The Failure in Resilience
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Streaming here
In this episode, featuring a lot more Chumbawamba than anyone asked for, the commerce chefs get real about relevance, resilience, and being better every day. Spoiler alert: as with most important things, it’s rooted in the choices we make. Relevance is dynamic and resilient brands need their leaders to wake up every day and choose courage over comfort. That way, they can reframe failure to build opportunities. Kyle and Tom explore these themes with Brent Baldwin—a prolific marketer who’s worked with the likes of Disney on Ice, the Harlem Globetrotters, and is now founder of NYOO Agency—Katie Tuff and Yannis Karlos—founders of the Banff Hospitality Collective—and Nate Justiss—co-founder and lead product designer of Distil Union.
Learn more about our guests:
EP. 2 Transcript
Tom I get knocked down, but I get up again. You ain't never gonna keep me down, I get knocked down, but I.
Kyle Soundin good buddy.
Tom What are you doing?
Kyle We're doing episode two, the one about brand resilience. Embracing failure is part of the journey about staying relevant and leading with bravery, about getting back up. You know, they're never going to keep you down.
Tom Oh, OK. But why are you in my bathroom? Wait, how did you get in my house?
Kyle I try the door than the window than the chimney eventually got through your little doggy door, which is weird because you don't have a dog. But the point is they're never going to keep me out.
Tom Yeah, yeah. I know the episode that explores the DNA of resilience and why it's so critical and how to ensure that resilience is a mainstay in your brand. But do you really think that this is the best place and time to be recording our second episode?
Kyle Yeah, I heard the acoustics are great bathrooms. I'll let you get out, get dried off and then we can start recording.
Tom I need you to leave Kyle.
Kyle Right, right.
Tom We're going to look back on what just happened here. OK.
Tom Welcome to Commerce. Chefs, a quirky and thought-provoking show for future focused commerce leaders. We're going to pit the world's most brilliant, inspiring and driven D2C visionaries, the commerce chefs with riveting questions to uncover their secret ingredients at the intersection of passion, performance and leadership and practice.
Kyle For the past decade, we've led teams of designers, strategists and digital wizards, at one of the leading eCom agencies in the country to help brave brands become enduring classics.
Tom And we're here to indefinitely borrow the strategies and pro tips that will make us all better leaders and make the brands we lead better, too.
Kyle Wow, that gets me every time, Tom.
Tom It means a lot Kyle.
Kyle It's poetry. It's like that E.e Cummings of commerce.
Tom E.e Commerce.
Kyle That's good. That's really good.
Tom So, Kyle, today we're talking about resilience, which is arguably the most important thing that you can embody as a leader.
Kyle Things never go the way you think they will. Failure happens. It's part of the process.
Tom Yeah, like like that day that we lost two hundred thousand dollars.
Kyle What?
Tom Do you remember that?
Kyle Tom? You said we weren't going to talk about that.
Tom Oh, yeah. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Sorry.
Kyle The day that shall not be named.
Tom Yes. Right. All right. Well, we've had our fair share of setbacks that we can say?
Kyle We can say that.
Tom The important thing is to reflect on it and pull learnings from it. After all, when you quote unquote lose 200K, you remember not to do it again.
Kyle Anyways, enough from us. We chatted with Nate Justice, the co-owner of Destil Union, to discuss his thoughts on bouncing back from failure as both a product designer and as a founder.
Nate The mistakes you can make are endless and you will make them. Some of the ones that we've we've run into not getting user feedback. You can go to the other end of that and get too much user feedback and sort of have a design by committee situation. So this word balance keeps popping up and sort of a lot of it just comes down to the judgment and wisdom comes from experience and failure and, of course, correction. So, you know, underestimating costs and not using a vetted, trusted supplier, not doing your competitive product analysis, not doing a thorough enough, you know, IP search pattern search. So many things have been thought of before. The scariest part is coming up with a new idea and seeing if it's been done before. And then sometimes it takes a hard, hard look more than a Google search. You know, not not considering the entire customer journey of the product, just accounting, accounting for all that and getting a clear picture of what your what your risk is. I think that's something that companies learn pretty early on. If you don't learn that, you just don't last long.
Tom So I found that wisdom comes from experience and failure. Kyle, how have you found that to be true in your own experience?
Kyle I mean, I know we joke about not talking about the two hundred thousand dollars lost in a day, but we also say it's our MBA. We learned so much about losing focus and getting distracted from the main thing we're trying to achieve that day, which is a whole nother episode. Tom, we'll get there. And we took so many lessons from that. And even in smaller things, we don't have to be this big, colossal failure to learn from it. You know, embracing a culture of learning from failure the wisdom that comes from it is something that's so important to us at PB&J our digital agency, where we every week look at what went well and what can we do better, you know, what do we learn from the things that didn't go the way that we thought they would or we expected them to go?
Tom I mean, and really, we we joke about losing all that money because it's a way to hide our pain.
Kyle Well, just a tiny bit. Yeah.
Tom But that aside, I think another thing that we hold important is, is just trying to learn from others. You know, there there are people ahead of us, you know, in business, patrons that we work with, like they've gone down some of these paths before. They've had these experiences. And the more that we can learn from others, the more that we can gain insight from their failures, whether that's through mentors or advisory board coaches, you name it. You know, people in our lives, I think learning from them is also pretty key.
Kyle So Tom, Nate lists some common mistakes when starting out like keeping a balance of enough, but not too much user feedback. So why is this important?
Tom Well, balance is important in a lot of things, especially if you're on a on a skateboard.
Kyle That's very true.
Tom You've seen me or maybe you haven't, but it's not great gold medal. Look, we are always obsessed as leaders with what people think, whether it's a new product or a new brand or, you know, what people think of our new podcast, for example.
Kyle But that's not something I think about at all.
Tom No, it doesn't keep me up at night. But feedback is important. Understanding what your customers and what your audience think about something is is important and it's real. We need to listen to it. Henry Ford was talking about market input and feedback, and he said, if I asked my market. What they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse, so if you take feedback at face value and you don't actually get to the real pain behind the feedback, the thing behind the thing, then you might very well miss out on the opportunity to meet the vision you had in the first place. So I would say the balance of feedback is to allow it to improve and deliver the thing that you're trying to create or the outcome you're trying to create in the first place and not be a distraction for what you know is the right move to make.
Kyle Yeah, and I think one of the idioms, as always, stuck with me is you can fix a bad decision, but you can't fix no decision. You know, balance.
Tom Nate gave us a really great list of things that can go wrong when bringing B2C products to life. But sometimes, even if we're told not to do something, we still seem to find ourselves making the mistake anyways.
Kyle It's kind of like being told, don't touch the red button. But I have to! Sometimes you just need to find out for yourself.
Tom And I know when you chatted with Katie Tuff and Yannis Karlos, the co-founders of the Banff Hospitality Collective and Park Distillery, you spoke about this. And they had a really interesting take, I thought.
Katie You got to pay a lot of attention and make really fast decisions and you have to a lot, we've been talking a lot during the pandemic. We've been talking a lot about failing fast, which essentially at its origin. I think everybody knows what it means, but deep down, as we analyze further what failing fast means, it means you have to try something. So to fail, you have to have tried and so being experimental and quickly trying and quickly removing your ego for something from something that isn't working.
Yannis Yeah, getting over that cognitive bias that you have towards loss aversion, people tend to throw more effort around things that are failing than they do around things that may succeed. It's a it's a cognitive bias of humans have rights. So we're trying to make a conscious effort to like Katie , said, fail fast and not get caught in that trap of going, OK, well, it's not working. What can we do to fix it instead of just saying, OK, let's just stop that and drive on to something different?
Katie And almost in every case, somebody's ego and pride will be tied up into that failure. And so as managers and leaders, you just really have to get over yourself and realize that your idea sucked.
Kyle Yannis mentioned cognitive bias that humans have towards failure. How have you seen that manifest amongst D2C brands you've created or work with?
Tom Everyone's afraid to fail. I think that's a that's a natural human disposition, but the sooner that we understand that failure is part of the journey, as soon as we can reframe failure as something to be leveraged and not to be feared, I think we're going to be in a way better spot as brands and as leaders. Be brave. One way I think actually a lot of ways I think we've seen this come to pass like some of our patrons, you know, PB and J. They don't move forward with an idea even when they know that it's needed because they're afraid it might fail. They water down exciting new ideas to placate the lowest common denominator versus really aiming at those that they really seek to serve. And so often we get caught playing not to lose versus playing to win. We focus on the biggest risk instead of the biggest opportunities. And in any opportunity, there's a chance for failure. OK, my question for you now. Are you ready?
Kyle I'm ready.
Tom Katie talks about ego. This is big. Why do you believe that some leaders get caught up in a single idea and they just can't let go of it? How can other people avoid that?
Kyle Well, Tom, I have a policy to not talk about ego. You know, I don't want to talk about my ego is not a problem.
Tom Just leggo my ego.
Kyle It's important to check yourself and understand if your identity is held up in one idea or a series of ideas. I think it's so easy as leaders as whether you're the founder or whether you're a brand leader. You know, so much of what we create, what we bring to the world is in those ideas. And we have to learn to detach from that because sometimes we don't have the best idea or sometimes we had a great idea, but it didn't work out the way that we wanted to. And part of creating is to let go of other things. As Elsa once famously said.
Tom I was thinking about Elsa.
Kyle Yeah, we just need to let it go.
Tom We can't afford the licensing rights for that song can we?
Kyle No I was going to sing it, but I figured.
Tom Please don't do it. Yeah, nobody can afford to hear you sing that song.
Tom OK, so if the only way that we're going to learn is if we make mistakes, does that mean that failure is in fact part of the DNA of resilience?
Kyle Well, speaking of frozen, Tom, we chatted with Brent Baldwin, a prolific marketer who's worked with the likes of Disney on Ice and the Harlem Globetrotters. He's the founder of New Agency. And I think he can help us get to the bottom of this.
Brent I think by their very nature, brands are not designed to be resilient. There is a reason that in the forties in the 50s, the department store was the model that we needed at that time and became the example of a retail. There is a reason now that traditional brick and mortar is faltering and we're all going to Amazon and every other delivery service that is possible because the brand has decided what our need is and how they can best fit that current need. So just by hard wiring, brands are not meant to be resilient. They're meant to be kind of flighty. They're meant to come in, fill a specific need, help us out for a short period of time and give way to the next brand that's going to come around. So that's why when you think about it, if you want to have longevity, you have to be resilient. I don't know that DNA of your brand and resiliency maybe go hand in hand as we would like for them to. I think maybe your DNA is something that's incredibly hard wired. We think about it as ourselves. We're hardwired to have very specific types of personalities. You're never going to make an introvert comfortable with an extrovert. You're never going to get an introvert out there leading the band in the parade. I mean, we're hard wired in some very specific ways. So are organizations in their DNA and a lot of that DNA comes from the founder of that company and what their vision is at the beginning. And that should never change for a brand. But your execution and how you communicate that, how you represent that through your brand or through other brands that you acquire or that you build or you grow, I think that is kind of a space where things can mold and kind of adapt, especially when you're in a global pandemic or when you're in some sort of a global economic depression or growth period or what or whatever it happens to be.
Kyle So Brent had a totally different take on this.
Tom Yeah. Instead of looking at failure as part of the DNA of resiliency, he says it's actually the opposite.
Kyle Failure is a byproduct of resiliency. It's part of the gig and it's not always this scary monster that we so often associate it with, often it's simply a hypothesis that didn't work out or a path that was no longer worth pursuing.
Tom Yeah, exactly. To stay relevant and ultimately achieve longevity, you have to experiment with change. The DNA comes down to the core ethos of your brand and your willingness and propensity to change. Failure is part of change. You can't have one without the other, but you'll certainly guarantee catastrophic failure without change.
Kyle We know brands need to continually evolve, which requires resilience. So then how do we go about being resilient as a brand?
Tom And now it's time for thoughts from the shower, where Kyle and I say, what's ever on our mind?
Kyle Why do we call them CTA buttons when they're not really something you can push?
Tom It's a good question. Since E-com platforms operate in the cloud, shouldn't it be called Shoppifly?
Kyle I vote for that. Tom, after an abandoned cart gets abandoned. Where does it go? Is there some poor high school student running around, collecting them in the middle of the digital winter and bringing them back to the digital cart carousel?
Tom That's a really bleak job. We treat our e-commerce platforms like our children. We get really defensive really quickly. The other day, somebody said to me that woo commerce was the greatest and I just stared at them like, nuh-uh!
Kyle Well Tom, does a fairy die every time someone says Spotify instead of Shopify?
Tom I think you just did it. We'll have to talk to Peter Pan. Say products description page ten times fast.
Kyle Productsdescriptionpageproductiion
Tom See, you can't.
Tom And we're back. Strong brands reinvent themselves over and over again, they stay fresh like pop stars after decades of hits. They're the Beyonce's the Garth Brooks is the Taylor Swifts, the David Bowie's, the Madonnas, the Celine Dions. The Chumba Wumbas.
Kyle Well, OK. Granted, Chumba Wumba has the anthem of resiliency. They aren't exactly the poster child of staying relevant.
Tom Right, right. Right, right. OK, so. So don't be Chumba Wamba unless you're Shrek.
Kyle Or Shrek the second, Shrek the third or Shrek the final chapter, Shrek Spooky Stories or Shrek the Holiday special.
Tom Ok Kyle, I'm Shreked out. We get the point.
Kyle OK, so you're saying this conversation is ogre?
Tom Well, let's get back to Brent.
Brent To maybe use Coke as the analogy for this. Resiliency. I don't think means that you get it right every time and that you have all the answers. You have to be open. You have to be adaptive. You have to be both inward and outward reflective, and you have to go back to whatever your brand standards are and constantly evaluate them. Probably the most famous example of Coke is New Coke in the 80s where they just absolutely got it like horribly train wreck, like 20, 20 level bad luck, you know. But what's so funny is in recent years with Stranger Things, you know, they brought New Coke back and they made fun of themselves and their failures. They short term relaunched the brand and used it as a stunt. And basically, I mean, you know, a previous CMO that was probably on their never list, like they've got a giant poster with an X through it that's like should be who should not be named, you know, like never, ever, ever speak of New Coke unless you want to go collect your things. But I mean, like, how brilliant was the team to to be confident enough in their brand and to say that's what resiliency looks like for us. We're going to say, like, let's be open, let's be receptive to some of these things and let's kind of challenge the norms and the numbers that we thought we would never put forward.
Kyle Tom, what are your thoughts on Coke's stunt with New Coke? Why is it so important not to take yourself too seriously when building the brand?
Tom You all know humor is part of me. It's true. And part of me personally it is true.
Kyle You're the biggest joke that I know, Tom.
Tom That's the nicest thing you said.
Kyle Thank you.
Tom But I also believe it's an important trait to carry as a leader. And I think those that I look up to and those that I have seen be successful have had humor and not taking themselves too seriously at the heart of it. The New Coke campaign still spoke to Coke's ultimate DNA of refreshment. So why is it important that regardless of risk and that was a big risk to bring it back up, you stay true to the DNA and the vision of your brand?
Kyle Yeah, I think it's it's important because it's your why it's why you get up in the morning as a leader, as a brand in the tough days and the good days. And it's the change that you want to see in the world. And it's why you're here. It's your if I could use the beautiful French, Tom, it's your raison d'être.
Tom Magnifique.
Tom Nate mentioned this as well when we chatted about Distil's commitment to donate one percent of their revenue to the planet.
Kyle Even when it gets hard, stick to your DNA is a brand. And as a leader.
Nate Just yesterday we did the calculation for what we need to donate one percent for the planet. I was surprised. I mean, it's you know, it's a tough economy right now. One one percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it's terrifying because if you're unprofitable, I'm here thinking, like, I have to keep the business going. But, you know, it's a commitment that we've made and we fortunately are able to to give that. But it is about balance. And you make these promises and these commitments for a reason. You might feel like you could grow the business more if you reinvested it in product or something else and maybe give more next year, you just it just do it and you talk to your accountant and and he sighs. And then and then you realize, you know, what are we doing this for?
Tom Yannis also mentioned this idea of sticking with your DNA in all aspects of the brand.
Yannis We don't compromise on making sure that every element of the business is the best that it can be. You know it can't just be a brand, it can't just be a spirit company and it can't just be a restaurant. Every one of those things has to be the best it can be. Any time that anyone is experiencing part, we strive to ensure that it's best in class for for what it is.
Kyle So to be resilient, brands need to continue to evolve and stick to their DNA, even when it's tough, even when things don't work out.
Tom And look, this applies to brand leaders as much as it does the brand itself. Leave your ego at the door and wake up every morning focused on being better.
Brent This new crop of leaders, they show humility. They're transparent. The old saying and the only idea I like better than mine is it's a better idea. I mean, it is so true. It rings with these people, but it's also you have to have that ego in a good way. You have to have that self-confidence in a good way that I'm very confident in my abilities, what I bring to the table, that I'm OK surrounding myself with people that are smarter than me in certain areas. And because we have this two way street of trust and because I know that when they succeed, I succeed and I want them to grow and they want me to grow, it's understanding where your ego and what your intentions of your ego actually lie. Are they pure and are they true or are they just purely selfish? So I think the simple call to the to these leaders is be better. And I think that if you get up every morning and you think, how can I be better, how can the work be better? How can my brain be better? How can I be better about providing value for somebody? Then you will go down that right path. It's something easy for us to think about, and some days we're going to knock it out of the park and some days we're going to struggle mightily and we're going to go in the wrong direction. But I think it's OK as long as every morning we're getting up and our mindset is focused on that and on being better. And a lot of that comes through just continued reflection. I think this is a theme that we've heard a lot, too, is it's just you have to be reflective on everything on yourself, inside your organization, outside your organization, reflective on what your brand looks and feels like today compared to yesterday, because the pandemic has taught us so many things. But one of them is that every day something is going to change and we have to wake up every morning and be reflective on what that is. And I think that extends beyond just the work we do as brands. I think it expands into the work that we do as humans and we do as people. And so every morning, how can I get up and how can I be better? What can I do in my neighborhood, in my community, the people around me, the circles that I run, the people that I call family, just like I think all the brand leaders, the great brand leaders are doing out there, they're getting up every morning and they're saying, how can I support my community, the people that look to my brand for hope and for inspiration and to fill whatever that need is each day. What's interesting to me is that this actually should be the easiest time for us to do this. When it's probably going to be hard is when things return to some sort of normalcy because we'll feel like we can just go back to the way things were. We can feel like things aren't going to change every day or every week. And so it's going to be really easy to go back to a lot of those old habits. And hopefully this new crop of leaders is going to take this concept of resiliency to heart, and it's going to become part of their DNA as a leader. And they're going to supplant it to the DNA of their brand. And they're going to say, man, this worked so well for us when things were hard. Let's keep doing it when things hopefully are a little bit easier.
Tom The simple questions we need to leave this cozy 30 minute podcast with and wake up asking every morning, are this what makes us relevant today and how can I be better today?
Kyle And like Brent said, we need to not let this mindset fade away when circumstances like a pandemic don't require us to ask it every morning. Relevance is dynamic. It's a choice to continue to get back up and to choose courage over comfort. Yes, we are maybe a small part of the whole, but as the leader goes, so goes the brand.
Tom Resilient brands and their leaders make the choice. They make bad decisions and they don't always get it right, but they choose to reframe failure and leverage it into the next opportunity.
Kyle They choose to let go of pride and focus on getting it right. It's that simple, but it's really freaking hard and it's scary.
Tom And so the failure and resilience is that failure is in resilience. It actually requires weakness. It demands failure first and then a choice to step back up and come out stronger than before. They go hand in hand, they're cause and effect they're yin and yang.
Kyle Or like the legends of our generation Chumba Wumba once said, you need to get knocked down in order to get back up again.
Tom Legends, really?
Kyle I like the song. It fits the episode. Just run with it Tom.
Tom OK, well, unlike Chumba Wamba, resilient brands endure and other resilient brands break. You have the hard road of resilience or the easy road of irrelevance. You choose.
Tom There you have it, that's episode two of Commerce Chefs, thanks so much for listening.
Kyle We hope you learned all the reasons why you should fail and keep failing.
Tom But if you're looking for more, make sure to join the Commerce Chefs community by following us on social at Commerce Chefs. Ask us questions. Send us requests. We want to hear from you.
Kyle We're currently cooking up the next episode of commercials, so tune in on February 4th. Remember, it's just as important to feed your ears as your mouth. As you always say Tom, the ears are the other mouth of the head.
Tom Lastly, if you liked this episode and want to support us, make sure to hit the subscribe button and leave us a five star rating and review. Until next time. This has been a dash of Tom.
Kyle And a pinch of Kyle. We'll be cooking with you in two weeks.