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This is The Modern Supply Chain, the show where we break down the modern supply chain strategies that help e-commerce brands shift from staying above water to predictably scaling.
Each episode, we’ll chat with industry experts who will help give you the tools and insights to take control of your supply chain.
Just smarter, faster ways to keep your business moving.
Eli Weiss (00:00):
This is the greatest thing to ever happen for CX, because now you have bots that can handle all the things that you don't want to talk to a person about. And then the 30, 40%, those I can put a human to deliver a magical experience.
Izzy Rosenzweig (00:16):
This is The Modern Supply Chain, the show where we break down modern supply chain strategies that help e-commerce brands shift from staying above water to predictably scaling. Today's guest is Eli Weiss, a seasoned expert in customer experience who works with some of the most innovative DC brands in the world, including Jones Road Beauty and OLIPOP. Eli currently works at Yotpo, a platform that helps brands optimize loyalty and reviews. He's seen firsthand how customer experience could go from a cost center to a growth center. In our conversation, we'll dive into what the best brands are doing to create memorable customer experiences and how they're leveraging modern ways to build brand loyalty. Eli, so good to have you. Thank you so much for being on the modern supply chain. Thank you, Izzy. I'm excited to be here and excited to chat. So I think before we dive in, I love to frame the conversation.
(01:03):
Really in the early days of D2C, brands were run by performance marketing. Top line is what mattered and really was about how do we just sell more goods and pay Meta a ton of money. But over the last couple of years, that has a major shift. Today, brands actually have to run real businesses, profitable, and really every single part of the business, supply chain, loyalty, retention, it all matters. Because end of the day, if you want to survive and not really go bankrupt, you need to optimize every single part of your business. So that is in one area, sure it's supply chain, logistics. But equally important is what does your profitability look like? What does your LTV look like? So with that being said, Eli, I think this is an area that you've been in for years and would love to dive into. So I guess first question is, when you started in CX, most brands saw as a cost center.
(01:57):
Can you talk about where it was and where it's going or where it is today?
Eli Weiss (02:01):
Yes. I think a couple of things you touched on already, which I'll quickly reiterate is like we went through this 2014, 15, 16 phase where you spend a dollar, get five, the glory days. And the funny part is you still see on social people talking about that, that's going to happen again. Oh, this new ad platform is going to give me that same 5X or 10X. And it's just not reality. Every trend we're seeing, regardless of the tool, regardless where you put your money, you're never seeing the glory days we saw in 2010, 2015, 16, 17. And you're also never going to see the boom we saw COVID post COVID again. As much as 2026 is optimism, we know that it's not going to be what 2020 or 2014 was like. On the CX side, the idea around cost center makes a ton of sense.
(02:43):
If you're spending a dollar or you're making five, the idea is just push everyone out of the way and let the train keep going. So if somebody's bothering us about a suitcase that has never shipped, just shut them up and pay $7 an hour to whoever's willing to do that. And I was that person. So my first job making like $33,000 a year and it was just like, just keep them quiet. And what I learned doing that is that over time you realize that there's more than just what the person's saying. If somebody's saying like, "Hey, I have a problem with the taste of this beverage." If you're seeing 10 people saying it, it's more likely that there's another hundred. So being the front end of the business to catch things, that's like a side, fun, pro bono part of this. What we learned over time on the cost effectiveness of it is when you talk about LTV, which wasn't a term spoken about in 2016, nobody was talking about that.
(03:28):
But when you do talk about that and you say, "Okay, I acquired a customer. How can I make sure what's the insurance to keep them coming back?" Expectation versus reality is something we speak about a lot, right? What are the expectations you're setting? And on the CS side, there are two things. Number one is the closer you are to the customer, the faster you're getting that Intel to learn where you're failing. And number two, yes, customer experience can actually be a pivotal part of the business that makes somebody come back, but that's maybe an outlier. Putting that on the side, say, no, Eli, that's Zappos. The part that we learned in the last 10 years or the part that I learned is customer experience, when it's viewed holistically through every part of the business, it is retention. It is understanding where things are breaking and making sure you're fixing them.
(04:06):
And it does ladder to every part of the business, meaning product has no clue what's working, what's not, unless the person that the customers are talking to are saying that. And yes, we can talk about AI and all that other fun stuff, but ultimately without understanding what your customer is saying, you have no ability to make sure they come back because you have no ability to understand what broke.
Izzy Rosenzweig (04:24):
The early days of Facebook marketing you talk about the good old days was the Wild West, you put in a dollar, $5 out. And it actually really started with Google. The early days of Google, Amazon was built on Google. A great platform like that, money comes to it and eventually gets really expensive. Started with Google, then it went to Facebook, now Meta. There is TikTok shops now. I think people are starting to see at TikTok shops, but I'm hoping the lessons learned from history is if today it's cheap, it won't be cheap tomorrow because if you like it, everyone's going to like it and everyone's going to spend money there. So it'll be one of your channels and hopefully you get a bit of good CAC for the next little while, customer acquisition costs, but eventually CAC always increases if there's a great distribution. Now in the area that you're talking about, you're looking at these feedback loops.
(05:06):
You said product doesn't know what customers are saying, especially in an e-commerce environment. Is it more for retention? Are you actually learning from this feedback of changing product? Maybe you need a bigger zipper, you need your wheel constantly breaks. So is it more product design or product optimization or is it no, if we're really good at CX, customers will come back? How do you guys think about it in the CX world?
Eli Weiss (05:30):
One of my favorite examples that I've certainly overused, but I always come back to is, I was talking to my good friend when he was at FIGS, he was the SVP of CX at FIGS, and FIGS is doing 400 plus, $500 million in annual revenue, one of the best ever do it, publicly traded. And he was talking about like post a product launch. So Figs is selling scrubs for medical professionals. How do they know what works and what doesn't, right? Because on one hand, you're trying to be boring. Somebody wants like a predictable everyday clothing. On the other hand, you're trying to push the needle on what you can, right? So different colors, unique shades, unique fits. And can we get away from those tight skinny leggings to the more kind of like wide cut and bootcut, et cetera? And how do they understand what works, what doesn't?
(06:09):
So he said after every launch, they would look at three things. They would look at returns through loop. So better understanding percentage on the return rate. They'd look at their yet power views to better understand like, give me from the analytics perspective, positive versus negative keywords, what are the main keywords coming up? And then qualitatively, they'd look at tickets. And I think understanding triangulation of what customers are saying across a wide swath of data is always going to be important. But yes, on the fixed side, it's like, did this work? Meaning should we be launching more of this? B, should we be editing, modifying what we already have and C, are there little issues and maybe QA things that we missed that we can handle one by one? So I think on the CX side, today, let me fix what's currently broken. There's the look back, what did we do right or wrong?
(06:54):
Like for example, if everyone's saying this ran too small, maybe we sized it wrong, but maybe we also in the product description, we didn't write that this runs true to size versus doesn't run true to size. So sometimes you can just like switch the product description and automatically decrease your returns. In the footwear game, we see this a lot with Yetpo on the footwear side. Brands that have really strong reviews and AI summaries and PDPs with a lot of descriptive information can actually dramatically lower their return rate because people buying shoes, I mean, we're all guilty of buying three pairs and hoping that one fits versus buy one, wait two weeks, send it back, get another one, send it back at a third one, people just buy three. But if you understand exactly like of 3,000 reviews, 90% said it fits true to size. I think that's where we're heading on customer experience, but also consumer shopping in general.
Izzy Rosenzweig (07:41):
So that's actually a segue into like a focus conversation. So customers, you give them an opportunity to talk, they will talk, which is a good thing. They should be talking. And I know Yotpo, for some brands have tens, hundreds of thousands of reviews and comments. And as a brand, very often a brand wants to listen to everyone and do everything. Okay, you're getting tons of feedback. Certain customers want different colors, certain customers want bigger selection, some want smaller selection. I think this focus question is really important in a world where there's so much noise. How do you guys think about that at Yotpo or in general from a CX perspective?
Eli Weiss (08:18):
I think finding the signal and the noise is the forever question. I think most brands do a poor job of understanding what is a customer saying that they actually want versus a complainer versus somebody that just has a strong point of view but will never buy anyway. So if you look at any Facebook comments on an ad and people will be saying, "Oh my God, this is the worst thing ever." Search their name and use Shopify, 95% of the time they never purchased it. Not only did they never purchase it, they don't know anyone that purchased it. The people that are commenting on Facebook are bored and probably need a hobby. That was a learning for me on the brand side is noise almost rarely equals signal. And putting back on the Yotpo side, yes, verified buyers, right? So make sure these people actually purchased your product.
(08:54):
B, understand, look at the most popular words, understanding the trends that when somebody left a five star versus a one star, what did they do after? So if they left a five star, you loved it. Did you purchase it again? Or did the person that keeps giving a three star keep buying it because they thought it was good enough? So a lot of the times it's like the action to me is more important than the talk. So the people that are commenting and the people that are actually acting are almost always different. It's like, what's happening when they purchase?
Izzy Rosenzweig (09:18):
So signal listening, I think is so key for brands that we talk to and really layering that focus layer. To your point, take away the noise. What is the signal? Go deep. Does this person actually buy from you? And based on that very carefully and with prioritization, potential release new colors, potentially new flavors. One of the comments you said at a previous podcast that I saw is that at OLIPOP, you did things that didn't scale, you did human touch things. And I'm curious how you think about in this world of AI, which some of this AI stuff is noise, but some of it is very real. How do you look at things that don't scale from a CX experience when you're competing against AI, which is meant to put things that don't scale out of work?
Eli Weiss (09:58):
I love the question because this is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately. A year or two ago, when I was at Jones, we would get pitched every single day. I mean, every day was a new AI tool. Sienna, Sierra, Decagon, we'll automate your whole CX. And for everyone in CX, there was a moment of fear like, "Does this mean we're out of a job?" And I kept saying this is like a hot spicy take. Oh, it's going to come for the growth guys first or oh, it's going to come for the creative guys first. More so because it was like a fun take to say on a podcast being the only CX person to defend this. But I do think like over time, what we saw is a few things. Number one, this is the greatest thing to ever happen for CX because now you have bots that can handle all the things that you don't want to talk to a person about.
(10:36):
When I get on a phone with Delta and I have to wait 45 minutes to ask you a question that I would love for a bot to answer, phenomenal. But if I'm stuck in an airport and you canceled my flight or you lost my stroller, I want to talk to a person, I want to talk to a person now. And I think the best brands in the world are going to do that. They're going to say, "Okay, what can I automate?" And it's probably between 60 and 95% of tickets that I can automate or solve for pre-reach out, pre-first touch, I can solve for those. And then the 30, 40%, those I could put a human to deliver a magical experience. I started writing about it actually for my newsletter this week and I was writing about my stay in London a couple months ago where I stayed at a cheap Hyatt place or whatever.
(11:16):
And I came into the hotel and it was just a machine. So there was no check-in, it was just a machine. I scanned my passport and it printed out a key card. And in my head I was like, "That was so disgusting and vile." I should have just gone to a hostel. The room wasn't fancy. The experience was then. Why Hyatt Place? A hostel was $90 or $60 for a super clean private room. And I think I then realized that if you went to 11 Madison Park and it was like a great food experience, but no human experience, it would be extremely lackluster. And hospitality's learning that first that human experience is human experience. On the e-comm/social side, we're still in this weird phase where most of my Twitter replies are bots. Moltbook is now like a social media for bots. OpenAI is now saying, "We're going to scan your iris to be able to log into this social media platform." And I think we're going to see that in CX as well where the meaningful touches will always be human and they'll be fantastic and they'll be so amazing.
(12:10):
And everything else will be like a bot and I know it's a bot and it gives me the right answer. And you put me through a virtuous cycle of just bot after bot after bot to transfer me to a supervisor bot versus just like putting a human at that problem. That's the glory days of CX. We spoke about it on the OLIPOP side where everything was, this is pre AI, everything was human. And we said like, if we're spending $100,000 or a million dollars a month on ads, can we take a thousand dollars to create magical experiences? And I think it'll be even more optimized over time where you'll say 95% is bots, but these bots are so smart that you have a supervisor bot that's looking at all the queries and says like, "Eli, if you have five minutes, this is the one." And I can come in and give that person a phone call, jump on a Zoom and just change their life.
(12:55):
That's the future of hospitality, of AI of CX that I think is going to make everyone 10 times happier. If you have a bot that gives me the answer, and I see this even on returns, right? Sometimes you can jump in, even with Amazon, with Rufus, you jump in, give it your problem, it gives you a solution, it gives you a refund or says you can't ... And you didn't talk to a person and as an introvert, that's fascinating. It's amazing. It's my greatest thing ever. But then in a hotel, I want to vomit. And I think humans will learn that.
Izzy Rosenzweig (13:20):
It's so interesting. And I think there's this concept called unreasonable hospitality.
(13:24):
And the example I have is I go to China quite often. When I travel in the US, I'm staying at a Marriott or a Sheraton, but in China, I can stay at the Ritz-Carlton. It's not expensive. It's very affordable. And when I go there, my classic is in the morning, I have coffee and a mango. That's what I do. One of the times I went, I come in and I get my coffee. I'm like, "Hey, by any chance I get that mango I always get. Sorry, sir. It's just not in stock. We don't have any." I'm like, "Don't worry about it. I go and I grab something else." The next morning I come for my coffee. Within 30 seconds, I had a mango sliced in front of me and they said, "We know yesterday you wanted a mango. We know you usually get a mango.
(13:57):
We sent someone 45 minutes away to a farm where we could get mangoes for you. Now we have stock while you're here." Blew my mind. I said this story 10 times and even at Portless you say, "How do we give the mango experience? How to give the Ritz-Carlton experience?" And to your point, it was magical where it could have been like, not a big deal. I was out of stock. I have been a promoter of theirs ever since. And now my team goes, they're staying there as well. But to your point, I understand in hospitality, how do you bring that to e-commerce? You mentioned one example like, oh, you should call this one. Is that the answer? It's one in a thousand, get a human touch or is that okay? Maybe, and I would argue the opposite. Maybe where it's not in hospitality, maybe when you're not in a restaurant or you're not in a hotel, it's okay.
(14:42):
Don't talk to anyone. But I would also argue equally you're losing a massive part of an experience. So how do you balance that? What is the right answer?
Eli Weiss (14:50):
So number one, my favorite part, and there's a book about the Ritz-Carlton stuff as well. My favorite part about Ritz is they learned that the mango is all that matters. It's that one moment and that one experience. And there's a book about the peaks and the valleys, right? Deeply understanding, it's called the Power of Moments. And it's like deeply understanding when to create that peak. If you came in and you said, "My shoes are wet and they came over and they bought you a new pair of shoes," you'd be like, "This is so strange and bizarre. I'm creeped out. I don't need the shoes. I just needed a napkin." But understanding when is the mango moment. And if your entire day before that was messed up and you got a mango, you'd be like, "Well, whatever." But if everything was going poorly and they checked you in late and they messed up your other newspaper order and everything else, the mango would mean nothing.
(15:32):
So understanding where to fill those valleys before creating the peaks is like what Ritz-Carlton does better than ever. To your question about e-comm, I think we're still in a phase where 95% of instances, to your point, are not high stakes. I just wanted my package and it's two days late. But if you understand the nuance, and again, with AI agents, everything's scannable, everything's understandable, everything's digestible, you'll learn that this person, you have an entire dossier on them. And I love the new tools like Outer Signal where you can deeply understand who they are as a person outside of their order. But if you understand, okay, this person, extremely high net worth, placed 10 orders for me, never had an issue, has no time to breathe. The issue they're having is not just that it's an issue, it's that they ordered Olipop for their wedding and their wedding is next week.
(16:16):
So if somebody ordered Olipop and it was delayed, big deal, we'll send them a $10 discount. But if it's the most important day of your life, that's your Ritz-Carlton moment. So I think we're going to understand nuance outside of the order, the whole human understanding, right? The beauty of hospitality is you're coming into 11 Madison after a full day of work. They understand what you do for a living. They understand did you drive or did you walk? They understand that you put your car in the meter and they know that the most meaningful thing would be for you to not think about the meter so they put in coins. And it's 50 cents. But I think it's like understanding the context of who you are, what you do, what you're about. And I've never been to 11 Madison, but the idea that you come in and they know what you look like because they put together a dossier on you is fascinating.
(16:59):
But if I did that in other places outside of hospitality, I'd be a creep. So I think it's the wider scope that I think is going to become crazy, crazy good.
Izzy Rosenzweig (17:09):
If I understand correctly, again, there's a lot of noise out there, but when to do the human interaction, what is the right signal will matter? So it's not that everyone will get it, but the right person to get a call or all of a sudden's express order because we know we wanted a weekend before your wedding, that's what matters.
Eli Weiss (17:25):
Yep. And I think it's also going to get so much better over time because all of the things that are annoying as hell, and there are so many partners in e-comm, SaaS providers that I think are doing phenomenal work. Loop returns is one of my favorites because they're starting to think about this friction in such a deep way already. When I'm processing a return, if I'm a first time customer versus a 10th time customer, if I purchased a hundred times from this streetwear brand, after a hundred orders, one of them, for the first time ever, I got the wrong size. I went into process that return, they would treat me like I'm a first time scammer who came off the street, who's trying to make a buck off of them. And they would just put every stop to make sure it's miserable. So they'll say, "$10 restocking fee, you have to cover your own shipping.
(18:10):
Once it arrives back, it's seven days of processing. Once it gets processed, we'll give you a store credit." Versus when I'm using Loop and this brand like Bombas, for example, I placed 10 orders, I click return, I click, I don't like it. They say, "Eli, the socks were $100 for six. We'll give you $120 credit right now to purchase right now. Just send it back with this free label. If it gets back, you'll be good. If you keep it, we'll have a problem." And I'm like, "Wait, what? " So you're saying I don't have to wait. You're saying I can either get a return for $100 or get $120 store credit, which again, for them is genius because $120 store credit costs them $20 and the return costs them everything, but immediately $120 store credit. I love the Socks. Now I get new Socks. Now you get your return and they did that because I'm a 10 time customer.
(18:56):
For a one time customer, they can just say, "Yeah, we'll give you a credit, just send it back." Or are they more of a Zappos type of brand?
Izzy Rosenzweig (19:02):
So
Eli Weiss (19:02):
I think Bombas is an example, is closer to a Zappos kind of brand, but there are so many brands and Loop just did this massive 23 million returns, 400 million shoppers like this study. B
(19:12):
But to try to understand the nuance, where it works, where it doesn't. But what they saw is overwhelmingly when you give your longtime customers a different return policy or an easier chance to fix whatever, it's mind blowing. And I think that's, again, the hospitality piece that you're seeing in eCom that was unscalable 10 years ago, but now with AI and scale, we can actually do this. In five years, this might sound insane, but AI agents are doing 80% of the shopping. How does Yatpo create loyalty programs for agents? But also, how does Yotpo create loyalty programs that every single human can have a personalized experience based on what we know they liked or purchased elsewhere? And I think this singularity of understanding every agent is their own shopper with their own world understanding. The only thing lacking was the knowledge and the scale, but we can do all of that with AI.
Izzy Rosenzweig (20:05):
The knowledge and the scale of when's the right time. What's the mango for that person?
Eli Weiss (20:09):
Correct.
Izzy Rosenzweig (20:10):
And when is their mango moment? Yeah. All right, awesome. Now on that note, you mentioned low team rewards. Where do you think that goes? Again, credit cards, one point for every dollar spent, brands, I don't know, you buy with us five times, your next thing is 5% off. Where do you think that evolves to loyalty?
Eli Weiss (20:27):
I think, and I came from a world where I worked on a ton of consumer brands, but I never launched a loyalty program. At Jones and OLIPOP, we didn't have loyalty, but coming into Yotpo, I saw two things. Number one, the cost to create an AI slop version of loyalty program is next to nothing. I can launch something tomorrow. The best loyalty programs in the world understand nuance. So they understand tiers have to be optimized. If you spend $100, you're tier one, $200, tier two, $300, tier three. And then I look at the data six months later and 99.9% of people are not even getting past $100. So I have an LTV problem, but if I switch the tiers to tier one goes till 60, tier two goes 60 to 120, then I can slowly push behavior. So I think the set and forget it days of loyalty are dead.
(21:11):
I think setting up a loyalty program for $10 through the guy that's going to do it for you from Craigslist is not smart. And I think loyalty programs are living and breathing and need to be optimized regularly. And I think over time they will be hyper optimized where we'll say, "We know your customer, we know the behavior you want to get them to, and we can build something that will slowly move behavior over time." The best programs in the world can move customer behavior. Starbucks is like the legendary one where they're a bank. And now they just announced like the new stage in their loyalty program. For every $20 you add to your Starbucks card, you get X amount of points. And the amount of people that will add 20, and you and I both know, if I have $20 in my Starbucks card, I'm very quick to spend $8 on a beverage where if I'm paying cash, I'm spending 450.
(21:53):
Understanding human behaviors and what it takes to push them and building something around that, that's where this all goes.
Izzy Rosenzweig (21:58):
You've, I think in the past, pushed for adding friction to the journey, if at least to hire LTD. As a former performance marketing person, that is like the craziest thing to hear CAC versus LTV, wow. So I'd love to hear a little more on that. What does that mean?
Eli Weiss (22:17):
I'll give you two examples. Real life, OLIPOP and Jones Road examples. So on the OLIPOP side, and I share this in the past, we ran this ad that was like a beautiful Porsche. It was like a Pepsi Super Bowl ad where you saw a Coke or Pepsi over ice and you heard the fizzy, all of that. And you saw that the ROAS on that was phenomenal. We were driving a ton of customers. None of those, almost like zero of them repurchased. The LTV on the customers that came through that ad with that UTM was lower than ever. And we asked ourself like, how does that make sense? Number one, is this sensible? Because it was still like we weren't profitable on order number one, but it was much cheaper. And number two was like, why? The hypothesis was the people that are seeing that ad are understanding that this is something that's a Coke.
(22:58):
It's a Pepsi. And they're like, okay, if I'm spending $3 for a can versus 50 cents, I'm sure it's 10 times as good. Without understanding the nuance of like, it's not terrible for you, the microbiome, all the claims we made on the side. And what we learned is like that's an easy way to get a one-time order. If we added friction, we said, "Here are the 10 reasons why drinking OLIPOP is better." Yes, we'd have a lower return on the outspend, but over time the LTV was much higher. So that's one example. On the Jones Roadside, what we saw over time is when we put people in a quiz, they were 10 times more likely to spend a lot more money. Why? Because on both order number one and LTV, they understood what the right product is to get. When you're choosing makeup online, most of these shoppers have never bought makeup online.
(23:38):
The understanding is, I hope it fits, but when you see models that look like you, when you see the colors, what they will look like on you, yes, return on ad spend, you might have a slightly lower click through, but the people that click through will A, spend more money on first order. We saw it was like 30, 40% higher order number one and like 70% higher LTV. So again, and this is not every brand, Apple probably shouldn't be adding friction to their iPhone funnel, but I think it's a hot take that sometimes lands.
Izzy Rosenzweig (24:06):
No, I get that. I think like in our world, we've talked of like ICP, a deal customer profile, right? You could have lots of customers come through the funnel, but it's actually noise. It's actually horrible. They're going to have high churn. They don't get your value proposition. So basically back in brand world, it's like, sure, give a little more education, pay a little bit more on your CPC, put a little more on your CAC, but you're getting the right customer for the product you're selling. And those are the ones that will hang around and those are the ones where your LTV will kick in and you could afford that CAC hopefully a lot more with those moves.
Eli Weiss (24:37):
We see that on the Yotpo side too, right? You can sometimes find these customers that will negotiate down for six months to save $1,000 on a $20,000 contract and you'll spend a year to get them. And actually the other way is like sometimes you'll have these super quick, easy customers, but then they will leave six months later versus the ones that are ... It could take six months to win them over, but they will stick around for 10 years because the same choosing mechanism that takes them six months to choose you is what makes them not want to swap platforms every six months to save a dollar. And I think people have started thinking more about LTV even in the acquisition side than they ever have.
Izzy Rosenzweig (25:14):
And I think that ties in actually interesting from like an Amazon perspective from a brand. So we talk to brands like, "Hey, I'm building this product. I'm building this story. I'm building this. " Really they're storytellers and brand builders, but there's also an Amazon that lives out there and all of a sudden there's a non-branded version that's competing with you. I guess from your perspective, Yotpo, past brand experiences, any advice for brands like, "Hey, you are a brand. Yes, they're cheaper out there, but if you go rock bottom, you're probably going to go broke." What is the mode of a brand from your perspective in CX World?
Eli Weiss (25:45):
Moat is almost always brand and brand means story. The difference between a Hunter boot and the 27 other boots are not the material. You can get a Shein boot that is the same, feels the same. It's the fact that people are excited to wear a Hunter boot. The difference between Glossier and the cheap competitor is that it's Glossier. And I think very few brands can live to build that. But I think the only thing you have as a brand is a story you're telling and the product, community, universe you're building. I've seen this a lot even in the supplements world, like the difference between creatine and Create, but the reason why somebody's choosing Grüns is because everyone and their friend is using it and because everyone and their friend is talking about AG1. And I think most brands don't live long enough to create that, but when they do, they realize that you can charge a premium for that.
(26:31):
So yes, it takes longer to build, but when you invest in building a brand, you can demand a premium. And if you play the Reese to the bottom, it's just like a volume game that you probably won't win anyway. So you're going to race to the bottom.
Izzy Rosenzweig (26:44):
I think this very falls into, again, DDC 1.0 versus DDC 2.0. Back from the days of just like pricing matters, meta ads, et cetera, to know building community and doing it profitably. And you're really good at this. You built a community online, you build communities for brands that you work with. If you were a founder, if you're advising a founder that started day one, limited budget, how should they be telling the story? How should they be building community?
Eli Weiss (27:09):
So two things. Number one, in this world of everything AI, humans are tired. They're tired of having to guess every single text, every single tweet, every single video like, is this a human? We're just going to crave authenticity. And the only way to build authenticity in your brand is being yourself and creating your story around who you are. I've seen this like, and I'll talk personally on the brand side, on a personal level, I will never be the smartest in the room. I will never have the strongest pedigree. I won't have the Harvard education. I won't have worked at the X, Y, and Z brand, but I have my own story and I've kept my story quiet for so long. And then I realized that authenticity, that's my story. And on the brand side as well is like, unless it's your product, which is the greatest product in the world, the only thing you have is your story.
(27:57):
And I think most brand founders say, "No, no, I want to build a great brand, but I don't want to be in the limelight." Well, you probably chose the wrong job because I do think like founder-led brands, founder-led stories, this is the future in a world of slop. And unless you're Nike where you've built a million years of brand equity, the only thing that sticks out, and there's so many great examples. Even in the food and beverage world, there's so many small brands that are like building yogurt companies and cottage cheese companies, like young women that are just like sharing their story on social and going viral every day. Unless you've had like legendary money or legendary expertise, it's you. And in the world of AI, it's just you. Even on the social side, so many people are like, "Oh, how do I build my social presence?" Well, the first step is bringing yourself to social, right?
(28:44):
Yeah. You're expecting yourself to jump into ChatGPT, have ChatGPT write 35 posts that are all slop and you're expecting to put your slop near other people's slop and your slop should do better. It's going to get weird, but I think we're going to have this human resurgence that will be scary, more parties, more face-to-face because that's all we have.
Izzy Rosenzweig (29:03):
This might tie into predictions, but I guess if you had to pick one thing about customer experience in the next five years, specifically the DC space, what would it be?
Eli Weiss (29:10):
I really think that what we're seeing in hospitality will be more and more and more into the experience, like customer experience world. The only concern we've had over time was it's so expensive and we don't have the margins, which is hysterical because obviously restaurants don't have those margins either, but it was always like, we don't have the margins we can't afford at X, Y, and Z. When everything is AI and everything's automated and it costs you an agent and some cloud credits, those human experiences will matter so much that it's going to be the only thing that, why am I buying David Protein from their website versus Amazon? Why am I doing anything D2C? Why am I buying from you versus the competitor? Yes, product will always matter, but those experiences that create like brand affinity will just keep coming back to that and hope it'll finally be scalable.
(29:56):
So do things that don't scale might actually be scalable if you're doing five of them a month.
Izzy Rosenzweig (30:00):
Mango experiences at scale.
Eli Weiss (30:03):
I love it. That's your book.
Izzy Rosenzweig (30:04):
That's my book.
Eli Weiss (30:06):
Yeah.
Izzy Rosenzweig (30:06):
Eli, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Love the conversation. Where could people find you?
Eli Weiss (30:11):
I am unfortunately too easily accessible on the internet, but I'm Eli Weiss with an extra S on Twitter. So Eli Weiss, W-E-I-S-S-S and Eliss.com and on LinkedIn and everywhere else that people can find me. But it's been such a pleasure and thank you for having me.
Izzy Rosenzweig (30:29):
Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to The Modern Supply Chain. If you have questions about anything we talked about, you can find me on LinkedIn. And if you're interested in learning more about Portless, check out our website, portless.com. As always, hit that follow button so you don't miss an episode. See you next time.