In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, Kerry Curran is joined by Jennifer Peters, Director of D2C, Martech, and Digital Compliance at OLLY. They discuss essential strategies for future-proofing startups, covering key topics from building effective roadmaps to managing customer subscriptions for long-term growth. Jennifer also shares her insights on scaling OLLY from a startup to a Unilever brand, emphasizing the crucial role of leadership, tech infrastructure, and customer-centric decision-making. This episode is filled with valuable takeaways for executives focused on driving revenue growth and sustainability.

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.209)

So welcome, Jennifer. So excited to have you here today. Please introduce yourself and share a bit about your background and experience.

Jennifer Peters (00:10.962)

Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm Jennifer. I'm the director of D2C, Martech, and Digital Compliance at OLLY, the gummy vitamin company, supplement company. We are a Unilever brand. I've been there for about three and a half years. It is a wonderful place to work, and we sell a product that is just fun every day, so that makes it a lot easier. I came from a lot of different places. I've been at an agency, done a lot of brand work, worked on several different kinds of brands, and freelance with a lot of different kinds of brands. And when I was at the agency, I was an e-commerce platform architect, so I built stores for brands. So I've kind of seen all the elements, the marketing, the technical, the sales piece, like all of that in my life. And I think it makes my job a lot easier.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:58.336)

Yeah, definitely. It's the e-commerce landscape, the evolution just even in the past 10 years has been so rapid. So I know I've loved watching it and kind of being a part of it on the marketing and advertising side. And obviously the backend part of it is so important as well.

Jennifer Peters (01:07.735)

Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:19.029)

Great. And so you've got tons of experience and have mastered a lot of different business challenges in the e -comm space. And I know one of the topics that you are very knowledgeable on is kind of how to set yourself up, how companies can future proof, how companies can future proof themselves for the different stages of scaling and growth. So love to kind of have you take it away and share a bit of your POV on that.

Jennifer Peters (01:48.366)

Yeah, absolutely. I have a couple different examples, but I'm going to start with OLLY. Cause we were started as we were a startup. We were founded in 2015 in San Francisco as a startup, same founder as Method. Well, he is kind of like a chronic entrepreneur. And it was very startup culture is, you know, it's very exciting when you're a startup that's doing well. We were acquired by Unilever in 2019, which is not a lot of time. I would just like to say that it's not a lot of time.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:07.189)

Mm-mm. Yeah. 

Jennifer Peters (02:17.534)

Then obviously COVID happened. So there was like, you know, kind of a couple of years of that. But basically it's, it's, you often come in, especially like in the role that I'm in, you come in midstream, like you never, you're never there at the beginning and build everything from the ground up yourself where you know how everything works and why decisions were made. Like that is pretty unrealistic. Usually you come in and you're like, what is this? How did it get this way? Why was this decision made this way?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:30.444)

Okay. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (02:45.346)

What were you, who did that? What were you thinking? And then, you know, there's always this kind of research piece where you try to understand why things happen the way they did. Sometimes there's very good reasons for that. Sometimes there, you know, there's a perspective that was missing in the conversation where that was decided. So at OLLY, for sure, it was one of those situations where I came in very lucky to have the same developer that built the store. Like I think, …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:57.379)

Mm-mm.

Jennifer Peters (03:12.43)

… for that every day. I mean, it's amazing because he really does know where all the digital bodies are buried. So that's an amazing advantage, but usually you do not have that. Usually you're kind of trying to figure that out on your own. And I was the first person to run D2C. So it was the first head count that was specifically assigned to that role and running like the OLLY.com business. And you could tell. So there were a lot of things.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:19.027)

Yep. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (03:41.664)

Where we were making decisions for six months from now. We were not making decisions for a year or five years from now. And I think it's really hard at that stage too, because you want to move fast. You want to be agile. You maybe don't have the time to do as much due diligence as you would in a more established brand. And sometimes the knowledge and experience just isn't there on your team. In this case, there was no headcount assigned to it. It was kind of just like...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:50.083)

Mm-mm.

Jennifer Peters (04:10.39)

Swept under marketing in a vague way. But there were, I mean, there were a lot of things that you could tell were startup decisions that were not gonna scale. And the example I always use that I think is one of the most important ones, especially in the supplement space is subscriptions. There's two things that are terrible in digital and that's moving subscriptions and migrating ESPs. Like nobody wants to do either of those things.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:20.899)

Right. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (04:37.994)

I think subscriptions are the worst because they are very high risk. You're, you know, you're moving these tokenized credit card numbers and PII and kind of all this stuff and hoping you don't lose it. So that is one of the things I always like when I talk to other companies that are in any sort of replenishable business, not even just supplements. For me, if you're going to go hard and you're going to invest in something that is a five year plan, subscriptions are the place to do it. Like go find the partner that you want to be with for five years. Like if you think.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:46.766)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Peters (05:07.746)

Let's try this, don't, don't do that. wait. Because that's one that's really hard to back out of. And with us, we had kind of a structure built around our subscriptions that was driven by operations and shipping costs instead of by customer needs and customer wants. And that I think is another thing that you can always use as a course corrector in a startup or a maturing brand is to think about, know, like what, but what would our customer like the most?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:09.313)

Yeah, mm-mm.

Jennifer Peters (05:37.41)

Because a lot of times those decisions don't get made with that in mind.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:40.553)

Right. Well, and it's because you see that a lot with any, any product development, especially when in the startup, like the founders had a vision, they saw it and, and what a great idea. But to your point, it's like the product led or operations led, you're, you're going to miss what's going to resonate with your customers. And then to your point of there's so much data and infrastructure, that's, that's needs to move with it.

Jennifer Peters (05:49.005)

Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:09.337)

I wanted to, you brought up a really good point of kind of when you came into OLLY, wasn't that there were, you came in and there's a lot of things that needed to be changed right away. And, and I know you, you'll probably get to this later as well, but startups and as they grow, like it's different skill sets at different stages, right? So to a point, like the team that your founders had around when they launched, you know, kind of outgrew the brand outgrew the skill set of those people and then they needed to kind of graduate to more elevated expertise like yourself.


Is there an opportunity for brand startups to start with and you're kind of talking about that with the tech partner and infrastructure, but from a talent perspective as well? Like, is it possible or recommended that the founders at the very early stages are looking for a more advanced talent or does it work to start with the kind of who they have and then graduate?

Jennifer Peters (07:18.892)

Yeah, that's a great question. And this is purely my opinion. I'm not sure that there is a right answer to that. I think that there are people who have a heart for startups and love the startup world. Like they thrive in that world and you see them go from startup to startup to startup. And there's a reason for that. That's what they like, that's what drives them. That's what makes them happy.


When you kind of move out of that phase as your, as your brand into this awkward, awkward teenage phase was what I usually call it. you know, there's, there usually is like self-correcting because I think they're like, this is, this is not what I want to do. Like, I don't want to sit here and build processes that are, you know, going to get us from here to there. Like, this is not what's in my heart. Like I want to go, I want to go do something that's, you know, more in line with what I love, what I love. So I think there's, there's part of that and, we need those people who love startups. think they're so critical to getting things off the ground because

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:55.257)

Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Peters (08:16.268)

Like I do not have the heart for getting things off the ground. Like I don't want that. I am not interested. I did spend some time at an IOT startup here in San Francisco and they were kind of on that cusp of boom, like, you know, either being acquired or, or getting much bigger. And, now, there's definitely a feeling I think in San Francisco in general that like, you might have a CEO that is like you said, he's brilliant. He made this product that he lives for and loves, he might not be the best business manager in the world. So I think there's some of that too, where you just think that it's okay to bring in people. It's okay if you're a CEO and a startup and you're just like, I love, I'm a product person. I love my product. I want to work on that. Bring in someone who is a general manager who can manage the business. It doesn't have to be you, but there is sometimes ego involved. And I think there is a lot of reluctance to kind of let go …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:51.235)

Right, Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (09:15.382)

… and focus on the things that you are good at, if it's product development, if it's marketing, if it's branding or whatever it is. Those are decisions I think that can kind of make or break a startup in those early years. Like how much is that CEO willing to let go and let the other people manage, let them be experts in their space.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:33.847)

Yeah, no, that definitely, and it's such a rush for funding and capital or acquisition. So it's almost more of a short-term focus anyway versus long-term planning.

Jennifer Peters (09:39.138)

Mm-hmm. Constant cycle of fundraising. Yes, that's, yes.

Jennifer Peters (09:47.126)

Absolutely. And I think that's a great point because a lot of times the goal is to get to the next fundraising round and not to be profitable and not to make customers happy. And so I think that again, if you don't have people specializing in those kinds of roles, you're going to lose sight of that. And that's going to hurt you eventually.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:55.905)

Right, Or volume, yeah.

Yeah, no, definitely. yeah, it's interesting. And it's probably a much bigger concept and topic of how to move through that growth phase without disruption. In this scenario, you come in, you've got a startup, and you're ready to scale it. So talk us through some of the right steps that any …

Jennifer Peters (10:16.685)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:31.971)

… companies should be considering future -proofing.

Jennifer Peters (10:35.928)

So road mapping is critical. That, you know, I mean, there's road mapping in a very technical way, like a web development kind of way. And there's road mapping in just a very broad kind of idea sort of way. And both are really important. Thinking down the road of a year from now, where do I expect to be, really determines everything you do in between now and then. So even if you're not in a technical environment, it's still really important to plan those things. And in a technical environment, it's more like, …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:37.857)

Mm-mm

Jennifer Peters (11:06.08)

At what point in my revenue journey am I gonna bring in this new tool? Like when does my revenue justify the addition of, I don't know, say you wanted to go all in on, I don't know, they don't really work that way anymore. I was gonna say you wanna go all in on Salesforce marketing or whatever, but that's not a great example. But like when do I want to...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:24.632)

Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Peters (11:30.222)

When do I want to really launch into sophisticated CRM programs? When is my journey going to become a focus? When is, like, when does that make sense? When do I have enough customers in my database to make that make sense? And you can build journeys all day long, but if there's like 10 customers in the pipeline, it's not going to be great. But like, when do we think? Absolutely. Like that's sad. Like, you know, at what point do you feel like when we hit this amount of revenue, … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:34.903)

Right. Yeah. A very empty CRM. Echoes.

Jennifer Peters (11:57.026)

Do we bring in a CDP so we can manage our data better and safer? You know, there's just, there's so many things that I think like you have to plan those milestones in advance. Even if they're not, even they're not technical, they're not, they don't have to be technical, but they have to be a plan of, when we, when we get here, we do this and fulfillment is another place that is a critical in scaling because if your fulfillment partner is doing great with what you're doing now, …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:06.935)

Hmm.

Jennifer Peters (12:25.742)

… and doesn't have the capabilities to scale to the $10 million business you want to be in five years, moving warehouses is terrible. Like nobody wants to do that. So think asking those good questions of vendors upfront too, like what are your full capabilities? Not just can you accommodate me now, but can you accommodate me as my business grows and scales? I think those are really, really important questions. And I mean, I can say since I've been at OLLY, we have moved warehouses.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:28.27)

Mm. Yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Peters (12:52.908)

We have moved CRMs, we have moved subscriptions, and they're all full of learning. You always learn a lot when you do it, but it's easier to not have to do that if you can avoid it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:54.755)

Mm-mm. Yeah.

Great. And so you talked about this kind of planning. you've the setting up the roadmap for the physical and technical infrastructure. And then as you're thinking about where do you want to be in the next year and the next year, what are some of the next steps?

Jennifer Peters (13:22.19)

Gosh, that's such a good question. I mean, I think it depends on what kind of business you're in, but a lot of it starts with the product too. And I think that is another thing that can easily happen in startups. When you have 10 people, 15 people, 20 people working at a company, everybody knows everything all of the time. And it's really nice. Like you feel like you have a full understanding of what, what the product people are working on and what the salespeople need and you know, all of those things. You have a lot of visibility into that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:27.031)

Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Peters (13:49.708)

As you grow, I think there's a real tendency to start siloing off. And then suddenly you don't have any visibility. And then there's no infrastructure to support communication cross -functionally. So then, know, the silos just get worse. They never get better unless you do something. but there's, think that in the startup culture, there's such a, here's this tool. I'm going to use my company credit card and sign up for it really quickly because I need this thing. Well, somebody else might have signed up for that same thing.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:00.343)

Right, Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (14:17.576)

And now you're paying for it twice instead of like being an enterprise account. And that has happened in several places where I've worked. like, how many Canva accounts do we have here? You know, like, so I think there's, you know, that communication piece is really important. Even if the infrastructure is not there, you don't want to be paying for something twice or, or having tools that do the same thing, but there are different tools. So like if your sales team is using a different email system than your marketing team, like why are you doing that?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:17.653)

Mm-hmm. Yep, yep.

Jennifer Peters (14:47.118)

That's expensive, you're paying for it twice. So yeah, I think consolidating tools is really important, but I think it all comes back to that kind of cross -functional communication. And I think as leaders, it's our job to facilitate that. It's our job to make sure that that is happening and it's happening correctly. Otherwise, I think that reflects directly on our leadership.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:56.985)

Yeah, yeah. And so you talked a bit about leadership and culture and kind of building the team out. And so how do you approach when to hire the right people or know when it's time for your business to scale? Now it's time to scale the team. Where do I look? How do I plan for that?

Jennifer Peters (15:29.74)

My gosh, that is, I think, I don't know that there's a right answer to that. But I think it definitely starts at the top, in relinquishing some of that control as a CEO or as assuming you're a CEO founder or even just a CEO. I think hiring people that you trust to do their jobs is the best thing you can do. and, and, and that trickles down because then those people will hire people that they can trust to do their jobs. And that's how it works in a successful brand.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:39.585)

Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (15:59.106)

But it really does have to start at the top. And I think it's really a lot easier when that leadership person at the top of the pyramid demonstrates that in a transparent and honest way. Our CEO at OLLY is, she is totally incredible. And she is one of the most transparent people I've ever seen in my life. And all of that is part of our culture because of who she is. That is all of that is in our culture.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:11.16)

Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (16:23.214)

So I think that it starts at home. It starts in the C-suite and then the CEO's office of who do we want to be? How do I want people to feel? How do I empower the people that directly report to me so that they then empower the people that directly report to them. And then you're also hiring people in as you're adding headcount, you're trusting people to say, Hey, we need headcount. I think that can be a thing too, where you're just like, I need help. But you know, you can't really necessarily quantify what you need help with.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:23.352)

Right. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (16:52.802)

Writing a job description and the cost of bringing on that headcount. Again, that kind of goes back to that planning and road mapping. If you're running an e-commerce business, at what point do you bring in somebody to just do retention? What point do you bring in someone just to do like, just to be like a website manager so that, you know, that the other person can be more strategic? I think it's different for different brands, but.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:53.538)

Mm-mm. Right, right.

Jennifer Peters (17:17.376)

My feeling is if you are hiring people from the top down that you trust to make good decisions and that are experts in their area, then it will determine itself. Like those things will happen in the right order. Probably not perfect and like none of us are perfect, but I think you have a much better chance when you have empowered leaders from the top down making good choices for the business as a whole and not just for their department. And that again, that comes from the top too.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:23.687)

Yes, yes.

Yeah. And one of the examples you gave was about a kind of brainstorming for design thinking and how to expand your product from either marketing or product actual vitamins, different supplements. So talk a bit about how that process has been really valuable and how it's helped your teams.

Jennifer Peters (18:11.148)

Yeah, absolutely. I was the director of marketing and e-commerce for seven years at a Christian church supply company in Nashville. This is part of our business as a publishing house as well. So there was a lot, a lot of creative people, a lot of creative stuff happening there. wasn't just kind of like just transactional. And we did so many design thinking workshops and I didn't realize at the time because everyone around me was kind of the same, you we all were doing the same thing. I never realized until recently how much that drove the way I think about solving problems. And I'm lucky to have had the opportunity to kind of learn in that way. And that's something I think at OLLY, we're it's, well, any, at any, at any startup, probably that's evolving. Always starting with the customer first is not necessarily part of your culture. And it's, it's like the customer first, then you work backward always, like it always starts with the customer. And, you know, I mean, there's.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:45.837)

Love that. Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Peters (19:10.592)

There are times, like one of the brands I worked with in the operations department, you would ask their director of ops, like, who's your customer? And they're like Walmart. And they're like, no, it's the wrong answer. So I think humanizing the customer throughout your business and in all departments is really, that is a cultural thing for sure. But at the end of the day, your goal is to make a customer happy, a person, like an individual person, and you're supposed to be making their life better. And then thinking backwards and how do I do that?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:21.409)

Yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Peters (19:40.59)

But when you let other things drive decision -making like operations or shipping costs, or you want to hit a certain price point maybe on a product, but that's not how customers would want that. anytime you're letting those other things drive decision -making, you're going to eventually have to go back and clean that up because it's always going to end up being a problem. But if you start with the customer first and work backwards, you're pretty much always going to win.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:50.178)

Mm. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Cause you need the customer to be happy to sell more products, to keep the company growing, to have that money, to reinvest. it really ties down to if you're going to grow revenue, you need to focus on who's actually spending the money. So yeah, no, I love that. And, no, this has been great. So what would your, like kind of, what would your top recommendation be to a startup today?

Jennifer Peters (20:13.153)

Absolutely.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:34.825)

Of the kind of the things they need to make sure they're keeping in mind?

Jennifer Peters (20:39.02)

I would say have a one-year plan, have a two-year plan, have a three-year plan, maybe go up to five years and really dream big on what you think your volume is going to look like and what you think your evolution will look like because it can be bigger. It can be bigger than you think it can be. And if you only prepare for small things, then you're going to be really challenged. If you are in the CPG space, food, bed, alcohol, anything replenishable, invest heavily in subscription.

One of the brands I worked on at the agency was a very specialty potato chip company. And I remember pitching subscriptions to them and then being like, no one's going to subscribe to chips. And I was like, I guarantee you they will. And they have like one of the biggest subscription programs of any brand I worked on. like never underestimate the power of subscriptions. If your product is consumable, it helps you forecast. helps you plan inventory. helps you.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:14.496)

Mm-mm. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (21:36.076)

I obviously retained customers. Those customers are much higher, LTV customers than anyone else you're going to acquire. So I think that is the place if you're in consumables to really, really invest. The other thing I would strongly emphasize is absolutely having an email program. Like just having a website is not enough. Like you don't have to do SMS when you're starting out, but I have seen a lot of brands lately with a website and doing paid.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:43.426)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (22:04.2)

And kind of like paid acquisition work, but they don't have an email program. And I'm like, that's a, that's a slam dunk. Like that's easy. That is, there's nothing difficult there at all. So if you're going, you're willing to go out and spend money on paid, but not invest in any sort of retention, like that's, that's not great. But there is a balance to, I think as your startup grows, of balancing the acquisition and retention efforts and where you're spending your time and resources.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:08.715)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (22:31.406)

And I feel like for different brands and different kinds of brands, there is a balance for, there's like a ratio for everyone. Like I like mine to be 30 returning 70 new. Like that's kind of where I'm comfortable, but it depends on the brand. What, you know, I mean, if you're selling a product that people don't have to replace, that's going to be different, obviously. but yeah, those are the places I would definitely say a roadmap and plan. and then absolutely stay focused on the customer always.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:48.845)

Right. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters (23:01.071)

And balance your resources and invest in email. It's easy. Email is easy.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:05.829)

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? You're so right. And I agree. And I think we're seeing and this is our next podcast episode topic. Jennifer will be emailing and retaining because I think it's so important, you know, and you probably know actual data, but they always say it's harder. It costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. But yet, like what percentage of marketing teams are focused on retention. So that will be our teaser for when I can get you scheduled again, because this was super helpful.

 

Great. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer. And we will definitely be talking to you again. Thank you.

Jennifer Peters (23:34.838)

Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was great.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:51.683)

Great, thanks.