Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: Keeping Retail Real with Matt Limeri & Trevor Davenport

At the onset of COVID-19, one thing became clear: Retailers needed guidance. In an effort to help brands operate effectively and efficiently in this digital world, we launched Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: A biweekly series with bite-sized episodes tackling the latest in retail, featuring established marketers from today’s biggest brands.

With retail evolving seemingly hourly, the never ending stream of headlines can seem overwhelming. To mix things up, in this episode Bluecore’s Senior Director of Marketing, Sarah Cascone, discusses three recent headlines with her colleagues Matt Limeri & Trevor Davenport. The plot twist? One headline is fake. Read on and see if you can guess which one it is…

CASCONE: Hi everyone. Welcome to Coffee & Commerce. Today’s episode is a special edition episode where we are going to run through different headlines with my colleagues, Matt and Trevor, who have spent the majority of their careers driving retail growth for a variety of top brands in the industry. So to get started, we are going to talk through three different headlines, one of which is fake. And at the end of this, Matt and Trevor are going to decide which is the fake headline. So you guys ready to get started?

MATT: Ready

TREVOR: Ready

CASCONE: Awesome. Okay. So the first headline we have here: How turning malls into fulfillment centers could reshape towns. This is an interesting one. Matt, I’d like to start with you. What are your thoughts on this? 

MATT: Well it certainly seems like a practical decision. You’ve got these big malls, which are empty, whether they’re empty because businesses can’t afford their rent, and they have too many stores, or people aren’t coming to the malls in general or a combination of both. So I think it’s smart to leverage real estate, which was meant for the front end of retail. Well, to now be kind of the back end of retail, and malls are kind of distribution centers anyway, and that the idea is to put products where people are and want to buy them. 

How it’s going to reshape towns. I don’t know. That’s going to be interesting, right. Driving by a fulfillment center instead of a mall that you can pop in yourself. So, it seems practical and more of a win for the brands versus the residents of the towns. I don’t know, Trevor, what do you think.

TREVOR: I think it’s going to be more individual stores and malls in general, right? I mean, you’re seeing Class A malls, Class AA malls grew exponentially and Class B, C and D malls shrink, but stores like Kohl’s, where you are able to return Amazon packages, are seeing traffic get driven actually to the store from that sort of service. So I don’t know if it’s going to be malls per se, but I definitely think there’s value. Being able to receive or return items to your local stores, on a per brand basis. 

CASCONE: Yeah, I do agree. And I think overall, retailers rethinking the value of store all up and it moving from this epicenter of being a transactional place to being something that’s either more experiential or completely changing it to something like a fulfillment center. So it’ll be interesting to see how this changes over time. So let’s head to the next headline. So the next one we have here: Athleisure brands are ramping up wholesale efforts, bringing in new distribution partners. Matt, let’s start with you. 

MATT: Athleisure brands running a wholesale store as well. I think everything else we’re hearing is around ramping up DTC and brands wanting to get direct relationships with customers. I mean, our first headline is true here in that brands are rethinking the value of stores or certainly rethinking the value of having their product in a lot of places versus having a valuable relationship directly with consumers. So I’m not sure about this one. 

TREVOR: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think that the only way that I’m behind this is if they’re utilizing someone that already has a distribution network in place as a way to piggyback and expedite the shipping for their products. There’s a lot of value in doubling down on the DTC experience right now, everything from brand ownership, better margins, but also you’re mitigating risk of getting back to the local mall scenario and that local mall being inaccessible for a population that you need to sell into.

CASCONE: It is interesting. I think some legacy brands have traditionally felt that as long as customers are buying my brand somewhere, I don’t really care what it is. And having that distribution network gives them more reach, but there’s definitely some validity to what you’re saying around mitigating risk, for example. So our final headline is: Why are companies battling to snatch up bankrupt retailers? They want your data. Trevor, what do you think? 

TREVOR: Well, it’s hard to tell if it’s a question or a statement or if we can actually interpret that they want our data. I think at the end of the day, owning direct to consumer customer data is super valuable. It can do everything from helping you increase lifetime value to understanding what sort of products you should be producing or iterating on or what products you shouldn’t be selling. So I think if you look at some of these brands that you know will go bankrupt but have a strong enough brand image to sustain themselves moving forward, it makes sense that people are looking to snatch those brands up and learn from the data that’s already been collected.

MATT: Yeah. I mean, why are they going bankrupt, right? We’ve seen already this year with JCrew and JCPenny. A lot of these have to do with just bad decisions around too many people, physical locations. Bankruptcy’s a way just to get out of these longterm leases with landlords and restructuring debt into equity. These are big brands that people know and are still are bullish on. This is a bet on how can these be successful via ecommerce moving forward. There’s a ton of data that they have on consumers and I think the bet is just that these could be profitable businesses just run much leaner moving forward. 

CASCONE: Absolutely. I do think, and this is something you don’t necessarily hear in the news, but bankruptcy does kind of clear the deck for these brands to kind of move forward and transform in some sort of way. The fact that these bigger parent brands are interested in their data. It makes sense to me. So that’s definitely a very interesting one. Can’t wait to see what else reports on that. So those are the three headlines. I want to know which one you guys think was a fake one that we kind of made up here. Trevor, what’s your vote?

TREVOR: I think the last one frankly, could be false. I’m not sure how GDPR and CCPA laws fold into acquiring customer data from a bankruptcy. So there could be something to be said about that and the policy there.

MATT: I think three is true, just cause it feels like clickbait and something I would click on. So unless you guys are really good at making fake clickbait, I’m going to go with the second one around wholesale, just because these athleisure companies are new in nature and probably started as DTC brands. I am suspicious that wholesale is their avenue of growth in the short term.

CASCONE:. So Matt, you are correct on that one. The headline “Athleisure brands are ramping up wholesale efforts, bringing in new distribution partners” is one we made up. That’s not to say it’s not happening, but I do agree that it’s probably the large majority of them going in alone and taking the direct to consumer approach.

So that is all for today. Thank you guys for joining. This was fun.

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