NM Live: Balancing Brand and Performance Marketing With John Hutchison, CEO of Bonobos

Drew Sanocki

Hey everybody today on the nerd marketing podcast, we talked to John Hutchinson, who is the CEO of Bonobos just completed his tenure as CEO of Bonobos. He shares with us how he grew that brand, how he thinks of brand marketing versus performance marketing, what he would do if he were running a smaller DTC brand today. He also ran TRX, which is that performance equipment company. And so really interesting conversation with John. Had a great time. We're really lucky to have him at this stage in his career. Enjoy the podcast with John Hutchinson.

What's the story behind the print?

John Hutchison

Yeah, so I'm calling in here from my home office. When I started with Bonobos, you know, we're a hybrid business and I'd be working some days from home. And I thought like, I want to always be about the brand. And so Bonobos is kind of famous for our prints. Thank you for wearing a Bonobos shirt. I recognize that one. This is our froggy floral shirt print. And I had it turned into custom wallpaper to put on the back of my wall here in my office. And so everyone gets a kick out of it and actually has the shirt, I'll wear the shirt sometimes. I'm just like a floating head, you know, like the scale is perfect, but that's pretty close to what you're wearing.

Michael Epstein

So for those just listening, John has a wallpaper print of Bonobos style and Drew has tried to match it as closely as possible with his shirt. So we plan this well.

Drew Sanocki

Things you miss if you're just listening to the audio. John, welcome to the podcast. Former CEO, Bonobos TRX. Maybe just give us a quick rundown because I think everybody in DTC knows Bonobos. It's like how you got to where you are today.

John Hutchison

Well, yeah, I don't know if it's quick. I'll try to do the quick version. I've kind of fallen into it. I'm a consumer branded guy now. I have a disease called apparel and footwear and I just love it. You know, I did a lot of things earlier in my career, corporate finance and management consulting, a little bit of private equity, but I found myself at Nike and this was like 2011 and Nike was like the real formative experience of my career. I learned more there than I did at business school. And so I spent about five years at Nike doing strategy. It is a great place to actually learn every aspect of the business. I was kind of the smart young guy. They threw it every problem. And when you're like that across five years, you really get a chance to see everything. I thought I'd stay at Nike forever and kind of switch from being the strategy right hand guy to being the guy in the captain chair and running a P&L. And I got a call from a headhunter at just the right moment who said, hey, do you want to transform the world's biggest outdoor brand based in the Bay Area? Like, well, that is intriguing. Let me take that call. And that was the North Face. And Nike was just the head of strategy for slices of their business. At the North Face, was the head of strategy globally. At a time when they really needed to transform the business, they had grown really well for like 15 years and then flatlined for a period of a few years before I started there. So the then president, Todd Spiletto, and I and a handful of others were on a mission to get the business back to growth. But when you're already the biggest in the outdoor world, you have to grow beyond. And so it was really about category expansion and brand extension and simplistically growing into sportswear and the athletic and athleisure world, in addition to holding onto your core outdoor business. And it was super fun. Big transformation. We changed everything about how we were structured, how we went to market. And, you know, in the process of doing that, we built these business units and I raised my hand and said, I'd love to finally make that jump over to the general management side and do this athletic and athleisure business unit. We called that the run and train business. Simple is always easier when you name it something. And it was fun. It was like, we grew that to $150 million and pretty short order. And I thought I was going to be at North Face for a long time. And, you know, you find throughout your career that restructurings happen and it was a surprise, but it gave me the opportunity sitting there in the Bay Area, try something new. And TRX came along. It was much smaller than the worlds of Nike and North Face, you know, like $50 million. Incredible, charismatic founder and Ramty Hetrick, who is a Navy SEAL, who invented these black and yellow straps. And what was really cool about TRX was one, it was like the first like president, like a full P&L gig that I'd had. It was smaller and they gave me a shot at it. But it was the opposite of most companies' issues where you've got a good business, but you're struggling to get brand awareness. T-Rex was the opposite. Whereas the business needed to have some professional management to it. But the brand awareness was off the charts. Like I could talk to people in like Germany and I'd be like TRX and they might not know, but then I might say the black and yellow straps. I'm like, yeah, I use that in my gym or with my personal trainer. It just felt like this awesome opportunity to take this brand that was so well known and just bring a little process, a little strategy to it, which I felt like I could do. And so that was fun. That was 2019. And then the world changed in 2020. It was a total tale of two cities and we can get into that some more. We had the world's most affordable full body workout you could put over the back of your door at a time when everyone was starting to work out at home. It was just so many life and business lessons that came along in the TRX time. But a lot like Peloton of very publicly, TRX privately, we would have that stratospheric rise and the kind of meteoric fall in demand. you know, when you're the head of the business, they'll look to you and say, like, maybe it's the person leading it to change it. And so I eventually got let go. They went through a couple of different things. Randy Hetrick got the business back over time. So I'm very happy for him, who was the founder of TRX. But again, lots of lessons. then, you know, I was doing different things in between and Bonobos came along. What I loved about Bonobos was that I had Bonobos pants before the company even existed. I was fortunate to go to business school with Andy Dunn and Brian Spaley, who were the co-founders of Bonobos at Stanford. And it was actually Brian who made Spaley pants, as we called them in school. And I had a pair of those. And I was really an early customer. And you just kind of support my classmates, really. And had a lot of fun with it. And we can talk some more about it. But I just saw the potential to bring Bonobos back to some of its former glory and it was a fun couple year ride with Bonobos.

Drew Sanocki

Owned by Walmart at that point?

John Hutchison

Yeah, Andy Dunn sold it to Walmart in 2017. You know, Walmart is a great owner in the sense they have like the world's best balance sheet. It was kind of a distraction for them. Like it was originally part of the jet.com kind of walmart.com strategy that Mark Laurie was trying to bring into Walmart. And that strategy had run its course by the time I got there in 2022. so Walmart decided to exit all of their DTC digitally native businesses and asked me to help them with that. And I was like, sure. I love the brand too and so it's been a fun ride helping them sell it and integrate with another business and try to bring back the brand.

Drew Sanocki

So that you knew going into the Bonobos leadership position that the vision was that they were going to divest of Bonobos.

John Hutchison

Yeah, it was nice of them to let me know that but in the interview process I was actually interviewing with the EVP of all of apparel at Walmart. It's like 25 billion dollars or something like that and I was like, what are you doing with Bonobos? They're like, well, we don't really know. We're looking for the next CEO to help us and I'm like, well, I'm happy to continue to grow it on your balance sheet indefinitely but we're not going to sell at Walmart. It's not the same customer price point and they agreed with that. And I said, also said like, hey, when you're ready to sell it. I think I'm uniquely able to help you do that as well, given my earlier stints in private equity and then trying to help sell the TRX business a lot in the previous go. And right before they gave me the offer, they're like, actually, we're going to sell it. You still want the job? I'm like, sure, let's do this.

Drew Sanocki

And that's how you and I met. Yeah. We were at the same business school. We didn't meet there, but we were part of a group putting a low ball bid in on Bonobos. But I loved it for the same reason. I mean, the first digitally native apparel brand maybe, or at least done, put that term into play, right? That this was like the first to totally embrace customer lifetime value, to open up the guide shops. Like you want to be a part of Bonobos, right? I mean, this is, it's history.

John Hutchison

It's a really special company, really special brand, the team that is there and still there. There's a handful of folks that were from kind of that original guard, original team early on and yeah, it's a special place. So in a lot of ways though, the world caught up to it, like selling online was no longer novel. And I think a lot of people kind of got lost that like D2C was like a revolutionary business model when in reality, it's just another channel business, you know, and so. But novels needed to modernize and catch up to where others had kind of surpassed it in lot of ways.

Drew Sanocki

So is that what you did under your tenure?

John Hutchison

Yeah, you know, and there's only so much you can do when you're trying to drive a sale and an integration, right? But what's interesting about Bonobos is like the tech stack is still in a lot of ways, like what they had to build themselves, you know, like a decade ago or longer. In fact, like a lot of people don't realize it, but Bonobos at a certain point actually had their technology team sitting in Palo Alto trying to basically white label the e-commerce stack that we had built. like before Shopify existed, they were basically trying to become Shopify. And that ran for a few years and they kind of got confused. Are we a technology company or an apparel company? And they said, no, we're actually, we're an apparel company. And they kind of pulled that team back. But it was curious to think like had Bonobos leaned into that pivot, it might be a totally different, much more valuable company today, but we still make amazing pants and suits and other things. And it's a great fun, great fun brand and team. I still feel very proud of the team and the work that we've put out over the past few years.

Drew Sanocki

How do you measure success on that kind of branding work?

John Hutchison

The way you measured is on brand awareness. There's all sorts of ways to measure it. We actually worked with Harris Poll and we did like a weekly study on that, which is maybe too many measurements. Often you'll hear people do it like every six months or every quarter. But like for us that brand awareness and consideration was an important number. I largely credit Krissie Millan, who's our CMO at Bonobos with a lot of this great work, but she and I basically started at the same time and we were in the 20s in terms of like aided brand awareness. So like if someone gives you a list of brands, have you heard of them check box those? And we were like 2627, which on the one hand is great, like you've checked yourself into a general brand awareness. But there's like 75 % of people out there who've never heard of Bonobos or know that it's, you know, pronounced Bonobos and it's not bombas the sock company, like all these different ways of like people, you know, not really knowing this. And so we measure that a lot. Brand awareness and moving is difficult. We moved it up into the mid thirties or the past two years, which is pretty considerable. It's like a 7 to 10 point move moves and brand awareness of like one or two or three points is generally seen as successful. That part we felt really good about, you know, bottom of funnel marketing is just there's not a lot there. Like we call it a funnel because you got to fill the top of the funnel, right? And that brand marketing or that getting onto people's awareness and consideration makes the bottom of the funnel so much more efficient. And so that's what you guys do so well in helping other companies out there. Getting into a mailbox is going to be better than an email inbox. And so those are the sorts of things that we were trying to do is rebalance our marketing, which had gotten way too dependent on performance marketing, rebalance that to brand so we can fill the funnel and get more people to know about us.

Michael Epstein

This is something that's a really hot topic right now, especially now because people's P &Ls are stretched a little bit. People have a hard time thinking about how to allocate resources to the top of the funnel and awareness versus the bottom of the funnel. You're exactly right. Like the bottom of the funnel is just circling the drain at this point. How did you all think about those success indicators and how you would allocate spend and marketing effort and dollars across different stages of the funnel.

John Hutchison

So a couple different ways and maybe it was like principles to like one of the principles we had was like to not move it too quickly but now was suspending more than 75 % of its marketing budget on bottom of funnel performance marketing and we knew we weren't gonna shift that to 25 % overnight you do that you're gonna kill your revenues so we knew that it needed to be like a gradual shift I think what surprised me was I thought we would shift more dollars over time into brand and we didn't actually have to. It wasn't like flipping it from 75-25 in terms of performance marketing to 25 performance marketing and 75 brand. It was much more gradual. think maybe, and we never really got there, but like maybe a more optimum would have been 40 % brand and 60 % performance marketing. Again, we probably got to like 30-70 right on that. And so it doesn't take as much spend on brand and upper funnel as people think, but it makes a world of difference in terms of your efficiency as you work your way through to those hardworking conversion investments. And then to your question on measurement, a couple of different things. One is tracking brand awareness and seeing that it's checking through. One is checking all of your channels and hopefully driving more ROAS, although I think ROAS is one of the hardest and worst metrics to use. Ultimately, it's the business growing too, like at the end of the day, like the top line on a monthly basis and like the profitability of business, like sometimes we get lost in like micro measurements on marketing channels and you're, you're using dubious data. Like is the business, you know, feeling like it's growing or not? Like that said a lot. And then the other thing we did was we used a media mix model too. It takes a little money to pay for it. I don't even know the term for it. Like PhD data science folks in econometrics and they built something for us that helped us understand investments in brands and how they were delivering on the business more holistically that gave us a sense that it was working too. So kind of like as many measurements as possible, but also like the business performing ultimately too.

Michael Epstein

What kind of time frame did you look at measuring some of those top of funnel investments?

John Hutchison

I was trying to give us, and it sounds like forever, but you just have to believe, I was trying to give us six to 12 months to start to see things. What was really surprising was, particularly in the brand awareness tracking, we were starting to see results in one to two months, and then it got better and better over time. And that's what I was surprised by is typically brand investments, you got to give yourself some time. But what was surprising to see was it can actually start to make an impact sooner than people realize.

Drew Sanocki

What's an example of one that really worked well, even though you don't have a ROAS on it?

John Hutchison

We kind of outsourced our creative, the previous leadership that outsourced to an agency. And that agency was great and supportive. But when I reflect on thinking about the output, it was just kind of all over the place. And so what I think really worked well for us, and again, kind of surprised to how fast it worked, was we went through a pretty deliberate rebranding effort, bringing an agency to support us, some consumer research, and then really trying to define a look and feel. The ethos was like, let's get back to the fun Bonobos, but let's modernize it for today. It can't be fratty or bro-y in terms of tone, but it needs to be clever and witty. Let's be thoughtful about color because clearly I'm pointing to my background. We can be bold and fun. We spent a couple of months doing that hard work, but we came out of it with a really clear brand, playbook, persona, palette… all of those important things. And then we put it into place in a fall campaign and just put out, you know, all of the content that we put out over, like, again, really until this day was like following that formula. think the consistency around that, hopefully surprising people a little bit, or like, you know, reminding them of what they enjoyed about Bonobos. Like there was a pretty nice immediate reaction to that. And we could get measure that and brand awareness numbers as well as, you know, a nice bump in revenues. And that was in fall of 23. So we had a great, great 2023 into 2024. And I think a lot of it was like showing a new face that was familiar, but also fresh.

Michael Epstein 

The other philosophies I think that Bonobos kind of inspired Drew and I on was this concept of whales and minnows treating different customers differently. The people who come in and buy socks are a lot different than the people who buy the suit. Was that something that sort of persisted in your tenure? Was that something that you all looked at a lot? Is bifurcating customers?

John Hutchison

What was really fun about Bonobos was when I started, I kind of went on a listening tour of like all these OG Bonobians who had gone on to other places. And I had several people talk to me about the whales and minnows strategy. So we didn't call it that anymore. Maybe we should have because it's a great shorthand, but it was built into the way we thought about our business. We like so many other companies, you know, identified a VIP segment. We don't have a loyalty program which maybe makes us an anomaly in this day and age, no one says a business model that is inherently sticky. You know, we make lots of different fits for our product. And once you find your perfect fit, you're not going to find it at a J crew or wherever. And so that is inherently sticky, but our VIPs, you know, spent like four times more with us, you know, four to six times more valuable, like depending on the timeframe that you would pick. Right. That ethos of Whales and Minnows was still with us and we thought about it as we tried to build our business. And it's like maybe a grade above Minnows. Maybe it's, you know, like a small feeder fish or something like that. Those customers matter too, right? And so like that's the beauty of the business offense is figuring out how you can optimize up and down like different consumer and customer segments.

Michael Epstein

How did you sort of orient the business around targeting those different segments differently?

John Hutchison

We're awash in data, right? And like, this is maybe one of those places where I think like some of the industry had surpassed us. You know, we were kind of stuck with some older stuff in terms of like data and CRMs and other things. And so, you know, we really just kind of had segments based on purchase behavior, which is helpful. A lot of people do that, right? How many times they purchased. We definitely focused on VIPs. Again, we didn't have like a loyalty program so we weren't offering discounts or anything we would give them like previews of product first chance at new product first chance at sales so search of things converted really well but a lot of times like our biggest opportunity was getting that like big bucket of one time buyers to become a second time buyer and just like playing with all the different sort of tactics that can get you there of course discounts are always the fastest way but not the best way in terms of lifetime value so it's just kind of playing with those things we tried to understand to beyond just like frequency, like what they were buying. We've learned some really interesting things like our flagship product is a Chino. We call it the Chino 2.0, right? And like, you know, if a buyer came in for that, they were pretty likely to buy another Chino at some point. Like it's that guy who just doesn't want to spend a lot of time shopping. He's found the thing it works for him. He bought it in khaki. Now he wants the charcoal one. Right. And so like that was also a way for us to like, try to get those people to repeat purchase. And then we had an interesting golf segment. We had like a really nice little golf line and we found that was kind of like a unique buyer. Like that person might actually stay a lot in our golf world and buy there. And so let's just understand frequency and the types of purchases they are making to try to, you know, get them to repeat more. And we were very fortunate to have a repeat rate, retention rate. Not every company has that luck.

Drew Sanocki 

I mean, you guys were one of the first to open stores. At the time, the marketing department worked with Peter Fader from Wharton, and there was a lot of content about how opening up the guide shops got you in front of the highest value customers, right? Like your whale customers. That's still the case. You see a lot of your best customers coming through the store.

John Hutchison

And just for everyone to know, Bonobos has this thing called Guide Shops. Our Guide Shops are small format stores and unlike the normal store, it's really a fitting experience in a showroom. We don't have any inventory for you to carry out there. And that still surprises people. We've had them since 2012. So we're working on 12, 13 years of having Guide Shops out there. Definitely people still walk in and think like, hold it, I don't get the product in a shopping bag. But was actually, we built them because of a unique consumer insight. The Bonobos corporate team used to be headquartered on the fifth floor of a building in Midtown. Still headquartered in Midtown, but in a different facility. But on the fifth floor, people would find us. They would literally Google the office and come up unannounced and just show up to our fifth floor and be hey, I just want to try on some pants. I just want to know that they fit. And we'd happened to build like a little showroom because we were at that point already trying to sell to Nordstrom. So Bonobos is digitally native, but like even five years in, we realized the power of Omni-channel, which we can talk about. So guide shops in Nordstrom kind of both happened at the same point as we were trying to find, you know, distribution in the world. Anyways, insight was like guys came, tried it on and were totally fine. They're like, yeah, I'll just, you know, I'll put it in the order here and you can ship it to me two days later. And so with that insight, actually, you we actually had a guide shop and our fifth floor office for 10 years with people doing that. We opened the first guide shop in Soho and it just worked. Although again, the original digitally native brand, we recognize the power of like brick and mortar or like the real experience, particularly building the business around fit. People want to make sure things fit well. And so our best customers are still the ones who come through. Actually the very best customer is someone who gets fitted at a guide shop, knows what works for them, and then orders online for repeat purchases until something new comes out or until their body changes, they want to get fitted again. And that omnichannel customer is like, even if you just take a snapshot of a year, they're like two times, you know, they're buying two times more and they're spending three times more, just in a year. And then you extrapolate that over like a longer lifetime value. They're much, much more valuable. That person who shops both guide shops and online. And it just makes sense. You know, people want to touch and feel a lot of times, but they don't want to do it every time.

Drew Sanocki

In your playbook now, like if you ever run an apparel brand again, it's like we need brick and mortar.

John Hutchison

Absolutely. I want to be where the consumer is shopping period. Right. And so I think there's a big value in owning as much of that experience as possible. And so if I've got the capital, I'd be building my own stores because I think that immersive experience in the brand is so much more valuable. They're buying a lot more from you and they're better customers over the lifetime. But if it means showing up in an Orstrom or a Bloomingdale's or something like that, when they're thinking about buying pants or shirt or suit or what have you, like I wanna be there also, you know, at that moment of decision and present my brand. And I'm willing to bet that the brand that I'm with is gonna win, you know, like that's just kind of the mindset you got, you know, go in and fight for customers wherever they are.

Drew Sanocki

How about if outside of apparel like TRX?

John Hutchison

You know, TRX was interesting too, because like TRX, most of the sales of TRX when I got there were actually B2B sales to gyms. And so the founder and the, you know, the early growth of the business recognized that like selling to trainers or selling to gym owners, getting that product out there and used by people, that was the thing that was going to drive the at home purchase. And that still kind of worked really well. so TRX, even though it is, you know, a smaller business and some of the other ones I've been in was really well distributed, across every channel you can think of. And a lot of it was like building a trial by going to gyms and trainers first and then selling it to people.

Michael Epstein

How did you look at the economics of a store, particularly for Bonobos? We've got so many brands are realizing the same thing is like, we've got to be where the customer is and that's not just online. And they're starting to roll out their own stores. They're starting to go into wholesale too. But especially when it comes to thinking about an owned retail strategy, how do you think about the economics of.

John Hutchison

The traditional way of measuring it is what they call four wall profitability, right? So like, you know, once you cover your rent and like your, you know, the labor allocation and then some sort of like marketing and corporate overhead, like is that business still profitable within those four walls? Right. And it varies, right? Like Nike and North Face or like other big established retailers, they want to see 20 to 25 % four wall profitability, which is a pretty high bar, but because they have such awareness and cloud, they can go get that you know, but no, most of other companies don't have that, right? And so you'd like, you still want to make sure your your stores for well profitable, but like, in my mind, like, break even was fine, because of this, like omni channel lifetime value of the customer, like, I know that customers that come through a guide shop are much more valuable, they stay longer, and it helps the the website of the business, right? And so I encourage people to take a little bit longer view or broader view than the traditional four wall profitability. Another way to look at it is just like customer acquisition. Like nowadays, like $100 CACs are not uncommon for a lot of brands, very expensive. And like a storefront, like, you know, some of our storefronts would get like 2000, 3000, 4000 new customers a year. And so when you factor that in, that's like, oh, that's like $200,000, you know, of like, or $20,000 or like $50,000, like however you want to like calculate that, but like that's real value as well. And so like, I can acquire customers once you pay off the capital invested in that business, in that storefront. That's kind free customer acquisition year in and year out. And so like me, like there's lots of ways to measure it. I encourage people not to get too stuck on like the four-wall profitability because that'll be a barrier to them getting started and kind of missing the broader value of like that omni-channel customer.

Drew Sanocki

I remember all the theses of these companies that, you the private equity companies that were going to buy Bonobos from Walmart. We're all like, let's get rid of the stores. Let's just cut it down. Find the profitable stores and then we're going to cut everything else.

John Hutchison

There was definitely a lot. At the end of the day, we had to go to the best and highest value for Walmart, of course, in the sale. But when people were asking me who would I prefer, it was definitely people who understood the value of stores or what we would be losing if we had to close all those stores. Because there's definitely a group of investors out there who just see them as capital intensive and not very profitable and kind of miss the true value that they bring. It's a tough time to raise capital too, you know, like I would have loved to add another 50 stores, but it's really hard to do that as well. So it's just, I get why it's a harder decision for folks, but I think if you can afford to do it, you're not going to regret it.

Drew Sanocki

Honestly, and I'm not saying this just because I run PostPilot, but it's like when some of these big iconic brands cut the catalog and then do worse afterwards over the next six months, because it's like this big line item that they just think they're going to get rid of. And what they actually end up doing is getting rid of their highest value customers. You know J.Crew’s went through that before they rebooted the whole.

John Hutchison

And you can see how much value they realized came from it with the big splashy, like we're bringing back the catalog and they had a big event for it and everything, which shows you, I think, the realization of like how valuable it was, but also what it meant to people. Like J.Crew is like, everyone remembers those catalogs and like, you know, they went away and then, you know, not coincidentally, like J.Crew kind of went off the radar for a while with people. So we were doing a lot the same thing. Bonobos had a great catalog business for many years. They went away from it like in COVID. And then it took us a while to start to reboot it, because it is an expensive proposition. You got to prove it out. But as we put tests out there, they worked. They're incremental. As you guys know, it's a great channel. And you can measure it just as well as you can measure anything else. Frankly, better.

Michael Epstein 

What's the future of D2C look like for you? Or maybe it's what's the future of consumer brands look like?

John Hutchison

Yeah, that's what I going to say is I think the future of D2C is really just like the future of consumer, right? So like, think DTC is a channel. And I think that channel has matured and frankly, I think there's aspects of profitability in the channel that are really challenging right now. The companies that are succeeding are ones that are truly omni-channel, meaning web, D2C, their own stores and like a nice wholesale business, right? Like the balance of those things, like anyone I can think of, and I don't necessarily want to name names, still like to call anyone out. But like the ones that are working right now and successful have that balance, but have it like a strong, juicy presence. I do believe that that direct connection to the consumer matters. Yes, it matters on the data, but like it really just kind of matters more on like, how people feel about you, you're not just some random brand that they pick up because they need it in a, you know, a retail store, like you're communicating to them and you're providing value to them. Hopefully you're entertaining them or inspiring them in between purchases. Like, I think that matters too. And I think that's where people get lost in the world of like, just email them more often or just add another discount. Like I worry about, that's not sustainable. That's not going to work. Right. But brands who recognize they're trying to build a relationship with people, entertain and inspire. That's the way. And then meet the customer wherever they are, whatever channel you can sell.

Michael Epstein 

One of the other philosophies that I think we both subscribe to, especially with all of us being involved in a lot of turnarounds, is like the Drucker quote of culture eats strategy for breakfast. You sort of alluded to it earlier, culture at Bonobos, but throughout your career, like how has that impacted how you've operated these businesses? And I think people overlook that a lot and think it's all about sort of performance marketing metrics and things like that. How do you build culture in these organizations and how do you change culture in organizations that you've had to step into.

John Hutchison

I love the question because at the end of the day, it really is about culture and people. Like those are the things that make something work or they're the things that didn't work. Right. Nike was an amazing place, very competitive, which has its pluses and minuses, but I really just wanted to do the world's best work. And like, you can learn so much there. The North Face was not nearly as political, which was awesome, but moved a little bit slower, but still had big ambitions and people who cared. I think the outdoor industry gets people like that. TRX was awesome in a sense of like, really, and particularly that time, like we thought we were changing people's lives because we were helping them work out at a time when, when everyone was like sheltering in place and, Bonobos just, you know, legendary culture, really empathetic, cared a lot, and really want to do a good job. Like, I think what I learned about each of those places is unless you're at a startup, you're joining a culture that exists, right? And like, I think particularly as a leader, like you can create some aspect of culture, but like either you align with the culture or you don't, right? Or you're fighting, you know, upstream. And I think there were times in my career where I was fighting upstream a little bit. And there were other places where I wasn't, where I felt like the culture that already existed was really kind of aligned with how I behaved and operated. And I've definitely felt that way at Bonobos. So it was just, it felt like a great fit. It felt like we could drive a lot of, a lot of change, a lot of change happened, but it felt okay. Like I didn't feel like in any aspect, we wrecked the great culture there, which was really about like a tight knit team who cared about each other, you know, to be able to navigate that, you know, I leaned into that culture. I think I'm a transparent and honest guy and I come across as empathy is kind of like a high, you know, piece of what I do in terms of teams and leadership and it just worked. And so I think that's what I would say is like it really is about culture and people at the end of the day, but it really helps to make sure that like how you are and how you lead and how you show up aligns with that culture. Cause if not, it's going to be a tough fit or just going to feel a lot more challenging than it should.

Drew Sanocki

Good advice. My last question is about your career and sort of you've done something that everybody wants to do. Probably listening to this podcast, you know, the young marketer or merchandiser who wants to run a P&L worked at so many big brands. How would you advise somebody who's now early in their career blocking and tackling at a Shopify brand, a Shopify store right now, you know, five, $10 million in revenue to get to where you've gone.

John Hutchison

I will say that on the resume or LinkedIn, it looks like a nice linear path. It didn't feel that way. I think anyone who's gone far enough in their career would say it's a long and winding path. I think getting great experience and great experiences matters a lot. I think what's interesting about my career is I've never had the same job more than two and a half years. I've worked in the same company and had different jobs, but I would be what headhunters might call, it looks like a jumpy resume. I go from one thing to the other. for me, it's always like, what I really liked was like, coming into a situation, hopefully learning quickly, making an impact, and then like making sure things are set up well for the future and then moving to the next thing. I don't know if it's like just intellectual curiosity or whatever, but like, I think for people, like make sure you're like gathering great experiences along the way. That can be on the same firm, but like pushing yourself and stretching yourself into other roles, but like to get to CEO, you're have to have like a number of roles along the way and just, you know, don't get stuck in the same place if it's not feeling right, but definitely like make sure you kind of understand like what you're doing a job for, what you hope to gain from it, how it stretches you. And then, you know, at a certain point, think about what's next. You know, the world's big, it's changing a lot. I value people who have, you know, lots of experiences that they can draw on versus someone who kind of just took a pretty static journey somewhere.

Drew Sanocki

That bats, you know, and don't sit idle. Like I think the times I've been the most frustrated in my career looking back, I've just been in one position too long and I didn't have the motivation to switch for some reason.

John Hutchison

Totally. I mean, that's what's interesting to me too is, Bonobos is an awesome opportunity, but it was also like, there was a lot of change we had to navigate in the past two and a half years. And I was very heads down. And just in the past like six, seven weeks since I've, you know, left the business has been such a great generative, exciting, exploratory time, AI and you know, all these different things I've been diving into in conversations. Like I feel like in some ways like, I've grown in the past six or seven weeks of just talking to people and seeing what's interesting out there than I did in, you know, six to 12 months in the Bonobos grind. so like, make sure you're getting similar generative times in your career as well. It can be in a job or it can be in between jobs, but like that's actually really invigorating for me. And I hope that for a lot of people.

Drew Sanocki

Anything in AI that is impacting apparel?
John Hutchison

I think AI is going to dramatically change how you run a consumer business in the next like 12 months. And so that's been like a big part of my exploration is like kind of building this thesis of like, okay, well how and where and let me learn as much as I can about those things, either to utilize them in my next gig, whatever that is, or to just try to like, you know, stay on the pulse of what's happening. But I just think that if you do any sort of analytics as part of your job, finance or planners or something like that. Your world's going to change. AI agents can do so much more and faster. I think that, I mean, obviously things like CX and customer service are actually quite mature. There's like, you know, lots of brands out there, but there's been a wave of like in-house CX to offshore BPOs. I think chatbots are going to people that are actually implementing these things like those chat bots are taking like 75 or 80 % of incoming customer contacts and people are loving it. Like you're giving me the answer right when I want it. Great. I don't care if you're a bot, you know? And then I think things like truly personalized marketing, like we've been talking about personalized marketing for like a couple of decades now. It's never really, you know, been about the ability to create customer segmentation. We've been able to do that for a while. It's been about like marrying up the content, the message, what is the personalized message? And that still required like graphic designers and copywriters and like creative directors to approve stuff. like the company that like cracks like the ability with generative AI to like actually provide variations on copy, offer, image, video, whatever. And that like really detailed customer segmentation, like that's personalized marketing. And you can do it at scale. And I thought like some of the image and video stuff was going to be a couple years away. And it's like, the advances I've seen in just like a couple months was like jaw dropping. So like, it's so interesting.

Drew Sanocki

And it's a topic for another podcast, but I kind of feel like the three of us, this stage of our career in our late 40s, early 50s, it's an interesting point because we're not totally aged out of it and just be like, I don't care what happens. We have access to these bigger sort of like legacy brands and iconic brands, and yet we still, maybe through our kids or something, are just tied into the state of the art. And we've got the ability to sort of bridge that gap, right? And bring whatever's working for some of these startups we see and bring it to like the bigger legacy brands. It's an interesting position.

John Hutchison

The thing about AI too is like usually like new technologies favor the young because they're they're just more willing to try something or what have you. I've heard this is not an original idea by me, but like AI is actually going to benefit the experienced folks like us and maybe like, you know, a few years younger because we've actually done the work and we know when we're getting garbage output. I actually feel bad for the kid who's 20 who's like using ChatGPT to like create something and it's done in a black box. has no idea how it's done. He sees the output says, okay. I don't really have enough bats to know that this is reasonable or not. I'm to pass it on. It's like, no, like the number of times in chat GPT, I'm like, I think you're wrong. You need to check this. And it's like, yes, you're right. There is a whole data field that I omitted. I'm like, so it might ironically, you know, benefit more experienced folks out there, but it would make it really hard for Gen Z getting jobs right now. So we'll see what happens.

Michael Epstein

Totally agree with you, I think. Knowing what good looks like is gonna be a hugely important skill. Entry level work is gonna be tough.

John Hutchison

Totally tough. Or this is just what we're telling ourselves so we feel good about our jobs.

Michael Epstein

I mean, it's all getting eaten at some point. It's just like in which order and at what time.

John Hutchison

Totally. I totally agree.

Drew Sanocki

Thanks, John. This was awesome. This was really, really fun. Great knowledge. Thanks for sharing with us. Yeah, we really appreciate you coming on.

John Hutchison

Yeah, thanks for having me.