#645: Building brand trust with Aman Advani, CEO of Ministry of Supply

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Agile Brand #645 – Building Brand Trust with Aman Advani, CEO of Ministry of Supply

In episode #645 of The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®, host Greg Kihlström engages in an insightful conversation with Aman Advani, CEO and co-founder of Ministry of Supply. The discussion delves into the intricacies of building brand trust in an era dominated by savvy and socially conscious consumers. Advani shares his experiences and strategies in fostering authenticity, leveraging customer insights, creating seamless omnichannel experiences, and maintaining agility within a growing organization.

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1. Introduction to Aman Advani and Ministry of Supply

Aman Advani provides a comprehensive background of himself and the genesis of Ministry of Supply. Founded over a decade ago in Boston, the company emerged from a shared passion for blending technology, sustainability, and comfort into professional apparel. Advani recounts the duo’s early days of modifying personal garments to enhance comfort—a practice that laid the foundation for the company's mission.

Aman Advani [03:04]: “We were born in Boston just over a decade ago now. [...] How do we take the comfort and technology behind your favorite Nike gear and apply it or create it or invent it to apply it to your least favorite dress clothes.”

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2. Building Brand Trust with Socially Conscious Consumers

Advani emphasizes the paramount importance of authenticity in establishing brand trust. He underscores the necessity of humanizing the brand by maintaining direct and meaningful interactions with customers. This approach ensures that the brand's values and commitments are not merely stated but actively demonstrated.

Aman Advani [04:39]: “An authentic brand has to be a human brand. [...] I would talk to five customers a day until I felt like it wasn't necessary. And now here, three years later, it's still necessary.”

Advani shares his personal commitment to daily customer engagement, highlighting how these interactions have cultivated a loyal and engaged customer base.

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3. Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Customer Insights

The conversation transitions to the integration of qualitative and quantitative data in shaping customer understanding. Advani explains how direct customer interactions generate valuable insights that inform the company's strategies and product development. By validating these insights with data, Ministry of Supply ensures that decisions are both customer-centric and data-driven.

Aman Advani [06:26]: “The data no longer serves to create the origin of the story, it becomes the confirmation or denial of our theories.”

Advani also addresses potential biases in customer feedback, emphasizing the importance of inclusive and diverse data collection to maintain an unbiased perspective.

Aman Advani [08:01]: “It is also a ticket to bias if you're not careful. [...] How do we start to attack the people who almost bought from us but didn't for one small reason?”

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4. Creating Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience

Advani discusses Ministry of Supply's approach to omnichannel experiences, which transcends traditional platform-based strategies. By integrating customer service, retail, and wholesale teams under unified leadership, the company fosters a cohesive and seamless customer journey across all touchpoints.

Aman Advani [11:15]: “They can touch all three of our kind of quote unquote channels. They can come and touch with one seamless experience.”

This structural integration ensures that customer interactions are smooth and unified, eliminating silos that often disrupt the customer experience.

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5. Supply Chain Agility and Inventory Management

The discussion shifts to inventory management and the role of data analytics in optimizing the supply chain. Advani highlights the use of specialized software solutions to manage inventory effectively, focusing on metrics like inventory turns to gauge supply chain success.

Aman Advani [16:27]: “Ultimately comes back to, you know, is it high margins and fast turns cure. All right. And we've heard this saying before and it's, it's absolutely true. We focus, I'd say more on the speed of turns.”

By prioritizing agility and speed in the supply chain, Ministry of Supply can swiftly respond to market demands and iterate on products, maintaining a competitive edge.

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6. Staying Agile as a Leader

In the concluding segment, Advani shares his personal strategies for maintaining agility in his leadership role. He emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and engagement with other industry leaders to stay abreast of emerging trends and practices.

Aman Advani [17:43]: “I will force myself at least once a month to engage with other leaders, other technology, other brands. [...] Hearing your podcast allows me to have this constant exposure to what's happening.”

Advani’s commitment to stepping outside his comfort zone ensures that he and his team remain adaptable and responsive to the ever-evolving market landscape.

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Conclusion

Aman Advani's insights offer a compelling roadmap for brands aiming to build and sustain trust with today's discerning consumers. By prioritizing human connections, integrating diverse data sources, fostering seamless omnichannel experiences, and maintaining supply chain agility, Ministry of Supply exemplifies the principles of an agile brand poised for long-term success.

For more information about Aman Advani and Ministry of Supply, visit the links provided in the show notes.

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Notable Quotes:

• Aman Advani [04:39]: “An authentic brand has to be a human brand.”
• Aman Advani [06:26]: “The data no longer serves to create the origin of the story, it becomes the confirmation or denial of our theories.”
• Aman Advani [11:15]: “They can touch all three of our kind of quote unquote channels. They can come and touch with one seamless experience.”
• Aman Advani [16:27]: “We focus, I'd say more on the speed of turns.”
• Aman Advani [17:43]: “Hearing your podcast allows me to have this constant exposure to what's happening.”

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Note: Advertisements and non-content sections have been omitted to focus on the substantive discussion between Greg Kihlström and Aman Advani.

Transcript

[Domo Representative]

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[Aman Advani]

Brand.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, E commerce and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show.

[Interviewer]

We are here at Ital Palm Springs and seeing and hearing the latest and greatest in E commerce and retail. When brand trust is everything, how do companies ensure that they aren't just talking about values, but actually demonstrating them in ways that resonate with increasingly savvy and socially conscious consumers? Joining us today is Aman Advani, CEO of Ministry of Supply. Ministry of Supply is known for revolutionizing performance, professional wear by blending technology, sustainability and comfort into their apparel. And today we're going to talk about how brands engage with socially conscious consumers and bridging the gap between in store and digital experiences to create seamless omnichannel shopping journeys. Aman, welcome to the show.

[Aman Advani]

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate being here.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, looking forward to talking about it's always great to be in person here at these. At these shows. Before we dive into, got a few things to talk about. Why don't you give us a little more background on yourself and Ministry of Supply.

[Aman Advani]

Yeah, that sounds great. So, again, my name is Iman, co founder and CEO of Ministry of Supply. We were born in Boston just over a decade ago now. My partner and I were classmates and I was in business school. He was undergrad, so not quite classmates. And we both came to each other with the same idea. I was coming from a consulting world where I hated getting on a flight every Monday morning, off a plane every Thursday night. He was graduating undergrad, getting ready to dress up for the real world. And so we both actually had been cutting and sewing our own clothes. I had been cutting out the soles of my dress socks and sewing in my Nike cushy soles so that I would be kind of walking on Nike air, you know, during my workday. And so when we came together and said, we're the only two kids at MIT focused on fashion, let's become partners. Twelve years later, the premise hasn't changed. How do we take the comfort and technology behind your favorite Nike gear and apply it or create it or invent it to apply it to your least favorite dress clothes? And that's really the central premise of Ministry of Supply and has been for a decade plus now.

[Interviewer]

Nice, Nice. I love it. I'm going to have to get some of those socks, but they've improved since then. Nice, nice. That's awesome. So, yeah, we're going to talk about a few things here, but as I mentioned at the top of the show, I want to first start talking about building brand trust with a savvy and socially conscious consumer. Today's consumers expect brand brands to be transparent about their values, sourcing sustainability efforts. What do you think are the biggest challenges that brands face? Improving authenticity in these things?

[Aman Advani]

Yeah. So, I mean, the number one thing that comes to mind when I hear authenticity is human. Right? And an authentic brand has to be a human brand. And a few years ago, I had a mentor ask me kind of, when's the last time you spoke to a customer? And maybe here and there, right in the store, I'd run into a customer. And it ended up being a really pivotal moment where I made a commitment to myself and to our team that I would talk to five customers a day until I felt like it wasn't necessary. And now here, three years later, it's still necessary. And so I spend every single morning from 8:30 to 8:45 answering five customer emails that have been routed to my inbox and have found that over three years of doing that, there's an army of people out there on social media and forums and slack channels that have a one to one relationship with our brand through me or through other members of our team, through our customer service team, through our stores that feel some direct human connection that we've accumulated through hours and hours and hours of time invested. And so I think the answer to authenticity has to come back to time and humanity.

[Interviewer]

Nice. I really like that because I mean a, I've been a customer that feels like, wow, I don't feel like anyone's listening to me. I've also, you know, there's a lot, I think there's, there's a few good stories at least of companies that make sure that all of their employees kind of go through and answer those, those emails. But to hear the CEO of a company, you taking your time to do that every day, like that's, I think that's really powerful and it. So I guess, you know, I, I wonder, I'm sure you get a lot of the data as well, right? The, the quantitative stuff like how does the, how, how is kind of your view of the overall view of the customer shaped by both of those kind of working together?

[Aman Advani]

Yeah. So interestingly, what's kind of emerged, I'd say organically from talking to a thousand customers a year is I can create a lot of data points. And a lot of the leaders on our team are also doing the same thing. My co founder does a video chat with a customer every single day and he's getting a different type of insight because he's doing shopping shop alongs. Right. So every single day he engages with one customer on a video. And what we can do through hundreds and now thousands of data points is we create little theories and hypotheses. And what ends up happening is the data no longer serves to create the origin of the story, it becomes the confirmation or denial of our theories. And so now these fresh, new exciting ideas come from directly customer pain points and conversations. They get confirmed or denied through data and then they get to market really quickly, whether that be a product, an initiative, a user experience, tweak things like this that can come to life from concept to reality within a week in many cases.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, so this is way off topic, but I'm going to go with this because I'm kind of interested in this because I think there's that bias of, you know, the anecdotal Evidence. Right. So it's like that, you know, that's one thing that kind of comes to mind of like, okay, you have a few conversations and then you have this, like, anchor bias or whatever. The, you know, there's hundreds of biases or whatever. So you're kind of solving for that in mixing the quantitative with the, you know, we'll call it qualitative as well, but you're doing it in volume so that it's not really an anecdotal. Like, oh, well, this one person said they didn't like the color blue or whatever. Right?

[Aman Advani]

Absolutely. Yeah. And I will say, like, it is also a ticket to bias if you're not careful.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Aman Advani]

Where sometimes we would phrase these emails and only sent you our first cohort when we started doing this, which was wrong, was we only sent it to our mega customers, people who had spent several thousand dollars in the last few months at Ministry of Supply. We'd say, we want to hear from you, and wonderful. It was really helpful to hear from them. But it was not an unbiased viewpoint. Right. These are people who already love us and want us to double down on certain things we're doing. Well, how do we start to attack the people who almost bought from us but didn't for one small reason? I want to know what that is and make a decision as to whether or not we fix it or double down on our stance. Right. So I think getting to the point where you have those unbiased insights and you're able to get a really wide variety of whales, prospects, you know, win backs all into your conversations will create a truly holistic view of what your customer is thinking and why.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. I think that idea of listening and it's the feedback loop, I mean, there's lots of ways to look at authenticity, but I think I just think of myself as a customer as like, okay, I put something out there. I take the time. Just like you're taking time to talk with people, other people in your company, or taking the time to talk with people. A customer takes time out of their day to give feedback and then it's just like, okay, nothing ever needs to.

[Aman Advani]

Where did it go? Yeah, yeah. The amount of responses I get to these emails saying, like, I doubt there's a real human here. And then three minutes later, they get a fully customer response with my cell phone number in it and realize like, no, we're absolutely listening. We. We only exist because of these emails. Right. Because people tell us what their real deep problem statements are in a candid, safe place, we're able to fix them.

[Domo Representative]

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[Aman Advani]

So another.

[Interviewer]

Thing I want to talk about with you is so you know, a lot of your business is online, but you do have physical retail store as well. And talk about kind of bridging the in store and the online experiences. Certainly, you know, Omnichannel is mentioned a lot these days and certainly a lot on the show as well. What does a great Omnichannel experience look like today?

[Aman Advani]

Yeah, a few years ago we made this unintentionally pivotal decision and what that meant for us where we just by the nature of really strong leaders on our team, decided to combine our customer service and our retail and our wholesale teams, all under one leader. And it was because that leader was just particularly good at handling all three of them. Now what ended up unintentionally happening is that the three teams, which are all relatively small, ended up becoming effectively one team. They're all sitting in different locations. One group is sitting in the Philippines. That's our offshore customer service. One group is sitting in retail or pop up stores and one group is sitting in our office. Right. And they're handling wholesale. But now by allowing those three teams to feel like one, they're obsessed with this kind of nurture process. There's tons of handoffs every single day between a customer who came in in store, then bought something on Nordstrom and then returned it to our website because that's where they wanted to. And they can touch all three of our kind of quote unquote channels. They can come and touch with one seamless experience. That name now has a thread and has a seamless experience across all three and so by unintentionally combining all of this into what we just call broadly service, our customer service teams, retail crew and our wholesale crew all act as one unified force that is obsessed with that joy of the customer. And so I would say the number one thing we've done there is avoided the concept of omnichannel by really not having a clear separation anyway.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, so that's interesting because I think a lot of companies are looking at it from the platform. You know, it's like people, process platform. Right. So like a lot of companies are looking at it from the platform perspective. And then I, you know, in my consulting work I run into the, the process and the people part of like okay, now these people, even if they sit in the same office, they still are not used to working with each other. So it sounds like. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's technology involved as well, but it sounds like you did you approach it from a people and process part first then? Is that kind of.

[Aman Advani]

Yeah, exactly. But I think we have probably to a fault prioritized leaders passions over logical decisions. Right. And we've been also lucky to have fairly long tenures at our company. So investing in those leaders passions has tended to pay out. Right. Rarely do we make an org chart decision, then the leader leaves, which would kind of defeat the purpose. But often we'll make these kind of sometimes micro decisions on two people being on the same team, two groups being in the same function based upon a leader's skill set. And I think it's probably not in the playbook of perfect, but it's worked well for us in investing further in those leaders and their joy leads to a better product on the other end.

[Interviewer]

Well, I mean, I do think there's a lot of companies that are struggling with how do they do that? Again you have these siloed teams and org structures and everything like that. And how do you. There's lots of, there's federated models, there's putting everybody under one umbrella, there's lots of ways of doing it. But it's interesting to hear how that's worked. I guess to talk a little bit about the technology though, looking at some of the tools that you've used to enhance in store shopping, so like QR codes, mobile apps, things like that. How do you use technology to enhance that in store?

[Aman Advani]

We could certainly go through that playbook and it's probably a lot of the things you' already heard before. But what I'd actually kind of point to is that experience of kind of crossing Channels seamlessly. I continue to double down on the idea that it happens behind the customer, not in front of them. And what I mean by that is putting all of these folks on a single Slack channel allows us to communicate about that customer in a positive way without that customer having to be bothered by it. Right. They don't have to worry about whether or not they're, they buy the pants in store and the suit jacket gets shipped online. Why do they care? They shouldn't, they shouldn't need to know that those are two separate transactions and they're two separate rollups. Right. Similarly, we have an email address conciergeinistryofsupply.com that contains the top two leaders of every channel. And so if somebody emails in, somebody on our team will be able to answer that and relatively rapidly. It's coming directly to their inbox. It's not going to a Zendesk queue. Right. That email is going to all of the primary leaders. And so they're answering, they're talking to customers every single day just like I am. And so I'd say that the technology, I'm referring to Slack and email, they've been around for a while. Are the behind the scenes tools we use to create that seamlessness rather than the traditional QR code and other. There are wonderful front solutions here, but I think you've heard them before. I'll focus my answer here on what happens behind the customer's back.

[Interviewer]

So it's almost philosophy, right?

[Aman Advani]

Structural?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. There's been a lot of focus on like inventory, like supply chain stuff over the last few years with retail. How do you look at, you know, inventory management and how does like data and analytics play into that?

[Aman Advani]

Yeah. So you know where I've talked a lot about kind of the qualitative relationship with the customer and helping us to predict and drive all of our time into making the best product. We are deeply and heavily relying upon software solutions to power our supply chain. So we use Crest for inventory management, we use B product for product development. We have a wonderful suite of tools that we use to make sure that the product is correct when it gets to the customer's doorstep in the right place at the right time and the right volume. And fundamentally we've realized that inventory turns are the only metric of success Right. When it comes to a supply chain. We talk about ioh, we talk about stocking levels, we talk about AOV and conversion rate being impacted by all this, but really ultimately comes back to, you know, is it high margins and fast turns cure. All right. And we've heard this saying before and it's, it's absolutely true. We focus, I'd say more on the speed of turns. In fact, we'll take a worse price for a smaller batch that we can iterate faster. And we realize over and over and over being agile in your supply chain is a superpower.

[Interviewer]

Well, Aman, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here. I like to ask everybody on the show, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

[Aman Advani]

Yeah, so I often will end up we're here at etel and I'll end up coming to places like this to make sure that while I'm deeply locked in my Ministry of supply bubble 95% of the day, that I will force myself at least once a month to engage with other leaders, other technology, other brands. And so I'd say constantly pushing myself out of my normal comfort zone into grabbing a coffee with two founders on Friday that are in my space or chatting with you. Hearing your podcast allows me to have this constant exposure to what's happening and whether or not I want to participate.

[Interviewer]

Love it. Love it. Well, again I'd like to thank Aman Advani, co founder and CEO of Ministry of Supply for joining the show. You can learn more about Amman and Ministry of Supply by following the links in the show notes and stay tuned for more of my interviews from here at Itel Palm Springs.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the [e-mail] that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.

[Aman Advani]

The Agile Brand.

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