Reputation Rehab

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Sherman writer of Pucks Fashion and Beauty, Mema Line Cheat. And today with me on the show is Jesse Derris, president of orchestra. We're talking crisis PR, brand communication in 2026, the DTC revolution and evolution and so much more. (audience applauding) Before we get going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email called Line Cheat. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. It's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries. Line Cheat is scoopy, analytical and above all fun. Along with me, a subscription to Puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment media, sports, politics, finance, the art world and much more. If you're interested, listeners of fashion people get a discount. Just go to puck.new/fashionpeople to join Puck or start a free trial. (audience applauding) Happy Friday, everyone. Hope you're having a great week. I am gonna try to keep this very, very short 'cause I'm very, very tired. I went to London for two days to see the Scaperale exhibit at the Victorian Albert Museum. I highly recommend it if you wanna check it out. It's really, really, really, really well done. And those things, fashion exhibits at museums are really tricky. So I thought it was great. I went to this dinner that the company hosted with the museum and Daniel Rosemary was there kind of holding court. And it was interesting, Marissa Baronson, what was there? I got to sit next to Chase Infinity and I totally fangirled and told her how much I loved one battle after another and it was really fun. Don't worry, I didn't take a selfie with her or anything embarrassing like that. Anyway, I did a big story on sort of the business of Scaperale, which is honestly much bigger than you probably realize. It was very little in 2020 and has essentially 16Xed its size in the time Daniels had been the creative director. So just kind of looking at like the motivation of Diego Delavale, the guy who controls it, he is also the owner of Todd's group. So that was a fun story. And then I also, I did get to see a lot of people in London. If I didn't see you, I'll see you in the next trip 'cause I'm gonna go there all the time now. It was really nice though that everyone I had a drink with or a meal with, it was just great. At one meal, Kate Moss was at the restaurant and she looked amazing and I realized there's not as any street style shots of her anymore and she really does have the most amazing personal style of anyone in the world and any of you who dress like Santa Miller, you're really dressing like Kate Moss, never forget it. And then also the one little retail thing I did was I went to the JW Anderson store, I believe on Pimlico Road in the Grovener States. It's amazing and if you're a fan of Jonathan Anderson's and you wanna like see inside his brain but also like love homewires and love beautiful source vintage jewelry and there is some clothes too, but it's really gorgeous and really, really nicely done. So I highly recommend it and feel like that needs to be the sort of future of retail. Have fewer stores but do it like that. Anyway, it was a great time. I'm back in Paris and I hope you all have a really nice weekend and I'll talk to you on Tuesday. Jesse Darius welcomed a fashion people. - Thank you very much Lauren. - It's been a long time coming. - I know, apparently this is my fault but I still think it jures but I'm fine with either. - Okay. - We're both busy people. Would you have for breakfast this morning? It's still early where you are so maybe you haven't eaten. - I haven't really eaten. I'm on my second cup of coffee and then a buddy of mine started a company. I'm doing an ad called Pioneer Pastures and it's ultra filtered A2 milk. So it's got, it's really good macros. 160 calories, 30 grams of protein. - Is it pasteurized? - Yeah, of course it's pasteurized. - You know ultra filtered, that sounds, that sounds like something that Dan from or would be like stay away. - Dan definitely knows about this. It's, if you've heard of fair life, fair life is ultra filtered. What he's doing is combining it with, I'm not an investor in this business. I'm just really obsessed with it. He's combining it with A2 milk which basically is okay for people who have lactose intolerance and it has much more protein in it. It's good. - Interesting. So Jesse you mentioned that you're not an investor in this protein-y milk situation but you want everyone to buy it. Why don't we start with a bit about who you are and what you do? - Yeah, so right now I have two jobs. My primary, my day-to-day job is I run, I mean the president of a business called Orcashtra and I run that business with my partner Jonathan Rosen. We're about 700 people working in a bunch of different categories including consumer and technology and public affairs. Primarily built around strategic communications but it's an entire kind of suite of integrated marketing including crisis, public affairs, data, strategy, a bunch of other things. I started my career though. I've had like a very circuitous route. I started my career working in public affairs. I worked on political campaigns. The last one being John Kerry's presidential run 21 years ago. I worked for a guy named Ken Sunshine and built the crisis business at his firm and then accidentally got involved with direct consumer which was my introduction to consumer brands. I was very early in helping Ben Lear with Thrillist and eventually got introduced, not introduced. I was talking to a friend of a friend named Neil Blumenthal about something he was working on a business school and that discussion, his that company became Warpy Parker. And so I helped those guys get that business off the ground. I started talking to Neil about in 2008, the business launched in 2010 and that experience precipitated the launch of DARRIS which was our initial business. - I wish I had my emails from 2008 with Neil and his co-founders ignoring them. I've told you this story right where we have a mutual and she was like, can you talk to these people when I was like, sure, and I just kept blowing them off and it's very funny now. - Yeah, you are the only one. I think I even blew them off. Neil tried to hire me like two or three times because I was just sort of helping them informally and I was like, dude, I don't wanna work with a buddy. And so he asked like two or three times before I actually said yes because I was just like spending time with them. On the side, I would go down and like hang out with them on a Thursday and Friday night and just spend time whiteboarding with them but like it didn't become formal until he asked like three or four times. So you're not allowed. - Makes me feel a little bit better. Don't take my investment advice. That's the answer. Really quickly and then we're gonna talk about Darius because that's how we met and we'll be sort of the beginning of the conversation today. But on the John Kerry campaign, I remember this campaign very clearly because I lived abroad during this period. And I remember I had a lot of friends from small European countries, namely Sweden. And they were like, how can you vote for this person, John Kerry? What does he represent? And I explain to them that when you vote in America, you need to vote for the greater good. It's not like you can have nine candidates and your vote like if you vote for one of them it will really make a difference. You have to vote for the person who you think will make the biggest difference in a country where in a divided country. Was this the way that you, they positioned the campaign was better than the alternative? Like I don't really remember, especially because I was living abroad and acting like I was better. - I mean, that was. - This story starts with Howard Dean 'cause that was who I worked for in the primaries. And often, I mean, I was 23 at the time. Often your first candidate in the primaries like your true belief, right? - You can't. - I like, I like, I-- - Is this the year that he got pretty far? Did he get pretty far further along like in the 2000s? I can't remember. - No, this was the year and it was the year of the Dean's scream when you could like lose a race by yelling into the wrong microphone. Which is really quaint. And we were, you know, in the lead, it looked like for the entirety of the campaign and then stumbled in Iowa and that he had that snaffoo. With the microphone and then basically it was a slow descent through what I think if I'm remembering right was Wisconsin. I was like a nothing on this campaign. I was 23 years old, but I really believed in him and his healthcare message and all these other things. Once that race is over, you then like make a decision, right? Which to your point is like more of an X's and O's decision. Do you want to keep working on the campaign? Can you hustle yourself into a job? Nobody knows who you are. And so I ended up getting sent, there were 14 battleground states that year. I got sent to the 14th. Our team than smallest one, which was Maine, they were trying to win the second congressional district up at Bangor. And I spent six months there, got to build a team, was a really terrible manager, like brutally bad. But why was I, I mean, yeah, we were better than George W. Bush. That was the argument. And I think the kind of original sin of that campaign was it had no reason for being, right? Yeah. You know, for me, I got through that campaign. It was November. It's like one of these weird things where if you win and we went into that, like that, I remember election day, believing at least in my tiny little seat that we were going to win. And you wake up the next day and you're either like, gonna hopefully get employed and it's going to be some big cool job in Washington DC or you're totally unemployed. And you're back at square one and you've just turned 24 and you're living on like friends couches, which is what I was. And I was pretty disillusioned by the race. I mean, we got Swift boated and which was like one of these original kind of things where the president who had who had not gone to serve to Vietnam called this guy who had won Silver Star and a bunch of other awards, a coward, which is kind of fascinating. And it stuck. And I just wanted to take a break, which is how I ended up back in the city. Okay. So fast forward a decade or maybe six years and you had done all this like scary crisis comms for Sunshine Sacks and stressful stuff. How did you end up, you mentioned Warby as I guess you're, that was your one of your first deris clients, but how did you end up starting an agency and it being consumer about consumer brands because your partner is Lisa Frank who came from L'Force and Steven's who I knew from she worked on Target and a lot of fashion brands. How did you end up thinking, oh, all this experience I've in politics and crisis comms, I'm going to launch an agency that focuses on consumer brands because there was something very particular happening in the market right now that I feel like you all captured that no one else did. Well, that wasn't what it was. I want to say when I left, so I had a couple consumer brands at Deris. I knew Warby was going to be our first client. I talked to probably 25 people with adjacencies to consumer and eventually Neil asked me to talk to Lisa who was not looking for a job and I, you know, this Lauren, but like she's a very risk-averse human being. I still have the meetings on my Gmail calendar, but it took me eight meetings once I met her to convince her to come do the job with me and literally only because Neil actually said I was a good person did she come and do it. But the original business was sort of two things. So on the one side, it was a replication of the work that I had been doing at Sunshine so we started out doing a bunch of crisis. We still have crisis clients, crisis only clients. We started out with a little bit of work in pop music. So I was representing Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers and a bunch of others. And then we had a bunch of work in nonprofits. I mean, I think our second client was Share Our Strength, which is a large hunger nonprofit out of DC. The consumer thing started because of Warby, candidly, you know, starting when that business launched in 2010. I was going in every week and sitting with Neil and Dave and then there was a guy named Patrick Bradbury in that room who had a small kind of independent fashion agency and there was a creative shop called Partners in Spade in there and Andy Spade was there and oh my god, why am I blanking on? French music? Fernando music. Fernando. Fernando. I'm a terrible person and I'm going to get Anthony Spardoodie and I do want to say Anthony's the greatest creative I've ever worked with in my life, no offense to anybody else. And I was watching that room work that Neil and David put together and you know, Patrick was handling kind of all of the consumer and fashion, accessories, press really specifically. He was helping them build relationships in the industry, you know, Partners in Spade was doing so much of the like creative, like ideation and execution of like the random ideas that the guys were coming up with that we were all coming up with. And then my job was sort of threefold. I helped them in the early days kind of shape some of the sort of bi-appare language, you know, but again, a lot of that business was like, like grew out of Neil's like actual experience when we were in our 20s. I put in place this thing where we would start to tell all of these stories about the founding of their brand as like a core thing that everybody takes for granted and then I was one of that crazy crew just coming up with ideas that, you know, and what Darius was on the consumer side is I was trying to recreate that room. And so I knew that I could help with strategy and corporate social responsibility and corporate comms and the connection to technology. And I needed somebody who spoke consumer and who spoke fashion and not uppercase f fashion as you know, but lowercase f. And it just took me a while to track down Lisa, but eventually I did. That was the words in business. Yeah. And so I know Patrick, a lot of people listening to this podcast, well, no Patrick. The thing was at the time consumer brands, especially ones that were connected to fashion and a more B Parker is and then also Everlane was an early client of yours. And this was a new sort of it was the start of the rise of the DTC brand, which we both know existed forever, basically. And and really became a big thing with the rise of specialty retail in the early night in the early 80s with like the gap and things like that where you have an owned brand and a single brand in a store. And it's not just about multi brand retailer department stores, but at the time, because a lot of these brands didn't have physical retail, they were digital first. They became like this new class of brand. And having this as a startup to have a sort of corporate comms side to things, that was pretty rare. And so you all work, you were there was no one like you, especially in the beginning. And and there was so much attention to these brands. Did you and then and then you all also would take equity sometimes in the business, which I think is was not common at fashion PR at least. Yeah. When did you realize that as you picked up things like glossier or I know that was a few years later, but when did you realize, Oh, there is like a going to be a whole new genre of brand coming out of venture that and we are the best position to sort of help us in them through because you were never going to do sample trafficking. But like as we both know that basically doesn't exist anymore. So you were sort of early on the fact that like it has to be about strategy. Yeah. So we thought I thought the foundational change that was happening was that a bunch of brands were going to get created that were having conversations with consumers as opposed to at them. That brand would no longer be this thing that you like shouted at people and like they had to listen. It was it was meant to be communicative. And what was fascinating being like in the very early warby thing is that a lot of the businesses I saw in the year after that business launched and it immediately connected with consumers like people launched like replica eyeglass businesses, which was fascinating to me. And up to it, including I remember one of them, I'm forgetting the name of it. Actually, never mind. I know the name of it, but I won't say out. And they actually stole the photography off the warby website, which was only really funny because the photography was like partially of everybody's friends like because they wouldn't have money if there was no money for like models. And so what I saw was like, oh man, this is going to hit every single industry like in the entire world. Because what's happening is that the channels that people communicate through are changing and comms was one of them, but social obviously pretty early on was also clearly going to be one of them. And the conversation was going to be had with people and we were going to respect people and tell them the truth. Like that was the like original grain. And each of the businesses, it's sort of like they were connected linearly. So in the fall of 2012, Jeff Raider reached out to me because he was starting to put together what became Harry's. And so I helped Jeff and Andy with Harry's very early. And that was where my first office was. Jeff introduced me to Michael Praseman, who was in the early days at Everlane. And I helped Michael with radical transparency. Michael introduced me to Yael Flalo when Rafe was starting to turn from a physical kind of retail store, containment, secondhand, like into what it became. And so we got to work really early on that. And then I helped Josh Kushner really early with what became Oscar Health Insurance, which is a whole other story and a different thing. And Josh was going to lead the first round of financing into what became Glossier. And that's how I met Emily and originally Henry. And so like the businesses were pretty linear. And they were all following not the same playbook, but they were understanding the kind of world as it had changed, which is that there needs to be some reason that you exist that you can talk about. And yes, the brand has to have great product and it has to have compelling visual language, but it also has to have substance. And substance that you can talk about both through the lens of the product that the company has created and through why it exists in the first place. And you could see customers picking up this notion that Wow, oh, this is a breath of fresh air. And that brand is going to talk to me like a human being as opposed to a customer. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? He's so dangerous to live that more dangerous than a B minor. This is a C++ life because when you're living a B or B++ life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough? Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, "Okay, an A++ life is not available to me, but there is a way." We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts. Early on, I think a lot of what we end up talking about with DTC is how you market it to consumers. I feel like I've had this conversation with Neil or journalists have millions of times where when they first started marketing on Facebook, it didn't cost any money or it cost very little money. Then it just got too expensive and I don't know how long this would take, but walk us through this evolution of these brands because a lot of them, Michael famously would say, "We're never going to have stores," which obviously they were going to. He was like, "We're never going to have stores." Well, into the 2010s, and then suddenly, they had stores because you have to have a multi-channel approach to these things. Obviously. Yes. But how they reached consumers in the beginning and how did that evolve over 15 years or 10, 12 years? If you look at the Providence of Warby, and a lot of this was Patrick at the beginning, and you know this, but we hired Lena out of Patrick's office and she was the fourth person we hired. She's not a president of the business. A lot of it was earned, and a lot of it was press. A lot of the early Warby stuff was GQ and other things. Facebook was taking hold, but it was still starting to grow outside of the original core college audience. You know, I give Michael Praesman credit for this because we talked about it a bunch. Pre-indexed, like, pre-add Instagram was the other thing. Like a bunch of these businesses started to find content market fit in the days when Instagram didn't cost anything. And I think that goes a lot for Glossier and Everlane and a bunch of the other businesses. When that thing got indexed and people started to spend money against it, we went through this, like, almost third epic where a bunch of growth venture firms decided these were venture businesses, which is a whole different discussion, but like maybe worthy and poor enormous amounts of cash into it. And that cash people just like lit on fire on these social networks. And they stopped worrying about the math of the way their business worked and the way their growth margin worked and how much it cost to acquire a customer and the lifetime value of that customer. And when the money spigot got turned off, a lot of that stuff went away, but that was also the moment when we went from kind of having this, like, friend graph approach to social to what we have now, which is the sort of tick-tockification of everything and best content wins. And what's been true throughout is you can spend money, right? Anybody can spend money and grow. But if you don't find like the fit between your content and your customer, you're going to fail eventually because it's not sustainable to buy every single customer at a loss, obviously. Yeah. I feel like the reductive way to put what happened during that period was that like these, a lot of these venture firms thought that consumer was hot, thought these brands seem really cool and they were growing fast. And they put a bunch of money into them and they were like, don't worry about making a profit. Just like grow, grow, grow, grow, as if you were a tech platform or something. And in the end, like, that's not how consumer brands are built and most of them failed. Talking to founders who like had so much pressure to just grow the top line, do you think that there is any nuance to that or do you think that's just like kind of plain and simple what happened? I mean, listen, to the extent like people prioritized growth over like having real businesses 100%. Like, I mean, there's just no question about it. And I think to the extent you were running a business that had good fundamentals and you could pull it back and make the math problem work and the business still was a real business. You survived. And when you couldn't, when you know, the Ferris wheel stopped, like, how was that? And so I think, but we had a 10, I mean, you know this, we had a 10 year period where when interest rates were near zero, money was free. And to your point, like, I don't necessarily think consumer isn't venture, right? But it like, and adventure, like, and I think this is like the important point. He's like, oh, man, DDC didn't work. I'm like, it sure did. I mean, you know, but in venture, 99% of the stuff doesn't work. So you'd have a hard time explaining me that skims isn't a venture business. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing is these brands, a lot of them still exist. So even like outdoor voices, which I mean, how long that last at this point, I don't know, but like, it still exists. Yeah. And I guess like, why do you think so many of them have stuck around? Do you think it's that because most of them like their original investors aren't even in it anymore? Do you think it's because the brands that were built early on were just so solid from a architecture perspective or? Yeah. I mean, they all have different stories, right? And many of them have succeeded, but a lot of those businesses existed before the paid epic, right? And so like, say whatever you want about what Ty has built, but Ty is an incredible merchandiser at the great storyteller. She, I think, led an entire era in that category, whether or not she wanted. And what she did was incredible. So I'm not surprised that business is still around, right? You know, I'm not either. Yes. Yeah, I agree. In the same way that a lot of those businesses, like they were there for a reason and they had built like really real relationships with their customers. And so whether or not the business was ever going to be, because you could make an argument that in the world that we live in and the way discovery happens, that it's going to be extraordinarily hard to create another abracrombie, right? And I read your piece, you know, I don't know when this is going to air, but you wrote about it I think yesterday. Sarah Shapiro, yeah. And yes, like I was thinking about I was putting like the analyst had on because I read a lot of retail analysis and it's like if you start your year at zero every year and you drew $3 billion of revenue, that you're a successful business. Yes. And I think it's going to be really hard to build that kind of business in the epic that we have now, but I'm not surprised that a bunch of these businesses have succeeded to some extent. They had real connections with people. So another thing, let's talk about the storytelling element of it for a second, because I was working at business a fashion when most of these companies came up and when you all, I started there in 2013. So it was like, as you were growing, Deris, I was looking at these businesses. And so I worked on a lot of stories with you and your team. And this thing that happened during that period was this like very close coverage of these firms. A lot of sharing of revenue when they were going out to raise another funding round, like a lot of transparency as Michael Praseman would say in terms of like what was actually happening at the business because they were proud of it and there were strategic reasons. And what it has done and I see this in my coverage of the luxury industry too and I'm sure this is across industries is that there is this like micro coverage of businesses and also like now, now you see it on TikTok and you see it with when I'm covering LVMH, like there are consumers who shop, Dior who are doing TikTok videos about like, is Dior going to save LVMH? It's so step by step now. But how did that benefit the brands that you were covering and also like how did it challenge them? Because outdoor voices is a great example. I'm probably the most, the biggest student of outdoor voices and the person who's followed is closely through all the different iterations. But there were other people too. Like there were New York Times. Think about the fact that there was like, there was a New York Times story about this little company that like at most made 90 million a year and sales probably not that much. What do you think like the benefits of it were or the, you know, what were the challenges with people covering stuff so closely? I can tell you why I thought it would work at the beginning because it's definitely changed, right? But like, I grew up, I'm an 80s kid. I grew up in a mall, right? Pretty much every week. But it feels like the heyday of like brand advertising, like the Gillette ads were incredible, like the B-Leg Mike ads, all that stuff. You walked into a mall on the weekends and it was sort of the like original social network. You walked around a mall with your friends, like the windows were what was important and all the merchandising you walked in, like, you know, you, you maybe saw stuff merchandising on a table. You maybe pick something up. Like the third or fourth or fifth thing was touching the product, but it was all imagery and merchandising, right? And so I do think the thing that we had all gotten a little allergic to was being sold at, right? Because it felt like we were being sold at in the most materialistic country during the most materialistic time in its history. And I think the organic nature of these businesses when they started and to accept now where people would just be honest with you, right? I remember like long conversations like I think the day after we launched Harry's, the company, oh not the day after me, it was a few days later, we had a problem with the product. And I remember talking to Jeff Raider, who incredible founder, right? Vorbian Harry's. And he was a clutch we do, right? Because it was people were saying the product was doing, it was not working the way they wanted. And literally the conversation we had, well, what would like the incumbents do? And we talked that out. And then we did the opposite. And I really do think a lot of it was that it was filling a white space where people felt like the brands they were interacting with were kind of not phony, but like felt like brands. I didn't feel like people, right? And so that was the beginning of it. It then starts to scale and everybody's talking like this, right? And we go through this period of time where everything looks exactly the same, which always happens. Everybody speaks exactly the same. Everything is derivative. And then it starts to feel less special, right? It starts to feel like everything's been carbon copied. And that period of time is sort of when you figure out whether or not you actually have a connection with your customer and with the ecosystem. So I do think, and we've gone through several periods since them. But I do, like that was the original intent of it if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. And but like when it got a little dicey later on, like how did you manage it for and all your brands? It was different. Like I would say for most of reformations trajectory, there was a business wise, it always did well. And B, there was like one blip during the pandemic where you had like a thing that a lot of people were dealing with at that time, like reckoning type thing. But they was actually when you look back on it was like two days. Yeah. Like it was, but then there were other businesses that you worked with that would like have weird, like Everlane never had, like would have like weird controversies, but they were sort of also surface, but it would come up, you know, once every six months or once every year, like, how did you, as those, it was like, and you had all the big brands. So all the ones that people cared about were the ones that had challenges. Like why do you think it got a little dicey for some of them? Like we obviously wore be never, never anything controversial. But like, there was stuff to talk about. I just think it's part of the natural cycle. Yeah. Like every single brand goes through peaks and troughs. Like, this is why I like, I probably bring this up and I hope I don't get in trouble, but like, you know, there are brands, I won't say the name because I want to get in trouble. But the enormous consumer brands, consumer lifestyle brands that got in trouble for child labor in the 90s. Right? Like literally, people make their products and lots of them. And those brands are all still around and all bigger than they have or have been before. Like brands go through challenges. Right? And so I mean, reformations and amazing example, like, yeah, I'll founded that business and has an incredible eye and an incredible voice. But like that business isn't what it is now without Halley, who is an insanely talented operator. Yeah. And what she's done to the business as it's grown, I mean, it's just incredible to watch, but they have since the beginning, no matter what they've gone through, like, stay really true to their product and to serving their customer and to like, making stuff that people love. And it also exists for like a great purpose and a reason, right? To make the world a little bit better. And so I don't know, I see, like, I think it's normal. What every single one of these brands went through, they were hyper scrutinized because they were covered a lot. And like, you know this, but like the media echo chamber is a thing. Like, people love to write about the things they've written about. And so if you've written about the rise of a company, you have to write about its downfall. And then eventually you have to write about its resurrection, right? So it's like, to me, that's just the cycle of like, of the way, like, the public personify stuff. Well, I think that's why you all are a bit different than, you know, for the PRs or for the fashion people who are listening to this, like, that's why you're different from a strategy and an approach perspective. Because in fashion, a lot of these companies, like when they're high problems are just used to brand, used to journalistic, ignoring them because they need the advertising too much. So they'll skip over if a company is having a lot of financial issues. The one exception to that is like, if it's on the public market, then it's fair game. So I feel like a lot of these trade reporters in particular get very gleeful when a big company has like a very bad quarter because they're like, yes, we can finally write up the truth about what's happening with it because it's public information instead of doing their jobs and writing about it behind the scenes. But that's my own little, my own little soap box. But but um, to your, your point, and which I guess fascinating is like, a lot of this has gotten democratized, right? So you're not seeing, you don't have to wait for an established media presence to write about something to have, you know, some analysts, you know, whether you consider them armchair or not, kind of like doing thing pieces on it, right? Like the idea, like even what you're doing, I mean, just like the idea of what you're doing existing 10 years ago, like it's so obvious now that it should exist, but it wasn't necessarily obvious when you were at B.O.F., right? So like, I just think, and again, as we've totally democratized distribution, right? It's totally free to distribute now. Like, I have the same distribution cost as Puck does, right? Whether an eye-based reading it is a different matter. But like as we've totally democratized distribution, as we made it easier and easier to discover new stuff, whether it's new people, new brands, do anything, like you've just totally flatten the earth as it relates to like how many people kind of pined about how many different things. That's what you're seeing. So like to me to overreact to any one thing, when a brand is going through ops and going through downs, you know, brand is built on years and then decades of repetition. Like and you're either good or you're not good. And I think the only time when brands truly suffer, when their business is actually suffer, is when the stuff that is not good becomes like a working pattern. But aside from that, like going through like a single like negative event, I don't think is like particularly impactful on a real brand. Do you feel like these brands are in the brands that you're working with that that have been around for 15 years? What kind of phase of the cycle, of the consumer cycle? Do you see them in? And how do you all, how are you all working with them differently now than you were even five years ago? I mean, the world fundamentally changed, right? And so I would say three things in particular to me. One audience is everywhere and all around us, right? It's you're a large company, a small company, your internal audience matters, right? Your customers matter influencers and creators matter, the press matters. That's one, two, the kind of distribution of power has changed. And so power exists in lots of different places that are formal or informal. You can talk about the government, both federal and state governments, but you can also talk about power like existing in like small pockets of the press and in influencers and getting caught in a political debate that you never, you know, never intended. And then three, everything's moving really quickly. And so, you know, the best brands are collapsing the delta between like the advice their CEO and their CMO and their CCO gets the strategy that they have put in place and then their ability to react, whether you're doing something proactive or reactive. So I say all that to say, everything needs to be more integrated now, right? And we have this fundamental belief here that the future of the world is earned that every single channel that's meaningful now is meaningful because it earns your attention, right? It earns your time, it earns your scrolling, like it earns your ability to show up in person. By the way, reflection of what you guys have built and others in that space have built that are successful. And you know, for us, like, you have to have the ability in a company like ours, I believe, to be able to speak to the C-suite one, to be able to build like data informed strategy that actually like speaks to your customer and allows your customer to speak back. And then three has the ability to work like totally multi-channel, like regardless of channel in whatever way works for your client. So that might be press, it might be influencer, it might be affiliate, but it might as much be, you know, organic social or public affairs or crisis or internal communications. And the more defuse those various things are, the harder your life is going to be as a leader. How do you think the way that consumers consume now? Now, being so, I don't even know how to describe it. It's like so micro in terms of the direct relationship with the brands, but also you just have so much access to so many different brands and how you discover things has changed. It's not about going to a store anymore. As much as we would love it to be, it's not about going to a store and you find a new brand and great and what a lovely experience. People just don't, it's not how their brains are wired anymore. How is that changing how these companies are growing and being built? Well, I think the way discovery works, especially in fashion today or in retail more broadly, the way discovery works and the desire of people to discover makes it harder to build something scaled. Full stop. I think we all know that and it's driving people into smaller and smaller corners. I think two things can be true. People still love that act of discovery, but I also think, like, paradoxically, we're going through a bit of an age where people want to buy less stuff and have it be higher quality. In some respects, it's still young people are still going to buy fast fashion. I think when you look at those two things, I still do think people shop in similar ways that they have in the past where if they find something they like, they invest in it. At the same time, I think the way discovery is happening in a world like consumer is different than the way it's happening in other places. We talked about this briefly, but when people are searching on chat GBT or Claude, it's a totally different thing. If you're searching for the best tent for a desert, for instance, you used to put that in Google. You'd have to shuffle through the 10 sponsored links and then search into your own research. You do the same search in chat GBT now and it's going to tell you the tent to buy. It totally changes the intent and it totally changes the conversion. If you click the sourcing on that chat GBT work, it's going to bring up probably 10 things that are either based in customer comments or press effectively, which I think is fascinating. It's almost like going back to the beginning where something as simple as just doing straight up paid is going to change in value relative to things that help establish and build brand. I do think we might be at the beginning of a new app. This might be a dumb question, but how much are brands able to pay these chat GBT or Claude or is that not part of the equation right now? I assume it is with Google AI. People are building AEO products. We have a really good one. There's three pieces to it. The models are picking up certain types of earned content. If you understand what they're picking up and that gets to the last part which I'll talk to, you can reinforce what they're picking up and do more of it. That's one. Two, a lot of SEO work was about the functional setup of a site and the way your own content works and a bunch of other things. We have a team that can actually work on that because there are things that the LLMs are picking up. Then three, you have the ability to continually measure this, to literally run the same query millions and millions of times and see how it's changing from day to day and why it's changing. That data can drive the decisions that you're making on one and two if that makes sense. Listen, chat GBT, I mean, open AI and a bunch of these companies are starting to move towards paid and that ad thing is going to happen and I think that will change over time and adapt as they see what works. But already right now, the version of how you impact these engines, plenty of people are starting to do that. If you're not, you have to be. Well, I just wonder, the thing I use it a lot for is what book should I read next or what movie should I watch next? I do the first couple of times you use it, it's really valuable because you're like, "Oh, that's exactly what I want." And then you realize it's only going to, it keeps coming up at the same things because I'm a limited person. So even no matter how I really put it in, I'm kind of saying the same thing every time. And so there's books that have been surfaced to me on Clawed like 15 times and I'm like, "Why does it?" And so I wonder, I mean, I guess this is just what our world is just so small now and that's what it reflects. It's so big but so small. The LLMs are going to take in and reflect the conversations you have with it and get to know you, right? And that's one, which may or may not sound creepy, right? And then number two, I think the most interesting thing to think about technology is today is the worst it's going to be. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Like the experience you're having today is the very worst version of it you're going to have. But when you're going to have tomorrow, it's going to be slightly better and slightly better because good continue to improve. Big experience. Yeah. And so as it learns more about you as the kind of as the product matures, it's going to get better and better at this, right? And you're probably since you've realized that like it works on books and movies, you might ask it for some other stuff down the road. And you're not going to do it for like the clothes you buy because you're encyclopedic about that. But you're not encyclopedic about everything, right? Well, I have used it for like what should I, what kind of outfit should I wear tonight? Yeah. So like, I'm not going to ask you for advice on what to buy in that like what brand to buy or anything like that. But I have been like, it's this weather outside and I'm going here at this in this place. What kind of what's like and because sometimes you just don't know like you, especially in LA, there's like people dress like freaks like no one in nothing ever makes sense. I'm always like, should I wear that? I don't know. Think about what you're saying. Like you, Lauren Sherman, right? The most like knowledgeable person about this in like I know you won't say you are. You spend your entire life writing about about what people are wearing about like how these brands grow and you are asking for advice in that category. Yeah. Do this thing. I think any of us trying to anticipate exactly how this is going to change the world. It's sort of futile. But I think you play it ending by ending and right now it's at this place product wise where you can definitely impact it by doing like smart things and doing it repetitively. That will move into the paid realm like everything else like once paid starts to pick up and it'll be fascinating to see the paths the different products take. And then there's going to be a million other like versions of that. But if it's not like it has to be part of how you're thinking because I like discovery is going to continue to change. In the same way that like where you and I grew up like as like AIM kids right doing dial up internet. Yeah. We could have never anticipated the impact the 20 year impact Google's had right and Google search and like obviously this both like the opening eye version and the clawed version and the Google version like is going to have it's an it's an apoccal like impact in how we're going to behave as consumers. Okay. Final question for you. But do you think and this it's a hard question to answer but like what do you think the value of brand is now and will be as as this stuff develops because you can say the thing I see with sort of generational surveys that I've been looking at for 20 years is half of the survey say that consumers young consumer. Don't care about brands and our brand loyal half of them say that they are and it seems like every generation is the exact same thing but I'm curious like do you think there is a value in spending a lot of time and money in building out a brand story and a brand's reason to exist when there are just people buying these hair curling irons on tiktok because tiktok said to do it. Yeah. Yes and. So like I think brand is always going to have enormous intrinsic value and generational value like brands are things you can pass down to your kids and I also think people shop with their wallets and their emotions right. And so discovery is both going to be a thing that we're actively doing in finding new things whether those things are finding us through all the social media advertising or we are scrolling with intent and trying to look for something one two we will still also pretty much always go back to the brand that like deeply connect with us and those brands exist all over our lives right. You might feel that way about Nike but like like we feel that way about Colgate right like if I brought up crest to my wife. Oh my god like no way. And so there's no way that is going away and if anything in the world to come where we're doing less of the legwork on discovery when we're counting on these answer engines to tell us what to buy. I could make a pretty compelling case that brands going to matter more because you're going to have to have heard of something to feel trust in buying it if it's going to be sent to you in a way in which oh this is the choice because if you if you see it and they're like this is the one you should buy if you've heard of it you're almost certainly going to pull the trigger and buy it. And if you haven't, it's probably going to lead you to do a bunch more research and like to figure out like what the proxy for trust is for the purchase. Yeah. I mean, it's, of course you brought up Nike because I think it is the brand that is the most like at an impasse right now where it seems like it's doing a little better. It was never doing that badly, but in the market, the perception was that it like lost whatever it had. And for our generation, it is the like go to brand. I don't, I have actually never been a big Nike sneakers person. I've gone in and out, but like right now if I buy, work out clothes, I still buy them from Nike because it's just and I love the, I love the logo. Like I love the way I love old vintage Nike stuff. I don't know like do younger consumers feel this way about Nike or Levi's or Kleenex or Crest because the marketing isn't as effective even if the marketing is good. It's not as like emotional as it was when we were growing up because there's just so much more. It's just that there's so much more exposed to so many different things that like I don't, do you think there are going to be brands that come out of this generation that people feel a do you think that Nike is going to be as valuable or powerful as it is now 50 years from now and be. Do you think they're going to be brands that develop during this time that you helped develop that are going to be super powerful 50 years from now. I don't know and I hope I mean I was looking up Nike's numbers Nike did 46 billion dollars of revenue. 10% increase year over year at that size. I mean that's incredible. That means it grew $4 billion last year. Like I, well I think it had had had fallen quite a bit. So they clearly pursued a distribution cap that wasn't like super smart under previous leadership. They've also clearly gotten back to like product led delivery now and I think the product looks. I mean I love Nike. I Nike is but what Nike is everybody when I ask Nike what the mission is they say just do it. It's not the mission. Right. The mission of Nike is inspiration and innovation right to every athlete in the world and then it it puts a little star next to the athlete thing says be able to body your an athlete. And yes I remember it. I'm obsessed with it. And like if you look at the work they've done over the last like 50 years. I'm a paying attention to this thing forever. Whether it was Nike air or it's the innovation they've done with materials with MIT or all these other things like they're actually doing the work on the innovation side. And then the inspiration side the way they tell stories like I still think that stuff is going to matter deeply. And I still yeah if I had to bet on like five brands that are going to be around 50 years Nike would definitely be one of them. And I think it's an incredible brand. And you know and I just I do think this stuff is going to mean again paradoxically even more in the future than it has over the last 10 years because of the way like shopping is changing. I hope you're right because otherwise it's a little depressing. But think about the way your life works you're going to have products in your mind that you commoditize you've had that since you're a kid right like in our family we don't drink soda in our family but when I was a kid when my mom bought a two liter bottle of soda every single week at the grocery store and it was whatever was 90 cents that week right. She had no brand affinity. But there were other things where she swore by the brand I still think that's the way we shop right there things that to your commodity it doesn't matter or something that you're willing to try because why not and the thing is surfacing something. That's like oh yeah I love hair curlers I'm just like they know you like they've been following around the internet they know the likelihood is that you're going to convert and it's just like cheap bottom of the funnel like really truly direct consumer stuff. And then there's going to be a much of other stuff that you buy where you either buy it as if it's a subscription like every time you buy sneakers you buy Nike or you just become like you've deep affinity for the business. And you continue to collect it in whatever it means and the collection can be anything it can be stuff that's consumable it can be stuff that lasts forever. But I think you're going to have both but I do think given the way discovery I think will shift I think brand will mean more in the coming of it. Jesse thank you for being here this is super fun. Yeah it was a lot of fun. Thanks for. Fashion People is a presentation of Odyssey in partnership with Puck the show is produced and edited by Molly Nugent special thanks to Puck co-founder John Kelly executive editor Ben Landy producer Maya tribute and director of editorial operations Gabi Grossman an additional thanks to the team at Odyssey Kelly Turner and Bob Tabitor.