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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
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Brent Peterson (00:00.962)
Welcome to this special episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Keri Concannon and Olivia Schmid from Beauty Rep. Why don't each of you do your own introductions, tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. And Keri, go ahead, you can start us off.
Keri (00:16.46)
Yeah, hi, I'm Keri Concannon CEO and co-founder of Beauty Rep. I have been in sales for over 20 years. Started as Boots on the Ground at a popular skincare brand called Obagi Medical. I was there for almost 10 years. Again, Boots on the Ground worked my way up into kind of executive sales leadership roles and then took over Obagi's global KOL program. So key opinion leaders working with physicians, R &D,
marketing efforts from there went to a startup, a whole different slew of issues going from, you know, a household name brand to a startup. Couldn't challenge myself enough. And then during that time, I helped acquire a brand called Glytone from Pierre Fabre and was handling like marketing overseeing that. But just to give you kind of an insight of where it started and to segue into beauty rep a little bit.
realized how siloed the business was, I think, on both sides. And that's how I was introduced to Olivia. I naively thought that the brands that she had worked at had it maybe a bit more together than where I was. And so I will kick it over to Olivia to do her intro.
Olivia Schmid (01:30.312)
Perfect, thank you so much, Keri. Thank you, Brent. So I met Keri through working in the aesthetics industry. So I have experiences at mostly injectable brands like Galderma and Allergan, but had a bit of a different path getting there. Before that, I worked in e-commerce at Amazon, and prior to that, I was actually a lawyer in the US. So done a lot of different things, but super.
you know, super excited about the medical aesthetics industry because it's a very unique one. People think of it as niche, but it's actually quite big. And both Keri and I saw a lot of the inefficiencies, you know, that come with a sales process within a big organization where there's marketing that thinks very differently from sales, thinks very differently from education. And in the end, the actual customer or the buyer is forgotten. So
Our platform is called Beauty Rep, first of all, and it's intended to really bring a user-friendly environment to customers where they can find product, the right education for those products and the right marketing assets, and still have a direct relationship with brands.
Brent Peterson (02:48.632)
That's very nice. each of your, do you have passions each of you? What is your, what do you like to do outside of work?
Keri (02:55.296)
gosh, well, I live in a climate controlled environment, Brent. My husband's in professional hockey, my son plays, so if we're not doing aesthetics, we are doing hockey. So that is the other secret part of my life. It's not so secret, but yes.
Olivia Schmid (03:11.614)
For me, I'm happy right now if I find some time for a workout or actually just watching a silly show. So I'd say right now my hobbies are pretty boring.
Brent Peterson (03:23.79)
Hobbies are never boring and Keri, I'm from Minnesota originally. I know all about hockey. We, our kids, we didn't even introduce them to hockey because we knew we knew what we were going to get ourselves into. And if you're not three and on skates in Minnesota, you're you've already lost out.
Keri (03:40.48)
It is true, but it's so accessible there. We're a little jealous here in Charleston, South Carolina with that, but that's amazing. My son went to Shattuck for some summer camps and things. Love it there so much. Beautiful. Beautiful.
Brent Peterson (03:52.791)
And I live in Kona now, so we're at the opposite of hockey. There's one roller rink that's been here since the 1990 roller rink, something or another, that there's no ice in Kona anyways. Maybe you go to Hilo, but it doesn't matter. right. Before we talk about your platform, Beauty Rep, I do have to tell you a joke. It's called the Free Joke Project, and you're just going to give me a rating 8 through 13. So here we go.
Keri (04:07.416)
Thank you.
Brent Peterson (04:21.014)
I just watched a guy fill his canoe with ice cream and root beer. Kinda strange, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
Olivia Schmid (04:29.534)
So.
Keri (04:31.17)
such a dad joke. An eight to 13. Come on Olivia. we try to play the game where we say it at the same time?
Olivia Schmid (04:36.67)
You know, you know what? I think I'm going to give you a 12 for effort. Is that is that one of the scales?
Brent Peterson (04:43.879)
that's absolutely fantastic. Thank you. Yes.
Keri (04:47.436)
I was gonna go 9.8, sorry, Brent.
Olivia Schmid (04:49.63)
you
Brent Peterson (04:49.942)
No, that's fine. I'm good to get to anything above an eight. That's fantastic. Thank you. All right, so let's just give, I think that the idea of what you're doing is really interesting. And it's probably unique in your industry because it is more B2B, right? You're not really doing direct to consumer. Tell us about the solution and how you both came up with it or how you came up with it.
Keri (04:55.576)
you
Keri (05:16.022)
Yeah, so I think from my perspective, as I mentioned, I was a sales rep in Charleston for years and then managed sales reps for many years as well. And I think that the B2B process, it's not like when, you
door-to-door salesmen would knock on your door and they'd have a handheld flyer, right? I mean, that was kind of the old school way of how you were introduced to things. Fast forward now, we live in such a, you know, a commerce driven world where everything is digitized. People are expecting information at their fingertips. I COVID really drove that specifically in our industry where, you know, products and services that you could only actually access from going through to the physician, all of a sudden, you know, customers are raising their hands going, we want access to these things.
and physicians were crippled at that point. So it really forced our business from the consumer standpoint to become digitized much quicker. But then on the professional B2B side, we're still lagging behind. A lot of these brands are relying on.
marketing and sales teams to get the word out in different, really unstructured channels. So reps oftentimes are emailing marketing assets, they're emailing education materials. And so it's a really...
inhibited process in that sense that, you sometimes it can take days, weeks to get information kind of passed back and forth. And it's just incredibly inefficient. So you find that sales reps are spending, Olivia and I talk about this all the time. What's the stat, Olivia? It's like,
Olivia Schmid (06:47.558)
Yeah, only about 35 % of a sales rep time is actually spent on selling and the rest is really admin. So that's...
Keri (06:55.768)
which is incredible to think about. So we're really trying to take away a lot of the functions that typically bog a sales rep down so they can get to more quality meetings and conversations with their practices. Because again, it's the 80-20 rule. Reps, their KPIs are driving them to the top 20 % of their business and the other 80 % kind of funnels through the sales process. And so Olivia and I really wanted to create a solution and she experienced this at larger brands to find
continuity for these smaller clinics that are generally very loyal. They just don't typically have the high end touch point of a sales rep. An inside sales rep is usually calling asking to place another order. It's not to help with their understanding of products or sell through and things like that.
Olivia Schmid (07:43.379)
Yeah, just one more thing to add there is, you know, in their real life, these people are all consumers, right? So they're all used to ordering on Amazon and having really beautiful experiences. But somehow in the B2B world, you know, that's not expected. So I think it's also a bit of challenging that and just being a bit more common sense about how you, you know, provide an offering to your customers. So we're hoping to...
Yeah, bring kind of the direct to consumer experience to the B2B world.
Brent Peterson (08:18.112)
Yeah, well first I want to make a comment that you said that shopping on Amazon is a beautiful experience. Some people may disagree with that, but I guess you get what you want, right? And you get it delivered in the timely manner. I want to talk a little bit about the B2B world and sales reps specifically. And I kind of came up into the whole digital age when things are moving from legacy ERP systems to more of a user friendly system where people could
order things without the rep? And a lot of reps were felt challenged by that. Is there still a feeling and I'll call them legacy reps, like I would be a legacy person, I think at this point with my age, but maybe some legacy reps that have been, you know, up through the faxing and Telex and, and triplicate and carbon copy now to digital and now we're introducing AI. So tell us a little bit about how you're trying to both
Keri (09:03.437)
Yeah.
Brent Peterson (09:12.684)
be with the current generation, but also bring the older generation up with what's happening in technology.
Keri (09:19.256)
Yeah, such a great question. This is one of my favorite ones because again, I am a sales rep. I am that person. Beauty rep was built because I had sales rep say, I need an assistant. I mean, that was all, know, when I would go into the field and I would say, what can I do to help you? And they would say, I just need someone to help me place my orders. I need someone to answer general questions just to be timely for my practitioners.
And I would laugh and say our VP of sales is not going to give us money for that headcount. So we've got to find another solution. And there's never really been a solution. so to your point, yes, there are some legacy reps that this is relinquishing some control. This is giving control to the practitioners to have an experience with the brand that they can't manipulate. But that's also not a bad thing because I do think, especially in the world that Olivia and I work in, when you work with regulated brands that have medical
claims, you're talking about the FDA and really important, you know, clinical stats.
It is important from a continuity standpoint that messaging stays consistent. And so I think from a sales rep standpoint, it levels the playing field. There's a level of transparency and clarity in our business that hasn't existed prior to this. And we've made the experience really beautiful and easy. Beauty rep is incredibly intuitive. It's not complicated. And we've also put in parameters too for brands that do have active sales reps that if a practice place is in order, the rep has the opportunity to have
final approval before it goes through so they can upsell, do any of those traditional functions, but they're not manually entering things in. And I know you know this as well. Sometimes reps accidentally order the wrong size product, and then you have the backlog of swapping out those goods too. So it's just streamlining a lot of those functions that have been typically pretty manual.
Brent Peterson (11:13.646)
What have you seen then in an adoption rate? Has it been easy to get people on board with what you're trying to do? And I'm assuming this is a change from the traditional way of doing it, like you're logging into SAP and ordering your products through some horribly, horribly awkward portal.
Olivia Schmid (11:32.831)
I mean, I just want to come back to something you said, which really made me smile about Amazon not being necessarily a beautiful experience, but it's all relative, right? So in today's world, the experience is basically an Excel spreadsheet, you know, maybe a WhatsApp message. I mean, it's a really messy experience to place orders for these products. I think, you know, in what we found is actually
We know that our solution versus what's on the market is a huge improvement and it also means that practice can come to one place to access multiple brands directly, right? So they've never had that before. But the initial reaction is what's the catch? They don't understand that this is really just a simplified way of doing things without an additional cost associated to it.
I think for Keri and I, that's been a really interesting experience is to see that, you know, what we think is so obvious, like people just don't believe that there could be something like that that just makes sense and makes life easier without there being a catch.
Brent Peterson (12:41.592)
Do you have any areas that you can point to that have really helped sales reps in their jobs that they may have not, like some innovations that you've added that's helped them that they would not have thought about without trying to think outside the box even?
Keri (13:00.652)
gosh, I mean, where do we start, Brent? think, honestly, I think it's just general access. When you think about the average practice today, right? And this is mind blowing to me because again, I worked at Obagi 10 plus years ago when, you know, there was a lot of loyalty around specific brands. So practices didn't carry, you know, more than a few brands. Today, the average practices carrying around 14 different brands. So you're talking 10 to 12 skincare companies, three to four injectables,
and two device. So that's about 16 plus reps that they're having to manage on a day-to-day business or basis. So from the practice standpoint, it's access. Most of these single owner operators are wanting to talk to a rep after business hours and those reps have lives. have families, have activities after school. I was running to hockey practice. So for a practice to be able to get questions answered quickly that reps didn't have to stop everything and respond
on to and mitigate those friction points to where maybe it would be a day before they get back to that practice. Those are some of the major pain points that we're seeing reps getting solved for. But I'll flip it over to Olivia. I know there's way more.
Olivia Schmid (14:12.67)
There is, but I think the most important thing is also better use of their time, so better targeting of customers that need support, for example. Because we're selling also across brands, we have the customer experience across different types of products, across different categories. We know that this is the type of customer that might be interested in this type of product or has had issues with these types of experiences in the past.
We just have more information than what typically has been one brand, one sales rep, one territory.
Brent Peterson (14:49.708)
Yeah, I'm across industries and I maybe you probably don't understand or you don't know what it's like to be in the manufacturing like the hard manufacturing industry, but there's a there's an expectation from you know, one industry, I would imagine your industry has a higher expectation on what the what the experience should be when working with a with a rep is is it true that there might be a higher expectation and that your solution would push that a little bit further than somebody that's making
that's making nuts and bolts.
Keri (15:21.624)
Absolutely, especially when you're talking injectables and things that require a very high level of education and training and you need continuity of training. This is absolutely where it's at. mean, part of our portal is to where you can actually link back to education marketing down to the SKU level. So a practice could actually click on a particular product and see every webinar, every piece of information, master safety data sheets, we call them.
protocols, anything to help them in their patient care to be better. So we're really trying to keep that at the forefront because typically again, a sales rep is responsible for disseminating that information. It may get lost in their inbox, they don't get it or they're searching for it, they can't find it when they need it. And it just again, delays kind of the whole process of things to where then, know, patient care could effectively be, you know, be impacted. So
We're trying to keep those things that, you know, really readily accessible for practices to be better.
Olivia Schmid (16:22.77)
Yeah, and the sales rep becomes more strategic, more of an account manager that really starts to think with the practice rather than just an order taker.
Brent Peterson (16:33.654)
I had a really interesting conversation with a founder of one of the retail brands who talked about the ability now for AI to help do a lot of the segmentation of lists and things like that, help to find out the intent of clients doing more than just generative things. What are you doing in AI to sort of employ some of the things that are outside of just generative, but making it work smart for the sales reps?
Olivia Schmid (17:02.556)
It's a great question. we have trademarked AesthetiTech as a term to kind of be the banner for all the technology that we're putting into our platform. And it will take the form of many different things. So this is kind of optimizing checkouts and recommendations for how to get the best pricing when you're looking at different products and quantities and promotions, of course. But it also comes down to
we're going to have a larger and larger repository of brand approved assets, of educational materials. And so you can imagine a world where a practice comes on, says, I'm this type of practice, I have these types of consumers, I'm in this location, and it starts to pull demographic information, information on the type of treatments that make sense, and really starts to a support, almost like a small consultant for that practice.
We're building in those functionalities over time as we grow, it will no longer just be a product detail page with a bunch of information. We all know conversational shopping is already here.
Brent Peterson (18:13.902)
One of the things that I was surprised and I had a call with a a entrepreneur who had developed a PDF to like he'd been using AI to help help his clients ingest a PDF that are coming when somebody places an order and he also included faxes. So are there legacy things that are that seem really old to us that we never would even think are being used anymore but are still being used especially in the in this B2B world where you have to sort of adapt to make them work for you?
Keri (18:44.248)
Yes, I experienced that when we acquired Glytone from Pierre Fabre There were still practices faxing orders. mean, when you think about these large hospital systems too, a lot of their systems are still very old school. They've got POs, they're running things in a very different way. So yes, there are functions of our business that it can take six months to get a brand set up with a hospital system because they are so archaic. And that is something that we're trying to work on
helping to integrate through API back-end functions to really, again, make those things more seamless for the practitioners, for the big systems, and then obviously the brands to process those.
Brent Peterson (19:28.494)
I think you mentioned your clients are could be just one person dermatology shops. Do you have a spectrum of how many of your type of client that would use your system? it anybody in that space?
Keri (19:41.164)
Yeah, it's anybody in medical aesthetics. So you think aestheticians, nurse practitioners, physicians, assistants, plastic surgeons, dermatologists really runs the gamut. It's also been really interesting too. think Olivia has been attending a lot of really interesting international conferences where we're seeing the blending of regenerative and longevity medicine into aesthetics. So you're starting to see health and wellness bleed into the aesthetic space. And it's also reflecting too in the types of brands that are reaching out to us.
to be on the platform. So it's not just your traditional skincare injectable and device brands. It's now going into supplements, women's health, GLP ones, you name it.
Brent Peterson (20:26.262)
I want to ask you questions around content and this isn't specifically about your brand, but I know that in the medical space or in your space specifically, maybe AI content isn't as easy to do because there has to be so much human intervention. Are you seeing more of a comeback of the human being in content and especially in the medical space?
Keri (20:48.504)
It's an interesting coin. You want to take that one Olivia?
Olivia Schmid (20:51.594)
you know, I think, I think actually it's more, you can do more with AI in terms of thinking through, let's say profiles of, patients that, that you would think of, right? So now you have like the ability to use AI to create this virtual profile of what would be a patient and you can make it much more personalized to very specific situations. So I would still say, you know, you are still kind of.
it's still human in the sense that you're thinking about a specific person and their profile and all of that, but you have the ability to get a lot more granular and nuanced in how you're thinking about training, for example, right? And even doctors can create their own avatars for the type of patients they have and these things. So I think like that is completely changing the game. It's interesting too, because for medical aesthetics specifically, it's not really taught in medical school as a
as a separate thing. you know, this is something that often doctors afterwards need. They're kind of learning as they go and on their own. So I think there's a huge opportunity with what AI is offering to support much, much better, at least injector training than what we have now.
Keri (22:11.928)
But it's also going into the actual formulations of products. was the one thing Olivia and I just returned from MCAS in Paris. And I was just amazed at now all these brands and products that are coming out with AI perfected molecules. instead of in the lab with the scientists, you know, manipulating, um, you know, the products, the formulas, they're actually using AI. So when you think of that, even down to clinical studies and the, you know, the efficacy of products and, know, kind of the traditional way that things have been studied and,
Brent Peterson (22:12.302)
Olivia Schmid (22:15.709)
Mm.
Keri (22:41.902)
and perfected and then disseminated out to consumers and patients. A lot of that, I'm so fascinated to see how that impacts and changes our space as well because it's just everything's moving so quickly.
Brent Peterson (22:57.166)
So we have a few minutes left, but I do want to ask you both about sort of the outlook you're seeing on the economy Olivia You're in I think you're in Switzerland right is the European economy is a little bit different than the US economy What do you where do you think we're heading in this this next half of the year?
Olivia Schmid (23:15.05)
I mean, look, I see it now as we've been through some really difficult waters, I would say, also from the perspective of commerce with the US after tariffs and the economy going up and down. And now I feel quite positive about the outlook of the future. And I also feel that we are seeing a lot more innovation momentum in Europe. I think part of that is kind of,
also waking up to the geopolitics of America kind of saying Europe needs to stand up and do its own things. But you feel that and you feel investors are more interested in kind of stepping in and providing capital here. And that's really good. So that means I see more competition on the horizon and I see things moving in a good direction, I would say.
Keri (24:09.878)
And aesthetics is not slowing down. mean, there's still, mean, patients would rather go without a car payment than, you know, get their injections and all their products to look good. I mean, that is still the reality of our business. It's growing exponentially year over year.
Brent Peterson (24:25.292)
Yeah, I went to my dermatologist and just to get a skin check and he said, there anything that I should know? said, somebody said that I have male pattern baldness. And he said, well, I can do something about that. And I said, OK, that was a joke. I'm not going to worry about it. I think you're right. I think that there's also all kinds of opportunities. And I'm a great opportunity for male pattern baldness. Anyways, I do want to say.
Keri (24:48.514)
There's lots of things in that. There's exosomes. I give you a 13 for that joke, Brent. That was a good one.
Brent Peterson (24:52.97)
All right. Thank you. All right. So we do have a few minutes left. As we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they like. What would you guys like to plug today?
Keri (25:03.8)
My gosh, it's a no brainer, Brent. It's beauty rep, beautyrep.com. Everybody needs to go. Every practice, sign up. It's easy. Your medical license, if you have one, if you don't have one and you're an esthetician, upload that. Your Duns and Bradstreet, your business information. But we're a really amazing closed community, a beautiful platform, so seamless and easy to shop and explore and discover your favorite brands and also great indie up and coming brands too.
Brent Peterson (25:34.414)
That's awesome, Olivia. Anything to add to that?
Olivia Schmid (25:37.254)
Just going to add that we are also, our customers are also brands as Keri was saying, and for international brands that are scientifically backed and maybe couldn't afford an entry into the US, now there's an opportunity to do that with us without an expensive sales force. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here and we're really hoping to bring some amazing innovations to the US as well from Europe.
Brent Peterson (26:06.422)
That's great. Keri Concannon is the CEO of Beauty Rep and Olivia Schmid is the Chief Operating Officer. I'll get this out. Thank you so much for being here today.
Keri (26:17.42)
Thanks for having us, we really appreciate it.
Olivia Schmid (26:17.95)
Thank you.