Commerce Chronicles 014

Combatting FOMO 📧 

Commerce Roundtable. FOMO. Seems like anyone who’s chronically online was there connecting offline. Looked pretty fun, ngl. If you weren’t there as well, don’t fret because I’m rounding up all the info I can here. Plus, apparently they’re sending out the replay soon. I’ll recap that here when I can as well.

Congrats on the event, Sendlane team!

K, let’s get into …

The rest of the email:

• How Oats Overnight Drove a $4M EBITDA Increase (Drivepoint Sponsored)

• Insights From The Screen

• Brand of the Week

If you were sent this issue, join the most on-the-ground community in e-commerce and subscribe:

🌟 How Oats Overnight Drove a $4M EBITDA Increase Using Drivepoint 🌟

Ever wondered how a breakfast brand managed to defy industry norms and skyrocket to a $100M+ run rate? While the journey wasn’t always smooth, the team at Oats Overnight was able to make sense of a few key decision-making factors…

Imagine being at a crossroads in your business, where taking a step further could either lead to unprecedented growth or become a costly mistake. Oats Overnight was at this point not too long ago.

Through working with Drivepoint, the Oats Overnight team was able to visualize the full financial impact of a huge business decision. Oats Overnight’s margins skyrocketed, even offsetting the added expenses of accelerating their expansion plans.

But what was this secret strategy that Drivepoint unveiled? And how did it propel Oats Overnight to smash their Q4 sales goals and boost their EBITDA by a staggering $4M?

Read more at the link below to learn about the groundbreaking strategy that turned a dilemma into a golden opportunity, setting a new benchmark in the industry.

🌟 Read the full story below and learn how you too can transform your business trajectory with Drivepoint. 🌟 

LINK HERE | Pro tip: use the above if you have multiple people making changes in your ad account. Sometimes when I look in an ad account and I see the budget set higher I have a mini-freak out thinking I set it too high, when really it was someone else 😅 

LINK HERE | Really insightful stuff from Sendlane Founder, Jimmy. Actually using some of these insights in this newsletter now! Specifically the ‘clickable link’ bit.

LINK HERE | One of my favorite ever Taylor Holiday quotes is “We’re all going to die waiting for customer lifetime value.” It’s not inherently bad to set first order unit economics based on a long time horizon, but to Taylor’s point you should do a risk-adjusted return analysis. Or better yet, understand what lookback horizon actually makes sense for your brand.

LINK HERE | The whole tweet thread is essentially an ad for a new tech platform that makes influencer product seeding easier, but it still has some pretty solid tips for you if you’re running your program manually.

LINK HERE | A lot of great ad examples in this thread. My personal favorite is the “Your wife is hot” one for a bedsheet brand 😂 

LINK HERE | Nicole has been on fire with the creative strategy tips recently. Definitely recommend you follow her for her content.

BIRKENSTOCK FILES TO GO PUBLIC

First of all, I had no clue Birkenstock has been around since 1774. Wild. Second of all, they’ve put up impressive revenue numbers over the past couple of years. Especially considering the pandemic years.

BIRK is a fashion brand. I don’t think they’ll ever become a Veblen Good, but I think they do land somewhere between Veblen and mass market. In their F-1, they mention the Archive. Archive fashion refers to the historical collections, products, and styles brands come out with. If you’re familiar with sneakerhead culture, specifically Air Jordans, you’ll understand this quite well. For example, anything in sneaker culture that’s referred to as a “retro” is considered part of the archive.

Why does this matter for Birkenstock?

Taking an archival approach to building your product collection is setting your brand up for longevity. You end up designing and releasing products that (at least theoretically) stand the test of time and either stay relevant or re-enter relevance.

To reference the Lindy Effect, if Birkenstock has been around for this long (249 years), they’ll likely last for another 250 years. That is, if they don’t get chewed up and spit out by the public markets lol. I have a sneaking suspicion that going public might actually hurt the brand itself.

They’re not luxury like Hermes (~$10 earnings per share), so I feel like they’ll lean closer to CROCS and HeyDude (~$3 earnings per share).

Anyways, I guess this is a congrats message to their team, and a try not to eff it up message at the same time. But who am I to speak? They’re in the arena 😉