ButcherBox CMO Kiran Smith on how she overhauled a startup-y marketing team

Join us for the Modern Retail Marketing Summit taking place April 20 through 22nd in Huntington Beach, California. Brand leaders from Thrive Market, Codary, Paxson, and many others will dive into how they're navigating a marketing landscape that's changing quicker than ever. This annual summit will equip you with the knowledge, strategies, and connections you need through our one-on-one meetings, working groups, casual networking, and more. Don't wait! We're offering $200 off with the promo code Sumit 2026, No Spaces. Again, that's Sumit 2026, No Spaces. Go to modernretail.co/marketing-summit to learn more and secure your paths. Branson retailers may be eligible for a complimentary pass. Apply on the event page to see if you qualify. Hello everyone and welcome to the Modern Retail podcast. I'm Kale Guthrie Weissman, the Editor-in-Chief here at Modern Retail. This week I'm super excited. We have Kieran Smith. She's the CMO of Butcherbox. Butcherbox, I bet you most, if not all, of our listeners know about it, or have seen it somewhere. I always like to set the stage a little bit about what I want to talk about. But Butcherbox is a really interesting company because there are two things that I think are really commendable. One is that it's a profitable company, which you hear the word profitability in all companies talking about it, but they never mean it in the present. They mean it as something in the vague future. That's not Butcherbox. They've done it. That's great. It also is a huge company. I believe 2022 revenue was over 600 million if I'm not mistaken. So I want to talk about Kieran, who's relatively new to the company, how she's been bringing it all to ahead, making the company move forward. I'm just really interested in how you build a company, especially one that's based on subscriptions, which is used to be really hot, aren't doing so hot anymore. We're going to talk about all of that. But Kieran, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me today. Absolutely. Thank you for joining. So let's start with you because you've worked at some really interesting, really big companies over the years, haven't you? I have. It's been quite the journey. Talk about the journey from then until now. So I started off post undergrad. I graduated with a computer science major, which is very unlikely for a marketer. Did a few years in consulting and then decided I wanted to go into marketing. So I went to business school and post business school. I decided to take a somewhat non-traditional route and spent 10 years in grocery, which for a marketer is the best place to learn. It is a data rich environment, high frequency, just incredible engagement with customers, and just the best learning ground. And after doing that for 10 years, it was time to try something new. And so I went with the unexpected move of going to kids shoes and being the mom of three girls, I joke that I needed the discount on the shoes. They grow so fast. They do. You need a lot of shoes. Most shoes are not inexpensive. No. And did kids shoes roll? I went to Brookstone. I led an agency. I led Arnold worldwide for a few years and then was at Irobat. Most recently, prior to coming to Butcherbox. And then Butcherbox came on my radar. I met with our CEO, Mike Solgaro, and knew right away that this was the right opportunity for me. It seems like it's sort of a return to home that you started in grocery and you're not at a grocer now, but you're in overall a grocery business. Exactly. And business that believes in the power of food and that is more than just the food that you eat as the environment that it creates, the relationships that you create, and all of the other pieces that go along with it. That very much is part of the Butcherbox story, which is why it's had such a high appeal to me. Well, now that you mentioned the Butcherbox story, let's give, you know, for those few of you listeners that don't know, why don't you give just a brief history of Butcherbox so people know what we're at right now. That's great. Our CEO, Mike Solgaro, started Butcherbox about eight years ago, not with the intention of growing it to, you know, over a half a billion dollar company eight years later, but really for a way for him to source high quality meat for his wife who had an autoimmune syndrome. And as he looked around, he realized that there weren't reliable sources for that meat. And it wasn't just he and his family that were looking for it. There are others in his community that were also looking for those types of meat. And so he started this business as a side business started on Kickstarter. And really from day one was profitable because he started it with affiliates. And as you know, from an affiliate standpoint, it's not upfront marketing. It is on the backside of as the referrals come through as a commission based arrangement. It allowed him to be able to build this very responsibly financially responsibly and very rapidly, especially since at the time eight years ago where there were programs like Keto, Paleo, Whole 30. There weren't a lot of partners like a butcher box that were able to supply the types of meat and seafood that a lot of the people who are following those type of programs were looking for. So it's really a pretty amazing story. How would you describe the marketing schema evolving? I mean, full disclosure, Karen and I chatted a few months ago and we had a, at one of modern retail events and we had a pretty long conversation about this. But one of the things that I remember you mentioning was that butcher box had been operating like a startup pretty much for all eight years, right? So talk about like how that manifested in marketing. Correct. I think what I found when I arrived about a year ago is that marketing was spread across six different teams across multiple people within the business. And from a coordination standpoint, that made sense at the time. It was a startup as a typical roll up your sleeves, get done, what needs to get done. And what happened is that got us to where we are today, which is incredible. Got us to a half a billion dollars plus. But as we look at that next, whereas that next half a billion going to come from how we organize ourselves, how we look at how, who our partners are, how we're thinking about marketing investment capabilities that we're building, we had to take a look at the organization itself. And that's why I was hired to help build us for that next stage of growth from the marketing. And would you say that it was, I don't know if this is the correct term, but like reactive marketing or reactive decision making in the sense that as you got bigger, you needed to have something that dealt with influences for influencers four years ago or something like, how did it become more complex? Was it just because of the exigencies of the business? Great question. When we first started affiliates and influencers make it up about 70% of our marketing spend. The reason that worked is because the word of mouth that they provided the legitimacy that they provided in terms of recommending our product that fit the needs of their members worked really well for us. But at some point from a scale standpoint, that couldn't be the only channel in which we brought out the butcher box message. As you know, Facebook, Instagram, all of those different social platforms now started to play a much bigger part in a company's ad spend and the effectiveness of now taking those dollars and diversifying it across multiple channels really was how butcher box started to evolve. It was however, done not necessarily in a full, okay, let's look at all of our marketing dollars. How are they performing across each of those channels? Where do you want to shift dollars? That came later in our journey more recently is a major part of how we think about our marketing investment, but it happened more organically as we were growing. In addition, a big part of butcher boxes growth also came from the pandemic. People were at home. People were not able to get easily to the grocery store when they did the options that they had for meat and seafood weren't what they were looking for. And so butcher boxes growth obviously came also organically being in the right place at the right time during the pandemic. Interesting. Out of curiosity, how much did butcher box grow like 2020 to 2021? Can you share that? I can't share that, but I will tell you it was very significant. Okay, interesting. That's, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I didn't even think about that. Did you find it daunting to go to a company that is doing so well, but you would have to systematize so many things that were in so many different silos? I didn't find it daunting. I found it exciting. The reason is because I've been in these situations before coming into a new industry, coming into a new organization at some point during their life cycle and having to figure it out when I got there. In this case, the excitement came from being at the very beginning of the butcher box marketing journey. And what I mean by that is there's so much ahead of us in terms of capabilities that we can build out that as a marketer, we know are directly impacting the bottom line, personalization, segmentation, targeting, all of those things are ahead of us. And for me, that's why this is the best place that I could imagine being. How much of your job for the first year was systematization and standardization and just sort of making sure that people understood what was going on, what needed to be sort of right side it, I guess. It was significant. I would say it took up most of the first year in terms of when you take six different teams, put them under one leader, and then as you set the road maps or how that team is going to operate moving forward. It also includes looking at who are external partners. Let's use media, for example. We were using our media across several different vendors prior and we consolidated a significant amount of that under one house recently, very purposely. So as we looked at being able to have the flexibility of where our media dollars were being invested, how they were being reported on, how we were thinking about increased investment, lowering investment. It was really important for us to make some of those moves. In terms of how you think about from a creative standpoint of what do we do internally? How do we partner externally? All of those things had to kind of get created over the past year so that we then have our foundation and a much stronger place so that we can jump from there. Do you have any, I guess, advice or tips? It seems like everything that you've done and are doing is important for any company that's in growth mode, but also any organization, especially an eight year old organization, as organizational inertia. People have been doing something for the same way for a couple of years now and then someone comes in and says, "Actually, we're going to do something different." Logically, it makes sense, but they might not love that. How did you go about presenting that to teams, especially teams that had many different leaders? That's a great question. I would say the most important thing was starting to create a relationship with those individuals who were on my team. I know that sounds silly, but it was a trusting relationship, a relationship that was built on conversation and understanding and explaining and sharing my past experiences and how some of that was maybe relevant here, learning from them in terms of what's been successful at Butcherbox and what hasn't. Really starting to have them feel like they were part of the journey and where we're heading. I would say it was one of the most important things, but also setting a vision on where we wanted to head. This is if we want to be here a year from now, here's how we're going to work backwards to get there. Beyond the organizational tinkering and making sure everybody understands what's going on, I guess, sort of a company-wide marketing unification, what were some of the most important forward-looking projects that you went about the first year? It really was going team-by-team and taking a look at how work was getting done both internally from a process standpoint, how they were working cross-functionally, both within marketing, so how our retention team was working with our growth team, working with our merchandising team and creating. So how our marketing team was working together, but then how they were working externally with other teams within the business, how they were working with engineering and product and IT. Those were a big part of how we had to look at how we were organized and how work was getting done and where was getting done well and where it wasn't. And then we also then had to look at externally in terms of what are the things that we wanted to be really great at internally and what are the things that we want to use external partners for their expertise, their point of view, and finding that right balance? Like in terms of metrics and working with different teams, sometimes they're just not interoperable and especially when you have a tech team on one side and they don't know anything about attribution on the other, you know, turn, how did you go about making that work? I will say Butcherbox is a very marketing driven organization. So when I got here, I felt extremely fortunate that the metrics side of the business was well understood by almost every team across the business, starting with our CEO who leads with the numbers and he's very open about the numbers. And so in every all hands that we have, he's talking about AOV orders per member per month, churn, all of those things that some people consider marketing metrics, their company metrics. And everyone in the organization not only has exposure to them, they know what our targets are, how are performing against those targets. So I think that's what one of the things that makes Butcherbox is someone of a unique organization. I'm always appreciative of companies where the leaders are much more transparent about things because I feel like that's those are the best types of companies because if it's just hidden behind, I don't know, you know, veils of we're doing well or we're seeing vague growth, it doesn't help a team, I find at least. You mentioned churn and I wanted to get to this just because Butcherbox is a really unique company that you're predominantly subscription based. Subscription was a really hot business model. I want to say like, you know, when Butcherbox started up until like five years ago and then they reached the problem of, you know, acquisition got more expensive. It was harder to keep people in. So how would you say like what has been the secret, I hate to say secret sauce, what has been the secret for Butcherbox that has made the subscription model work and do you have a unique approach to turn that others just haven't been able to figure out? I would say one of the unique things about Butcherbox is, and I don't say this slightly, we have an amazing product as a marketer to be able to unapologetically talk about how great our meat and seafood products are, really gives us a leg up against a lot of competitors honestly. And so what I mean by that is when you go out and we have our own members talking to people who are at their around their dinner table saying, oh, this meal tastes great. They're the first ones to jump in and say, Oh, Butcherbox, you've got to try this and they give the litany of reasons why that helps a lot that we have that belief that our members have in us and in our products in terms of being our best marketing tool. That helps. The second part is going grocery shopping is a habit. It's something that people do weekly, maybe a couple of times a week. So therefore food, for us on the subscription side with meat fits into that pattern, getting a box once a month of your essential meat and seafood items isn't as far of a reach for many people as it would be for maybe some other categories. So I think that's one of the things that allows us to continue to have a very successful subscription model that has still a lot of more room for growth. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. This was before your dime, although it sort of went in there, but like when you got that pandemic bump, was there a new approach just because there were so many people who because of the situation were unable to go to the grocery store and then were able to go again. How do you deal with one of those anomalous situations? One of the interesting things is post COVID. People were still cooking at home much more than they had prior to COVID. So those habits were still there. They found that they liked eating better when they ate at home. They liked the savings that eating at home gave them the flexibility that it gave them. And so it wasn't that they went back to their old habits immediately post COVID. I think the second thing that for us that was interesting was if we were able to continue to grow our product offerings by a variety of cuts that we have, for example, or some ready to eat items. We have butter, for example. We have broth, for example, as we're able to build out some of our offerings, people saw more value in us than just our meat and seafood. And some of those ability to grow in terms of our offerings really helped keep them interested in wanting to stay part of the subscription. I want to ask kind of a broader question just with you as a marketer, especially leading this company as it relates to subscriptions. Like do you think there needs to be or there is new messaging around being a subscription company? Like I feel like it was a novel thing back in the day. And now there are different ways to describe what a different company is where there's a recurring box coming every month or so. Like how do you think about the messaging of such a product and how is that evolved? I would say I think about the messaging going forward about how having a subscription for your meat is a great thing because it's saving you time. It is one less trip that you have to take to the grocery store each week or a couple of times a week. It is allowing you to have control over what cuts you have versus just going to the store and seeing what they have. It's allowing you to plan ahead and say, what am I going to have this week for meals? Great. I know what's in my freezer and my fridge. I then can plan the rest of it around it and it's giving you that first start from a planning standpoint that you don't necessarily get when you go to the grocery store and you're standing in front of that meat or seafood case. So I think of the subscription as somewhat of a superpower that people will have to be able to help them get meals on the table faster. Feel good about the quality of meat and seafood they're putting in front of their friends or family. And I think about that as empowering and I think people will be really attracted to that. You mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to get deeper into it is just overall marketing, advertising and media diversification. So what have you been focused on? What has the company been focused on? Now that I imagine affiliates and influencers still are very, very important to you because that's the type of core customer you want, wrapping the product. But how are you thinking about these other channels and how, especially now, what are the areas of focus? The areas of focus are making sure that we have the right messaging towards the right segment of people. We, our customer base is not a one size fits all. We have people who are families, the kids in the household, they're running around from soccer practice to lacrosse practice to all of the things. And then we have people who are living in an urban setting, single or married, no kids. We can't treat them the same. Our product offering can't be the same for all of them. Our messaging can't be the same. So how they each individually see themselves in our brand, we have to make sure that we're creating those messages for them that they see themselves as being part of our Butcherbox family. And that means, okay, so let's think about what are the most important things to that family who's running around and who is looking to have a good meal at home, but without a whole lot of hassle. That messaging has to feel different, sound different. And that's some of the work that we're doing right now as we continue to build out our messaging staff. What are the channels that you're hitting, hitting these people on? What are the most useful channels or, yeah. Social continues to be a very important channel for us. Affiliates and influencers continue to be a very important part of our mix. We will, we're on TikTok. We're on, you know, all of those with a variety of messages. We're learning every day in terms of what works, what doesn't, and we are meniable about testing, which also email continues to be an extremely important part of our communication mix of how we talk to people, how we talk to them, what we have both prospecting and existing members. So it's, it's not nothing surprising. Streaming continues to be a part of our media mix as well. So it's a variety. Talk about streaming because I was going to ask you about this. When you're a company that focuses on the basics, has been profitable, you know, since day one, correct me if I'm wrong, but like you, you really want everything to be very efficient and something like TV or top of funnel isn't very efficient, but it's very nature. So how do you approach that or is it just you hope it works or you get a few cues that it works or what are you thinking about? We are still trying to figure out the right mix. Now if you look at various upper funnel activities, you have streaming, you have the podcast work that you do in terms of podcast advertising, you have word of mouth, referral, you have experiential and trial, all of those are what I would consider upper funnel activities. We're working finding out what that right mix for us is. Obviously, most of our investment is on the consideration and conversion side, but we do know the importance, the health of our businesses and that mid funnel comes from being effective in the upper funnel work that we're doing. Let's talk about podcasts just because I'm fascinating with them. They were hot, then they weren't. Do you think podcasts work for butcher box? Have they worked in the past or are they, is that a difficult channel to tap into? It's been a great channel for us, honestly, because if you look at our customer base and podcasts are an important channel for them on their own entertainment side of what they're listening to on the way to work, what they're listening to and they're on a walk, what they're, it's a very important of their entertainment mix. And therefore, if we can find that right podcast that is where our brand feels organic and relevant to the message that's being delivered, we've had wonderful success with it. Got it, got it. Makes sense. Let's talk about the influencer side of things because you were one of the early on-trons figuring out that if you have individual brand reps, people will listen to them and follow it. But also, it's become a lot more crowded. There is, you know, talk about micro influencer, macro influencer. They're all on different platforms. So how, how have, has that evolved? How does butcher box figure out who to work with? Is it become more difficult to cut the wheat from the chaff to figure out that this is a person we should be working with? Walk me through all that. It is a world that's changed significantly over the past eight years. It was, I think I'd say a lot simpler eight years ago than it is right now. What we're finding is our highest level of success is with kind of that more mid-size influencer because they have a reach that is significant but not massive. But we still are able to have messaging that's delivered by them that feels much more organic. We are in a company that says, "Here's your script." Say it exactly the way that we're telling you to say it. That doesn't work for us. Those don't perform for us. We give them information such as, "Here's why members love butcher box. Here's what we are really proud of. Here's what we offer." But then we allow them or we ask them to take that messaging and make it their own. Why does it matter to their listeners in terms of why this is a good fit for them? They know better than we do. So that's where we really rely on them for that. Got it. Got it. Working with these mid-size influencers changed. Most of them operating affiliate. Are they more bigger, brandy deals like how is that working? It's still more on the affiliate commission based side of the world. It will tell you the reason it's changed is because we have so many more as we've grown in size. It does require our teams to really be diligent about assessing how what are the relationships that are working, which are the ones that are not working. What does the report card look like when you're doing that assessment? I would say it's now not as much of who's the next one, who's the next one. It's being able to take the ones that you have within our offering and saying, "Which are the ones that we want to double down on? Which are the ones that we may have to move on from?" I would say that's a bit of the change that's happened over the last few years. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and just talk about overall business model because earlier this year you guys had an interesting announcement given that you've been predominantly or pretty much entirely direct to consumer brand where you launched in BJ's wholesale club if I'm not mistaken. I want to just give a little bit background about that deal. Why but your box decided to do that? Should we expect to hear similar announcements in the future? I would say what you should expect in the future to hear is that we're always looking to learn. The retail side of the business made a ton of sense. As we looked at it, we know we are a very small part of the retail grocery landscape. If you look at frequency, our members get a box once a month, once every two months, people are in a grocery store once or twice a week. Therefore having an exposure for a brand in that environment makes a lot of sense. How do we get eyes on the brand? That was our foray to learning from that. It was a great, great learning. Right now the timing is that's not where we're looking for in that next vein of growth. But I do think it is a testament to butcher busts constantly testing the waters to see where there may be more possibilities for growth. I would say I don't want to ruin any inside secrets, but I think we'll continue to surprise you in terms of where as we look to expand our audiences, as we look to expand our offerings, it's something that is always top of mind for us. Even that you're not focusing on it. Now, did you find that there was the potential for subscription cannibalization? People are in the grocery store. They're less likely to be a subscriber. How did you approach that and how are you thinking about that with this under your belt? I would say for us as we look at the opportunity in retail versus the unique offering we can have by offering a subscription, it allowed us to say we believe that there is still a lot of headroom in the subscription model of our business. Our CEO recently went and talked about how we're moving into the pet side of the world as well. That is part of a subscription business that continues to allow to bring more members into our family, but also being able to offer additional value for existing members because over 50% of them have pets in their household. So, those are different ways that we're looking at where growth can come from, but where are we building off of the position of strength and then how do we go from there? Got it. You mentioned there are some focuses or things that might be coming up. What are your main priorities for the year to come? What are the sort of areas that you see the marketing team at Butcherbox or the overall Butcherbox program growing or expanding into for the next year? It's an exciting year that we have. 2023 for us was very much a foundation setting year. We just re-platformed not to Shopify. That's giving us a lot of unlocks. We did not have when you have somewhat of a homegrown system over the first eight years of your company's existence. That the move to Shopify now allows us to be able to through partnerships, through systems capabilities, through messaging capability. All of those allows us to now be able to do much more on the personalization and segmentation side. So, those are some of the things that we're going to be able to tackle going into this next year. We also are taking a look at making sure from a messaging and creative standpoint how we talk about why Butcherbox and how we talk about what we're offering members and the value of being a member. That's work that we have underway and there's going to be a lot of focus on continuing bringing new people through subscriptions into our organization. In addition to the retention of the members that we have right now, making sure that they constantly feel valued and feeling like the membership that they have Butcherbox is the best investment they made. So you mentioned the pet side of things. And we expect to hear any other new categories you might be entering into in the next 12-ish months. We're always looking. Alright, well Karen, this has been an amazing conversation. Thanks for joining. Thank you for having me. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Modern Retail Podcast, a show by Digidae. If you haven't already, please do subscribe and send this podcast over to a friend who you know would enjoy it. See you next week.