute force, it was through dollars and people, etc. It wasn’t necessarily through technology or data, etc. I thought there was a real opportunity to come in and take this amazing asset of the brands, the amazing asset of the e-commerce work that they had done, candidly, both in Amazon and other pure plays.
Michal:
But also candidly in the D2C space. I was shocked to hear like how significant the D2C business was here, and that there was so much opportunity. That was all very exciting because it felt like real opportunity to similarly transform, grow, do some really interesting things on the back of these phenomenal brands, phenomenal businesses.
Stephanie:
Yeah, so for anyone who doesn’t really know Newell Brands, I’ll say, I didn’t really know there was like that company over top of all the other ones. Can you name some of the top brands within your portfolio, or maybe just like 10? I think there’s like 50 or more.
Michal:
Yeah, there are. So Newell Brands has, I don’t know, 100 brands, something like that, and they’re all household names you know. Rubbermaid, Graco car seats, Sharpies, Elmer’s glue, Coleman camping, Marmot technical apparel, Contigo water bottles. Let’s see who, Ball canning jars, Calphalon pots, Booster [crosstalk]-
Stephanie:
Crockpot.
Michal:
Crockpot, right? Literally, dozens and dozens of brands that everybody knows. Almost all of our brands are really household names. One of the exercise I did when I first joined was I, literally, the day before I started, I went around the house and just took photos of all the Newell Brands I could find in my house. It was a staggering amount. It was big collage of pictures.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I was doing the same thing after getting the prep doc for this and looking through that and looking around my house and being like it’s everywhere, everything. Like all these brands I had no idea were Newell Brands and they’re all really good brands too. Sometimes you see holding companies where you’re like, “I know two of those brands and the rest I’m not really sure about.” This almost every single name.
Michal:
Yeah, it’s an amazing collection of brands and I think if you look at the history of the company, like there are so many brands over the years, over the decades that have come in or out of the company. If you look at brands that have ever been in the umbrella of this company, it’s even a bigger list. It’s just amazing.
Stephanie:
so when thinking about your first 90 days, what was your plan? What were you like, “I’m set out to do this for the first 90?”
Michal:
Well, the first 90 days was really just assessing. The figuring out where we had strength and where we had opportunities and reestablishing. In my particular role, this was less about e-commerce, but in the role the team that I inherited had been leaderless for a long time. So there was just getting to know people, figuring out what existed, trying to reshape, reform a few teams or start reshaping, reform a few teams at the beginning. That was a lot of what the beginnings was. It was also learning we’ve got eight business units, which is a complicated, which is hard. Because it’s eight different CEOs effectively of businesses and there’s a lot of just relationship building there to make sure that I understand what they need. By the way, their needs from my team are very different.
Michal:
Let’s say car seats is a very highly penetrated online category. It’s a very different set of needs than let’s say our paper made brands that are pens where the penetration is much lower, or you think about a brand like Marmot, that category people are used to buying technical apparel at this point online. It’s just a very different experience to buy, sell market those types of things than it is to pick another brand. Pick something else that we sell. There’s a lot of just really learning there. Then the first thing was just figuring out, you always start with the foundational stuff, so figuring out where, how are we doing on the foundational work? If you think about e-commerce, in particular, it’s really around the consumer.
Michal:
There are two things to really look at all the time, and consumer number one, and the second thing is to make sure you’ve got is data. Making sure that the data that you have to run the business is accessible, usable, digestible, available, etc. So those are the two real areas I started looking at to figure out, “Do we have that?” There’s obviously a third thing, which is important in a company like ours, which is around the customer. The customer for us, meaning the retailers, so the Amazons, the Walmarts, Targets, etc., Buy Buy Baby for our baby brands, Costco. You keep going, the list goes on. That’s also very, very important place to look but looking first from a consumer lens and seeing how are we doing from a consumer perspective across all of our direct and indirect channels?
Michal:
That was the first thing to look, and so the looking at how does our content look online? How are is our copy good? Are we getting the right… How are our reviews? What are people saying? How is our experience from a in stock and other things? The things at the end of the day the consumer can see is the first place that I started looking and started identifying opportunities there to focus. Then from there you look at, like I said, data is really important because that’s the thing that’s going to drive any decisions, and more importantly, any test and learns or any improvements.
Michal:
That’s the second focus is trying to figure out how to make sure, and that we have the data available. Again, I inherited a lot of really strong both people and assets, and so trying to figure out what we have, how to put it together in different ways? Do we have to make changes or not? That was a lot of the beginning phase.
Stephanie:
Yeah. How did you shift the team’s mindset? I know you, before, you said it was a lot of like put head count to it, brute force, like make this work and it did work. But how did you shift their mindset to then start thinking, “Hey, what can we do to automate this?” How can we actually organize this in a more technical way than it has been done before?
Michal:
I’ve only been here nine months, so it’s still early. The approach, so first of all, change is tough and change in a big organization is tough, and especially, in an organization like ours which is by design a matrix organization. It’s hard to come into a new company and pound your fists and say, “This is the way it has to be done.” The approach that I’ve been taking and encouraging the team to take has been one of experimenting. Basically, come up with hypothesis, something to be done differently, and then instead of trying to convince somebody to do it, that’s the way we have to do it, just say, “Hey, can we test it for a month, two months, three months?” And see if we can try it a different way, and worst case, we revert.
Michal:
It’s like it’s pretty low risk decision, there’s not a large commitment and it’s just a way to learn. That approach, I think broadly, we’ve been able to apply it to a lot of different things. And we’ve ever been able to find some areas where we found some experiments that work, found some areas where experiments don’t work. But that approach, I think, has been one that’s just been a little bit lower risk and easier to get the feedback loop. You spend more time, actually… It’s easier to come up with hypothesis, get some agreement to do a test, and then do it and then build the data set based on the actual results of the test rather than the other approach. Which is to spend six months arguing about what’s the best way to do A, B and C, and then do a big reveal.
Michal:
Then it turns out that it sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. That’s broadly the approach I’ve been trying to take here with the team, and like I said, we’ve seen some successes, we’ve made some changes as a result of that. We’ve also, like I said, we’ve seen some failures, which is also candidly good.
Stephanie:
How did you go about thinking through like what tech to implement? I’m thinking about all these different brands, all those different data, are you bringing them all under one tech stack? Was there a solution that you already had in mind that feels like there’s a lot of things you’d have to tackle at once with all these different streams of revenue coming in?
Michal:
Again, I was blessed into some sense that some of that work had been done already. So two big decisions that were made that before my time. One was to consolidate some of the Amazon team into a single team that crossed all the business units, and that I think has been very strong reason for success on that channel. The other big decision was related to the direct-to-consumer businesses, we had a crazy amount of websites and direct-to-consumer sites across the world. There was a decision, again, predated me to get them all onto one tech stack, and that was basically 95% complete by the time I joined. That credit to other people, that was really, really great. The basics of that I think were good.
Michal:
Now the problem with that is that it’s very hard to be nimble and agile and responsive to all these different brands when you’re in a single stack, but there’s also some pros to being on a single stack. Now that we’ve got everybody on the stack, now the next part is figuring out how do we take the single basically product for all of our brands and figure out how to personalize them or individualize them for the particular brands and particular consumer segments? That’s the next step now.
Stephanie:
Got it. If you don’t mind me asking, what tech stack are you using? What software are you using behind the scenes to deal with personalized and all that work?
Michal:
It’s if you can imagine it’s a conglomeration of lots of different products. I think it’s a Salesforce backbone.
Stephanie:
Got it. Okay, well, that’s our sponsor on the show, so hey, shout out to them then. That’s awesome. When it comes to the kinds of data coming in, some of the products are similar. Like what are you seeing when you’re looking at these different business units and products? Are you seeing some themes happening over the past nine months where you’re like, “Oh, I’m starting to see some trends and ways to maybe organize things differently or cross promote each other?”
Michal:
I actually think that’s a big opportunity. I think we have not done as good a job as a company as cross promoting partly. Again, there’s a long corporate history which I think led to it. But I think the business units, this is more corporate structure rather than technology or data, I think the business units have been building their brands more independently, historically, and there hasn’t been as much opportunity to do cross-sell. If you think about like the ultimate consumer, the mom, you think about, let’s say, a mom is buying a infant car seat, that tells us a lot about her. If you think at the breadth of products, that mom likely is going to need kitchen tools for her kitchen, pots, pans, ball jars, food saver, vacuum ceiling, like lots of things.
Michal:
She probably needs, if she has older kids, might need some school supplies, Elmer’s or paper made or things like that. There’s so many of things we know about her just from that one purchase or just one piece of data that we probably can cross-sell. That’s a massive opportunity for us. We have just scratched the surface in terms of opportunity there. Now we do have the data to be able to do that, and candidly, we increasingly have the platforms to be able to do some of that cross-sell. Whether it’s through our direct-to-consumer sites or whether it’s through some of our retail partners. I think that’s a big opportunity. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s-
Stephanie:
Yeah. No, it definitely does.
Michal:
… it’s a huge, huge opportunity for us.
Stephanie:
I’ve always thought about that when I bought three car seats at this point and every time I’m like, “You essentially know the next 18 years of my life. Like you should be just help me out here. At age three, I’m going to need this. When they’re five, I’m going to need this probably.”
Michal:
There is a lot of data that we know about consumers and we increasingly have to use it better. Because, again, just within the brands even, think about the mom who buys an infant car seat, we actually know when she’s ready for the next size or when she’s looking for a highchair or when she should be looking for a jogging stroller or whatever, all these different things. That’s just within a particular set of brands. Cross brand is even is so much a bigger opportunity, I think, than we’ve taken advantage of yet, or at least in the recent history.
Stephanie:
Yeah, are there any experiments right now you are having your team work on when it comes to personalization or trying to utilize the data in a different way or a new way?
Michal:
Well, so a couple of… None of it I would say is rocket science. I’m going to say things and they don’t sound incredibly sexy but I think they’re really important. Like one experiment that we did, which was very successful was, and again, it seems obvious, was we sell these food saver appliances so you can vacuum seal food, etc. Then we sell the consumables, the bags and the other products that go along with it. We have not done a good job of figuring out how to effectively get the attach rate of the consumables to the appliances. So figuring out how to use tools like retargeting and other tools like that to figure out how to remind people like, “Hey, you may be running out of the consumables, the bags, etc. We know you have a device.” That seems like an obvious thing.
Michal:
Putting a little bit of focus on those types of activities as opposed to broader just food saver marketing activity proved very successful. Again, I don’t think that’s rocket science necessarily, but I think it was just a little bit of focus we were able to convince folks who just hadn’t thought that way before to try something, and then they were like, “Oh, this has a good return and it’s great for the consumer and it’s good for the product. That would be an example. I think you’ll see us more, especially coming this year, especially later in the year, you’ll see more of us trying to do multi-brand type of things. One of the opportunities we have is with, especially with our retail partners, is to leverage the scale of their traffic to try to do cross brand, more higher cross brand selling, basically.
Michal:
One of the things, and this is something I did with the team very successfully at PepsiCo, we realized that if you’re on a Walmart or Target or an Amazon and there’s tens or hundreds of millions of sessions going on in there, and there are 10 or hundreds of millions of products on there, like how do you get people, how do you get consumers to see your products? By trying to attract them with a variety of brands that we think target them, the likelihood of consumers coming in through that to like a store within a store of our ecosystem, of our ecosystem brands is probably a way to be very efficient with marketing spend. It’s probably a very good consumer experience and it makes a choice, the selection a little easier. For us, it can be a very effective way to do that. I saw that with PepsiCo that was a very effective mechanism we used. We haven’t done it here yet too much at Newell but that’s something we’re exploring for this year.
Stephanie:
What are best practices when thinking about Amazon having your own like custom store experience? How do you go about building that to get awareness around certain products and then bring them into the ecosystem?
Stephanie:
How would you advise a company right now to think about that and really tap into Amazon like you did at PepsiCo?
Michal:
Right, so the advantage of both, I had a PepsiCo and candidly have a Newell is one that they think is pretty unique. There are probably 10 companies in the world that I think can use the same strategy. It’s basically it’s a strategy that works really well for companies that have scale, and meaning scale of brand, scale of revenue, etc. and scale of products that hit a particular consumer segment. In the PepsiCo world, it was snacks and beverages that those went together pretty well. So we were able to make events that were like a snack and beverage event of some sort. Whether it was around a prime day or a holiday, or whether it was just bespoke. We were able to say, “Get your snacks and beverages and get people into the PepsiCo store within a store on whatever retail platform we were on.
Michal:
I think the same thing is true, at Newell, we can potentially do things. Again, either with retail events, like a holiday or prime day or whatever, or we can do it potentially on our own like create some kind of a mom centered or a family centered or an outdoor center for some of our outdoor gear or etc. We can potentially create these effectively events that people might come into the event because it’s an interesting event. Then once they’re in there, the selection of products is the products we think fit that created segment of consumer. That kind of thing is what you can do. Now, if you’re a company that’s only selling one, two, three products, that’s very hard to do.
Michal:
In our case, that’s where I think we have an opportunity, and candidly, that word scale, I think, is the important one. Going back to your first question about what was interesting about Newell? It’s this ability to we have scale, we have to figure out how to leverage that scale in a way that’s really, again, consumer oriented and drives growth and profit for the business.
Stephanie:
Yep, got it. How are you thinking about this year 2022? Are there any trends right now that you’ve seen when it comes to people shopping on Amazon versus going D2C, versus going to retail partners? You have access to so many different brands. I’m sure you can see a lot, so what are you all seeing behind the scenes?
Michal:
Well, okay, so the obvious things are what everybody knows where there’s all these COVID lapses. A year ago, the online adoption went crazy once we hit COVID and we’re starting to lap that, or actually, I should say two years ago, people were crazy and so we’re starting to lap, we’re starting to feel more like the normal world. That’s one thing that we’re obviously looking at and trying to figure out how sticky is the e-commerce consumer? We saw massive growth in e-commerce over the last years. How sticky are they? This past year we’ve seen that for a while, there were people going back to stores, candidly, faster than we thought. Now people are back online.
Michal:
I don’t think we know, nobody can predict what’s going to happen but that’s something we’re in watching very closely. I think, for us, the other ones that are big impact to the company and to the world actually is all the supply chain disruption. That’s actually affected a lot because we spend probably more time than we’d like to figuring out how to optimize the inventory that is constrained now because we have all these disruptions in the supply chain and figuring out where does it go? That one actually gives actually… Hopefully, we’ll figure out how to continually improve on that into this year, but that’s a wild card a bit because we lost some ability to look at the data because we were artificially demand was high, but we weren’t able to necessarily supply as much as the demand was in a lot of cases.
Michal:
It’s hard to see that signal is going to be hard to read, so that’s going to complicate things a little bit for the next little while in terms of trends, from my perspective. But as the supply chain improves, which looks like it’s improving, we’ll hopefully be able to get to something more normal and be able to see it. Then obviously the third thing that we’re just macro, that everybody’s looking at again is also just what’s going to happen with inflation this year and what’s going to be the impact? Candidly, what it’s going to do to demand? As prices likely go up or are going up, are consumers going to change their behavior or not? That’s something that, again, I’m not sharing any secrets here in the industry or in the world. You can see demand hasn’t gone down with prices going up so far, but that at some point will probably change. It’ll be interesting to see when that does change.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I was listening to an interesting podcast a few days ago and it was about inflation and how right now consumers may be feeling like artificially richer than they are and they’re spending at rates maybe that they shouldn’t. That, of course, is making some people nervous of like, “Okay, spending on a decrease over the coming year as inflation goes higher.” Yeah, that’s a tricky one to watch though.” Also, it’s out of a lot people’s hands.
Michal:
Yeah, these are all the things we’re watching. I don’t have a prediction here but these are some of the key things. Again, everything comes down to the consumer, I’ll just keep saying that. It’s all about what the consumer wants. The great thing about e-commerce, again, whatever channel you’re in, is it’s incredibly data rich. It’s also the feedback loops are very quick, so it doesn’t take… In a traditional brick and mortar world where you’re shipping product to a retail outlet, they’re putting on the shelf, it sits on the shelf forever long and then it gets bought, the data, it takes a long time but there’s a long lag there.
Michal:
In the world of e-commerce, we’re getting real-time information on what’s happening with price, what’s happening with the consumer, what’s happening with supply, what’s happening with out stocks, like all these different things. The data is so rich that it doesn’t… Again, we’re still a minority of the business is still e-commerce sales but the data is so rich that it should be able to impact and inform the majority of the business has still brick and mortar base. That’s where I think we have a lot of opportunity to hopefully move faster and make decisions faster than we ever have in the history.
Stephanie:
Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about was how you balance your retail versus e-commerce experience? How do you think about creating the perfect customer journey or omnichannel experience for the customer?
Michal:
Yeah, so I think, again, it’s we’re following the consumer so we need to make sure that any consumer touchpoint is a consumer touchpoint that’s excellent. Whether it’s on our sites, whether it’s through our media, whether it’s through our call centers, whether it’s through our warranty replacements. Like whether it’s through our retail site, a D2C site, any of these things. From my perspective, I think that the key thing that I think we’re evolving to, and this has been an interesting conversation with many of the brands and many of the brand leaders, has been the consumers are interacting with us and all these different channels, independent of where they shop.
Michal:
By the way, independent of where they shop might also be different from how they get it fulfilled. It’s a lot of this is becoming super decoupled, and so you have to think about the person who walks into a physical store, a Walmart, a Target, a Costco, wherever, the way that they got to that physical sale in that particular case may have been through a lot of digital assets. They may have been going to our D2C site to get product descriptions or check out colors or look at reviews or whatever. Or it could be the opposite, they may be going into the store to touch something, and then by either directly through us or through another retail outlet. The consumer is becoming omnivorous in terms of way that they’re consuming the data and learning about our products and interacting with us, and so we need to figure out how to continue to be everywhere that they are.
Michal:
It’s important for us to make sure that the experience we have on our direct-to-consumer platforms, the experience we have on the various [inaudible] platforms, which by the way, all have different capabilities. But when we think about the sum of that, plus our media, plus our other brand communications is holistically consistent and gives the consumer the ability to get whatever information they need wherever they might want to consume it. Again, that’s independent of potentially where they buy it, and that’s also independent of potentially how it gets fulfilled. They might pick it up at the store, they might get it shipped, there might be some other way of doing it. But all of these things effectively become decoupled, but the whole experience becomes the consumer experience and that’s the way we have to look at it.
Stephanie:
What does the partnership look like with retail partners? Because they have a big part of making sure that experience works well, and I know you mentioned also having different kinds of partnerships with them. What does it look like to set up a successful relationship in a way that you can make sure that experience really does work the way that you’re explaining it?
Michal:
Yeah, our retail partners are incredibly important to us, obviously. That’s still the majority of our sales are coming through that channel. There’s fundamentals in terms of just setting up the business relationships so that it’s a win-win, so that we’re making money, they’re making money, we’re operationally efficient. There’s all the block and tackle stuff that you would have in any retail relationship. Making sure pricing is right, supply chain is right, promotions are right, etc., etc., etc. But I think also the added stuff that we have now is really making sure that the, again, the consumer… we have to work with them continually on the consumer experience.
Michal:
They’re on our case all the time. Every one of these retailer’s on our case to make sure is your content up, is your… they have scorecards for us as to how well we’re doing on what they consider the fundamentals, and candidly, we’re pushing the retailers as well to continue to build capabilities that help us do two things. One is get our message out to the consumer in an effective, positive way, and that those technologies across every retailer have been evolving over the last 10 years from what the detail pages look like, what the brand stores look like, what their media platforms look like, etc. How offsite, onsite, like all the different things.
Michal:
Then the other part of it, which is the other area we’re pushing with the retailers is around the data access. It’s in order for us to make our joint business more effective, we just need to make sure we have the data that allows us to be more effective. Whether that’s having faster feedback in terms of problems, better feedback in terms of what the consumer is doing, etc., is really important. Obviously, there are privacy concerns so we’re not getting down to individual consumers and what they did. But the trends and the speed of which we’re getting the feedback is really I for us because increasingly we’re able to react to that faster and speed really matters.
Michal:
So the faster we can get the data, the faster we consume the data, the faster we can react to the data, whether it’s into something on supply chain or pricing or marketing or promotion or whatever, the better it’s going to be for everybody. That data transfer and data partnership I think is something that is also evolving along with some of the other things.
Stephanie:
Yeah, cool. Are there any pieces of tech right now that you’re geeking out on that are maybe helping in that initiative or helping anything that you’re doing day to day where you’re like, “Oh, I’m really excited about this one new piece of tech that we just stumbled on.”
Michal:
I tend to be boring on that front like-
Stephanie:
Okay, I like boring too.
Michal:
I tend to, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing. On our direct-to-consumer sites, we’re doing a lot of experimentation with the shiny object stuff that are more personalization, augmented reality. Like all the buzzwordy things that exist there, we’re testing a lot of that stuff. Some of it is proving to be fruitful, some less. I’ll tell you, I think there’s still so much opportunity just to improve the fundamentals. Just continue to look at the consumer flow and the consumer funnel like how do we find the consumers? How do we interact with them and how do we get them to effectively make a purchase? Which is candidly what we’re in business to do. Again, independent of where they do the purchase, that whole funnel, I think there’s so much low hanging fruit just in terms of broad looking at data, making small tweaks iterating.
Michal:
That’s really not a sexy new technology, it’s just pushing the envelope and continuing to push the envelope and figure what to do. The example I just said before, the food saver consumables, retargeting’s been around for a long time. It’s just a matter of applying it appropriately to the product. There’s plenty of technology out there, basic technology out there to help, so we’ll see. The only other place I’d say I think that there is opportunity, and actually, I would say, does excite me a lot is around some of the new data science techniques. Because the issue in a company like ours is we’re big and we have a lot of things going on at once.
Michal:
And at some point, it’s very hard to do things manually and optimally, and so having some sort of automation, data science, AI/ML, like those kinds of tools to apply to things that people might be able to do manually, again, gets a scale that we may not have otherwise. Again, is that a sexy new technology? No. Are there new techniques that are coming out every day to do that? Yes. Is that exciting? I think so.
Stephanie:
What’s maybe an example of a new technique coming out where you’re like it could transform something that we’ve been doing manual for 10 years or longer?
Michal:
Well, I’d have to think about things that are right now, but if you think about let’s say the most obvious one over the last five or 10 years, I think has had a massive implications, has been the automation of and optimization of paid search and display ads. That just the marketing automation that’s happened over the last five or 10 years has been incredibly effective and important and grown a bit. If you look at like every display, just within the retail environment, forget at Google, if you just look within the retail environment, the growth in those paid search and display platforms that is because it’s effective. How is it effective? It’s because they’re getting more smarter, continually smarter about targeting the right consumers, getting their bidding right for the ones that have bidded the ad units.
Michal:
All of the behind the scenes mechanisms that are better pinpointing the right ad to the right consumer at the right time is doing two things. One is it’s like all of us as advertisers, it’s making it more effective for us to and more efficient for us to play in that sandbox. But it’s also because it’s more pinpointed, it’s also giving more inventory effectively to everybody. It’s, actually, it’s growing the pie in multiple different ways. I think that’s, for me, is still something that has been very exciting in the last five or 10 years and I think is going to be and continue to be an area of innovation for the next long while. Some of that’s going to be developed by some of the retail platforms, some of it’s going to be by tool or other providers, some of it’s going to be hopefully innovated by folks like us.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I love it. All right. Well, let’s move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?
Michal:
I am ready.
Stephanie:
All right. First, what’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?
Michal:
Focus on the consumer.
Stephanie:
I love it. What’s something you constantly tell your team or remind them of?
Michal:
We don’t have to solve everything, we just have to continue to make incremental improvements.
Stephanie:
Love it. What’s up next on your reading list?
Michal:
Oh, I will say I just read, so it’s not what’s upcoming, but I just read a great book called Working Backwards about Amazon that I thought was actually one of the best business books about Amazon that was really not only just telling stories about Amazon, but actually gave some really got crisp advice on how to apply some of that to other businesses.
Stephanie:
Ooh, I’ll have to check that one out. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about?
Michal:
So good question. I actually spent a lot of time, especially the last years, in home automation DIY, that kind of stuff. And so that whole world is like how to automate stuff and to make your life more efficient. Those are the areas where I have a lot of like personal passion, and so that could be a fun podcast I think.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I would definitely say it goes with the trend that’s happening around the home improvement. Everyone would be listening to that.
Michal:
Yes.
Stephanie:
You should start it, we’ll find you a sponsor. All right, and the last one, what is a favorite memory over the past 10 years that you think about that makes you happy? It can be personal, it can be business, it can be anything. Just something that first pops into your mind?
Michal:
Well, it would be hard to all… A lot of the memory are personal. I’ve got five kids actually, and so the times when we’ve all been able to be together and some more fun, typically, on a vacation, either skiing or on the beach, I think those are the areas where I’m like, “Oh, this is nice.” Relaxing, etc, and good family time.
Stephanie:
I love that. Well, Michal, thanks so much for coming on the show and joining me. It was a blast, and we’ll definitely have to have you back in the future. Where can our listeners find out more about you and Newell Brands?
Michal:
To learn about the brands at Newell, you can go to Newell Brands. But check out all of our D2C sites, Yankee Candles, a really popular one, Marmot’s another good one. There’s several other interesting ones to learn more about our products and brands. To learn about me, I think the typical LinkedIn, etc., is probably best.
Stephanie:
Perfect. Thanks, Michal. That was great.
Michal:
Thank you.
