E-COMMERCE

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

The expression “Christmas in July” is not just about summer sales for retailers; it also applies to the time they start preparing for the holiday season.

And for the first time, Shopify is planning to aggressively push its Shop app, the hub of all its shopping activity, during the upcoming holiday season for a much longer period, Jess Jacobs, VP of consumer marketing and head of growth for the Shop app, told Retail Brew.

Holiday shopping has been starting earlier and people have gotten into the rhythm of buying most things they need before Black Friday-Cyber Monday.

“We plan to have a multiphase holiday period during a much longer window than previous [years], and we don’t want to inundate with the same message over and over throughout the entirety of [the] holiday season,” Jacobs told Retail Brew on the sidelines of a Shop app event in New York City.

Keep reading here.—VC

      

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MARKETING

Morning Brew Inc., Photos: @getsourmilk/TikTok

It’s not often a brand touts a “drug deal” model in its marketing.

But that’s exactly what the founders of Greek-yogurt company Sourmilk were doing in the lead-up to and after the product’s November in-store launch date, having delivered more than 8,000 pre-ordered yogurts to customers from coolers across NYC on Citi Bikes.

“We have a product that has an eight-week shelf life, and so we also can’t sell DTC online and have that as our testing ground,” founder Kiki Couchman told us. “We knew we had to build up demand before we were ever on grocery-store shelves.”

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—KH

      

COMMUNITY

Drew Videira

On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Drew Videira is CMO at vitamin brand First Day.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? Organized chaos. One of the biggest challenges in retail is staying proactive in what is inherently a very reactive channel. Unlike DTC, where you can put something live and pivot in real time based on immediate feedback, retail doesn’t give you that luxury. So I think of myself as a part-time problem solver, identifying pockets of challenge and building solutions before they compound. Part-time fortune teller, trying to anticipate opportunities and obstacles before they materialize so we can act rather than react. And part-time explorer, because staying genuinely connected to the customer is everything. I’ll go sit in an aisle and just watch how people shop, what they pick up, what they put back down. The data you get reactively is only a small sliver of the story.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? LinkedIn rarely tells you how hands-on someone actually is, or whether that’s even a personal motivator for them, and it’s certainly not for everyone. For me, it is. I love building. I love taking brands with incredible products and building the bridges and connections to get those products into more hands, and then building the systems that allow those hands to speak on your behalf. But more than the mechanics of it, LinkedIn can’t tell you how personal this work is. I found First Day after searching for products to help my oldest son, who is on the spectrum and had nutritional gaps. What started as a product search became something that made a profound difference in my family’s life. Now I get to help share that with other families. You can’t capture that in 500 characters.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? That’s a tough one. I led a makeup collection inspired by the 2019 live-action The Lion King film that I’m really proud of. The packaging used a technique that had never been executed in the US, inspired by a stippling painting style reminiscent of the scene where Mufasa appears in the stars. The formula colors were drawn directly from elements found in Africa itself—the soil, the clay. Projects that create a genuine emotional connection with the consumer and make them feel something always rise to the top for me.

Keep reading here.—EC

      

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swapping skus

Today’s top retail reads.

Hire calling: Target has named Lowe’s exec Chandhu Nair as its first chief AI officer. (the Wall Street Journal)

Pick out a white dress: David’s Bridal has prepared two dozen sketches based on what the designers think Taylor Swift’s Christian Dior wedding dress might have looked like so the retailer can “move very quickly” once it’s revealed, CEO Kelly Cook said. (Reuters)

Value chain: The rise of luxury fashion resale is disrupting brands’ and products’ carefully crafted concept of value. (Bloomberg)

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Goodwill

Learn how this Goodwill located in Seattle attracts 18,000 weekly visitors and processes 10,000 items a day.