← The CPG Guys
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, I'm Jason o', Toole, head of connected Commerce and Media at Gildan.
- [00:04]
B
And I'm Katie Tripoti, Director of US Digital Merchandising and E Commerce expansion for Gildan. And you're listening to the CPG Guys podcast.
- [00:14]
C
Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Sat at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts Sree Raja Gopeland and Peter V S Vaughn explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in a digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG guys.
- [00:34]
D
Hello and welcome to the CPG guys. I'm of course Sri, your co host and also CRO and co founder of ThinkBlue Consulting, your trusted partner on your omnichannel development journey. Get in touch with me at shreenkblueconsulting co. Please do listen to my older daughter's music@www.riaraj.com and my younger daughter is a member of the band, the fastest growing global girls group, Cat's Eye, Ms. Lara Raj herself. I'm joined today by my co host and co founder pvsb. Today we want to solve the mystery and expand what PBSB is, who also moonlights as head of industry and client engagement as Flywheel Commerce Acceleration division of Omnicom. Peter, nice to record on a Wednesday afternoon, but expand for our audience. What's the VNS and pbsb?
- [01:17]
E
Well, Sree, you know my first name is in competition with my last name. So that's why it's P versus B. That's what it's all about. I can't. I can't.
- [01:26]
D
I knew that. But it's important the audience knew that you're constantly competing between your two alter egos.
- [01:33]
E
Sri, what's got me all excited is the conclusion of the World Baseball Classic. Venezuela beat the U.S. in the championship game and that signals that we are ready to start the Major League Baseball season. So you and I have got quite a bunch of baseball games that we need to attend to this year. That's what I'm excited about.
- [01:53]
D
You know that Kyle Schwaber and Mason Miller were the first two players in the USA team who took their silver medals off immediately. I haven't solved the mystery why, Whether they were disappointed what happened. They didn't want to do the press conference, but they disappointed that they took out their silver medals. I mean maybe they had to catch
- [02:11]
E
a flight and they were, they were afraid to go through security and have, you know, the, the alarm go off.
- [02:16]
D
That could have been the long TAC lines these days, I guess.
- [02:19]
E
Yeah, they are pretty long right now. It's a little crazy out there. It's good to be with you, Sree.
- [02:24]
D
All right, to our audience, make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform where you can get our latest episodes and go back and consume some of the 580 plus episodes we've already pub. And now let me talk about our guests. We have a phenomenal show lined up today. As always, we're talking apparel, we're talking omnichannel strategy and what it really means to capture the everywhere customer in a category that is profoundly omnichannel these days. As someone who is constantly analyzing our brands bridge the gap between product discovery and actual conversion, I'm thrilled for today's conversation. We're diving deep into retail media. Your favorite topic on the CPG guys, the digital storefront. And the strategy is required to stop the scroll of a consumer in a highly competitive and visual category. To do that, we're bringing on not one, but two heavy hitters from an iconic company that quite literally touches the everyday lives of millions of consumers. Gildan Enterprise apparel company that owns iconic brands like Hanes, Maidenform, Bali Latex, Gildan and Goldo amongst others. Let me introduce our first guest, the head of connected commerce and media at Gildan. With over 15 years of experience spanning retail and e commerce career at the intersection of storytelling and performance media for incredible brands like Spanx, Zegna and now Haynes. The question then remains, Peter, will the Raj family have a Spanx like product in the future? He's a prominent voice in the industry who understands the full arc of modern commerce. Plus he brings a unique background to the table with a degree in music business from Belmont University. So maybe we will talk music today, production particularly and beyond Stopping there joining. Jason is an absolute digital powerhouse as well. She's the director of US Digital Merchandising and e comm expansion for Gildan. Her expertise lies in building and scaling e commerce ops, developing DTC marketing campaigns direct to consumer, of course, and aggressively driving brand growth on emerging platforms, including making major strategic investments into TikTok shop. Beyond her daily work, she is deeply passionate about helping marketers develop their careers and grow within the industry. Join Peter and me in welcoming Katie Tripoti to the show and Jason o'. Toole. Jason, Katie, welcome to the CPG guys. How you both doing?
- [04:44]
A
Hi Greg.
- [04:44]
B
Great. Thanks for having us.
- [04:47]
A
Awesome.
- [04:48]
D
In the digital liner notes of this episode, of course, we'll include links to their LinkedIn profiles, your company's corporate websites for our listeners to access while we go on with our conversation. So Jason, let me kick it off with you and let's start with what we've just kind of said is a deep expertise in the domain you come from. You lead connected commerce and media for Gildan, driving digital transformation across a massive portfolio. We rattled off a bunch of those brands you frequently talk about the everywhere customer, a shopper who moves effortlessly across devices, platforms, channels, expecting to discover and purchase anywhere, anytime. Have you actually structured your connected commerce teams this way internally to meet the demands of this complex omnichannel landscape and customer and break down all the silos Peter and I see every day in grocery?
- [05:36]
A
Yeah, well, first off, I want to congratulate you both before we kick off the episode and all the success of CPG guys. I've been a long time listener and
- [05:46]
D
I think you both you're saying Peter and I have been successful with the CPG guys. Thank you. How generous.
- [05:52]
A
As long as I can remember, you two have been deeply influential in our industry. So thank you very much for continuing to push us forward.
- [05:59]
D
Don't let it go to his ego. Just saying, you know, we already got the P versus B split ego.
- [06:05]
A
That's right. There's a lot to compete with there Sree. So last year with the rise of both social and agentic commerce, we realized that, you know, new channels were going to continue to emerge. And so we needed to evolve from this traditional channel, centric media org to more of a connected capability. The everywhere customer really serves as a short term proxy in my mind for consumer behavior.
- [06:32]
D
Right.
- [06:33]
A
So as choice becomes more proliferated, brands need to create a flexible framework for meeting the consumer wherever they choose to discover, search and shop.
- [06:44]
D
So Jason, it's one thing to have teams structured that way and it's one, it's a different thing to operate that way. I think. I asked you a question about teams which you said, hey, that's the path we're headed. How about everyday operations? Do you think of the customer as an entity that you need to serve and service and therefore no matter whether you're marketing, whether you're sales, whether you're customer experience, your operations, you're always thinking, I gotta do my best. And one hands it off to another and then it's a full flywheel at the end of the day, none of
- [07:14]
A
this exists without the customer. And so I think if we start to lose sight of that, then we're in trouble. Right. So we need to build this connected framework to understand every touch point of the consumer whether again it is when they're first discovering the brand if they're considering a purchase or they are at the moment of checkout. And so we just need to remain very adaptable to how this ever changing consumer dynamic is happening. A few years ago you could buy a product online in just a handful of places and now you can buy it almost everywhere, right? Agentically, you can do it natively through ChatGPT and other LLM partners. You can do it on social commerce, which Katie will speak about in a moment. And so, as Choice continues to expand, we need to continue to honor the consumer.
- [08:07]
E
Thank you, Jason. That's great. Katie, let's bring you into this conversation. Before I do that, I should make mention of everyone who appears on the CPG Guys podcast gets a CPG Guys T shirt. I'm really proud to say that we print our logo on Gildan T shirts. So we're very glad to be having your business as a part of how we thank our guests on a frequent basis. So Katie, your role oversees US Digital merchandising and e commerce expansion. We know Gildan has leaned in and made a significant investment in TikTok Shop. For a legacy apparel brand. That's a pretty bold but necessary move. What does your playbook for TikTok shop look like and how does your merchandising strategy there differ from a traditional.com marketplace or even your direct to consumer?
- [09:01]
B
I kind of laugh at the word playbook. This is a new channel for everyone. There isn't a playbook. Anyone who thinks that they have the special formula for TikTok is definitely mistaken. Every day you are revising your playbook. You're reading off what consumers are saying, how they're voting for your product and restating your playbook and what your strategy is. So we're constantly leaning in. We're tweaking all of our category strategy, not only our media strategy, our community strategy, but also the merchandising strategy, which is unlike any channel that we've seen before. The merchandising strategy is a monthly, weekly, daily review of what the creators are voting for. And if a great creator is voting for a specific item in our portfolio, that's when the customers will start to vote for them as well and then begin to therefore buy. We can quickly see that customers are attracted and how they read and react to that content and to those products. We then build inventory for those styles that are taking off and we get creative with our internal product partners. So there are some styles that we even get design feedback from customers and from creators and determine how we can implement that into actually our supply chain. And it is the most optimal real time customer feedback platform that we've ever seen. We have really been limited before in making changes or leaning into certain styles based on voting from a customer because it's just so much harder to see in other channels. But this is a real time feedback engine that is not only giving us feedback on our product, they're giving us feedback on the fit, they're giving us feedback on how we're positioning the product, the pricing feedback. There is just a lot going on in this channel. It's very different from any other retail channel we've seen.
- [11:01]
D
Katie, how do you know on TikTok or is it, is there like a metric? You say, hey, if there's a thousand likes, something of that nature, like how do you just know is it engagement?
- [11:13]
B
There are numerous cues that we take from the platform. I would say the, the two major ones that we're working on with the TikTok team is engagement and content. And so if there is a high percent engagement over what we would see as kind of the standard for any type of video, we see that as a cue. We also see that we can represent the number or identify the number of searches we're seeing on certain product categories. So our Comfy Lounge set's doing really well and it's actually driving search volume on the platform. We're reading those and reacting to it in real time.
- [11:51]
E
So Katie, I want to demystify a little bit about targeting on TikTok shop, particularly for people who have spent the last couple of years immersing themselves in retail media, particularly the upper funnel of retail media. They're used to using clean rooms to access purchasing behavior from retail marketplaces and they create audiences and they expose those audience to messages. What is it you're doing on TikTok that's different from that? And what are the expectations you should have and how you measure the performance on that platform versus when you're advertising full funnel through something like Amazon marketing cloud.
- [12:36]
B
Yeah, it's interesting on TikTok and we have very different brands. We have brands that are in 9 of 10 household like canes, we have other brands that just have more of an awareness opportunity. And so how we handle the funnel on TikTok is very different. From a Hanes standpoint we're really looking at that consideration area of the funnel. Individuals already know our brand. We just need to show up and be part of their consideration set and then get them to convert. So it's real repetition. Right. And so we're just going after this channel very differently from how you typically would see this across retail.
- [13:11]
D
Nothing like what we do in a grocery store, huh, Peter? But let's build on the conversation with the consumer. Katie just talked about TikTok shop. You got a fantastic background bridging, storytelling and performance media from. We mentioned your time at brands like Spanx and Segna. In a world where everyone's fighting for attention, even the old school world of grocery that we discuss pretty often here, attention is the new storefront. So how do you ensure that your upper funnel brand storytelling connects all the way down the funnel into disciplined bottom funnel media systems that actually deliver outcomes for the brands you represent and for the consumer?
- [13:53]
A
Yeah, I think we're in a really interesting time right now. I call it the era of democratization. And I think when everything becomes available to the consumer, right. Between choice, between distribution, we find that really the only indestructible asset left is attention. So in building our connected commerce and media capability, we've developed a measurement framework that considers all stages of the funnel brand and commerce media sitting on separate teams has never quite made sense to me as I feel like the two functions are inherently symbiotic. Right. We like to say that brand media lowers the tax you pay on growth and commerce media converts the consumers that brand media has won over functionally. A connected full funnel approach should accomplish holistic success metrics like branded search, traffic and sales growth, while also increasing organic full price sales and lowering acquisition costs.
- [14:57]
E
So Katie, I want to follow up around those metrics, particularly Back to the TikTok platform. When you're merchandising for a platform that's driven by viral moments and creator content. I'm starting to like, immerse myself in new terms. Right? Creator affiliates, all of these things. Right. My big question is this, how do you forecast. We're all used to being able to forecast inventory from demand when we're doing product search ads and what have you. But how do you forecast inventory and manage the digital shelf differently than you would for a predictable weekly cadence at a mass, mass market retailer?
- [15:39]
B
Truthfully, we have a. We're in a unique situation because we have so many different channels that we sell to. So we do have deep inventory. Right. I can read and react quickly, specifically in the, in the TikTok channel. I bet Jason will remember mid last year, everyone was asking me, katie, how are you going to forecast this? And I just had to laugh, right? Like, I don't know. I'm going to. I've never done a TikTok shop. Right. And so we decided that we needed to make bets on styles that we were seeing perform. Right. There's categories that are performing on the platform. We can go into the data and see what's growing, what's not growing, you know, what's going up 200% year over year. And lit really lean into those categories. We can see how the creators are voting, as I mentioned, and therefore the customers are voting by buying. But we have to make bets and we're going to make good bets and we're going to make bad bets. And luckily I have the support from the organization to make those bets and have the flexibility to be wrong. Right. So that's really what we're doing. So there's. There are certain categories I mentioned, company and lounge. It's doing really well. It's doing well for us, it's doing well for a lot of other brands. And there's other categories that are much smaller and we thought that we can make some headway in those categories and we're really not seeing much pickup there. But we do, as an organization, which is unique and different from smaller mom and pop brands, we have a lot of flexibility into deep inventory. That gives us an opportunity to move inventory around if we're seeing something pick up on the platform or we can move into inventory, into that DC and be able to support the consumer there. So. But there's definitely some situations where we're going to be right and probably more situations where we're going to be wrong.
- [17:32]
E
And how would you measure, rather, how would you caution other people in this industry about investing in TikTok shop as simply looking at the conversions you get from the shop. Is there a broader halo effect that you recommend people in, in your position and other companies consider when they think about how they invest and how they activate in TikTok shop?
- [17:56]
B
Yeah. Any content you'll read around what's happening here, you will hear it's very expensive. That's not a lie. You will hear that there is the halo impact. That is also not a lie. What you need to figure out is how you're going to message that up to executive leadership. Because it's not a hard metric that you can put in a P and L, but somehow how are you going to represent those halo metrics when you are talking about the entire value of the platform? And so the caution would be it is costly. The positive, I would say, is do not forget your marketing wisdom. This platform works. It is a unique platform. There is huge opportunity to build awareness around your product and to introduce new product to your consumers. Truthfully, I don't know anywhere else consumers are spending the amount of time and from a media standpoint, learning about products versus on social media. My children are growing up. The only places they are are YouTube, TikTok. Really. They're not on meta and they are. That's where they're spending their time and learning about their product. And so we, we need to be there as question is just how are you going to be there as a brand face?
- [19:18]
E
Katie, while we're at it, is MySpace still in the equation or should we move on?
- [19:22]
B
So I worked at aol, so we had AIM pages back in the day, so you never know. I mean, MySpace could come back.
- [19:31]
D
And any advice for Peter, who's still using a 28.8k modem when he travels on the road?
- [19:37]
B
Well, I really would like to know what his AIM screen name is.
- [19:40]
D
So, Jason, I'm going to, I'm going to throw a Tim Wakefield knuckleball pitch to you now. Do you guys know. Do you know who Tim Wakefield is? He was a Yankees daddy forever in the early 2000s until Mr. Aaron Boone figured out how to hit him for a home run at the bottom of the ALCS back in 2001, which is why he became the manager the one time Aaron Booten did something useful. But here's the knuckleball pitch for you. So Katie just spoke about convincing the executives of how TikTok works, right? So Peter and I have been trying that for, let's say, at least a handful of years now. In fact, we're going to start a fourth episode of the show pretty soon, which is going to be dedicated to digital creators, social shopping and unified commerce across the board, because we feel it's that important. The question is for both of you, how do you convince executives in a world when they don't have accounts on these platforms? They're not on these platforms. But you mentioned that's why my son is my daughter. I spend two hours on social media every day across TikTok X, maybe lighter meta, but Instagram. And I'm learning a lot about what trends matter, why the virality is, who's speaking about what. Across pop culture, moments that drive innovation. But across the board, people Peter and I meet, they don't even have an account.
- [21:01]
A
They. They may not understand the platform, but they understand the insights. So I think you have to equip ELT with the metrics and the data. We saw a stat recently that users on TikTok spend over a hundred minutes a day on the platform. I mean, that's incredible from an engagement perspective. Hard pressed to find any other platform that is warranting that much engagement time. Another interesting thing is measured versus unmeasured markets. In our unmeasured markets, we're seeing expansive growth versus traditional measured markets, which may see, you know, stagnation. We have to look at the entire market and judge accordingly.
- [21:42]
B
I was just going to say, when the data fails, remind them they're not the target audience and tell them to go home and ask their kids, boom, boom.
- [21:50]
D
But are they not a target audience though? Because you have me, who's not exactly a spring chicken, as we declared at the beginning of the show. While I have kids who are 25 and 20 in pop culture every day, I'm on the platform for 90 minutes a day.
- [22:04]
B
Well, then you're the target audience.
- [22:05]
D
So when you say target audience, you don't mean just young people, you mean anybody who's on the platform. That. And do y' all both feel that the audience could be across a diversity of spectrums, including age demographics?
- [22:18]
B
Jason knows this stat, but the largest growing demo on the platform is over 45.
- [22:24]
D
There we go. There we go. All that said, Jason. I love to therefore talk about a specific execution. I believe last summer in June 2025, the Hanes brand in particular launched a massive full funnel campaign on Amazon for the new Hanes Moves activewear collection. You and I met for dinner recently at Etail west and we even chatted about it. So I remember it distinctly. You combine mid funnel DSP advertising with a massive homepage hero placement. The Results were staggering. 88% of ad attributed sales and 91% of brands branded searches came from that homepage exposure. How did you convince the org to invest in that upper funnel? Specifically homepage placement, which is very upper funnel, rather than just finding it out and nuking it out in the bottom funnel kind of search to drive a basket.
- [23:17]
A
Yeah, this was a really exciting activation last year. The team on the Hanes brand side always tries to ident arbitrage opportunities, whether it's on site, off site or in store. And so this opportunity actually came together surprisingly quickly given all the moving parts. Right. So in a matter of weeks, we identified the homepage inventory opportunity. We aligned internally with Cross Functional partners on creative, legal and product and then worked closely with the Amazon ads team to secure the placement during really the height of our summer season. This campaign was especially important because it really kicked off the broader second half full funnel campaign called Never Uncomfortable that that first utilized our new connected approach. Ultimately we were very pleased with the results and felt it drove the business forward and delivered on meaningful brand building success metrics.
- [24:16]
D
Awesome. Congrats on the campaign last year. It's a big achievement. To get a homepage ad is no joke. A reminder to our audience. We're speaking to Jason o' Toole and Katie Tripoti from Gildan.
- [24:29]
E
Jason, following up on this particular case study, you noted that for the campaign you consciously chose to prioritize branded search and incremental ad attributed sales as your main success metrics. Why were those specific metrics the best indicators of the consumer's path to purchase journey for apparel in this brand?
- [24:53]
A
It's a great question. So with the data that we have available today, if I'm only allowed two metrics to define the success of a full funnel campaign where the intention of that campaign is to drive a commercial outcome, these are likely the best two. So banded search helps serve as a strong proxy in my mind for consumer engagement to site and incrementality measures causal effectiveness of media more than you know, roas or another media related lift metric. So ideal state. If I were given a few more metrics to layer in a marginal incremental return on investment to understand where that optimal spend should be and then consumer sentimentality, growth and acquisition cost reductions, I think that if we are judging a full funnel campaign, these are the right metrics to use.
- [25:47]
D
Kind of a follow up on that, Jason, is, you know, little while ago we kind of declared it's a war for attention, consumer attention. The entire media industry is built around impressions. Everything starts with impressions. Why is that not a big talk of the town these days, especially in upper funnel?
- [26:04]
A
Because the quality of impressions is not standardized. I think that's the biggest thing.
- [26:09]
D
Right?
- [26:09]
A
So a lot of times if you scroll past an ad, particularly a display ad, the consumer may never see it, but it will still count in certain platforms as an impression. Right? So I think we have to be really scrutinizing around impressions, viewable impressions, what counts I'm willing to spend a lot more on on an impression that I know is something like a non skippable pre roll ad versus something that can be quickly scrolled past on a site or platform that doesn't really count for anything right now. There's a subconscious component you could consider. But really again in in the war for attention in this era of democratization, I think impressions mean less and you really have to start with effectiveness metrics and then work your way backwards into Understanding that consumer's path to purchase.
- [27:06]
D
Gotcha. Katie Apparel is a pretty complex category online given it's one of those categories. Unlike Grocery, which has moved close to 100% digital at this point. Discovery is definitely is happening there. You aren't just selling, let's say a box of tomato sauce or ketchup. Here you have endless attribute variations of sizes, colors, fits and quite a complex consumer attribution to navigate. So how do you think about this attribution when you approach digital shelf management, specifically regarding PDPs of product detail page content, ratings, reviews to help the consumer confidently navigate that SKU complexity and then eventually get to being able to buy what they want to buy.
- [27:58]
B
I would say the hardest part of all of that is the game is always changing everything. Now with Agentic, the formulas change from day to day. What you know is valuable changes. You know, there may be blog sites that would be valuable one day and the next day ChatGPT deprioritizes it. So it's ever changing. It's staying up at the constant research of that. It's also watching the competition. What are they doing? The people that are winning, what are they putting on their pages as well as what I would call would be industry leaders. There's just some brands I watch that I believe in that I see they're doing amazing things from an industry standpoint standpoint for digital merchandising. And I feel like we should be able to compete at their level. So we really have a very deep, wide catalog as you can imagine. We have a lot of brands, we have tons of categories. We, everyone can't be our favorite child. So we're really dealing with the 80, 20 rule. The top, you know, 20% of or 20% of our products that drives 80% of our volume is really what we're heavily focused on. We have to, we just don't have enough resources. And we really want to focus on what the consumer is also saying about the products and taking that information and then embedding it into our product pages. So you get, you know, voting from consumers via reviews, ratings, questions that they are asking. And what you want to do is take that type of content and build it into your product page. So you're answering every one of their questions when they land on that page and there shouldn't be any question as to should they convert or not when they land on your pdp. And so one is focusing on, you know, the, the top, most important products and then two, it's listening to the customer. It always goes Back to the customer, listening to the customer, what are their needs and how do you embed that into product pages?
- [29:52]
E
Katie, I totally hear you on this. What's, what's fascinating for me is the 8020 rule. I think what's going to fundamentally change that approach is obviously AI and your ability to automate a lot of the content configuration and distribution through product experience management and you will be able to. I'm not saying that the, the 80% of your tail that's only generating 20% of the of the return, right. Is ever going to get as much attention as your top 20, but it's going to close the gap dramatically in the next couple of years where I think you're going to be able to give your entire portfolio, right, a much better, a much better level of attention than it's ever seen before. Jason Part of managing that digital shelf is obviously keeping it clean. Protecting a legacy brand online is frankly very tough, especially with the rise of third party sellers. So the question is, how do brands like Hanes and Maidenform Approach 3P competition and brand safety across digital marketplaces to ensure the consumer gets an authentic premium experience?
- [31:08]
A
It's a question we wrestle with constantly. Apparel is the single most sku intensive category sold online and at the same time you can't create a patent on most clothing items. Right? National brands like Hanes used to own moats across pricing, distribution, brand equity. But because of this era of democratization in E commerce and modern marketplaces, brand attention and product innovation remain really the only moats left for us. How we found success in the last several years as marketplaces become increasingly pay to play is a couple things. One, prioritizing operational speed, marketing incrementality and a deeply ongoing thoughtfulness around consumer personalization. It's what's allowed us to actually gain share in core and emerging categories while we see other national brands and historical competitors shrinking.
- [32:09]
D
I want to go back to the question on attribution. Today, apparel largely goes through filters, drop down boxes, selection boxes, things of that nature. Let's say you want a L tailored fit, long sleeve shirt that's herringbone cloth. Like you get all those filters and you got to go through 6 or 7 of filters to narrow down what you want. Unless you're willing to scroll forever and then click and redo those filters on individual products, do you see a future where a consumer will just be able to type in a search box exactly what they want and that's exactly what they'll see. Or better still, they'll be able to speak to A device and it'll give them exactly what they want.
- [32:49]
A
It's an interesting question because I think the retailer will still want to give the consumer optionality. And if you just type in I want the green long sleeve hoodie and it sends them directly to a page with no other options and attributes like you're speaking about, the opportunity to upsell goes away. The opportunity to cross sell is limited. Right. So I think that we have to constantly balance convenience with experience and just think through it, you know, are we giving the consumer the best opportunity to see the breadth of product that we offer? So I do think the funnel can collapse, Sree, but I do also think that, listen, we're shoppers at the end of the day, right? We want to experience newness and so we have to ba. We have to balance convenience with experience.
- [33:52]
D
No, no doubt in my mind that you have to balance convenience with experience. I do worry in a future world where search is going to be primarily paramount, that experience aspect might become too transactional in nature. That's why I asked the question. But in any event, let me wrap it up by. I have to touch upon this topic because it's the buzzword of the year. The hour 21 CEOs that we watched at Cagney talked about it. And that is your favorite word here on the CPG guys outside retail media, artificial intelligence kind of is going to bring it back to something I just kind of touched the surface on. As consumer discovery shifts away from traditional search bars with social feeds that Kini talked extensively about creator recommendations which obviously inform trends, especially in the apparel business, probably beauty and skincare as well, and even generative AI. What's the most critical muscle an apparel brand like Gildan needs to build today to win the digital shelf? Not just today, but well into the future.
- [34:52]
B
For me, that word flexibility. And I'm constantly thinking about how we can be flexible when it comes to AI needs and when it comes to social commerce needs. We constantly internally talk about people, process and technology. And you have to be flexible with your organizational structure. You have to revise your process constantly. And you need to make sure that the partners that you're working with from a technology standpoint can also grow and change with you. You can't just buy into a vendor that has a capability now that doesn't change with where the ecosystem and the environment is going. So it is flexibility a hundred percent for me.
- [35:31]
D
How are you training long term veterans therefore to be flexible? Right, because the long term veterans have dealt with the in store business model and the reason they didn't need the flexibility is store resets only happen occasionally, once a year, maybe in apparel even less frequent. Unless you're in high end luxury fashion, which is frequent because they also have much fewer SKUs. But you walk into a department store like a Macy's or a Kohl's, things of that nature, they're not reselling those shelves. Often it's a couple of times a year. So there's no need for flexibility. But the world you both discuss here, the information and flexibility is coming from digital creators who may change every day. How the heck do you train people who have no experience in that to understand that? I'll take it back to the question I asked you before. Probably don't even have an account on that business model.
- [36:16]
B
It takes a long time to convince members of organizations to move forward with where the industry is going when it comes to E commerce. When it comes to flexibility with the organizational structure, it is critical to bring data and to repeat constantly the benefits of the change until you're able to break through.
- [36:40]
D
Yeah, you're right, Kitty, because the store business model wasn't built in a day either. And we tend to forget that we're impatient with our push on digital. Jason, your thoughts?
- [36:49]
A
At the end of the day, brands cannot lose sight of the consumer. We have to continue to show up where they are. Winning the digital shelf now has evolved into winning the web and honoring the consumer journey in any format or platform that they wish to shop.
- [37:07]
D
Awesome. Let me remind our listeners, you can find all of our content simply by going to a Web browser typing cpguys.com as the URL. If you or someone you know has something to contribute on this ongoing discussion on the CPG guys, please do send us an email@contactpguys.com to our audience. I want to thank you for the clicks, likes, comments, direct messages, meeting us at trade shows, coming to events, recording episodes with us and our sponsors. We're always grateful for you. The show doesn't exist without all of you. You work with us all year and we're grateful to have you as our audience and partners. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Peter, pleasure doing this episode with you as always. What's your one big takeaway today?
- [37:46]
E
Thanks, Sree. Yeah, my takeaway is actually something Jason said in response to your question about why not use impressions as the key metric, and he said it very clearly. It's all about quality. Not all impressions are the same, right? If you want to spend your money looking for impressions, there are MFA or made for advertising sites that are more than happy to suck up every dollar you've got. But it's not going to actually drive a conversion because it's not designed to do that. It's designed to simply get your impression dollars. So I think that's something that always has to be kept in mind. Are you driving impressions in a meaningful way to a highly valuable audience? That's going to result in higher conversion rates? That's something that always has to be in the back of mind when you're advertising across any platform.
- [38:38]
D
Sree the big one for me, Peter, is re emphasizing again and again and again like a broken record. If you're a senior leader in the industry on the commercial side, you could be a CMO. It could be a CCO or C, whatever, CFO, CEO. Please, please, I beg you, get an account on TikTok. If you want to prioritize one platform, get it on TikTok. Let me give you the good news. You don't even have to worry about privacy and security anymore because it's owned by Larry Ellison and a group of investors in the US now. So please, please, please get to know your consumer. Understand trends. It's not just an apparel industry situation. Trends are formed. Beauty, skincare, food, bev, grocery across the board, household items, personal health and wellness. Things of that nature. Please, please, please get an account on TikTok. Get familiar with it. You don't have to post, so don't worry. We're not asking you to do that. Jason and Katie, thank you so much for appearing on the show. We enjoyed this conversation.
- [39:38]
A
Thank you both for having us.
- [39:40]
D
This episode of the CPG Guys.
- [39:56]
C
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