An Interview with Ruaraidh Grubb, CEO of Own-Kind

[Music] Hello everyone, I'm Brian Ameral and welcome to the Clientelling Podcast. In each episode, we'll be talking to the retail industry's most knowledgeable and successful executives, those luminaries that are creating value with the intersection of retail and technology. In every episode, you'll hear about new, innovative and transformational customer-centered ideas that are redefining shopping and creating high-value customer experiences. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and let your friends know by liking us on social media. So, let's get on with the show. Well, hello again and it's great to be back. We have a very exciting show today with Rory Grubb, who is the CEO of Own Kind from the UK. You know, I learned about his company through one of his advisors while I was having a conversation at NRF back in January. And when I later talked to Rory, I could immediately see he was doing something different. He had a very unique perspective and had a story candidly that I think my audience would want to hear. So, before I actually bring him on here, I want to tell you a few things about Rory. He's from the UK, as I mentioned. He actually spent a few years as a lawyer before getting an MBA and then launching Own Kind in 2018. This Renaissance man speaks for languages. He's lived in various places in France, Spain, as well as the UK, where he's now based. He's based in London. So, we're going to have a really interesting guy to talk to here and hello Rory. Hi, Brian. Very, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me on very, very excited to be speaking to the good father of clientele. It's better than grandfather. And, you know, given your somewhat diverse background, I am really excited to hear your story today. And I'm sure everybody else is so. And, you know, I've seen your product. I've heard about all these great results that your clients are getting very, very impressive business impact. And we're going to get into all of that in just a minute. But first, I really do want to go into this origin story. I know what was that spark that made you want to start Own Kind and make the shifts that you've made in your career. And then build this solution. And I'm going to say it because I've done it. You know, what made you want to take this crazy entrepreneurial journey into retail? So, I think it's definitely always been an extra wanted to scratch our university, a friend and I kind of did various entrepreneur things. We imported carom boards from India and sold them across the UK. I set up a speaker rental business while at union did a couple of other little things. So, yeah, I think it was definitely somewhere I always wanted to go and I've always loved retail. I love kind of humans and understanding humans. I love human psychology. But I wouldn't say it came together that kind of directly. I am on leaving uni. I decided to become a lawyer. This is back kind of 2009. So, you know, things were pretty unstable. And I got an internship at law firm in Spain. And it just seemed quite like a kind of safe stable choice. So, yeah, I kind of plugged for that after university qualified and then realized that it just wasn't a fit for me. So, I started kind of plotting my way out. And then the hence the MBA in Spain. And then while I was out there again, going involved in a lot of entrepreneurial things I worked on. A project to commercialize a compression engine for low or a bit satellite. So, I worked on a go-to market for a juice cleanse company that was trying to break into new markets in Europe. I did a summer internship at a company called Drover that later got acquired by I think Kazoo who are kind of doing an urban mobility stuff. It was really cool. And then, yeah, I always wanted to do something like kind of say in retail and something entrepreneur. So, after all of that, I said I'll clear to set up what is on kind. That's great. Tell me a little bit about the original problems that you really had in mind. You were trying to solve for retailers for the brands and the customers. What was that original vision? And then I guess the other question is that vision change over time. For sure. I mean, we started out with a very, very different product and business. So, the original idea was for a digital wardrobe back in 2018. So, the idea would be to be everything in between your kind of your first-time platforms and then your resale platforms. So, somewhere that you could take that data profile and your net reporters and file fetches and stuff could use it to give you a better kind of more detailed experience. They could start you with your own pieces. And then once you are finished with your items, as well as being able to style yourself, share outfits with a friend from within the platform, you could then feed those items directly into resale platforms. For a number of reasons that was really, really hard to make realize that that wasn't going to take off. So, we iterated across. And it was only really coming out of lockdown. So, 2021, where we got our first kind of real opportunity. We got introduced to someone at Stella McCartney. And at that time, they had all these incredible staff who were still in stores. But the store experience itself was horrible, right? You could only go in two people at a time, let's wear a face mask. You had to sanitize your hands. So, they wanted more of a kind of sales outreach tool. So, we took elements of what we're done, repurposed it. And that's where we probably found our first bit of product market fair. And yeah, it's kind of then gone from that. That's great. That's great. And I want to hear more about these customers as we kind of go through and kind of with the success stories, look like. You know, thought of, we might talk a little bit about how you define the category. You know, I mean, go out of your website. I've seen a lot of your materials. Your marketing kind of describes you as clientele, and Sierra, customer engagement. Because it's a combination of things that you have in the book books. But I've always said that clientelling is really more of a practice than it is a product. Right? A lot of people go in. And by the way, the misuse of the word clientelling, I mean, it is, it's awful. Right? I mean, it's one of my pet peeves, right? But, you know, how do you frame what it is that you do for the brands that you work with? Yeah. So I guess we think of it as using data and software to deliver a really, really exceptional customer experience. And if you get that right, then everything else flows, you know, more sales, better sales conversion, better, better brand positioning, which leads to pricing power, better customer attention. So if you can do that, then, then everything else flows. So, you know, rather than looking at the labels, we always kind of go back to those core practices. And so our job from a software point of view and from a kind of option on boarding point of view, like you said, some practice is how can we shorten that time to value? How can we make it as quick and easy to deliver a really, really exceptional customer experience? So that's our goal, really. Yeah. Okay, great. So obviously, where I think we're aligned philosophically about, how do you create value leveraging those components we've talked about here? So, how many understand what the solution really does to make that happen? Maybe you can give me at a high level. We don't want to do too deep into this, but give me the idea of the buckets of capability that are making that all happen. Yeah, definitely. So I guess what we want to do is make it quick and easier to make every customer touch points as good as it can possibly be, right? And a customer touch point could be when a customer walks into store. It could be when they pick up, if you send out like my lower catalogs, it could be when they pick up one of those. It could be if they come to an event, if they register for an install appointment, it could be doing sales outreach from install. So each time you come into contact with your customers, we want to empower the brand to do the best possible customer experience. So just zeroing in on a couple of those touch points. Let's take the brochure, for example, we have a QR code, which you can print onto your brochures, which when the customer scans it opens up a branded onboarding experience and allows the customer to do things like request a personalized lookbook, book an install appointment submit a request to a sales advisor so that they can respond to them via text and give them really personal advice via text if that's a favorite communication channel. Taking another example, let's say sales outreach or app allows sales advisors either centrally at the at the brand level or locally to create really beautiful content, the can feature videos, multiple product views pricing information, campaign imagery, and also for college years and send it to customers on one to one or one to many basis a bit still on a really personalized way so for each customer it's going to have the name on the cover, it's going to have that top quality imagery we've done tons of work to optimize the loading time so that they get to see the best quality imagery but in short, it's time possible. What's really important about that is that we collect all of that customer engagement data and we feed it back to the brand and to the sales advisor but not only that we index it for purchase intent and for kind of engagement level. So if you're the customer, you're not getting blind outreach or blind follow ups like there's always going to be a reason that you're receiving a loop right you've got this learning loop that you're used in order to improve the engagement with the customer on an ongoing basis. So we're basically taking the guess I caught for the sales advisor, these are customers who actually are engaged and this is what they're engaged with and this is where they're kind of at in their in their patch and journey and then for the customers just making much more personal so that if you are receiving outreach it should be relevant to you it should be relevant to your interest and it should be relevant to your geography. Yeah, what you're currently doing so just went to everything is about make it as quick news is possible for the offer the brand to live the best possible customer experience. Yeah, that's. That's great. I think I said to you one day, I've been in the client telling space and people are arguing about how many Ls were in the world telling. By the way, I won on that one, I'll have you know, when the second vendor came in the space, I accidentally didn't know which one L, not two, is at the end of that word, but in any event. But the idea of empowering associates to do a better job, you know, engaging clients before, during and after the sale, isn't a new idea. The way you're approaching it is certainly different than a lot of the vendors out there. I mean, there are like three two or three key differentiators that you think you're bringing to the table that are either under delivered in some of the older legacy programs that were never there or maybe even some of the newer things that are out there that really are differentiated. And I wanted to understand is this something that can be an add-on, let's say for a homegrown or maybe even a third-party vendor solution where you could add value to their existing, some of those more traditional client telling workflows that may already be in place in the organization. Yeah, 100%. So I think that, you know, the way that we got here coming from a different initial products has meant that we've always taken a very, very unbiased view of things, right? And I think we've always looked at things of like, okay, well, not we haven't looked at existing solutions and gone, okay, well, let's build our own version, but for a different customer setting. We've always started from first principles and built on top of that. So I think things like the content module that I just mentioned and the customer engagement data and the purchase indexing is pretty like top of class from what it understands. And I think that's validated by the fact that that module is actually used alongside some of the big client telling plans in the industry for some of the kind of biggest luxury brands in the world and just delivered really, really exceptional results, you know, anything from doubling sales conversion up to quadrupling sales conversion and tripling average or divadue. So definitely, those bits, I think, are really unique. And I think, yeah, so I think what makes us different is that we've just taken a very unbiased, very, everything must be validated approach. And that's, yeah, left definitely led to us building some different capabilities. Okay, if you keep talking, I keep coming up with more questions, but I'm not going to go into all of them because we'll be on here for like two hours. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the headwinds, right? Like we all know that implementing change in a retailer with with a technology stack that requires some kind of behavioral shifts or learning new tactics. Let's call it for people to operate in the stores always, you know, what are the biggest obstacles and challenges you've seen and how are you overcoming that? What did you think about in your solutions as a way to make that change adoption? I guess I would say, dear. So I think you said something earlier that's really on point, which is that client telling is a practice, not just a product, right? So, you know, definitely one big piece of potential friction is onboarding, you know, it doesn't matter how good your product is, you've got to understand the user's motivation, which is your sales advisor on an stylist. And one thing that we do is we usually almost always do a one-to-one onboarding call with every single person who's going to use our platform. And we do it in the style of user experience test. So it's two parts. In the first part, we ask them, what is day and day, they're like, what do they want our app to do for them? And the second point we get, we've given them their login details, we get them to share their screen and go and walk through the app. That has been so valuable, not only because we think it's the best possible way to train an onboarding, right? Because people are doing things in the way that they want to in the way that they're used to. But also every time we do this and we've done many thousands of these onboarding calls now, we learn something new, we see something new, we get people to say, like, please say whatever crosses your mind. So we're always, always learning. And I think where you see that payoff is if you look at the kind of the number of updates that we release, we're always tweaking, always finesse. And I think the user experience of our app we're really, really proud of where we got it to, you know, we're still always tweaking it. So yes, I think onboarding is definitely one piece of potential friction. And then in terms of other headwinds, yeah, I guess like integrations is always, is always going to be a bottleneck. Yeah. How are we looking at that? We have been able to streamline, we actually use a platform now that allows us to standardize another of our integrations. We've got a ton of integrations now where essentially are now kind of plug and play. And we have a Shopify app, for example, that means that so brand to using Shopify is basically literally like a five minutes installation called them more or less good to go. So yeah, those are probably the two biggest things that we've been working on. So it's not a huge lift for an IT organization to integrate you with their inventory or their POS or obviously e-commerce besides Shopify. It's not a huge lift. No, definitely not. And usually we'll do, we'll do all of the mapping and stuff on our site, which means that we're not going to ask them to change their structure if that's remotely possible. We will basically map our integrations to their existing structure. So more or less we just need like access to their test environment and then we can crack on and then we can usually deliver something after a couple of weeks. All right, that's great. That's great. Well, that kind of leads me to my next question. So one of the most impressive things when I first saw your demo is the way that you have incorporated content, the shoppable lookbook and all that interactive content as kind of a that first touch engagement in many respects, right, with the customer to kind of start them and you're tracking all of that. Clientelling, you know, there's a lot of different functional areas of what I I've got kind of this map that I use in the industry around customer data and task and communications and then all of these product and content pieces and all these other workflows that may need to get supported with task and communications. There's a lot of pieces to all of this. But it seems as though content is becoming more and more important and I think we're going to be seeing some other technologies that are going to be making new workflows we probably haven't seen before in terms of engagement starting to come which we'll talk about in a minute. But very briefly, maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you see the role of content in clientelling and how are those insights that come from the engagement at that earlier stage, particularly being used to drive further value. Yeah, so I think content, especially in that fashion or in theories, incredibly important. That's very much like a large part of it. So from our point of view, like the job is to level the best possible than most engaging, most crystal clear, the best video, all like the best cut of the video in the lowest friction way. So we think a lot about loading times, for example, and browns ability. So it's super, super important. If you want to deliver an elevated customer experience, then content is incredibly important and obviously that feels to brand which shoots into retention, price and power, everything. Super, super important. And then yet, how do some of those touch points feed through? So we collect data on everything. So did the customer, what did they click on? Did they open the notebook? Did they respond to the text? Did they look at multiple product views? Did they watch video? How long for? We collect all of that really, really important data. So we've got so much of it now, the way we spot patterns. And so we start with our benchmarks. And then we're able to kind of finesse. So once we've been working for Brown for a while, we can look into their data and kind of update those purchase intent levels. And like you said, I think how else is that factor in? One of the things that we do, and you mentioned the tasks being one of the kind of tenants of functionality, is we'll set a purchase intent level. And then if a customer passes that according to their engagement data, we'll automate a follow-up task for the relevant sales advisor who's reached out to them or who owns that client with the next notebook to follow up with that customer and show them which products they're most engaged with. And we also have things like what we call the SEVERLOOKS function, which allow them to look for kind of quality controlled content within the platform, featuring that item. And then they can just enter the customer in a couple of clicks. So if you step back and look at what their customer journey is, I'm interested in, let's say, a pair of trousers. So I engage with those pair of trousers. I check them out. I have a look. I'm not quite sure. The next touch point that I might get is a separate look or a separate notebook featuring that pair of trousers. Style three different ways, with maybe some video in there, from my sales advisor going, "Hey, I saw you're interested in those trousers. Here are some other ways that I think are quite called style-ed. Did you have any event coming up for whatever?" Yeah, I mean, that's great. You have any questions. That's great. You know, in the past, we could only do that after purchase history, right? I mean, like good client-telling systems would leverage a purchase history and say, "Oh, we can do an upsell on a cross-sell from this because I actually transacted that." But because you're engaging earlier in the process and actually tracking that click stream, we get intent very clear, even though there hasn't been a monetary transaction, you know, with the brand on that particular skew. And then you're able to leverage that in order to create. And now, and once you start to show out between the conversion on that, right, it's, you know, when you put together a collection, a lot of people can't visualize. You know, it's what I've come to realize. I was an image consultant at one point. I got to tell you, some people really cannot visualize. I'm probably one of them to be honest. So I think, you know, if I wasn't for my life, I'd dress in the dark every day. But no, I think so. I'm just two couple of things to build on that. I think really important. That's why I learned that we really noticed what that customer's really value newness. So when you've got especially kind of like your VIP customers, they've probably seen your socials. They probably seen your campaigns. They've been on your website. They've seen all of that beautiful content that you've gone to great time and expense to shoot. So putting together these notebooks and styling different looks, you're showing them something new and it comes through with their name on it. So it feels incredibly personalized, incredibly engaging, incredibly interactive. That's That's a really good experience for the customer and it's got that newness as well. The other thing that I just thought about what you were saying as well is that if we think about purchase and 10 as a journey leading up to purchase and 10, leading up to making purchase is going up, right? But then as the customer disengages, they get less hot in that person, 10 drops off. After they've made the purchase, which you say is the typical gets reached out to them and trying to upsell because they've just bought something, what we expect as he purchasing don't drop right off, right? Because they've just scratched that edge, they've just fulfilled that need, they've made the purchase, they're happy, they're like, cool, I'm not in that purchasing mind frame at all. Right. But so arguably there's a lot more value to be got from catching them pre-purchase on that journey and just before they drop off, right? Before they're like, and I wanted to, and I forgot about it. If we can catch them there, then that's that's providing a lot of value. Absolutely. I'm not going to go too deep into this because we are probably going to go way over time and I may let us do that because it's great stuff. But just being upfront, I had an idea of how long these things were going to take, but the content is great. So let's just keep going. But maybe you could talk a little bit about which KPIs are really resonating with customers. I know you do a lot of tracking of all of them. What are the KPIs that are really resonating? Yes, ROI is the one that you probably see like at the moment we're publishing about a case study we get the moment showing ROI's around the kind of 40X mark after literally just like a couple of months of usage. So you ROI and then we look at that as incremental sales divided by contract value. So that is obviously a key one. The one that is really, really important to us is retention, but it's so much harder to measure because it increases in retention. So that's one that we think about a lot. But yeah, if we're really delivering the exceptional customer experience that we aim to and that we think we are, then customers do keep coming back. It can just be a bit harder to pull that day. And you need a longer timeframe, co-ordinate analysis and stuff like that. It's kind of harder to separate all the different interactions and customer touch points. But yes, so we look at ROI, we look at sales conversion increase, we look at average order value increase, and then you have a super interesting amount. And all of those lead up of course to the reportable numbers, right? I mean, at the end of the day, all of those things are impacting either top line revenue or margin, right? And cost savings may need some things, I don't know. But at the end of the day, we're all trying to drive traffic, increase conversion and increase average transaction size and frequency. Those are the kinds of things that retailers are looking at and that ultimately drive ROI. But there are also some softer metrics, right? Like the more outreach that they do, the number of communications, the number of behaviors in certain ways that an associate does in the store ultimately drives those other numbers, right? Are you seeing retailers track some of those softer metrics? Definitely. I think you're touching a really interesting point here because I think that you can get a lot from those softer metrics. You know, ideally, we want a higher conversion rate and maybe a slightly lower outreach rate and we want a higher open rate, right? Because that all indicates quality. And we don't want to get to that place where we're extending too much outreach or too many communications to customers and it's, you know, and it risk becoming a turn off. But the data that we collect helps feed into that. So for example, our open rates, we have benchmarks on a brand by brand basis that we can then use to analyze individual sales advice performance. We go like, okay, well, let's take a look at the outreach, which you can see one of the content with them on the platform. And let's see why we're getting lower kind of engagement rates here. And let's see what we can do to improve that and thereby improve customer experience across the board. Great. Super. That would be all positive. But I'm going to ask the question anyhow, there's qualitative feedback. What are you hearing back from the social media and from customers? So we, yeah, we're really, really pleased with the feedback we're hearing. Ease of use is a big one that we get. And I think that is testament to, like I say, the amount of onboarding calls that we do, we're always, always, always getting live feedback from our end user, which is sales advisors. You know, everything is typically one click away, which is super useful. And that sounds easy to do, like, you know, to build a good product. It, in reality, it can be very, very hard. So you're really pleased with that. And then, yeah, again, the quality of the content, the interactivity and then the results, you know, really, really pleased with our, our ways that we're generating. That's great. Obviously. All right. Is there anything else you'd want to share kind of like what success looks like inside of one of these stores? What success looks like? So I guess the time to value questions, the core user motivation. Yeah. We think a lot about what makes sales advisors happy. So we definitely want to make sure that we are helping them deliver on their targets, that we are helping them, hopefully, and some commission where they can. So that's super important. And then also, like, as you've made, as you've made a very good point, like this is, this is a human business, yes, powered by software, but it's a human business. So we love being able to, like, go into stores, jump on calls, get more feedback, maybe drop off some pastries. If we count them true, one to one engagement, you know, the vendors coming right into the store with breakfast. I love it. That's it. Practicing what we preach. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's that's great. I'm a proponent of all of that. Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about some story stuff here. I know personally, anybody who has ever built a tech company knows that it is really not easy. Wanted to know what do you think has been the biggest challenge for you? And what surprised you the most positively or negatively? So I think the biggest challenge for us is that I would say that we've been really, really strong on product, but we still have a pretty small team. And I would say that where we are now putting a lot more of our attention now, we now we have strong evidence to support really, really strong product market fit. We're growing really fast as it is, but I would say that brand awareness and kind of market awareness is probably the thing that we think about most at the moment. We're getting a ton of inbound, but it's mostly word of mouth. Yeah. So we're starting to think about marketing a lot more. Yeah. I think like it's a very noisy industry. You know, it's not just kind of telling it's like that dollar, that dollar is that there are 50 categories looking for the same dollar you're selling. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So definitely that, how do we kind of stand up? Because once we want to get people on the court and show them on the demo, we have a really high kind of conversion rate of getting the brands into pilots and then a really strong kind of pilot conversion rate. But yeah, so it's just that kind of like getting on a mouth there when it's so busy and there are so many people doing this hard to sell. Interesting. You know, I have a college-age son who is some, I must have been genetic because he's got all of a sudden got a love of luxury retail, right? And like, no, no, you're going to a great school. You'll get a job on Wall Street or you'll get a job. You know, it's the kids here or something, do not go into retail. And but he absolutely loves it. And you sit back and you're like, you have to realize it. Retailers are a really tough market. I mean, the retail industry, when times are good, they don't think they need stuff and when times are bad, they can't afford it. But it's this constant challenge at trying to find and retail math impacts it as well, right? It's like, hey, that's not that expensive per store, but I have a thousand stores. A little bit sudden, I can open a lot of stores for what it costs to put that in a thousand stores. Is that the best return on my investment? And so technology vendors are constantly fighting that. And then early stage technology best investors, while they're trying to get a category going. Sometimes, honestly, sometimes the business isn't there early enough. They can't get enough rounds of capital and they die, they die in the vine, which is always unfortunate when you see good stuff. But I'm so glad that things are going as well as they are for you. I want to talk a little bit more about some big changes happening in general in the tech space, right? So you've built this tool for deeply personalized client relationships. But I'm had a lot of conversations around this and I wanted to know, like, how do you think about balancing automation and the human touch? You know, over here, retailers are really having a hard time figuring that out right now. And how do you make sure that the human is staying at the center of these technology products that you're building today and delivering as well as the things you're thinking about for the future? So for us, it always goes back to that core kind of principle of time to value. So how can we make it, how can we remove all of the admin and all of the faffing about and make it so that it's ideally? We want ourselves advisor to pick up a phone to see a notification from us that's a well-timed task, hit take action, complete it within a couple of seconds and deliver a really beautiful customer experience. That's always the vision and the mission. So that's always, always what we're working towards. So yeah, that's it. Like, remove all of the unnecessary work, cleanest, shortest possible time to value for the size of us. Great. I did have one question. It's like, a lot of people misunderstand what this stuff is partially because this category is just not that clear in people's minds often enough that people that are making business decisions. What are some of the misconceptions about client telling and about our own kind that you're seeing out there? So we sometimes have client calls where they're like, oh, client telling is client telling. It's really not. I would say that there's a lot of differences. There are so many, if you think about all the different customer touch points and the different approaches that you could take to software to support and power with their touch points, there are a lot of differences out there. And our content module that's obviously a core part, we can be like the whole thing, all that content module can just provide a lot of value by itself. That delivers so much value and that just doesn't exist in most other platforms that I'm aware of. So I think that I would definitely say that not, it's not just like kind of one size fits all in it doesn't matter if you buy your client telling software from A or B. I'm saying it doesn't matter. Yeah and I think we also don't want to just become two standardised as well right you know just a post purchase two days later we're going to send them the same text template. We definitely still want to get you know let's not be lazy let's not go to that place so I think always we want to be thinking about okay well how can we pass as you know especially with AI and stuff that we have at our disposal now there are some really really amazing things that we can be doing. Well let's talk about what are the features modules and directions that you're excited about because I know where you're going with that in your head already I can see it so go ahead talk about it. Yeah 100% certain with the kind of the AI tools that are out there now we've really been able to speed up our development which has been really really exciting so I've got a couple of things in the works we've got an events module coming out literally either this week or next to kind of like people's posts but with sales attribution allows the brand to send out the both audiences and invite to those audiences register purchases to seek very quickly. Clearly needs that ROI on each of their events. We're working on an instant chat module we are working on the social meeting module we've making improvements to our appointment booking module so yeah a lot a lot of stuff that is getting super charged at the moment moving pretty fast. That's great you know are there any other emerging tech I mean obviously AI at a generative level you know we kind of can all see how it can help but what are the things out there that you think you're going to have bearing and what do you think if you had a crystal ball what do you think it's all going to look like five years from now? Yeah so I definitely think AI is the most powerful thing you know ARVL we've seen some quite cool stuff out there you know you're being able to see like a digital watch on your arm sneakers you know if you hold your phone over I think that's cool but I think the AI is so pervasive it's going to be in everything from software development to customer experience to data manipulation to data visualization I think it's just going to be super super invasive I don't think anything else comes close. I think that in five years we've seen a bit of Whipplash for example if you look at I'm going to forget their name now who the instant the Swedish the O'Connor how you know they they five 700s customer experience reps and then replacing with a kind of customer experience bot then harder bunch of them back. I think the realistically there was some really good kind of like instant chat bots out there you know so when you land on a website you can actually get really good advice from an AI bot now I think realistically we do start to see a bit more of that and you know especially when sounds a bit more interesting things happening it's matter of fact I have somebody that I'm working with right now that is doing stuff and it's they're doing it in hard lines right now it's not being done in the more traditional you know soft lines or luxury or beauty kind of categories but they're able to do an extraordinary job of approximating in certain workflows the very kind of stuff consultative stuff and and it requires a deep understanding and building the right models and all the rest of them. I think we're going to see a lot of that go in there but I don't think we want to get to a place where human beings aren't part of the equation. Totally green. No totally agree I think it always becomes supportive so I think we're going to see AI agents almost being layered into many different parts of the stack right to kind of like support the sales of us everything from like you know what next step should I take or which of my customers do you think has a high level of purchase intent or who should I reach out to today. I'm to you know help me understand this data to yeah I think it almost becomes almost how social media became a layer right and you had social media that are layered into fitness apps and commerce platforms and stuff I think probably the same thing happens with AI agents so you know that would be my biggest problem with this. Great I'm going to move along to the next section here of questions that I have we aren't going to get all these things done but this is a fun one okay I've never done this before and I'm hoping that this goes well what we're going to do here is I'm calling it the lightning round okay so as we kind of wrap things up so you got to be quick or else you're going to everybody here's going to suffer by hearing me impersonate a buzzer okay so I want to just a very very short response and it's supposed to be fun okay so I'm going to give you a choice here if own kind had either a motto or a mascot what would it be. motto is exceptional customer experience and our mascot is a key for unlocking value. Just come to you that's good all right there's one misconception about clientele you'd like to correct um that it's a one-size-fits-all okay great great you mentioned it before uh what book blog or podcast is influential it doesn't have to be my podcast but what book blog or podcast is influenced you the most. Well obviously would have been your podcast but now you've taken that away from me um I would say thinking fast thinking slow uh by Daniel Connerman yeah great great yeah just you know it's I mean there is so much richness in there I think about that so much in terms of here I'm psychology I have it right up here behind me somewhere yeah uh and you know product design how we think how we feel yeah all of that it's just such an incredible book. All right great what do you wish more retail execs knew about clientele um the results I always say you know I really do think it isn't essential you know I think that the space is so competitive now I think that it's so easy to fall into like a discounting death spiral and I think the clientele is the thing that helps you stay about that maintain brand maintain pricing power sell it full price uh yeah so it's all value. All right what are you most excited about this year? Oh um a lot of the releases that we've got coming out um yeah yeah probably that is that am I meant to give a personal experience I'm like give a personal one I mean I'll let you do one so so boring what are you excited about work on the on the personal front I'm always not going to Japan what we've never been to it's been on a bucket list. That's great ever so that that is the only place I ever truly felt that I had zero skills to function uh without a handler but I'll tell you that story some other time but I almost didn't get back to my hotel all right and then the final one is what is the funniest cultural or retail terminology difference you run into dealing with the US. So I say maybe not just the US but I don't know if this counts as terminology, but I um, if I'm feeling really cruel, I quite like to watch someone I haven't met before trying to navigate my name and either they kind of have a god at the beginning of the night, "Rurrr, rurrr, rurrr, rurrr!" Yeah, well that's rrrrr, rurrr, rurrr. I actually, but netted police spells your name in product. We heard it makes sure I didn't try to translate it. Rory is quite easy to say if we use the the other spelling of it. Yeah, it's um it'll be in the show notes folks if you want to see how you really spelled this thing. It's not an easy one to get through. Okay, that was great. Thank you. All right, so it's really kind of all the time that we have today. We're coming up on 40 minutes here. I really appreciate honestly more than you know, taking the time to join us, share your story about own kind. I was impressed with it. The first time I saw it, every interaction I've had, I've become more and more impressed with the way that you're managing this company and the way that you're growing it and the value you're delivering to retailers. If a retailer was curious wants to learn more, where should they go? Find me on LinkedIn. Again, you know, I wish I had a slightly simpler name for that, but yeah, definitely find me on LinkedIn and I hope you could really kindly put a link in the and you can put it right in the show notes. Yeah, perfect. And then yeah, I've got a book and appointment thing so you can just book a demo and yeah, we've loved it. And the website as well, right? So the website is well, you can book a demo of the website as well. All right, I'll put that all in there. You know, this has been great. This audience that follows me, knows that I love shining a light on tools and practices that are really making customer experience, creating what's possible in retail customer experience. So I'm always enjoying this kind of thing. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for our listeners? Well, I didn't about words of wisdom. We're definitely trying to learn a lot more than, yeah, we're always trying to learn. So it's been really cool to get to chat to you and not just today, but yeah, kind of lean into your experience. I really value that. So thank you. Thank you for the try to come on today. But yeah, I don't know. We are just obsessed with shortening time to value. So everything that we think about is making it quicker, easier to deliver really, really exceptional customers. Well, that's great. Well, listen, everybody, thank you very much for listening today's show. I'm wishing all of you just great retail experiences. We're really such a pleasure. I'm hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you so much. I've loved it. All right. Bye-bye. Well, that's today's show. Thank you for listening. If you like what you heard, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and like us on social media or drop me a line at Brian at retailtankexec.com. If you'd like to learn more about what we do at Clientricity, visit www.clientricity.net. Until next time, stay well and go do something amazing for your customers.