EP346 - Victoria's Secret & Co. EVP Digital, Brian Seewald

0:00 Yeah, that idea of the assistant, we debate a lot. There's been a lot of implementations, of AI shopping assistants around retail, and we love them, but we think we want to put it in the right place within the experience where the intent is not just AI for AI's sake, AI to solve a problem in real time that the customer would have on that place in their experience. And so that's our UX leaders all the time, like preaching, like we don't want a solution looking for a problem. Like we really need to make sure we put this in all the right places because it's also expensive. And so we need to be mindful. Like I want it to be in the place where you need it and it's going to drive the right result for us. And it's not going to be upside down economically for us.

0:42 Welcome to the Jason and scot show. Your source for the latest news and trends in the e-commerce industry. Featuring host Jason Retail Geek Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer of Publicis and scot Wingo. Co-founder and CEO of ReFiBuy. Here are Jason and scot. Welcome to the Jason and scot Show. I'm Jason Retail Geek Goldberg, and I'm here with our co-host, scot Wingo. Hey, Jason, and welcome back. Jason and scot Show listeners and viewers. We have an exciting show. Both of you, yes, all of them. We appreciate you watching, the super fans watching on both formats to make sure you get, it's kind of like IMAX versus normal with Odyssey kind of a vibe.

1:27 We're recording live at NRF Nexus. Jason has a audio curse. We are next to the elevator room. So usually we're near a train station, audio room. Let's see, we've been near jackhammers. That's always a favorite when we're in New York. We always get the jackhammers. But this time, Mr. Murphy dealt up the elevator room. So yeah. So that's the production qualities we shoot for here, trying to keep it as professional as possible. We should have had this episode sponsored by the Otis company. Oh, yeah. Otis, if you're listening or watching, we're available. Yeah, absolutely. Joining us today is Brian Seewald. He is the EVP of digital at Victoria's Secret & Co. Brian, thanks for taking time out of the show to come chat with us today. Yeah, thank you guys.

2:09 Long, long time listener to the pod and sort of bucket listener for me to be asked to be a part of it. I don't know what that says about my overall bucket list. You have a very long bucket list. We're like number 200 on the bucket list. Seriously, super grateful to be here. Thanks, guys. Thanks. Thanks for coming. We appreciate it. The pleasure is all ours. I'm picturing your bucket is shaped like a funnel with some very trivial bucket items at the top, like us, and then some really aspirational stuff at the bottom. Yeah, we've got like, you know, I still need to run a marathon. I still need to climb Malcolm Majaro because I just met somebody this morning with that already. So you've got some things on there that, you know, we're looking for aspirations later. Yeah, fair enough. So Brian, as you well know, we always start out our shows with guests by kind of.

2:52 Introducing the audience to your background. In your case, Victoria's Secret is in the retail capital of the world in Columbus, Ohio, and you have had the opportunity to be involved in several historic brands from the Columbus area. So can you kind of walk us through how you got here? Yeah, sure thing. So I am a lifelong retailer at this point. I came out of college, shout out to Penn State, my Nittany Lions, with all intents of being in finance. That was my goal. And I interned in finance when I was in college and that did not resonate with me and I didn't know what I was going to do. And so I just started going to information sessions and I went to one for a company, which is no longer with us. But, and they were explaining their training program. You got to be part of a buying office and you essentially, the way they sold it was you were running your own business without the risk of running your own business.

3:43 You got to be part of everything, picking the product, helping with pricing strategies, what got advertised, walk down to the selling floor and work with the customer directly. and, It was, it appealed to me immediately. And so I joined Coffin's department stores in Pittsburgh. That was my first job. Met my girlfriend, then fiance, now my wife, there. And then we moved to Columbus, Ohio shortly thereafter to work for Abercrombie & Pitch. The first half of my career was all in the merchandising and planning side. And I joke about it, but it's somewhat serious. I was not a good merchant. No one should have ever allowed me to be selecting a product. That is not my skill set when i moved into the merchandise planning side i found my footing definitely more so times in the finance piece so you kind of like get both yeah a little bit yeah and then you fast forward like 15 years it was 2007 2008 and the limited had just launched a website with a really small skeleton crew sort of off in the corner getting the work done and they were like well now we need someone to run this business brian do you want to take a shot at it, And I went home and I talked to my wife and I was like, oh, I don't know.

4:51 I don't know what I was thinking. I was like, oh, I don't know if this internet thing is going to work in 2007, 2008, of course. And ultimately I took that and it was the best decision of my entire career. Like I fell in love with this space immediately. The ability to see customer behavior in real time. I think for me, the retail drug is every day I get to look at sales. And then every day I get to change something. To make it a better experience, to sell more, whatever the, whatever the goal is of that, of that next day. And I can't think of another business where you get a report card every day left. Yeah. So then you go into digital. And it's actionable. Like you can actually just change stuff. Yeah. And stores changing something has got the, you know, if you're lucky six month.

5:36 Yeah. And then it's like, there's so many things you've changed. It's hard to pick the variable out. And what's incredible in digital is you can see it. Now I can see it. It's the minute I can, And we can understand what's happening in a given day and make a change if we need to. We try not to do that every day. But that was what got me when I started in retail. And it's what keeps me in it every day. That's the thing that I love the most. And so I started in digital at the limited and then just progressively moved through, you know. Increasing areas of responsibility in digital at a couple of different companies, bringing me to BS and co for the last two and a half years. It's an incredibly exciting time to be at VS & Co.

6:17 Hilary, who's our CEO, always says, the world is ready for us to unapologetically be us again. And so if you're following our brand, looking at our marketing and seeing what we're doing, you'll see that we are definitely embracing the brands and what makes the brands great. And I think our goal, we always say it is about. Celebrating sexy about sparking joy and about inspiring confidence and try to remind ourselves every day, are we doing those things? And it has been, it's been a wild ride. It's been super fun and watching our customers react to what we're doing. In addition to the fact that the business has been strong and everything, if you're following our earnings releases, you see that, but just watching the customer reaction to what we're doing has been just really, really enjoyable.

7:06 Yeah, I'm a CNBC junkie, and they've been calling you guys out as really pulling away from the pack of kind of that same size retailer. Here lately, you've just been really supersizing the growth, and so the customers are responding to it. Yeah. My boss, who's Elizabeth Price, our chief marketing officer, she always says, think monumental, not incremental. And so we're trying to take bigger swings, do bigger things. I think our fashion show is a great example of that. I don't know all of what's in store for our fashion show this year, but what I do know is bigger. Everything's going to be bigger, scale, more exciting, and we're really jazzed about that. So, A, every time I see those earnings calls, my main thought is, thank God you negotiated such a big equity position as part of your compensation. Of course, yeah.

7:54 Being a friend of Brian is my main retirement strategy. So I'm excited about that. I'm also imagining the very beginning of your career, I'm laughing because I feel like a week before you took that job at Limited, I guarantee you there was a board meeting at The Limited where someone's like, no one's ever going to buy clothes online. Well, and I remember because I launched my first mobile site at The Limited, and my wife, who's usually somewhat forward thinking, looked at me and said, Brian, no one's ever going to shop for clothes on their phone. And so I sit here now with 90% of our traffic being through mobile and sometimes higher. and I'm like, yeah.

8:35 She gets a lot right if she got that one wrong. It was hard to envision before the smartphone that it could happen. Yeah. And even with the iPhone 1, it was kind of like, oh, this screen is so small. It's come such a long way. Yeah. As everyone knows, like, I'm old and miss every trend. But, like, I launched my first mobile site. It was a thing at the time called a WAP browser. So it actually wasn't graphical. It was a pure text-based browser. And I, like, that was the hill I was going to die on is the world's going to start shopping on these mobile devices. And everyone thought I was silly and they were universally correct because no one ever did shop on a WAP browser. So I do think predicting the future is important, but the timing is also important because I unfortunately wasted a lot of my employer's money building this WAP e-commerce experience.

9:21 Well, there are hits and misses, right? So like voice commerce, when Alexa first came out, everyone's going to shop through voice. And I remember at the time saying to my executive I said, I don't think so. I don't think people are going to be walking around with their phone yelling things into it while they're in a store environment, like trying to find the thing that they bought on, that they wanted, that they saw online. So we built a voice interface in our app at the time. And when we looked at the analytics, I think there were like 80 uses of it. And I think I was probably like 77 of it. And so that was like the one that did, one of the ones that didn't happen. So within your role tell us so i understand evp you report to the cmo and then the digital so what all what all is in your role what are some of the things that aren't your role and do you cut across victoria's secret has a bunch of brands that's the and co so there's pink and then i'm sure there's a bunch i don't know about what what are all the brands and and how do you cut across this yeah so first of all it's really it's victoria's secret it's pink and then it's beauty so each one of those as their own distinct brand president and leadership team.

10:26 But then I, my role is, spans across all of them. And so I'm trying to provide the best digital customer experience across all of the brands. So it's kind of an agency type model. Each brand can have some nuances. Victoria's Secret may want something a little different. We're definitely trying to differentiate pink, irreverent, youthful, fun versus Victoria's which is a bit more sophisticated. And then Pewdie is really more of a deep integration into each brand. We think. We find we have the best success when you're going to find the beauty while you're shopping with the other things and sort of integrating the whole experience. So the brands, Victoria's Secret and Pink, are distinct.

11:08 We do find there's quite a lot of shopping overlap, which is something that we talk a lot about. In terms of the functions I'm responsible for, we have digital merchandising, which is really content strategy. Everything from content strategy and that engagement strategy all the way to how the products on our pages are sequenced to maximize for conversion and the best shopping experience. We have digital operations and analytics, which is very near and dear to my heart. We talk a lot about the foundation that we have built, where there are gaps and how we build the future of everything that is happening around us. And I'm sure we'll get into all the AI things and all of that, but data and how we manage data, it becomes more important every day.

11:51 And then we have digital product, user experience. One of my colleagues is here with me this week at Nexus from our, who leads our product team, and then customer care. So those are the areas I have direct responsibility for. But I collaborate deeply across the organization with merchandise planning and merchandising, of course, because. At the end of the day, our job, above and beyond everything else, is to take the assortment strategy and the product strategy that our brand presidents, through their merchandising teams, devise and bring back to life online. That's it. Like, in its simplest form, it's all we're trying to do is represent the brand the best we can. We want to sell a lot of stuff. But I'm also cognizant that the website and the app are the biggest marketing vehicles in the company.

12:34 It's not just about the sales. It's about the pre-shopping experience for stores. It's about elevating the brand. And so we think about all of those things too. So I have deep collaboration with merchandising, with merchandise planning. Then of course with creative digital marketing, I wouldn't live without digital marketing partners that are driving traffic and they do that splendidly. So like that's a huge partnership we have. So I've gotten used to it. Like over the years, I think digital is structured a little differently every different company. But the one thing that's always been true is you have to collaborate across the entire organization to get stuff done. And we don't do things like you'll remember, like in your early days, put in a new search engine or do this or do that, like things that you did on the website. I didn't really need to bring in partners from all over the organization.

13:21 Those days were over. Like everything we do impacts everybody. And so it's a much more complex world we live in. I want to go back to one of the earlier things you said about the cadence and, one of the things that you mentioned appealed to you that I totally agree is sort of the real-time nature, that you can get a quick snapshot of results and then you can make quick corrections. But I do find in every organization I go into, there kind of is a different cadence, right? So pre-digital, it was like a monthly cadence. Walmart was an outlier, they had a weekly meeting. Because it was hard to get data for last week's performance. And then of course it took a long time to act on that data.

14:03 So I'm kind of curious, what is the, like is it truly a daily cadence and does it have to change at all? Like I could imagine around holiday or around the fashion show, or you know, there could be some tent poles where your cadence might change. And I'm just curious, like what's a regular week at FBS and company? It really ebbs and flows. We do not touch everything every day, but we have big launch moments. So yesterday was a very sexy launch for our Victoria's Secret brand. And so that entails the activation of tons of new product and a lot of content around that product, which manifests itself on our site, on our app, but also in social, in marketing, in our stores.

14:46 It's a very coordinated effort. Those probably, you know, we have those across the brands. Those are a few of those moments a month. Outside of those moments, obviously there's tactical adjustments that you're making. I don't think we change things every day, but we certainly discuss what we're seeing in the business every day so that we can be aware and make changes if we need to. But we optimize the site, we have teams that are optimizing the site in a very normal routine way every day. Every day we are looking at the sequencing of our pages. Every day we are making sure that if certain face outs are sold out, the work placing those are things that we are still in stock in. Like nuts and bolts stuff.

15:28 And we and the team are merchandising, our operations teams, our execution teams are extremely good at that part of the business. Yeah. And are there a subset of like KPIs or metrics that you think are most valuable? Like are there, like what, what are the, the, your two or three favorite metrics that you like to? Yeah, I mean, it's a bit mundane, but I live and breathe conversion. And so what's interesting about that in the new world we live in now, where traffic is coming from so many different places, where for us, new customer acquisition is such a huge priority. We are in the midst of turning around these brands.

16:10 Getting to know new customers is a huge piece of that. And there was a time when one out of every three bras bought in the United States was bought through Victoria's Secret. That is like domination. That's what we want to get back to. And so conversion is probably the metric I pay attention to the most. But now that we are doing all of these things to drive more new customers, you have to cut that up way differently. I have an expectation of app conversion that is very high because the app is where most of our loyal customers are. And once you've downloaded our app and you're actually willing to devote phone space to it, you're invested. And so I have a certain expectation there. Mobile web, that's a lower conversion rate. That's where we're getting the looky-loos and the new customers.

16:55 What our analytics team calls our single page slackers. People that come to the site and they bounce. They got curious, something they saw on Instagram or on TikTok and they came in. And so our expectations for conversion in a world where you're throwing traffic so differently all the time is now different. And so I have to sort of, each week we discuss like, what was our traffic level? What was the quality of that traffic? What does that mean for conversion? Are we happy? Are we sad? Where are the opportunities to make it better? So those things I would say are the most important things. I think the sneaky API we don't talk enough about is just our average order value. Because there are times when that helps or hurts the overall economics of the operation.

17:39 And that's probably one we need to focus more on. Yeah, I love that. And it's funny, we're here at Interim Nexus this week. And it's actually, I've been involved in several hallway conversations around conversion rate, right? Because obviously, super important metric. Everyone wants to benchmark themselves on conversion rate. And the dilemma for your point is like there was a world in which digital was a small silo within a big organization and only certain kind of people came through the digital funnel. Today, it probably influences 100% of purchases in your company. Right. And so not everyone comes into our digital ecosystem at the same place in the purchase cycle. They don't all have the same purchase intent.

18:20 And so the super basic definition of conversion rate, like orders over traffic. Kind of can obfuscate a lot of what's going on. That traffic that you get direct from TikTok may have very different buying intent than the minuscule amount of traffic you get direct from the bots. I like to needle scot with the agentic traffic, which I'm sure we'll get to. And that might be very different than the conversion rate you might expect from your app, right? And so I actually have run into a couple of people on the show that talk about how, oh, internally, we have a different metric. We have what we call real conversion rate, where they try to normalize for some, like, you know, focus on the conversion rate of people they think actually are at the bottom of funnel versus top of funnel.

19:09 And I'm curious, like, do you guys, the problem with that real conversion rate is then when eMarketer publishes a benchmark, your boss comes to you and goes, how come our conversion rate is so much different than the industry standard? So I'm curious, like, do you guys go through any of that? We do. We do. We have, I mean, as we should, we have tons of conversations on this topic specifically. And that's where this concept that our analytics team worked up of having like a traffic quality index came to life. Because the problem they were trying to solve was... Basically validating that the conversion was expected or not expected. Like what, what, what ebbs and flows did we see and why? I mean, I've talked to a couple of colleagues here and you'll ask that question and they'll say, well, what does conversion even mean anymore in this new world?

19:52 And I was like, well, I'm not there yet. I still think it's an important metric that we have to track all the time, but I do think you can't, you can't track it accurately unless you get on the covers and look at how it's so like, we look at it by every marketing channel, paid social versus organic social versus direct app traffic, etc, etc. And we have different expectations for each of those things. Our promotional cadence, not surprisingly, has a massive impact on conversion. We ran a flash sale a couple weeks ago. The conversion rate for those six hours is understandably incredible. You move back to a completely full price moment, that conversion rate. So we have different expectations for every different part of the business. I don't see us ever not talking about conversion, but I do think that we're going to continue to get more granular in how we're looking at it.

20:40 And my job is to just, you know, be able to best explain it to all of my partners, because in a world where traffic is, you know, always up, which is luckily what we are. I'm knocking on wood for you. And where conversion is therefore down a little, you've got to, you've got to talk about that. Yeah. I wouldn't want to see that if I were an executive at a company. So my job is partly to optimize it, but also partly to help educate all of our teams in terms of what's happening. Yeah. I love that idea of looking at conversion rate through the lens of traffic quality. Humorously, I'll get invited to a lot of companies for a short-term initiative. Jason, we've got a conversion rate problem. You've got to help us improve our conversion rate. And my universal answer is great news.

21:24 I absolutely know how to improve your conversion rate. We just have to cut your traffic way down. Yeah, exactly. You've never wanted to do that. Or you can add a 70% off promotion. I'll get your conversion rate up. My go-to is I only allow people who have purchased eight times in the last month onto the site because they turn out to be quite loyal. But the loyalty thing brings me to another super interesting thing where I feel like you guys are sort of bucking the trend or leading the market. You alluded to your app and the high engagement you have on your app. And I want to learn from people that are in a vertical brand that have high engagement on the app. Because my general advice is I feel like us as an industry, over focus on the apps because they're lovely, but they're really hard.

22:12 Like the real estate on the phone is super competitive and the overall industry statistics on apps are daunting. Like, you know, the vast majority of apps that get downloaded get abandoned in the first 30 days and you have like a 95% mortality rate. And so you're running lots of companies where it's a vanity thing. And they spent a bunch of money on the app, high-fived themselves, and maybe their success criteria is downloads of the app, which again, doesn't help you with 95%, never use it after the first month. And so I'm always, you know, I always encourage people, the app is a valuable part of the ecosystem, but it's a loyalty play. It's a tool for the customers that most already love you. It's not a customer acquisition strategy.

22:54 I'm not going to be surprised if you tell me that in your case, I'm at least partially wrong. It is. I am often surprised at the amount of newish customers that download the app as fast as they do. That is unexpected. And we've had, and you're right. Like we, we, we look at our app downloads every week, last year, we had a huge initiative to essentially like the rally and cry was we're going to double our app downloads. And when you say something like that, you might not double it, but we certainly got a huge increase in them. The magic of that is app push notifications, which is like what included, not free, right? Like it's, but it's a great way to communicate to our customers.

23:36 We run app exclusive events. We run app exclusive product. We do early access on the pink app and the Victoria's Secret app or product. So, you know, if we do a certain drop of pre-fashion, your pre-fashion show product drops available on the app first. So there's a reason the loyalty program is one reason to have the app. It's the best manifestation of the program. The other is you're going to get access to things that other people aren't. And so that the growth of our app has been, I think, you know. We definitely supercharged it by, these strategies. Um, I mean, we had our, our head of pink merchandising, um, you know, it's like everything takes a village. Our analytics team observed that one of our competitors was getting huge traffic spikes with drops on a certain item.

24:23 Our pink president was like, well, pink VP of merchandising was like, we should try that. Thus was born this thing we call pink when they drops. And it, it sometime, and it's, it's that that's available on the site and the app, but again, you're going to get notified first in the app. You're going to get to know about it more. And that started as this tiny little hack where like, we're trying to figure out how to pull forward product to becoming like a huge part of our business. I, what I love is that entrepreneurial mentality of like, start small, blow something up into a real part of your business. But again, it's just another reason why I think this idea of having our app gives you real utility. I love that. And I, right before the show started, scot mentioned that, that the Wednesday drops were what brought him into the pink app back up. So that, that, that makes total sense.

25:09 The one cautionary thing I would say in that story is you got to be careful about letting those business users know that their ideas were smart and really worked because you're kind of empowering them. Absolutely. Danger. Danger. Yeah. This is how Jason got so many words in this title. Yeah. Yeah. Not complimenting his colleagues. Yeah. scot's jumping into the bit to get to AI. I want to make him wait one more topic because digital is awesome. Obviously we're all sort of digital first people, I think at this point, you still have a huge asset in the stores. And the thing I'm really interested in is all of those customers that in my mind are now digital first and that app is the homepage is the front of their experience, not that store have higher expectations when they go into the store.

25:58 And so I'm always curious how you think about digital in store or how you think about. Making those customers happy that have gotten used to the cool amenities you have in store. And I'm even curious, is that in your scope? Because in a lot of organizations, that's still kind of silent. Yeah, it is. The omni-channel experiences, buy and pick up in store, as an example, are within our scope. Yeah. I would say, you had said earlier, like 100% of transactions in store are probably influenced by digital. We always use 80% or whatever. Sure. You're right, though. It's probably 100% at this point. The partnership between Becky, who heads our stores, and me is incredibly strong. Right hand, left hand. And we are always sort of trying to make sure that one channel is backing up the other channel.

26:43 I know every time we have a new big floor set going on and a new launch that is coordinated on the site as well, I like to go to the store and I stand in front and I look at the app and I look at the mobile web and I say like, if I walked in the store and I was, are we telling the same story? Is it consistent? If I was a customer, does it feel like one brand, not a digital brand and a different store brand? And most of the time I would give us pretty good marks on that, on that consistency. I think it's critical. I think customers have to feel that when they walk into the store. Our associates are adept at helping serve customers that can't find their size in a store and having it shipped to them. They have embraced that skill.

27:23 You hear a lot about companies. This was probably more than the early days of Omnichannel where there was a bit of friction between the store teams, the digital teams, as these capabilities were being built out. It's a tribute to Becky's leadership of that store's organization. We don't have that. Our stores embrace digital, we embrace the stores. And I think that for us to succeed, that has to happen. The magic of our business, is in a bra fitting experience, specifically in our stores. Trust me when I tell you that we have tried everything to recreate that experience digitally. We have done the quizzes, we have done the body scanning tools, we have done all of these things. You can't replace the idea of being able to talk to somebody, you know, I just, I am on the DLP one, I lost all this weight, I just had a kid, I've put on weight and I'm not happy about it, but I need a new bra.

28:15 That experience is magical when someone can give you confidence in person. I think, you know, we can talk about AI all you want. I still don't think you can recreate the magic of the store experience completely online. We're going to get as close as we can, but that store experience will always be incredibly important as these brands move forward. That's super interesting because I'm curious, like, do you think... The state of the tech just isn't there yet? Or do you think it's something more, innate in humans that there's a trust symbol in having that live expert in front of you give you advice? And even if you got the exact same advice from a robot, it wouldn't land in the same way. I think it's both of those things. I think using the body scanning tool as an example, you have to put your phone at a certain angle and point it a certain way at yourself.

29:04 Any experience that has the words in it and now take your shirt off, i'm out like i'm not doing that so it's a pretty high threshold to like yeah standing in front of a camera in your underwear yeah like that so they're just there hasn't yet been and then there's like the virtual try-on option which i've seen a bunch of those those are cool, ish but again our product, fits right up against your skin it's the thing you're wearing closest to you i i don't think that the virtual we'll try on stuff has come to a place yet, generative AI presents some interesting options in terms of being able to say, well, I want to see the skin tone and this body shape and this fresh shape and show me like what might look like me. So we've tossed those things around. We haven't acted on that yet.

29:45 So I think, I think we may get there eventually, but I still don't think it's the same thing as our store experience. And I still think that, For us, that will always be incredibly important. The good news is once they do it, it's in the app, and then they can just reorder online. Yeah, well, the beautiful thing of going to our store and ordering, and now you know that you're a 34C, then we can replenish you all day long online. And then that's the beautiful way in which our stores and our digital work together. Sometimes we have people on the show where their digital and their store inventory is very close to each other. And then other times they blow out the digital shelf, looking at styles, not worrying about sizes, where I'm sure you've got a lot.

30:29 The shelf is probably very powerful for the size dimensions. How much delta do you guys have between the store and online? Right now, I'd say not a ton. We have some online exclusives. That is an area where all three of our brand presidents are now exploring and driving forward. And so we are going to start having more online explosives in the future than what we have today. It will not be like an endless item. It will not just be assortment for assortment's sake. It will be targeted. So for example, in Victoria's Secret, we love our pink and white heritage stripe. All day long online, I would do more of that. I know that in pink, it's going to be a lot about apparel.

31:10 I think in beauty, we have an opportunity in terms of bringing back an archive sense, to things our customers loved, you know, 10, 15 years ago. I also am not smart enough to know how hard all that is. And so I think there are opportunities, but we have to make sure that they also make sense. There are minimums, there are lead times that I, you know, I am vaguely aware of, but not really good at that stuff. And so I think our merchant teams are doing everything they can in a targeted way to make our assortments more effective online. So that's a good framing of what you do and all the different pieces that you touch. What are some of the big initiatives that you're looking at probably going into?

31:53 Do you guys think much about holiday or are you already more thinking about Valentine's Day? We're all over. Which is a bigger holiday? We are literally always talking about all four seasons at once. The context switching that comes with the day-to-day job. I would say right now I am absolutely 1,000% fashion show obsessed. I want to make sure we execute it. Two years in a row, I have been, and I tell this story all the time, 2024 was the first time we brought the fashion show back. And I remember, I'm lucky in that I got to attend the show. And I was so incredibly proud of the digital experience and the shopping experience that we built to go with the show, this whole shop the show experience and literally watch the sales. And this is why I love what I do.

32:40 You literally like the show ended and like everyone's hugging and congratulating. I'm sitting there on my phone. And I'm like looking at numbers because I'm so curious. I'm like, what was the tracking? It's like they sell huge traffic and people are buying. And I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. So fast forward to 2025. And I was like, oh, we got to do that again. And we did. And so there's a lot of pressure on it, but also like I'm really excited about it. And then you add the element this year of TikTok shop, which is new for us. And so I think that could be a really unique fashion show moment as well, depending on how we, how we decide to handle all of that. So I think fashion show is very, very much top of mind in terms of like overall initiatives. You know, we try very, very hard to make sure everything we do ladders up to this path to potential, which is something we talk about in all of our earnings calls.

33:26 That's our corporate strategy. It really is. It's about supercharging bras. When we win in bras, we win like full stop. It is about recommitting to the growth of pink and the way I think about that is, you how we make sure that they feel like distinct experiences online. We have tabs, we have one website, we have one checkout. And yet I want to make sure when you're on pink, it really feels like pink. And when you're on VS, it really feels like VS. And we have more we can do there. Fueling growth in our beauty business, of course, is a priority and how we integrate that with everything else. And then the last one is like evolving how we go to market. I always interpret that as how do I continue to elevate these brands? So if you transfer that to like what's important digitally, we've sort of translated it into you know our digital speak so the first thing is really about what we call shopkeeper mentality, optimize that site and that app all the time embrace all the paths potential pieces so like bras gets extra attention it has a there's a there's a product page ai driven assistant on bras no other category has that on the site right now we tested our personalization model for sequencing in bras and in panties like so, we try and give that category we actually love as much as we can.

34:39 Emotion over promotion is something we talk about consistently. That goes back to evolving how we go to market. We need to personalize more. Jason, you and I, I feel like we've been talking about this for years and years and years, the whole industry has. Sure. We're very good at personalizing product recommendations. We're very good. We're getting good at personalizing the sequencing on the pages, using models for that and AI for that. We're not as good at personalizing around offers and discounts and we need to reduce our reliance on those tools. I think every retailer wants to do that. We know it's a multi-year journey. We know it's going to require a lot of technology advances. Super, super excited about the idea of being able to pull that off in the next couple of years.

35:24 As a joint digital marketing team, like there's a ton of passion around that. Maybe one of the newer things, be where our customer is and that is TikTok shop, which I'm very bullish on. That is Gentic AI. So Google UCP is something we're working on. We would have been working on OpenAI, but that was a bit of a false start, as we all know. But I also think about discoverability piece, like we're going to be in all of these places and we're going to try and do it faster than Victoria's Secret Company traditionally did. Not because I think there's some avalanche sales coming from these places, but because we have to be where the customers are. And I think the discoverability piece is massive, massive for us.

36:04 And that traffic while still small, growing fast, but still small in absolute terms, that's what's coming. Uh, and so being where our customer is is something we talk a ton about, and then this one is, it may sound boring, but strengthening our foundation, product information management, modernizing our content processes. We are about to be flooded with content, whether it's TikTok or all of our other marketing programs. The amount of content in this new creator economy that's available to us is huge. And how we manage that content. We have to have better processes, systems, tools, all of that stuff. So those are the things that in digital are the most near-end rewards right now.

36:47 Yeah, the product thing's smart because people are under-investing in it. And it feels like you kind of talked about it as a little bit of a silo, but it will impact your AI stuff more than anything. Even your on-site bra AI will get smarter when you do that PIM piece. Because someone's asking it, which bra did this celebrity wear? And right now it may not know that because the PIM doesn't know that. Yeah, product information management for us is, again, it flies a little on the radar. Like I'm probably the most engaged leader because we know how important it is. You're right. It's going to enable so many of the experiences that we need to enable forward. I think it's super interesting because when people think about these AI discovery experiences, you want to quickly go to the chopper context.

37:34 What's all the nuances about that chopper that are going to influence what product is best going to meet our needs? But we do forget the other side of that coin is we need way more context about the product than we traditionally have. And in your case, you're mostly vertically integrated. So you make a lot of the products you sell and so you are absolutely the canonical source of truth for how many ounces this garment weighs and how many millimeters this strap is and all of these things that, we would have never needed in a traditional brick and mortar merchandising system, but are very useful for the robot. Yeah. And when you, yeah, and we think about bra as like some of our competitors do the most incredible job of this. And we have an area of opportunity around overall content articles.

38:17 They're not not because we think customer wants to read a ton of articles on our site but because, all the LLMs need to pick up that concept and a couple of our competitors have hundreds of articles on their site in their educational sections and we need we have a major initiative to get there we're just starting to like get get our, ducks in a row on like it's early days but we know that's shortcoming so we've got some of this like inventory feed blocking and tackling done now and now it's like, a laundry list of like a hundred things There isn't like. Well, the inventory feed was a little bit of a silver bullet and I don't get, you don't encounter a lot of those where I'm like, oh wow, that made a big difference right away. But the rest of these things is like little things, a million little things that we need to do to make sure that we are like, we're the number, we're number one in market share. We should be number one in this film.

39:04 Like that is, my boss reminds me of that all the time. She's right. And we need to make sure that's happening. How about, can you say, my intuition is your pink brand would be getting a lot more agentic traffic because the Zillennials are adopting things a little bit ahead of the other groups and they're way more comfortable buying within the, at least discovering and not quite to the buy part of agentic commerce. Is that something you see? I would say... I'm not actually sure, but I would say our, I'll bet it's beauty actually. Yeah. Beauty is like way up. Probably getting the most of that traffic is absolutely dominating in the TikTok space, dominating in terms of ourselves, not dominating the TikTok landscape yet, but that is, I think beauty is the, is the area where we're going to see the most of that early days.

39:54 I'm super curious about, about what we'll see from a TikTok perspective. Yes. Versus pink, but we've been so focused on the beauty piece of it right now. That we haven't gotten there. And now in the agentic piece, it would make sense to me that that younger consumer would be more comfortable shopping that way. Yeah, and you probably don't know this or can't say it, but we have within our customer base, and it's interesting, Adobe reports it converts traffic referral from Chachapiti and Gemini primarily, converts at 40% more. We see orders of magnitude higher than that. It's pretty interesting that to Jason's point, it is small, but it punches way above its weight if you were to rank channels by conversion. Yeah, I mean, I would concur. I would say like, it's a smaller level of traffic.

40:38 We're very happy with how it converts to see it. It's high intent. And so that doesn't surprise us. And I know that that avalanche of traffic will come because this is how people, that's the new discovery. Yeah. The one reservation I always have about that, you guys are unquestionably right, but when I look at data from panels of users where we've instrumented users' whole digital life, what I've learned is we have no idea how big our agentic traffic already is, right? Because the happy path is not you use the robot, you click on a link, you go to a VS URL. The happy path is you use the robot.

41:19 And you type one of the threads from the robot into Google and then cut like, and that is not attributed to the robot, but, you know. It's even worse than that. A lot of the direct traffic is not attributed either. Oh, 100%. Yeah. So if it comes from a mobile app or a desktop app right now, it's stripping off the UTM and the referrals. Yeah. At the moment, I feel like we have such poor understanding of those flows and it's so difficult to measure. Like, I encourage people not to get too laser focused on any of those individual signals because they're directional at best. We do suspect there is some muddiness in terms of traffic source right now.

41:59 Like, I don't think I have. I have LRED, and I'm happy with what I can see, but I've always suspected that what I can see may not be 100% accurate right now. Yeah, if you have, depends on your analytics platform, but in GA4, we've helped people look for this pattern. And the way we detect it is a benchmark against a prior period. So we look at like January 25, and the signal is people that went right to a PDP and didn't pass through any of your website, which is very unusual. Like certainly maybe some of your customers bookmark something and go there, but we would catch that in the historic data. So if you look back in time and then compare today, the chart's up and to the right. And that's that dark, I call it dark agenteic commerce traffic, where they've gone all the way through and they're clicking and we're missing it, or to your point, they're circling back through somewhere else.

42:48 It's always funny that we're in a world now where. My product person said this today, because he was using AI to generate articles that we could put on this site to get more traffic from AI. And he was like, it's not lost on me, the irony of this process that we are locked in. Like, it's just, there's a crazy fast pace of how we are trying to do all this. And if you really think about it, we're working for the AIs. Yes. And I welcome that robotic overworld that you're watching, yeah. It's super interesting. But even non-digital attribution, like I'll tell you a use case that I guarantee is happening in your world, right? They're girl dads, but there's some subset of families where the dad has to help his daughter pick her first bra and has no expertise, right?

43:38 So they're going to have a much higher propensity to ask the robot for advice, and they're going to take that advice and then they're going to walk into a store, right? And we're at the moment we don't see that. To me, that's agentic commerce. That robot helped that dad figure out that he needed to go to Victoria's Secret when he otherwise would not have. Yeah, and that is always my internal battle. I've got the person on one shoulder saying, like, AI, go after it, agentic experiences, the agent's going to buy things for you. And then on the other shoulder is my wife sitting there who always says, have fun at work today, please don't ruin shopping.

44:21 And so I am reminded almost daily that shopping is still an emotional experience it can very much be a social experience and for us like, I'm just I'm beyond curious about where this all goes and is somebody gonna need a you know a black bra for a dress for their honeymoon and get on chat GBT, and buy the first one that gets served up I don't think so yeah I think they're gonna They're gonna be like, oh, that's great. Let me go to victoriasecret.com and see what other options they have. I remember back at NRF Big Show, there were those that were like looking way forward and saying agents are gonna replace your websites and your apps.

45:02 I, I don't want to sound contrarian or not forward-looking. I just don't see it at least not in the first next few years. And I think that there's a, there's a thrill of the hunt. There's a adrenaline thing from shopping and buying all the things that you want that, that I think will, will last and we'll still be there. Even when AI takes over a portion of this. Now you're making tacos. Great. Cat GPT or Google Gemini all day. I get it. But for clothing and fashion and things like that, I think they're still up. Yeah, I think there's a spectrum and there's highly considered purchases and there's new consideration and categories and all these things where the robot might be an assistant, but it's not going to be the front of stage.

45:44 And then there's auto replenishment. Right. And so, yeah, you know, you probably are on the more discovery and and reconsideration than you are on the on the replenishment side. Yeah, that idea of the assistant, we debate a lot. There's been a lot of implementations of AI shopping assistants, you know, around retail. And we love them, but we think we want to put it in the right place within the experience where the intent is there. Sure. Not just like... Not AI for AI's sake, AI to solve a problem in real time the customer would have on that place in their experience. And so that's our UX leaders all the time, like preaching, like we don't want a solution looking for a problem. Like we really need to make sure we put this in all the right places because it's also expensive.

46:30 And so we need to be mindful. Like I want it to be in the place where you need it and it's going to drive the right result for us and it's not gonna be upside down economically for us. Yeah, well, it's certainly working for you because you guys are on a great run. You're way outperforming the market. And we're coming to the end of our a lot of time. But, Brian, super grateful for you coming and sitting down with us and sharing some of your insights with our listeners and our two viewers. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for taking time out of the conference. I've seen you post on LinkedIn. Is that the best place for folks to follow kind of your tho ught leadership in this space? Yeah, absolutely. I should post more than I do. You're busy. You've got some things going on. Typically a lot of like when I want to congratulate teams on something or celebrate a win, that's the place that I go.

47:14 But yeah, that's a great place to follow me. Absolutely. And thank you guys for allowing me the time to chat and to be a part of this. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Yeah, we're thrilled to have you. And until next time, happy commercing. You've been listening to The Jason and scot Show. For all the latest news and trends on e-commerce and shopper marketing, subscribe to us on iTunes or visit jasonandscot.com. We'll be right back.