Reimagining Retail: The Unofficial Most Interesting Retailers List (March)
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Hello, listeners. Today is Wednesday, March 26th. Welcome to Behind the Numbers, Reimagining Retail, an e-marketer podcast made possible by Trax. This is the show where we talk about how retail collides with every part of our lives. I'm your host, Sarah Lebo. Today's episode topic is our March unofficial most interesting retailers of the month list. Before we jump into our list of our top eight most interesting retailers, let's meet today's guests.

Joining me for today's episode, we have back after a bit of a pod hiatus, Becky Schilling. Hey, Becky. I'm back. Welcome back. Also with us is one of our analysts, Rachel Wolf. Hey, Rachel. Hey, Sarah. And also joining us is another analyst, Sky Canaves. Hey, Sky. Hey, Sarah. Glad to be here. Glad to have all of you. Okay, let's jump into our most interesting retailers of the month list.

As our listeners will know, Becky and I, we're the committee, will present our list in the first half of this episode. And in the second half, Sky and Rachel will have the opportunity to edit our list. So here is our unofficial list of our eight most interesting retailers of the month. Number eight, Reebok. Becky, why Reebok?

So Reebok is getting back into golf. And while I'm not a huge fan of the sport, millions of people in this country are. 45 million, in fact. My father, shout out to him. The move signals the shoe giants move to position itself back into team sports, but keeping its professional edge as well. Team sports are such a huge thing in this country, especially with kids. And so it signals a great move for them to try to stay competitive. Yeah.

One fun fact that I learned while researching Reebok and golf is that millennials and Gen Zers make up over one quarter of golfers and their proportion is growing. So, you know, I think it makes sense for Reebok to really lead into that space. So you're telling me it's not just my dad? Becky, where'd you get that number for how many people in the U.S. are golf fans? It was a Fortune magazine article I

All right. Well, good for those people. I don't care about golf at all. But I think it's a great nostalgia category as well. I was going to say, I think it's a great nostalgia category as well. As a Gen Xer, I have fond memories of Reebok as my first trendy sneaker shoe brand when and this was in the 80s. And

And I've just started looking at golf as something that I might do as an activity at some point. I will say it is more fun than it looks. I think I'm aging into that. Golfing? Yeah. You get to whack a ball as hard as you can. I mean, like. What's the saying? A good walk ruined? That's true. I mean, that is also true. All right. Number seven, bath and body work.

Bath & Body Works made the list for launching a new store design with an updated layout. It says the layout is more focused on Gen Z, and one of the ways that it's getting Gen Z involved is a new scent bar where people can test different scents of not just Bath & Body Works iconic body sprays, but also candles, flowers I saw on there, just various different things that have to do with scent, which we know that perfume is a growing category right now. Yeah, I mean, I think this is...

pretty low-hanging fruit. People like to smell things before they buy. I was kind of surprised that they didn't already have a similar function.

Yeah, me too. I'm thinking, can't you smell everything in the store? Don't they at least have a sample of each product that you can smell? That's the problem though, right? All the scents come together and you can't smell them. So I'd be very interested to see how they're actually going to make it to where you can smell an individual scent. Bath and Body Works to me is one of those mall stores that you walk in and you get a headache right away from all the scents. But now I've complained about two different things on this episode. So I think I have to stop for a little bit.

Number six, CVS. Becky, tell us why CVS made the list. Yeah, so drugsters are hurting. That's not a shock to anybody, but it looks like the retailer is trying to focus on its core business of pharmacies. It's opening 12 new small format stores that will focus on those just the full service pharmacies with limited retail offerings. Average is less than 5,000 square feet.

It's an interesting move by a retailer to become less focused on retail, but to save its big business. So it's an interesting move in that part. And if you are looking to learn more about drugstores, check out our podcast for Monday.

where we talked about Walgreens. Yeah, so they're doing like a convenience store kind of format. Go ahead, Skye. A convenience store with a pharmacy, though. So my first reaction to this was a smaller store. Does that mean they'll be able to stop locking up the products if their employees can then see who's in the store and what they're looking at? I think it's an interesting move with the

pharmacy focus, but I see the future of pharmacy as increasingly digital and online because nobody wants to go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. You want it brought to your home, and that's really where the future of pharmacy is, maybe not in stores. And we see other retailers with

struggling formats like department stores, like Macy's rolling out small formats. And if your big picture is struggling and going downhill, just shrinking it isn't necessarily going to solve the problems. And I think Macy's has found that too. They touted these smaller stores and now they're actually closing some of them. Number five, Louis Vuitton for launching a beauty brand with makeup artist Pat McGrath.

So I didn't realize this until Becky pointed it out to me, but this is Louis Vuitton's makeup debut. I assumed they had a beauty brand. They do not. But it's actually not. So I learned that Louis Vuitton had a cosmetics line literally like 100 years ago.

In the 1920s. It was very small. I think it was like compacts and makeup brushes, but it was something. And yes, that's like an eon ago. Wait, so when did they get rid of that 1920s beauty brand? I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, to your point, like I was shocked that they hadn't done this, you know, even a few years ago when beauty was experiencing this huge boom. And I think it's smart to get Pat McGrath on board. She has a pretty dedicated following and it will certainly help boost the brand among, you know, beauty or makeup savvy consumers. Yeah.

Yeah, Pat McGrath is an older makeup artist. How old is she? She's 54. Okay, so not that old. Hey. Sorry. She's not that old, but she's not like a young Gen Z trendy makeup artist. No, she's a legend. She's been around. Yeah, she's a legend. Yeah, she's been around since the 90s.

With younger people recently, she went viral for these looks that she had in, I think, a Fashion Week runway where she had these like – So cool. What were they? Like a gel face mask over makeup. Yeah, it was like glass skin or something. It looked so cool. So, yeah, I think she's a smart person to partner with because she's legacy and she's still relevant today.

Right. And she has her own beauty brand, but there have been some struggles there. And I think it's more around the executive side of the brand and the people running the brand. So I think with Louis Vuitton, she'll be in better hands. And then, of course, it's going to have the automatic distribution through Sephora, which is owned by Louis Vuitton's parent company. And there will surely be premium placement for that launch as well. So expected to do pretty well.

Okay, so welcome back, Louis Vuitton beauty brand. Back for the first time since maybe the Great Depression.

Number four is Poppy. Poppy, which is a prebiotic soda brand, was just acquired by PepsiCo for close to $2 billion. I think this is really interesting because we had Coca-Cola on our list last month for launching its own prebiotic soda brand. I want to once again, like I said last week, say that prebiotic is kind of one of these like marketing health terms. It like doesn't really exist. What is prebiotic?

But these health soda brands are really strong products with strong marketing right now. Coca-Cola clearly thought that it needed one in the market. And PepsiCo responded by acquiring Poppy. So we can see how important these brands are to the major distributors.

Yeah, I think to your point, right, these are really zeitgeisty products. People are interested in these so-called functional foods and beverages that promise to improve your gut health or give you more protein and all those kinds of health concerns. Right.

And it fits in neatly with what the other work that Pepsi is doing to make its portfolio, you know, more appealing to health conscious consumers, adding more whole grain options or smaller portions, all of that work. Yeah. Presumably now you will also, this is just an assumption, but I think it's a fair one, be able to get poppy anywhere that distributes Pepsi product.

So like the age old joke is like, do you have Coke? Like, no, but we have Pepsi. Like those places will have poppy now. So poppy, which is already a huge brand online, will keep getting bigger as you're able to get it in stadiums and maybe on airplanes. And I already see it in stores everywhere. And it's this other competitor, Olipop. They just seem to have

gotten everywhere in front of me, like by the cash registers at the supermarket, right next to the cases with the traditional sodas. But I think a challenge will be, these are relatively premium products and they're up against big competition as well from the flagship brands that frankly taste a little better. And I think that's maybe a challenge. Maybe as a parent, I think that's maybe one reason I would buy is

is if your kids haven't gotten into real soda yet, maybe you can fool them with this better for you soda. Number three, Ulta. Becky, why is Ulta on our list?

So Ulta is launching a marketplace for select invited brands, and they're also adding some more personalization to its e-commerce business. Ulta's new CEO has acknowledged that the company made several self-inflicted mistakes recently, and they lost beauty share last year. She's hoping that these changes will help elevate the guest experience.

I want to shout out fellow committee member, pod regular Arielle, who predicted that more third-party marketplaces would launch this year. And I'm pretty sure she specifically predicted that Ulta would launch one.

Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty safe bet to make at this point. I mean, we've seen Best Buy do the same thing where, you know, it's an easy way to just add more products, brands to your lineup. And it's also an advertising opportunity, right? With your marketplace, you can get these brands to sponsor their placements and it's just another revenue stream. Right. I think any company that's trying to follow the Amazon playbook in building a retail media network has to understand that a lot of that growth has come from the marketplace. Right.

And so we increasingly will see that they want to bring on board advertisers and new advertisers are best positioned to come from the new merchants. You can exponentially increase your pool of potential advertisers with a marketplace and avoid some of the tensions you have with your existing suppliers and, you know, the marketing budgets and shifting them to retail media.

Number two, we have Unilever, which claims to be investing half of its ad budget in an influencer-first strategy is what they're calling it. Unilever's investment in influencer marketing will rise from about 30% of that ad budget to about 50% of their total ad spend.

A quote from their CEO, Fernando Fernandez, said, there are 19,000 zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them. I think it makes sense. Our own research shows that social media is Gen Z's favorite place to discover new brands and products, right? So given that, I think it makes sense for Unilever to really go after those audiences and target them where they are.

What I'm curious about here is if they're going to be using influencers mainly for cosmetics, beauty, health products, or if they're also going to be using them to market things like food and other sort of grocery CPG. I think they need them for everything. I think they see the way the wind is blowing. Creators are really where it's at. And they need to stand out from the competition, primarily in private label in this environment.

And content, creator content that's entertaining and interesting is really one way. I think retailers with their private labels, they still haven't capitalized on influencers and the groups that follow the retailers and their private labels as much. So this is one way to get the brands to stand out in this increasingly competitive environment.

Yeah, Poppy, I should note that we talked about before, is a creator-driven brand as well. Their founder, Alison Ellsworth, used social media heavily to market that brand. So I think it shows how powerful creator-driven brands can be right now. Not that Unilever will be creating creator-driven brands, but it shows the influencer side of that, the content side of that. Number one, Wonder. Becky, why Wonder?

Yeah, so the food delivery company bought Tastemade this month. Tastemade makes and distributes social and streaming content about food and restaurants. They have more than 160 million followers, and this acquisition gives Wonder not only a content studio, but also a significant ad revenue opportunity.

My impression was like, wow, they're just like have this bottomless well of money and are buying everything, trying to become a food and delivery super app. But all around the food space, I think I read that they...

Got nearly a billion dollars in funding last year in two rounds, and they bought Blue Apron and Grubhub. But I'm a little concerned about the purely regional focus right now in the northeastern U.S. Where I am in Texas, there's no wonder presence, really. So there's no way for me to test it out and see if it's worthwhile. But now you could watch some social and streaming content. Yeah.

Is Tastemade the one that the MTA ads are partnered with where you see them making like a weird little dumpling in those like multimedia MTA ads? I think so. I wonder if those will now become wonder ads also.

So now what's missing is a grocery partnership for those Tastemade recipes and to get you to get your food home too. Interestingly, Walmart and Tastemade have had a partnership where Walmart Plus members get a free subscription to or at least a free trial to Tastemade, which is interesting, given Wonders.

CEO Mark Laurie has a long history with Walmart and their e-commerce business. Everything always comes back to Walmart. Yeah. Okay. So that means our list is number one, Wonder. Number two, Unilever. Number three, Ulta. Number four, Poppy. Number five, Louis Vuitton. Number six, CVS. Number seven, Bath & Body Works. And number eight, Reebok.

We also included a 9 and 10 honorable mentions on this list. At 9, we have Fresh Direct for partnering with Uber Eats on its grocery delivery. And at number 10, we have Wayfair for opening its second brick-and-mortar store in Atlanta. Now it is time for our second half, where Sky and Rachel get to tell us where we went wrong.

Both of them will have a chance to move a brand up or down our rankings and to add a new company entirely. So Sky, why don't you go first and make a move? So I'm going to bring Wonder down a few spots, maybe to number four. So moving up Unilever and Ulta.

above them, just because I think it's an interesting acquisition, but there's still a lot that's unproven with Wonder and its business model and whether it's going to be

profitable. They say that their stores, their food halls are profitable. Their original business concept was not that great. But I still have questions because it's a very crowded and competitive market in food delivery. Becky, you were the wonderer. How do you respond to this?

So I would deny that move. And the reason why is not because I agree with you that they have a lot of challenges and headwinds in front of them and that it may not work, but...

For the interesting component alone, I think this is the most interesting move that a retailer has made. We've acknowledged with Unilever how important social content is, and this gives Wander that acquisition to be able to do that. We know what streaming does for people. We know what audience reach does for people, ad revenue. I think when you take in all of those components together, that it is holistically the most interesting move that anybody's made. Will it work? Will it help them succeed?

It can't hurt. They have a lot of challenges ahead of them, but just on the interesting alone component, I would have to say that I'm going to keep them number one. Yeah, I'll keep them number one. I'm okay with that. They, Taste Made feels like such a, almost like,

It's very of the 2010s Tastemade's content. Any viral like food recipe content mill feels very BuzzFeed tasty 2010s to me. So I'm really interested in what this new iteration looks like. Yeah, and I'm just interested in how Wonder plans to stitch all of these things together, right? I mean, they have Grubhub, but how will Grubhub play into how the Wonder food halls develop and so on? And will people start consuming media on Grubhub or on...

Wonder's own app. Does Wonder have an app? Probably. They do. And then I'm also wondering about the Blue Apron part. That's another brand of the 2010s. Yeah. That's kind of past its heyday. And how do you get people to come back to meal kits or, you know, restart growth in that sector? OK, so we are denying Sky's move at this time. Sorry, Sky. Congratulations, Wonder. Rachel, what is your move?

So I want to boot Bath & Body off of the list. We kind of touched on this before, but I think, you know, just adding a place for people to smell things is not really a reinvention of the store format. I'm not sure that, you know, that will be the thing that Gen Zs will be like, this is why I go to Bath & Body work. I'm okay with booting them off the list. I mean, when you put it that way. Feel free to

free to deny this, but I was never super sold on Bath and Body. The only reason they're above Reebok is because my argument was that golf is boring. So I'm okay with taking them off of the list. I know that we don't tend to judge things on whether or not things will work, but I don't think Bath and Body is going to successfully rebrand itself as a Gen Z brand by

I like going sort of a glossier route. Not that that's necessarily a Gen Z brand either. I'm okay with taking them down a notch. I'm all right with it. Okay. So we are taking Bath and Body off the list. Technically, that moves Fresh Direct onto the list. But if we accept any of your additions, then they'll move off again. Okay.

So, Rachel, what is your wild card that you're adding to the list? Where are you putting it? So I'm going to add another luxury brand to the mix, and that's Gucci, which made a kind of

I would say this appointment came out of left field, but they brought in Demna, who is currently the creative director at Balenciaga, to revamp the brand. And investors weren't pleased about that. But in some ways, I think that's what makes it so interesting, which is that, you know, a lot of luxury brands have really been playing it safe to try and, you know, win over wealthier shoppers and just avoid alienating people in general.

But I think that this appointment shows that there's a real need to shake up, you know, the creative leadership of these brands and bring in new ideas. And this could be the breath of fresh air that Gucci needs to get back on its feet. Where do you want to put them? So I would put them, I would say above Louis Vuitton because I think it's a more interesting move than launching beauty. I didn't know about this, but this is a weird choice. Demna famously collaborated with Kanye West, Aldo.

was behind that Balenciaga ad campaign with children in like holding teddy bears and leather harnesses that ended up becoming like

a whole conspiracy theory online. This is a sort of a risky choice for Gucci, is it not? It is, but he's also at Balenciaga kind of been a proven commercial quantity. I mean, he really almost kickstarted the trend of designer sneakers. He got people to pay attention to the brand, which at that point had been kind of languishing. And so I think for Gucci, this is really kind of what it needs. Even a dash of controversy really could be what helps it just get back into the cultural limelight.

I'm okay with adding Gucci to the list. I think the big question mark is whether he's more of a known quantity, which I think is what the market reacted to, thinking like, oh, we already know what he's capable of. This is who he is, and it's not going to be interesting enough. Or whether he really has a viable second or third act in him that could really propel the brand forward and do something that's wholly new and creative. I think he is capable of that, though.

I'm okay with adding Gucci to the list. Becky, what do you think?

I'm okay with adding him. I would not put it above Louis Vuitton, though. Okay, so we can put Gucci above CVS and Reebok, I think. Okay, Sky, what is your wild card and where would you put it? So my new brand is actually in the marketplace space, a new launch. So a couple of years ago, the flower and fruit delivery brand edible arrangements, maybe they're more...

flower-shaped fruit delivery or fruit bouquets. Anyways, Edible Arrangements, they rebranded as edibles.com or edibles and edibles.

At the time, there were some jokes and speculation about the other kinds of edibles, as well as some acknowledgement like, oh, yes, we could move in that direction. And now, lo and behold, they've just announced that they are launching a marketplace for the other kind of edibles, not fruit, but THC and CBD-type products.

which is a really booming market in the U.S. We don't cover it as much because it, I think, falls a little into the vice goods area. But it's a really interesting market. And there is this growing trend towards what I learned today is called Cali Sober, which is abstaining from alcohol but engaging with other substances of varying degrees of legality. Where do you want to put them on the list?

I would put them pretty low on the list. Maybe does that boot... Would that boot Reebok off? I don't know. Yeah, but I'm okay with that because I think golf is boring. Can I swap them with CVS? Yeah, I'm definitely okay with that move. The reason Edibles didn't make our original list is because this move happened after we made our list.

But the reason I'm OK with putting it on the list is because Becky and I already had a conversation about this this morning and about how interesting it is. And then it didn't occur to us to change our list. And there's also a potential advertising opportunity there that just crossed my mind because there are a lot of these companies, they don't have many places to advertise. And this new marketplace could be one.

I think it shows a lot of something interesting about cannabis as a product. Also, Edible Arrangements is like a wholesome company. They're like a Mother's Day, get well soon company. And if they're getting into the cannabis market and specifically into e-commerce, which is kind of a complicated area, like legally as it relates to cannabis products, it

shows just how mainstream these products are. And we're probably going to see other companies do similar things. So I'm definitely okay with booting CVS for edibles. I'm good with that. I mean, our entire team was having a conversation about this move this morning, and it was so debated on whether or not you actually liked getting fruit as a delivery or as a gift, if that was a good gift or a not good gift. So expanding your product line into something that seems very

fitted for your name, I think is a very interesting move. Okay, both of your wild cards made the list. Good work. So that leaves our final list with honorable mentions of Fresh Direct and CVS, which got booted from the list. And then we've got number eight, Reebok. Number seven, Edibles or Edible Arrangements.

Number six, Gucci. Number five, Louis Vuitton. Number four, Poppy. Number three, Ulta. Number two, Unilever. And number one, Wonder. That is all we have time for today. So thank you so much for being here with me. Thank you, Becky. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Rachel. Thanks. And thank you, Sky. Thanks. This was fun.

Please give us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you to our listeners and to our team who edits the podcast and always ranks number one for us. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode of Reimagining Retail. And on Friday, join Marcus for another episode of The Behind the Numbers Show, an e-marketer podcast made possible by Trax.