WWYD if you were starting a new job as CEO at an 8-figure fashion brand? Rich Chapple, former CMO of Gymshark

Speaker A: If you can ask a new recruit, what's our objective? Where do we play? How do we win? And they play back something like, you know, 90% accurate, you're in a good place. And if obviously around the boardroom or the senior leadership team, if you're getting different answers as a CEO, uh, you've got to do some serious work around strategic alignment in the leadership.

Speaker B: It's the E Commerce Master Plan podcast here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e commerce business, cutting through the hype to bring you inspiration and advice from the e commerce sector and beyond. Here's your host, Chloe Thomas.

Speaker C: Hello and um, welcome.

Speaker D: It's great to have you here. Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests. In this episode, we get to catch up with the brilliant e Commerce growth strategist, Rich Chappell. Rich has held senior roles@uh, play.com, the Hot Group and Gymshark. He's a marketer by heart, I think would be the right way to put it. But he's also now a strategic genius, really in the space, helping many E commerce and DTC brands work out their best path to growth. And he is joining us to share the answer to his what would you do? Which is what would you do if you were the new CEO, uh, of an eight figure fashion brand? Make sure you listen to the end of the episode because as well as sharing all of that, ah, I'll be cheekily asking Rich for his take on what marketing is the best marketing marketing to be doing in 2026. And he's sharing some absolute golden nuggets in the top tips at the very end of the episode as well.

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Speaker D: And now to introduce our special guest. Rich Chappell was previously the CMO at gymshark and the CEO at uh, THG Ingenuity, part of the Hut Group, scaling both companies to unicorn valuations. He's now the co founder at the Growth foundation, helping e Commerce and D2C brands grow the right way. Hello Rich.

Speaker A: Hi Chloe. And um, hi listeners looking Forward to getting stuck into this.

Speaker D: Very cool to have you on the show. So thank you so much for suggesting this. What would you do? Before we get into that though, how did you get started in E commerce? I think my intro barely covers a tiny, tiny fraction of your E commerce history, Rich. So tell us a bit more about it.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So actually uh, started off on the shop floor at home base here in the UK in the mid-90s. And I know uh, m, you're listening to us, but in the room I'm in, I'm in my home office which is a studio and I'm a, uh, massive fan. I'm very passionate about music. So um, I was obviously trying to earn some money to fund my musical uh, passions, being in a band and stuff. And effectively grew up in retail. Actually fell in love with it and got a junior marketing job at Carpet. Right. So still within the home improvement category. And you're thinking why are you sticking around in home improve, obviously like family connections and uh, families or building contractors, electricians and things like that. But actually my passion was to say is in music and I, in terms of E commerce, actually fell in love with E commerce as a consumer early adopter. So I was the guy in the group of friends that would be early adopter on actually getting an Internet connection In the early 90s, um, on dial up, first one with an email, first person to spend hundreds of pounds on a DVD player, all those things. And was desperate to work in that industry, but managed to grab a job@play.com in the early 2000s. Chloe, if you remember that brand.

Speaker C: I do.

Speaker D: And that, that would have been like the, the, the must have job back then. They were, they were the case study on everything.

Speaker A: Uh, I'm just phenomenal. So I joined as a, as a marketing manager and grew up to head of marketing in that business. Um, I joined around 20 million turnover. The business was profitable, um, back then, selling discs in boxes predominantly. And that grew to 500 million in the space of about four and a half years while I was there. Just bananas. And I'm conscious of our time together so to sort of really what fueled that growth. But ultimately combination of two things. The addressable market growing massively with people going from analog to digital, people going straight to broadband. Not to dial up, you know, or via dial up. But also we managed to stay on top of that opportunity and not let Amazon, our arch enemy at the time, overtake the market share that we held onto and grew over that time, particularly in video and video games. Um, so yeah, Absolutely loved it really deep down as a passion of mine in terms of entertainment it was a phenomenal business to work for um, and actually met some incredible operators in that business that have gone on to do very amazing things in the E commerce I suppose community in terms of those sort of, you know, I suppose aspect. In the early wild west of E Comm, when Google had just opened its sort of search advertising, Facebook was only a social media platform you couldn't advertise on, et cetera. So yeah, really good they say went off then to thg, had a number of roles there actually, then went sort of freelance and then met Gymshark as part of that journey and that's brought me up to the growth foundation and I can tell you a bit more about that as and when uh, during our time together.

Speaker C: So you like me got to play around in the early days where I think of E commerce as being kind of like a crazy land grab. Oh yeah, you know, everyone was adopting. Yeah the wild west, the consumers were just piling in. Yes. We had to do clever things to keep growing and to keep selling. But nowadays with levels of competition, everything, I think it's a lot harder.

Speaker D: Do you think it's changed a lot over that time span how you go up the mechanics of growing a brand?

Speaker A: I think the principles and maybe we'll get into them in our content in a minute. I think there's some that are uh, evergreen and even with a similar paradigm shift, you could argue the AI has a similar wild west feeling about it at the moment. I think even with those in place, those frameworks that I've I suppose spotted been part of putting in place or actually testing and learning through are applicable because I suppose it comes down to the execution channel as the things that are changing. But you're right, it is, I suppose it's, it is tougher now I suppose. You know, if I go back to those early days for us, Chloe, there was only, I remember looking at similar web data or the equivalent back then and there were only like let's say hundreds of sites with over a million visitors a year. Right. And there are now I suppose tens of thousands. So you know, it was just getting that early, early time. Right. In terms of competition and particularly again if we remember technically you had to have quite I suppose weapons grade development help to get an E commerce site working to do millions of turnover. Right now you can go on to Shopify or other platforms and you can be trading within a couple of hours with a fully very actually with a very beautiful Kind of templated site ready to go. Ah, right. So the difficulty of actually connecting a payment gateway to a website, you know,

Speaker D: oh, there's about 20 tangents of uh, of PCI DSS implementation and, and the mind blowing thing of when Shopify came around.

Speaker A: But I'll give you just very quickly to bring that to life for the listeners. I suppose when I was um, @play.com, right, so we're a department store for entertainment actually. Interestingly, well over a million SKUs. Not all in stock, but that development team at the time, around 500 million, would have been around 100 people maintaining a Hybris environment. And I could roll forward to gymshark for example, or on Shopify, the IT team that's working with Shopify directly and a few partners, but is a team of four.

Speaker C: It's mad, isn't it?

Speaker D: Yeah, so mad. Um, right. I'm not going to tangent on my

Speaker C: tangents because we will be here for

Speaker D: the rest of the episode. Just reminiscing, which as entertaining as that would be, is not what everyone's tuned in for. So Rich, what would you do is if you were starting a new job as a CEO at an eight figure fashion brand, what would you do?

Speaker A: Yeah, well I've thought about this and actually replaying my experience, I've entered pretty much those business I mentioned, Play the heart.

Speaker B: Huh.

Speaker A: Group and Gymshark at that eight figure moment. And I think I thought about deconstructing this into the first 90 days, which I thought could be helpful for listeners.

Speaker D: Nice.

Speaker A: So. And um, I think there are five work streams that I would prioritize. But as a CEO there are many more as we know to get into. But I think like truth is a, is one and there's truth to find all over the business, like the strategy. So what are the guiding rules and principles that everyone's operating under? Uh, and are they really clear everywhere? So you know, is there strategic clarity and narrative clarity everywhere on that? What's the truth about the customer? As a marketer, obviously I've been promoted to CEO, but I'm a marketer at heart. So obsessing about the customer and understanding that I'd want to know, um, where we are on a talent and organization point of view. And then I suppose operating leverage in terms of what are our, what's the opportunity, particularly now with AI and systems and those other things. So um, they're the kind of the five work streams I'm kind of going to look at. And obviously they work across those sort of first 90 days. Really.

Speaker C: Okay, so that's going backwards. That's operating leverage, talent and organization.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Truth of the customer, truth of strategy.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I suppose actually called truth as a work stream overall because I think like there's things like I've uh, got them like you know, financial truth, like what's going on there really key like channel and cohort truth. So percentage of revenue is repeat versus know in our cohorts. You know, what's the Pareto? Is there a very concentrated percentage of customers like I've seen in many businesses? Like 5% of customers generate 30% of your revenue. You know, getting to understand those things. You know, is it actually I suppose and a product or channel truth, uh, depending on this apparel business that I've now taken the, the leadership challenge on, is it distributed across TikTok shop, Amazon D2C and wholesale or is it purely direct to consumer Shopify. Right. So is a channel truth to understand quite often is there a hero skew or a hero product line Truth. And quite often in the brands that I've worked with more recently that are innate figures found a visionary led still there is actually a hero product. And quite often they're getting distracted by newness and other things. You're like hang on, we need to really focus on the hero. But we still haven't really unlocked that. So there's that truth, obviously the organization truth and then those kind of things. That's kind of what I'm after in those truths.

Speaker C: I love the fact you start with those truths because I think it's so easy to assume that when you come in, in that high position in a big business, you take all that for granted and just start making decisions. But that's not the way to go about it, is it?

Speaker D: You need to actually make sure that when you're looking at an apple, it's an apple. When you're looking at a pear, it's a pear and so on. And therefore you've actually got those accurate stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. And even, and I'm sure you're the same clay I meet a number of say eight figure, uh, uh, founders or investors or um, senior leadership teams and still the vast majority are still arguing about the truth on actually revenue like net revenue yesterday, excluding returns, cancellations, tax, vat. Shopify will have its own slightly unique algorithm of what it calls sales. The finance system has a slightly different view of that. And actually you know, getting I uh, suppose understanding where some of these untruths are, uh, really quickly and that really helps. And I'D imagine actually look, if you've got an opportunity to join a CEO, this might be day minus 30 as you're sort of preparing to start, right, you'd start to immerse on these and get to know the business and things like that. So yeah, that's really key. You know, on the financial side you've got you know, gross margin by skew contribution margin and one of the things that we do or I've got into the habit of doing is grouping or lining contribution margins at different sort of I suppose sections, I suppose down the P L as it were. I'm trying to think of a better word for it. But yeah, you've got gross cost of goods, you know, and then that GP1, GP2, I uh, look at that as brand. So any sort of more fixed mid to upper funnel investment, GP3 sort of variable performance marketing, GP4 trading costs to acquire the customer at the point of sale and you put potentially your payment processing fees in there. But it could be your rent for a shop or the license fee for shopify in there as well. Ops, uh, you know, outbound fulfillment, you know, GP5 and then GP6 overhead. So you look at all those different bandings right the way down to GP7 final one salary and you can get a sense of like where, where is the opportunity and obviously great, particularly D2C businesses have brilliant GP1, um, right. Where you've got hopefully on their grim schedule. Yeah, I mean interesting. Again going back to my, my play in early thg days, you know, GP1 would be like 35, 40% which, which you know, again shows you how cheap it was to acquire customers in the early days as well.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker A: Compared to what it is now. Yeah, so much so, yeah, that would be one. Yeah. We spoke about the um, sort of cohort tree. So again looking at customers through that lens and then I think organization truth's a really interesting one and I'm conscious again we could probably spend an hour talking about this but I meet a lot of again those sort of eight figure, sort of early eight figure brands where you've got founder. Ah and again so it's like early loyalists who are friends, family, um, sort of founder centric decision making around org design and actually that's an interesting thing to have to fix or manage in terms of how do we upskill the operating horsepower or capacity of the team but also keep some of this loyalist in place. You know that's a really interesting dynamic. Is there true ownership of the P and L anywhere? Actually, you know, one of the things I mentioned when we were together last is like, particularly with AI and the pace of decision making actually, where is the power of attorney and agency in the business? Is it truly at a performance marketer's desk or that. Does it go back to the finance director every. Every day, for example?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Just understanding that. But yeah, that's. That's first 30 days. Truth.

Speaker C: All about the truth. And it's. I like the fact that you've included both the metrics, the numbers, which I was going to say call the hard and fast numbers.

Speaker D: But as we've just gone through, they're not necessarily hard and fast.

Speaker C: They should be.

Speaker D: But you've got to find that truth and get them solid. But you've got that kind of the black and white of the numbers, but you've also got that softer side of does everyone actually think we're doing the same thing? Is there, um, confusion at the board table of what we're actually here to be? Are we a retailer or are we an online store? Are we a marketplace seller or all that kind of cultural values but. But kind of even harder than culture and values side of things that needs to be outlined.

Speaker A: Yeah. And this is a perfect segue actually into my m. Next sort of month, month two, which is actually once you've looked at the truths and sort of captured them. I think even if there is, let's say, strategic alignment, but codifying it and then creating a. A system or a way of becoming a broken record and a consistent narrator of strategy throughout the business, really key. So we've got a framework, the growth foundation that we've developed and actually, look, I've bumped into different strategy frameworks and things throughout the last particularly 10 to 15 years. And I've sort of grabbed the best bits from all of them and pulled them up. But I think situation capturing what's happening now and being brutally honest is first 1m both strategically, I suppose, macro, what's going on in the market, everything else, but actually internally strengths and weaknesses and things like that, the vision and mission. So again, why does the brand have permission or the company have permission to exist? Is really key for us all to remember an objective capturing that which actually is very much a quantitative process of how much by when. And that's not just like revenue and EBITDA or contribution, but also some of the softer things like maybe customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, sentiment and other things that you can track, um, with high confidence. And then the way we deconstruct the strategic choices here is actually a phenomenal PNG Or Procter and Gramble framework, which is where to play and how to win. And you might have bumped into that before Chloe, but it's a lovely way of like sort of the symbiosis between the rational choices you have to make strategically and the emotional ones and you say the hard and soft. So in the where to play and anyone listening, I'd look at this through your own businesses. Who is the target audience we mentioned about obsessing about that which I'll come on to the product that you make. So you know, customer product, the channel you sell through and the geography you're in and you can make. Obviously you could say, well I'm going to be to every customer, we're going to make every product in all channels in all countries. Well you can quickly understand that the skills, the capital and the sort of limited resources you have a business probably won't succeed if you went, let's just do everything. So it's then coming down to how do we choose? Should we be, you know, as you say, um, when, when do we launch a new country, when do we launch into TikTok shop or not become quite interesting strategic choices on the where to play and then the how to win comes after. Once you've got the uh, confidence in that where to play is that is the way the almost like uh, the way you act as a brand. So things like the offer architecture in its own right, which I look at as being okay, what is the brand? Is there sort of some heroic myth or story we can tell how unique is the product? Is there an irresistible call to action that we can create? Which doesn't necessarily mean discount. It means could be scarcity or something that just makes people act today and then social proof and all those kind of it's then like the how and also where I've helped influence and build these strategies with other brands, there's a true ability to point them externally to customers and they work kind of this how to win sort of set of rules but also internally in terms of how we behave as people. It works as well. Uh, if that makes sense. Like it. There's a real, a kind of blurring of that internal external in terms of the way the brand behaves and how to win within those choices uh, you make. Yeah. So I think what I've seen is quite often there can be um, I suppose or the litmus test for me is like if you can ask a new recruit, you know, it doesn't matter at any level what's our objective, where do we play how do we win? And they play back something like, you know, 90% accurate, you're in a good place. And if obviously around the boardroom or the senior leadership team, if you're getting different answers, then there's probably, as I said, CEO, you've got to do some serious work around strategic alignment in the leadership. Right. That's really key.

Speaker D: And we're talking about this as what you would do as the CEO starting the new job. But both that month one and even more importantly the month two activity, this isn't you squirreled away in your corner office working things out, is it? This is a whole company project, Correct?

Speaker A: Yeah. And depending on the size and complexity of that, it may be that there are. Maybe it's not whole company, but very much a. Not an insula, you know, um, as you say, squirreled away in the corner office. You've got to understand, particularly I suppose in that first month, like just getting everywhere and actually into the warehouse, get to the manufacturer, get, you know, get as much truth as you can, I think is really key. And I suppose there is probably a little bit more remote synthesis in the strategy because you probably have a view if you're CEO, uh, but actually making sure if you, let's say, create a draft in terms of, I think this is our where to play and how to win. Go and get that tested and challenged across the business, actually, from say from junior all the way to senior levels around and find out, particularly potentially, uh, you might think as a CEO, actually we've opened a new market. For example, let's say you're a 100% direct to consumer, you've got 80% of your sales in the UK and let's say that 20% long tail is 30 countries and the E Com team are distracted positively by launching, you know, a French website or something else. Right. You could actually. Is that the best use of how much energy you're spending? That's using half your week to create 5% revenue. Should we put that 50 of your time back into driving the UK more? Yeah, there might be some interesting challenges you've got. And they. And quite often I've seen them, sometimes they're linked to people's bonuses and incentives.

Speaker F: Right.

Speaker A: Which is, you know, you know, um, particularly around channel conflict of, you know, retail versus dtc and there's all sorts of things going on there, isn't there, to unpack.

Speaker C: Yes, so much to unpack. Um, but I guess that's why you've got to spend that first month trying to uncover as much truth as possible. Because then as you start building the strategy, you start to. Then it's a lot easier to find the conflicts and the issues.

Speaker A: Yeah, completely.

Speaker C: And I think so often when people hear you say, oh yeah, we're going to create a strategy and announce it to the team, they think it should be this big kind of wow, surprise moment. But in the way you build a strategy and in what the actual strategy is, I found it's often more likely to be a. Oh, cool. Oh, that's not unexpected. You know, it's almost like if you

Speaker D: announce the strategy to the company and everybody's shocked or surprised, then you probably got it wrong because it should be kind of obvious in some ways.

Speaker A: Yeah. And often in my experience, it's usually doing less but doing it better.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Is usually what I find happens sort of around the eight figures because it's just sort of got a bit distracted and not kind of really focused in on that. And I think the other thing just to keep reminding is, I suppose as you move into month three is like actually creating a KPI around measuring the recall of the strategic propaganda in the business. So, you know, um, when I've been in other senior roles in other businesses, you know, using a sort of a PR tactic which is like, you know, you might get a question from a colleague or a co worker and then, you know, reframing the question back, that includes the strategy to say, oh, you know, because either in your apply, the answer is this. And that's because our where to play is just constantly referring back to it to get it into the muscle memory of the business.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think you said called it the

Speaker D: consistent narrator of strategy, which I think is so critical, isn't it? You have to keep reminding everybody.

Speaker A: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. And you find again, I've been privy to being in quite a few different organizations, you find sometimes you get natural narrators as uh, CEOs are in the leadership team. And sometimes there isn't a natural narrator. So it's again, sometimes you can find other individuals in the organization that seem to have a impact and influence and relationship with the organization. You know, again, M might be one of those legacy loyalists that have been their OG employee for they can be really impactful on getting them on board on narration of where we're going because obviously the trust has been built or you, you know, or as a case you have to proactively engineer it into particularly leadership roles. Is that that, you know, strategic clarity is part of a KPI, a soft KPI, as it were. Right. For that team.

Speaker C: So month three what comes next after truth and strategy?

Speaker A: Yeah I think well there's particularly probably now I've got a bit of understanding of talent, truth, things like that. So looking at then is the organization designed for sort of scale and future scale or survival. So quite often at eight figures I find typically underinvestment in CRM and I'll bump into that probably a few times in our conversation today but dedicated obsession on customer insight and customer relationship management um to build ltv. I suppose the interesting one here as well is the nuance around if the founder is still in the business like in your CEO working through and really understanding like decision making governance of who's doing what is really interesting. And that might be the. The founder becoming more non executive and floating around and impacting maybe product and customer and things like that or versus the real operating daily pulse of the business that would be really key and typically what I would look at doing in that third month is future gazing into what does the organization need to look like at twice our revenue now and then working where are the major gaps? Where do we have to prioritize in terms of that? And being very pragmatic around. Look I can't tie up all our working capital I would like to buy stock and demand with by putting another 30 people in for example.

Speaker F: Right.

Speaker A: It has to be very pragmatic. But getting a sense of what does that organization look like if we're twice as big and um, on the current run rate, how quickly is that? So kind of 12 to 24 month M horizon on that would be really key third month cash and working capital discipline. So making sure all over inventory markdown, production, lead times, margin, guardrails and I suppose making any changes if the business is let's say weak on that would be really key. And the other thing I suppose is getting out to that understanding if you've got the strategy set and happy you can then think about the execution of that strategy. And I suppose particularly now more than ever where is it appropriate for an AI tool or system or ways of working to help increase product productivity or do we get you know is it much more I suppose utilizing brand and creative for example or are we using more in financial and planning? And I'm sure there are opportunities across the whole business around where it can be used and how it could be leveraged. So I'd be thinking about that in particular in tandem with the talent organization piece as well.

Speaker C: Yeah because I suppose that having your

Speaker D: kind of uh, your vision of where the company's going to go but also the vision of where the organization of the people is going to go. You know what that structure chart looks like when you've doubled. That's not just about hiring or AI these days. That's also about who you develop to get into which role because you've got a time window until you get there of I think Suki could actually become a head of marketing but she needs this, this, this and this done. And by the time you get to end of month two and you're into month three you've got some idea ah of who the stars are in the business, who are the best cultural fits and all those elements and how you can keep them.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've done that in a few other organizations. Being in where you find those let's say really high potential I call them sort of high horsepower people and giving them actually they're often leaning in high bias fraction problem solving and actually some of those more I suppose things you don't quite get to um on the to do list that's still with very much within the strategy can say like special projects like why don't you get together as a group and actually cost functionally they may not be get them to own a task or a project that isn't maybe in their core discipline but you're helping progress their skill outside of their core discipline as well. So you get you know perhaps a head of finance, uh you know a senior performance marketing manager and a campaign manager whatever to get together and go right. We've got a problem around our returns rate fix, you know, whatever. Right. And you've got smart people from different places thinking about that holistically from just instead of just an operational challenge for example. Right. I think the other one that's really key actually in this third week. Sorry, third month. Now you've got that strategic um third week it could be because it feels like that, doesn't it?

Speaker D: I think that's an AI goal isn't it?

Speaker A: Yeah. And actually anyone listening I'm sure as we all work in E commerce, um perhaps when we look around our peer and friend group we realize a day in E commerce is a week in anyone else's life like they generally are dog days, aren't they? In our industry I think the governance and decision cadence as well like weekly trading, monthly strategic reviews or quarterly offer what's the right operating cadence for the business and does it need to flex around peak moments or launches and things like that. You know again I've been in business where there's a Very I say standard sets of let's say campaign ideation on a monthly basis but actually you know when you get to peak intensive periods, perhaps in Q4 actually a daily stand up which is around blockers and you know just flexing, making sure we've got real clarity of again why we meet the uh, objective of the meeting, how frequent are they valuable and keeping really on top of that again meetings can be a material time suck when you start to get into larger organizations.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's a key one. That's a really important one.

Speaker C: Yeah, I totally get what you mean. Holding onto the same meeting structure you had in year one when you've got to wait figures is probably a bad idea but um, Richard, I love that three month breakdown.

Speaker D: I suspect many of our listeners are

Speaker C: going right, we're doing this as of

Speaker D: next week we're just going to do it ourselves and sort it out, fix all these problems. This time of year is a great time to be doing it but you are as you said a marketer at heart. You're great at growth. So an extra question for you. If you were a CMO at uh, an e commerce store this year, what would be the key things going into your marketing team? What would you have them working on this year? Would it be a CRM M Focus? Would you be diving into TikTok shop and channels doubling down on meta? What's your recipe if I can ask.

Speaker A: Oh man, it's so hard because I suppose one of the things I always think about if I depending on the financial health of the business I suppose again I've sort of put this on a spectrum of is the business in wartime so you know where it might be thinking oh we've got a cash Runway of X and we might struggle to pay our team in a few months time or you're at the other end in peacetime where you've got really amazing working capital, high gross margin, free cash flow and profitable if you're in the more in the peacetime side of the world I think having a test budget of around you know, either incremental 20 on top of what you're really spending to test those different things Chloe is absolutely brilliant and actually it's really exciting for the team again perhaps to work cross functionally around we've got some money for demand and awareness creation. What are those new and immersion channels that we can go and test and try. So is it Reddit?

Speaker C: Is it it?

Speaker A: Tick tock. Is it Hello, I'm m like a remnant snatch deal on above the line Posters So sorry you know like our home posters on the underground that I've managed to get and can we just thinking about that I suppose testing and learning I suppose principle of particularly probably if you've got to eight figures that's probably is part of the business and why it's got there. Can you apply that to new and emerging channels? I always put um, I suppose extra confidence and investment into CRM. I think the more you can do there and again AI is doing a great job of helping do more at scale and it's pace in that, in that function or in that channel. That's definitely something there I think. Never underestimate the power of actually just meeting your customers. So again one of the things I spot often if we've listened to Pure Play DTC listeners on here Chloe is that um, I often ask who's your top customer and they go oh I don't know or who are your top 10? And they don't know the name, they don't know where they live, they don't know anything about them. So spending some time actually either talking or interacting with customers ah ideally in, in different value segments. So very valuable, you know, medium value, low value and like what's going on? Why'd you buy it? Why don't you. Who else you buying? You know just getting to know them. There's so much comes from those little conversations you can have around a pizza and a beer or some other thing you could do with them relative to your brand. I'll be doing that for sure. I think that kind of ones come straight to mind and of course experimenting with productivity through AI and seeing where that gain is. Is it on content production, is it on analytics? I'm sure you've seen these Chloe as well. You can see there's a lot of power if you can connect truth into these systems to help you make decisions quicker.

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Speaker B: It's time for the Top Tips round.

Speaker C: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level. Rich, are you ready for the top tips?

Speaker A: Yeah, go for it.

Speaker D: Okay, the book Top Tip. If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?

Speaker A: Cool. Well, it's really difficult to choose one, but the one that I find most of my people, uh, I talk to haven't read is the Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. Uh, written in the 60s. Vance was a consumer psychologist that worked for like the Madison Avenue ad agencies. And it's a brilliant thing around psychological depth of like, how cognitive bias consciously and subconsciously works on decision making. So, very quick story and I'm conscious of time, but there's a really good example of this that, uh, one section in the book talks about ad agency. We're approached by a big chocolate company in the US and they would ask to design like the full packaging, the pricing architecture, absolutely everything. And they counterintuitively for, let's say, lower spending power consumers. The packaging was really, let's say opulent. Lots of bows and foil and ribbons and you can't see the chocolate. And then for the higher spending power cohort or the target audience, it's all about having clear and open chocolate so you can see the chocolate inside. And that's still true today. If you look at like a five pound box of chocolates, you can't see inside them. It's very sort of nice box. And then the expensive chocolate, you're actually looking at the products inside. So it's this like, perception of, am I giving this a gift? Is this for myself? You know, there's lovely things in this book around your offer architecture and thinking of some of the more subconscious decisions that customers make around status and what it says about them and their needs. It's amazing.

Speaker C: Nice. I haven't come across that one and I think as a marketer you can't ever read too many books on consumer psychology because it hasn't changed. It's how we're hardwired.

Speaker A: And that's again when you think about AI and all the other kind of big again. Where are we going to be in another 20 years when another shift comes of some kind? We still act, I think unless we've all got AI chips in our heads or anything else, but we still act. There's a brilliant. My second book on there was Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Kamer which is that again conscious slow thinking brain versus the fast subconscious brain. And that's linked to, to Vance Packard's one very much.

Speaker D: Yeah. We'll still be wanting our uh, posh chocolates visibly and our cheap chocolates wrapped in boxes.

Speaker A: Yeah. Or particularly, um, I'm now the CEO uh, of an apparel brand. What the apparel brand says about me as I'm walking around or when I look at myself in the mirror. Right. So there's some interesting things there. Again consciously, subconsciously.

Speaker D: Exactly right. Number two, traffic. Top tip. Which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn't get the press it deserves?

Speaker A: Well I mentioned CRM earlier so I'm not going to leverage that one again. I have been a big fan my whole career actually on remnant above the line inventory. There's some amazing deals to do. If you approach a media owner directly and say look, I've got artwork ready. If you can phone me once a week or tell me what you've got left over I can pick that. And you can usually get deals as good as 10 to 30p on the pound at full rate card and again during my play.com days and at the hut group in particular where we used to get like you know, marketing co op from, from brands. There's an amazing arbitrage opportunity there where we would go out and buy remnant tree, let's say remnant at 30 pence and the rate card is at 100.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You can imagine that. And we used to buy tens of millions of eyeballs at uh, you know, 70% discount from the rate just. But then the flexibility is there. Knowing I can't plan it exactly around start date, end date but I've still got that access to the consumer and focus on the frequency. So yeah, there's amazing opportunities in particularly our home audio TV still if you're in that remnant space.

Speaker C: I've having started my career in mail order, huge fan of remnant stuff. Remnant above the line. Do you know though the strangest thing, I have never been approached for a

Speaker D: last minute deal on podcast sponsorship or email newsletter advertising. At the risk of being now being bombarded with it. No one has ever gone, Chloe, you know those ads we ran two months ago?

Speaker C: If you have a space later this

Speaker D: year, what could you do it for? You know, uh, because it expires. It's just like the magazine industry or

Speaker C: the side of a bus shelter.

Speaker A: I don't know how you feel as well. Interestingly that again, um, I don't think I've probably in the last 10 to 15 years it's very rare for me to go into an eight figure brand and find an individual with any traditional above the line or non digital buying experience. And I think even with a potentially a media buying partner and tell them to focus on Remnant, they still get a commission on those things. There's so much opportunity and again I think some of the upsides of why would you do above the line. It still has a trust and again there's a brilliant thing. You know when I think few years back when Facebook had to apologize around a ah, scandal of some kind, you know they use billboards and newspaper ads to do it because we trust it.

Speaker C: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker A: There's a brilliant trust and it does bring you out from the other, let's say I wouldn't call everyone, you know, bedroom operators. That's not appropriate. But there's a sense of you in the real world suddenly becomes there's something again coming back to our conscious the psychology of a consumer. Oh, you've turned up here. You know why why banks used to build big monolithic columned buildings at the end of high streets is because it's around trust. And similar thing works there in the media choice.

Speaker D: Oh completely. Um, a tool, top tip. Then maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plugin, a phone app or just a way of working. Is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?

Speaker A: These aren't um, tools predominantly but ways I've kind of built a bit more productivity for myself. So I think turning off all notifications while you're at work, except maybe vip, but the ease of getting distracted by a ping or a ding or anything else absolutely key. There's an amazing feature I live in the Apple ecosystem now and have done for the last sort of 10 years. I don't know if you. Are you in Apple as well, Chloe?

Speaker D: I'm not an Apple, no.

Speaker A: But in the Apple ecosystem there is a thing called text replace where you can put a Shortcut on your keyboard and it can replace it with any text. So I've got probably 30, uh, different, like just act and then three letters and it can replace the thing I type quite frequently. I think genuinely over the last five years, I've saved a week of my working life by not having to copy, paste manually or type these things out. And it can be things like email addresses, maps, you know, instructions for X, things like that. And it, you know, calendar link. Honestly, like, you type it in under a second and it's produced 50 words for you.

Speaker D: Love those kind of tools. I have one myself in my PC world called typedesk, which has whole emails, you know.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker A: You can insert them with two character hits on the keyboard.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, it's just like alt, circle and up it pops. Type in a bit phrases.

Speaker A: So like exclamation mark, whatever next. Like three letters or whatever.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: So that's really key. Um, the other one, I'm. I spend a lot of time in spreadsheets, obviously as a more sort of commercial analytical marketer. Two things that drive me crazy. Merge cells. Don't merge cells. And learn keyboard shortcuts. Again, the speed. A very quick story about school. I did a. When I grew up, it was in the late 80s and early 90s, like going through secondary school. And yeah, there were four computers at school, but I had a guy that taught us like XL1. We didn't have any mice on the computer. Everything was learned by keyboard. And you can see where, where I'm showing spreadsheets to other like colleagues or people, they're like, see me work the keyboard, moving around the spreadsheet so quickly, they're like, oh my God, how are you doing that? Instead of holding the mouse on the scroll to the right hand side and it takes 30 seconds to get to the other side. I can go straight to the other end of the table in a keystroke though. How do you do that? So honestly, spending half hour learning keyboard shortcuts in Excel or Google Sheets, I love it.

Speaker D: I also like your little plea to anyone working with you to not merge

Speaker C: the cells in a spreadsheet.

Speaker A: Oh my God, I see a merge cell.

Speaker D: I completely concur with all your recommendations there, Rich.

Speaker A: I think that merge sell feature should be like admin level switch on or offable

Speaker D: whole company ban.

Speaker A: Cannot see why. Uh, I know it's got better over time in the more recent versions, but like, oh my God, merge cells.

Speaker D: I'm with you. Uh, okay, the carbon top tip. What's your favorite way to Reduce the carbon footprint of an E commerce store.

Speaker A: This one actually came up. Really struggling to be candid because obviously I'm now running an agency business and we're pretty light on carbon and all those things. We don't print everything. And I was thinking kitting. Got it. I've been working over the last six months actually on a lot of subscription supplements. Businesses looking at, you know, doing commercial due diligence for investment, all those other things. And you can see a m material carbon impact, also a commercial benefit. So this is a double win on shipping quarterly instead of monthly. So a quarterly supply on a quarterly basis. So you know, it's three times as less. You know, the packaging, the fuel, all those things. Slightly heavier package but in terms of cardboard uses and everything else, like no brainer. And actually what you look at commercially, when I do my LTV analysis over these cohorts that are um, on the three month, they're typically worth more money over the same period of time than a monthly subscriber as well. So that would be.

Speaker D: Love that one.

Speaker C: Thank you, Rich. Now before we say goodbye, could you

Speaker D: please let the listeners know how they can get in contact with you and your business.

Speaker A: Yeah, of course. We're at the Growth foundation is our website. There's a form there on the foot of the page. But you can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm M just forward slash. Richardchapel. Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys. I'm very open by the way for any questions or ideas or anything you want to know. Please feel free to drop me a line.

Speaker C: Awesome. Rich, thank you so much for coming on the show. You've given us all a ton of stuff to think about, which I love. So thank you so much for being here.

Speaker A: No problem.

Speaker C: Always a treat to catch up with Rich. And how do I summarize that? Here's what would you do if you were starting a new job as CEO at an eight figure fashion brand? I love the way he split it down into what you do in each of the first three months.

Speaker D: First of all, finding that truth, the truth in the numbers, the truth in the strategy, the truth in how the business is operating and how everyone is kind of culturally aligned. Then month two, getting into strategic alignment, both working out what the strategy should be and then becoming that consistent narrator of strategy. Obsessing about the customer and working out where to play and how to win and then making sure everybody is on board with that and kind of living and breathing it. And then month three, start looking at is the organization designed to scale. You now know what your strategy is. You now know you've got the numbers and the truth throughout the business. So how are you going to go about doing that scale organizationally? Has there been enough investment in the CRM? Do you have clarity on your customer insights?

Speaker C: How is the CEO working alongside that founder role? Build that. What does the organizational structure need to look like when we're doubled in turnover?

Speaker D: How does AI fit into that? How does hiring fit in? How does talent, uh, acceleration. That's not the right word, is it? Talent development work? So many bits and pieces. I mean there's so much just in the top tips that you could pick out. But such a good, a good rundown there from Rich and I think even if you're not, um, a new person who's just got a new job as CEO at an eight figure fashion brand, I think we could probably all apply that to our businesses in this off E Commerce season of the spring and work our way through those things to make our businesses tighter and stronger. You can get your hands on our notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we've mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplan.com you can also use ecmp.info the number of this episode to go straight to the right page of the site. When you get to the website, please do add yourself to our email list so you don't miss out on any of the things we share to help you improve your business. And if you liked this episode, then make sure you check out all our other what would you do episodes which you will find via the website@ecmp.info wwyd. Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode of the Ecommerce Master Plan Podcast. I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help e Commerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including progressing along the path to net zero. So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the E Commerce Master Plan Podcast. Hope you have a great week and don't forget to keep optimizing.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the E Commerce Master Plan Podcast. Find out more@ecommercemasterplan.com podcast.

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